The Dalai Lama has said that Buddhism and science are deeply compatible and has encouraged Western scholars to critically examine both the meditative practice and Buddhist ideas about the human mind. A number of scientists and philosophers have taken up this challenge. There have been brain scans of meditators and philosophical examinations of Buddhist doctrines. There have even been discussions of Darwin and the Buddha: Do early Buddhist descriptions of the mind, and of the human condition, make particular sense in light of evolutionary psychology? This course will examine how Buddhism is faring under this scrutiny. Are neuroscientists starting to understand how meditation “works”? Would such an understanding validate meditation—or might physical explanations of meditation undermine the spiritual significance attributed to it? And how are some of the basic Buddhist claims about the human mind holding up? We’ll pay special attention to some highly counterintuitive doctrines: that the self doesn’t exist, and that much of perceived reality is in some sense illusory. Do these claims, radical as they sound, make a certain kind of sense in light of modern psychology? And what are the implications of all this for how we should live our lives? Can meditation make us not just happier, but better people? All the features of this course are available for free. It does not offer a certificate upon completion.
Extra Office Hours 2
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Philosophy, Psychology, Mindfulness, Meditation
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IP
Dec 23, 2018
This is a great effort which should be appreciated. Just because at a time like this, some are curious to know about the Buddhism, & with the psychological background, which adds more value for this.
AS
Feb 08, 2018
Acquired huge amounts of insight from this course and enjoyed reading the various perspectives when marking papers in the peer marked assessments. Thank you for providing such a wonderful course!
從本節課中
What is Enlightenment?
教學方
Robert Wright
Visiting Lecturer
Hello, welcome to Office Hours.
That, of course, is Frasier, half of the reason
that anyone would tune in to Office Hours.
The other half being Milo, who at the moment is in this room, but not visible.
I think he's behind the bookcase behind me.
Anyway, both Frasier and Milo will be enlisted later in this
episode of Office Hours, to help us illustrate the concept of emptiness.
They won't actually articulate the doctrine of emptiness, but
they will serve as vehicles for explaining it.
And aren't we all basically vehicles, after all?
But that's going to come later.
First, apparently I've generated a raging controversy over serenity.
Who would've thought you could do that?
I've been doing this kind of pendulum swing thing about serenity in the last
couple of Office Hours.
First, I was singing the praises of serenity in meditation, and
emphasizing that in every day meditation,
you can reach a point of serenity, and that's great, keeps you coming back.
Then the next week, I kind of thought better of it because I didn't want
people to think you're failing if you don't attain serenity in meditation,
which, after all, many of us often don't do in meditation.
And so I emphasized that that's not the only kind of meditation there is.
And not the only point of meditation, in that whatever is happening,
whatever you're experiencing, as long as you are mindful about it,
then you are doing mindfulness meditation.
You can just observe it.
And that's fine and that's all to the good.
Now this, emphasizing that you shouldn't get too attached to serenity,
as I put it, and shouldn't come to expect it,
lead to some blowback from Cula Augie, whom we've heard from before.
I've decided that the official pronunciation of this first name will be
Cula regardless of what the actual pronunciation is, C-U-L-A.
Cula writes, I must say, this is on the discussion forum, I must say that
professor Wright's experience with Buddhist meditation does not seem to go
beyond modern 19th century Vipassana traditions that de-emphasize serenity.
Detachment from serenity is not something that's taught in most Buddhist traditions,
and it's definitely not in accordance with the advice in canonical Buddhist texts.
First of all, I would say, I'm not advising detachment from serenity.
I mean, if you feel serenity, embrace it, wallow in it, whatever.
Serenity, I like serenity.
I was suggesting non-attachment to it.
So in other words, not
becoming dependent on it, not going into every day's meditation expecting it,
although some people may want to go into every day's meditation expecting it.
But the reasons I wanted to warn against that
were kind of spelled out by some other commenters, I think on Facebook.
Alicia Moag Stahlberg said,
if I think I'm supposed to have A experience, meaning experience A or
experience X, a given experience, each time I become self-critical,
think I will not perform "right," in quotes, and
so will tend not to do it, will deem that day's meditation a failure.
