Tag: Zen

Categories
Reality Science Zen

A look into Being You by Anil Seth

The mystery of consciousness – how minds arise in the material world – has perplexed me for most of my adult life. This question drew me to both Zen Buddhism and neuroscience when I was in college. Still today, I believe that it is important to understand why consciousness exists – because the nature of consciousness, and of our self, can tell us a great deal about what we truly are, in the deepest sense. o, it is no surprise that I was very excited when I came across Being You by Dr. Anil Seth, a new book on the science of consciousness.

Being You by Anil Seth

In the book, Dr. Seth presents a synthesis of current research on consciousness, with a focus on his one work (primarily in the area of perception). In the prologue, Seth begins with a description of a time when he went under general anesthesia.

Experiences of anesthesia are not exactly common (many people have likely never had a surgical procedure that requires general anesthesia. Or, they have only had one, if any). But, general anesthesia is also not exactly rare. Personally, I have been put under anesthesia twice, but not since I had my wisdom teeth removed when I was a teen.

So, given the “ordinariness” of this procedure, I was impressed with how Seth used it to tease out the problem of consciousness:

Five years ago, for the third time in my life, I ceased to exist… I returned, drowsy and disoriented but definitely there. No time had seemed to have passed… I was simply not there, a premonition of the total oblivion of death, and, in its absence of anything, a strangely comforting one.

Anil Seth, “Being You” (pages 1-2)

From this (rather unsettling) start, Seth goes on to lay out the problem of consciousness: how does our consciousness emerge from the activity of a brain? He acknowledges that many other researchers and scholars have struggled with the “hard problem” of consciousness, which he introduces with a quote from Dr. David Chalmers:

It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it arises. Why should physical processing give rise to an inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.

David Chalmers, “Facing up to the problem of consciousness”

This problem, a kind of philosophical koan, is one that has gripped me for as long as I can remember. As a college student, I vividly recall long walks on the unpaved roads near my home, looking across empty corn and soybean fields at the setting sun. I struggled to understand, then and now, – why do I experience this light as a rich set of colors?  Why does the winter breeze feel cool? How does my subjective experience actually come from the activity of the brain?

Sign up for our newsletter to get our latest essays delivered to your inbox. We don’t spam! We will only use this address to send you our latest posts and news.

In this book, Seth recommends that we set the hard problem aside, and to focus on what he frames as the “real problem.” The real problem frames the goals for a science of consciousness to “explain, predict, and control the phenomenological properties of consciousness” (p. 25).

While at some level, this feels like Seth is dodging the important question, I left feeling that this could be a valuable mindset to bring to consciousness research. He made an interesting comparison to early theories about life, some of which held that life required something extra, “a spark of life.”

But, a focus on describing and detailing the basic properties of life and living systems has eliminated a need for something “extra” to explain life. As Seth summarizes:

As the details [of life] became filled in – and they are still being filled in – not only did the basic mystery of “what is life” fade away, the very concept of life ramified so that “being alive” is no longer thought of as a single all-or-nothing property… Life became naturalized and all the more fascinating for having become so.

Anil Seth, Being You, p. 32

I don’t know that the consciousness research will follow a similar path, and let go of the hard problem in the end. But, I think that Seth makes a strong argument that focusing on the real problem will help consciousness research move forward. His own book gathers many of the fruits of this approach.  

Is seeing believing?

As a Zen practitioner and neuroscientist, one section of the book that I found particularly compelling was how Seth looked at the contents of our conscious experience – essentially our actual subjective experiences. He focuses on our perceptions of the external world at first, and points to how our perceptions of reality are limited. The argument he uses is pretty much consistent with what I’ve written here about how our senses are limited, and misleading, and about the limits of our ability to truly experience “reality.” He argues, for example, that all of our sensory experience of the world – the sights, sounds, smells, etc. that we experience – are not really faithful representations of the world, but are our “best guesses” – in a statistical sense – about what is out there in the world.

This is easily demonstrated in visual illusions, where our experience of color is not determined just by the wavelengths of light that are falling on the retina in our eyes, but also by the context. For example, in the checkerboard below, both boxes A and B really are the same color, but we perceive A as being much darker because of the surrounding context:

Checkerboard Illusion – Mental Floss – “5 Color Illusions and Why They Work“

But, there is an important difference in emphasis in Seth’s approach, compared to how I would normally describe perception. Usually, I would say that my experience of the world (what I see, hear, taste, etc.) is a representation of the sensory data that that I am receiving. It is how my brain is representing the information coming in from my sensory nerves. I would accept that the brain is attempting to correct for missing information, or context (as in the visual illusion above), so of course we should not trust our perceptions to be direct measurements of the world. The goal of the brain is to produce a useful representation.

But, I would normally accept that what I am experiencing is the incoming sensory information itself. That view, the one I held, assumes that perception is as a process where our senses provide a window onto the world. That window is not fully transparent, certainly. The window controls what information gets through, and transforms or distorts it.

But, Seth goes farther, I think, and in an important way. He argues that our experiences of the world, the contents of our consciousness, is not the sensory information itself. Seth points out that the brain has no direct link to “reality” – it is stuck inside the skull. And the information that the brain receives from the senses is only partial, and often imprecise. So, at each moment the brain must make its best guess about what is out there, in the world, to try to explain the (unreliable, incomplete) sensory signals that are received.

