Fact or Fiction

I’m planning on going back to America and becoming a teacher of English Literature, which got me thinking that perhaps I should start reading fiction again.  For the past year and a half or so I’ve read nothing but non-fiction, almost entirely popular science.  I’ve read introductions to astronomy, physics, and cultural anthropology.  I’ve read to some depth in evolutionary biology, psychology, mythology, and religion.  I’m familiar with Occam’s Razor, Bertrand Russel’s Tea Pot, Fred Hoyle’s Junkyard and Karl Popper’s (justified) insistence that a non-falsifiable hypothesis is not a scientific one.  I know about the problem of inference.  I believe in the scientific method.  I read some of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s work on cognitive biases and had to retreat into my room for a week because even though everyone was wrong about pretty much everything, none of them had any idea.

Have you ever heard of the narrative fallacy?  Writers (and readers) of fiction are often wont to talk about the power of story, how we crave it, how it lifts us up, how we use it to transmit wisdom and a sense of belonging from generation to generation.  The stories we tell, they say, shape our lives.  I believe this is true.  The human brain has many jobs, one of which happens to be a storyteller.  Without a running narrative to link things together, the world becomes a mass of billiard balls bumping together for no reason at all.  With a narrative, however, you can see that the billiard balls are bumping into each other because somebody with a stick is momentarily commandeering the laws of physics in an attempt to knock them into a hole.  If you took a couple of steps back, you could probably come up with a compelling story why.

The fallacy is that compelling stories are often wrong.  And not just that.  It’s that utterly bogus, completely compelling stories seem more believable than unequivocally true, dry-as-dirt statements of fact.  The stories don’t even have to be terribly compelling.  They just have to be plausible.  Sports reporting is especially guilty of this.  A baseball player starts hitting well and you get stories about the tweaks he made in his stance or the couple extra hours of batting practice he took the day before or the new eye drops he found at Bartell Drugs.  Maybe some of that helped.  Maybe it didn’t.  The point is that the stories are believable.  They establish a simple cause and effect relationship that harmonizes with our simple cause and effect notions about how the world works.  Struggling baseball player works hard gets better.  Of course.  It’s a good story.  A good story that may be total bullshit.  Maybe his team was playing the Royals.  Or maybe he starting putting a new brand of pine tar on his bat handle.  Who knows?

  Ultimately, who cares about sports reporting.  Those guys need to make a living, too, so let them sling whatever stories they want, and let whoever wants to eat them up.  It’s annoying to have a conversation with someone who slams speculation on the table as if it were fact, but at the end of the day it’s no big deal.  If I were a baseball executive I’d make sure that I surrounded myself with the type of people who knew good stories from hard facts (which, in all reality are simply good stories themselves), but as a baseball fan what’s the big deal?  Sometimes speculation is fun, as long as you’re aware that’s what it is.

  The question I’ve been asking myself recently is whether literature is simply the history of human speculation written in fancy words.  Do we have, here, a host of people who have tricked themselves into thinking the whoppers their brains spat out are true?  If so, how can I teach that?

 The next question is, can I get away with calling the great literary works of human history (as far as we can tell) “whoppers.”  No, probably not.  Why, though?  What exactly is the point of literature?  Is there a point?  Should we all just pull out our calculators, lock ourselves in broom closets and try to come to grips with the geometry of the universe?  Does literature deal in Truth?  Does it have to?

These are questions that I have to answer before I step in front of a group of kids and start talking to them about Shakespeare.  The world, let alone the universe, is a very big place, and there are obviously a lot of different types of things to know.  People often put physics on the iron throne because, as far as we can tell, all things reduce to it.  When you get right down to it, there are the rules of quantum mechanics, and upon that mysterious bedrock that everything is built.  Unless, of course, there is something underneath quantum physics, but that’s beside the point.  In this intellectual day and age (perhaps in every intellectual day and age), we like to think that there is some substance fundamental to the objects and processes that make up the universe, and that is where you find truth with a capital T.  That is where you find, unequivocally, that which truly is.

I don’t really buy that, of course.  The question of whether there is in fact a fundamental substance is an open one, unresolved by minds more well-built than mine, but even supposing there was, and we found it, it would still only exist on the fundamental level.  I can’t begin to guess where that is, but I imagine it would be really small.  Too small for anybody to experience.  The world in which we live is, though perhaps made out of fundamental stuff, entirely lacking in it.  We live on a much bigger scale, and meaningful human truths ought to be rendered appropriately.

And there it is.  There are meaningful natural truths that have little bearing upon human matters except as a condition of our existence (think the strong nuclear force), and then there are human truths that have little to do with nature except as we relate to it (think anything written in a poem).  I think literature is a valid way to explore the subjective interaction between human brains, beings, and the various environments in which they find them themselves.  I won’t say that literature can’t take on cosmic truths.  I would say, however, that it should be very careful when it tries.  Humans are certainly capable of glimpsing bits and pieces of universal truth.  That’s what science does when it’s at its best.  Literature informed by universal truths sifted on the pans of science is great.  Literature runs into trouble, however, when it confuses simply human truths with cosmic ones.  The two are separate and must be kept apart.