And that is, indeed, what I was kind of
saying was one of the downsides of going in, kind of expecting serenity every day.
There's another reason,
was kind of exemplified by a comment by Duane Trinchuck.
That could be the way Duane pronounces his last name, for all we know.
He says, I find that in those times when the meditation is less settled,
more thoughts, sensations, etc.,
that it is precisely these times when new ground is being blazed.
As we meditate and peel back the layers of the onion of our mind,
each layer opens with a flurry of distractions.
Impermanence is key, and it will pass.
So, Duane sees some actual upside in
those moments in meditation when you're not serene.
And, I think I would second that motion,
and emphasize that one virtue of actually practicing,
let's put some more light on the situation.
One virtue of actually practicing mindfulness meditation,
observing whatever arises and not just kind of zeroing in on
serenity all the time, is remember one
of the payoffs of cultivating mindfulness in every day life
is that you can be out there in the world,
you'll feel a feeling like anger, resentment, anxiety, whatever arise,
and you will view it more mindfully than you otherwise would have,
and it will have less of a grip on you.
And that's value-added, and that comes from practice,
that comes from during meditation, doing the exercise
of viewing whatever happens mindfully.
So one thing I'm saying is
even if you go into meditation hoping for serenity, aiming at serenity,
if that's not what happens, well, make a lemonade out of your lemon,
just try to observe mindfully whatever does happen.
Frasier right now is observing a threat, he thinks.
Frasier senses a threat and he thinks he should start barking.
Frasier, everything under control, buddy?
Everything okay?
Okay, he was just woofing, he wasn't yet up to the barking level.
It wasn't like mailman-level barking, or anything, it was woofing.
So, anyway, that's kind of what I'm saying.
Now, another reason I kind of am drawn to it, and by the way,
the accusation is on target.
Cula's accusation that my experience with Buddhist meditation does not seem to go
beyond modern 19th century Vipassana traditions that de-emphasize serenity,
well, it's true that my experience is mostly in Vipassana.
Whether that's a kind of distinctively, Frasier's going to go investigate now.
Whether that's a distinctively 19th century
version that I'm really focusing on is in a way controversial, I think.
Some people who do modern Vipassana would say that
they're doing exactly what the Buddha prescribed in
the famous four foundations of mindfulness discourse.
Others would look at that and say, no,
actually the practice has evolved quite a bit, things have changed.
Modern insight meditation has changed.
Whatever it's true that my experience is mostly in vipassana
which means insight which is a mindfulness meditation and
it's common to divide meditation into these two basic branches.
There's serenity which is generally attained through great concentration, and
then there's mindfulness, insight, so on.
So, that is, thought of as a fork as a road, I kind of don't see him that way.
Any given sitting of mine may tend more toward one or the other.
I'm just saying whatever happens can be useful.
Can be, even if you're not having a great time,
it can be constructive in the sense that you're learning things
that will actually in every day life lead to more serenity.
If you can go through life less
reflexively responsive to every single feeling.
Look, it's Milo.
Hey, Milo.
How are you doing?
want to say hi to the folks?
You ready for your close-up, Mister Milo?
He's assuming the position formerly occupied by Frasier.
I wonder if that can lead to canine strife later in this episode.
It's not impossible.
Frasier may return okay.
So, I really view kind of the twos working in synergy and
not as so I don't think it's a decision you have to make every day.
Like, am I going to do serenity meditation or am I going to do mindfulness?
But what do I know?
Different people may be different.
But there's one other thing I want to say on behalf of mindfulness meditation,
which is, one reason I emphasize it in this course, and I think I would have even
if I had as much training and experience in serenity meditation.
I think it, I don't want to belittle serenity meditation and
make people less favorably disposed towards what I say,
but in a certain sense I think mindfulness meditation is more profound.
I think it maybe I should take that back.
Okay, I take that back.
I don't want to go into any more trouble.
I have to but it's, mind plus meditation,
to me, speaks very much to human psychology.
The way it works says a lot about human psychology.
Understanding what's going on demands, almost leads you to
an understanding of human psychology, in particular evolutionary psychology.
And is, I think, just kind of philosophically interesting and
mindfulness, now Milo is exiting in Frasier's footsteps.
