The Science of Enlightenment

Shinzen Young has written my favorite meditation book so far.  He did it not by coming up with any radically new ideas or techniques, but by speaking my language -- a modern, secular, scientific language that only works its way to the deep end step-by-step.  You gotta love a guru who can talk intelligently about complex numbers and viscosity!  That said, the title of the book might be slightly misleading.  While the language is scientific in a broad sense, Young is a meditation teacher, not a scientist, and the book is not about the state of objective scientific research into the neural, physiological, or behavioral correlates of meditation.  For that, you want to read Altered Traits.

Instead, the book is a carefully edited selection of material originally derived from dharma talks Young gave at meditation retreats over the years.  As you can see for yourself on youtube, he's a great speaker, and I'd certainly recommend this compilation to anyone who meditates.  The editor has done a great job though, and I think the way the book describes the progressive practice of meditation would make a lot of sense to almost anyone insofar as it describes a set of tools for exploring their psychology.  It also might serve to bring some of the more esoteric ideas associated with Buddhism -- like, emptiness or no-self -- back down to earth and motivate a newcomer to explore what it no longer (quite) so alien a territory.

The book is structured to get progressively deeper and more abstract as it goes.  So the first chapter is biographical material about Shinzen's time back in the 70's as a Shingon monk on Mt Koya.  The second is a review of all the nice things that getting into a calm and concentrated state does for your physiology and state of mind.  The third is a very interesting survey of the world's meditative traditions that suggests they all have a common core.  The fourth introduces the idea of the analysis of insight as a complement to the synthesis of concentration.  And so on ... things get more mystical slowly enough that by the time he reaches chapter ten and says something like:

When you start to meditate, it seems like your mind and body are the abiding background, and within them, you are having various sensory experiences.  But at some point, a striking figure-ground reversal takes place.  Your mind and body become a transient figure, and the field of impermanence becomes the abiding ground.  For a moment, you shift from identifying with the mind and body, which are the produce of that field, to identifying with the field itself.  For a period of time you un-become the product of impermanence, and you re-identify with impermanence itself.  Impermanence viewed this way could also be called spirit or even soul.

... you don't bat an eye and instead just think it sounds like a great restatement of transcendental empiricism.  

[I'm not even kidding about the parallels between Chapter 10: Return to the Source and Immanence: A Life.  But this is no time for an extended discussion of the transcendental field]

So what I mainly loved about the book was the language he uses and the way he brings some analysis to bear on deeply mystical concepts.  However, I also came away with a number of very practical techniques or images or ways of thinking about my own meditation experience.  I've been testing these out as I go, and they seem really promising.  I'll describe these mainly for my own edification; you're going to want to read his much better description of them if you want to experiment with them on your own.

First, I find his breakdown of meditative factors into concentration, clarity, and equanimity just about the simplest explanation for the way samatha (concentration) and vipassana (insight) can function as complements.  

I still remember the mind-opening moment of coming across the idea that you could either focus on the continuity of experience, or its continuous change.  Up to that point, I had assumed that the "quality" of a meditation session could be roughly measured by how many times you forgot you were breathing.  As if the whole goal were no more than to constantly be aware that you are, in fact, still breathing.  After reading Daniel Ingram's book, I realized that I had been entirely focused on just stabilizing my concentration.  That might have been an okay way to get started, but I was missing half the picture.  Unfortunately, Ingram didn't subtitle his book "An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book" for no reason.  He takes the hard line that the feeling of stability in states like access concentration, where you are absorbed in following the breath, or in the jhanas, where you are absorbed in some other sensation, are illusions.  I think he says something to the effect that you are "artificially" stabilizing experience.  And of course, he has to say something like that because of his commitment to the idea that meditation provides insight into "how things really are" -- impermanent, unsatisfactory, and not-self.  In other words, "stable" can't be a description of any real experience for Ingram.  As a practical matter, focusing on the ever-changing nature of experience adds an essential dimension to meditation that greatly expands its applicability to everyday life.  I mean, it's pretty hard to do anything useful when you're trying to be completely absorbed in just breathing.  But at the same time, calling this wonderfully restful sensation of being completely absorbed in an experience an illusion just demonstrates how our philosophical baggage is always something we're always trying to pack reality into.  I would have thought that the first thing heavy-duty meditation would teach someone is that nothing is an illusion -- not the visions you see, not the weird sensations, not the impression of dissolving ...  To get anything out of it, you have to believe that these are all real experiences, and so is the experience of concentrating on those experiences in order to draw more experiences from them, which of course is what insight is all about.  

Young's explanation does away with this illusory contrast.  Concentration's focus on stable, restful absorption is the perfect tool to prepare us to clearly dissect experience.  Clarity, in turn, analyses experience into such fine components that it dissolves into a sort of liquid whose pure flow can literally absorb us.  The two are totally complementary.  I'll come back to his idea of flow in a minute, but first I want to talk about his breakdown of the components of clarity.  This is another place where I feel likeYoung really improved my understanding and practice.

Clarity means breaking down experience into three basic categories twice over.  The categories are images, sounds, and body sensations, and you can have these either from the inside (as something "you" are doing, subjectively) or from the outside (as something done "to you", objectively).  To each of these types of experience and their combinations, we can add a perceived location, a starting and stopping point in time, and a changing intensity.  To me, this is a major improvement on the basic practice of "noting", as derived from Mahasi Sayadaw.  Just noting in general is already a useful technique, but I find that having this simple classification structure vastly improves the resolution and precision of my noting.  