  I’ve been reading a little bit of Stephen King recently, and it’s making me think.  Partly about the difference between story-telling and literature, partly about which I think is better suited for what it does.  The book I’m reading is called 11/22/1963, and it’s about a guy who goes back in time and tries to stop the Kennedy assassination.  Like most of Stephen King’s books, it’s full of half-glimpsed magic and veiled supernatural forces.  Occam would slice it into pieces that Christopher Hitchens would then laugh into a garbage can.  It is a carnival game of shoot the logical fallacies.  It is a metaphysical fog and I was lost in it.

That’s when I realized I was doing something wrong.  I started thinking about another story, this one a card-carrying work of literature.  An enigmatic man named Thomas Pynchon wrote a short book called The Crying of Lot 49, and whereas nobody in that story goes back in time to stop anything, it too is full of half-glimpsed magic and veiled supernatural forces.  In King’s world they are real; in Pynchon’s they are almost assuredly not.  Pynchon’s world is probably closer to the way things really are.  Demons in the dark and angels in the clouds are almost assuredly figments of our overactive imaginations.  Our mental lives are cluttered with trash, and Pynchon is in there with a flashlight.  You’re left disturbed by the fact that it’s all bolted to the floor. 

King does something a little bit different.    He approaches the trash in the attic and turns it on.  Causation, probability, agency, intention, all of the things that we fumble with in real life have handles there.  As a description of how the real world actually works it is miserable, but as an example of how we think the world works it is masterful.  

The real world is indescribably complicated and our brains do us a favor by simplifying it.  If they didn’t, we would all be dead from overexposure.  What you see is certainly not all there is.  What you see is all you need to keep going, which, in the grand scheme of things, isn’t a lot.  Literature, I suppose, is forced to take this into account.  It has to catch glimpses of truth through tiny, broken windows.  Or, perhaps, as is more likely the case, the reader of literature has to.  After first deciding what are windows and what are walls.  That’s probably why reading literature gives a lot of people headaches.

 Fiction for fun, however, doesn’t necessarily have to do that.  Fiction for fun can tune the boundaries of its world to the pitch of our imaginations.  Even though rocks and trees and buildings almost assuredly don’t have thoughts, we come equipped with the capacity to put thoughts pretty much anywhere.  Fiction for fun can put that capacity to work.  We come from the factory with a tendency to confuse coincidence with fate, and fiction for fun can build a world where prophecy isn’t always self-fulfilling.  It’s kind of nice.  The truth doesn’t lurk in a well arranged string of words, but a particular type of pleasure does.  Good writing doesn’t necessarily get to the root of things, but it is something we want to trust.  When reading fiction for fun, you don’t have to worry too much about whether or not you’re being bewitched by somebody with a silver tongue.  I don’t know what I’m really trying to say except for that reading can be like playing in the theme park that comes pre-loaded into your head.

So what am I going to tell my kids, whenever I get them?  Shit man, I don’t know.  

Is It Worth It?

Let’s wrap things up, shall we? 

            We started with a question that branched off into further questions which in turn implied but did not engage a host of still other questions, likely engendering a few doubts, certainly some disbelief, but hopefully stopped short of eliciting outright disgust and rejection.  I have a theory, a private theory that is propped up by the unsteady pillars of a few barely related texts, and while in my head the lines are all pulled tight, I’m afraid that as I’ve laid it out on paper there remains a lot of slack.  Ultimately that’s ok, because, well, it’s nice to have things rattling around in your head to write about later.

            What is enlightenment?  That, I believe, was the original question.  The ultimate answer as I see it, traced out along the pathways of physical materialism (the belief that there is no secret spirit stuff in the universe, only atoms and what they compose), transience (all things that are shall pass away), meditational mental management (clearing out the zatsunen), and the hemispheric specialization the brain (roughly speaking, the fine-toothed comb and the wide lens) is that Enlightenment as it is depicted (and here I realize I must further limit myself) in Zen traditions is a particular brain state functioning on more universal right-brain circuitry.  The earth is old and your moment upon it infinitesimally short, what is soon shall no longer be, to desire is suffer (the gap between wanting and having is, as I’m sure everyone can appreciate, bridged with red lines), if you wipe away the accumulated grime of the ages everyone is made of the same things (they say that all things are a manifestation of the Buddha essence which doesn’t make any sense to me but what does make sense to me is that everyone is the incalculably improbable product of vast ages of natural events, ranging from the initial spark of the universe to the cooling of plasma oceans through star-forming, planet-building, interstellar bombardment, the filling of the oceans,  the long, steep climb to unicellular organisms, multi-cellular ones, mats of algae, the Cambrian explosion, climbing out of the oceans and a massive asteroid that kills off the dinosaurs and now we’re in an Ice Age and good luck surviving that but those little African rat-like things that we probably came from were tough and I’m summarizing here but lo and behold, inexplicably, nigh impossibly, here we are).  Words get in the way, reason is misleading, and the only way to true peace is to sit quietly and tap into it.