Maybe it was something I said.
Okay, focus Bob.
Mindfulness.
It is also, I mean it is of the two I would the more direct form of almost
rebellion as I've said against natural selection, because mindfulness
meditation is taking all of these feelings and tendencies that were designed by
natural selection to happen and saying wait a second, I will decide.
Which of these I am and I'm not in the thrall of.
So, for all these reasons I like, I kind of do like mind trance meditation.
But, Coola says that we should all read a Swift Pair of Messengers,
that is a free book online Google a Swift Pair of Messengers.
And I suspect you will be led directly to this title, this particular tract.
So I encourage that.
Now I said that Milo and Frasier are going
to help us illustrate something about the doctrine of emptiness.
Well, actually, it was a student, Peter Robejsek,
R-O-B-E-J-S-E-K, who brought them
into the discussion, and challenged, a lot of students challenging me these days.
What is it?
Kind of challenged something I had said about emptiness.
So I want to talk about that, but first, there's a prop
that I need to talk about this, so give me a second and I'll get that prop.
Okay we are back and
while we were away, when I leave like that and turn off the camera,
there is always a little time elapses because I have to save the file that I've
created and that can take a while, so there's always time for stuff to change.
And like being impermanent, stuff changes, and in this case Milo
has returned and is occupying the throne, hi Milo.
And very, do me very serenely I might say, a little serenity.
I think I pick up some serenity vibes there, but enough about serenity.
Frasier is in the room too and at the moment is not challenging Milo.
A sign of how far along the dharma he's traveled since we last taped him.
So Peter, says this in the discussion form.
I would not consider myself an advanced student of Mahayana philosophy.
This is something Peter and I have in common,
but I believe that there is a fundamental confusion of emptiness and
dependent origination in the latest office hours video.
Week seven, as he notes, starting at 17 minutes and 58 seconds.
The two, meaning emptiness and dependent origination,
are often referred to as brothers, because they complement one another however,
they are distinct concepts.
In the video it seems to me that emptiness and
dependent origination are equated which is in my view not tenable.
I would not say I equated them.
Let me review quickly what I think I said before we move on to a very interesting
little thought experiment that Peter does that involved Milo and Frasier.
Depend origination, again, one of the two main versions of
the idea is that things don't, everything that exists depends for
its existence on other stuff and without them it would be nothing.
And things are caused by things and continuously influenced by things and
still kind of changed by things and
dependent origination is about the interdependence of everything.
The causal interdependence of everything we might say in western terms without
distorting the concept too gravely I think.
And what I said was that to the philosophical.
In Mahayana philosophy the kind of philosophical justification for
seeing things as empty has a lot to do with
this concept of dependent origination.
Part of the idea is that, one sense in which things are empty is,
because they're dependent on other things, nothing has independent existence.
Nothing has inherent existence.
And this is one.
This, definitely, is in Buddhist philosophy, in fact, in this book,
Which some of you may have, because there were readings from it in the course.
This is explained somewhere page,
no I had it marked, yeah 237, look at page 237.
And read the next few pages, you'll get that picture, and
that's what I meant to say.
Now, let's go on to what Peter is positing as his
understanding of emptiness, which I think is also valid and
important as one of the take-home lessons from the idea of emptiness.
The idea of emptiness is sometimes put as you now,
things lack essence, things lack in a certain sense, self.
Not self-doctrine is the idea that I lack essence, and
then emptiness is the idea that stuff out there lacks essence, even just objects.
Not only living beings, but just stuff in general, even concepts, you could say.
So, here is what Peter says, assume a darkened room
with a coffee table in it, and a pen on the table.
You stand on the doorway and switch on the light.
You can just make out that there is a cylindrical object on the table.
It might be a pen.
As you approach, the object comes into focus, and
it seems that it really is a pen.
You pick it up, you know this would be an example of a pen, a Sharpie.
You pick it up, try to write something, it writes and
you conclude that it is in fact a pen.
Next, Frasier, not Milo, he's had emptiness figured out for along time,
of course.
Frasier comes into the room, he sees a cylindrical object.
It might be a chew toy.
He walks up to the table.
The object comes into focus.
