Zen-Brain Horizons by James H. Austin

Author:James H. Austin [Austin, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: neurology, zen, meditation, Buddha, Buddhist, neurosciences, meditative, mental, mental processing, psychology, spontaneous color imagery, Buddhist Botany, Avian Zen
ISBN: 9780262027564
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 2014-04-19T04:00:00+00:00

Part V

Peering into the Future

What we do know is the greatest hindrance to our learning what we don’t know.

Claude Bernard (1813–1878)

14

New Research Horizons

The essence of things is just this. If even one thought appears, that is already a mistake.

Zen Master So Sahn (1520–1604)1

While my inner monologue unrolls, I have the impression of not being free.

Hubert Benoit2

This chapter serves as a reminder: thoughts are an integral part of daily life. Thoughts are as natural as clouds in the sky. However, excessive thoughts distract from the clarity of awareness. From its inception, the Path of Buddhism has sought the balance of a Middle Way.

Concise Advice about “No Thinking”

We had not met before. This preliminary interview took place before the retreat started. The two of us had just sat down in facing chairs. The Zen Roshi spoke first. “Remember this,” he said. His next six words supplied the essence of the mental attitude I would need during the week-long Zen retreat:

“No doctor. No God. No thinking.”

The advice stripped this new student of all professional vanity. It negated any possible need (that even a Unitarian might retain) for some lingering theological attachments. It epitomized the Rinzai Zen approach to meditation: let go of discursive thoughts!

Discursive Word-Thoughts

To Hubert Benoit, the French psychologist, each person’s Self-centered world was “the world of speech.” The evidence was obvious: Every word-thought is verbal in nature. Moreover, each word-thought conveys only relative meaning, not real, tangible meaning. Therefore, at least from a Zen perspective, his 1973 book invited us to “let go” of this strong primary attachment to language. In its place, he advised readers to cultivate other “automatisms of divergence.”

This first proposal—to “let go”—might seem to restate some of the Buddha’s early advice to Bahiya about letting go of attachments. We observed how Zen masters during later centuries incorporated this teaching into their training methods (see chapter 5). In this twenty-first century, how does such age-old psychological advice translate into neural terms? The counsel in these pages is straightforward: Abandon unfruitful Self-centeredness; free more lower pathways from being entangled with egocentric word-thoughts. As a result, you will open them up for more allocentric processing. But what did Benoit mean by “divergence”? And which of its “automatisms” were to be cultivated?

Divergence in the Context of Meditation and Creativity

Things that diverge spread apart from a common point of origin. When divergent thinking branches out it increases the number of creative options. On the other hand, too much diversity interferes with the next process of selecting which option is best. So, what absolute requirements do creativity and meditation each seem to share? At a minimum, they both require (1) flexible alternations between narrowly focused attention skills and global awareness skills, and (2) precise timing of each such skill set on the leading edge of just the right kinds of convergent and divergent processing, respectively.3 [SI: 109–112] All along, our fluid intelligence performance improves when there is less cognitive and emotional dissonance, rather than more.

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