            I would suggest that it’s not enough to just sort of agree with these principles.  You’ve got to be like Pythagoras looking at triangles; you’ve got to feel it.  There is a path to enlightenment, and in order to get there you have to walk it.  This means throwing away the world.  Remember Dogen-Zenshi?  Now I’m paraphrasing, but essentially he says that anyone who truly wants to reach enlightenment and stay there must throw away his family, throw away his name, throw away his home and all that he knows and move to a monastery at once.  He’s probably right.  Remember Jill Bolte Taylor?  Remember her standing at the shower head, euphoric as the 37-year mish-mash of her fabricated self fell away leaving behind nothing but peace in its wake?  You can get the peace.  You can have eternal bliss at every moment of your life, but it comes with a price.  You must pay for it with your self.  You must pay for it with your passion, with your rational mind, with your ambition and your desire to be a thing in the social world.  A man named Echkhart Tolle had a similar experience to Jill Bolte Taylor, except without the stroke.  In The Power of Now, a fascinating if potentially misleading account of alternate states of consciousness, he talks about his moment of release from self and how he enjoyed it as a homeless man sitting on park benches for a couple years.  Everything was so beautiful, he said, that he felt no desire to ever do anything.

            You can have that, too, if you want.  But you can’t at the same time be a mother or an elementary school teacher or a police officer or a musician, well maybe you could be a musician, but you most certainly couldn’t go to law school.  You’re not going to be advocating for social change and you probably won’t give a shit about global warming.  In general I imagine you would be pleasant to be around, but you definitely would have transitioned to a different and very foreign phase of personhood.  I thought about this kind of stuff for longer than perhaps I should have, and ultimately rejected it because that’s not really the sort of life I want to live.  Maybe that’s just my ego taking over, but if so I’ll let it steer me away form that cliff.  It seems to me that we were born into this world, so we might as well interact with it as much as possible before it’s all gone.

            At the same time, I don’t think “enlightment chasing” is entirely worthless.  At the end of her TED talk, Jill Bolte Taylor suggests, in a time-tested synergistic fashion, a type of duality for human nature that I can actually get behind.  At once, you can be a “classic” human being, thinking, rationalizing, weaving past experience and future hopes into a self with a defined identity and intense singularity while at the same time being aware of the deeply codependent experientially “universal” being accessible to you through meditation and other right brain on-ramps.  I am who I am, and I’m not willing to give that up, but sometimes it feels good to be nothing at all.  Occasional trips out there might make me better equipped to be me, who knows.

Pulling Aside the Curtain

            Jill Bolte Taylor had a stroke on December 10th, 1996 that disabled most of her left brain functioning, and I would argue that in the world patched together by her isolated right brain she then experienced an amplified (and somewhat distorted) version of Enlightenment as described in various Buddhist traditions, particularly Zen. 

             What is enlightenment?  We’ve been talking about it a lot, but sometimes repetition and summary are helpful.  心身脱落.  Shin-shin datsu-raku.  Shedding the body and shedding the mind.  It’s the visceral awareness of the impermanence of life, the irreducible interdependence of all systems, the feeling in your bones that all things are both interconnected and destined to be torn apart for subsequent and roughly eternal recombination (unless, of course, the heat death of the universe isn’t actually the end of it, in which case no qualifier is necessary).  If you read enough, an intellectual appreciation of these phenomena seems to me inescapable given the realities of energy transfer and the continuous exchange of cellular material between pretty much everything (you don’t have to make out with someone to swap spit; just being in the same room and breathing the same air is enough), but in some way Enlightenment is about more than reading comprehension.  It’s about feeling it, you know?  I can know that the Earth goes around the Sun, but it’s a lot harder to feel it (as an aside, I read a book the other day explaining why there are seasons (it has to do with the way in which the Earth’s titled axis lets in sunlight at different angles during different periods), but even though I spend a fair amount of time looking at the sky I can’t figure out what’s going on). 

            It’s difficult to get to that deep level of understanding, but we’ve all had at least a taste of it at some point.  At least I suppose we have.  Maybe this experience depends upon whether or not you like math, but I remember mechanically working on algebra problems or calculus problems or whatever kind of math problems they were without really knowing what was going on, just sort of plugging numbers into formulas like the textbook said, when all of a sudden, Cha-Ching, it clicks and you get it.  It’s not about words which is why it’s hard to define, but in an intuitive flash you see the interlocking parts and you feel how they work together.  The details snap into place and like that you have a picture of a larger functioning whole.  What does that sounds like to you?  Perhaps a shift from the particular-oriented left-brain to the pattern-oriented right one.

            It’s relatively easy to see the interaction between left and right brain thinking in the manipulation of numbers and formulas, but it’s considerably more difficult to see the larger patterns into which we as sentient beings are enmeshed.  Why is that, exactly?  When you “get” a math problem, it is because you have stopped thinking about the specific numbers and your brain has been allowed to cast its neural net over the wider and more generalized patterns governing the way in which they interact.  An intuitive understanding of a²+b²=c² requires that you step back from the individual elements and let your mind envision the larger relationship between sides of triangles.  Enlightenment, as I understand it, is roughly the same process applied to human beings (specific numbers) as they are entangled in the various pushes and pulls of life on earth (general formulas).  The problem is that our left-brains are always working, and we are too focused on ourselves as singular digits to see where we fit on a massively expansive number-line.