And sure enough, it looks like a chew toy.
He picks it up and gnaws on it for a while, and concludes that, yeap,
it's a chew toy.
Of course, though, it was what I would call a pen, that's the point of this.
The fact that neither you nor Frasier are right or wrong stems from the lack, right
or wrong about what this object is, stems from the lack of essence in the cylinder.
You project pen-ness, Frasier projects chewed toy-ness on it.
It is neither pen nor chewed toy, from it's own side, that is emptiness.
And incidentally, as it happens, this sharpie illustrates the point so well.
Because if you look closely, you see that?
You what those are?
Those are chew toy marks left by one, and
there's some on this end too, if you look closely, left by one of my dogs.
I know not which one, because both have demonstrated in the past a tremendous
capacity for doing this to a Sharpie, and any number of other objects.
So, this is the perfect illustration of the point Peter is making.
Thank you, Peter.
And, I totally, I totally like this way of thinking of emptiness.
I think this is really the important take home lesson of emptiness is that,
you know,
we conceive of things, naturally by, this is the way our brain is designed.
We conceive of things in terms of our own interests, right?
That's the way we define things.
What can they do for us?
Or, what harm can they pose us?
That's the way we look at everything.
And this gets back to the emphasis I put on the fact that we kind of,
without even thinking about it, and
often, in very subtle ways, we have these reactions of feeling to things.
And that is really part of our perception of them.
It's like built into our perception of them and
I agree with Peter that
emptiness would be not Seeing things from the point of view of your interest.
And that's why I emphasize that I, I think the meditative experience of emptiness,
and the experience of going through everyday life of emptiness, seeing things
as kind of empty, involves relaxing this affective reaction to things.
This, this reaction of feeling toward things that,
because feelings are what kind of register
our interests in things, from natural selection's point of view.
That's what feelings were designed for, to, kind of,
have a strong, strongly distinctive affective reactions to things,
is to not so strongly define them in terms of your own interests, right.
I look at it, and I don't go, great, something I can write with, wonderful.
And I also don't go, great, something I can chew on, wonderful.
I'm just like, thing.
So you know, this is, so
I see the important take-home of emptiness as being that you know,
things don't have meaning except to the extent that we bring meaning to them.
And that allows us to choose, you know?
Reflecting on that allows us to step back and
rearrange the meanings in our lives if we want to, and say you know, no,
I don't have to think of that person as noxious or bad if I don't want to.
Or that Experience, or that building, or anything, if I didn't want to.
So, I'm all on board with this part.
But, I do think it is a fact of philosophy that dependent
origination and emptiness are not just,
well, they don't just compliment one another, as Peter puts it.
Because I think that suggests a symmetry about them.
No, it's that dependent origination is used as a philosophical support for
the concept of emptiness.
Although, again, I don't think that's necessarily related to the meditative
experience of emptiness in a very, you know, close way.
And, I don't think that's what's most important about the doctrine of emptiness.
Peter's also not clear on the concept of formlessness.
By the way,
Peter usefully brings something to my attention that I wasn't aware of that,
that the philosopher John Searle used the term neuronal chauvinism.
Frazier's investigating another possible threat to the house.
Milo is not, Milo is meditating.
Frazier's going to to do a couple of woofs, good work Frazier.
Keeping the house safe, thank you Frasier.
Okay, anyway.
So, John Searle used the phrase neuronal chauvinism
according to Peter to talk about the tricks that,
that tricking ourselves into believing that our
perception of something is the real true thing, okay.
Now, I was going to, until Frazier left, I was going to give him the test, see if he
really did perceive the emptiness of the pen, by offering it to him.
You know, to see if it is empty of chew toy-ness,
I was going to offer it to him and see if he chewed it.
Apparently, we'll have to use Milo, instead.
Hey, Milo.
Milo, come here.
Milo, come here.
Come on, come here.
Come on, come on.
Milo, am I going to have to make the shredded wheat noise to get you over here?
Well, okay.
Hey, Milo, come here.
All right, good, now,
sorry I feel bad about this because he's thinking he's going to get shredded wheat.
No, Milo,
we're going to do the chew toy test to see if you grasp the concept of emptiness.
