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.
Essentialism and Emptiness
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What is Enlightenment?
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Robert WrightVisiting Lecturer
Religion Department and the Center for Human Values
Okay, one very important idea in Buddhism that we
haven't talked about yet is a concept known as emptiness.
And, the, the basic idea is that the things we see
out in the world are in some sense emptier than they seem.
Now, this doesn't sound like a very upbeat idea.
I've never seen somebody burst into a room saying, I'm
so happy, I just finally grasped the emptiness of it all.
But, serious meditators who have kind of had
the experience of emptiness say it's actually very pleasant.
Now this idea, the idea of emptiness is not as well known as
say the idea of not self, you don't hear as much about it.
But I think it's.
It's very, very important and is really kind of critical in fully com,
coming to terms with what the experience of enlightenment might, might be like.
Now a reason you don't, you don't hear so much
about this idea as you do about something like not self.
Is that you now, not self is kind of common to various schools of, of Buddhism.
Whereas, emptiness is most closely
associated with what's called Mahayana Buddhism.
The most basic distinction that scholars make between
kinds of Buddhisms is between Theravada and Mahayana.
And as a philosophical doctrine the idea
of emptiness is developed within the Mahayana tradition.
however, as a meditative experience I think it's common to both.
I've talked to, to lots of mediators
in the Theravada tradition, and what they described.
Sounds like emptiness they may or may not use that word sometimes they use
the word formless but it turns out their basically talking about the same thing.
Okay, so what is the experience of emptiness like?
Well like not self it's very hard to describe so I
think its worth kind of laying the intellectual foundation for it.
By quoting from a very well known sutra, the Samadhiraja Sutra.
And part of that sutra goes like this.
Know all things to be like this.
A mirage, a cloud castle.
A dream, an apparition.
Okay, now so far it sounds like the
Sutra is talking about and out and out hallucination.
Like, like the movie The Matrix.
Where the idea is that none of this stuff is real.
And there are strands of Buddhist thought that do carry things in that direction.
But I wouldn't call that the, the mainstream.
Interpretation of the idea of emptiness and to get closer to the
mainstream interpretation, let's just look at the next line in the Sutra.
Without essence, but with qualities that can be seen.
Okay, so it sounds like the idea is that if you see say an apple, the qualities
are real You know it, the redness is real the stem is real the shape is real.
But there's something about this sense of kind of
appleness, you know, the, the perception of essence of
apple that is in some sense kind of not real or is im, imposed by you, I guess.
Now what would it be like to have that experience
to see things as, as kind of lacking their essence and.
And what might be going on in the brain if you have that kind of perception.
Well, there's, there's actually a kind of a clinical
condition that, that I think sheds light on this question.
It's something called Capgrss delusion.
It's a very serious cognitive disorder.
And I don't mean to imply by the way that, that the
perception of emptiness in this Buddha sense, is any kind of disorder.
We'll, we'll get back to the question of
whether it's a true and valid experience or not.
But I do think that Capgras delusion is a very useful.
Way of of trying to get a sense of
what maybe going on with the perception of empty.
Okay.
So what is Capgras delusion?
it, it's when people look at someone, very often, a loved one
or close friend and they become convinced that the person is an impostor.
Okay?
They, they don't deny that the person on
the outside looks exactly like say, their mother.
But they are convinced it's not their mother,
kind of on the inside, so to speak, okay?
Has the visual qualities of their mother, but it lacks
what you might call essence of, of mother, I guess.
now, what's going on in the brain when, when this happens.
There are various theories.
One of the, the leading theories is that there has been
a disruption between the part of the brain that processes emotions.
And the part that does the visual processing.
Okay, so, so the visual perception of the
person is not being infused with the emotional content.
That it normally carries.
It's just a theory.
There's some evidence for it.
But in any event, it's pretty clear that people with Capgras delusion are, are
lacking some of the, the emotions that,
that they generally associate with, with the person.
They're not feeling what they would normally feel towards their mother.
And this is a reminder of what an important role
feelings can play in our everyday perception of the world.
I mean, you might think that, that perceiving a
face, recognizing a face, is a strictly cognitive thing, right?
That you could teach a computer to do.
And, in fact, you can teach a computer to
recognize faces with a pretty high degree of confidence.
