Monday, October 19, 2015

Reviews by me for two new books:

Culadasa (John Yates) and Matthew Immergut, The Mind Illuminated: A Complete Mediation Guide Integrating Buddhist Wisdom and Brain Science, Dharma Treasure Press, 2015:

“This book does an outstanding job of both constructing a cognitive theory of how the mind works and presenting a detailed handbook for learning and mastering meditation. The result is a beautiful integration of theory and practice, whose parallel strands lead to experientially, and account for conceptually, the radical shift in consciousness we call awakening.”

Ken McLeod, A Trackless Path: A translation and commentary of the great completion (dzogchen) teaching of Jigme Linpa's The Vision Experience of Ever=Present Good, from Longchenpa's Heart Drop Circle (in press):
"Here we have the perfect combination – a poem by the 18th century Tibetan mystic Jigme Lingpa’s which reveals both the potential for awakening and the expression of full awakening , translated brilliantly but authentically by McLeod for contemporary Westerners. The Vision Experience of the Ever-present Good cuts through to the essence of awakening in barely ten pages of poetry, leaving a beautiful, almost scientific theory shimmering within. McLeod’s commentary then draws out the subtle implications of each verse with consummate clarity, giving us piercing glimpses of what awakening is like and making unavoidable Jigme Lingpa’s lessons for how we should practice and how we should live our lives, in order to learn about awakening for ourselves directly." 

Still working on the theoretical model of ordinary and awakened awareness (or mind, or consciousness). It is coming along great, but keeps developing more implications that need to be dealt with. 

Saturday, May 23, 2015

Advance copies of Realizing Awakened Consciousness are now available at 30% discount directly from Columbia University Press:
http://cup.columbia.edu/book/realizing-awakened-consciousness/9780231170758
In the Promo Code space, enter BOYREA

An abridged version of chapter 9 (the interview with Pat Enkyo O'Hara) is posted on the Tricycle Magazine blog:
http://www.tricycle.com/blog/you-yourself-are-oatmeal

Features of the awakening experience

NOTE: For research which supports and complements this paper, see Jeffery A. Martin,
"A Continuum of Persistent Non-Symbolic Experiences in Adults," www.DrJefferyMartin.com.

