Why Buddhism Is True

good evening everyone if all goes well tonight we'll cover many of the subjects that Tom discussed I'm so pleased to be with you here tonight so honored as well to be here with Bob who is I would argue one of the deepest coolest most thought-provoking scholars out there a leading light in the world of intellectual will you blurred my next book yes absolutely absolutely and and we have much to dig into so let's just start you know you've pondered existential questions for decades you teach either a meaning of life at Princeton but let's talk about the audacity of the title of your book right why Buddhism is true that's quite that's quite a statement and I know you struggled initially with saying okay is that an accurate assessment of my book why did you go with it I think audacity is the polite term some other ones might come to mind are obnoxious and things like that um it only occurred to me at the very end of you know I didn't I didn't start writing the book of that title in mind I kind of realized that I had kind of mounted an argument that Buddhism was true I should I should qualify that with a couple of things first of all I'm talking about the naturalistic part of Buddhism not not the the more exotically metaphysical or some might say supernatural parts like rebirth but the parts of Buddhist psychology and philosophy that are amenable to kind of evaluation from the standpoint of modern science and philosophy so claims about the human mind the sources of human suffering and you know I'm I'm basically arguing not that I have myself had any particular special deep insight after meditating for weeks or anything and that's not the reason I feel I can make a claim is strong it's because of developments that have happened in psychology in particular ecology certainly including evolutionary psychology which I had written about before so the argument is that because of developments over the last few decades in these fields it's possible to mount a new kind of argument in defense of Buddhist psychology and philosophy and to just stay on the macro level for a moment this idea that you've posited in a couple of articles that Eastern philosophies have been sort of dismissed and and in favor of Western enlightenment and rationalism but you're sort of reevaluating it in that context yeah I mean this was actually I should admit that this is it's a piece I wrote in the New York Times the well blog and I have to admit that it was in response to a piece about the book in The New Yorker that I wasn't completely delighted about which kind of complained oh that I didn't spend enough time on kind of the poetry of Buddhism and I spent too much I was too many litical and maybe trying to tackle a subject analytically that isn't amenable to analysis in a certain sense and my reply in that Times piece was that actually that I think this is a common misconception about Buddhist philosophy and maybe Eastern philosophy generally is and I I said in a way I think this attitude could be labeled Orientalism I don't know if you familiar with the term it comes from Edward Sayid and and the idea behind Orientalism is that it's a way Westerners look at traditions from the east that is in a certain sense condescending that it's like yeah they're nice they're they're they're cute and and and and they have these aesthetic virtues but they're not as rigorous as Western thought and I argued that note when you look at Buddhist philosophy and psychology it's it's very rigorous now it's true that the claims it makes are radical so for example the idea that the self doesn't exist which is I spend a fair amount of time on it in the book that's a radical claim about both psychology and in a certain sense metaphysics and you spend a lot of time looking at natural selection at Darwinism and what we know about modern psychology and you look at it from sort of food traditions or certainly from mindfulness traditions yeah I mean I argue that I mean there's an appendix at the end of the book because I felt so defensive about the title it kind of toward the end I wrote an appendix that actually lists Buddhist claims that I think are true at least true in the sense that science ever says things are true in other words you know to the extent that we can tell right now I mean you know scientific theories are never proven they're just the they have a lot of corroborating evidence and I listed these things that I think qualify as as very credible claims made by Buddhism and I and I said in there but in a way the one sentence answer to a question of why is Buddhism true is because we are animals created by natural selection so I do think that if you look at the way natural selection well first of all certain features of the way it builds any animal brains that Buddhism really reckons with for example the fact that gratification tends to evaporate I think that's true of all animals and it's the reason so much of the quest for happiness as ordinarily conducted is if not futile you know not as profitable as might help because you you get you get the thing you're pursuing the pleasure evaporates so that that's a product of our just being animals and then there's these specific things that are products of our being human animals so that brings us to powdered Donuts and in your case dark chocolate and I see it's just turning into a confessional but those cravings are something that's indicative and charted on MRIs in modern psychology but something that one can find an antidote for in meditation yeah well I mean in a way it's the you know the the Buddhist term dukkha which when you hear that the Buddha emphasized that there's a lot of suffering in life I don't think he ever quite said life is suffering which is the standard paraphrase well but certainly emphasized the pervasiveness of suffering but the term Dukan it's recited is suffering a lot of scholars would say you could almost translate it as unsatisfactoriness or certainly has a strong connotation of unsatisfactoriness and and so the idea is that a big part of suffering is just the fact that whatever at every moment you want things to be a little better you you you eat the doughnut it feels good for a while and then you want another one and that's a big part of what Buddhism addresses and I think meditation helped you become aware of how pervasive this this really is you know one great thing about mindfulness meditation is I just think it's a very good form of introspection and it makes you aware of mental dynamics you weren't aware of and I think it can make you aware of how many problematic you know how much of suffering does boil down to always wanting things to be a little can this be a little better this feels a little uncomfortable and and what you say is a product of our Darwinian sort of its evolution any animals evolution I mean when you think about it it's like if your natural selection and you're designing an animal that's whose job is to get genes into the next generation of course natural selection is not a conscious designer but it does create animals that look as if they were designed to get genes into the next generation well if you imagine an animal that like it has one meal and then just goes whoa that was great and it just sits there contented forever I mean it'll starve to death right the hunger has to return and and the same is true you know it's very competitive game natural selection is you mentioned the Four Noble Truths you know and overcoming some of those first the craving hungers yeah well the the Four Noble Truths basically they they assert that first of all there is the problem of suffering and that at the core of the problem is this word tan ha ta NHA which can be translated as thirst or craving the way to the end of suffering is to I mean I'm not this isn't exactly the for the Four Noble Truths one by one but but the upshot is that there is a way to come to terms with the problem of tan ha of of just endless thirst and craving and then the way to do that is the Eightfold Path so-called and the last the Eightfold Path is a bunch of things that start with as it's traditionally translated with right right livelihood right understanding and so on in the last two are one of them is mindfulness and one of them is concentration right mindfulness right concentration so both of those refer to meditation so mindfulness meditation is you know we think of it sometimes as this secular therapeutic things that sometimes taught that way and I think that's a fine way to teach it but it has very deep roots in Buddhism mindfulness is not just some some fad let's delineate sort of and maybe even define some of the broader terms because I've read that you don't actually label yourself a Buddhist although you are practicing meditation you would I would argue you're an atheist so if you could delineate for us the spiritual versus you know the the faith tradition versus the secular aspects of Buddhism well I mean as for the atheism question