WMOM:WU:chap1

# Spirituality

I once participated in a twenty-three-day wilderness program in the
mountains of Colorado. If the purpose of this course was to expose
students to dangerous lightning and half the world’s mosquitoes, it was
fulfilled on the first day. What was in essence a forced march through
hundreds of miles of backcountry culminated in a ritual known as “the
solo,” where we were finally permitted to rest—alone, on the outskirts
of a gorgeous alpine lake—for three days of fasting and contemplation.

I had just turned sixteen, and this was my first taste of true
solitude since exiting my mother’s womb. It proved a sufficient
provocation. After a long nap and a glance at the icy waters of the
lake, the promising young man I imagined myself to be was quickly cut
down by loneliness and boredom. I filled the pages of my journal not
with the insights of a budding naturalist, philosopher, or mystic but
with a list of the foods on which I intended to gorge myself the instant I returned to civilization. Judging from the state of my consciousness
at the time, millions of years of hominid evolution had produced nothing more transcendent than a craving for a cheeseburger and a chocolate
milkshake.

I found the experience of sitting undisturbed for three days amid
pristine breezes and starlight, with nothing to do but contemplate the
mystery of my existence, to be a source of perfect misery—for which I
could see not so much as a glimmer of my own contribution. My letters
home, in their plaintiveness and self-pity, rivaled any written at
Shiloh or Gallipoli.

So I was more than a little surprised when several members of our
party, most of whom were a decade older than I, described their days and nights of solitude in positive, even transformational terms. I simply
didn’t know what to make of their claims to happiness. How could
someone’s happiness *increase* when all the material sources of
pleasure and distraction had been removed? At that age, the nature of my own mind did not interest me—only my life did. And I was utterly
oblivious to how different life would be if the quality of my mind were
to change.

Our minds are all we have. They are all we have ever had. And they
are all we can offer others. This might not be obvious, especially when
there are aspects of your life that seem in need of improvement—when
your goals are unrealized, or you are struggling to find a career, or
you have relationships that need repairing. But it’s the truth. Every
experience you have ever had has been shaped by your mind. Every
relationship is as good or as bad as it is because of the minds
involved. If you are perpetually angry, depressed, confused, and
unloving, or your attention is elsewhere, it won’t matter how successful you become or who is in your life—you won’t enjoy any of it.

Most of us could easily compile a list of goals we want to achieve or personal problems that need to be solved. But what is the real
significance of every item on such a list? Everything we want to
accomplish—to paint the house, learn a new language, find a better
job—is something that promises that, if done, it would allow us to
finally relax and enjoy our lives in the present. Generally speaking,
this is a false hope. I’m not denying the importance of achieving one’s
goals, maintaining one’s health, or keeping one’s children clothed and
fed—but most of us spend our time seeking happiness and security without acknowledging the underlying purpose of our search. Each of us is
looking for a path back to the present: We are trying to find good
enough reasons to be satisfied *now.*

Acknowledging that this is the structure of the game we are playing
allows us to play it differently. How we pay attention to the present
moment largely determines the character of our experience and,
therefore, the quality of our lives. Mystics and contemplatives have
made this claim for ages—but a growing body of scientific research now
bears it out.

A few years after my first painful encounter with solitude, in the
winter of 1987, I took the drug 3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine
(MDMA), commonly known as Ecstasy, and my sense of the human mind’s
potential shifted profoundly. Although MDMA would become ubiquitous at
dance clubs and “raves” in the 1990s, at that time I didn’t know anyone
of my generation who had tried it. One evening, a few months before my
twentieth birthday, a close friend and I decided to take the drug.

The setting of our experiment bore little resemblance to the
conditions of Dionysian abandon under which MDMA is now often consumed.
We were alone in a house, seated across from each other on opposite ends of a couch, and engaged in quiet conversation as the chemical worked
its way into our heads. Unlike other drugs with which we were by then
familiar (marijuana and alcohol), MDMA produced no feeling of distortion in our senses. Our minds seemed completely clear.

In the midst of this ordinariness, however, I was suddenly struck by
the knowledge that I loved my friend. This shouldn’t have surprised
me—he was, after all, one of my best friends. However, at that age I was not in the habit of dwelling on how much I loved the men in my life.
Now I could *feel* that I loved him, and this feeling had ethical
implications that suddenly seemed as profound as they now sound
pedestrian on the page: *I wanted him to be happy.*

That conviction came crashing down with such force that something
seemed to give way inside me. In fact, the insight appeared to
restructure my mind. My capacity for envy, for instance—the sense of
being diminished by the happiness or success of another person—seemed
like a symptom of mental illness that had vanished without a trace. I
could no more have felt envy at that moment than I could have wanted to
poke out my own eyes. What did I care if my friend was better looking or a better athlete than I was? If I could have bestowed those gifts on
him, I would have. *Truly* wanting him to be happy made his happiness my own.

A certain euphoria was creeping into these reflections, perhaps, but
the general feeling remained one of absolute sobriety—and of moral and
emotional clarity unlike any I had ever known. It would not be too
strong to say that I felt sane for the first time in my life. And yet
the change in my consciousness seemed entirely straightforward. I was
simply talking to my friend—about what, I don’t recall—and realized that I had ceased to be concerned about myself. I was no longer anxious,
self-critical, guarded by irony, in competition, avoiding embarrassment, ruminating about the past and future, or making any other gesture of
thought or attention that separated me from him. I was no longer
watching myself through another person’s eyes.

And then came the insight that irrevocably transformed my sense of how good human life could be. I was feeling *boundless* love for one of my best friends, and I suddenly realized that if a
stranger had walked through the door at that moment, he or she would
have been fully included in this love. Love was at bottom impersonal—and deeper than any personal history could justify. Indeed, a transactional form of love—I love you *because*…—now made no sense at all.

The interesting thing about this final shift in perspective was that
it was not driven by any change in the way I felt. I was not overwhelmed by a new feeling of love. The insight had more the character of a
geometric proof: It was as if, having glimpsed the properties of one set of parallel lines, I suddenly understood what must be common to them
all.

The moment I could find a voice with which to speak, I discovered
that this epiphany about the universality of love could be readily
communicated. My friend got the point at once: All I had to do was ask
him how he would feel in the presence of a total stranger at that
moment, and the same door opened in his mind. It was simply obvious that love, compassion, and joy in the joy of others extended without limit.
The experience was not of love growing but of its being no longer
obscured. Love was—as advertised by mystics and crackpots through the
ages—a state of being. How had we not seen this before? And how could we overlook it ever again?

It would take me many years to put this experience into context.
Until that moment, I had viewed organized religion as merely a monument
to the ignorance and superstition of our ancestors. But I now knew that
Jesus, the Buddha, Lao Tzu, and the other saints and sages of history
had not all been epileptics, schizophrenics, or frauds. I still
considered the world’s religions to be mere intellectual ruins,
maintained at enormous economic and social cost, but I now understood
that important psychological truths could be found in the rubble.

Twenty percent of Americans describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” Although the claim seems to annoy believers and atheists
equally, separating spirituality from religion is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. It is to assert two important truths simultaneously: Our
world is dangerously riven by religious doctrines that all educated
people should condemn, and yet there is more to understanding the human
condition than science and secular culture generally admit. One purpose
of this book is to give both these convictions intellectual and
empirical support.

Before going any further, I should address the animosity that many readers feel toward the term *spiritual.* Whenever I use the word, as in referring to meditation as a “spiritual
practice,” I hear from fellow skeptics and atheists who think that I
have committed a grievous error.
The word *spirit* comes from the Latin *spiritus,* which is a translation of the Greek *pneuma,* meaning “breath.” Around the thirteenth century, the term became
entangled with beliefs about immaterial souls, supernatural beings,
ghosts, and so forth. It acquired other meanings as well: We speak of
the *spirit* of a thing as its most essential principle or of certain volatile substances and liquors as *spirits.* Nevertheless, many nonbelievers now consider all things “spiritual” to be contaminated by medieval superstition.

I do not share their semantic concerns. Yes, to walk the aisles of any “spiritual” bookstore is to confront the yearning and credulity of our species by the yard, but there is no
other term—apart from the even more problematic *mystical* or the more restrictive *contemplative*—with which to discuss the efforts people make, through meditation,
psychedelics, or other means, to fully bring their minds into the
present or to induce nonordinary states of consciousness. And no other
word links this spectrum of experience to our ethical lives.

Throughout this book, I discuss certain classically spiritual
phenomena, concepts, and practices in the context of our modern
understanding of the human mind—and I cannot do this while restricting
myself to the terminology of ordinary experience. So I will use *spiritual, mystical, contemplative,* and *transcendent* without further apology. However, I will be precise in describing the experiences and methods that merit these terms.

For many years, I have been a vocal critic of religion, and I won’t
ride the same hobbyhorse here. I hope that I have been sufficiently
energetic on this front that even my most skeptical readers will trust
that my bullshit detector remains well calibrated as we advance over
this new terrain. Perhaps the following assurance can suffice for the
moment: Nothing in this book needs to be accepted on faith. Although my
focus is on human subjectivity—I am, after all, talking about the nature of experience itself—all my assertions can be tested in the laboratory
of your own life. In fact, my goal is to encourage you to do just that.

Authors who attempt to build a bridge between science and
spirituality tend to make one of two mistakes: Scientists generally
start with an impoverished view of spiritual experience, assuming that
it must be a grandiose way of describing ordinary states of
mind—parental love, artistic inspiration, awe at the beauty of the night sky. In this vein, one finds Einstein’s amazement at the
intelligibility of Nature’s laws described as though it were a kind of
mystical insight.