What Buddhist Teachers Say About Their Awakening Experiences
Richard P. Boyle
This article is adapted from Realizing Awakened Consciousness: Interviews with Buddhist Teachers and a New Perspective on the Mind, Columbia University Press, June 9, 2015. (http://cup.columbia.edu/book//9780231170741)
The project began when eleven Buddhist teachers agreed to tell me their path stories – how they got started, what their training and practice involved, and what they had learned (especially through insight experiences). The interviews, with Shinzen Young, John Tarrant, Ken McLeod, Ajahn Amaro, Martine Batchelor, Shaila Catherine, Gil Fronsdal, Stephen Batchelor, Pat Enkyo O’Hara, Bernie Glassman and Joseph Goldstein, were rich in many ways. Here I concentrate on their descriptions of “awakening” experiences.
Awakening, of course, is a loaded term, controversial and with emotional implications, so I should first clear the ground a bit with some definitions.
·       The focus was on how awareness is modified during an insight experience, where the contents of awareness could include sensory perception, feelings, or inner speech.
·       I call awakening a reality experience because while the contents of awareness do not change there is a shift in perspective and a pervasive feeling of being more in touch with the real world. This differs from mystical experience, in which something extra is added to the contents of awareness, and spiritual experience, in which feelings of loving and being loved predominate.
·       An awakening experience is usually temporary, but leaves a strong urge to work hard on one’s practice and oneself in order to make what was learned a more pervasive part of one’s life.
Note that by concentrating on awakened awareness, the term enlightenment is left open – it could be reserved for more complete, permanent, and ultimate states, or refer to the rational enlightenment of Immanuel Kant and the Age of Reason.
Awakening seldom happens without preparation. The preparation reported in the interviews concentrated, first, on quieting the mind until silence prevailed and inner speech occurred only rarely, and second, on letting go of attachments to desires, habits, and ideas. Significant progress in developing these two qualities seems to be, if not a necessary condition, at least very helpful for awakening. Something Jack Kornfield once said about silence illustrates this well:
"It is like going from the windswept, weather-filled atmosphere, getting to the surface of the ocean and then dropping down below the level of the water, like a scuba diver, into a completely silent and different dimension. While there are some reflections that might go by, it is a completely different state of consciousness.” (Shankman, The Experience of Samadhi: An In-depth Exploration of Buddhist Meditation, p.116)
Similarly, letting go of conditionings can lead to peace and equanimity even as the world one has been living in seems less and less real.
The reality experiences to be considered next begin as this preparation deepens. They were often reported to occur in parallel, symbiotically, as in Joseph Goldstein’s quote from the 12th-century Korean Zen master Chinul, “sudden insight, gradual cultivation.” For example, meditators often report an experience in which the perceptual content of their conscious awareness becomes distinctly more vivid, and is reinforced in their efforts to explore this by further embracing silence.
My analytic method consisted of sorting the experiences described in the interviews into categories on the basis of similarity. These were qualitative judgments and necessarily subjective. I have tried to make my decisions explicit so that others could examine them and reach their own conclusions. I also sent my conclusions back to the teachers, asking them to correct or comment on my shortcomings.
No Reification.
The first group of quotes express the fundamental Buddhist concept of non-attachment, but I am going to define this is a somewhat different way. Humans construct ideas using language, which we invented (animals get along fine without it). Verbally communicated ideas become part of group culture, adding enormously to the evolutionary success humans have enjoyed. A funny thing happened during this evolutionary process, however – we began to accept ideas not only as useful constructions but as principles not to be questioned, not as just one alternative among many possible ways of representing the world but the way things really are and should be. This is especially true for ideas about the self and the social reality in which the self lives. To believe that an idea is real for reasons that go beyond the context in which we invented it is to reify it. Suddenly we have emotional attachments reinforcing the culture of the group and the social reality of its members. So this first group of descriptions of awakened awareness will be called No Reification.
Martine Batchelor describes a preliminary version of de-reification, which occurred during her years in a Korean Zen monastery:
“My domestic responsibility was to clean the communal bathroom. I would do this chore at four o’clock every afternoon. At the same time, though, another nun would appear and proceed to wash herself before performing an afternoon ceremony at which she had to officiate. This went on for several weeks and I began to feel extremely resentful. Then one day I went down at four o’clock, and it suddenly didn’t matter any more that she was there washing herself. It was my time to clean and her time to wash.  How wonderful it felt to be free of resentment! Although a small incident, it was somehow very meaningful to me. Without my intentionally forcing any changes, it dissolved the grasping and attachments that gave rise to the irritation.” (Women in Korean Zen, p. 41)
Social reality provides us with scripts that tell us how important our efforts are and when we should feel irritated. When we become less attached to those ideas life becomes easier. 
Letting go of social reality can take more subtle forms. Here Gil Fronsdal describes an experience that occurred fairly early in his path, during a sesshin:
“We would remain in our meditation posture while servers brought us tea and a cookie. I received the tea and held the cup in my hands. As I lifted the cup to my lips and the tea water went into my mouth, the world stopped! This stopping was a remarkable experience for me that I have never been able to adequately convey in words. Part of the experience was my mind having the unusual thought, ‘As the tea touches my tongue, I stop the sip.’ I was quite surprised that in the words and in the experience there was no self. Without any of my usual self-referencing it was as if everything stood still.”
What was involved in Fronsdal’s sensation that the world stopped? Start with the idea that ordinary awareness is structured by social reality, which flows along over time like the script of a movie. When social reality is de-reified and the mind is silent, the script of the moment loses its hold and our perceptual experience of the moment takes over. A moment has no time dimension, and our usual awareness seems to stop, to stand still. Without the scripts and drama of social reality the perceptual world just is, quietly.
John Tarrant also mentioned a moment during a sesshin when time stood still: “That’s when everything stopped . . .  I started just laughing. Then everything seemed filled with light, and all the people seemed wonderful.” And later: “Then I thought, ‘Oh, that’s in a way how I’ve always experienced reality, as sort of a flash that shifts’.”
Although none of the interviews mention this word, this experience of a “stopping” of awareness seems similar to what is called in the Buddhist literature “cessation” or Nirodha.
A somewhat different kind of experience of No Reification, described by Shaila Catherine, lasted over a much longer period of time:  
“Everything appeared as just concepts representing dynamic processes or changing things. I knew what my social responsibilities, commitments and duties included, and I performed family and work tasks effectively. I could function well, because the concepts were clear. But each moment of seeing, hearing, feeling, and tasting was known right in the moment of contact, as ephemeral and completely devoid of any reference to me. It was a surprisingly different way of being in the world. I felt light, buoyant and unperturbed by any event.”
The scripts and role responsibilities of everyday life were still understood clearly, but as impersonal concepts without emotional attachment to the self.
A few days after interviewing Catherine and three other teachers in the San Francisco area, I had an awakening experience myself which resembles hers in suddenly feeling freed of all attachments to social reality (thousands of attachments, like Gulliver tied down by the Lilliputians). About ten seconds into that experience a voice in my (sociologist’s) head said, “So that’s what they mean by nothingness – no social reality.” Which was not quite true, of course - I still knew all about social reality, it simply was no longer reified.
Summary. I use No reification and No emotional attachments to social reality or the self as equivalent, but prefer No reification as the label. Letting go of emotional attachments implies that the attachments can be “de-grasped” of one at a time until none are left. Letting go is certainly a critical part of the work one does to prepare for awakening, but the hypothesis advanced here is that when awakening happens all remaining emotional attachments are removed, in one sweep. No reification says that the world of social reality no longer feels real – its emotional basis for ontological support has vanished, and what remains is just living in the world as it is. We feel a sense of freedom and lightness, peace and equanimity.