Consider, for example, how much easier this makes noting the various ways in which something as slippery as your subjective self appears. Following his division of experience, Young sees the self or subject as composed of three parts -- mental images, mental talk, and emotional body sensations (the pain in your knee is a physical sensation that happens "to" your body, but the disgust in the pit of your stomach is, at least to begin with, "yours").  So at any point in time, you can try to resolve your self into some combination of these three elements, each with a respective location, intensity, and rate of change.  At first this might sound a bit general or common sensical, barely better than saying that "you" are a mind-body complex (remember though that this is actually the level of explanation that Young's scheme should be compared to).  But just try it.  

This technique has immediately taken me to a deeper level of noticing.  I think a big part of that comes from the way I can now imagine my experience as composed of these sort of time varying basis vectors of reality.  Each one has a characteristic location.  The emotional bodily sensations map somatically.  Mental images often seem to be projected onto some third eye screen, but can reference other locations as well.  Mental talk is usually like a little homunculus whispering (or sometimes shouting and jabbering) into the space between my ears.  Each one also has its own rhythm, or a kind of frequency.  It's almost as if there are three different little oscillating machines running independently of one another, though of course also interacting in various ways and sometimes even merging into one big resonating activity called me.  I find it exciting to have an analytic framework like this that poses a clear set of questions, and then to be able to sit down for an hour and really start tracking the answers.  The framework also helps me see what questions did not get answered, and even suggests other question I might ask of my experience, like exactly how these three components interact contextually.  In other words, I find this method of noting to be much more systematic than anything else I've come across.  It suddenly feels much closer to a scientific probing of subjective experience.  In reality, it feels much more like a true map of insight than the others.  Or perhaps it's better to say that it's more like a set of tools for progressively building your own map than a cartoon drawing of stages you'll drive by on the interstate to Enlightenment.  At any rate, I find that thinking of components really helps to structure the wild and wooly world of sitting very still.  

I said I would come back to Young's idea of flow.  This is related to Csíkszentmihályi's version of flow, but considerably generalizes that idea.  So far, I'd say this is actually the most useful idea for me in The Science of Enlightenment.  Flow is meant to expand on the concept of impermanence that figures so centrally in buddhism.  Instead of drawing your attention to the way that experiences do indeed start and stop, arise and pass away, the idea of flow gives you a much richer vocabulary to talk about the continuousness of change in your experience.  This doesn't mean that all change is continuous (in the mathematical sense); Young claims there are many flavors of flow.  He mentions undulatory, vibratory, expansion/contraction flows.  I'd throw rotational in there as well, and something like a turbulent flow filled with vortices.  This classifications works in combination with the three part division of self into image, talk, and sensation.  Mostly flow is the rate of change of those parts (Young even explicitly mentions "taking the derivative of experience") though there seems to be some qualitative aspect to this change as well.  

The image we get is of a sort of fluid dynamics of experience, where you can analyze "an" experience into the flows that characterize it.  Young calls this his "rheological" model.  This works wonderfully for me as a way of investigating experience because I can ask what component is changing in what way and how is this impacting the rest of them.  With that image in mind I can actually feel the fluctuations of my self a whole lot more precisely.  Young's discussions of the buddhist ideas of purification and not-self build directly on this fluid model.  Thinking of fluid flow, I find it much easier to feel my self dissolving into a continuous circulation, or on the contrary, congealing into a viscous vortex around a painful point.  The goal then becomes to examine places where the flow is blocked or stuck, where a continuously changing process has coagulated into an identifiable lump of a thing.  As he points out, studying the modes of this fluid means you can learn something from both the moment when your self dissolves and when it arises.  I find the fluid metaphor endlessly helpful and fascinating, and I think Young is perhaps rediscovering the power of something very ancient here -- there's probably a reason that all the similes the suttas used to characterize the jhanas involved some reference to water.

Finally, the flow model can be extended to consider discontinuities within your continuously changing experience.  Young introduces the concept of Gone to describe the discontinuous flow that happens when an experience, or part of an experience, ends.  Of course, there's a parallel discontinuity in the flow when an experience begins.  He doesn't actually mention this, but it seems relevant to point out that these are places where the "derivative of experience" we discussed earlier is not going to be well defined (+/-∞)  In other words, points of mathematical singularity in a field of flow.  I've had some modest luck finding these points by following the procedure Young suggests -- when a flow seems to be dissolving into little jets or bubbles, follow these till they vanish.  Apparently, this can lead you to a point where you see the entirety of flow vanish, and subsequently reappear.  This is beyond my pay grade at the moment, though I feel like it shows promise as a technique.

Gone is also meant to reinterpret the classic buddhist idea of arising and passing away.  While I can't say I've thoroughly experienced the concept yet, I already think it's a major improvement intellectually.  Young points out that it's very easy to conceive arising and passing away as like watching images appear and disappear on a movie screen.  The metaphor implies a clear point-of-view or center that a flow of expansion and contraction does away with.  If you're looking to be the arising and passing away, this change of metaphor is quite helpful.  

I also think the idea of discontinuous flow solves another problem I've wrestled with in considering arising and passing away -- the question of the unity of "an" experience.  Experience is not actually naturally broken into individual pre-formed atoms the way a film is broken down into 24 frames per second.  So I was puzzled by what exactly was supposed to arise and pass, when it seemed like other, even finer grained, experiences would arise and pass within the first.  Is there really some atom of experience, some fundamental limit to the grain size of experience that buddhism is searching for?  Why stop just there and decide that this size of experience is the smallest?  With discontinuous flow, experience itself defines the starting and stopping point from within.  It's not like "a" pre-defined experience starts and stops, coming into view and disappearing from it as if it were a dog paraded past the review stand.  Instead some part of (perhaps some day all of) the overall flow of experience starts and stops.  In other words, there are sources and sinks of fluid.  The image of the entire cosmos being sucked into a black hole and born anew in the Big Bang makes a lot more sense to me than trying to hit pause on the gap between frames.