A Couple of Random Thoughts on Zen and the Science of Consciousness

A Couple of Random Thoughts on Zen and the Science of Consciousness April 28, 2017

brain

A few random thoughts from the monkey mind…

Neurologist Norman Farb at the University of Toronto has devoted most of his research to consciousness and what happens during mindfulness meditation. . He identifies two ways we normally perceive things within our human minds.

He calls one narrative—the process by which we take the discrete events of our lives and weave them into a story. This mode is essential to our sense of identity. The other is the experience of the moment, free of any particular story, which he calls experiential. Here we lean into what our senses present and not merely into our stories of what they mean. By way of an MRI, both of these styles of perception can be observed functioning in the brain.

Dr. Farb posits that the experiential form of consciousness may appear much earlier in our evolution and therefore is a form of awareness we likely share with many other animals. In our ordinary lives, however, it takes a recessive place behind our narrative sense. Awareness meditations uncouple us from these narratives and instead rest us in that experiential consciousness. There appear to be a number of positive results in this shift, psychological and physiological.

To the degree this is an accurate mapping it has consequences for our understanding of Zen and its approach to consciousness. And there’s another researcher whom I think may be even more interesting in that regard.

Retired neurologist and long time Zen practitioner James Austin, author of Zen and the Brain and many other reflections on the scientific investigation of Zen meditation, once tried to explain to me some of his findings in terms I might follow. If I characterize him correctly, he also notes how our human brains have two distinct ways of perceiving, although he frames these somewhat differently than Dr. Farb.

Dr. Austin focuses on how one of these allows us to see things in their particularity, while the other is more generalized. He too makes evolutionary associations and suggests both forms of consciousness have been useful in our survival at various points in our evolution. But Dr. Austin then posits that within Zen’s disciplines we seem to oscillate between these two states of awareness so rapidly that a new integrated consciousness emerges. With enormous hesitation he suggests this emergent integrated web of consciousness might in fact be the awakened mind.

Maybe this is so; maybe not. And. What I find compelling is that objective research confirms that disciplines like Zen and mindfulness do to shift our human consciousness, even if we aren’t yet sure how.

Fascinating stuff, this…


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