New Age thinkers usually enter the ditch on the other side of the
road: They idealize altered states of consciousness and draw specious
connections between subjective experience and the spookier theories at
the frontiers of physics. Here we are told that the Buddha and other
contemplatives anticipated modern cosmology or quantum mechanics and
that by transcending the sense of self, a person can realize his
identity with the One Mind that gave birth to the cosmos.

In the end, we are left to choose between pseudo-spirituality and pseudo-science.

Few scientists and philosophers have developed strong skills of
introspection—in fact, most doubt that such abilities even exist.
Conversely, many of the greatest contemplatives know nothing about
science. But there is a connection between scientific fact and spiritual wisdom, and it is more direct than most people suppose. Although the
insights we can have in meditation tell us nothing about the origins of
the universe, they do confirm some well-established truths about the
human mind: Our conventional sense of self is an illusion; positive
emotions, such as compassion and patience, are teachable skills; and the way we think directly influences our experience of the world.

There is now a large literature on the psychological benefits of
meditation. Different techniques produce long-lasting changes in
attention, emotion, cognition, and pain perception, and these correlate
with both structural and functional changes in the brain. This field of
research is quickly growing, as is our understanding of self-awareness
and related mental phenomena. Given recent advances in neuroimaging
technology, we no longer face a practical impediment to investigating
spiritual insights in the context of science.

Spirituality *must* be distinguished from religion—because
people of every faith, and of none, have had the same sorts of spiritual experiences. While these states of mind are usually interpreted through the lens of one or another religious doctrine, we know that this is a
mistake. Nothing that a Christian, a Muslim, and a Hindu can
experience—self-transcending love, ecstasy, bliss, inner
light—constitutes evidence in support of their traditional beliefs,
because their beliefs are logically incompatible with one another. A
deeper principle must be at work.

That principle is the subject of this book: The feeling that we call
“I” is an illusion. There is no discrete self or ego living like a
Minotaur in the labyrinth of the brain. And the feeling that there
is—the sense of being perched somewhere behind your eyes, looking out at a world that is separate from yourself—can be altered or entirely
extinguished. Although such experiences of “self-transcendence” are
generally thought about in religious terms, there is nothing, in
principle, irrational about them. From both a scientific and a
philosophical point of view, they represent a clearer understanding of
the way things are. Deepening that understanding, and repeatedly cutting through the illusion of the self, is what is meant by “spirituality” in the context of this book.

Confusion and suffering may be our birthright, but wisdom and
happiness are available. The landscape of human experience includes
deeply transformative insights about the nature of one’s own
consciousness, and yet it is obvious that these psychological states
must be understood in the context of neuroscience, psychology, and
related fields.

I am often asked what will replace organized religion. The answer, I
believe, is nothing and everything. Nothing need replace its ludicrous
and divisive doctrines—such as the idea that Jesus will return to earth
and hurl unbelievers into a lake of fire, or that death in defense of
Islam is the highest good. These are terrifying and debasing fictions.
But what about love, compassion, moral goodness, and self-transcendence? Many people still imagine that religion is the true repository of these virtues. To change this, we must talk about the full range of human
experience in a way that is as free of dogma as the best science already is.

This book is by turns a seeker’s memoir, an introduction to the
brain, a manual of contemplative instruction, and a philosophical
unraveling of what most people consider to be the center of their inner
lives: the feeling of self we call “I.” I have not set out to describe
all the traditional approaches to spirituality and to weigh their
strengths and weaknesses. Rather, my goal is to pluck the diamond from
the dunghill of esoteric religion. There is a diamond there, and I have
devoted a fair amount of my life to contemplating it, but getting it in
hand requires that we remain true to the deepest principles of
scientific skepticism and make no obeisance to tradition. Where I do
discuss specific teachings, such as those of Buddhism or Advaita
Vedanta, it isn’t my purpose to provide anything like a comprehensive
account. Readers who are loyal to any one spiritual tradition or who
specialize in the academic study of religion, may view my approach as
the quintessence of arrogance. I consider it, rather, a symptom of
impatience. There is barely time enough in a book—or in a life—to get to the point. Just as a modern treatise on weaponry would omit the casting of spells and would very likely ignore the slingshot and the boomerang, I will focus on what I consider the most promising lines of spiritual
inquiry.

My hope is that my personal experience will help readers to see the
nature of their own minds in a new light. A rational approach to
spirituality seems to be what is missing from secularism and from the
lives of most of the people I meet. The purpose of this book is to offer readers a clear view of the problem, along with some tools to help them solve it for themselves.

## THE SEARCH FOR HAPPINESS

*One day, you will find yourself outside this world which is like a mother’s womb. You will leave this earth to enter, while you are yet in the body, a vast expanse, and know that the words, “God’s earth is vast,” name this region from which the saints have come.* -- Jalal-ud-Din Rumi

I share the concern, expressed by many atheists, that the terms *spiritual* and *mystical* are often used to make claims not merely about the quality of certain
experiences but about reality at large. Far too often, these words are
invoked in support of religious beliefs that are morally and
intellectually grotesque. Consequently, many of my fellow atheists
consider all talk of spirituality to be a sign of mental illness,
conscious imposture, or self-deception. This is a problem, because
millions of people have had experiences for which *spiritual* and *mystical* seem the only terms available. Many of the beliefs people form on the
basis of these experiences are false. But the fact that most atheists
will view a statement like Rumi’s above as a symptom of the man’s
derangement grants a kernel of truth to the rantings of even our least
rational opponents. The human mind does, in fact, contain vast expanses
that few of us ever discover.

And there is something degraded and degrading about many of our
habits of attention as we shop, gossip, argue, and ruminate our way to
the grave. Perhaps I should speak only for myself here: It seems to me
that I spend much of my waking life in a neurotic trance. My experiences in meditation suggest, however, that an alternative exists. It is
possible to stand free of the juggernaut of self, if only for moments at a time.

Most cultures have produced men and women who have found that certain deliberate uses of attention—meditation, yoga, prayer—can transform
their perception of the world. Their efforts generally begin with the
realization that even in the best of circumstances, happiness is
elusive. We seek pleasant sights, sounds, tastes, sensations, and moods. We satisfy our intellectual curiosity. We surround ourselves with
friends and loved ones. We become connoisseurs of art, music, or food.
But our pleasures are, by their very nature, fleeting. If we enjoy some
great professional success, our feelings of accomplishment remain vivid
and intoxicating for an hour, or perhaps a day, but then they subside.
And the search goes on. The effort required to keep boredom and other
unpleasantness at bay must continue, moment to moment.

Ceaseless change is an unreliable basis for lasting fulfillment.
Realizing this, many people begin to wonder whether a deeper source of
well-being exists. Is there a form of happiness beyond the mere
repetition of pleasure and avoidance of pain? Is there a happiness that
does not depend upon having one’s favorite foods available, or friends
and loved ones within arm’s reach, or good books to read, or something
to look forward to on the weekend? Is it possible to be happy *before* anything happens, before one’s desires are gratified, in spite of
life’s difficulties, in the very midst of physical pain, old age,
disease, and death?

We are all, in some sense, living our answer to this question—and
most of us are living as though the answer were “no.” No, nothing is
more profound than repeating one’s pleasures and avoiding one’s pains;
nothing is more profound than seeking satisfaction—sensory, emotional,
and intellectual—moment after moment. Just keep your foot on the gas
until you run out of road.

Certain people, however, come to suspect that human existence might
encompass more than this. Many of them are led to suspect this by *religion*—by the claims of the Buddha or Jesus or some other celebrated figure. And
such people often begin to practice various disciplines of attention as a means of examining their experience closely enough to see whether a
deeper source of well-being exists. They may even sequester themselves
in caves or monasteries for months or years at a time to facilitate this process. Why would a person do this? No doubt there are many motives
for retreating from the world, and some of them are psychologically
unhealthy. In its wisest form, however, the exercise amounts to a very
simple experiment. Here is its logic: If there exists a source of
psychological well-being that does not depend upon merely gratifying
one’s desires, then it should be present even when all the usual sources of pleasure have been removed. Such happiness should be available to a
person who has declined to marry her high school sweetheart, renounced
her career and material possessions, and gone off to a cave or some
other spot that is inhospitable to ordinary aspirations.

One clue to how daunting most people would find such a project is the fact that solitary confinement—which is essentially what we are talking about—is considered a punishment *inside* a maximum-security
prison. Even when forced to live among murderers and rapists, most
people still prefer the company of others to spending any significant
amount of time alone in a room. And yet contemplatives in many
traditions claim to experience extraordinary depths of psychological
well-being while living in isolation for vast stretches of time. How
should we interpret this? Either the contemplative literature is a
catalogue of religious delusion, psychopathology, and deliberate fraud,
or people have been having liberating insights under the name of
“spirituality” and “mysticism” for millennia.

Unlike many atheists, I have spent much of my life seeking
experiences of the kind that gave rise to the world’s religions. Despite the painful results of my first few days alone in the mountains of
Colorado, I later studied with a wide range of monks, lamas, yogis, and
other contemplatives, some of whom had lived for decades in seclusion
doing nothing but meditating. In the process, I spent two years on
silent retreat myself (in increments of one week to three months),
practicing various techniques of meditation for twelve to eighteen hours a day.

I can attest that when one goes into silence and meditates for weeks
or months at a time, doing nothing else—not speaking, reading, or
writing, just making a moment-to-moment effort to observe the contents
of consciousness—one has experiences that are generally unavailable to
people who have not undertaken a similar practice. I believe that such
states of mind have a lot to say about the nature of consciousness and
the possibilities of human well-being. Leaving aside the metaphysics,
mythology, and sectarian dogma, what contemplatives throughout history
have discovered is that there is an alternative to being continuously
spellbound by the conversation we are having with ourselves; there is an alternative to simply identifying with the next thought that pops into
consciousness. And glimpsing this alternative dispels the conventional
illusion of the self.

