The Gateless Gate of Awareness:Kaszniak Dharma Talk
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Upaya Zen Center Dharma Talk May 27, 2020 Sensei Al Genkai Kaszniak, Ph.D. The Gateless Gate of Awareness We’ve been living in a very challenging time … An invisible mortal threat, uncertainty about what we can do, how effectively our actions will protect us and others, and even whether we can trust relevant information provided by various sources. Existential threat and uncertainty can easily give rise to the reactivity we call fear. We’re all familiar with the experience of fear: A sense of high alert and vigilance, physical tension, breath and pulse accelerated, the body mobilizing for the energy demands of flight, fight, or freeze, our attention narrowed to focus upon and amplify awareness of the perceived threat. In this pandemic, it can often seem that there is so much reactivity, and too little opportunity, available or taken, for calm reflectivity. Each of us may sometimes react without pause to the fear and anger that threat and uncertainty can provoke. Both personally and collectively, this can impel toward quick actions that might not best protect ourselves and others. For example, understandably afraid of permanently losing their source of livelihood, small business owners may pressure their Governor’s office, demanding that closure orders be lifted before the evidence for new infections and continuing deaths indicate that it is safe to do so. Fearful of the consequences of lost social opportunities, and angered by restrictions that seem irrelevant, given their lower risk status, a group of 20 young adults parties in close proximity at the beach. Angered by a fellow grocery shopper walking too close without a mask, an older woman stops to give this person a piece of her mind, prolonging the time during which viral particles might be exchanged between them. Spending each day in a state of fearful high alert, frequently angered by customers who don’t respect social distancing, a store clerk goes home and again drinks too much in order to relax, risking further damage to his liver, already compromised by a previous illness. I’m sure each of you have similar stories you could tell. In our practice of meditation, however, we settle into stillness and silence, and reflectively become intimate with our experience, facilitating an ability to allow a fuller awareness of all that is present, including our mental processes and bodily sensations, as well as what is happening around us. This broadened awareness is then available to inform our health, safety, and other decisions. And, the awareness we cultivate in meditation practice can also provide a gateway to a more skillful relationship with difficult experience. Roshi Joan Halifax, in her 2018 book, Standing at the Edge (New York: Flatiron Books), uses the phrase “vast view” in reference to this awareness. She writes that: “Vast view can open when we talk with a dying person about their wishes, when we hear the prison door clang, and when we listen deeply to our children. It can open when we connect on the streets with a homeless person, when we visit the wet tent of a Syrian refuge stuck in Greece, and when we sit with a victim of torture. It can open as well through our own experience of anguish.” (p. 8) Of course, none of these experiences described by Roshi Joan guarantee, in themselves, that vast view will be opened. Such experiences also have the potential of eliciting our reactivity, whether fear, anger, disgust, or even empathic distress. Whether what we encounter in our lives, including the challenges of a viral pandemic, elicits reactivity or opens a vast view in awareness, depends importantly on how we have cultivated awareness in our meditation practice. In her 2019 book, entitled “Naked in the Zendo” (Boulder, CO: Shambhala), Roshi Grace Schireson reminds us that: “When we are fully present, we may find and enter the great space of awareness. However, it takes practice to come to know this space and to enter it willfully. Within this space we can find a different relationship to loss, pain, and trauma, allowing such emotions to dissipate and release themselves in that expanded space of awareness. (P. 13) Today, I want to appreciate awareness with you, from the perspectives of both science and Zen. My goal is to outline a framework for how we might consider awareness, particularly in regard to Zazen and related meditation practice, and explore how the expanded space of awareness, this “vast view” that we practice with in Zazen, can provide a gateless gate to a way of living with adversity, including the adversity we are encountering during this difficult period in which we are now living. My consideration of awareness has been stimulated by preparation for the upcoming annual Upaya Zen Center Varela International Symposium, previously called Zen Brain, and named in honor of a beloved friend and colleague, the late Chilean neuroscientist, philosopher, and Buddhist practitioner, Francisco Varela. This year, the symposium is being offered online to reduce the spread of