shaman sun
10-11-2009, 08:52 PM
Hey, I just was listening to a recent Buddhist Geeks interview with James Austin, author of Zen and the Brain. (http://books.google.com/books?id=8ywrjDa0vZ8C&lpg=PP1&dq=zen%20and%20the%20brain&pg=PA14#v=onepage&q=&f=false) Found this to be really interesting. He analyzes types of attention, consciousness and the science behind kensho.
It's a two part, "This is your brain on meditation (http://personallifemedia.com/podcasts/236-buddhist-geeks/episodes/52229-brain)," and "The Mechanism of Kensho (http://personallifemedia.com/podcasts/236-buddhist-geeks/episodes/52539-mechanisms)."
Here are some highlights from the transcript:
James: Our concentrative meditation is more effortful. It’s more sustained, focused, and exclusive it requires top-down attentive processing. It’s more self-referential. It may evolve into the absorption of the jhānas, and it can be kind of summarized as paying attention. Whereas the more receptive modes of meditation are more unfocused. They’re more effortless. They’re more open. They involve only a bare awareness that expresses bottom-up modes of processing there more involuntary there other referential there tuned to the world outside and they're the ones who can shift into our more intuitive and insightful modes of awareness and they're clearly choiceless because we're not in there choosing to do with them, they more or less take place automatically. So it's these two major modes of attention that overlap in significant ways with comparable styles of meditation the one is concentrated and the other is receptive.
And from part two...
Because kensho has an immediate residual that will last for many minutes not hours. It should be possible to define what changes they just taken place in that subjects brain. To do that of course, you need to have a new baseline, so let’s say at the start of a one-week retreat. So if during the retreat, the meditator dropped into kensho, you should be Johnny-on-the-spot and able to tell whatever changes that might have occurred in the brain, in the interim. So I think this is feasible and I think sooner or later, maybe not in this decade, which were almost out of, but in subsequent decades… I think it should be possible, theoretically, to determine more about the underpinnings of kensho and satori.
James: It’s not a very bad word that you’re putting into a phrase because the evidence, I think, is consistent with the fact that the brain is rewiring itself. The brain of a sage person I say certainly is pursuing impulses through rather different pathways and experiencing the world phenomenologically, in a rather different way from how they started out, many decades before. So rewiring I think is an apt phrase.
What are your thoughts on studying consciousness, meditation and neuroscience? To me it helps support the insights meditation and contemplative practice helps us develop. Many see spiritual experiences as hallucinogenic or delusional, a strange brain "malfunction." People like Austin, IMO, help dispel this bias and reveal the fascinating science behind spiritual practices.
It's a two part, "This is your brain on meditation (http://personallifemedia.com/podcasts/236-buddhist-geeks/episodes/52229-brain)," and "The Mechanism of Kensho (http://personallifemedia.com/podcasts/236-buddhist-geeks/episodes/52539-mechanisms)."
Here are some highlights from the transcript:
James: Our concentrative meditation is more effortful. It’s more sustained, focused, and exclusive it requires top-down attentive processing. It’s more self-referential. It may evolve into the absorption of the jhānas, and it can be kind of summarized as paying attention. Whereas the more receptive modes of meditation are more unfocused. They’re more effortless. They’re more open. They involve only a bare awareness that expresses bottom-up modes of processing there more involuntary there other referential there tuned to the world outside and they're the ones who can shift into our more intuitive and insightful modes of awareness and they're clearly choiceless because we're not in there choosing to do with them, they more or less take place automatically. So it's these two major modes of attention that overlap in significant ways with comparable styles of meditation the one is concentrated and the other is receptive.
And from part two...
Because kensho has an immediate residual that will last for many minutes not hours. It should be possible to define what changes they just taken place in that subjects brain. To do that of course, you need to have a new baseline, so let’s say at the start of a one-week retreat. So if during the retreat, the meditator dropped into kensho, you should be Johnny-on-the-spot and able to tell whatever changes that might have occurred in the brain, in the interim. So I think this is feasible and I think sooner or later, maybe not in this decade, which were almost out of, but in subsequent decades… I think it should be possible, theoretically, to determine more about the underpinnings of kensho and satori.
James: It’s not a very bad word that you’re putting into a phrase because the evidence, I think, is consistent with the fact that the brain is rewiring itself. The brain of a sage person I say certainly is pursuing impulses through rather different pathways and experiencing the world phenomenologically, in a rather different way from how they started out, many decades before. So rewiring I think is an apt phrase.
What are your thoughts on studying consciousness, meditation and neuroscience? To me it helps support the insights meditation and contemplative practice helps us develop. Many see spiritual experiences as hallucinogenic or delusional, a strange brain "malfunction." People like Austin, IMO, help dispel this bias and reveal the fascinating science behind spiritual practices.