I would call myself an agnostic who thinks there's reason to believe that there is a larger purpose unfolding on the planet for that but but that I I believed and even argued before before I got into Buddhism the reason I say in the book that I don't call myself a Buddhism a Buddhist is just because you know in Asia Buddhism is very different things from the Western Buddhism that a lot of us in America think of as I mean the American stereotype of Buddhism is they meditate and they don't believe in God actually in Asia it's roughly the opposite almost no Asian Buddhist meditate many monks do but some monks don't the and they do believe in deities although not an omnipotent creator God and anyway the point is that now there's also this this whole psychology and philosophy which I deal with in the book but but it you know I just worry that if I come out and call myself a Buddhist because I meditate every morning and it is a meditation informed by Buddhist philosophy it is but still if I were an Asian Buddhist I might I just might think you know I you know you've all heard the term cultural appropriation probably it's a big concern I'm personally not a cultural appropriation obsessive it's like I you know I don't go around worrying about you know who's playing the blues and stuff but it's a serious issue I don't I don't mean to belittle it it's it's just not something I spend a lot of time but I did feel in this one case that it might be seen as disrespectful if I went around calling myself a Buddhist but I'm fine with Western Buddhists who call themselves that might just by full disclosure my mother is a practicing Buddhist I'm a Jew there's a lot of confusion in our household but I do find it interesting I know you were raised Baptist and you you know sort of taught at Union Theological Seminary and it's it's something that you've considered so it was a question I thought was with asking but let me get back for a moment to the issue of cravings you have a whole chapter about how it's not about discipline or willpower it's something deeper than that yeah I mean yeah I was pretty keen the idea that willpower is like is is like this muscle that you have to exercise to make it better I mean it's true that it kind of does work like that in the sense that the more you successfully exercise what we call self-restraint the probably the better you'll get at it but but there is a somewhat different approach which consists of and this has been used in like helping people quit smoking and it's been shown that it can be effective which consists of rather than like stealing yourself to like fight the urge you actually would let the urge arise like the urge to smoke a cigarette or the urge to do anything else and then try to observe it mindfully which will be better at you do a lot of mindfulness meditation it's not easy to do that I mean our cravings and our emotions generally are kind of designed to get us to do their bidding without us reflecting on them and and exerting any kind of autonomy but if you do that if you if you just observe let let the urge arise and observe it but don't give it the reinforcement of smoking the cigarette or whatever or whatever the thing is whatever the payoff is that that's a very effective way to disempower the urge over time it's a slightly alternative approach that that implies a different model of the way the mind works which maybe we'll have time to get into just a little bit of a workaround it's a little bit of a short circuit because you talked about a lot of the science the modern science and the understanding of cognition right the idea that here's your brain here's your brain on chocolates and you there's a lot of MRI imaging going on looking at the in fact impact of like you're given money and you're about to buy something and the impact of your brain of that purchase right and so this idea that that meditation can help you short-circuit that meditation that the slave to passions is you know this is a fundamental point that Western psychology has been starting to catch on to that I think Buddhist psychology was was in on very early which is just that the the the traditional distinction between cognition and effect or feeling or emotion is just misleading and the fact is our feelings are so finely intertwined with our thoughts and our perceptions that they are doing the steering and this is what you mentioned you know reason is the slave and passions that's a David Hume you know Western Enlightenment philosopher who was actually kind of Buddhist I mean he thought the self doesn't exist and and so on but but he did pick up on the fact that ultimately as we ordinarily live our lives the feelings are in charge they're driving the thoughts they accompany our perceptions you see someone you have a certain feeling about them you don't notice it probably but it's going to govern the way you perceive them you know you're it has it's like are they in the rival slaw serious rival enemy possible ally ally you know it's like all these different categories of people elicit feelings that then frame the way we think of them and so you know you kind of alluded to a particular study there I think that I talked about in the book where it was just a demonstration that shopping behavior ultimately comes down to feeling they did brain scans of people trying to decide whether to buy a thing and they just showed that you know it's like they looked at you know when you look at how much it cost how bad did that make you feel when you looked at the thing itself how good did that make you feel and you know the pleasure centers and the the different centers of the brain that light up and it just comes down to contest of feelings and in that and that's David Hume himself emphasize that and I think mindfulness meditation both makes you aware of how pervasively feelings influence your thought your perception and allow you to do something about it so in the Western tradition you you are you've you've argued in articles that the Western enlightenment alone can't save the universe you have another audacious claim that meditation can save America yeah well this was actually it's a piece I just did for Wired about Steve Pinker's new book enlightenment now it's a best-seller and he's very aware of like the cognitive bias problem like confirmation bias and the fact that you know we confirmation bias is just that you know we're very we notice evidence that supports our pre-existing views we don't notice evidence or we easily dismiss evidence that is contrary to our views and I should say I mean all of this fits squarely in the in the great problem of our time the kind of tribalism the political tribalism in America where both sides look at your seeing the evidence that supports their view and and and so on and I say the irony is that this is an ancient faith that is perhaps perfectly timed for our age this idea that what you get out in the book is that evolutionary psychology is is explains the tribalism that exists in our thinking we are designed and to associate with groups and to identify groups that are threatening and to process information about them accordingly which means in a biased distorted way that reinforces our view that we're right and we deserve to win and they deserve to lose the I think these things are built pretty deeply into the human mind and they work very subtly and and the point I made in this in this piece about Steve Peters book was in his book he says okay we have these cognitive biases and there's these things you can do like you can be aware of like certain kinds of fallacies that that you may be prone to and so on and I think that's all fine but I still think there is nothing as effective as a practice that makes you aware that like when you're on social media and you see a tweet or a Facebook item and you want to share it because it supports the your your tribes view until you feel the urge to share it it is an urge it's a feeling if you pay attention to what's going on it's not like a rational decision it's like it would feel good to click retweet it would feel good to click share and this is responsible for a lot of the so-called fake news problem I mean people just uncritically share things that corroborate the pre-existing view without actually examining them and so I'm just saying that I think you know and I'm I'm like your colleague at ABC Dan Harris I'm pretty evangelical about this and so how does i mean we've we've obviously got a lot of information on facebook and how it bifurcates the audience and and you know speaking in real time about what this does how does meditation or mindfulness act as an antidote to that because you actually put out something called a resistance newsletter yeah the mindful resistance newsletter thank you for the plug yeah yeah the the it's a mindful resistance net or you can just google it that grows out of a piece I did for a Vox where I kind of critique the so-called resistance against Trump I think the