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Leo Tolstoy, hippies and books on personal growth: together with theologian Robert Wright, we trace the history of Buddhism from the moment of its appearance in the Western world to its transformation into another fashion trend and understand what neo-Buddhism is, how it is connected with the achievements of modern evolutionary psychology and why in a world whose image is built from our cognitive distortions, meditation can be a tool that really helps to see the essence of things.
“Master, my brain continues to wander during meditation.
- It's good
- But I noticed that it happens all the time!
- Very good.
- Why?
- It's good that you always notice this Dialogue from the book Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment (by Robert Wright, 2017); has not been translated into Russian. - Approx. author ..
Imagine that you are in an outdated spacecraft and you need to fly out of orbit, but the system is hardly designed for this - the power is critically lacking, and the navigation equipment is shamelessly lying. So, the pilot is your consciousness, chained in a body and trying to go beyond illusions, developed in a world that no longer exists: hello, evolution!
The journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Wright, in his latest book, Why Buddhism Is True, which has not yet been translated into Russian, suggests meditation as a superfuel for space travel and shares his personal experience of the path to enlightenment of a person who could have become enraged along the way. go to work or grab a can of sardines over the sink for lunch.
Robert's interest in the nature of human behavior was formulated back in the book The Moral Animal, published in 1994 and capturing the minds of not only sofa philosophers, but also prominent contemporaries. The origins of giving Neo a red pill can be found in those distant times when, while still brothers, the Wachowskis gave the young Keanu Reeves "Moral Animal" as a home reading in preparation for the filming of the first part of "The Matrix" ...
In his latest work, Wright examines Buddhism, freeing it as much as possible from the flair of the supernatural. Here Siddhartha Gautama is not a mystical deity, but a researcher of his time, a psychologist himself seeking relief from suffering called Dukkha Dukkha (Skt. - "restless dissatisfaction"). At the same time, Wright is not trying to prove that the supernatural ideas of karma and reincarnation are outdated moral doctrines that made it possible to adhere to a fairly successful model of behavior only in the context of Pali culture 2,500 years ago.
The author's approach to Buddhism is imbued with scientific interest and knowledge of the achievements of evolutionary psychology, which is generally characteristic of a new wave of turning to Eastern practices in the Western world.
The first two happened when missionaries from New England discovered the world of the East in the nineteenth century and impressed prominent contemporaries - from Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy Speech on the work of Leo Tolstoy "Siddart, nicknamed the Buddha, that is, saint" (1886) ... - Approx. the author. before Carl Gustav Jung, who wrote his own commentary on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Then, from the middle of the twentieth century, the fascination with Eastern philosophy resulted in what we call the generation of hippies, whose representatives opposed militarism and excessive consumption, and once made Nepal a kind of "Mecca" of New Age culture.
Today's interest in meditation has morphed into an ultimatum teaching to increase effectiveness, much the same as the Tony Robbins seminars. Books like How to Achieve Enlightenment: A Practical Guide to 10-Minute Meditation, Mindfulness as a Tool for Scaling a Business effectively use modern values, eroding Buddhism into yet another trend of bourgeois society like yoga or green smoothies.
That is why the approaching third wave of neo-Buddhism is entering the Western world on the rails of the scientific achievements of evolutionary biology and behavioral psychology, deliberately and equally moving away from mysticism and populism.
Robert Wright, along with Buddhist researcher Stephen Batchelor ⓘ Stephen Batchelor is a Buddhist researcher and educator, author of several books, including After Buddhism. - Approx. ed. and Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, author of the acclaimed Sapiens. A Brief History of Humanity ”, explain why we, people, are so imperfect, even though we seem to ourselves to be beautiful creatures of nature.
And if you think that a person is a consciousness endowed with feelings, then the famous neuroanatomist Jill Boult Taylor in her book "My stroke was a science to me" is in a hurry to upset you: a person is a machine that processes feelings, which has elements of consciousness.
So, meditation, according to Wright, is not a metaphysical path to a higher plane. It is a conscious attempt to explore yourself and make your life better. Wright writes:
Meditation allows you to see how destructive and totally inappropriate emotional reactions can be and what triggers trigger them. From the point of view of the device, the brain has no task to give an accurate reflection of reality, the main focus is the transfer of gene material to the next generations, and the distortions of perception that are inherent in us are aimed at precisely this. In addition, human perception of the world is based on five senses, and the collected information passes through the limbic system, which fills it with emotions. This means that the perception of the world is endowed with emotion before entering the brain area responsible for logical thinking.
For example, many irrationally suffer from arachnophobia, experiencing uncontrollable terror at the sight of spiders. Recently, a study was conducted on newborns confirming that they had a greater fear of images of spiders compared to images of flowers. The fear inherent in us by evolution helped us survive for 90% of the existence of our species, but is hardly adequate to the conditions of our time.
The mismatch between cause and response is deeply rooted in evolution. We have collected from our human and non-human ancestors a whole complex of genetic reactions, formed for a successful existence in a world that no longer exists.
Wright explored the irrationality of his own behavior using the example of a sweet donut: the body loves to receive valuable sources of energy contained in sugars. Something sweet did not come across to the wild man very often. Then the instincts shouted - "Take it, this is the rarest opportunity!" Being perfectly aware of the fact that this kind of food is harmful, we continue to be attached to it by our basic instincts.
This is another illustration of the illusory power of consciousness over the actions of an individual, and the measure of our ability to control and be aware of our behavior is much less than we think. As an example, try making your brain focus on your breath and nothing else - this way the meditation muscle will allow you to control the rest of your life, and there is no mystical secret here.
People are animals, chained in a cycle of seeking pleasure and feeling bad between these stops. According to the Tibetan teacher Yonge Mingyur Rinpoche, happiness is a choice between the discomfort of understanding one's mental attachments and the discomfort of being subordinate to them.
It would seem that what could be simpler? Today, however, it is not necessary to be enlightened to get out of the wheel of attachment. For some, it is enough to learn how to make money: the last Nobel Prize in economics was awarded for discoveries in the field of behavioral economics, which spun the wheel of monetary samsara to unprecedented speeds.