            You can use meditation to tune the descriptive silence out, or you can just burst a few carefully placed blood-vessels in the left side of your head.  That’s what happened to Jill Bolte Taylor, and while I wouldn’t recommend having any sort of invasive brain surgery to simulate the effect (the experience sounded excruciating and fully debilitating), I am thankful for it (and astounded by her recovery) because it fills a lot of holes in a lot of gaps.  While I stressed caution in attributing too much hemispheric specialization to the brain in one of the previous posts, well, here’s an actual brain scientist talking (with more first-hand experience than most) so let’s at least listen to what she has to say.  The left-brain, she says, “thinks in language,” and is the source of the “on-going brain chatter” (also known as zatsunen) that I know I, at least, am accustomed to living with.  It is “designed to take the enormous collage of the present moment and start picking out details, details, and more details about those details” before organizing it all into a coherent conception of a defined self in the world, patterned around past experience, present emotional state, and future possibilities.  Sounds good so far.  The left-brain, she continues, “is the little voice that says to me, ‘I am,’ and (with that statement) I become a single individual separate from the energy flow around me, and separate from you.”  According to Dr. Bolte Taylor, it is through the constant referential, administrative powers of the left-brain that what we consider our “selves” are constructed from what otherwise would be an incomprehensible glot of sensory input.

            When the left-brain malfunctions, however, what happens to that self?  Recounting the difficulty of taking a shower on the morning of her stroke, she describes hesitating in the act of turning on the hot water, shocked into immobility when “the left-brain chatter (in her head) went totally silent.”  Where most of the time unspools a constant stream of phone-calls to make, deadlines to meet, injustices to be righted, wounds to be nursed, clothes to iron, rewording of a conversation that didn’t go so well last night, breakfast to make, an umbrella to locate, where almost every moment of our inner lives is dominated by the endless fragments of social obligation, all of a sudden there was nothing. 

There were no familiar thoughts, and soon after there was no familiar body, either. “I could no longer define the boundaries of my body,” she says.  “I felt enormous and expansive.  I felt at one with all the energy that was and it was beautiful there.”  Talk about an out of body experience.  It's very difficult to identify with because most of us have never stepped outside of them, but the boundaries of self are inscribed, it seems, by the tools of the left brain, and while your pride in you pecs therefore falls away when the tools are broken, so too do private insecurities and the accumulated scar tissue of past failures: “Imagine what it would be like to lose 37 years of emotional baggage!  I felt euphoria.”

            “I found Nirvana.”  That’s Bolte Taylor what says of her experience.  I found Nirvana.  I am sort of inclined to believe her.  Considering that her self-constructing left brain was submerged in blood rather than being inhibited by neuro-transmitters or whatever the hell is going on when you’re in a deep meditative state, she may in fact have found more of it than most monks.  And that’s kind of that.  When Siddhartha sat under the Bodhi Tree meditating all those years ago (if in fact he did), the wisdom he eventually came to wasn’t, I would suggest, something he “came up with.”  It wasn’t something he crafted out of the words and thoughts, but rather, it was a picture that emerged when he stopped trying to paint it.  Hopefully now that shouldn’t strike you as nonsense.

            Next time let’s sum up and talk applications.

Exploring Enlightenment

  I was reading a fair amount on Zen when I came across Dr. Bolte Taylor's TED talk.  Anybody out there ever heard of Symphony of Science, by the way?  Essentially, they are a series of mash-ups, employing auto-tunes for a more educational purpose than it was perhaps designed to deliver choice quotes from a host of eminent scientists on topics ranging from human exploration of Mars, to The Big Bang, to Quantum Theory.  There is also one on the human brain, which is where I was first introduced to the good doctor Bolte Taylor.  (As an aside, I was also drawn to Dr. Vilayanur Ramachandran, here is this mass of jelly, and highly recommend this book if you want to look at ruminations on the neural underpinnings of art appreciation (among other things))

     From auto-tunes it was to TED talks, as I mentioned previously, and I rewatched the twenty minute clip earlier this morning in an attempt to refresh my memory and/or lift some usable quotes.  There was about twenty minutes worth of them, but for a moment let's put that aside.