resistance is sometimes too reactive response reacts too readily to Trump's provocations for it's own good isn't reflective enough for its own good isn't mindful in the everyday English sense of the word of just calmly paying attention to things and and and focusing on what's most important but yeah I do think meditation helps you be like that if if something is happening in the news or there is a public figure who is pushing your emotional buttons yeah and there are some that are very good at that you can work around it you can I mean I find in general with feelings that emerge in the course of your life like it can just be you're at the checkout counter the person funny is taking a long time you're getting annoyed you're starting to think unkind things about them because they're so slow just a feeling like that it's not a super subtle thing you know you all know the feeling when I say it but at the same time I find that when I'm practicing meditation regularly I'm more likely to notice it in real time when it's happening and just be able to pause and reflect on it in a way that again disempowers it I mean and and this this disempowering can happen with really unpleasant feelings like deep anxiety I mean you can in principle meditate on anxiety and I've had experiences where suddenly deep anxiety was something I was just viewing with detachment it was it was I could see where it was in my body but it was just no longer painful so I think with with both dramatic unpleasant feelings and subtle feelings that you're not even aware are guiding you I think a regular meditation practice can help you deal with them you talk in the Vox article I think about how that kind of outrage and emotion getting overwhelmed with the emotion is a disservice to those of us who all of us frankly who need to examine sort of the polarization that's happening and what those real causes are of the polarization yeah and I think it's the I mean and it goes beyond America I mean the psychology of tribalism I think is well it's long been a great human affliction and I think now it is driving everything from sectarian conflict to national conflict to this polarization in America and and knowledge ease in some ways abetting it it's making it easier to divide people into tribes and micro tribes so I think you know it's critical that we that we get better at you know what you call kind of metacognition understanding your own cognition how it works getting better at viewing it and in a sense taking control and I think you know we all think the other tribe is the problem but we are all subject to this to this thing and we are all part of the problem can I still not like the red sauce that is actually no you cannot like the Yankees a little polarization happening on the stage right now I couldn't okay there we were talking about the the Comey interview on Sunday night at ABC News it was what we were all fixated on and Franklin's the pulse pollster conducted a watch party and polled Republicans and Democrats and clearly their reaction to what was happening looked like two parallel lines you know it was just like inversely correlated yeah clearly an example of the fabulous the way it is and it has really like perverse implications like all of a sudden all these people and left on the left are like getting into kind of Cold War mode about Russia because the guy they hate Donald Trump is not doing that and they suspect it may be because the Russians have influence over him so that's you know I mean so much it's just so much of it is governed at the personal level like this Donald Trump is a person you hate whatever he likes you hate whatever you hate you like it's not quite that simple obviously but but that's a good example of how your views are governed by which which tribe you're you're with give me a glimpse give us a glimpse if you will of what your meditation practice looks like you know most people who aren't meditating are intimidated the idea of you know lots and lots of I don't have time mm-hmm well Herstal I'm not a natural meditator I had to go to an actual one-week silent meditation retreat before I saw any value at all most people happily don't have to go to such extremes although I recommend retreats but there are apps for example in fact the 10% happier app courtesy of your colleague in Harris and other apps and there are online teachers and so on you know I my own practice is 30 minutes in the morning and then periodically and you know sometimes that doesn't go that great I mean sometimes it's like why did I spend this time and then sometimes what will happen is late in the day I'll be feeling like anxiety or anger or something and I'll sit down and meditate and that will deal with it pretty effectively and the fact is if I didn't have a morning practice I wouldn't be I wouldn't be remembering to do that and I wouldn't be as good at it is there a magic number is there a baseline number you know some people add an in its most recent book advocates what is it micro micro hits or something micro dosing of meditation and there and and you know and different things work for different people but yeah I would say pausing for one minute is a good thing and and one if you're having trouble sustaining a practice one tip I got from somebody which I think he's good is just the rule has to be that every morning whenever your time is you spend at least one second on the cushion so even if you're saying I just don't have time today you go ahead and do the ritual of sitting down and then you just don't lose the thread now for myself anything short of 20 minutes I like I said I'm bad it's like to even start focusing on many consecutive breaths could take me a while and for me it feels like in the morning if I didn't do 20 minutes I'm not sure it'd be worth it but a lot of people say that 40 minutes you know is really like the dopamine kicks in or something but but these things work differently for different people I'm gonna call out your ADHD because you write about it in the book because everyone thinks of meditation is something that you have to focus on it's something I was drawn to you for my middle son who has attention issues and and seems to be helpful yeah I'm that score yeah thank you I think it's helped I think now meditation may be harder to begin with if you have attention problems but at the same time I mean it's a general truth I think that the people who most need meditation have the hardest time doing it but that doesn't mean you shouldn't put in the effort I I do think it helps I mean you notice that in the extreme example of like being on retreat where like at the end of a week you're just in a totally different zone and that the attention problems are completely gone but then you get back to the real world and you're only gonna be able to hang on to some of that at most and and there I would say the times you may notice it are like if you're trying to write a piece like you're trying to write something online you supposed to focus on that and then like you get to a difficult place in the writing and your mind wants to wander and you think like you know I could really stand the research like smartphones I need to buy a smartphone whatever whatever it is it's tempting you away is very literally temptation you'll notice it's a feeling and it's a feeling that very much like you know it would feel better it feels good I enjoy researching smartphones and it's very much like the desire to smoke a cigarette if you can make yourself stop and observe it you know that can disempower it so that is an act of of attention of restoring attention where it might otherwise straight talk a little bit about you know we think of meditation as being blissed-out like you know and Dan talks about all the time losing one's ambition if you're blissed-out and you're not motivated by anger and frustration or what-have-you and yet you know we see executives of fortune 500 companies we see you know Goldman Sachs Apple executives everybody taking to the meditation crazy what do you make of that well first I'm not I'm not a cynic about it there are people who you know serious meditators long-standing and they don't like the way like executives in Silicon Valley are using it to like get an edge and make more money I mean my own view is that the the it so often just tends to be the case that meditation makes you at least somebody's you're live with that that whatever your motivation I say it's probably good that you're doing it and it may be the kind of gateway drug that leads you to much deeper exploration of it and exploration yeah you said well right that's a it is a process of of self exploration and I should say they're different kinds of meditation I'm talking me mainly about mindfulness meditation I mean they're different kinds of Buddhist meditation let's talk a little bit about enlightenment the checklist for enlightenment that Tom alluded to but talk you talked a bit him the book about the difference between bliss