But we humans apparently have a more
complicated system for really positively identifying things.
And it involves more than individual perception
it involves this this infusion of feeling.
Now, to, to start trying to connect this to this idea of emptiness.
One question is Could the same dynamic that
seems to be at work with Capgras delusion in
principle, could that apply to the perception of
non-human things, like, say, my house for example, okay?
You know, I think if I stopped and paid attention when I'm looking at my house,
I'd see that I have feelings that always
accompany My house, it's my house after all.
And it may well be that if one day I looked at
my house and just didn't have my feelings that I normally have.
It would really feel strange, I'd be going like it
looks like my house but there's just something off here.
There's something wrong you know.
And you know that may be true of a number of perceptions that we have.
One question is could this go beyond things we own?
I mean, obviously, you know, I have special feelings about my
house, I have somewhat special feelings about my car, I guess.
So it's, it's kind of easy to imagine in those cases that, that if you
could somehow shut off the affect, the feeling,
your perception of the thing would change profoundly.
But what about just, just objects in general?
Cars generically, just, just items that don't belong to you.
well, we've already seen in this
course that psychologists have found that actually
people do have affective responses, you know,
positive or negative, to just everyday objects.
It seems to be part of human nature.
Okay so maybe, if it was the case, that when you
look at various kind of everyday things that you see and
you, you, suddenly didn't have the, the, the, the reaction of
feeling, the affective reaction that you normally have to these things.
You know, that however subtle the reaction.
May normally be.
It, it may be the case that, that things would look a little strange to you.
You know, you might look at a pine tree
and, and not get that pine tree feeling and
go, you know, yeah, it's got the needles and
everything there just seems like, like there's something off here.
It just, it just, you know, doesn't seem to have essence of pine tree.
Now all of this leads to my own pet theory of what is going on in the brain.
When there is the perception of emptiness.
Okay, and you may be able to guess it by now.
I think maybe what's happening is that things in general
are evoking less of an affective response than they normally would.
And as a result, things in general seem a little
empty, seem to, to possess less in the way of essence.
They, they don't kind of project their
identity as strongly as they normally would.
And certainly this this, this theory is, is at least consistent.
With my own kind of brush with experiencing emptiness.
I mean, I guess that's what this was.
I'll tell you about this experience I had on a meditation retreat.
And you can judge for yourself, but this was on my very first retreat,
and I was walking through the woods, and this was days into the retreat.
And certainly, my kind of affective res,
reaction to things had died down really considerably.
And I looked at a weed, a particular kind of weed.
It's a kind of weed that had afflicted both front yards that, that I
had, you know, wou, in the houses that, the two houses I had lived in.
In.
Both of them had, had this kind of weed as kind of their,
their, the main affliction of the art as I thought of it then.
And suddenly, I just thought you know, why have I been doing battle with these weeds?
I mean this, this doesn't, this is exactly as beautiful
as, as the grass, as this plant, as the flowers.
It's, it's nice.
What's.
You know, why have I been you know, thinking of
this thing as kind of, kind of evil, you know.
It lack essence of weed.
Now one thing that was true of this experience I had that is
consistent with reports you get from
serious mediators about the apprehension of emptiness.
Is that, you know, the weeds just didn't stand out as strongly from other plants.
And, and you hear this.
That things don't seem as separate from other things
in the visual field as is ordinarily the case.
And this came through in a, in a, in an exchange I had
with Rodney Smith, this meditation teacher whom we've seen earlier in the course.
And I just seen this exchange, I kind of try to sneak my little pet
theory about what is going on the brain when there is a perception of emptiness.
I try to kind of insert that in the conversation and you'll see how he reacts.
>> You don't lose the shape or colors of things,
it's just that the spaces between doesn't, no longer divides.
>> Mm-hm.
Do you have [CROSSTALK].
>> [INAUDIBLE]
>> Do you have less strong emotional reactions
to some things than you might otherwise have?
Do you invest them less with, kind of emotional content?
>> That would make sense, wouldn't it?
That if things weren't as substantial as you believe them to be.
Then your reaction to things would also simmer.
You see?
So that happens.
You see all the states of equanimity and all of those things
come through the realization that things aren't what we thought they were.
>> Now, in a way, Rodney is corroborating my little theory about what's going on
in the brain when you have the perception of emptiness, but in a way he's not.
