This is an article by Jeff Warren of Psychology Tomorrow "Enlightenment: Is Science Ready to Take It Seriously?" It explores exciting new discoveries about how mindfulness practice affects the structure and function of our brains. Warren also wonders if the opposite is possible - would science make a similar brain transformation possible without 20 years of meditation?
In March 2012, I, along with twenty other meditators, took part in an experiment conducted by Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston. The experiment was led by a young Harvard neuroscientist David Vago and a Buddhist scientist and mindfulness teacher Shinzen Young.
For one week, we - all twenty participants - meditated in an impromptu retreat space in the Functional Imaging Lab. Over the course of two days, we went through various behavioral and psychological tests. But the main events took place in the clinic.
Every few hours a practitioner was selected from our group who went to a clinic-owned magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner for a functional and anatomical scan of the brain (due to an injury I suffered many years ago, there was a metal plate in my neck that did not allow me to participate in this part of the experiment).
Wago and Young grappled with one of the great questions of neuroscience: What is the true state of a resting brain? In order to observe any brain activity, whether it be for memories, movement of body parts or focusing attention, when studying an MRI, a neuroscientist needs to determine a baseline state of rest, with which the active state can be compared.
To this end, neuroscientists have instructed patients undergoing magnetic resonance imaging for many years to let their minds “just wander” between active tasks, as if “mind-wandering” were a state of rest and inaction. However, recent studies of the brain's neural network, known as the “default mode network,” have shown that mental wandering has nothing to do with rest. In fact, many parts of the brain "at rest" in this state are active - in particular, the networks that support the so-called "self-referential processing", that is, an endless history of thinking about oneself.
This all too familiar part of the brain is constantly occupied with comparisons and building plans, worrying and fantasizing; at night at a party, she pours out words, after which she begins to look for grievances, clues and conclusions. In other words, it is the thinking mind, or at least one aspect of the thinking mind, a state to which we tend to reflexively return without being focused on any specific task.
However, Shinzen Young argues that true peace is something else, something that meditators can demonstrate over time, thereby helping to identify the true basis of sensory experience. To find out if this is so, our small group set out to do.
Promotional video:
Lying on their backs in a buzzing functional MRI with a magnetic field of three Tesla, taking readings from the brain, each meditator immersed himself in one of four different meditations taught by Young: visual peace, auditory peace, bodily rest, or the open state known as “nothing not doing”, in which the meditator gives up all attempts to control his attention and simply allows any thoughts to come and go, maintaining awareness. This allows the experienced practitioner to make the mind clear, open and spacious.
When the subjects felt that they had achieved stability in these states, they pressed the button. In between these active states, they allowed their mind to wander to create a contrasting state, as well as highlight how the wandering of the mind differs from these shades of deep peace.
However … a problem arose that Vago could not have foreseen. Twenty meditation practitioners were selected based on the duration and regularity of the practice. But even in this sample, there was a line between the average practitioner and a few senior practitioners who had meditated for over twenty years.
Their minds differed both in quantitative and qualitative indicators. He was no longer the mind of ordinary people.
Experienced meditators achieved the ideal state of calm in each type of meditation, but when it came to creating a contrasting state, they were helpless. They have lost the ability to “let their minds wander,” because they gave up the habit of discursive, narrative-type thoughts long ago. They no longer cared about what their hairstyle looked like, what they had in the near future, or whether they annoy other people. In general, their minds were silent.
When thoughts came - and they still came - these participants in the experiment reported that these thoughts have a different, non-fixed quality. The idea that "MRI is very noisy" could have arisen, but then quickly evaporated. It seemed that thoughts arise as needed in response to various situations, and then decisively disappear against a clear background of consciousness. In other words, these practitioners have always meditated.
But this was not yet the most shocking discovery of Vago. Something even more amazing happened to the two most experienced practitioners, something that, as far as the experiment leaders knew, had never been captured by any brain research equipment before.
Lying on padded gurneys in a humming MRI center at a famous clinic in the heart of East Boston and at Harvard Medical School, both subjects suddenly … disappeared.
Har-Prakash Khalsa, a 52-year-old postman and yoga teacher from Canada, one of two experienced practitioners to whom this happened, describes his experience as follows:
“It's like a pressure or an impulse. I was in one of these states of calm, and when I let go of it, I felt myself heading into a much greater dissolution - a greater “disappearance,” as Shinzen would call it. It was impossible to resist it. My mind, body and world just collapsed."
Moments later, the shimmering, renewed, transformed Har-Prakash returned to consciousness, not quite understanding how he could fit this experience into a research report. He couldn't mark it with a button press, even if he wanted to - there was no one to press the button.
It was not peace - it was total annihilation.