and enlightenment I thought that was illustrative yeah now it is said of course in Buddhism enlightenment is this thing that is said to lie at the end of the path not many people attain it may be but the Buddha did you know enlightenment awakening and it is associated with bliss it is the end of suffering so it's liberation from suffering and enlightenment in the sense of seeing the world clearly and by the way I think the most amazing claim of Buddhism is that the reason we suffer and the reason we make other people suffer is because we don't see the world clearly that's a claim I defend in the book and I think it's an amazing claim but anyway bliss is associated with enlightenment but with mindfulness meditation the object of the game is not bliss I mean there are forms of meditation of concentration meditation which I've done and they can be super blissful and they can they can they can bring states of super deep bliss and that's that's great but but with with mindfulness meditation especially the variant associate well especially when it's associated with what's called the Posada meditation which translates this insight the goal is to really understand things about the world and your mind more clearly really see things about the world in your mind more clearly now that is going to tend to make you happier is the claim and I think it that tends to be true and it's going to tend to make you a better person in a sense of treating people more distant decently it's at least correlational ly true I think not guaranteed so so you know I wouldn't work you don't even worry about the Bliss you're probably gonna get happier if you go further along the path of my let's meditation but it's it's not the immediate goal of mindfulness meditation so take us on the road to enlightenment what is the checklist well again you know Buddhists very diverse tradition there are different meditation traditions different units here of Auto Buddhism Mahayana and substations within them Tibetan and so on and they have different and they're different conceptions of what enlightenment amounts involves but I think pretty much common to all of them an example of something I think you'd find implicit or explicit in pretty much all traditions is that it involves a recognition that the self is an illusion the letting go the idea that you are this there that there's this distinct core of your identity and that it's this like CEO that's running the show that's a good example of what is considered a like a breakthrough insight that would be associated with enlightenment and it has tremendous implications because I should say if you'll if you'll permit a little tangent I mean in in Buddhism there is this interesting distinction between the intellectual understanding of the claims of Buddhist philosophy you can argue on behalf of the doctrine not self and the experiential understanding the spirit the direct apprehension of the truth of not self and that latter thing would certainly be involved in enlightenment and I've had glimmers of it myself especially while on retreat I'm not one of these people who claims that they've had that full-on not self experience but it can involve dramatic things like I remember I was meditating once on retreat and just suddenly you know I felt a tingling in my foot and I heard a bird singing and just suddenly it seemed like the tingling was no more part of me than then the bird song and the bird was no less a part of me than the tingling it was like a dissolution of the bounds of self that when you actually feel it is a pretty amazing thing and of course it changes your relationship to the world I mean if you don't and and this is one of the great like moral payoffs of the not-self experience the full on not self experience is that you would in principle cease to privilege your own interests over those of other people would be which would be completely radical it's the ideal of a number of ethical systems but you know try it and see how far you get and this sort of right it's the sort of interconnectedness of the world which brings us to the matrix because I don't know if you all saw the Keanu Reeves franchise three movies of which have been distributed the red pill takes away his delusion yeah the matrix I don't know if you're familiar with it but it's you know it turns out that that what we think of as human experience is actually all a dream we're actually in these gooey pods just like with our eyes closed and these dreams are being pumped into our brains by these robots who have taken over I mean this 100 years this maybe who knows and but anyway in the movie it's happened now and it's funny that when that movie came out a lot of kind of Western Buddhists saw it as a so-called dharma movie you know dharma means the teaching of the teachings of buddha also the path you follow in response to those teachings and they saw it as a metaphor because that the buddhist claim is dramatic i mean it says the world is you ordinarily perceive it is in a sense an illusion and not i mean there are only almost all forms of Buddhism in Buddhist philosophy are not saying that that that it's true in in in in the complete sense that it's true in the movie the matrix that it's just all not there but the idea is that we are deeply deluded about the actual nature of reality and the delusion involves things like myself existing and also the sense that things have essences which I can take and get into but in any event the you know people who have practiced very seriously that the main point is they resonate to the claim that it's all an illusion because I mean that's a testament to how fundamentally a really sustained meditation practice and I'm not I'm not I don't have a practice that deep right now but I've gotten a glimpse of dislike on retreat a really deep meditation practice can transform your perception so thoroughly that you just go I cannot believe I was walking around under the influence of that kind of consciousness it was just it was just wrong it was just I was making all these judgments about people on the basis of almost no evidence I was wrong about the way my own mind works and this is a much truer and better way to view the world where take us through this delineation again between because you're sounding almost supernatural not exactly but this idea how do you regard the rebirth tradition or they you know some of the supernatural aspects of Buddhism I actually don't treat him in the book I wasn't brought up Buddhist or some so I have no particular connection to them I mean I guess I'm technically agnostic it's not you know it's not it doesn't seem to me completely impossible that I mean I think until we figure out what consciousness is you know I don't think you there are a lot of exotic scenarios that I don't think you'll be able to take completely off the table but I don't have any particular belief in them but the you know the the the matrix scenario I mean there have been western philosophies you know Berkeley and so on it made really extreme claims about the extent to which the reality of the world that there cannot be verified and it's for practical purposes be thought of as an illusion so I mean I guess you know metaphysics is an important word it's sometimes taken to be synonymous with like New Age and Wu and like non-scientific but no I mean a lot philosophers here in America deal with metaphysics seriously and they examine claims about the nature of the self the nature of our perceptions how real they are to what extent are they constructed and so in metaphysics nan Wu metaphysics you might say makes rannilt a technical term what was a technicality I don't think I actually use in the book but but my boys mainstream metaphysics can involve radical claims Buddhism makes radical claims and and I defend them tell us about the evolution you're thinking at what point did did sort of modern science and modern psychology sort of overlay with what you knew about the ancient traditions in mindfulness meditation well I wrote a book almost 25 years ago called the moral animal in the early part of when evolutionary psychology was just becoming a term and it was a about evolutionary psychology and I noticed that that made me more aware of the shortcomings of my own perception I mean remember natural selection says those traits that are best at getting genes into the next generation are the traits we will have including mental traits if they're grounded in the genes it doesn't care whether they lead to accurate perception if there's an illusion you can have that will get genes into the next generation if the illusion that you are more morally morally entitled than your neighbor will get genes into the next generation any kind of a simple case we when when I when an object is approaching us rapidly we tend to overestimate how fast it's moving that's an illusion now when you think about it it makes sense because it's better to get out of the way too soon than too late right so that's