What I love about Buddhist meditation

Reality is made up of yin and yang, seeming opposites that actually aren't. Atoms wouldn't exist without positive and negative charges, so neither would we.

Thus when I wrote recently about my main gripe with Buddhist meditation, I knew that I wanted to balance that negativity with some positive props. After all, a bunch of Buddhism-themed books reside in my morning meditation area. I enjoy them a lot.

Except when they get into my gripe zone, explicit or implicit claims that human consciousness somehow is able to enter into a state of pure observing -- either of the inner mind or the outer world.

I argued that this isn't possible, given what neuroscience knows about how the brain/mind works. All kinds of factors shape how each of us experiences reality. Further, every experience feeds back into the "hidden brain," causing further changes in how the world appears to us.

This is great news, a cause for joy, not disappointment. Our minds are "plastic," not rigidly fixed. We have plenty of room to grow, change, and learn.

There are limits, though, to what we can become. At least, so long as we are talking about what is possible as human beings living in this material world. Imagination and fantasy have no limits, whether in the secular or religious sphere.

Some Buddhists are inclined toward a form of practice that borders on quasi-fundamentalist religiosity. They believe in supernatural phenomena, survival of consciousness after death, and other unprovables.

But the Buddhism I'm attracted to is here and now. It is centered on mindfulness -- the core theme of a book by Jon Cabat-Zinn that I've been reading (and enjoying) the past few weeks.

The way I understand it, mindfulness is simple.

It's being aware of what is happening now. Not trying to change it, though a desire to change something can indeed be part of what is happening. Much more a calm observing than energetic action, which is a large part of most people's frantic days.

There's no need to consider that mindfulness involve seeing things as they are in some sort of pure truth sense. Our experience is just that: our experience. Not someone else's. Not absolute reality.

Buddhist teachings about mindfulness remind me that no matter what bubbles to the surface of my awareness from the hidden brain in my psyche's unconscious depths, I can see it for what it is: a changeable, impermanent phenomenon which needs to be attended to, but not taken so seriously as I often do.

Things come. Things go. Me and you included.

We're all integral aspects of a marvelous natural world that encompasses so much more than we'll ever know. Yet this doesn't diminish the beauty, wonder, and awe present in each and every moment, when lived mindfully.

Today Mark Morford nailed this whole mindfulness thing from his own unique perspective in his column, "Oh my God you are so missing out." Well worth reading. Here's a substantial sample.

It is, of course, the white-hot urban affliction affectionately known as Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) hereby defined as that wildly addictive and yet totally nightmarish sociocultural dance whereby you are constantly being attacked by the overwhelming sense that so many wonderful, life-altering events are happening all around the city in any given moment that, well, there is simply no way to attend them all.

Result: the overwhelming feeling that you are, right now, missing out on some miraculous experience that is quite possibly the coolest thing ever to happen to anyone ever. Poor, poor, pitiable you.

This kind of madness, it can be downright dangerous. I have friends who suffer FOMO nearly every day, who almost never say no to a party or an invite to avoid getting knocked by the affliction, who try to cram in as much activity and social scene-stering as possible so they can build up an enormous repository of fantastic memories, friends, Evites, groggy morning-after stories, and mysterious bodily pains the genesis of which they cannot quite recall.

...Gosh, really? You say there are too many fantastic things to do? Too much to choose from? Too many restaurants, bars, cocktails, concerts, yoga classes, sex partners, books, gatherings, amazing people doing amazing things that titillate the senses and expand your body in new or wondrous ways? You are not exactly suffering. You are, you might say, spoiled beyond belief. Can you appreciate?

It only matters if it matters. The wise ones, as always, just wink and smile and tell us that you can never really be missing out, because no matter what you're doing, every single moment is actually full to bursting with divine richness, packed like a public swimming pool in a New Jersey summertime with howling, screaming divinity, raw and tactile and good. Hell, you can sit there and take a few deep breaths in the middle of a forest, and have more ecstatic joy than 100 Burning Mans on the moons of Jupiter. Well, maybe.

These masters of divine mischief, they remind us that the senses are always ready to offer their full expression, the heart is ready to feel everything in an instant, and full ecstatic consciousness is just a millisecond away. Dial into it just right, and missing out becomes, well, impossible.

You have, after all, to make a tiny but still profound shift in your awareness, a little click on over to dial into what the Tantrikas might call chid rasa (the fluid essence of consciousness) to ride the best ride of all.

It's like the great Taoist philosopher Lao Tse said, just before heading off to that new Vegas rooftop hookah bar/roller derby/burlesque review that promises to be totally offf the hook: "The greatest revelation is stillness."

Who would want to miss that?

Comments

[Willie R.]

I think FOMO has a firm basis in reality. As an individual, you ARE missing out: on every aspect of reality that is NOT you. It comes with the territory. Too bad...
The other side of the coin of reality is that your being an individual is temporary. Soon you will be dead. Actually, you will not be dead - there will be no individual to BE dead. Or to have missed out on anything. There is no cosmic scorekeeper.

Just like Kirchoff's law: the algebraic sum of voltages in a closed loop is zero - the sum of all experiences that an individual has, or has not had - is ZERO.