No Separation.
I begin with this example from Shinzen Young’s interview:
“I put down the cushion and sat down, and the instant I sat down, the koan was there: ‘Who am I?’ Then suddenly there was no boundary to me at all. I was so shocked I actually got up. And there was still no boundary to me. I was walking around, looking at things, and there was no border between me and anything else... there was a kind of intimacy between inside and outside . . . There was just no boundary separating me and what was around me.”
A similar experience was reported by Enkyo O’Hara:
“This [experience] was a kind of opening of compassion. What it was, was the dropping of the distance between me and the other, which one could say is the experience of awakening, when you realize there is no wall between you and the other. The opening of compassion just dissolved that sense of separation…” 
My interpretation is that ordinary awareness is organized from the perspective of the self as protagonist, which is assumed to operate in the world as an autonomous actor. It is thus set apart from people and objects in its environment, and appears to itself to be separated. When we awaken to the fact that this construction is artificial (that is, when the self is dereified), we see that we are actually just a part of what is going on and not separate from it. When we stop seeing things from the perspective of a self separated from other people, we instantly feel closer to them. Realizing the illusory nature of the separated self, we no longer need to protect it, which opens up a greater sense of empathy and compassion for others.
When I asked John Tarrant, “What is life like for you now compared with before you left Australia?” his answer also had to do with being free of walls:
“Well, I had so much going on in my mind then. The simplest way to put it is, I was caught. I would have moments of freedom, and huge amounts of non-freedom. I mean one easy way to describe ‘being present’ is in terms of the interior decoration model. It’s like you’re in prison when you’re trying to just paint the walls rather than kick them down. Even if you’re trying to kick down the walls you’re still in prison. You can’t find any walls when you’re free.”
Tarrant expresses the same idea without specifically referring to the self: Social reality brings with it barriers that not only separate us from what is going on around us but prevent us from living life freely, as it can be lived when the walls disappear.
Ajahn Amaro also talked about eliminating walls or boundaries. He relates this experience to a specific aspect of self, the self that cares about performing well in the world of social reality. His story begins when, after many years of practice, he began to feel dull and constrained, as if trapped in a little gray box. Then he tried meditating on a classic question Buddhism uses for investigating the self: “Who Am I?”
“What happened was that the walls of the little gray box just fell open. It was like suddenly being in a field of flowers, and warm sunlight: ‘Oh, this is different. It’s a whole different atmosphere.’ I’d had that experience early on, about how the inflated sense of self and ambition and competition can take over, but I’d never realized how insidious, pervasive an effect this more subtle kind of self, this ‘me, the doer’ can have… the influence of that presence had been invisible, like gravity – you didn’t even notice it was there.” 
These four teachers all mention a disappearance of barriers, boundaries or walls that had previously closed them in and created a sense of separation. They all point to the same cause - ideas of self and its relation to others that are heavily reified. Here we have another way in which awakening does not add anything to awareness but simply removes the feeling of separation which attachments to the cultural construction of self has imposed.
I will also note the awakening experience described by James Austin, a neurologist, author, and long-time Zen student. He had this particular experience while standing on the surface platform of a London subway station:
“The scene was transformed... There was no viewer. Every familiar psychic sense that “I” was viewing this scene had vanished. A fresh, new awareness perceived the whole scene impersonally with the cool, clinical detachment of an anonymous mirror, not pausing to register the paradox that no I-Me-Mine was doing the viewing.”
The sudden shift in perspective, whereby he is no longer the central actor but simply one part of what is going on around him, is familiar. Austin calls this an allocentric (other-centered) perspective, in contrast with the egocentric perspective of ordinary consciousness. In addition, though, the phrase “cool, clinical detachment” suggests dereification of social reality.
Summary. Awakened consciousness arises from perceiving the environment as a whole system, with the self as simply one part of it. The experience is distinctly different from the perspective of a self that stands apart from the rest of the system. In awakened awareness we experience ourselves as one part of what is going on around us, not as the director or principal actor in that system, and not separate from it. As a consequence, we feel more intimately involved in our environment, freer, more connected with what is going on and more sensitive to the existence and feelings of those around us.
Not knowing.
Ken McLeod reported having this conversation with an old friend, during which the friend asked him:
“‘Ken, what’s life like for you these days?’ I replied, ‘Well, imagine that you’re walking over the Grand Canyon.’ He said, ‘Walking into the Grand Canyon?’ ‘No, over the Grand Canyon.’ Now, it’s not the Wile E. Coyote thing, where if you look down you start to fall. You just [walk] – and you’re not sure what’s up, what’s down, what’s forward, what’s back. That’s what life is for me today.”
McLeod talks about proceeding through life without any conscious expectation or concern for what is going to happen next. Consider the similarity of this with what Bernie Glassman says about not knowing:
“Koan study is set up to try to get you to experience . . . the state of not knowing, the state of complete openness, of being completely open to everything. ‘Not knowing’ is an essential part of Zen training – getting you to experience what we call the sauce from which everything comes. It’s a state where there are no attachments to any of your conditionings.”
“No attachments to any of your conditionings” means, in the language used here, no reification of the self and social reality, so Not knowing includes No reification. But something more is added, a dynamic quality that includes allowing “the sauce from which everything comes” to take over. The combination produces a new kind of experience.
Stephen Batchelor describes his version vividly:
“All of a sudden I found myself plunged into the intense, unraveling cascade of life itself. That opaque and sluggish sense of myself, which invariably greeted me each time I closed my eyes to meditate, had given way to something extraordinarily rich and fluid. It was as though someone had released a brake that had been preventing a motor from turning and suddenly the whole vehicle sprang into throbbing life. Yet it was utterly silent and still. I was collapsing and disintegrating, yet simultaneously emerging and reconstituting. There was an unmistakable sense of proceeding along a trajectory, but without any actual movement at all.” (Confession of a Buddhist Atheist, pp. 29-30)
Stephen goes on to talk about how fluid and dynamic this way of living feels, and like Glassman he points out how reification of the self stands in the way of letting one slip into not knowing. Robert Forman calls this “non-resistance” and compares it with learning a secret: “There’s a buoyancy to life in knowing the secret, a secret you did not know you did not know, a lightness beneath your breath… You come to carry an unbidden translucence.” (Enlightenment Ain’t What It’s Cracked Up To Be, p. 196) 
Summary: Not knowing requires letting go of, de-reifying, the self of social reality, which says that we act on the basis of conscious awareness. The notion that we are rational decision-makers is replaced by fully accepting that our actions emerge at each moment directly from unconscious processing. What we are aware of and what we find ourselves doing in each moment emerge together as our brains and bodies interact with our environment. Without self-consciousness life feels fluid and dynamic, delicious and relaxed.
Concluding:
I want to emphasize that these three properties of awakened awareness are tentative. They were induced by one person (me) from interviews with eleven Buddhist teachers and one scientist, a few accounts published elsewhere, and my own experience. One pressing need, therefore, is to expand the sample size and get comments and analysis from other people. Readers who have had experiences which fit or do not fit into these categories are invited to email me about them at boylemmx@gmail.com. A design for further research is posted on https://dana.io/realizing-awakened-consciousness.
Finally, while scientists do this kind of thing because we love doing it, others may ask what the point is. My answer is that there are the beginnings of a scientific theory of awakening here, which may or may not help people who are on a path toward awakening. What I would argue is that integrating research on awakening with the scientific study of consciousness generally will attract the attention of non-Buddhists who believe in science. Just as research has done with meditation, research on awakening may help dissolve the walls which presently separate it from other topics in mainstream culture. After all, the Buddha always maintained that awakening is part of the natural world, available to everyone.