Most traditions of spirituality also suggest a connection between
self-transcendence and living ethically. Not all good feelings have an
ethical valence, and pathological forms of ecstasy surely exist. I have
no doubt, for instance, that many suicide bombers feel extraordinarily
good just before they detonate themselves in a crowd. But there are also forms of mental pleasure that are intrinsically ethical. As I indicated earlier, for some states of consciousness, a phrase like “boundless
love” does not seem overblown. It is decidedly inconvenient for the
forces of reason and secularism that if someone wakes up tomorrow
feeling boundless love for all sentient beings, the only people likely
to acknowledge the legitimacy of his experience will be representatives
of one or another Iron Age religion or New Age cult.

Most of us are far wiser than we may appear to be. We know how to
keep our relationships in order, to use our time well, to improve our
health, to lose weight, to learn valuable skills, and to solve many
other riddles of existence. But following even the straight and open
path to happiness is hard. If your best friend were to ask how she could live a better life, you would probably find many useful things to say,
and yet you might not live that way yourself. On one level, wisdom is
nothing more profound than an ability to follow one’s own advice.
However, there are deeper insights to be had about the nature of our
minds. Unfortunately, they have been discussed entirely in the context
of religion and, therefore, have been shrouded in fallacy and
superstition for all of human history.

The problem of finding happiness in this world arrives with our first breath—and our needs and desires seem to multiply by the hour. To spend any time in the presence of a young child is to witness a mind
ceaselessly buffeted by joy and sorrow. As we grow older, our laughter
and tears become less gratuitous, perhaps, but the same process of
change continues: One roiling complex of thought and emotion is followed by the next, like waves in the ocean.

Seeking, finding, maintaining, and safeguarding our well-being is the great project to which we all are devoted, whether or not we choose to
think in these terms. This is not to say that we want mere pleasure or
the easiest possible life. Many things require extraordinary effort to
accomplish, and some of us learn to enjoy the struggle. Any athlete
knows that certain kinds of pain can be exquisitely pleasurable. The
burn of lifting weights, for instance, would be excruciating if it were a symptom of terminal illness. But because it is associated with health
and fitness, most people find it enjoyable. Here we see that cognition
and emotion are not separate. The way we think about experience can
completely determine how we feel about it.

And we always face tensions and trade-offs. In some moments we crave
excitement and in others rest. We might love the taste of wine and
chocolate, but rarely for breakfast. Whatever the context, our minds are perpetually moving—generally toward pleasure (or its imagined source)
and away from pain. I am not the first person to have noticed this.

Our struggle to navigate the space of possible pains and pleasures
produces most of human culture. Medical science attempts to prolong our
health and to reduce the suffering associated with illness, aging, and
death. All forms of media cater to our thirst for information and
entertainment. Political and economic institutions seek to ensure our
peaceful collaboration with one another—and the police or the military
is summoned when they fail. Beyond ensuring our survival, civilization
is a vast machine invented by the human mind to regulate its states. We
are ever in the process of creating and repairing a world that our minds want to be in. And wherever we look, we see the evidence of our
successes and our failures. Unfortunately, failure enjoys a natural
advantage. Wrong answers to any problem outnumber right ones by a wide
margin, and it seems that it will always be easier to break things than
to fix them.

Despite the beauty of our world and the scope of human
accomplishment, it is hard not to worry that the forces of chaos will
triumph—not merely in the end but in every moment. Our pleasures,
however refined or easily acquired, are by their very nature fleeting.
They begin to subside the instant they arise, only to be replaced by
fresh desires or feelings of discomfort. You can’t get enough of your
favorite meal until, in the next moment, you find you are so stuffed as
to nearly require the attention of a surgeon—and yet, by some quirk of
physics, you still have room for dessert. The pleasure of dessert lasts a few seconds, and then the lingering taste in your mouth must be
banished by a drink of water. The warmth of the sun feels wonderful on
your skin, but soon it becomes too much of a good thing. A move to the
shade brings immediate relief, but after a minute or two, the breeze is
just a little too cold. Do you have a sweater in the car? Let’s take a
look. Yes, there it is. You’re warm now, but you notice that your
sweater has seen better days. Does it make you look carefree or
disheveled? Perhaps it is time to go shopping for something new. And so
it goes.

We seem to do little more than lurch between wanting and not wanting. Thus, the question naturally arises: Is there more to life than this?
Might it be possible to feel much better (in every sense of *better*) than one tends to feel? Is it possible to find lasting fulfillment despite the inevitability of change?

Spiritual life begins with a suspicion that the answer to such
questions could well be “yes.” And a true spiritual practitioner is
someone who has discovered that it is possible to be at ease in the
world for no reason, if only for a few moments at a time, and that such
ease is synonymous with transcending the apparent boundaries of the
self. Those who have never tasted such peace of mind might view these
assertions as highly suspect. Nevertheless, it is a fact that a
condition of selfless well-being is there to be glimpsed in each moment. Of course, I’m not claiming to have experienced all such states, but I
meet many people who appear to have experienced none of them—and these
people often profess to have no interest in spiritual life.

This is not surprising. The phenomenon of self-transcendence is
generally sought and interpreted in a religious context, and it is
precisely the sort of experience that tends to increase a person’s
faith. How many Christians, having once felt their hearts grow as wide
as the world, will decide to ditch Christianity and proclaim their
atheism? Not many, I suspect. How many people who have never felt
anything of the kind become atheists? I don’t know, but there is little
doubt that these mental states act as a kind of filter: The faithful
count them in support of ancient dogma, and their absence gives
nonbelievers further reason to reject religion.

This is a difficult problem for me to address in the context of a
book, because many readers will have no idea what I’m talking about when I describe certain spiritual experiences and might assume that the
assertions I’m making must be accepted on faith. Religious readers
present a different challenge: They may think they know exactly what I’m describing, but only insofar as it aligns with one or another religious doctrine. It seems to me that both these attitudes present impressive
obstacles to understanding spirituality in the way that I intend. I can
only hope that, whatever your background, you will approach the
exercises presented in this book with an open mind.

## RELIGION, EAST AND WEST

We are often encouraged to believe that all religions are the same:
All teach the same ethical principles; all urge their followers to
contemplate the same divine reality; all are equally wise,
compassionate, and true within their sphere—or equally divisive and
false, depending on one’s view.

No serious adherents of any faith can believe these things, because
most religions make claims about reality that are mutually incompatible. Exceptions to this rule exist, but they provide little relief from what is essentially a zero-sum contest of all against all. The polytheism of Hinduism allows it to digest parts of many other faiths: If Christians
insist that Jesus Christ is the son of God, for instance, Hindus can
make him yet another avatar of Vishnu without losing any sleep. But this spirit of inclusiveness points in one direction only, and even it has
its limits. Hindus are committed to specific metaphysical ideas—the law
of karma and rebirth, a multiplicity of gods—that almost every other
major religion decries. It is impossible for any faith, no matter how
elastic, to fully honor the truth claims of another.

Devout Jews, Christians, and Muslims believe that theirs is the one
true and complete revelation—because that is what their holy books say
of themselves. Only secularists and New Age dabblers can mistake the
modern tactic of “interfaith dialogue” for an underlying unity of all
religions.

I have long argued that confusion about the unity of religions is an artifact of language. *Religion* is a term like *sports:* Some sports are peaceful but spectacularly dangerous (“free solo” rock
climbing); some are safer but synonymous with violence (mixed martial
arts); and some entail little more risk of injury than standing in the
shower (bowling). To speak of sports as a generic activity makes it
impossible to discuss what athletes actually do or the physical
attributes required to do it. What do all sports have in common apart
from breathing? Not much. The term *religion* is hardly more useful.

The same could be said of *spirituality.* The esoteric doctrines found within every religious tradition are not all derived from the
same insights. Nor are they equally empirical, logical, parsimonious, or wise. They don’t always point to the same underlying reality—and when
they do, they don’t do it equally well. Nor are all these teachings
equally suited for export beyond the cultures that first conceived them.

Making distinctions of this kind, however, is deeply unfashionable in intellectual circles. In my experience, people do not want to hear that Islam supports violence in a way that Jainism doesn’t, or that Buddhism offers a truly sophisticated, empirical approach to understanding the
human mind, whereas Christianity presents an almost perfect impediment
to such understanding. In many circles, to make invidious comparisons of this kind is to stand convicted of bigotry.

In one sense, all religions and spiritual practices must address the
same reality—because people of all faiths have glimpsed many of the same truths. Any view of consciousness and the cosmos that is available to
the human mind can, in principle, be appreciated by anyone. It is not
surprising, therefore, that individual Jews, Christians, Muslims, and
Buddhists have given voice to some of the same insights and intuitions.
This merely indicates that human cognition and emotion run deeper than
religion. (But we knew that, didn’t we?) It does not suggest that all
religions understand our spiritual possibilities equally well.