If you chew on this, it will mean that you're not enlightened.
There, you want that?
Want that?
Want to chew on that?
No.
Because Milo has attained enlightenment, and he no longer sees chew toyness in it.
Hey, Frazier, come here.
I have a question for you.
You want to chew that?
No.
No, because Frazier has attained enlightenment, too, apparently and
no longer sees chew toyness in this.
Of course, the ultimate test of enlightenment.
Comes in whether they see shredded wheat as empty.
And I'm a little less optimistic on this one, I gotta say.
[SOUND] Yeah, see that's not a sign of seeing this as empty,
what Frazier's doing now.
Mm, I'm growing pessimistic about the enlightenment question.
Okay, Frasier.
Now, Frasier, if you've really attained enlightenment, you know
what's going to happen here is, you're going to look at the shredded wheat.
You're going to realize it's empty of inherent existence.
You're going to say to yourself, why bother with it, okay.
There you go.
Okay. Frasier failed the emptiness test.
Llet's check Milo out, Milo.
But I would say, yeah okay Milo Milo is over here.
Ready?
Frasier, no.
Frasier, it's Milo's turn, come on.
Be a good Buddhist.
Here you go, Milo.
Want that?
Okay, so they're not enlightened, maybe.
Although, I don't know, even enlightened people have to eat and enlightened dogs.
And I thought they ate that pretty mindfully.
So, you be the judge of how far along the Dharma they are.
Okay, a half a piece for each of you now, you ready?
All right, thank you.
Run along, you serve your pedagogical purpose.
The only other.
What else did I want to mention?
I know, love an attachment.
Give me a second.
I gotta find the the raw material for the attachment point, and that'd be it.
Okay, I'm back, and I have found the comment that I wanted to respond to.
This is from Robert Cornell.
And, actually, this is several weeks old, but
I'm finally turning my attention to it.
It has to do with an issue I was raised in an office hours awhile
ago about the difficulty in my view of separating love and attachment.
A commonly said thing in Buddhist circles, especially if,
for example, someone is trying to overcome a loss,
a loss of a loved one is to say, well, love is fine.
But maybe, you should try to overcome the attachment and
that would, hope you overcome the grief I guess.
Robert Cornell has this story about something that happened to him.
It's kind of moving and you might say sad.
He says a week ago, a neighbor of ours went missing one evening.
He was an 83-year-old man who had dementia and was impaired in vision and hearing.
He loved walking in the woods and
visiting the grave of his partner in a nearby cemetery.
So, after a couple of days, the man's body was found.
He had indeed wandered into the woods and eventually died.
Robert writes, when I examine my response to the situation, I find that there are no
words to adequately describe the subtlety of feeling involved.
Did I hope, desire, wish for a good outcome?
I don't think so.
What I felt was a deep ache, a sadness, a compassion for
what he might be going through.
In the end, I could only hope that he had gone to die in a place he loved, and yet,
hope is inadequate to describe a feeling that is devoid of desire or expectation.
Robert goes on, there is a heartache, a sadness, a compassion for
another being that as difficult as it may be to bear is not suffering.
It is a feeling of profound intimacy tied with the equanimity not to desire that
things be any different than the way they are, not to be attached to any outcome.
It is not different from the joy that comes from another's happiness, and
it can only appear when the self, call it the egoic self if you must,
is out of the picture.
Okay, so this sounds like a very wholesome response.
I would say, I think there are different kinds of love.
And in some cases, it's more challenging to separate the attachment than others.
I think it's certainly possible to have a love for
a friend or a neighbor, as in this case.
And yet, should not to manage to, in some sense,
not be attached, so come to terms of the loss of that person.
But I do think there are other kinds of love.
Love for relatives, in particular, offspring is pretty intense.
Romantic love can feel intense, and
I think those two things are very different things.
I mean, in Darwinian terms, you would expect them to be very different things.
They may involve some of the same chemicals, some of the same feelings, but
they are functionally different things.
Love of offspring is much closer to being by nature,
an unconditional thing,
at least in terms of the logic of natural selection.
And in my view, that is really the hard case, right.
That is the really, really, really hard case in my experience.
And my wife and I agreed on this a long time ago.