COVID- 19. Our theme this year is Exploring the Great Landscape of Awareness – Insights from Neuroscience, Cognitive Science, Buddhism. The symposium’s faculty include Roshi Joan Halifax, myself; Buddhist scholars John Dunne and Jay Garfield, cognitive scientist Jonathan Schooler; neuroscientists Kalina Christoff, Richie Davidson, and Wendy Hasenkamp, and stress and aging Researcher Elissa Epel. Each of these faculty members has studied and written about aspects or consequences of our mysterious capacity for awareness, each from a different scientific, philosophical, Buddhist scholarship, or contemplative practice tradition. Each, in this way, has played a key role in the development of a new science of consciousness. In the still-recent appearance of science in human history, a science of consciousness is quite new. The predominant position of academic psychology, as recently as the middle years of the 20th century, was that so-called subjective experience is not scientifically tractable. Only what were termed objective observations of behavior, .in other words, only third-person observations, could be admitted into a psychological science. However, over the past few decades, the idea that only such “objective” psychological science is legitimate has been challenged. Scientists and scholars are creating a new set of standards based on what we could call intersubjective confirmation. Intersubjective confirmation recognizes that all “objective” data are simply those available to discussion among the community of scientists and scholars, enabling consensus decisions about whether to regard any observation as accurate and “true.” Truth, in this new view, is always intersubjective, not objective. What has been called a “view from nowhere,” the older objectivation position, as physicist Erwin Schrodinger had noted, is impossible. There is always a perspective, always a subject who makes an observation. This new science that admits subjectivity has been extraordinarily creative in devising ways of inferring the experience of another, and exploring biological and other correlates of subjective experience. This new science asks such questions as what differentiates aware from unaware mental processes? How is it that we can be aware of being aware, what scientists and philosophers call meta-awareness? What characterizes and contributes to unusual states of awareness? There are also questions now being asked that have obvious relevance for meditation practitioners. In what way does our meditation practice cultivate awareness? How might the awareness that we develop in meditation practice help liberate us from suffering, including past trauma, painful memories or painful present experience, consuming reactions of fear and anger, as well as the constraints constructed by our self-narratives? These are questions that have drawn my own interest for more than a half century. From research on the psychophysiology of sleep and dreaming as a graduate student, I began to understand the processes by which daytime experience found its way into the phantasms of dream narratives. And, I witnessed through all- night observation how the striking shifts in synchronized brain electrical activity could demarcate unique sleep stages, with their particular correlates in mental processes. New technologies allowed me to collaborate in brain imaging studies of the processes by which we can be aware of our own, and infer another’s mental activity. And, studies conducted in the clinic enabled me to ask how these processes are disrupted in brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s, through experiments exploring what brain and other body activities correspond with conscious versus apparently non-conscious phenomena. In the last several years of my research career, I was privileged in having the opportunity to inquire about how such bodily correlates of consciousness manifest in the course of long- and short-term meditation practice. Today, I would like to focus on questions about what it is that we are aware of, how awareness is multi-faceted, and in what ways the cultivation of awareness in meditation practice might affect how we meet the challenges of this pandemic era. So, first, what does it mean to say that we are aware? We each likely have a sense that we understand this common word, though providing a specific definition can be difficult. One definition, offered by the Merriam-Webster dictionary is that awareness is knowledge and understanding that something is happening. This generally fits our common sense of awareness. To be aware is to know in a way that seems sensible, conveying meaning. Not some booming, buzzing confusion that 19th century founder of academic psychology, William James, posited to characterize the awareness of newborn infants, but rather awareness of meaningful phenomena, … sensation, for example, that is quickly and automatically categorized in our awareness as trees, birds, thoughts , feelings, and all else. “Awareness,” often used as a synonym for consciousness, seems to be the ocean we are always swimming in while we are awake.