like a better safe than sorry illusion that's apparently in our genes that that helps Gene's get transmitted so anyway I as I wrote the book about evolutionary psychology I became aware of like how many especially things in the moral realm are really distortions of a clear view but one thing I noticed is that knowing about them being more aware of them didn't by itself help me control them because evolutionary psychology is a statement about the way things are it doesn't involve a practice a discipline for actually dealing with these things and what I realized this Buddhism actually makes much of the same descriptive claims about the human predicament as evolutionary psychology but in a in addition to having a diagnosis it it has a prescription it has something you could you can do about it so for me that was the big I mean I it's probably what led me to pursue meditation and actually go to a retreat and how does it help us from an evolutionary psychology perspective to have this kind of tribalism hardwired into our brain to have the kind of susceptibility I mean I guess it's because the tribe protects us arguably yeah I mean it's it's in a way tribalism and misleading I mean way misleading term I mean there weren't during you know great bulk of human evolution took place during the hunter-gatherer phase and our tribes the way anthropologists described a northeast huge you know groups of people but even within a hunter-gatherer society or any society there are coalitional conflicts you and your friend versus three other people and it may not be physical it may not get to a point of physical fight it may be a contest over resources it may be the belief that you deserve some mate and somebody else doesn't but but there are contests between groups that have steaks in Darwinian terms in genetic terms and any way of thinking that makes you better at at getting the resources including just arguing your case you know I mean it's more and more recognized that our minds are just designed to make arguments on our behalf which is different from being designed to see the world clearly their minds are just like our own personal lawyers you know and and if that helped get genes into the next generation then that will that will be a thing and and and again that's what's driving a lot you know you ask why is it good for us I think it's not good for us I mean that's another thing natural selection doesn't care about us per se it cares about the genes so even in a more natural environment than this these tribal impulses might bring immense suffering but but natural selection doesn't care about our happiness either well and some of it can be very self-destructive yeah I mean especially in a modern environment you see this with like you see an impulse like rage right I mean evolutionary psychologists think that rage is a design by natural selection to do a certain thing which is when you feel aggrieved you stand up for yourself and you show that you're willing to fight which and even if you don't win the fight you have demonstrated to your audience that they will pay a price for messing with you because you are willing to get into a fight I mean that's the kind of rough logical rage well in a modern environment in a road rage just MIT you know makes no sense whatsoever I mean first of all you may get killed secondly there's no one watching who is who matters to you right there's no one who are you trying to prove this to you're never gonna see any of the other drivers again and yeah and yet the impulse its original logic was to be a demonstration that doesn't make sense in this environment and yet it persists and we we have all kinds of feelings that I've demonstrated repeatedly to my children in the backseat how irrational yeah yeah in traffic they comment back in traffic I believe they have um what about lust in a modern context well lust is something that probably doesn't need a lot of explanation and Darwinian terms right I mean you can see how it might lead you to get genes into the next generation um it's like the rest you know in the sense that first of all it never brings enduring gratification I mean I'm not I'm not against it necessarily but and I mean you mean compare modern environment and the so-called natural in the context can be self-destructive you are a slave to one that - a perfect example of how absurd these impulses can become is pornography right I mean there are people really addicted to pornography because in the and it's a perm ale than a female affliction in ways that evolutionary psychologists need to have an explanation but in any event you know in the environment of our evolution a person would no clothes on was a person with no clothes on so if natural selection designed us to respond to that pattern of information then it made sense in Darwinian terms at least in the sense that yeah that was a particular sex partner and now you have this absurd situation of people sitting at home with computer screens and you see just how pointless and ridiculous and it's a serious problem yeah you had a section called hatred as an addiction as well which I thought yeah I mean hatred is and again with you know it's interesting question what is the well I mean just look at the things hatred sets in motion if you feel the impulse of hatred toward someone you might start having revenge fantasies things you can do to them down as a favorite pastime of mine you might I mean I try for not to be but but or you might just think about unflattering things you could say about them and again in if you imagine a hunter-gatherer society it's like you know that's if you've got somebody's you mortal enemy you want to undermine their status that will help your status and so you want to be able to say things about them that are unflattering so you think of these unflattering things so that's those are the kinds of things that are set in motion when you feel hatred and it's very difficult to like when you feel hatred to like just stop and observe it mindfully but if you do that successfully then it won't lead to those things and it won't get that kind of reinforcement in it I think in your book it's quite clear that what you're saying it's not just about neutralizing these cravings or about the whoo the you know loving-kindness aspect of it but about really sort of getting a self awareness that allows you to control some of these yeah there is a kind of meditation called Metta meditation or a loving-kindness meditation that is specifically oriented toward cultivating emotional empathy for people including yourself and that's fine but but yeah I think even I mean that doesn't come out that doesn't I haven't in tremendous success with that kind of meditation but I but but what I want to say is it's just kind of ordinary ordinary mindfulness meditation I think has some of the same benefits it lessens your your harsh judgments of people it can make you more just to calm down be less governed by your kind of reactive feelings I think can bring compassion and so I think either way you can you can become a better person I was handed this iPad because we're gonna get questions from the audience and from our online audience as well so think through but this comes very well dovetails off of what you're just saying April from Beijing asks you a question a lot of what you write has to do with morality and how we can become better people what's the connection between mindfulness and becoming more moral okay first of all again it's not it's not an automatic connection and there and there have been meditation teachers who I think reached great depths of mindfulness who use their meditative prowess to sexually exploit students and things that can happen and that's one reason that in Buddhism there's a whole set of ethical teachings that accompanies the meditative practice and is kind of part of the path to enlightenment that said I think mindfulness does tend to make people better first of all just by calming calming down I mean how many times have you done behaved in a way towards someone that you regretted and or just as you weren't calm enough right so calming down is moral progress but in the extremes if you get to the extremes of and another radical Buddhist concept is the concept of so-called emptiness or the idea that things don't have essences if I can just quickly say one of my more profound retreat experiences was to come upon a kind of weed that I had spent a certain amount of my time trying to kill because it was in my front lawn and just suddenly going like why have I tried to kill this it's it's exactly as beautiful as the other plants in the forest now at one level that's a trivial observation in other words we know that weed is an arbitrary category weed isn't written in the DNA it's just our culture is to find certain things as weeds but when you have the experience all a prehension when that category breaks down in an experiential way you're no longer seeing essence of weed that's what