Note: For a report on research which supports and complements this paper, see Jeffery A. Martin, "A Continuum of Persistent Non-Symbolic Experiences in Adults," available on

What Buddhist Teachers Say About Their Awakening Experiences
Richard P. Boyle
This article is adapted from Realizing Awakened Consciousness: Interviews with Buddhist Teachers and a New Perspective on the Mind, Columbia University Press, June 9, 2015. (http://cup.columbia.edu/book//9780231170741)
The project began when eleven Buddhist teachers agreed to tell me their path stories – how they got started, what their training and practice involved, and what they had learned (especially through insight experiences). The interviews, with Shinzen Young, John Tarrant, Ken McLeod, Ajahn Amaro, Martine Batchelor, Shaila Catherine, Gil Fronsdal, Stephen Batchelor, Pat Enkyo O’Hara, Bernie Glassman and Joseph Goldstein, were rich in many ways. Here I concentrate on their descriptions of “awakening” experiences.
Awakening, of course, is a loaded term, controversial and with emotional implications, so I should first clear the ground a bit with some definitions.
·       The focus was on how awareness is modified during an insight experience, where the contents of awareness could include sensory perception, feelings, or inner speech.
·       I call awakening a reality experience because while the contents of awareness do not change there is a shift in perspective and a pervasive feeling of being more in touch with the real world. This differs from mystical experience, in which something extra is added to the contents of awareness, and spiritual experience, in which feelings of loving and being loved predominate.
·       An awakening experience is usually temporary, but leaves a strong urge to work hard on one’s practice and oneself in order to make what was learned a more pervasive part of one’s life.
Note that by concentrating on awakened awareness, the term enlightenment is left open – it could be reserved for more complete, permanent, and ultimate states, or refer to the rational enlightenment of Immanuel Kant and the Age of Reason.
Awakening seldom happens without preparation. The preparation reported in the interviews concentrated, first, on quieting the mind until silence prevailed and inner speech occurred only rarely, and second, on letting go of attachments to desires, habits, and ideas. Significant progress in developing these two qualities seems to be, if not a necessary condition, at least very helpful for awakening. Something Jack Kornfield once said about silence illustrates this well:
"It is like going from the windswept, weather-filled atmosphere, getting to the surface of the ocean and then dropping down below the level of the water, like a scuba diver, into a completely silent and different dimension. While there are some reflections that might go by, it is a completely different state of consciousness.” (Shankman, The Experience of Samadhi: An In-depth Exploration of Buddhist Meditation, p.116)
Similarly, letting go of conditionings can lead to peace and equanimity even as the world one has been living in seems less and less real.
The reality experiences to be considered next begin as this preparation deepens. They were often reported to occur in parallel, symbiotically, as in Joseph Goldstein’s quote from the 12th-century Korean Zen master Chinul, “sudden insight, gradual cultivation.” For example, meditators often report an experience in which the perceptual content of their conscious awareness becomes distinctly more vivid, and is reinforced in their efforts to explore this by further embracing silence.
My analytic method consisted of sorting the experiences described in the interviews into categories on the basis of similarity. These were qualitative judgments and necessarily subjective. I have tried to make my decisions explicit so that others could examine them and reach their own conclusions. I also sent my conclusions back to the teachers, asking them to correct or comment on my shortcomings.
No Reification.
The first group of quotes express the fundamental Buddhist concept of non-attachment, but I am going to define this is a somewhat different way. Humans construct ideas using language, which we invented (animals get along fine without it). Verbally communicated ideas become part of group culture, adding enormously to the evolutionary success humans have enjoyed. A funny thing happened during this evolutionary process, however – we began to accept ideas not only as useful constructions but as principles not to be questioned, not as just one alternative among many possible ways of representing the world but the way things really are and should be. This is especially true for ideas about the self and the social reality in which the self lives. To believe that an idea is real for reasons that go beyond the context in which we invented it is to reify it. Suddenly we have emotional attachments reinforcing the culture of the group and the social reality of its members. So this first group of descriptions of awakened awareness will be called No Reification.
Martine Batchelor describes a preliminary version of de-reification, which occurred during her years in a Korean Zen monastery:
“My domestic responsibility was to clean the communal bathroom. I would do this chore at four o’clock every afternoon. At the same time, though, another nun would appear and proceed to wash herself before performing an afternoon ceremony at which she had to officiate. This went on for several weeks and I began to feel extremely resentful. Then one day I went down at four o’clock, and it suddenly didn’t matter any more that she was there washing herself. It was my time to clean and her time to wash.  How wonderful it felt to be free of resentment! Although a small incident, it was somehow very meaningful to me. Without my intentionally forcing any changes, it dissolved the grasping and attachments that gave rise to the irritation.” (Women in Korean Zen, p. 41)
Social reality provides us with scripts that tell us how important our efforts are and when we should feel irritated. When we become less attached to those ideas life becomes easier. 
Letting go of social reality can take more subtle forms. Here Gil Fronsdal describes an experience that occurred fairly early in his path, during a sesshin:
“We would remain in our meditation posture while servers brought us tea and a cookie. I received the tea and held the cup in my hands. As I lifted the cup to my lips and the tea water went into my mouth, the world stopped! This stopping was a remarkable experience for me that I have never been able to adequately convey in words. Part of the experience was my mind having the unusual thought, ‘As the tea touches my tongue, I stop the sip.’ I was quite surprised that in the words and in the experience there was no self. Without any of my usual self-referencing it was as if everything stood still.”
What was involved in Fronsdal’s sensation that the world stopped? Start with the idea that ordinary awareness is structured by social reality, which flows along over time like the script of a movie. When social reality is de-reified and the mind is silent, the script of the moment loses its hold and our perceptual experience of the moment takes over. A moment has no time dimension, and our usual awareness seems to stop, to stand still. Without the scripts and drama of social reality the perceptual world just is, quietly.
John Tarrant also mentioned a moment during a sesshin when time stood still: “That’s when everything stopped . . .  I started just laughing. Then everything seemed filled with light, and all the people seemed wonderful.” And later: “Then I thought, ‘Oh, that’s in a way how I’ve always experienced reality, as sort of a flash that shifts’.”
Although none of the interviews mention this word, this experience of a “stopping” of awareness seems similar to what is called in the Buddhist literature “cessation” or Nirodha.
A somewhat different kind of experience of No Reification, described by Shaila Catherine, lasted over a much longer period of time:  
“Everything appeared as just concepts representing dynamic processes or changing things. I knew what my social responsibilities, commitments and duties included, and I performed family and work tasks effectively. I could function well, because the concepts were clear. But each moment of seeing, hearing, feeling, and tasting was known right in the moment of contact, as ephemeral and completely devoid of any reference to me. It was a surprisingly different way of being in the world. I felt light, buoyant and unperturbed by any event.”
The scripts and role responsibilities of everyday life were still understood clearly, but as impersonal concepts without emotional attachment to the self.
A few days after interviewing Catherine and three other teachers in the San Francisco area, I had an awakening experience myself which resembles hers in suddenly feeling freed of all attachments to social reality (thousands of attachments, like Gulliver tied down by the Lilliputians). About ten seconds into that experience a voice in my (sociologist’s) head said, “So that’s what they mean by nothingness – no social reality.” Which was not quite true, of course - I still knew all about social reality, it simply was no longer reified.
Summary. I use No reification and No emotional attachments to social reality or the self as equivalent, but prefer No reification as the label. Letting go of emotional attachments implies that the attachments can be “de-grasped” of one at a time until none are left. Letting go is certainly a critical part of the work one does to prepare for awakening, but the hypothesis advanced here is that when awakening happens all remaining emotional attachments are removed, in one sweep. No reification says that the world of social reality no longer feels real – its emotional basis for ontological support has vanished, and what remains is just living in the world as it is. We feel a sense of freedom and lightness, peace and equanimity.