Okay, so he is saying yes.
>> There's a correlation between kind of a weakened
affective response to things and a perception of emptiness.
But in his view, the way it works is
you have the accurate perception of emptiness and that leads
to the weakened affective response because a strong affective
response wouldn't make sense if you're seeing things as empty.
I'm kind of seeing things the opposite way.
I'm, I'm suggesting that what comes first is the kind of lesson affective response.
A less strong feeling in reaction to seeing
something and that then gives you the sense.
That the thing is, is, is empty of essence.
Now I want to emphasize that I'm not
saying that the perception of emptiness is necessarily
invalid, because of that you know, just
because it's caused by a weakening of feeling.
I've tried to emphasize in this course that in
general I don't think feelings are especially reliable guides.
To reality.
And to, to clear perception.
So could well be the case that the, the, the,
the perception of emptiness is in some sense a true perception.
Even though it's caused by just a, a, a kind
of dampening down of feeling, and we'll get back to that.
Now, one psychologist who was, talked about essence
from a non-Buddhist point of view is Paul Bloom.
An we've already heard from in this course.
He thinks that people are, by nature, essentialists.
What he means is that it's, it's just kind of part of our nature to see things
as having a kind of interior you know, essence an interior nature that we can't.
See but we can sense and to kind of have
the intuitive idea that that's really what gives them their identity.
So he thinks that yes, people, they see a pine tree and there is,
however subtle, this kind of perception of
essence of pine tree, of, of pine tree-ness.
And he talked about all of this in a book he wrote called How Pleasure Works.
Now, Paul thinks that the essence is that we are tribute to things.
Depends on, in some sense the story behind him, okay?
So maybe you've got a bottle of wine and you've heard this is very rare.
You know, cabernet sauvignon from some special
year, and there aren't many of these bottles.
It's very valuable.
And that will give the bottle a kind of a, an aura or, or it'll give you a sense of
essence that's just different from what you kind of perceive
and feel if it was a bottle of, I don't know.
You know, Boone's Farm or something.
I dunno if they still have Boone's Farm, but, but,
that would have been the cheap wine in my day.
and, you know another example Paul gives is a tape measure that somebody actually
paid $49,000 for, even though it looks like a tape measure you could pick up.
In a, in a, in a garage sale.
But this one belonged to John F Kennedy.
That was the story behind it that, that gave it
you know, this, this kind of special essence, you know?
And, and, and you can imagine what it was like.
What it, what it may have felt like for
this The person who paid money for the tape measure.
I mean, you may not be a Kennedy aficionado in, in particular, but you,
you probably have some special enthusiasm that
would lead you to have a comparable perception.
Maybe you're a baseball fan, and if you saw
Babe Ruth's jersey in some museum, you'd have this feeling.
You know, like, that's almost like not ordinary cloth that's made of.
There's something it's, there's a kind of an aura.
There's some special vibe going on here.
And that's what Paul means by, you know, perceiving
an essence by virtue of the story behind things.
And to get a sense, for how this story
behind things affects the feeling you have about things.
Imagine that we kind of withdraw the story behind things.
So suppose you walk up to this guy,
he just paid $49,000 for Kennedy's tap measurer.
He's holding it in his hands and gazing at it lovingly and you say.
Actually there's been a mistake.
That tape measure belongs to the guy who was
installing the sink in the bathroom down the hall.
We're going to have to, we're going to have
to Fed Ex Hugh Kennedy's tape measure tomorrow.
Well, you can imagine, you know, he would have a dramatic
shift of feeling toward the tape measure, the story is withdrawn.
And the feeling changes and it would no
longer have this, this essence of Kennedy in it.
Now, Paul makes an interesting claim.
He believes that although in these cases,
you know, these are special items with special
stories he believes that every day things, just
generic things, you know, tape measures in general.
Generic things in a certain sense come with stories
and those stories do inform or kind of perception of, of essence.
And this came through in a conversation I had with about his book several years ago.
There's no such thing as a simple pleasure.
There's no such thing as a pleasure that's untainted by
your beliefs about what you're, what you're being pleasured by.
So in your food case, if you hand me something and, and, and I taste it
part of my knowledge is this is food that somebody I trust is giving to me.
