INTRODUCING THE MIDDLE WAY

In 1950, Nobel Prize–winning physicist Enrico Fermi posed a question that came to be known as Fermi's Paradox. That question was: Where is everybody? Given the vastness of the universe and the high probability that intelligent life has arisen elsewhere, why have we seen no evidence of advanced civilizations?

In 1998, economist Robin Hanson proposed an answer in his paper The Great Filter – Are We Almost Past It? Hanson suggested that civilizations must pass through a series of developmental barriers to become long-lived and technologically advanced—and that most fail along the way. He called those developmental barriers The Great Filter.

According to Hanson, we can't know whether humanity has already passed through the Great Filter or whether it lies ahead. We do know that some developmental challenges, such as the emergence of intelligent life, are behind us. Other challenges may be in front of us, such as ecological collapse and artificial superintelligence.

If the Great Filter lies ahead, then the decisive question may not be whether we can develop powerful technologies, but whether we can develop the wisdom to wield them responsibly. The greater the gap between technological capability and wisdom, the greater the risk that we will not survive our own breakthroughs.

What kind of wisdom might serve such a purpose?

Enter the beating pulse of Buddhist thought, the Middle Way.

After twenty-five years of study and practice, I have come to see the Middle Way as far more than a philosophical doctrine associated with early Buddhist thinkers. I believe it is a fundamental aspect of human development that can protect us from self-destructive extremes and enable long-term flourishing, personally and collectively.

First and foremost, the Middle Way is a model for the conditions under which human beings flourish.

We can think of the Middle Way as a law of conscious experience, analogous to how laws of physics describe the behavior of energy and matter. The central observation of that law is:

Suffering arises from extreme modes of thought and action. Flourishing arises from avoiding those extremes.

The Middle Way is an exploration of these extremes and how to avoid them. Its origin story is well-known. That story tells of a prince, Siddhartha Gautama, who renounces palace life to pursue extreme self-denial as a wandering ascetic. After nearly starving, he sees that both over-indulgence and asceticism are sources of suffering and, in the famous meditation under the Bodhi tree, liberates his mind through realizing its true nature. He then teaches the Middle Way as both a pragmatic guide for living and a philosophy of personal liberation.

That story became the opening act of a tradition that would course its way through humanity over the next 2,500 years. What made it so compelling? The answer, I believe, lies in its message of personal empowerment. Throughout his story, the Buddha insists he is not a god or a savior but merely a guide pointing the way to an awakening each one of us can realize.

It took several centuries to develop the full implications of the Middle Way, culminating in the work of Buddhism's greatest philosopher, Nāgārjuna, who lived around the 2nd century CE. While the Buddha introduced the initial ideas, Nāgārjuna gave them their most rigorous formulation in his masterpiece, the Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way.¹ It remains one of Buddhism's seminal texts and a monument to critical thinking about the sufferings of extremes and the path to liberating the mind.

As codified by Nāgārjuna, the Middle Way is a means for navigating the tricky path between two fundamental extremes that cause suffering: eternalism and nihilism. We will start with eternalism, as that is the extreme from which most human suffering flows.

Eternalism literally means to make eternal—to see perceptions, thoughts, and phenomena as more permanent, independent, and inherently existent than they actually are. The term in Sanskrit, śāśvata-vāda, translates as "grasping at permanence." It is a mode of thinking in which we treat mental constructs as solid realities. Perhaps the simplest way to say it is: to make something more real than it is. Eternalist thinking is characterized by dogma, rigidity, and a lack of reasoning or reflection.

Let us illustrate with a concrete example common in contemporary life.

Many of us are primed for success. We want to do the best we can and succeed. There is nothing wrong with that. Some of us take this further. We harbor thoughts, conscious or unconscious, that go something like: "I am a failure if…". We can complete the sentence with any number of possibilities. I am a failure if I don't get an A on the exam, get a good review at work, publish this article, and so on.

The inner feeling "I am a failure if…" is not a preference or a choice. It appears to our minds as an incontrovertible truth, with the weight of certainty. If the condition occurs, we will regard ourselves as failures and experience considerable suffering. This is an example of an eternalist extreme. We have overweighed the consequences of failure, turning conjecture into reality.

Buddhist philosophers see the deepest form of eternalism as clinging to the self, treating it as a fixed, solid reality. The more we solidify our sense of a separate, independent self, the more we must defend it, prove its worth, and satisfy its demands. Overweighting the self can be highly stressful and isolating, a source of tension and insecurity as we fixate on what the self deems important—my achievements, my reputation, my comfort.

According to Buddhist thought, eternalism—attributing a fixed, solid reality to phenomena that is not really there—is not simply a philosophical mistake. Eternalism is our default mode of perception.

Let us examine what this means.

Buddhist thinkers intuited that, for us to function, the mind cannot perceive reality as it is but must perceive it in a limited way. We need to see a tree, not a field of quivering particles, so that we don't walk into something that will hurt us. We need to feel separate from the world around us so that we can attend to our needs. We need to see others as separate so we can have productive relationships. In short, we need to perceive things as solid, enduring, and separate in order to function.

This solidity, permanence, and separateness is our default view of the world. It is also an eternalist view because it renders phenomena more rigid, separate, and permanent than they are. This means that, according to Buddhist ideas, our default mode of perceiving reality, which enables us to function, also causes us to suffer because it keeps us in an eternalist mindset.