emptiness is and it's not a bad thing emptiness sounds like this negative thing no it's like all things are equally beautiful and when you when you do that with people when you view a rival or enemy from that context and the end the essence of enemy or essence of rival drains away then that transforms the way you deal with it doesn't mean by the way that with that you'll quit worrying about punishing bad people or anything like that it doesn't mean that you relax all moral and judgment in a sense but but but mindfulness the moral benefits can range from calmness to a to just a tremendously lessened sense of judgment a less reflexive sense of judgment to in the extreme case this kind of thing were the essences that these negative essences just drop out of things do we have an audience member here who's interested in asking a question let's go here if Buddhism is true is is it the only religious philosophy that is true or are all other religious philosophies as true are some more or less true I'm specifically interested in see Advaita Vedanta or Patanjali Yoga matter yeah I mean short answer is I mean I in the very beginning in the book I'm mindful as I was or the perils of a title like this I have several things I want to get clear on one of them is that it doesn't mean that other traditions aren't true you know the Dalai Lama my quote at this point said don't don't use Buddhism to become a better Buddhist use it to become a better whatever you are so and also I would say again I'm not dealing with the religious side you might see a contrary you know a contradiction between rebirth in the Christian notion of the afterlife but I'm not I'm not dealing with that realm anyway and I would say that the things I am dealing with are compatible with religious traditions broadly I know there's a an emeritus at Union Theological Seminary which I have an affiliation is wrote a book called without the mood I could not be a Christian he considers himself a Christian Buddhist now as far as advice Vedanta the this is a Hindu tradition there are cases where you would have a difference of philosophical interpretation I mean first of all adviser means non-dual okay so the idea that experience I described when my the bounds of myself kind of broke down that's that kind of the beginning of a non dual experience where the distinction to me and the it just breaks down that's non dual now in AD vitae Vedanta meditation there can be experiences that I think are essentially the same as a Buddhist meditator would have along those lines a sense of unity a sense that the self is broken down the philosophical tradition might be different so Buddhism because of the notion of not self it would say well it isn't that I'm one with everything it's that everything is in some sense emptiness that might be the philosophical interpretation whereas with Vedanta the interpretation might be well there's been emerging you know of atman and brahman or emerging of kind of my self or soul with the universal soul that's a difference of interpretation and there there there's a difference it's a difference of philosophy that maybe there would be arguments about but I actually believe that the both the experiences themselves are probably essentially identical and in a sense the moral payoff of the experiences are probably basically the same and I would say that even with something like Christian mysticism we're where you have a sense of profound union with the divine again that that's probably I don't know it's conjectural but that might also have a lot in common with these experiences so there are places where disagreement can arise between certain traditions that make really specific philosophical claims but I think that by and large you could take the part of Buddhism I'm focusing on and and bring it into a Christian or Jewish or Muslim or or I mean ironically Hindu Hinduism is the one where you might see the kind of friction I've described precisely because Hinduism and Buddhism have you know the Buddha was born a Hindu apparently and so and there is so much in common with the philosophies that there are these specific points of difference of interpretation one more hand over here yes has there been any research on how meditation changes the limbic system or the amygdala in the brain there there there have been I don't I don't spend a ton of time on the psychological studies in the book but they're they're certainly I'm pretty sure you could find things where the amygdala which is generally associated like fear threat and so on kind of gets a little more passive a thing I focus on in the book having to do with these brain scans is is the so called default mode Network which which is the it's a network of parts of the brain that tend to get active when the mind is wandering and the mind tends to wander whenever you're not just focused on something specific you know working toward a deadline playing a sport reading a novel if you don't have something directly engaging the human mind just tends to wander which isn't necessarily a bad thing but it's it's something that you have to deal with if you're gonna try to do mindfulness meditation because you're gonna try to even though you're not playing a sport or anything you try to focus on one thing like your breath and there certainly have been studies showing that with you know meditators of great attainment the default mode Network this thing associated with the water in line gets much much calmer there's even as somebody I described in the book who his his default mode network was quiet just as a matter of course before he even started meditating according to this study he participated in but there is there is a lot of work in this field and you know I'd say it's showing about what you'd expect I'm going to go to the what is this thing called a tablet I that because there's another great question from Katarina from Long Island and she says The Crying crisis of the Rohingya people has shown in the world that Buddhism can have a militant aspect justice other faiths have shown despite its very benevolent image should we be surprised that there is militant Buddhism in the world probably not I mean people it gets I mean people you commonly hear this like if meditation is so great for you you know why is this happening again first thing to say is most Buddhists in Asia don't meditate there are specific places where there's something of a tradition of lay meditation but it's the exception there are a lot even monks who don't meditate the other thing is you you know in other words in Asia Buddhism is more like what you might think of as a traditional religion then the way people and some people in America think of this kind of Western Buddhism so it really shouldn't surprise you that much of course the teachings in Buddhism are you know emphasized not harming other beings then again there are a lot of Christian teachings that you know Christians you know don't always it's a nature it's the nature of of religions for for you know it to be that way and one thing about religion is it becomes a group you identify with this is if it's part of your ethnic identity to be a Buddhist or an anything else then then the tribal holistic impulses can get activated in a situation where you see another group as a threat if it's the case that most Buddhists in Asia don't meditate how did the idea of meditation and mindfulness germinate so strongly in what you often referred to in the book as Western Buddhism yeah it's interesting well first of all Buddhism has reached the West through several different kind of conduits so kind of a Zen hit the west coast I mean it's reached America through several different countries then hit the west coast and kind of 50s 60s in the 70s a form of Tibetan kind of a fusion of kind of a Tibetan and some other things got a foothold in especially in Colorado and then the tradition I am most associated with and I write about in the book tera Vaadin Buddhism got a foothold initially in the east and and that's particularly associated with with mindfulness and that is actually the one of the three I would say that's the one that actually derives from a part of Asia where lay meditation had gathered a foothold so in Burma for example an interesting Hank thing happened as a result of British colonialism which is that you know I don't know what it was like a hundred and thirty forty years ago I don't know the dates exactly but there was such a fear that British dominance was going to destroy the existing the indigenous cultural tradition that as a form of resistance they started teaching both precepts of Buddhism more more kind of aggressively to lay people but also started teaching meditation and meditation became a thing that lay people did and the the kind of Buddhism that is like at the inside Meditation Society where I've done my retreats spirit rock on the west coast which is an offshoot of IMS that derives from an Asian tradition that really is associated with