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. We take awareness for granted. Try a quick experiment. Close your eyes and silently ask yourself, "Am I aware right now?" Did any among you answer, "no"? Any time we ask ourselves this question, the answer is always “yes.” So much so that asking the question seems silly, the answer a kind of obvious tautology. In fact, awareness seems so ever- present, save for deep, dreamless sleep and chemically-induced anesthesia, that it’s difficult to even imagine being awake and not being aware. And, it feels like awareness provides a kind of direct and rather complete access to an independent world that is "out there," separate from this me “in here.”
Take visual awareness, for example. I open my eyes and I am aware of a highly detailed world, full and complete, seamless and without gaps … trees, flowers, animals, buildings, other people. I move my gaze, and even more of this world is revealed, again seamless and complete. Our common sense of awareness also seems to include an implicit sense of self and of volition. It is not just “awareness,” but a sense of it being "my awareness," feeling to be different from someone else's awareness. And, it seems like only that of which I am aware, is what I can take action upon. It doesn't feel like I can exercise volitional action upon that of which I'm not aware. But, is this really how it is? Is this the full story?
Imagine that you are sitting in front of a video screen on which you are seeing two quickly alternating photos of the same airplane, taken from the same angle. First the one photo, then quickly the other, then back to the first, over and over again. I then ask you whether there is anything missing from either of these images. You concentrate, clearly able to see each photo, but the two airplanes look to you to be completely identical, with nothing missing. I then show you the images one at a time, for a longer time with each. One appears as a complete commercial passenger airplane of the kind you have often seen. The other, however, shown alone without the image alternation, you now clearly perceive to be missing one wing. Now, this is a significant and consequential difference between the two airplanes. I would not want to board the airplane missing one wing.
This is a phenomenon demonstrated in a large number of similar visual perception experiments, revealing what is known as "change blindness.” This change blindness is seen even in experiments done in everyday situations. In one such experiment, a confederate of the experimenter approaches someone on a street, and engages the stranger in a conversation. Then, two workmen carrying a large door panel walk between the confederate and the stranger, temporarily blocking the confederate from the stranger’s view. While this happens, a different confederate quickly replaces the original one, continuing the same conversation, but now a rather different looking person. Surprisingly, about half of all participants in this experiment don’t notice that they have resumed talking to an entirely different person. Another example, that I suspect is familiar to many of you, involves visually tracking a ball being passed between players on a basketball court. While attending to the ball, most observers fail to notice someone dressed in a gorilla costume walking across the court. With apologies to the film about the late wildlife biologist Dian Fossey, this experiment is often referred to as “gorillas in our midst.”
This phenomenon has been termed “sustained inattentional blindness,” which refers to the failure to notice unexpected changes when attention is directed elsewhere. Change blindness and sustained inattentional blindness demonstrate that our visual experience of a seemingly complete and seamless world is, in part, an illusion. Our attention samples from all that is potentially available to our sensory systems, and we are constantly creating aspects of our visual awareness, filling in blanks, based on expectation formed from past experience. Visual awareness creates the experience of a full, seamless world when we move our gaze, or a scene rapidly shifts and changes, even though what is selected from the initial sensory aspects of vision is partial, fragmentary, incomplete, or contrary to expectation. Visual awareness appears to be co-creating the world we phenomenally experience, rather than providing some veridical representation of a world that independently exists “out there.”
Chilean neuroscientists Humberto Maturana and the late Francisco Varela, in whose honor our Upaya Symposium is named, applied their theory of autopoietic, or self-producing, systems, originally proposed to describe the interdependent processes and structures common in all life forms, to understanding awareness, in what is referred to as the Santiago Theory of Cognition. According to Maturana and Varela, we do not “represent” an independently existing world, as previous theories of awareness had proposed. Rather, in their words, we interdependently “bring forth a world.” This world we bring forth in awareness is enacted by our movement through environments, as Francisco would often say, we create a path in the walking. And, it is embodied, always involving the entirety of our bodily processes, not just brain, including those that participate in what we call emotion.
Phenomena such as change blindness, though replicable across different research laboratories, may not be a fixed characteristic of our human biology. Our attention and its consequences for awareness may be plastic, modifiable by experience, particularly by practice. Interestingly, though the research evidence on this is far from conclusive, it has been reported that experienced meditators, compared to non-meditators, tend to show less change blindness (Hodgins, H.S., & Adair, K.C. (2010). Attentional processes and mediation. Consciousness and Cognition, 19, 872-878.). I’ll come back to questions about meditation and awareness in a few minutes.