  I was reading a fair amount of zen, and while most of the books don't really spend a ton of time talking about it (and for good reason, as we will see late), like an overeager disciple clamoring at the feet of the great masters, I found myself drawn to the discussions of enlightenment.  What the hell is it?   In general the mind loves a good mystery, and as far as I was concerned enlightenment was a jewel of shifting smoke and cobwebs that I needed to get my hands on.  I feel like everybody has kind of heard the story before, especially if they've done the typical investigations into traditional East Asian culture.  A monk sits quietly under a tree for a long time and all of a sudden, POW, he figures it out.  Another monk is quietly scrubbing floor boards in a monastery when scritch, scritch, scritch, and BING, the lights go on.  Then they return to the temple grounds and hold forth in front of the other as-of-yet-unenlightened monks, offering unintelligible hints and what seem like fully-veiled clues as to how they can reach enlightenment too.  This gives rise to the tradition of ... what's the best way to describe them... riddles-that-are-not, called koan, perhaps the most well-known of which amongst Western people is the infamous sound of one hand clapping.  Here is another common one, called Nansen Cuts the Cat in Two:

Nansen saw the monks of the eastern and western halls fighting over a cat. 

He seized the cat and told the monks: `If any of you say a good word, 

you can save the cat.'  No one answered. So Nansen boldly cut the cat in two pieces.

That evening Joshu returned and Nansen told him about this. 

Joshu removed his sandals and, placing them on his head, walked out.

Nansen said: `If you had been there, you could have saved the cat.'

What, exactly, is the sound of one hand clapping?  Exactly what wisdom is Joshu displaying by putting his sandals on his head?  The problem with these things is that if you approach them armed with logic, well, then the cat gets cut in two.  They're not really logic problems.  What they are, I believe, is an injunction to use your brain in a drastically different way.  Hearkening back to our previous discussion, you'll recall that logic is largely a product of the left hemisphere of your brain, and if you try to reason out the sound of one hand clapping or decode the message in Joshu's sandal-hats then you're working from the left and in the context of the koan you're just making a lot of purposeless mental noise.  What these koan (and again, I'm not an expert so this is only slightly substantiated opinion) are often designed to do is get you to STOP thinking logically.  To get you to stop thinking at all.  What is the sound of one hand clapping?  Silence.  What was wrong with the warring monks reactions to Nansen's question that was right about Joshu's?  The problem is that they were trying to think of a good word, whereas Joshu realized that there were no good words and just said, fuck it, whatever, I'ma wear my shoes on my head and get out of here.  In essence, that's a stupid question, so here's the appropriate response.  Nansen, as we see, approves.

   But what's the big deal?  What's so wrong with words and logic problems and linear thinking?  This brings me to my ultimate thesis (if you could prop it up on such a pedestal) that Enlightenment (at least in the Zen tradition) requires a shift from left-brain dominant modes of thinking to a more right-brain oriented type of intuitive interaction with the world.  The thing is, all the historical figures who achieved Enlightenment in the past lived in times that were unlikely to have enough knowledge of the structural workings of the brain to know what was going on in there.  Which isn't to say that their empirical reports are off or do not align with a theory of an asymmetrical, hemispherically divergent mind.  道元禅師, Dogen-Zenshi, a man who lived (apparently) in the early 13th century and a big name (which literally means, Founder Zen Master) in the industry says a lot of things about meditation and its connection with enlightenment.  He is credited with writing a primer on za-zen (seated meditation in the zen tradition) called the 座禅用心記 (Za-zen Yo Shin-ki (maybe jin-ki)), which I suppose you could translate as A Primer on Za-Zen, and while I am by no means capable of reading and understanding that I did come across a modern interpretation of it called 「座禅用心記」に参ずる (Za-zen Yo Shin-ki ni Zan-zuru (Reading the Primer on Za-Zen)), from which, with a great struggle (that I gave up a third of the way through), I was nevertheless able to glean a few telling quotes.

  According to tradition, at one point in his career Dogen-Zenshi went to China to study under some other famous monk guy.  I don't really know who or where or whatever, I skipped names and stuff because they were too hard to understand.  The names don't matter.   What matters is 心身脱落.  Shin-shin Datsu-raku.  What is za-zen? the Chinese master asks Dogen-Zenshi.  Shin-Shin Datsu-Raku.  What does that mean?  Shin-shin datsu-raku.

  Ok, cool.  What does that mean for us?  The first two characters, 心身, in this instance essentially mean body and mind.  There's the old duality once again, but don't worry, in this context we can safely define the body and mind as a) physical sensations and b) thoughts.   脱落.  You can think of datsu-raku as shedding something, kind of like molting, more like taking off a robe and throwing it aside.  What does Dogen-Zenshi have to say about proper Zen meditation?  With what realization is he said to have achieved enlightenment?  We're simplifying here, but basically it's the sloughing off of all thoughts and definitions of self as described in bodily space.  Your mind is quiet, your self isn't bound by the limits of your skin, and you partake in a vast and indescribable peace or bliss or something along those lines.  Why can't you describe the way to enlightenment in plain words?  Because the only way to get there is by throwing words away.  If you can do that, then you will find you are actually one with the universe, you have reached Nirvana.

  Sounds like bullshit, right?  Wrong.  I would be a terrible architect because I can't plan worth shit, but I think the foundation is finally right and next time we will, I promise, discuss Jill Bolte Taylor and use her first hand experience of a left-brain-less life to give physical, scientific names to the esoteric experience of enlightened Buddhist monks of the ages.