We agreed there is a sense in which we love each other, but
when it comes to our kids, it's more intense.
And so, I would like to hear from people
who feel that they performed that fee.
And I apologize, because I think there was a comment to this effect,
an interesting comment weeks ago that I failed to pick up on.
Somewhere it's on the discussion forum or on Facebook or somewhere.
But, I don't know where, and it was about,
it spoke to this point, I think of loving kids without attachment.
There are different senses of the word attachment, as well.
So with romantic love, it can be an attachment
in the sense of possessiveness.
In other words, you want their love and
you don't want them giving it to somebody else, you know jealousy.
You could see that as a form of attachment.
With offspring that can happen, but I think,
more often it consists, it's not just possessiveness.
It is just an attachment to their well-being and a real difficulty
coming to terms with the possibility that they may be suffering.
That's a really hard case, and I'm interested in that as a challenge, and
also, I'm interested in the philosophical questions of whether you would want to.
There are people who'd say, look,
I don't think it's healthy to lose entirely your attachment to children.
So that's an interesting question.
But anyway, that's kind of the.
That I think is the tough case, the toughest case.
Although this is a very illuminating,
and an example worth heeding,
I think, that Robert has laid out.
A couple of quick things before we go.
Henricus Cornelis Bank, B-A-N-K, I've got that part right, Bank, I think.
Who am I to criticize the remarkable Dr. Wright, thank you.
He puts in parentheses, the affiliative module, which indeed,
he is successfully exercising in saying nice things about me.
But, on several occasions during a wonderful lecture,
he has bluntly stated that most of us will not obtain enlightenment.
I don't think I put it like that.
I have suggested that, I think I've said things like, for most of us,
it's not going to happen anytime soon, but whatever.
I think how accessible people think enlightenment has
has partly to do with how they define it.
I have probably a pretty strict definition.
I mean, I take seriously the idea that it would involve, among other things,
assuming it's possible, it would involve among other things overcoming aversion,
attachment, like really overcoming them.
And I think that's a pretty tall order.
But, I want to emphasize, I think there's a lot of space on
the spectrum between here and enlightenment, in a strict sense.
You can never make it to this state known as enlightenment and
yet reach transformative depths.
And I know of people who have done that.
There are huge, vast swaths of progress available to all of us including,
I think, things that can be called transformative.
So I'm in favor of that.
I'm conscious of the fact that I often, when I talk,
I am not looking directly at the camera.
And Martha Carlson would like to underscore that point.
Dear professor, thank you for
looking directly at the camera a few times during the most recent office hours.
It makes you surreal and alive.
Do not fear it.
You need not stare at the ceiling to gather your thoughts.
I'm not sure I don't.
Be assured that you are there, and matter very much to those around you.
You need not ask yourself whether you do in real life nor
meditation, whether I matter, I guess.
Dare to be who and where you, in whatever and whenever you do.
Thank you for that encouragement.
And I'm sorry if I'm always looking around.
I do think it is a thing with me that is not that easy to escape, but the other
thing is, remember, I'm not looking at a real person here, I'm looking at a camera.
And that's like not a natural thing, to stare into a camera.
I mean, in fact,
it's like really weird, in fact, when you truly focus on the camera and look inside.
I'm doing it now, and I'm getting kind of freaked out, so I think I'll stop.
Let me just see if the other participants in office hours have anything to say.
Looks like not.
No, apparently not, they're back.
They've defended the home front.
Everything is well here.
I suspect I will do one more office hours before the month ends.
And what did I say, it's May, it's a Friday.
Whatever I said is true, whatever I said in the latest email is true about when
the course ends, that is, when the site will close.
I think it's May 29th or May 30th, but whatever's in that email is true.
I will probably also post it as an announcement.
I think it'll give me time to do one more office hours because the comments
are still accumulating with reasonable energy on Facebook.
Some are tweeted to me @DarwinDharma, and then of course, on the discussion forum.
So the site lives on, the course lives on.
And thank you.
If you've lasted this long, congratulations.
I don't think there are many of you.
But thank you, and we will see you soon.
Or maybe not so soon, but within two weeks I'll do another of these.
See you.