It's food.
I would taste it differently.
Than if I found it on the floor.
>> Mm-hm.
>> Or if I paid a thousand dollars for it.
>> Mm-hm.
>> so, or, or take it to painting.
It's the paintings.
It's true that, that often you could look at a
painting and not know who painted and the circumstances and so,
and just appreciate it largely based on what it looks
like, but at the same time, you know it's a painting.
>> Mm-hm.
>> You know it's a painting.
You typically know it's a painting at an art museum, but you know it's a painting.
It's not a natural occurrence of paint splashing onto a wall.
Somebody made it a sometime for its display.
And that colors things.
So I think we always experience some, something.
And I would say this would apply to the simplest of sensations.
At, a orgasm, drinking water when you're thirsty, stretching, anything.
It's always under some sort of description.
It's always viewed as an instance of some sort of category.
>> It's always an implied narrative.
>> Exactly.
>> Okay, so, Paul's view is that the story we tell about something.
The category we put it in shapes the perception of its essence.
I want to emphasize that doesn't mean that there's no role for feeling here.
The way I would.
Tell the story is that, you know, the, the guy who, who paid for
Kennedy's tape measure, you know, first came
the, the narrative that it's Kennedy's tape measure.
That gave him a feeling about it, and
that shaped his sense of the tape measure's, essence.
And I don't think that Paul Blum disagrees with me.
About it kind of working this way.
I know hat in a later conversation, he agreed that if,
if you could give somebody a kind of a variant of Capgras
delusion such that when they walked into their office, they didn't
get the feelings they normally get when they walk in their office.
It would seem really strange.
They would not perceive kind of essence of.
Office and they might be kind of freaked out.
So, in sum my view is we
have these interpretations of things, these narratives about
things, these conceptions of where they fit
in and that, shapes our feelings about things.
and, and that in turn, shapes this perception of essence, and in
some sense, maybe the stronger the
feeling, the stronger the sense of essence.
And, if that's the case, then it stands to reason that through
meditation, which can after all, make you less effectively reactive to things.
You could come to see things as having less in
the way of essence, being in a sense more empty.
Now I kind of tried this, this theory out much
as I tried it out on Rodney Smith earlier.
I also kind of injected it into a conversation with Beku Bode
the Buddhist, monk, and scholar whom we meet earlier in the course.
And here's how that exchange went.
When we do interpret, we bring interpretation
to something, and thereby attribute essence to it.
Some of that interpretation, involves how we feel about it,
so I might, you know, my enemy is a bad person.
My, my home is a warm, cozy place.
Part of the essence I'm attributing to things is coming from my feelings, right?
>> Exactly, exactly.
>> And so, it kind of follows that if you're
following the Buddhist path in extreme form, if you truly
seek liberation and you're, you're, you're, you're kind of divorcing
yourself in a sense from feelings of attraction and aversion.
That then, things in the outside world
would not have these strong emotional connotations.
And that might be part of your perception that they lack essence.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
>> Again, I'd have to nuance my response to this.
Because if one takes that too literally, one might come away with the idea that the
ultimate aim of Buddhism is to become a
completely unemotional, emotionally flat, emotionally deprived au, automaton.
[LAUGH] As, as my mother used to say.
[LAUGH] As far as I'm concerned, between a, an
enlightened Buddhist and a, and a vegetable there's no difference.
[LAUGH] Is this why you become a Buddhist monk?
To become a vegetable?
[LAUGH] But I would say that in my opinion, in my experience that.
>> As one continues to practice, you know,
the Buddhist path, it enriches the emotional life.
So that one becomes emotionally more sensitive, more happy and joyful, and
I would say that one can respond to things in the world
in a freer, more happy, more, more delightful way.
So it's not that it's just turning, turning one into.
You know, just a flat an, an emotionally dead automaton.
>> Right, but.
>> You know.
>> Doesn't part of the freedom come from the fact that you are not attaching these
affective connotations, these judgemental affective connotations to things you see?
So, in other words the la.
Not attributing essence so strongly to things, it can be a source of freedom.
>> Definitely, it brings, or, I'm sorry, it
brings a freedom from kind of emotional disturbances that
arise from, you know, usually as we usually
live, sort of swinging between the two poles of.