One way of missing this point is to declare that all spiritual
teachings are inflections of the same “Perennial Philosophy.” The writer Aldous Huxley brought this idea into prominence by publishing an
anthology by that title. Here is how he justified the idea:

Philosophia perennis—the phrase was coined by Leibniz; but the thing—the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the  soul  something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man’s final end in the knowledge of the immanent  and transcendent Ground of all being—the thing is immemorial  and universal. Rudiments of the  Perennial Philosophy  may  be found  among  the traditionary  lore  of primitive  peoples  in every region of the world, and in its fully developed forms it has a place in every one of the higher religions. A version of this Highest Common Factor in all preceding  and subsequent  theologies was first committed to writing  more than twenty-five  centuries ago, and since that time the inexhaustible theme has been treated again and again, from the standpoint  of  every religious tradition and in all the principal languages of Asia and Europe.
Although Huxley was being reasonably cautious in his wording, this
notion of a “highest common factor” uniting all religions begins to
break apart the moment one presses for details. For instance, the
Abrahamic religions are incorrigibly dualistic and faith-based: In
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the human soul is conceived as
genuinely separate from the divine reality of God. The appropriate
attitude for a creature that finds itself in this circumstance is some
combination of terror, shame, and awe. In the best case, notions of
God’s love and grace provide some relief—but the central message of
these faiths is that each of us is separate from, and in relationship
to, a divine authority who will punish anyone who harbors the slightest
doubt about His supremacy.

The Eastern tradition presents a very different picture of reality.
And its highest teachings—found within the various schools of Buddhism
and the nominally Hindu tradition of Advaita Vedanta—explicitly
transcend dualism. By their lights, consciousness itself is identical to the very reality that one might otherwise mistake for God. While these
teachings make metaphysical claims that any serious student of science
should find incredible, they center on a range of experiences that the
doctrines of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam rule out-of-bounds.

Of course, it is true that specific Jewish, Christian, and Muslim
mystics have had experiences similar to those that motivate Buddhism and Advaita, but these contemplative insights are not exemplary of their
faith. Rather, they are anomalies that Western mystics have always
struggled to understand and to honor, often at considerable personal
risk. Given their proper weight, these experiences produce heterodoxies
for which Jews, Christians, and Muslims have been regularly exiled or
killed.

Like Huxley, anyone determined to find a happy synthesis among
spiritual traditions will notice that the Christian mystic Meister
Eckhart (ca. 1260–ca. 1327) often sounded very much like a Buddhist:
“The knower and the known are one. Simple people imagine that they
should see God, as if He stood there and they here. This is not so. God
and I, we are one in knowledge.” But he also sounded like a man bound to be excommunicated by his church—as he was. Had Eckhart lived a little
longer, it seems certain that he would have been dragged into the street and burned alive for these expansive ideas. That is a telling
difference between Christianity and Buddhism.

In the same vein, it is misleading to hold up the Sufi mystic
Al-Hallaj (858–922) as a representative of Islam. He was a Muslim, yes,
but he suffered the most grisly death imaginable at the hands of his
coreligionists for presuming to be one with God. Both Eckhart and
Al-Hallaj gave voice to an experience of self-transcendence that any
human being can, in principle, enjoy. However, their views were not
consistent with the central teachings of their faiths.

The Indian tradition is comparatively free of problems of this kind.
Although the teachings of Buddhism and Advaita are embedded in more or
less conventional religions, they contain empirical insights about the
nature of consciousness that do not depend upon faith. One can practice
most techniques of Buddhist meditation or the method of self-inquiry of
Advaita and experience the advertised changes in one’s consciousness
without ever believing in the law of karma or in the miracles attributed to Indian mystics. To get started as a Christian, however, one must
first accept a dozen implausible things about the life of Jesus and the
origins of the Bible—and the same can be said, minus a few unimportant
details, about Judaism and Islam. If one should happen to discover that
the sense of being an individual soul is an illusion, one will be guilty of blasphemy everywhere west of the Indus.

There is no question that many religious disciplines can produce
interesting experiences in suitable minds. It should be clear, however,
that engaging a faith-based (and probably delusional) practice, whatever its effects, isn’t the same as investigating the nature of one’s mind
absent any doctrinal assumptions. Statements of this kind may seem
starkly antagonistic toward Abrahamic religions, but they are
nonetheless true: One can speak about Buddhism shorn of its miracles and irrational assumptions. The same cannot be said of Christianity or
Islam.

Western engagement with Eastern spirituality dates back at least as
far as Alexander’s campaign in India, where the young conqueror and his
pet philosophers encountered naked ascetics whom they called
“gymnosophists.” It is often said that the thinking of these yogis
greatly influenced the philosopher Pyrrho, the father of Greek
skepticism. This seems a credible claim, because Pyrrho’s teachings had
much in common with Buddhism. But his contemplative insights and methods never became part of any system of thought in the West.

Serious study of Eastern thought by outsiders did not begin until the late eighteenth century. The first translation of a Sanskrit text into a Western language appears to have been Sir Charles Wilkins’s rendering
of the *Bhagavad Gita,* a cornerstone text of Hinduism, in 1785.
The Buddhist canon would not attract the attention of Western scholars
for another hundred years.

The conversation between East and West started in earnest, albeit
inauspiciously, with the birth of the Theosophical Society, that golem
of spiritual hunger and self-deception brought into this world almost
single-handedly by the incomparable Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky in
1875. Everything about Blavatsky seemed to defy earthly logic: She was
an enormously fat woman who was said to have wandered alone and
undetected for seven years in the mountains of Tibet. She was also
thought to have survived shipwrecks, gunshot wounds, and sword fights.
Even less persuasively, she claimed to be in psychic contact with
members of the “Great White Brotherhood” of ascended masters—a
collection of immortals responsible for the evolution and maintenance of the entire cosmos. Their leader hailed from the planet Venus but lived
in the mythical kingdom of Shambhala, which Blavatsky placed somewhere
in the vicinity of the Gobi Desert. With the suspiciously bureaucratic
name “the Lord of the World,” he supervised the work of other adepts,
including the Buddha, Maitreya, Maha Chohan, and one Koot Hoomi, who
appears to have had nothing better to do on behalf of the cosmos than to impart its secrets to Blavatsky.

It is always surprising when a person attracts legions of followers
and builds a large organization on their largesse while peddling
penny-arcade mythology of this kind. But perhaps this was less
remarkable in a time when even the best-educated people were still
struggling to come to terms with electricity, evolution, and the
existence of other planets. We can easily forget how suddenly the world
had shrunk and the cosmos expanded as the nineteenth century came to a
close. The geographical barriers between distant cultures had been
stripped away by trade and conquest (one could now order a gin and tonic almost everywhere on earth), and yet the reality of unseen forces and
alien worlds was a daily focus of the most careful scientific research.
Inevitably, cross-cultural and scientific discoveries were mingled in
the popular imagination with religious dogma and traditional occultism.
In fact, this had been happening at the highest level of human thought
for more than a century: It is always instructive to recall that the
father of modern physics, Isaac Newton, squandered a considerable
portion of his genius on the study of theology, biblical prophecy, and
alchemy.

The inability to distinguish the strange but true from the merely
strange was common enough in Blavatsky’s time—as it is in our own.
Blavatsky’s contemporary Joseph Smith, a libidinous con man and
crackpot, was able to found a new religion on the claim that he had
unearthed the final revelations of God in the hallowed precincts of
Manchester, New York, written in “reformed Egyptian” on golden plates.
He decoded this text with the aid of magical “seer stones,” which,
whether by magic or not, allowed Smith to produce an English version of
God’s Word that was an embarrassing pastiche of plagiarisms from the
Bible and silly lies about Jesus’s life in America. And yet the
resulting edifice of nonsense and taboo survives to this day.

A more modern cult, Scientology, leverages human credulity to an even greater degree: Adherents believe that human beings are possessed by
the souls of extraterrestrials who were condemned to planet Earth 75
million years ago by the galactic overlord Xenu. How was their exile
accomplished? The old-fashioned way: These aliens were shuttled by the
billions to our humble planet aboard a spacecraft that resembled a DC-8. They were then imprisoned in a volcano and blasted to bits with
hydrogen bombs. Their souls survived, however, and disentangling them
from our own can be the work of a lifetime. It is also expensive.

Despite the imponderables in her philosophy, Blavatsky was among the
first people to announce in Western circles that there was such a thing
as the “wisdom of the East.” This wisdom began to trickle westward once
Swami Vivekananda introduced the teachings of Vedanta at the World
Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893. Again, Buddhism lagged
behind: A few Western monks living on the island of Sri Lanka were
beginning to translate the Pali Canon, which remains the most
authoritative record of the teachings of the historical Buddha,
Siddhartha Gautama. However, the practice of Buddhist meditation
wouldn’t actually be taught in the West for another half century.

It is easy enough to find fault with romantic ideas about Eastern
wisdom, and a tradition of such criticism sprang up almost the instant
the first Western seeker sat cross-legged and attempted to meditate. In
the late 1950s, the author and journalist Arthur Koestler traveled to
India and Japan in search of wisdom and summarized his pilgrimage thus:
“I started my journey in sackcloth and ashes, and came back rather proud of being a European.”

In *The Lotus and the Robot,* Koestler gives some of his reasons for being less than awed by his journey to the East. Consider, for
example, the ancient discipline of hatha yoga. While now generally
viewed as a system of physical exercises designed to increase a person’s strength and flexibility, in its traditional context hatha yoga is part of a larger effort to manipulate “subtle” features of the body unknown
to anatomists. No doubt much of this subtlety corresponds to experiences that yogis actually have—but many of the beliefs formed on the basis of these experiences are patently absurd, and certain of the associated
practices are both silly and injurious.

Koestler reports that the aspiring yogi is traditionally encouraged
to lengthen his tongue—even going so far as to cut the frenulum (the
membrane that anchors the tongue to the floor of the mouth) and stretch
the soft palate. What is the purpose of these modifications? They enable our hero to insert his tongue into his nasopharynx, thereby blocking
the flow of air through the nostrils. His anatomy thus improved, a yogi
can then imbibe subtle liquors believed to emanate directly from his
brain. These substances—imagined, by recourse to further subtleties, to
be connected to the retention of semen—are said to confer not only
spiritual wisdom but immortality. This technique of drinking mucus is
known as *khechari mudra,* and it is thought to be one of the crowning achievements of yoga.