Which brings me to the essence and driving force behind Buddhism and the Middle Way:

Buddhism is about correcting the default error of eternalism—attributing phenomena with more solidity, permanence, and separateness than they have. It aims to elevate conscious experience beyond this default state, alleviating suffering and opening new vistas of experience. The Middle Way is a method to do this. It is Buddhism’s red pill,² its wardrobe to Narnia, its looking glass to Wonderland. It is the means by which we transcend our default experience.

Buddhism calls the experience of our default state samsara, the condition in which eternalism generates suffering It calls freedom from that state liberation, nirvana, or enlightenment. These are expressions of what happens when we push away from that default and gain a new perspective on reality. Nagarjuna’s great contribution was that suffering and freedom from suffering are the product of a shift in perspective—of transcending our default eternalism.

Different cultures experience that default error in different ways. The eternalist distortions of an indigenous Amazonian may differ from those of modern, technology-oriented people like us. And, of course, each one of us experience it differently. But the fundamental challenge remains: we each, in our own ways, perceive reality in ways that belie its nature, and these distortions cause us both to suffer, and to seek solutions to quell that suffering.

Buddhism stands for the idea that sophisticated conscious beings—which it considers humans to be—have the potential to move beyond the default state that causes suffering, continue to function well, and broaden the potential of experience.

To move in this direction, we can think of the Middle Way as a practice of unlearning. It doesn’t ask us to find, do, or be anything. It asks us to observe the eternalist distortions—the false solidity—in our perception and let them go. It is about dropping the illusions, grasping, and attachments that keep us stuck and suffering in the eternalist extreme. We will take a closer look at exactly what this means in a separate piece.

There is just one catch in moving away from the suffering of the eternalist extreme. As we realize that our reality is not as permanent, independent, or inherently existent as we think, it is natural for doubt or cynicism to creep in. Learning that things aren’t the way we thought can feel like having the ground beneath us fall away. This is the pull of nihilism.

Nihilism is the view that nothing truly exists, nothing matters, there are no consequences, everything is meaningless. In Sanskrit, uccheda-vāda means "the view of annihilation." Nihilist thinking is characterized by cynicism, hopelessness, and a lack of enthusiasm or motivation. If the eternalist extreme overweighs our perception of what is true and real, the nihilist extreme underweighs it.

Return to our example of the achievement-oriented person who realizes their attitude toward success and failure is unhealthy. The challenge with pushing away from "I am a failure if..." is the fear that nothing could replace it. This is the fear of nihilism. This comes as thoughts like: I got a B, so it's not worth studying anymore; or I didn't get my article published, so I won't bother to write anymore.

The goal of the Middle Way is to navigate between these extremes: I can fall short and still feel good about myself; I don't have to give up when something goes wrong. Although this is quite easy to understand in theory, in practice, it is difficult to realize. The notion that "I am a failure if…," or any of the infinite range of stories we tell ourselves, feels to us like an incontrovertible truth, hard to step away from even if it is making us miserable. The nihilistic fear of what lies beyond that certainty can be paralyzing.

Returning to the legend of the Buddha, we can see now that the eternalist extreme is Siddhartha Gautama stuck in the palace with all the worldly success he could imagine. The nihilist extreme is Siddhartha Gautama jumping all the way to the other side, renouncing life and almost starving as a wandering ascetic. His meditation under the Bodhi tree was the realization of the Middle Way. Upon that realization, he woke up and became known as the Buddha, the awakened one. Siddhartha Gautama is not different from us. His awakening is our awakening. It is the journey of conscious experience to realize its potential.

This is not a switch we flip but a perception we gradually refine. We've spent a lifetime constructing identities, defending positions, and seeking solid ground, so shifts rarely happen overnight. As we engage with the ideas of the Middle Way, our experience and perspective will shift, becoming more fluid, adaptable, and frictionless. We will be better able to surf life’s waves rather than have them crash down upon us, and we will tap into new vistas of experience unavailable to us before.

For Buddhist thinkers, the Middle Way is like the North Star, a guiding light that opens the door to new potentials of experience. In all aspects of Buddhism’s philosophy and practice, we keep a close watch on the alluring extremes, where dogma and rigidity on the eternalist side, and cynicism and despair on the nihilist side, substitute for the deep clarity and insight of the middle.

The Middle Way’s central insight holds that extreme views, such as eternalism and nihilism, lead to suffering. This tells us that if we attribute to our technological advances more weight and dogma than they actually deserve, we will swing toward eternalism, and suffering will ensue. We have seen this over and again with new technological breakthroughs. Industrialization caused ecological decline, processed food caused obesity and diabetes, and today we are understanding the detrimental effects of social media on mental health. All overweighed their benefits at the beginning.

According to the Great Filter, civilizations don't fail because they lack intelligence—they fail because that intelligence outpaces wisdom. This is why I am convinced that, if we ever encounter aliens, they will not be the aggressive, capture-the-planet types. To journey across the stars, they would have learned how to wield immense technological power without succumbing to extremes. The Middle Way—in whatever form they discovered it—would be their compass, just as a 2,500-year-old legend of a prince urges each of us to make it ours.

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