For Har-Prakash, this experience was completely familiar. He experienced his first cessation in 2003 after a particularly intense meditation retreat, and now it was happening all the time. “Sometimes it happens when I'm just walking down the street,” he told me.
Har-Prakash, entering from existence and re-entering it, periodically "flickered" - usually several times a day. It was not surprising that he was able to live in the present moment - the moment, literally, was always new. He seemed to wake up ten times a minute.
When I asked Yang about this phenomenon, he replied that it is called "cessation" or nirodha and is an extremely important topic in Buddhist practice. In fact, one of Yang's main tasks as a teacher of advanced practitioners is to help students adjust to these small, confusing deaths, which happen more often the longer the student practices.
“When you hear about it, it may seem dangerous, but somehow you continue to function perfectly normal,” Young said.
He told me about his interruptions, which happened, for example, when he was driving from his home in Burlington, Vermont, to Waterbury, a half hour drive away, where he conducts regular meditation retreats.
“I go into and out of terminations hundreds of times. Time and space are not separated in any way. But I was never even given a fine - what can we say about accidents. And this is not only my experience. I have never met a Zen master who crashed into a wall, because for a short moment, from a perceptual point of view, he was not there. Remember that the material world does not disappear, all these are events of sensory perception. This is consciousness. Causal relationships remain in place. The force fields remain in place."
Obviously, Young, like the two experienced practitioners who were on the MRI, no longer perceive reality the way most people do. Describing exactly how his perception changed became something of a journalistic obsession for me.
In mystical literature, authors use such designations as "self-realized", "awakened", "liberated" and - the most loaded - "enlightened". "A very clear experience of cessation," Young explained to me, "induces classical enlightenment."
But whatever we call it, after years of hard practice, Young's sense of identity has changed. Like the two experienced practitioners who participated in the study, he lost his former quality of discursive thinking. He spends more and more time in states of emptiness. In addition, he no longer feels himself to be a separate, limited "I" - he feels himself to be part of a greater, impersonal "act."
As both an observer journalist and a participant in the experiment, I was in the MRI room when some of these events took place and closely watched Vago. What conclusions will he draw from these strange metamorphoses of meditative experience? Although hundreds of scientific articles on the neurophysiology of meditation have been published over the past ten years, few researchers have been bold enough to speak of the ultimate goal of Buddhist practice, the cessation of suffering known as awakening or enlightenment (the very name "Buddha" means "awakened.").
But there are some signs that the situation is beginning to change. Indeed, a few years ago, Wago and a group of Harvard colleagues published an article in Perspectives on Psychological Science entitled "How Mindfulness Meditation Works"? In their review of the various components of the mechanisms of mindfulness, the authors of the article included an aspect that they called "a change in the perception of self."
The authors write that if at the basic levels of meditation there is a dis-identification with a certain part of the content of the mind, then at higher levels of practice there is a more “radical dis-identification” with our inherent sense of “I”. "Instead of identification with the static 'I', there is a tendency to identify with the phenomenon of 'experience' as such."
According to the authors, both theoretical descriptions and empirical reports "attribute a shift in self-perception to a key role in the development and maturity of meditation." They then summarize several discoveries from neuroimaging and personal experiences that can shed light on what is happening in the enlightened brain (although the authors carefully avoid the word "n").
Reasoning about this in a scientific article is just a play on interesting words. But within a living, authentic experience, it is a complex and radical change that has been called time and again the most important reorientation in human life. And not only in Buddhism. Throughout history, all the world's contemplative traditions, as well as secular literature, described the transition from thinking about one's own "I" to entering the stream of consciousness itself, although the language of these descriptions could be different.
There are many ambiguous maps and conflicting descriptions of enlightenment. Young and Wago hope that true "science of enlightenment" will be able to juxtapose and illuminate all the paradigms and experiences at the heart of serious spiritual practice.
Why is this undertaking so important, and what implications for science can it have?
On an individual level, we have potentially revolutionary insights to deal with the mental and emotional suffering of a person. Whenever practitioners' identity changes during the practice of meditation, they report noticeable relief from personal suffering. Of course, the pain does not disappear anywhere. In essence, pain is part of the human condition. But a person's relationship with their suffering can change.
What are the fundamental dynamics of this process? Practice seems to imply a kind of "de-fixation" from sensory experience in general and then, as the practice deepens, from our current identity as separate, autonomous individuals. Young believes that one of the skills a practitioner develops is equanimity, which he describes as not grasping at the sense system.
The experiences pass through the practitioner more fully, causing less anxiety and allowing faster homeostasis to be restored. There is a feeling of lightness, inner balance and the possibility of satisfaction, independent of external conditions. As practitioners spend less energy fighting themselves, energy is released that can be used to help others.