I’m more than happy to score a point for Koestler here. Needless to
say, no defense of such practices will be found in this book.

Criticism of Eastern wisdom can seem especially pertinent when coming from Easterners themselves. There is indeed something preposterous
about well-educated Westerners racing East in search of spiritual
enlightenment while Easterners make the opposite pilgrimage seeking
education and economic opportunities. I have a friend whose own
adventures may have marked a high point in this global comedy. He made
his first trip to India immediately after graduating from college,
having already acquired several yogic affectations: He had the requisite beads and long hair, but he was also in the habit of writing the name
of the Hindu god Ram in Devanagari script over and over in a journal. On the flight to the motherland, he had the good fortune to be seated next to an Indian businessman. This weary traveler thought he had witnessed
every species of human folly—until he caught sight of my friend’s
scribbling. The spectacle of a Western-born Stanford graduate, of
working age, holding degrees in both economics and history, devoting
himself to the graphomaniacal worship of an imaginary deity in a
language he could neither read nor understand was more than this man
could abide in a confined space at 30,000 feet. After a testy exchange,
the two travelers could only stare at each other in mutual
incomprehension and pity—and they had ten hours yet to fly. There really are two sides to such a conversation, but I concede that only one of
them can be made to look ridiculous.

We can also grant that Eastern wisdom has not produced societies or
political institutions that are any better than their Western
counterparts; in fact, one could argue that India has survived as the
world’s largest democracy only because of institutions that were built
under British rule. Nor has the East led the world in scientific
discovery. Nevertheless, there is something to the notion of uniquely
Eastern wisdom, and most of it has been concentrated in or derived from
the tradition of Buddhism.

Buddhism has been of special interest to Western scientists for
reasons already hinted at. It isn’t primarily a faith-based religion,
and its central teachings are entirely empirical. Despite the
superstitions that many Buddhists cherish, the doctrine has a practical
and logical core that does not require any unwarranted assumptions. Many Westerners have recognized this and have been relieved to find a
spiritual alternative to faith-based worship. It is no accident that
most of the scientific research now done on meditation focuses primarily on Buddhist techniques.

Another reason for Buddhism’s prominence among scientists has been
the intellectual engagement of one of its most visible representatives:
Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama. Of course, the Dalai Lama is
not without his critics. My late friend Christopher Hitchens meted out
justice to “his holiness” on several occasions. He also castigated
Western students of Buddhism for the “widely and lazily held belief that ‘Oriental’ religion is different from other faiths: less dogmatic, more contemplative, more . . . Transcendental,” and for the “blissful,
thoughtless exceptionalism” with which Buddhism is regarded by many.

Hitch did have a point. In his capacity as the head of one of the
four branches of Tibetan Buddhism and as the former leader of the
Tibetan government in exile, the Dalai Lama has made some questionable
claims and formed some embarrassing alliances. Although his engagement
with science is far-reaching and surely sincere, the man is not above
consulting an astrologer or “oracle” when making important decisions. I
will have something to say in this book about many of the things that
might have justified Hitch’s opprobrium, but the general thrust of his
commentary here was all wrong. Several Eastern traditions are
exceptionally empirical and exceptionally wise, and therefore merit the
exceptionalism claimed by their adherents.

Buddhism in particular possesses a literature on the nature of the
mind that has no peer in Western religion or Western science. Some of
these teachings are cluttered with metaphysical assumptions that should
provoke our doubts, but many aren’t. And when engaged as a set of
hypotheses by which to investigate the mind and deepen one’s ethical
life, Buddhism can be an entirely rational enterprise.

Unlike the doctrines of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the
teachings of Buddhism are not considered by their adherents to be the
product of infallible revelation. They are, rather, empirical
instructions: If you do X, you will experience Y. Although many
Buddhists have a superstitious and cultic attachment to the historical
Buddha, the teachings of Buddhism present him as an ordinary human being who succeeded in understanding the nature of his own mind. *Buddha* means “awakened one”—and Siddhartha Gautama was merely a man who woke
up from the dream of being a separate self. Compare this with the
Christian view of Jesus, who is imagined to be the son of the creator of the universe. This is a very different proposition, and it renders
Christianity, no matter how fully divested of metaphysical baggage, all
but irrelevant to a scientific discussion about the human condition.

The teachings of Buddhism, and of Eastern spirituality generally,
focus on the primacy of the mind. There are dangers in this way of
viewing the world, to be sure. Focusing on training the mind to the
exclusion of all else can lead to political quietism and hive-like
conformity. The fact that your mind is all you have and that it is
possible to be at peace even in difficult circumstances can become an
argument for ignoring obvious societal problems. But it is not a
compelling one. The world is in desperate need of improvement—in global
terms, freedom and prosperity remain the exception—and yet this doesn’t
mean we need to be miserable while we work for the common good.

In fact, the teachings of Buddhism emphasize a connection between
ethical and spiritual life. Making progress in one domain lays a
foundation for progress in the other. One can, for instance, spend long
periods of time in contemplative solitude for the purpose of becoming a
better person in the world—having better relationships, being more
honest and compassionate and, therefore, more helpful to one’s fellow
human beings. Being wisely selfish and being selfless can amount to very much the same thing. There are centuries of anecdotal testimony on this point—and, as we will see, the scientific study of the mind has begun
to bear it out. There is now little question that how one uses one’s
attention, moment to moment, largely determines what kind of person one
becomes. Our minds—and lives—are largely shaped by how we use them.

Although the experience of self-transcendence is, in principle,
available to everyone, this possibility is only weakly attested to in
the religious and philosophical literature of the West. Only Buddhists
and students of Advaita Vedanta (which appears to have been heavily
influenced by Buddhism) have been absolutely clear in asserting that
spiritual life consists in overcoming the illusion of the self by paying close attention to our experience in the present moment.

As I wrote in my first book, *The End of Faith,* the disparity
between Eastern and Western spirituality resembles that found between
Eastern and Western medicine—with the arrow of embarrassment pointing in the opposite direction. Humanity did not understand the biology of
cancer, develop antibiotics and vaccines, or sequence the human genome
under an Eastern sun. Consequently, real medicine is almost entirely a
product of Western science. Insofar as specific techniques of Eastern
medicine actually work, they must conform, whether by design or by
happenstance, to the principles of biology as we have come to know them
in the West. This is not to say that Western medicine is complete. In a
few decades, many of our current practices will seem barbaric. One need
only ponder the list of side effects that accompany most medications to
appreciate that these are terribly blunt instruments. Nevertheless, most of our knowledge about the human body—and about the physical universe
generally—emerged in the West. The rest is instinct, folklore,
bewilderment, and untimely death.

An honest comparison of spiritual traditions, Eastern and Western,
proves equally invidious. As manuals for contemplative understanding,
the Bible and the Koran are worse than useless. Whatever wisdom can be
found in their pages is never best found there, and it is subverted,
time and again, by ancient savagery and superstition.

Again, one must deploy the necessary caveats: I am not saying that
most Buddhists or Hindus have been sophisticated contemplatives. Their
traditions have spawned many of the same pathologies we see elsewhere
among the faithful: dogmatism, anti-intellectualism, tribalism,
otherworldliness. However, the empirical difference between the central
teachings of Buddhism and Advaita and those of Western monotheism is
difficult to overstate. One can traverse the Eastern paths simply by
becoming interested in the nature of one’s own mind—especially in the
immediate causes of psychological suffering—and by paying closer
attention to one’s experience in every present moment. There is, in
truth, nothing one need believe. The teachings of Buddhism and Advaita
are best viewed as lab manuals and explorers’ logs detailing the results of empirical research on the nature of human consciousness.

Nearly every geographical or linguistic barrier to the free exchange
of ideas has now fallen away. It seems to me, therefore, that educated
people no longer have a right to any form of spiritual provincialism.
The truths of Eastern spirituality are now no more Eastern than the
truths of Western science are Western. We are merely talking about human consciousness and its possible states. My purpose in writing this book
is to encourage you to investigate certain contemplative insights for
yourself, without accepting the metaphysical ideas that they inspired in ignorant and isolated peoples of the past.

A final word of caution: Nothing I say here is intended as a denial
of the fact that psychological well-being requires a healthy “sense of
self”—with all the capacities that this vague phrase implies. Children
need to become autonomous, confident, and self-aware in order to form
healthy relationships. And they must acquire a host of other cognitive,
emotional, and interpersonal skills in the process of becoming sane and
productive adults. Which is to say that there is a time and a place for
everything—unless, of course, there isn’t. No doubt there are
psychological conditions, such as schizophrenia, for which practices of
the sort I recommend in this book might be inappropriate. Some people
find the experience of an extended, silent retreat psychologically
destabilizing.

Again, an analogy to physical training seems apropos: Not everyone is suited to running a six-minute mile or bench-pressing his own body
weight. But many quite ordinary people are capable of these feats, and
there are better and worse ways to accomplish them. What is more, the
same principles of fitness generally apply even to people whose
abilities are limited by illness or injury.

So I want to make it clear that the instructions in this book are
intended for readers who are adults (more or less) and free from any
psychological or medical conditions that could be exacerbated by
meditation or other techniques of sustained introspection. If paying
attention to your breath, to bodily sensations, to the flow of thoughts, or to the nature of consciousness itself seems likely to cause you
clinically significant anguish, please check with a psychologist or a
psychiatrist before engaging in the practices I describe.

## MINDFULNESS

*It is always now.* This might sound trite, but it is the truth. It’s not quite true as a matter of neurology, because our minds are built upon layers of inputs whose timing we know must be different. But it is true as a matter of *conscious experience.* The reality of your life is always now. And to realize this, we will see, is liberating. In fact, I think there is nothing more important to
understand if you want to be happy in this world.