a certain amount of lay meditation from Burma yeah Burma and you you also see they also draw on Thailand in particular but Burma is this very clear-cut example of a kind of a you know a revival of a grassroots or at least a the creation of grassroots meditation tradition in the fairly recent past in Asia fascinating of a hand here and yes in the back won't you both all right thank you for sharing with us today my question is pretty simple other than your own book what book have you gifted most have a gifted most yeah given to people yep Wow you may be overestimating my generosity first yeah well let him answer unless he's wants to buy a little time to think about that okay that may be yeah I mean you're using Buddhist books in particular that I mean as far as books I a few books I think are great I was just thinking are there any books that you read a book I've gone back and looked at it there's a fascinating little book by Erwin Schrodinger the physicist the quantum physicists from a long early 20th century and what's interesting about it is that it's it's two little books that are generally published together and one is called what is life and he was one of the first people to start talking about like information and entropy and defining life in those terms but then if that is paired with a an essay that I think is called mine didn't matter but in any event it turns out he has a very eastern side as he's not the only physicist who does but that's just a very Eastern reflection philosophical reflection from from a Western physicist and America well Schrodinger I think was it must have been European but I don't know exactly if anybody know what Schrodinger is that like a German or Austrian German yes another question in the audience to what extent is all passionate attachment considered an obstacle to Buddhist ideals including if the attachment is towards a spouse or towards a mother yeah you know in principle if you actually attained enlightenment and I am personally agnostic on the question of whether any living person has okay there are people who say they've attained enlightenment and then there are people who may secretly think they've attained enlightenment but are wise enough not to make that claim I personally think that that if you're you know if you look in the ancient Buddhist texts and really look at what they're describing how extreme an achievement it would be I'm not sure anyone ever has and I've talked to people who say they've attained enlightenment and I'm not sure they have all the hallmarks that you would expect but the answer your question is yes you would have let go of all attachments and this sounds like creepy you know right I mean will I not be attached to my children you know and I'd say a couple of things first of all as a practical matter you don't have to worry it's not going to happen to you I mean you're not going to get that far secondly some lesson of attachment can be a very good thing in a parent as many of you will probably I'm a parent and I could use less and I don't mean just in terms of reducing my own suffering it would often be good for the child if you were less attached and and and so I guess I'd say there is a point beyond which the lessening of attachment seems creepy now if you got there it might not seem creepy to you and you might be a wonderful person it might not be a problem but in any event I don't think any of us has to worry about getting beyond the point where it might seem creepy you know there's an entire parenting methodology known as attachment parenting I know yeah so meditation has gotten really pervasive in America what do you feel like is the biggest obstacle for everyone or this philosophy to be adopted by everyone well I mean ironically one thing I've come to appreciate since I wrote my book is that in some context the word Buddhism is a problem so for example if you're a local school board various towns in America and you're advocating that they teach mindfulness to the children I recommend that you do not call it Buddhist because they will think of it as a religion that is incompatible with their own religious tradition so and so that's one reason I'm fine with you know I actually just had a conversation with Jon kabat-zinn on this I run a website called meaning of like TV and I just taped a conversation with him that will air I guess it's coming Friday maybe and he is that he's the person who came up with mindfulness based stress reduction and he has brought this mindfulness into a lot of institutional settings the workplace in schools and so on that it might not have gotten Hattie a test for Buddhism although he himself came at it from a totally Buddhist vantage point in fact he had his great epiphany about mindfulness based stress reduction while on retreat at the Insight Meditation Society where I've done my retreats and so that's that's an issue and I knees great for mindfulness to be taught under whatever label as a practical matter for people that there's the problems just sustaining the practice and there's various little tricks you know Dan as this new book in addition to 10% happier your colleague wrote a book called meditation for skeptics I think that did you know helps you kind of deal with and he has an app just to be shameless Lee plugging it called 10% happier and it's guided meditation and I and it plugs you into some of the teachers that I've worked maybe yes yes yes and what's nice about it is it's male voices female voices there's everything from body awareness to anti stress to but to layer this question from Billy in Brooklyn who says he's very interested in mindfulness and meditating more often how important is it to learn more about Buddhism itself I know very little he says which is sort of the opposite of her question everything you don't have to learn the Buddhism to start and it depends on how intellectually curious you are and how far down the path you go I mean I think I think you know Buddhism makes really interesting claims about the connection of our between our minds and the reality we think we're perceiving and so I recommend you know if people are intellectually curious and I think you can deepen your commitment to meditation it can definitely work that way now the ancient texts themselves are can be a little opaque but there's lots of books that that try to unpack them yes right here since tribalism seems to be bringing us to the edge of extinction as a race something that Charles Darwin and the movement he fathered would not be happy about do you would you say that mindfulness meditation might be an antidote to extreme tribalism that might keep us from blowing ourselves up as a civilization I mean I am I'm evangelical maybe because I was brought up Southern Baptist but all right you know I wrote a book called non zero in which I kind of told the story of humankind from Hunter the other days to being on the brink of forming a global community and my view is if we don't form a cohesive global community the whole thing may and once you know at best dissolve in chaos and maybe even worse because there's so many there's a growing number of so-called nonzero-sum problems that we can only solve in concert not just environmental ones all kinds of them and increasingly I think that if for Humanity to get across this threshold and we are as you know nowhere near crossing the threshold to a cohesive global community it's going to require uh maybe a transformation almost on the part of humankind I mean maybe humankind pretty broadly is going to have to pass through some kind of threshold that maybe you could call if you wanted to be making some very secular like metacognition in other words we have to become more aware of how our minds work and how they mislead us and you're seeing this you know the old term cognitive bias that's like become a term you read and that's progress that's good but I do think that just hearing about the problem doesn't myself solve it and mindfulness meditation is I think not the only tool but a great tool and so I I think you know it may it may not be too much to say that the planet salvation demands that humankind broadly make what you could call spiritual progress that that can occur within any religious tradition or any secular you know or a secular tradition but I think that maybe what's demanded of us yes and then in the back I'm just curious if you have a opinion is is yoga true and I can see where you know perhaps it's complimentary but maybe it's yoga's about me I'm doing the handstand and feeling that open and I'm not approaching non-duality button it's more about enhancing oneself as opposed to mindful meditation well first I I'm not in a yoga expert it's like there's one little thing that supposedly is good for your back I do that now yoga there are different kinds of yoga some of them do integrate you know like mindfulness per se and and is that connection but I would also say that even Mike should say mindfulness I mean I mean there