[Barbara O'Brien]

I think your conflicts about Buddhist meditation are based on misunderstanding, which happens when you get your information about Buddhism from books alone. I'm a Soto Zen student of 20+ years, and I do not see a conflict between neuroscience and zazen.

The state of pure awareness -- samadhi -- has to be experienced to be appreciated. I understand some research suggests that in deep samadhi some brain functions are suppressed, such as functions that perceive linear time. This is experience reveals that phenomena have no self-existence, and that our experience of the "external world" is partly a creation of our own brains and senses.

[Roger]

Barbara,

Could you describe your experience of the state of pure awareness. I would appreciate your discussion.

[Brian Hines]

Barbara, I also don't see a contradiction between neuroscience and zazen, or meditation in general. My main point in this and my previous post is that Buddhism has to move with the scientific times and adjust to ever-increasing knowledge of how the brain/mind works.

This shouldn't be difficult for Buddhists. But they'll have to give up the belief (which I find reflected in a lot of Buddhist writings) that it is possible to know "things as they are" via some sort of "pure awareness."

Anyway, Buddhism correctly says that we are interconnected with everything in existence. In fact, in a sense there isn't any "we" or "me" at all. So each of us is aware of reality in a unique fashion, our experience being the result of all sorts of nonreplicable causes and conditions.

So there's no privileged position of seeing, other than that of science in regards to the "objective" reality of the natural world. Yes, we can know ourselves (inner) and the world (outer) more clearly, but there always will be an inherent subjectivity in that knowing. Which is why we need science to help us understand things with less filtering.

[Ric]

Brian, having experienced bare awareness I have to disagree with you that it is not possible and that neurology cannot produce such a thing.

What is most noticeable about the experience is what is missing, what you could call background noise. The perceptions lack emotional, visceral and cognitive elaboration, processes which create meaning, leaving the experience itself utterly indescribable other than saying it is empty. I can't think of a better word to describe this awareness than 'bare'. 'Pure' works too though it has meanings that take it beyond into metaphysical realms that ironically elaborate the bare sensory experience.

This isn't to say that the brain isn't highly active below awareness, indeed, sensory activity requires a lot of preconscious activity. But stuff is missing. Parts of the brain aren't participating in the usual manner. It should be easy enough to imagine a system where all parts are not actively engaged at the same time, like a car. The nervous system isn't much different. It has an accelerator and brakes (actually large numbers of them) as well as a steering mechanism.

In fact, scientists have shown brain areas shutting down during meditation through imaging . This appears to be the modus operandi of many altered states of mind like suggestibility in hypnosis or towards a charismatic leader. In this case, the brakes and steering have been removed (medial prefrontal cortex, executive control function,) allowing someone else to drive the car.

During focused meditation, the indications are that the amygdala (the accelerator) is disengaged and actively suppressed (braked) by the prefrontal cortex. In general this is called emotional regulation by psychologists a key feature and benefit of meditation.

So, addressing the philosophical question, does bare awareness reveal reality as it truly is? No more than any other cognitive state, since it is just another limited point of view and perhaps less because fewer cognitive processes are involved in the experience. One might even say that the fewer cognitive systems involved, the more powerful the experience. That would mean that the degree of Truth one experiences is directly proportional to the intensity of the experience one has, making intensity the measure of truth, not comparative logic.

Following on that, it is my opinion that enlightenment is real but at least in some cases (that I can name,) it is the result of a permanent cognitive disfunction (brain damage by way of neural processes.)

The same goes for nondual experience. Apparently some people have the ability to shut down the left half of their brains, (temporarily as they seem to not be able to stop talking about nonduality,) leaving only the right holistic side active. Now nondual experience might be fun, but does using half your faculties produce a whole picture of reality? I think not. But the subjective experience is of overwhelming certainty, kind of like being drunk.

However, a decrease of activity in one area of the brain is often accompanied by an increase in another, a kind of neurological balancing act (brain resource allocation, brain fuel is glucose) which can be useful in meditation (e.g. less noise brings sharper image resolution.) One just needs to be careful not to allow the intense state to impair one's judgement about reality.

Some science:

http://www.investigatinghealthyminds.org/pdfs/davidsonBuddhaIEEE.pdf

[Brian Hines]

Ric, thanks for your interesting comment. You make some good points in an appealingly balanced fashion.

Yes, it does appear possible to shut down aspects of the brain that are normally operative, leading to an experience of fuller or more intense reality.

I haven't had the same experience(s) you've had, because we're different people. But I know what you're talking about. Reality can seem a lot more real in certain states of consciousness.

Like you said, though, the question becomes "What sort of real?" I liked your approach to meditation, but sometimes avid nondualists seem to be advocating a sort of infantile awareness.

Just sensing shapes and colors, not knowing that the blonde woman in the kitchen making a sandwich at the moment is my wife -- just seeing her as a bodily form with no past and no future.

That way of non-thinking seems to surrender a lot (or all) of what it means to be human. So I appreciate your more nuanced understanding of what "pure awareness" could mean. The word "pure" is the problem. It's really "altered" awareness, another choice we have, through meditation, of how to view reality.