No Separation.
I begin with this example from Shinzen Young’s interview:
“I put down the cushion and sat down, and the instant I sat down, the koan was there: ‘Who am I?’ Then suddenly there was no boundary to me at all. I was so shocked I actually got up. And there was still no boundary to me. I was walking around, looking at things, and there was no border between me and anything else... there was a kind of intimacy between inside and outside . . . There was just no boundary separating me and what was around me.”
A similar experience was reported by Enkyo O’Hara:
“This [experience] was a kind of opening of compassion. What it was, was the dropping of the distance between me and the other, which one could say is the experience of awakening, when you realize there is no wall between you and the other. The opening of compassion just dissolved that sense of separation…” 
My interpretation is that ordinary awareness is organized from the perspective of the self as protagonist, which is assumed to operate in the world as an autonomous actor. It is thus set apart from people and objects in its environment, and appears to itself to be separated. When we awaken to the fact that this construction is artificial (that is, when the self is dereified), we see that we are actually just a part of what is going on and not separate from it. When we stop seeing things from the perspective of a self separated from other people, we instantly feel closer to them. Realizing the illusory nature of the separated self, we no longer need to protect it, which opens up a greater sense of empathy and compassion for others.
When I asked John Tarrant, “What is life like for you now compared with before you left Australia?” his answer also had to do with being free of walls:
“Well, I had so much going on in my mind then. The simplest way to put it is, I was caught. I would have moments of freedom, and huge amounts of non-freedom. I mean one easy way to describe ‘being present’ is in terms of the interior decoration model. It’s like you’re in prison when you’re trying to just paint the walls rather than kick them down. Even if you’re trying to kick down the walls you’re still in prison. You can’t find any walls when you’re free.”
Tarrant expresses the same idea without specifically referring to the self: Social reality brings with it barriers that not only separate us from what is going on around us but prevent us from living life freely, as it can be lived when the walls disappear.
Ajahn Amaro also talked about eliminating walls or boundaries. He relates this experience to a specific aspect of self, the self that cares about performing well in the world of social reality. His story begins when, after many years of practice, he began to feel dull and constrained, as if trapped in a little gray box. Then he tried meditating on a classic question Buddhism uses for investigating the self: “Who Am I?”
“What happened was that the walls of the little gray box just fell open. It was like suddenly being in a field of flowers, and warm sunlight: ‘Oh, this is different. It’s a whole different atmosphere.’ I’d had that experience early on, about how the inflated sense of self and ambition and competition can take over, but I’d never realized how insidious, pervasive an effect this more subtle kind of self, this ‘me, the doer’ can have… the influence of that presence had been invisible, like gravity – you didn’t even notice it was there.” 
These four teachers all mention a disappearance of barriers, boundaries or walls that had previously closed them in and created a sense of separation. They all point to the same cause - ideas of self and its relation to others that are heavily reified. Here we have another way in which awakening does not add anything to awareness but simply removes the feeling of separation which attachments to the cultural construction of self has imposed.
I will also note the awakening experience described by James Austin, a neurologist, author, and long-time Zen student. He had this particular experience while standing on the surface platform of a London subway station:
“The scene was transformed... There was no viewer. Every familiar psychic sense that “I” was viewing this scene had vanished. A fresh, new awareness perceived the whole scene impersonally with the cool, clinical detachment of an anonymous mirror, not pausing to register the paradox that no I-Me-Mine was doing the viewing.”
The sudden shift in perspective, whereby he is no longer the central actor but simply one part of what is going on around him, is familiar. Austin calls this an allocentric (other-centered) perspective, in contrast with the egocentric perspective of ordinary consciousness. In addition, though, the phrase “cool, clinical detachment” suggests dereification of social reality.
Summary. Awakened consciousness arises from perceiving the environment as a whole system, with the self as simply one part of it. The experience is distinctly different from the perspective of a self that stands apart from the rest of the system. In awakened awareness we experience ourselves as one part of what is going on around us, not as the director or principal actor in that system, and not separate from it. As a consequence, we feel more intimately involved in our environment, freer, more connected with what is going on and more sensitive to the existence and feelings of those around us.
Not knowing.
Ken McLeod reported having this conversation with an old friend, during which the friend asked him:
“‘Ken, what’s life like for you these days?’ I replied, ‘Well, imagine that you’re walking over the Grand Canyon.’ He said, ‘Walking into the Grand Canyon?’ ‘No, over the Grand Canyon.’ Now, it’s not the Wile E. Coyote thing, where if you look down you start to fall. You just [walk] – and you’re not sure what’s up, what’s down, what’s forward, what’s back. That’s what life is for me today.”
McLeod talks about proceeding through life without any conscious expectation or concern for what is going to happen next. Consider the similarity of this with what Bernie Glassman says about not knowing:
“Koan study is set up to try to get you to experience . . . the state of not knowing, the state of complete openness, of being completely open to everything. ‘Not knowing’ is an essential part of Zen training – getting you to experience what we call the sauce from which everything comes. It’s a state where there are no attachments to any of your conditionings.”
“No attachments to any of your conditionings” means, in the language used here, no reification of the self and social reality, so Not knowing includes No reification. But something more is added, a dynamic quality that includes allowing “the sauce from which everything comes” to take over. The combination produces a new kind of experience.
Stephen Batchelor describes his version vividly:
“All of a sudden I found myself plunged into the intense, unraveling cascade of life itself. That opaque and sluggish sense of myself, which invariably greeted me each time I closed my eyes to meditate, had given way to something extraordinarily rich and fluid. It was as though someone had released a brake that had been preventing a motor from turning and suddenly the whole vehicle sprang into throbbing life. Yet it was utterly silent and still. I was collapsing and disintegrating, yet simultaneously emerging and reconstituting. There was an unmistakable sense of proceeding along a trajectory, but without any actual movement at all.” (Confession of a Buddhist Atheist, pp. 29-30)
Stephen goes on to talk about how fluid and dynamic this way of living feels, and like Glassman he points out how reification of the self stands in the way of letting one slip into not knowing. Robert Forman calls this “non-resistance” and compares it with learning a secret: “There’s a buoyancy to life in knowing the secret, a secret you did not know you did not know, a lightness beneath your breath… You come to carry an unbidden translucence.” (Enlightenment Ain’t What It’s Cracked Up To Be, p. 196) 
Summary: Not knowing requires letting go of, de-reifying, the self of social reality, which says that we act on the basis of conscious awareness. The notion that we are rational decision-makers is replaced by fully accepting that our actions emerge at each moment directly from unconscious processing. What we are aware of and what we find ourselves doing in each moment emerge together as our brains and bodies interact with our environment. Without self-consciousness life feels fluid and dynamic, delicious and relaxed.
Concluding:
I want to emphasize that these three properties of awakened awareness are tentative. They were induced by one person (me) from interviews with eleven Buddhist teachers and one scientist, a few accounts published elsewhere, and my own experience. One pressing need, therefore, is to expand the sample size and get comments and analysis from other people. Readers who have had experiences which fit or do not fit into these categories are invited to email me about them at boylemmx@gmail.com. A design for further research is posted on https://dana.io/realizing-awakened-consciousness.
Finally, while scientists do this kind of thing because we love doing it, others may ask what the point is. My answer is that there are the beginnings of a scientific theory of awakening here, which may or may not help people who are on a path toward awakening. What I would argue is that integrating research on awakening with the scientific study of consciousness generally will attract the attention of non-Buddhists who believe in science. Just as research has done with meditation, research on awakening may help dissolve the walls which presently separate it from other topics in mainstream culture. After all, the Buddha always maintained that awakening is part of the natural world, available to everyone.