Attraction towards what's pleasant, what's agreeable, what promises delight,
and then repulsion towards what is seen as threatening, as unpleasant.
Now, I think that what Deacon Body said
there is more or less consistent with this idea.
That less affect, less affective reaction does bring less, a lessened
perception of essence, and that this could account for the perception of emptiness.
I want to reiterate that that doesn't mean that
the perception of emptiness is in any sense inaccurate.
We'll return to that.
And in fact it may be that the perception of
empitness has some kind of some positive kind of, moral effects.
And, and we'll, we'll get to that.
For now I just want to emphasize again.
That that to say that you’re perceiving kind of
the emptiness of things in some sense, doesn't
mean it’s a bland perception, it also doesn't
mean that it’s a, its an unpleasant experience.
And on this point let’s hear again from Gary Weber.
You’re saying I gather that there is a kind of pleasure you can derive.
Via your sense that does not constitute emotional
involvement of, of, maybe of a problematic kind, or
in any event, it, it doesn't, it doesn't
const, you're not feeling that kind of emotional involvement.
>> That's correct.
You haven't lost your nerve endings.
I mean, you still.
I mean, a green tea tastes, still tastes like green tea.
Red wine still tastes like red wine.
You don't lose that.
What you lose is the carry forward of that sensation.
This is a fantastic glass of wine, or this
is, or this is, listen, this is great Meier.
You start getting into emotional content about it, past just a sensation.
>> Yeah, but some people would say if you don't
at least say, hey, this is a good glass of wine.
Then, like, what's the point of living, right?
I mean, that's, this would, you must encounter this question, right?
I mean, if you're not getting emotionally involved enough to
like it, [LAUGH] you know, then, then why be that way?
>> It's, it's a much cleaner perception.
>> Mm-hm.
>> If I'm tasting a glass of wine, and I'm trying to impress
some restaurant critic or something, or some friend of mine who's a great.
One fancier.
Then I made the story go.
I made an expectation for how this one should
be on how I should expect it to taste.
And so it really blocks my clear simple perception of that.
And so by getting this spot out of the way, this emotional block out of the way,
I do much higher likely, directly preceding whatever the sensation is.
>> Now I should add that Gary actually doesn't
like to use the work emptiness to describe his experience.
And the reason is because he says that in
his perception, the world is actually, it's very vibrant.
It's actually kind of full of energy.
But the experience he describes does correspond
to the, the classic kind of experience of.
Emptiness of formlessness.
He says that individual things in his environment
do not, kind of, project a strong independent identity.
He doesn't react to them with, with strong kind of feelings or distinctive feelings.
He, he sees a kind of a continuity among them.
So in other words, he, he doesn't see things, I take it as having individual
distinctive essences but he does feel kind
of collective essence or, or fullness to things.
And I think that points to one reason that it
someways it may be better to use the term formalist.
Then the term emptiness for this experience.
But, in any event, whatever you want to call it, apparently to judge by Gary's
experience carrying this experience into your everyday
life can be a very pleasant thing.
>> So when you finally do reach this space, when there are
all kinds of words that you try to language, I, I've used.
Words like empty fullness, or full emptiness,
or it's a space you can't imagine
putting anything into to improve it, or
take anything out would make it any better.
Just is an absolute complete satisfied full space.
>> Okay, did you hear that word satisfied.
Now as you may recall.
A fundamental idea in, in Buddhism is that life as
normally lived involves kind of recurring, you know, unsatisfactoriness.
But that in principle, enlightenment, liberation can
lead to the complete cessation of that unsatisfactoriness.
Now, Gary Webbert doesn't claim to be
liberated, he does not claim to be enlightened.
But his accounts of his experience are consistent with the idea that really
sustain and dedicated contemplative practice can really make a dent.
In you know, Dukha.
The, the, the word for kind of, suffering and unsatisfactoriness.
And his experience is consistent with the idea that this, this
path can also lead you to see the world much more clearly.
Okay, so now we've talked about the.
Idea of emptiness and also earlier about this exterior
part of the not self experience and I think
this leaves us in a position to now grapple
with the question of kind of what exactly enlightenment is.
Does it correspond to our perception of,
of profound truth maybe even ultimate truth?
Maybe even moral truth.
So that's where we will head in the next segment.
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