But we spend most of our lives forgetting this truth—overlooking it,
fleeing it, repudiating it. And the horror is that we succeed. We manage to avoid being happy while struggling to *become* happy,
fulfilling one desire after the next, banishing our fears, grasping at
pleasure, recoiling from pain—and thinking, interminably, about how best to keep the whole works up and running. As a consequence, we spend our
lives being far less content than we might otherwise be. We often fail
to appreciate what we have until we have lost it. We crave experiences,
objects, relationships, only to grow bored with them. And yet the
craving persists. I speak from experience, of course.

As a remedy for this predicament, many spiritual teachings ask us to
entertain unfounded ideas about the nature of reality—or at the very
least to develop a fondness for the iconography and rituals of one or
another religion. But not all paths traverse the same rough ground.
There are methods of meditation that do not require any artifice or
unwarranted assumptions at all.

For beginners, I usually recommend a technique called *vipassana* (Pali for “insight”), which comes from the oldest tradition of Buddhism, the Theravada. One of the advantages of *vipassana* is that it can be taught in an entirely secular way. Experts in this
practice generally acquire their training in a Buddhist context, and
most retreat centers in the United States and Europe teach its
associated Buddhist philosophy. Nevertheless, this method of
introspection can be brought into any secular or scientific context
without embarrassment. (The same cannot be said for the practice of
chanting to Lord Krishna while banging a drum.) That is why *vipassana* is now being widely studied and adopted by psychologists and neuroscientists.

The quality of mind cultivated in *vipassana* is almost always
referred to as “mindfulness,” and the literature on its psychological
benefits is now substantial. There is nothing spooky about mindfulness.
It is simply a state of clear, nonjudgmental, and undistracted attention to the contents of consciousness, whether pleasant or unpleasant.
Cultivating this quality of mind has been shown to reduce pain, anxiety, and depression; improve cognitive function; and even produce changes in gray matter density in regions of the brain related to learning and
memory, emotional regulation, and self-awareness. We will look more closely at the neurophysiology of mindfulness in a later chapter.

*Mindfulness* is a translation of the Pali word *sati.* The term has several meanings in the Buddhist literature, but for our
purposes the most important is “clear awareness.” The practice was first described in the *Satipatthana Sutta,* which is part of the Pali Canon. Like many Buddhist texts, the *Satipatthana Sutta* is highly repetitive and, for anything but an avid student of Buddhism, exceptionally boring to read. However, when one compares texts of this
kind with the Bible or the Koran, the difference is unmistakable: The *Satipatthana Sutta* is not a collection of ancient myths, superstitions, and taboos; it is a rigorously empirical guide to freeing the mind from suffering.The
Buddha described four foundations of mindfulness, which he taught as
“the direct path for the purification of beings, for the surmounting of
sorrow and lamentation, for the disappearance of pain and grief, for the attainment of the true way, for the realization of Nibbana” (Sanskrit, *Nirvana*). The four foundations of mindfulness are the body (breathing, changes in posture, activities), feelings (the senses of pleasantness,
unpleasantness, and neutrality), the mind (in particular, its moods and
attitudes), and the objects of mind (which include the five senses but
also other mental states, such as volition, tranquility, rapture,
equanimity, and even mindfulness itself). It is a peculiar list, at once redundant and incomplete—a problem that is compounded by the necessity
of translating Pali terminology into English. The obvious message of the text, however, is that the totality of one’s experience can become the
field of contemplation. The meditator is merely instructed to pay
attention, “ardently” and “fully aware” and “free from covetousness and
grief for the world.”

There is nothing passive about mindfulness. One might even say that
it expresses a specific kind of passion—a passion for discerning what is subjectively real in every moment. It is a mode of cognition that is,
above all, undistracted, accepting, and (ultimately) nonconceptual.
Being mindful is not a matter of *thinking* more clearly about experience; it is the act of *experiencing* more clearly, including the arising of thoughts themselves. Mindfulness is a vivid awareness of whatever is appearing in one’s mind or
body—thoughts, sensations, moods—without grasping at the pleasant or
recoiling from the unpleasant. One of the great strengths of this
technique of meditation, from a secular point of view, is that it does
not require us to adopt any cultural affectations or unjustified
beliefs. It simply demands that we pay close attention to the flow of
experience in each moment.

The principal enemy of mindfulness—or of any meditative practice—is
our deeply conditioned habit of being distracted by thoughts. The
problem is not thoughts themselves but the state of thinking without
knowing that we are thinking. In fact, thoughts of all kinds can be
perfectly good objects of mindfulness. In the early stages of one’s
practice, however, the arising of thought will be more or less
synonymous with distraction—that is, with a failure to meditate. Most
people who believe they are meditating are merely thinking with their
eyes closed. By practicing mindfulness, however, one can awaken from the dream of discursive thought and begin to see each arising image, idea,
or bit of language vanish without a trace. What remains is consciousness itself, with its attendant sights, sounds, sensations, and thoughts
appearing and changing in every moment.

In the beginning of one’s meditation practice, the difference between ordinary experience and what one comes to consider “mindfulness” is not very clear, and it takes some training to distinguish between being
lost in thought and seeing thoughts for what they are. In this sense,
learning to meditate is just like acquiring any other skill. It takes
many thousands of repetitions to throw a good jab or to coax music from
the strings of a guitar. With practice, mindfulness becomes a
well-formed habit of attention, and the difference between it and
ordinary thinking will become increasingly clear. Eventually, it begins
to seem as if you are repeatedly awakening from a dream to find yourself safely in bed. No matter how terrible the dream, the relief is
instantaneous. And yet it is difficult to stay awake for more than a few seconds at a time.

My friend Joseph Goldstein, one of the finest *vipassana*
teachers I know, likens this shift in awareness to the experience of
being fully immersed in a film and then suddenly realizing that you are
sitting in a theater watching a mere play of light on a wall. Your
perception is unchanged, but the spell is broken. Most of us spend every waking moment lost in the movie of our lives. Until we see that an
alternative to this enchantment exists, we are entirely at the mercy of
appearances. Again, the difference I am describing is not a matter of
achieving a new conceptual understanding or of adopting new beliefs
about the nature of reality. The change comes when we experience the
present moment prior to the arising of thought.

The Buddha taught mindfulness as the appropriate response to the truth of *dukkha,* usually translated from the Pali, somewhat misleadingly, as
“suffering.” A better translation would be “unsatisfactoriness.”
Suffering may not be inherent in life, but unsatisfactoriness is. We
crave lasting happiness in the midst of change: Our bodies age,
cherished objects break, pleasures fade, relationships fail. Our
attachment to the good things in life and our aversion to the bad amount to a denial of these realities, and this inevitably leads to feelings
of dissatisfaction. Mindfulness is a technique for achieving equanimity
amid the flux, allowing us to simply be aware of the quality of
experience in each moment, whether pleasant or unpleasant. This may seem like a recipe for apathy, but it needn’t be. It is actually possible to be mindful—and, therefore, to be at peace with the present moment—even
while working to change the world for the better.

Mindfulness meditation is extraordinarily simple to describe, but it
isn’t easy to perform. True mastery might require special talent and a
lifetime of devotion to the task, and yet a genuine transformation in
one’s perception of the world is within reach for most of us. Practice
is the only thing that will lead to success. The simple instructions
given in the box that follows are analogous to instructions on how to
walk a tightrope—which, I assume, must go something like this:

1. Find a horizontal cable that can support your weight.
2. Stand on one end.
3. Step forward by placing one foot directly in front of the other.
4. Repeat.
5. Don’t fall.

Clearly, steps 2 through 5 entail a little trial and error. Happily,
the benefits of training in meditation arrive long before mastery does.
And falling, for our purposes, occurs almost ceaselessly, every time we
become lost in thought. Again, the problem is not thoughts themselves
but the state of thinking *without being fully aware that we are thinking.*

As every meditator soon discovers, distraction is the normal
condition of our minds: Most of us topple from the wire every
second—whether gliding happily into reverie or plunging into fear,
anger, self-hatred, and other negative states of mind. Meditation is a
technique for waking up. The goal is to come out of the trance of
discursive thinking and to stop reflexively grasping at the pleasant and recoiling from the unpleasant, so that we can enjoy a mind undisturbed
by worry, merely open like the sky, and effortlessly aware of the flow
of experience in the present.

### How to Meditate

1. Sit comfortably, with your spine erect, either in a chair or cross-legged on a cushion.
2. Close your eyes, take a few deep breaths, and feel the points of contact between your body and the chair or the floor. Notice the sensations associated with sitting—feelings of pressure, warmth, tingling, vibration, etc.
3. Gradually become aware of the process of breathing. Pay attention to wherever you feel the breath most distinctly—either at your nostrils or in the rising and falling of your abdomen.
4. Allow your attention to rest in the mere sensation of breathing. (You don’t have to control your breath. Just let it come and go naturally.)
5. Every time your mind wanders in thought, gently return it to the breath.
6. As you focus on the process of breathing, you will also perceive sounds, bodily sensations, or emotions. Simply observe these phenomena as they appear in consciousness and then return to the breath.
7. The moment you notice that you have been lost in thought, observe the present thought itself as an object of consciousness. Then return your attention to the breath—or to any sounds or sensations arising in the next moment.
8. Continue in this way until you can merely witness all objects of consciousness—sights, sounds, sensations, emotions, even thoughts themselves—as they arise, change, and pass away.

Those who are new to this practice generally find it useful to hear instructions of this kind spoken aloud during the course of a meditation session. I have posted guided meditations of varying length on .