are forms of yoga where that where part of the deal is to become more aware of your body which is a form of mindfulness it isn't just feelings that you become mindful of I mean if you go back look at the ancient foundational texts on mindfulness if you become more Minds of everything including your body your your thoughts your feelings so on but I would say that what you said is that well isn't yoga kind of about the self well in the beginning meditation is about to self I mean people start meditating because they have a problem it it it typically starts off as self-help and there's nothing wrong with that you know they have anxiety they have whatever and it's one of the great features of it that what begins as self-help can draw you down a path that makes you more selfless so I don't think people should apologize for wanting to get something out of it even though it's true that being like determinately goal-oriented as you sit down to meditate will can get in the way and there's teachers will emphasize that and and that's right but people start meditating for a reason and it has to do with him yes been back I guess I'm not exactly clear what's the difference between Buddhism mindfulness and the Enlightenment project as conceived in the West I mean one has to be reflective on on everything about one is it basically a technique that Buddhism offers I don't see exactly what what at least is you're presenting it what Buddhism is offering that that that the Enlightenment project doesn't offer well first of all these two radical philosophical claims not self in emptiness there was one enlightenment floss David Hume who kind of got in the idea of not so but it's not associated with the Enlightenment and I would say this gets back to this piece I just wrote in Wired about Steve Pinker's book is that you know his whole book and enlightenment now is like if we'll just stay true to the path laid out by Western the Western enlightenment we can save humankind we can solve all these problems we can think rationally and I said I don't think that's true because the Western enlightenment does not offer a technique I mean enlightenment philosophers were at least somewhat aware Hume was certainly of the way passions influenced thinking and so on and they were aware of in some sense of tribalism and all that but it does not offer a systematic technique for addressing it and so I think you need a melding I mean the Western enlightenment project has a lot to be said for it but by itself I don't think it's really complete as a prescription yes here and then in the back have you heard people say that Buddhism undermines ambition and that countries that are predominantly Buddhist are less successful because of their well first of all there are a lot of countries with a Buddhist tradition that have no shortage of productivity so I don't think empirically you would need to worry about that now the idea that it may SAP your ambition is a common concern like if I start meditating will I no longer be as ambitious um first of all if you get there you won't care [Laughter] secondly I'm not aware of and I know people have gone well down way further down the path and I have gone I'm not aware of any who have like lost ambition I'm aware of people whose whose missions may have changed they may have maybe less maniacally devoted to conventional career achievement and in material you know material gain but they may be spending their time trying to convince people to meditate or something I mean I you know and then it may you know maybe or they may just I mean again it's one of those things like losing your attachments where you know as a practical matter or like losing all ambition even if it's a theoretical possibility don't worry about getting there I mean a more likely things you might be you know in your 30s and and determined to get that promotion or something and you might become a little it's possible you could become a little less determined to get it you might spend more time with your family or more time doing charity work or something that's possible it would be okay with me and again the point is it will be okay with you once you get there even if before you get there you find it terrifying yes thank you professor Wright I have two questions that you could take a pick I guess so I'm curious about emptiness and what it means if you could talk more about it and the second question is is meditation the best way to a selfless more aware existence okay um yeah the on emptiness I mean again it gets back to this idea that it's it's that things don't have essence now essence isn't something we realize we're attributing to things until it's gone until I saw it drop out of that weed I didn't realize the category of weed I had been there was a plant that I considered an enemy you know and and it really shaped the way I perceived it and it gets back to this idea that effect feeling just pervasively colors our perceptions it's like if somebody said there's no such thing as an immaculate perception right it's like they always come they tend to come with really subtle judgments and and it's so subtle and this is the sense in which you can talk seriously about like being a loser Eeyore or a delusion is that the the coloring is so subtle you don't realize it but it influences the way you interact with things so much now emptiness it's not it's not something I have I go through life feeling but again I know people I've talked to who do and and they describe it like there's a sense in which they can still tell like what's a TV monitor and what's a desk and what's a person and who's my wife and who's not but the things are in some sense less sharply delineated and the and the other thing that they tend to say is there's like a positive vibe about all of them it's like there's some kind of feeling of positive energy or so it's not it's not a bad thing now that the your your second question was well but not self an awareness okay so am I getting a rapid up signaling well I am one last question we have five minutes left and we're gonna sort of end it here which is you know downstairs in the lobby I walked in there's Buddha statues everywhere and talk for just a moment about the historical Buddha and and the intent or not that he had to unleash this sort of faith tradition okay let me quickly interject something I wish I'd said in response to the Enlightenment question which is that I think one thing that's underappreciated about the ideal of enlightenment is the extent to which it is a perfectly objective view of the world in a sense I mean some people might object with that word for certain reasons but it is it is just a view you could almost there's a phrase the view from nowhere you hear in philosophy sometimes it's just a view uncoloured by self-interest and therefore more objective view the now as for the Buddha well as a you know coming at it from just a in terms of what non-buddhist just scholars of religious history philosophical history would say is we don't know much about this Torico buddha same thing they'd say about Jesus and Muhammad you might say we know less about the Buddha as a historical matter if you're coming from outside the tradition then we do about Jesus because you know with Jesus we have stories that we know were written within a few decades of the way they were put down on paper within a few decades there's nothing like that with the Buddha the earliest things we actually have physical remnants are these kind of like milestone things are something that the emperor Ashoka spread around his Empire that are very you know ethically with you know very enlightened ethically things attributed to the Buddha and you know in different buddhists and different interpretations of what the Buddha meant and and of course the different Buddhist traditions have different canons there's that tera vaada can and mañana can there's a lot of overlap between them but they're not exactly the same so I put my my position is one of agnosticism on what the Buddha actually said but but but but it is possible to characterize very early Buddhist tradition and the claims it makes and and and yeah its commitment to ending suffering the view of human psychology and of metaphysics that's associated with that and so that's what I those are foundational yeah yeah well thank you so much for letting us glimpse inside your brain oh it was so interesting thank you so much thank you for being here [Applause]

Channel: Asia Society

Views: 81,684

Rating: 4.7756233 out of 5

Keywords: buddhism and beyond (18064), asia society new york (2549), complete (18435), robert wright (18436), juju chang (17036), books (1958), buddhism (313), religion (276), spirituality (713), video (1126), current affairs (7714)

Id: 9M9JOEFMEXg

Length: 79min 43sec (4783 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 18 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/10kforge]

Excellent book. Big impact on my life. Thank you Mr Wright!