Saturday, February 28, 2015

Realizing Awakened Consciousness: Interviews with Buddhist Teachers and a New Perspective on the Mind is scheduled for publication June 9. For information see the Columbia University Press page :
http://cup.columbia.edu/book/realizing-awakened-consciousness/9780231170758

Also on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Realizing-Awakened-Consciousness-Interviews-Perspective/dp/0231170750/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1422929844&sr=1-1&keywords=richard+boyle

Here is an outline compressing the book and work since it was written into seven pages. This outline guides a journal article I'm presently writing.


OUTLINE OF THE AWAKENING PROJECT
Richard Boyle, February 2015
Introduction.
Buddhism and cognitive science share an assumption that the content and structure of awareness at any moment is heavily influenced by conceptual systems stored in our minds.  Buddhism says that this is the cause of delusion, from which it is possible to awaken. Cognitive science documents many ways in which preexisting ideas alter perception, and philosophy recommends examining the ideas carefully to discover and correct faults. At the heart of both, therefore, is the conclusion that most people, most of the time, are operating with an awareness that is filtered through and to some degree distorted relative to the way their perceptual systems would otherwise present the moment.  
That is a powerful statement, with strong implications. Buddhism, especially, goes beyond the specific examples of distortion that science has documented to claim that the world of ideas that we carry around in our minds encloses us in a kind of bubble. This bubble, or veil, or carapace, separates us from direct experience of the perceptual world. Some people become tantalized by that notion and undertake a path recommended for dissolving the bubble, for “awakening.” The model outlined here tries to extend the scope of cognitive science to account for both ordinary and awakened awareness.
A. The Evolution of Culture, Social Reality, and Reification (Chapter 14). Since concepts have been identified as the source of distorted awareness, the first step must be to look at where ideas come from and what kinds of conceptual systems they form.
1. In evolutionary terms, concepts were not possible until some early members of the Homo genus began inventing language. This required a social group, and it is hard to imagine a group with even a simple protolanguage not sharing information and passing it on to their children. Presumably, then, the construction of culture proceeded parallel with the development of language, and gave major advantages to groups doing it.
2. I define social reality as the version of a culture that is internalized by an individual member. Heterogeneous, rapidly changing societies like ours include an enormous variety of sub-cultures; defining social reality in terms of individuals acknowledges this diversity. One’s social reality therefore incorporates ideas, values, beliefs, attitudes, habits, etc. from all the social groups to which one belongs or has belonged.
3. Thinking of social reality in terms of individuals is also convenient for defining reification. A person’s social reality is reified when it becomes, in that person’s mind, the taken-for-granted, unquestioned but authoritative way of doing things and making sense of life. When it has achieved this ontological status, social reality is layered with a texture of feelings and emotions. These are what Buddhism calls “attachments” – you can’t do something or think something without being affected by the associations within which it is embedded.
4. Early human groups whose culture was reinforced through reification must have enjoyed greater survival success than groups with a more objective, detached relation to their culture, due to stronger motivation to conform to group norms and sacrifice for group values. The question then becomes, how did this evolutionary bias toward reification express itself? Presumably a predisposition to reify is built into us biologically, just as a strong ability and predisposition to acquire language is part of our DNA. Most likely, neurological structures ensuring that children reify the culture that their parents present to them were built onto feelings and emotions already present in animals – but were elaborated on these themes to fit all the new possibilities created when social reality was added onto the perceptual reality of animals.
5. We take culture so for granted that we seldom look at it closely – it is in many ways the 800 pound gorilla in the living room that we tiptoe around and pretend does not exist. And when we do think of culture, we accept reification as an inseparable part of it. It is in that context that awakening presents its most dramatic assertion – reification is not necessary, we can live free of it. We can have culture, and use ideas, without reifying them. Social reality can be de-reified. Somehow, the neurological structures involved in reification include a switching capacity, which is characteristic of association networks like the Default Mode Network (DMN).
Therefore: Humans are born with a strong predisposition to acquire and reify social reality, a predisposition that is probably is the result of systems built into the brain at a fairly late evolutionary stage. Because humans reify social reality at the same time that they are learning it, unless this predisposition is corrected we go through life thinking that the awareness we experience day after day is real.
Implication: Many, probably most, of the world’s problems are and always have been caused by the human need to maintain, support, and protect a reified social reality. (chapter 16). The terrible mistake of evolution, after providing us with the capacity to develop culture, was to saddle us with such a strong predisposition to reify that culture. The remarkable assertion of awakening is that social reality, and culture, can be de-reified.
B. Ordinary Awareness (chapter 17). A review of the main factors involved in generating, at each moment, the subjective experience of ordinary awareness. (While there is no “standard model” of consciousness, there is some consensus about important parts. The model proposed here tries to express that consensus in summary form.)
1. Perception: bottom-up perceptual processing analyzes incoming sensory stimuli while top-down processing tries to fit this with information stored in memory. When top-down processing finds a match (which may be only approximate, even wrong) we have object-recognition, perhaps also situation- and event-recognition.
2. Conceptual processing involves words and other symbols.
a. After an object, situation, or event has been recognized, a word or phrase that describes it is activated in unconscious processing.
b. Sounds or written patterns are recognized as words (and corresponding percepts are activated).
c. Inner speech may be generated in conscious awareness whenever words are active in unconscious processing.
3. Any conceptual activity activates relevant portions of the person’s social reality.
a. Social reality is structured in terms of scripts, plans, and stories which specify approved means, desired ends, and appropriate emotions. These schema tell us how we should live and provide explanations and meaning for life as it unfolds.