Embarrassing Myself on the Brain

I would like to begin this post by reiterating that I don’t have a formal education in any of this.  I have a formal education that scratches the surface of Faulkner and Austen and Chaucer but the only Science classes I ever took in college were Weather and Climate and the equivalent of Geology 101.  Even then I got B’s.  As a result, when I pretend to speak forth about brain chemistry, evolution, models of consciousness, and comparative religion I must concede that none of my information comes from a lecturer and none of my “credentials” (which I do not possess) are backed up by test scores.

            That said, I don’t think it’s a fatal problem, because in place of lecturers I’m getting the scoop from actual neuroscientists, biologists, philosophers of science, and religion scholars as they break it themselves in a bunch of books.  The question is whether my interpretations are in any way credible I suppose, and yeah, I certainly would be more reliable if I was pursuing a PhD (or even a BA) in something scientific, but for our purposes I think we should be ok.  I can deal with books, and I can understand theory if it’s presented to me in a jargon-free (or jargon-light) fashion, and so essentially what I’m trying to say is that while I think I can hold my head high as a messenger, I would also highly recommend that anyone who wants to know what’s really going on read the actual books.

            I eventually want to get into Jill Bolte-Taylor and the awe-inspiring account of her stroke and rehabilitation in her book, My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey, but first let’s talk a little bit (and only the very littlest bit) about the human brain.  The human brain is incredibly complicated and I could go on at length about how little I know about it but I’ve undercut myself enough already so let’s just jump right in.  Asymmetry and specialization of function.  In general you have to be careful about attributing too much specialization to particular areas of the brain (this part controls love and this part determines whether or not you think Seinfeld is funny!) because apparently there is a lot of coordination between the different parts, but there are some areas neuroscientists are comfortable assigning relatively specific duties.  You hear a lot of stuff bantered around about left-brain thinking and right-brain thinking, and again, while it’s important not to get too carried away, there does appear to be a mechanical difference in what’s going on in different sides of your head.

            The left side of the brain is often characterized as being the “rational brain,” whereas the right side is known as the “emotional” or “feeling” brain.  I’m not going to adopt either of those labels wholesale (and it seems as if you should be wary of anyone who does), but (and here I pilfer from Wikipedia, Jesus Christ) the left brain does seem to deal more with logically constructed systems such as grammar, vocabulary and precise, formula-based arithmetic.  In other words, prepositional phrases and execution of Pythagorean Theorem are fiefdoms of the left-hemisphere of your brain. 

            While the left-brain can be implicated as a detail-seeking, if A-is-taller-than-B-and-B-is-taller-than-C-then-A-must-be-taller-than-C type of logic-problem solving linear processing unit, you wouldn’t be terribly wrong in offering your right-brain a more finger paints and fuzzy-teddy-bear type of role in your experience of the world.  It seems like the right side of your head takes in sensory input, turns waves of light into colors and rippling particles into sound, whereas the left side of your head analyzes those colors and sounds and tags them as yellow or music.  Actually don’t quote me on that, but here’s something: a discussion of music itself might be instructive.  Say you’re listening to somebody playing the guitar.  Essentially, striking the strings agitates particles in the air which agitate surrounding particles with agitate surrounding particles which eventually strike your eardrum.  Those vibrations are somehow translated into packets of information that shoot up into your brain which you then experience as whatever you experience a guitar to sound like.  The experience of the guitar, the pure, untouched sound (and to a degree the accompanying emtions) is managed more by the right side of your brain, whereas the process of labeling a particular sound as an A-chord or another as an example of post-industrial speed metal should be credited more to you left brain.

            It’s way freakier than this as we’ll see in a little bit, but in very simple terms, you can think of the right brain as providing an intuitive, textured map of the external world, sights, sounds, tastes, sensations, the big sloppy picture, if you will, while the left brain labors to cut it up into discrete, measurable pieces, and in a normal person both sides function as a seamless, interdependent whole to produce the moving picture of reality with which we are all accustomed to interacting.

            What happens, however, when one side goes offline?  Just such a thing happened to Jill Bolte Taylor, national spokesperson for the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource center (where she encourages people to donate their brains to research (when they don’t need them anymore of course)), and if you want to hear her TED talk then you can click here.  I watched the talk and immediately went to amazon to buy her book, which was about as inspiring as you could want a book to be but for the purpose of our discussion of Buddhist enlightenment I will restrain myself to a brief analysis of the things she experienced when her brain was running only on the right side.

            Unfortunately I will need to consult some notes first so we’ll have to wait until next time.  Hopefully I have notes to consult somewhere.

           

The Silent Spaces In Your Brain

            Ok, so now it’s time to go off the charts and make some barely defensible claims.  As I mentioned on my other blog, I spent a lot of time in the past few months reading books on Buddhism in search of whatever there was to be found.  I don’t remember what piqued my interest exactly, but when you’re on a spirit quest you’ll grasp at just about any straw within reach and since I make regular pilgrimages to Kiyomizu-dera (excuse that photo it's not often I find a picture of myself that strikes me as badass) and visit local temples for my birthday anyway (haha Rathwell), reading some actual words of Buddhist wisdom seemed like a logical next step.  There are a ton of different Buddhisms out there, Mahayana, Theravada, Pure Land, Sokka Gakkai, probably more Sri Lankan, Indian, Chinese, and Indonesian variants than you can count but I chose the one that, somewhat embarrassingly, sounded coolest to me, which is to say that I bought a book about Zen.