## THE TRUTH OF SUFFERING

I am sitting in a coffee shop in midtown Manhattan, drinking exactly
what I want (coffee), eating exactly what I want (a cookie), and doing
exactly what I want (writing this book). It is a beautiful fall day, and many of the people passing by on the sidewalk appear to radiate good
fortune from their pores. Several are so physically attractive that I’m
beginning to wonder whether Photoshop can now be applied to the human
body. Up and down this street, and for a mile in each direction, stores
sell jewelry, art, and clothing that not even 1 percent of humanity
could hope to purchase.

So what did the Buddha mean when he spoke of the “unsatisfactoriness” (*dukkha*) of life? Was he referring merely to the poor and the hungry? Or are
these rich and beautiful people suffering even now? Of course, suffering is all around us—even here, where everything appears to be going well
for the moment.

First, the obvious: Within a few blocks of where I am sitting are
hospitals, convalescent homes, psychiatrists’ offices, and other rooms
built to assuage, or merely to contain, some of the most profound forms
of human misery. A man runs over his own child while backing his car out of the driveway. A woman learns that she has terminal cancer on the eve of her wedding. We know that the worst can happen to anyone at any
time—and most people spend a great deal of mental energy hoping that it
won’t happen to them.

But more subtle forms of suffering can be found, even among people
who seem to have every reason to be satisfied in the present. Although
wealth and fame can secure many forms of pleasure, few of us have any
illusions that they guarantee happiness. Anyone who owns a television or reads the newspaper has seen movie stars, politicians, professional
athletes, and other celebrities ricochet from marriage to marriage and
from scandal to scandal. To learn that a young, attractive, talented,
and successful person is nevertheless addicted to drugs or clinically
depressed is to be given almost no cause for surprise.

Yet the unsatisfactoriness of the good life runs deeper than this.
Even while living safely between emergencies, most of us feel a wide
range of painful emotions on a daily basis. When you wake up in the
morning, are you filled with joy? How do you feel at work or when
looking in the mirror? How satisfied are you with what you’ve
accomplished in life? How much of your time with your family is spent
surrendered to love and gratitude, and how much is spent just struggling to be happy in one another’s company? Even for extraordinarily lucky
people, life is difficult. And when we look at what makes it so, we see
that we are all prisoners of our thoughts.

And then there is death, which defeats everyone. Most people seem to
believe that we have only two ways to think about death: We can fear it
and do our best to ignore it, or we can deny that it is real. The first
strategy leads to a life of conventional worldliness and distraction—we
merely strive for pleasure and success and do our best to keep the
reality of death out of view. The second strategy is the province of
religion, which assures us that death is but a doorway to another world
and that the most important opportunities in life occur after the
lifetime of the body. But there is another path, and it seems the only
one compatible with intellectual honesty. That path is the subject of
this book.

## ENLIGHTENMENT

What is enlightenment, which is so often said to be the ultimate goal of meditation? There are many esoteric details that we can safely
ignore—disagreements among contemplative traditions about what, exactly, is gained or lost at the end of the spiritual path. Many of these
claims are preposterous. Within most schools of Buddhism, for instance, a buddha—whether the historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, or any other
person who attains the state of “full enlightenment”—is generally
described as “omniscient.” Just what this means is open to a fair bit of caviling. But however narrowly defined, the claim is absurd. If the
historical Buddha were “omniscient,” he would have been, at minimum, a
better mathematician, physicist, biologist, and *Jeopardy*
contestant than any person who has ever lived. Is it reasonable to
expect that an ascetic in the fifth century BC, by virtue of his
meditative insights, spontaneously became an unprecedented genius in
every field of human inquiry, including those that did not exist at the
time in which he lived? Would Siddhartha Gautama have awed Kurt Gödel,
Alan Turing, John von Neumann, and Claude Shannon with his command of
mathematical logic and information theory? Of course not. To think
otherwise is pure, religious piety.

Any extension of the notion of “omniscience” to procedural
knowledge—that is, to knowing how to do something—would render the
Buddha capable of painting the Sistine Chapel in the morning and
demolishing Roger Federer at Centre Court in the afternoon. Is there any reason to believe that Siddhartha Gautama, or any other celebrated
contemplative, possessed such abilities by virtue of his spiritual
practice? None whatsoever. Nevertheless, many Buddhists believe that
buddhas can do all these things and more. Again, this is religious
dogmatism, not a rational approach to spiritual life.

I make no claims in support of magic or miracles in this book.
However, I can say that the true goal of meditation is more profound
than most people realize—and it does, in fact, encompass many of the
experiences that traditional mystics claim for themselves. It is quite
possible to lose one’s sense of being a separate self and to experience a kind of boundless, open awareness—to feel, in other words, at one with
the cosmos. This says a lot about the possibilities of human
consciousness, but it says nothing about the universe at large. And it
sheds no light at all on the relationship between mind and matter. The
fact that it is possible to love one’s neighbor as oneself should be a
great finding for the field of psychology, but it lends absolutely no
credence to the claim that Jesus was the son of God, or even that God
exists. Nor does it suggest that the “energy” of love somehow pervades
the cosmos. These are historical and metaphysical claims that personal
experience cannot justify.

However, a phenomenon like self-transcending love does entitle us to
make claims about the human mind. And this particular experience is so
well attested and so readily achieved by those who devote themselves to
specific practices (the Buddhist technique of *metta* meditation,
for instance) or who even take the right drug (MDMA) that there is very
little controversy that it exists. Facts of this kind must now be
understood in a rational context.

The traditional goal of meditation is to arrive at a state of well-being that is imperturbable—or if perturbed, easily regained. The French monk Matthieu Ricard describes such happiness as “a deep sense of flourishing that arises from an exceptionally healthy mind.”

The purpose of meditation is to recognize that you already have such a mind. That discovery, in turn, helps you to cease doing the things that produce needless confusion and suffering for yourself and others. Of
course, most people never truly master the practice and don’t reach a
condition of imperturbable happiness. The near goal, therefore, is to
have an *increasingly* healthy mind—that is, to be moving one’s mind in the right direction.

There is nothing novel about trying to *become* happy. And one *can* become happy, within certain limits, without any recourse to the
practice of meditation. But conventional sources of happiness are
unreliable, being dependent upon changing conditions. It is difficult to raise a happy family, to keep yourself and those you love healthy, to
acquire wealth and find creative and fulfilling ways to enjoy it, to
form deep friendships, to contribute to society in ways that are
emotionally rewarding, to perfect a wide variety of artistic, athletic,
and intellectual skills—and to keep the machinery of happiness running
day after day. There is nothing wrong with being fulfilled in all these
ways—except for the fact that, if you pay close attention, you will see
that there is still something wrong with it. These forms of happiness
aren’t good enough. Our feelings of fulfillment do not last. And the
stress of life continues.

So what would a spiritual master be a master *of*? At a minimum, she will no longer suffer certain cognitive and emotional
illusions—above all, she will no longer feel identical to her thoughts.
Once again, this is not to say that such a person will no longer think,
but she would no longer succumb to the primary confusion that thoughts
produce in most of us: She would no longer feel that there is an inner
self who is a thinker of these thoughts. Such a person will naturally
maintain an openness and serenity of mind that is available to most of
us only for brief moments, even after years of practice. I remain
agnostic as to whether anyone has achieved such a state permanently, but I know from direct experience that it is possible to be far more
enlightened than I tend to be.

The question of whether enlightenment is a permanent state need not
detain us. The crucial point is that you can glimpse something about the nature of consciousness that will liberate you from suffering in the
present. Even just recognizing the impermanence of your mental
states—deeply, not merely as an idea—can transform your life. Every
mental state you have ever had has arisen and then passed away. This is a first-person fact—but it is, nonetheless, a fact that any human being
can readily confirm. We don’t have to know any more about the brain or
about the relationship between consciousness and the physical world to
understand this truth about our own minds. The promise of spiritual
life—indeed, the very thing that makes it “spiritual” in the sense I
invoke throughout this book—is that there are truths about the mind that we are better off knowing. What we need to become happier and to make
the world a better place is not more pious illusions but a clearer
understanding of the way things are.

The moment we admit the possibility of attaining contemplative
insights—and of training one’s mind for that purpose—we must acknowledge that people naturally fall at different points on a continuum between
ignorance and wisdom. Part of this range will be considered “normal,”
but normal isn’t necessarily a happy place to be. Just as a person’s
physical body and abilities can be refined—Olympic athletes are *not* normal—one’s mental life can deepen and expand on the basis of talent
and training. This is nearly self-evident, but it remains a
controversial point. No one hesitates to admit the role of talent and
training in the context of physical and intellectual pursuits; I have
never met another person who denied that some of us are stronger, more
athletic, or more learned than others. But many people find it difficult to acknowledge that a continuum of moral and spiritual wisdom exists or that there might be better and worse ways to traverse it.

*Stages* of spiritual development, therefore, appear
unavoidable. Just as we must grow into adulthood physically—and we can
fail to mature or become sick or injured along the way—our minds develop by degrees. One can’t learn sophisticated skills such as syllogistic
reasoning, algebra, or irony until one has acquired more basic skills.
It seems to me that a healthy spiritual life can begin only once our
physical, mental, social, and ethical lives have sufficiently matured.
We must learn to use language before we can work with it creatively or
understand its limits, and the conventional self must form before we can investigate it and understand that it is not what it appears to be. An
ability to examine the contents of one’s own consciousness clearly,
dispassionately, and nondiscursively, with sufficient attention to
realize that no inner self exists, is a very sophisticated skill. And
yet basic mindfulness can be practiced very early in life. Many people,
including my wife, have successfully taught it to children as young as
six. At that age—and every age thereafter—it can be a powerful tool for
self-regulation and self-awareness.