b. The ordinary self is the way we experience, and have experienced, living in social reality.
c. Cultures provide models for how self-awareness should be structured. In modern western societies the self-model assumes a protagonist with free will who makes (or should make) conscious decisions and assumes (or should assume) responsibility for their outcomes.    
4. If a perceptual version of what is going on in the moment differs from the conceptual account of what should be going on that social reality provides, then one or both is modified. The dynamic for resolving the dissonance is to move toward consistency by modifying one or both versions. Note that this consists of rearranging the contents of ordinary awareness, not changing its structure.
Implication: All known human societies have cultures, and their members therefore need to maintain some degree of consistency between their culture and the facts their lives are presenting them with. In times of change or trauma, or because the ideas making up the culture are being questioned, or because group ties are weakening (or all three together), people may experience dukkha, or ontological insecurity. This can lead to social and individual disintegration, to fanatical reassertion of core beliefs (especially religious), to innovative changes in what one accepts as social reality, or to increased interest in meditation and awakening. Chapter 16 discusses the Gautama-Giddens theory of dukkha.  
5. It is important to distinguish between conscious and unconscious awareness. Unconscious awareness is a hypothetical construct which merely says that we can act appropriately in a situation even though we are not consciously aware of it (e.g., “blindsight” demonstrates that action can proceed directly from unconscious visual processing).
6. Unconscious processing also controls three activities that we can both engage in and observe ourselves doing in conscious awareness: action, attention, and inner speech.
a. Action: research stemming from Libet suggests that action slightly precedes its appearance in conscious awareness. We then perceive ourselves acting but modify the perception to conform with the stipulation of our self-model that conscious awareness precedes action. Note, however, that unconscious processing can also prevent or “pause” an action, put it on hold pending further processing.
b. Attention: We are subjectively aware that attention can vary from focused to diffuse and from attentive to inattentive. Attention is involved in the entire process of generating awareness, from focusing the lens of the eye on the retina to generating the final version in conscious awareness.
c. Inner speech is the expression in conscious awareness of what we call “thinking.” Kahneman distinguishes “fast” and “slow” thinking. Slow thinking is controlled by attention in such a way that the inner speech expressing the thought appears in conscious awareness but action is inhibited. Unconscious processing then responds to the awareness as it would a new event, by considering its implications and generating a new “thought” as inner speech. Slow thinking continues until a “decision” is reached and action released. In fast thinking the action occurs more or less simultaneously with the initial inner speech. I add a third type, “wandering thinking,” to refer to inner conversations taking place but with no attentional control over how one segment of inner speech leads to another.
Therefore: In ordinary awareness perception may be modified by conceptual systems, in a way that attempts to negotiate consistency between the perceptual image and, especially, the systems representing self and social reality. But inputs may also be initiated by conceptual systems as inner speech, and can be experienced subjectively as one of three forms of thinking. The self-model prevalent in our society emphasizes conscious awareness and downplays or ignores the roles of social reality and unconscious processing.
C. Preparation for awakening (Chapter 12). Can we account for awakening by varying some of the properties of the model just proposed for ordinary consciousness? The teachers interviewed in the book told about special practices and training they followed on their paths. These are discussed in three categories, along with their implications:
1. Practices designed to quiet the mind. These include many forms of seated meditation, techniques for maintaining mindful awareness of the perceptual moment whether sitting or active, and other strategies for developing attentional control. Engaging in these practices has causal consequences:
a. The experience of meditators is that with time and some discipline there is a reduction in the amount of uncontrolled inner speech (wandering thinking). Gradually the amount of attentional effort required diminishes as the mind seems to learn and enjoy settling into silence.
b. This silence implies that the Default Mode Network (DMN) in the brain can be turned off through attentional control. In ordinary consciousness, when one is actively engaged in physical or mental activity the parts of the brain comprising the DMN are quiet, but when one is not doing anything they become intensely active and inner speech commences. As noted, inner speech may take the form of slow thinking, but wandering thinking is also likely. During meditation, however, the DMN remains inactive and inner speech is minimal. Therefore the DMN appears to be switched on when our level of attentiveness is low, but switched off during activities requiring attention – including mindfulness during sitting meditation or other activities that would normally encourage wandering thinking.
c. Another implication of quieting the mind is that with less conceptual processing going on, perceptual information can play a larger role in generating awareness. As a result,  perceptual experience may seem clearer, brighter, and more vivid.
2. Letting go of attachments and de-reifying social reality:
a. Practices intended to encourage letting go of attachments to ideas, desires, habits, and emotions  include:  
-        Questioning ideas previously taken for granted, especially re: self and social reality;
-        Using attentional control to break old habits and cultivate new ones;
-        Adopting a more relaxed and equanimous way of being;
-        Learning to control desires and emotions by ceasing to indulge them;
-        Using psychotherapy to loosen the ties of fear, anger, desires, depression, etc.
-        Changing one’s life or environment, permanently or temporarily, or equivalently, doing nothing at all for a day or so (no striving, no worrying, no planning).
b. The ordinary self is us living in social reality. On the surface that self is familiar, but deeper levels are murky, difficult to inspect in conscious awareness. We need to examine the self carefully, e.g. by asking questions like “Who Am I?” The purpose is to cultivate awareness of the hidden workings of the ordinary self, which in turn begins to reveal the difference between the self that lives in social reality and the self that lives in perceptual reality.