            The first book I bought was a collection of old sayings called ほっとする禅語70, 70 Zen Sayings to Chill You Out, and in all honesty it sort of blew my mind.  For a Japanese person it would probably be a collection of relative truisms that wouldn’t move you beyond a shoulder shrug (imagine a book explicating “birds of a feather flock together” and “don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched), but sometimes words you didn’t grow up with bypass your mental checkpoints and crash into your brain at full speed.  The book was filled with sayings that pointed the way to a Zen-inspired view of the everyday, founded in refining conscious awareness, eliminating unnecessary thoughts and unfounded worry, a realization of the interconnectedness of things, and the sort of inner peace / calm for which it is popularly characterized (often caricatured) in the West. 

            Part of the reason I was so taken with this book is that it was an expression in clear and simple words of concepts I had already gotten from other sources.  I mentioned that I experimented some with meditation, reading a book by a woman named Hosai Arina, titled simply 始めよう。瞑想, or, Starting Meditation.  If I didn’t have this book rattling around in my head then it’s unlikely the later books on Zen would have meant anything to me.  I struggled through it in Japanese, so you can question the legitimacy of my arguments there if you'd like, but I like reading books on traditionally “Eastern” topics in Japanese as much as possible because you can get straight down to business.  You don’t have to wade through apologies on the inaccuracy of translation or primers on culturally divergent value systems; instead it’s taken for granted that you are embedded within the relevant value system and the only translation going on is in your head, which has the effect of turning what might otherwise seem a foreign, vaguely mysterious reading experience into something markedly prosaic and concrete (that is my experience with cultural interaction in general; the process of learning a foreign language and becoming familiar with different customs is the process of revealing the mystic other to be strikingly familiar and mundane).  This attitude is precisely the one with which the author probably wants readers to approach her book, as from nearly the first page she makes it clear that she intends to blow aside the screen of ethereal vapors obfuscating popular conceptions of meditation to disclose the non-supernatural kernel hiding within. 

            Let me put this out there right away.  I am pretty terrible at meditation.  I’m too impatient, my apartment is too loud, I’m not willing to travel to an isolated mountain temple, and all in all I’m too attached to my thoughts to really make it work.  That said, I think that I have a pretty solid understanding of how it’s supposed to work, and since the mechanics of meditation are instrumental to my understanding of Buddhist enlightenment, let me spend a paragraph or two spelling them out.

            Every book I’ve read on Zen or meditation mentions something like the term 「雑念」”Zatsunen,” or, in English, the random stuff that floats into you mind when you close your eyes.  Or when you’re standing there waiting in line for something, or when you’re lying in bed trying to fall asleep, or any other time you’re not doing anything and your mind wanders.  According to Hosai, (and very much in accordance with the established scientific view) the mind is a powerful and largely automated problem-solving tool that will invent issues to work on rather than sit in silence and risk leaving something important undone.  What goes in is unconsciously and involuntarily filed away for processing, and when you aren’t consciously focusing on another task you’ll notice (I notice, at least) that this queue of data is always playing under the surface like a radio at low volume.  Even if you’re not aware of it (or so used to it that you don’t even realize what’s going on), constantly worrying immaterial problems is a real source of stress and unnecessary mental fatigue, and as Hosai presents it in her book, meditation is a practical means of emptying your brain of dead-end thoughts. 

            And that’s pretty much where she leaves it.  Your brain takes in external stimuli and throws them in your face in moments of inactivity regardless of whether you need to be dealing with them or not.  When I was biking home today, I caught myself fretting over word-choice in mental lectures that I’ll never give, and while you could say that I was sharpening my vocabulary I’d counter that wasting my energy.  If you get good at meditation, you can learn to drain your head of zatsunen like fluid from a wound.  I won’t get into the mechanics, but it essentially entails sitting quietly, drawing zatsunen out with a mantra (in this case a short, meaningless phrase repeated over and over), by focusing on your breathing, or through any other boring and repetitive activity (the thinking is that your brain is programmed to seek out problems and isn’t capable of peacefully repeating nonsensical ohms if it can possibly latch onto anything else), one by one folding and shelving stray thoughts like shirts strewn across the floor of your mind.  When you’ve cleared the room of dirty laundry, in theory, no more thoughts should surface so you can drop the mantras and proceed to enjoy a period of restorative silence that is supposed to have all sorts of positive health benefits such as sharpening your focus, improving your memory, making you more cheerful, and generally giving you more pep in your step to hop to the beat of the everyday.