Contemplatives have long understood that positive habits of mind are
best viewed as skills that most of us learn imperfectly as we grow to
adulthood. It is possible to become more focused, patient, and
compassionate than one naturally tends to be, and there are many things
to learn about how to be happy in this world. These are truths that
Western psychological science has only recently begun to explore.

Some people are content in the midst of deprivation and danger, while others are miserable despite having all the luck in the world. This is
not to say that external circumstances do not matter. But it is your
mind, rather than circumstances themselves, that determines the quality
of your life. Your mind is the basis of everything you experience and of every contribution you make to the lives of others. Given this fact, it makes sense to train it.

Scientists and skeptics generally assume that the traditional claims
of yogis and mystics must be exaggerated or simply delusional and that
the only rational purpose of meditation is limited to conventional
“stress reduction.” Conversely, serious students of these practices
often insist that even the most outlandish claims made by and about
spiritual masters are true. I am attempting to lead the reader along a
middle path between these extremes—one that preserves our scientific
skepticism but acknowledges that it is possible to radically transform
our minds.

In one sense, the Buddhist concept of enlightenment really is just
the epitome of “stress reduction”—and depending on how much stress one
reduces, the results of one’s practice can seem more or less profound.
According to the Buddhist teachings, human beings have a distorted view
of reality that leads them to suffer unnecessarily. We grasp at
transitory pleasures. We brood about the past and worry about the
future. We continually seek to prop up and defend an egoic self that
doesn’t exist. This is stressful—and spiritual life is a process of
gradually unraveling our confusion and bringing this stress to an end.
According to the Buddhist view, by seeing things as they are, we cease
to suffer in the usual ways, and our minds can open to states of
well-being that are intrinsic to the nature of consciousness.

Of course, some people claim to love stress and appear eager to live
by its logic. Some even derive pleasure from imposing stress on others.
Genghis Khan is reported to have said, “The greatest happiness is to
scatter your enemy and drive him before you, to see his cities reduced
to ashes, to see those who love him shrouded in tears, and to gather to
your bosom his wives and daughters.” People attach many meanings to
terms like *happiness,*  and not all of them are compatible with one another.

In *The Moral Landscape,* I argued that we tend to be
unnecessarily confused by differences of opinion on the topic of human
well-being. No doubt certain people can derive mental pleasure—and even
experience genuine ecstasy—by behaving in ways that produce immense
suffering for others. But we know that these states are anomalous—or, at least, not sustainable—because we depend upon one another for more or
less everything. Whatever the associated pleasures, raping and pillaging can’t be a stable strategy for finding happiness in this world. Given
our social requirements, we know that the deepest and most durable forms of well-being must be compatible with an ethical concern for other
people—even for complete strangers—otherwise, violent conflict becomes
inevitable. We also know that there are certain forms of happiness that
are not available to a person even if, like Genghis Khan, he finds
himself on the winning side of every siege. Some pleasures are
intrinsically ethical—feelings like love, gratitude, devotion, and
compassion. To inhabit these states of mind is, by definition, to be
brought into alignment with others.

In my view, the realistic goal to be attained through spiritual
practice is not some permanent state of enlightenment that admits of no
further efforts but a capacity to be free in this moment, in the midst
of whatever is happening. If you can do that, you have already solved
most of the problems you will encounter in life.

1. ↑ My late friend Christopher Hitchens—no enemy of the lexicographer—didn’t share them either. Hitch believed that *spiritual* was a term we could not do without. It is true that he didn’t think about spirituality in precisely the way I do. He spoke instead of the spiritual pleasures afforded by certain works of poetry, music, and art. The symmetry and beauty of the Parthenon embodied this happy extreme for him—without there being any need to admit the existence of the goddess Athena, much less devote ourselves to her worship. Hitch also used the terms *numinous* and *transcendent* to mark occasions of great beauty or significance, and for him the Hubble Deep Field was an example of both. (I’m sure he was aware that pedantic excursions into the *OED* would produce etymological embarrassments regarding these words as well.) Carl Sagan also freely used the term *spiritual* in this way. (See C. Sagan. 1995. *The Demon-Haunted World*. New York: Random House. p. 29.)

I have no quarrel with Hitch and Sagan’s general use of *spiritual* to mean something like “beauty or significance that provokes awe,” but I believe that we can also use it in a narrower and, indeed, more personally transformative sense.
2. ↑ A. Huxley. [1945] 2009. *The Perennial Philosophy: An Interpretation of the Great Mystics, East and West*. New York: Harper Perennial, p. vii.
3. ↑ One can speak about Judaism without its myths and miracles—even without God—but this doesn’t make Judaism the equivalent of Buddhism. Buddhism without the unjustified bits is essentially a first-person science. Secular Judaism isn’t.
4. ↑ A. Rawlinson. 1997. *The Book of Enlightened Masters*. Chicago: Open Court, p. 38.
5. ↑ For an entertaining account of Blavatsky’s career, see P. Washington. 1993. *Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon*. New York: Schocken.
6. ↑ One wonders how it was possible for a charlatan like L. Ron Hubbard to acquire any following at all, because each story about him is more preposterous and embarrassing than the last. For instance, Hubbard claimed to have withdrawn one of his first books from publication “ ‘because the first six people who read it were so shattered by the revelations that they had lost their minds’ ” (L. Wright. 2013. *Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief*. New York: Knopf). According to Hubbard, when he delivered this “dangerous text to his publisher, ‘The reader brought the manuscript into the room, set it on the publisher’s desk, then jumped out the window of the skyscraper.’ ”

There are many more laughs to be had at Hubbard’s expense. However, several readers who saw the original version of this endnote found it so funny that they had to be hospitalized. Regrettably, I’ve been forced to edit the text out of concern for the health of my readers.
7. ↑ A. Koestler. 1960. *The Lotus and the Robot*. New York: Harper & Row, p. 285. Koestler was also less than impressed with the spiritual efficacy of psychedelics. See A. Koestler. 1968. “Return Trip to Nirvana.” In *Drinkers of Infinity: Essays 1955–1967*. London: Hutchinson, pp. 201–12.
8. ↑ C. Hitchens. 1998. “.” Salon.com.
9. ↑ Purists will insist on important differences among the various schools of Buddhism and between Buddhism and the tradition of Advaita Vedanta developed by Shankara (788–820). Although I touch upon some of these distinctions, I do not make much of them. I consider the differences to be generally a matter of emphasis, semantics, and (irrelevant) metaphysics—and too esoteric to be of interest to the general reader.
10. ↑ The research on pathological responses to meditation is quite sparse. Traditionally, it is believed that certain stages on the contemplative path are by nature unpleasant and that some forms of mental pain should therefore be considered signs of progress. It seems clear, however, that meditation can also precipitate or unmask psychological illness. As with many other endeavors, distinguishing help from harm in each instance can be difficult. As far as I know, Willoughby Britton is the first scientist to study this problem systematically.
11. ↑ Consider the sensation of touching your finger to your nose. We experience the contact as simultaneous, but we know that it can’t be simultaneous at the level of the brain, because it takes longer for the nerve impulse to travel to sensory cortex from your fingertip than it does from your nose—and this is true no matter how short your arms or long your nose. Our brains correct for this discrepancy in timing by holding these inputs in memory and then delivering the result to consciousness. Thus, your experience of the present moment is the product of layered memories.
12. ↑ F. Zeidan et al. 2011. “Brain Mechanisms Supporting the Modulation of Pain by Mindfulness Meditation.” *Pain* 31: 5540–48; B. K. Holzel et al. 2011. “How Does Mindfulness Meditation Work? Proposing Mechanisms of Action from a Conceptual and Neural Perspective.” *Perspectives on Psychological Science* 6: 537–59; B. Kim et al. 2010. “Effectiveness of a Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy Program as an Adjunct to Pharmacotherapy in Patients with Panic Disorder.” *J Anxiety Disord* 24(6): 590–95; K. A. Godfrin and C. van Heeringen. 2010. “The Effects of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy on Recurrence of Depressive Episodes, Mental Health and Quality of Life: A Randomized Controlled Study.” *Behav Res Ther* 48(8): 738–46; F. Zeidan, S. K. Johnson, B. J. Diamond, Z. David, and P. Goolkasian. 2010. “Mindfulness Meditation Improves Cognition: Evidence of Brief Mental Training.” *Conscious Cogn* 19(2): 597–605; B. K. Hölzel et al. 2011. “Mindfulness Practice Leads to Increases in Regional Brain Gray Matter Density.” *Psychiatry Res* 191(1): 36–43.
13. ↑ Nanamoli, orig. trans., and Bodhi, trans. and ed. 1995. *The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha: A New Translation of the Majjhima Nikaya*. Boston: Wisdom Publications.
14. ↑ However one bounds the concept of enlightenment, there is no escaping the fact that most traditional accounts of it, Buddhist and otherwise, attribute a variety of supernormal powers to spiritual adepts. Is there any evidence that human beings can acquire abilities like clairvoyance and telekinesis? Apart from anecdotes offered by people who are desperate to believe in such powers, we can say that the evidence is impressively thin. Traditionally, gurus and their devotees have sought to have it both ways: The guru will display various *siddhis* (Sanskrit: “powers”) to entertain and persuade the faithful—but never in such a way as to meet the tests of true skeptics. We are invariably told that to produce miracles on demand would be a crude misuse of a guru’s office. The *dharma* (Sanskrit: “way” or “truth”), after all, is more precious and profound than worldly powers. No doubt it is. But this doesn’t stop most gurus from taking credit, or their devotees from bestowing it, whenever random coincidences occur.
15. ↑ M. Ricard. 2007. *Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill*. New York: Little, Brown, p. 19.