But for now, what about our common sense of the tight linkage between awareness and volitional action? That sense that we can engage purposive action regarding only that of which we are aware. Let's stay with visual awareness, and consider an example from scientific studies of persons who are rendered blind in one portion of their visual field, caused by stroke or other sources of damage to part of the visual cortex at the back of the brain. Typically, the subjective experience of these persons is that they are blind in one half or one quarter of their visual field. If I ask such a person to look straight ahead, and I create some visual signal in that portion of their visual field where they are blind, then asking this person to tell me what they see, they will predictably say, "I see nothing." However, what happens if I ask this person to point to where something might have occurred in the blind portion of their visual field? They, again predictably, will protest, finding the request strange. "How can I point to what I cannot see?" they often ask. But, politely requesting that they play along and humor me, just making a guess, I would be able to show that they can, and rather precisely, point to the location of that which they cannot see, for which they have no phenomenal or subjective awareness. Other examples of this so-called “blindsight” phenomenon include making accurate forced-choice discernments in decisions about images briefly flashed in a portion of the visual field in which the person lacks phenomenal awareness. So, here we have rather accurate volitional action and decisions without visual awareness, the linkage between awareness and volition being considerably less tight than our common sense would have predicted.
So, how should we think about the examples I just described? Could we speak of a kind of awareness, able to inform volitional decisions, of which we are, paradoxically, not aware? And, what kind of awareness is cultivated in meditation practice that might render us less susceptible to phenomena such as change blindness? Though our language makes a binary distinction between aware and unaware, perhaps something more nuanced is occurring.
British psychologist, consciousness researcher, and long-time meditation practitioner Susan Blackmore, in her 2009 book, Zen and the Art of Consciousness (Oxford, UK: Oneworld), notes that thoughts and perceptions seem to arise as endless comings and goings, out of what she calls “a void of threads with backward extension.” By “threads with backward extension,” she is pointing to the experience that upon becoming aware of some sound or some thought, there is a sense that these experiences have actually been ongoing, somehow observed but seemingly without an observer, without a sense of a me who is observing. For example, relaxing in the backyard, I become aware of the sound of birdsong. Though there is some sense that I am just becoming aware of that sound in that moment, there is also a sense that something or someone, though not really feeling to be me, was actually in some way aware of that birdsong all along, before that moment that I sensed this “I” to be aware of it.
Cognitive scientists make a distinction between having an experience, termed experiential consciousness, and knowing that you are having an experience, termed meta-awareness. As Jonathan Schooler, one of this year’s Varela Symposium faculty, has documented, people frequently lack meta-awareness, for example, of the fact that they are mind wandering while reading, and therefore they fail to stop and refocus attention on the reading. Such mind-wandering, as most of you have experienced, is pervasive, some research indicating that it occurs about half the time when we are engaged in a task.
In Zazen and related mindfulness meditation practices, we cultivate meta- awareness. Resting attention on some object, whether the breath or the broad field of all that arises in the mental continuum, at some point we notice that mind has wandered. And, we recall our intention, with openness, curiosity, and acceptance, gently bringing attention back to our focus. John Dunne, another of this year’s Varela Symposium faculty, along with Evan Thompson, and Jonathan Schooler (2019. Mindful meta-awareness: Sustained and non-propositional. Current Opinion in Psychology, 28, 307-311) have pointed out in a recent paper that meta- awareness seems an essential aspect of most forms of mindfulness practice. And, accumulating research indicates that meta-awareness is key to the documented effects of mindfulness training, including what has been called “decentering,” a shifting of our experiential perspective from one that is self-referential onto an experience itself, and what has been called “dereification” or metacognitive insight, an experiencing of thoughts as simply mental events, and not as the things that they seem to represent.
Decentering, shifting our experiential perspective from one that is self-referential onto experience itself, is something familiar to Zen practitioners. In our practice, we come to see the illusory nature of our sense of self as unchanging and independent. In the words of Japanese Soto Zen founder Eihei Dogen, from the Genjokoan fascicle of his Shobogenzo, :
“To study the Buddha Way is to study the self; To study the self is to forget the self; To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things.”
In other words, shifting from a self-referential perspective onto experience itself.