The meditator feels a stronger connection with the soul of the world and with other people. Indeed, another aspect of the “awakened” mind is the unfolding of what many describe as primordial compassion. Our fundamental nature may be simpler and more loving than we think.
It appears that these changes are occurring within a continuum. There is tremendous scientific interest at the moment in the practice of mindfulness, as it is one of the ways to help people move along this continuum, which even at its "shallow end" can have a great impact on various conditions, ranging from problems caused by stress to anxiety. depression, addictions, pain, etc.
But, as I have tried to show, deeper changes are possible. Any science of the mind that wants to be worthy of its name must try to isolate, describe, and understand the entire continuum. Without this, the paradigm of the power of meditation is devoid of its cornerstone.
When we better understand the dynamics of the process (which may or may not have important correlates in the nervous system), we may have a chance to extend the positive effects of serious practice to people who have been deprived of the luxuries of daily meditation for twenty years. We may be able to fine-tune our meditation techniques, or even use a kind of "technical elevator," as Young suggested, that will allow us to literally change people's minds and achieve deeper levels of satisfaction and unity in our lives.
As we see more and more clearly the real elements of human experience, there may come a time when, as Shinzen Yang put it, "there will be cross-pollination of outer physical science and inner contemplative disciplines, resulting in a sudden and significant increase in the well-being of the entire world." Young calls this his "happiest thought." This kind of cross-pollination can enrich our neuroscience, provide us with new tools for eliminating human suffering, and significantly expand the understanding of human capabilities.
How can this cross-pollination work in practice? I have already suggested that scientific understanding can make the positive effects of serious practice more accessible. But this is a double-edged sword. There is another likely consequence: enlightenment itself can have an impact on scholarly practitioners.
Young often says that the next Buddha may be a team of enlightened neuroscientists. He means that deep practice endows the gift of deep vision. This is true both from a literal point of view - in the sense of outstanding clarity of feelings, and from a metaphysical - in the sense of deep insights about the nature of reality.
That this could mean the same thing is reflected in the story Young told about his teacher Jōshū Sasaki Rōshi (I will venture to end my article with a description of this episode).
Sasaki Roshi is 105 years old (at the time of translation of the article - April 22, 2013 - Sasaki Roshi was 106 years old. - Approx. Trans.), Which probably makes him the oldest living Zen master. It has been reasonably suggested that he meditated longer than any other person on the planet.
One day during a public speech that Young was translating (Young began his training as a monk near Mount Koya-san, south of Osaka, and speaks fluent Japanese), Roshi asked an unusual question: “Do you know what unit?" Before the perplexed listeners had time to answer, he answered himself: "One is that which contains zero." Then he continued, "Do you know what a deuce is?" And again he himself answered his own question: “Two is what contains a unit. Do you know what a troika is? " He continued in this vein, and while he spoke, Young, who was practically a math freak, was struck with insight.
Roshi expressed in words the fundamental dynamics of consciousness that no scientist has yet described, but which Buddhists have been talking about for more than two thousand years, albeit in a slightly different language. According to Roshi's vision, all sensuously perceived moments arise when an empty source (Zero) is divided into the force of expansion and the force of contraction. Between them, these two forces determine the shape of each nanosecond of perception. Over and over again, they annihilate and reunite, and their pulsation creates sensory reality, creating an ever-increasing wealth of Zero states that experienced practitioners can observe and even ride (Young once told me that this is the secret of the surging vitality and spontaneity of some Zen monks) …
Young realized that Roshi's description was strikingly similar to the foundation of modern mathematics known as set theory. But Roshi knew nothing about mathematics - the education he received in the spirit of the 19th century was inherently feudal. When Young pointed out this similarity, there was a long pause, after which his teacher finally responded with impassive Zen equanimity: "Ah … so mathematicians have dug that deep, right?"
Of course, as Young himself cautiously points out, this could be an apparent coincidence. Many people are eager to find correspondences between spirituality and science (usually quantum mechanics), which in most cases only annoys real scientists who know more details of these processes. On the other hand, the scientific tendency to make vague generalizations about "meditation" - an extremely complex set of techniques and processes - is no less annoying for meditators. This is one of the reasons for the attractiveness of the idea that researchers must be skilled in both areas.
What can we discover by examining the intersection of the deep self and the vast world? Any honest scientist or philosopher will tell you that the relationship between mind and matter is still a mystery, perhaps even the greatest mystery. From the beginning of history to the present time, meditators have argued that with the increase in openness and subtlety of perception, we begin to catch more and more coherence and interconnections in the relationship between the external and internal worlds. But is it an epiphany or a delusion? This question can only be answered by genuine collaboration between science and deep contemplation.