            I tried pretty hard for a few months to figure that shit out but don’t think I ever got past the gathering-of-useless-thoughts stage.  Try focusing on the rhythmic intonation of nonsense words while sitting still and half-lidded in a darkened room for fifteen minutes at a time.  O-n, Na-m, Suba-ha, am I there yet, is this it, oh shit, O-n, Na-m, this inner dialogue is exactly what I’m supposed to be flushing, I wonder if it’s dark enough in here, O-n, Na stoppit, maybe it’s too loud  O-n ah fuck it I give up.  That’s pretty much how it went for me, but, I wouldn’t say that I was out there chasing rainbows.  In principal it all makes sense, and plenty of people have experienced just such a meditation-induced clarity of mind to make me believe that it’s a real phenomenon.  I just can’t do it.

            Which doesn’t mean, however, that I believe people in a meditative trance to be partaking in the Universal Buddha Essence.  Not unless the Universal Buddha Essence is a metaphor for right-hemispheric brain activity, that is.  This post is getting long and unwieldy so I will cut it off here, but next time I want to talk about the neuroscientist who lost all left-brain functioning in a massive stroke and then got it back, and what her experiences in the right side of her head suggest, at least to me, about meditation and by extension the brain-state Buddhists have always called Enlightenment.

A Sensory Jig-Saw

What is a person without a soul?  What is a soul to begin with?  When we accuse someone in everyday conversation of “having no soul”, we’re accusing them of either lacking or failing to demonstrate certain “human” values such as compassion, empathy, or mercy.  Say you’re talking to your friend and he tells you that last night he dumped his girlfriend by text message and fifteen minutes later called her best friend in tears, trying to lure her in with pity so that he could then hook up with her.  Say it worked. He tells you with great pride and unrestrained laughter about how stupid girls are.  At this point you can accuse him of having no soul and I won’t butt in to say, of course not, nobody does.  If having a soul simply means being a relatively caring person who looks out for the welfare of others alongside his/her own and treats them with a level of respect proportionate to what they deserve, then sure, some people have souls and some people don’t. 

            Once you try fashioning the metaphor into something literal, however, we have to start throwing up stop signs.  I don’t believe in the soul if the soul is really some amnesiac and immaterial emissary from the spirit world just sort of squatting in the human body until it dies.  Of course, you can’t prove that it’s there and I can’t prove that it’s not because by definition there’s nothing to look for.  That’s what being immaterial means.  The best you can say is, “I feel like I have a soul, so I do.”  To which a friend of mine always responds, “well, I feel like I have an invisible, insubstantial third arm sticking out of my stomach, so I do.”  If we lived in a culture that widely validated immaterial third arms then you’d be hard-pressed to prove him wrong.

            That’s all I can say on that subject.  If we do have eternal souls, then we have no way of knowing and the universe makes a lot less sense.  Let’s discuss, then, the implications of a universe in which we don’t.

            The soulless universe must begin and end with constantly moving matter, which leads us to the concept of transience.  The concept of transience is one of the pillars of the Buddhist house.  All things change, no thing remains the same forever, what is today a plant tomorrow is broken down in the stomach of a cow goes through the slaughter house finds its way onto a BBQ into the stomach of a human 15 years later if it lasts that long is buried or burned and no longer looks anything like the plant it started out as.  For that matter it didn’t actually start out as a plant; that’s just the shape it wore when we first noticed it.  That’s the whole point.  A plant isn’t necessarily a plant, it’s just a group of atoms temporarily bound together in a shape we call a plant.  If you open your eyes wide and peer far enough into the past you’ll find sub-atomic-some-day-to-be-plant bits boiling in the pressure cooker core of a star.  For the Buddhist this impermanence is a reason to chill out and relax, because everything you think of as you (including your worries and grudges) is a temporary and chance meeting of atoms and molecules held together by a complex network of thumb-tacks and twine that will, inexorably, indisputably, and irreversibly break down, sending the particles of you back into the rattling centrifuge of the greater universe.  For whatever reason, you’re here, but it’s only a matter of time and then poof, you’re gone.

Matter is, matter moves, matter accumulates for a finite period of time as a table, as a chair, as a tree, as a human being, and then is dissolved either by the slow forces of erosion or the abrupt expedient of a bomb, blasting back into space to await subsequent recombination into something else.  That’s all there is; just matter coming and matter going, matter growing decaying changing rearranging rearranging again until time on the clock runs out.  To borrow the words of Richard Dawkins, “matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you,” and while people attached to the idea of an eternal soul might “find that thought disturbing,” he “find(s) (and I find) the reality thrilling.”

What is the reality?  The reality is that what our ancestors called the human soul is really the cumulative result of the incredibly complex interactions of simple matter.  Your soul is the sum of a life of sensory experience as filtered through the folded canals of your brain, a raft in a sea of physical stuff upon which you ride clothed in the layered garments of crossings past.  The raft and the rider are one and the same, and when the raft someday sinks into the endlessly undulating ocean the rider must perish with it.  At this point in time it’s the only thing that makes any sense.

And it’s alright.  Next time we’ll return to our naturalized Buddhism and discuss how acceptance of this world-view is a giant step down the path to traditional enlightenment.