Dereification, as several of you will recognize, also has resonance with other Mahayana Buddhist teaching. A short gatha near the end of the Diamond Sutra is commonly translated into English as:
“So you should view this fleeting world – A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream, A flash of lightening in a summer cloud, A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.”
This is a poetic expression of dereification. All that we experience in our awareness is impermanent and not what it appears to be.
Several neuroscientific experiments shed light on the biological processes corresponding with the meta-awareness of meditation practice, as it relates to decentering and dereification. Most of us have experienced how often our own mind-wandering is associated with a self-referential perspective, reviewing memory of events in our personal past or imagining future activities in which we might engage. Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging studies conducted by Kalina Christof, another of this year’s Varela Symposium faculty, have found mind-wandering to be correlated with activity in front and back midline brain areas. These brain areas have been referred to as the default-mode network, since their activation has been observed as the seeming “default,” when participants are not engaged in some task. Activity in these areas has also been associated with self-referential mental processes, and has thus come to be thought of as involved in how the mind-brain creates a sense of self.
Neuroscientist Judson Brewer and colleagues have found this brain default-mode network to be relatively deactivated in experienced meditators (Brewer, J.A., et al. (2012). Meditation experience is associated with differences in default mode network activity and connectivity. PNAS, www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1112029108.). This is consistent with other evidence for decreased mind-wandering in experienced meditators. Meditation training appears to reduce the extent to which the practitioner becomes “caught up” in or “clings to” the self-focus that is often involved in mind-wandering. And, this decentering may begin to occur relatively early with meditation practice. It’s been found that those receiving only eight weeks of meditation training are able to more flexibly disengage from brain region activation patterns associated with self-focus, and return to activation of brain areas associated with present-centered, embodied, experiential awareness. (Farb, N.A.S., Segal, Z.V., Mayberg, H., Bean, J., McKeon, D., Fatima, Z, & Anderson, A.K. (2007). Attending to the present: mindfulness meditation reveals distinct neural modes of self-reference. SCAN, 2, 313-322.). Such functional brain imaging findings are consistent with the decentering discussed buy Dunne, Thompson, and Schooler. The dereification which they also describe, an experiencing of thoughts as mental events, and not as the things that they seem to represent, is instantiated through meta-awareness in meditation practice, when we disengage from a distraction or from mind- wandering.
Our facility at such disengagement, what Japanese Zen teacher Kosho Uchiyama had referred to as an opening of the hand of thought (Uchiyama, K. (2004). Opening the hand of thought. Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications), appears to strengthen over long-term meditation practice. Wendy Hasenkamp, another of this year’s Varela Symposium faculty, has found length of meditation experience to correlate with increased connectivity between brain areas important for attention, and areas in the midline front of the brain associated with voluntary attention shifting. (Hasenkamp, W., & Barsalou, L.W. (2012). Effects of meditation experience on functional connectivity of distributed brain networks. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 6, doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2012.00038). This connectivity is likely important for disengaging from any mental formation.
It seems to me that the decentering and dereification facilitated by the meta- awareness we enhance in Zazen and other mindfulness practices, are cornerstones for a life less dominated by reactivity, even in our present time of invisible threat and uncertainty. Shifting from a self-referential perspective, fewer of the events we experience are likely to seem so threatening. We can begin to more clearly discern real immediate threats from distant imagined ones. And, it may become easier to see how such actions as social distancing and wearing a mask are as much about protecting others as protecting our self.
And, with dereification, more often experiencing thoughts as just thoughts, we are less compelled to be reactively driven by what arises in mind. Including thoughts such as, “I just can’t stand this social distancing for another minute.” Mindfully aware of the moment-by-moment arising of sensations, perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and opening awareness to noticing this flow of constantly changing mental processes, the meta-awareness of meditation practice, shifting our perspective from self-focus, and allowing a release from the mistaken reification of experience, we can realize the cessation of reactivity, however briefly, able to perceive more clearly, less biased by reactions of fear, anger, and desire for things to be different than how they are, even in the midst of threat, uncertainty, and loss.
So, I would like to close this talk with a favorite short poem from the 18th century Japanese Zen teacher, Hakuin:
“The monkey is reaching For the moon in the water. Until death overtakes him He’ll never give up. If he’d let go the branch and Disappear in the deep pool, The whole world would shine With dazzling pureness.”
Gassho.