3. Developing compassion, feelings of loving-kindness, etc. has been shown to assist in quieting the mind and in loosening attachments associated with emotions (e.g. fears), desires, etc., sometimes sweeping these away and bringing an experience of awakening as part of the flow. However, on the basis of existing evidence, it appears that people lacking in compassion can nevertheless realize awakened consciousness. (Chapter 13)
Therefore, practices recommended in Buddhist teaching traditions appear to be effective for quieting the mind, letting go of attachments, and cultivating compassion. While the first two conditions appear to be necessary for awakening, compassion appears to be a contributing but not a necessary condition.
Implication: The fact that many people, even in the modern Western world, have experienced awakening demonstrates that the bonds of reification imposed by evolution can be broken (and suggests that the brain mechanisms responsible for reification are relatively recent and relatively simple, perhaps an association network analogous to the DMN).
D. Theory: How these preparatory practices act on ordinary awareness to produce awakened awareness.
In a full experience of awakening, conscious awareness is almost entirely dominated by perceptual processing (i.e., inner speech is infrequent). Perceptual recognition of objects, situations and events still activates corresponding words, phrases, scripts, and meaning systems, but because social reality has been de-reified, feelings and emotions associated with the concepts are not activated and do not modify the perceptual image that appears in awareness. Conceptual processing remains active at unconscious levels, enough to generate occasional inner speech (as “thinking” or “commenting”).
1. In ordinary consciousness perceptual processing is modified to better fit social reality; in awakened awareness non-attachment to (or de-reification of) social reality means that no modification is necessary. Without modification, awakened awareness directly expresses the contents and structure of perceptual processing.
2. Awakened awareness differs from ordinary awareness primarily in terms of structure.
a. Ordinary awareness is structured in terms of social reality, with time as an underlying dimension along which scripts (for socially appropriate action) and plans (for using available means to achieve desired ends) are generated. Scripts and plans therefore extend conscious awareness through time by representing past and future as real.
b. Awakened awareness is structured as perceptual systems present it. Although memories of previous perceptual experience can be brought into conscious awareness and extrapolations into the future can be imagined, this is usually brief and conscious awakened awareness remains primarily concentrated on the present moment. This is encouraged when the mind has become quiet through practice – without inner speech to express scripts, plans, and stories, awakened awareness is silent and without a time dimension.
c. Unconscious processing, however, knows about the past and can project immediate situations into the future by drawing on memories of previous events, stored as either percepts or concepts. Therefore, unconscious awakened awareness does extend over time, and can use this capacity to generate appropriate action. Living with awakened consciousness thus means living consciously in the present moment, but with faith that unconscious processing will “do the right thing.” This is made possible through training that quiets the mind and lets go of attachments to social reality.
Therefore. Experiencing awakened awareness requires settling into a world of perceptual reality in which inner speech is mostly silent, both the structure of and specific attachments to social reality have been de-reified, and unconscious processing is trusted to take care of action.
Implication. Awakening is experienced as “sudden” because although gradual preparation is necessary, there comes a point where no gradual transition is possible. This is true for the transitions between between inner speech and silence, between reified and de-reified social reality, and between a self-conscious self and a self that trusts unconscious processing.
E. People describe their experience with awakened awareness in ways that imply five properties (Chapter 13). How does the theory account for these properties?
1. Conscious awareness is silent of inner speech.
Theory:     a. Inner speech is muted when the Default Mode Network is inactive, because mindfulness involves attentiveness.
b. The perceptual content of conscious awareness is distinctly more vivid, because when the cognitive load required for conceptual processing is reduced, perceptual processing is enhanced and conscious awareness reflects this.
2. No Reification: no emotional attachments to the structure or contents of social reality, which now look like scripts for a movie in which we no longer need to be actors.
Theory:     The practices summarized in section C.2 as facilitating “letting go” of attachments have the effect of de-reifying social reality, thus eliminating all emotional attachments to it. Austin proposes that certain areas of the thalamus serve as the mechanism for switching “excessive” emotional attachments off, and thus accomplishing de-reification.
3. No Separation: the usual feeling of separation from the world around us vanishes; awareness switches from a perspective of looking out at the world as a separated self (egocentric orientation) to one of being an integral part of an interdependent and interconnected system (allocentric orientation).
Theory:     Ordinary awareness structures the self as a responsible actor relating to others in a social reality of scripts, plans, and stories. When the self of social reality is de-reified, the self of awakened awareness is structured in terms perceptual reality. The sense of encapsulation disappears and one’s awareness is of coexisting as an equal part of one’s environment. Austin has identified neural systems responsible for ordinary awareness (the egocentric system) and for awakened awareness (the allocentric system).
5. Not Knowing: action proceeds directly from unconscious processing.
Theory:     Once de-reification of self and social reality has taken place and inner speech has been brought under control, conscious awareness is structured by perception and its contents include only the present moment. Unconscious processing, however, can draw on perceptual memory and carry out conceptual processing, which allow it to take these cognitive resources into account in determining appropriate action for the (next) moment. The trick lies in letting go of self-consciousness, i.e. attachment to the ordinary self.
NOTE: Examples of unconscious processing competently determining appropriate action include: skillful skiing or other cases of “being in the zone” in sports; driving-while-thinking-about-soemthing-else (where unconscious awareness serves as a monitor that can switch attention back to the task of driving the car).  The processes implicated in switching between awakened and ordinary consciousness need to be researched, especially if it is true that slow thinking is not possible during awakened consciousness.

 There is also an brief research design and proposal posted on:
https://dana.io/realizing-awakened-consciousness

Comments or questions can be sent to me at boylemmx@gmail.com