In this view, what we actually experience – the feeling of texture, the color of the sky – is not the sensory information itself. Instead, we experience the predictions that the brain is making, the brain’s best guess about what is out in the world. The sensory information itself, in this view, is mainly used to verify if our guess (a prediction) about the world is true. For this reason, Seth describes our experience of the external world as a controlled hallucination, one where the brain is creating a set of predictions (also referred to as “top-down” – that is, from the brain) that are compared to incoming sensory information (also referred to as “bottom-up” – that is, from the sensory organs).

It seems as though the world is revealed directly to our conscious minds through our sensory organs. With this mindset, it is natural to think of perception as a process of bottom-up feature detection – a “reading” of the world around us. But what we actually perceive is a top-down, inside-out neuronal fantasy that is reined in by reality, not a transparent window onto whatever that reality may be.

Anil Seth, Being You, p. 88

Seth describes this as a controlled hallucination, because he argues that the brain is always making these kinds of predictions. And, when the process of making “top-down” predictions becomes disconnected from those sensory signals, that is when we would start to experience real hallucinations.

But, and for me this was a critical point, Seth points out that the line between hallucination and accurate perception is not a sharp one, but a matter of degree. The brain is constantly making predictions, and what we experience are the predictions. When they are tied to the sensory data, then we would say that a person is accurately perceiving the world. But in both cases, they make up the contents of our conscious experience.

You could even say that we’re all hallucinating all of the time. It’s just that when we agree about our hallucinations, that’s what we call reality.

Anil Seth, Being You, p. 92

Under this view, hallucinogenic drugs may decrease the impact of sensory data, allowing top-down predictions (our best guesses) overwhelm our experience. While Seth does not give much attention to other states, this could also explain some of the properties of dreaming. Or even the kinds of hallucinations that can be common during intensive meditation (makyō):

The makyō I’ve experienced include the sense that my hands in the zazen mudra were huge (a persistent one early on), faces in the wall I sat facing (a particularly beautiful Avalokiteshvara), and the piercing song of a bird coming from the far side of a lake perhaps three miles away.

Dōshō Port, “Is Awakening (Kenshō) a Hallucination (Makyō)?”

Are we more or less than beasts? Than machines?

I found Being You to be a worthwhile read, and there were many other sections that I found personally relevant (as a Zen practitioner, and as a neuroscientist).  I would recommend the book to others, because it was one of those books that showed me the world from a new perspective.

But, there were other sections of the book that I would have liked to see Seth develop further. One of these areas was Seth’s presentation of his overall theory of consciousness, and our sense of self – what he calls the “beast machine” theory. After arguing that our perceptions of the world are fundamentally controlled hallucinations, Seth makes a similar case about emotions and interoception (sensations from the body).

Around this point, Seth introduces a theory of consciousness, and the self, that is grounded very strongly in our status as living being, and in our biological drive to stay alive. We can easily take life for granted, but in reality, keeping even one cell in our body functioning is a delicate dance. How much more difficult when that body has trillions of cells? Seth argues that this drive, to live, is at the core of our brain function:

Evolutionarily speaking, brains are not “for” rational thinking, linguistic communication, or even for perceiving the world. The most fundamental reason any organism has a brain – or any kind of nervous system – is to help it stay alive, through making sure its physiological essential variables remain within the tight ranges compatible with its continued survival.

Anil Seth, Being You, p. 196

Working from this premise, Seth develops the “beast machine” theory of consciousness (and self), which he states as “Our conscious experiences of the world around us, and of ourselves within it, happen with, and because of our living bodies.” (p. 181) 

I cannot do justice to the argument here, certainly, but I feel that in this area, he has drawn too narrow of a foundation. Staying alive is a key goal for any living being, and to be certain, it is not an easy process. At every moment, our bodies must work to push back against entropy.

But, is that our only goal, evolutionarily speaking? 

Perhaps, but many of the behaviors we engage in are only very weakly related to our physiological survival. Some motivations fit very well: consider the drive to eat, drink, find shelter (all of which help keep our bodies in an optimal range). But what of our motivations for exploration, sex, and parental care. What of the drives that support our social communities? These motivations might somehow serve physiological goals (keeping our body alive), but the direct benefit to our own physiological state seems tenuous.  Seth draws one explanation for exploration (as a way of better predicting what you’ll need to do in the future to protect yourself), but I felt even that link was thin.

To flesh out Seth’s theory of consciousness and self, I would have appreciated seeing him integrate more of what we know about other systems in the brain, besides perception. For instance, while there is some attention to decision-making (in the chapter, “Degrees of Freedom”), this part of the book could be developed further. For the interested reader, I would recommend Dr. A. David Redish’s book, The Mind Within the Brain for a good overview of decision-making systems in the brain (full disclosure: Dave was my PhD adviser, so I’m not entirely objective!). For those interested in a Buddhist perspective on the mind (focusing on cognitive and evolutionary psychology), I would also recommend Robert Wright’s excellent book, Why Buddhism is True.

And, while these concerns might seem technical, or trivial, I think they do matter a great deal. Or could, some day.

If we believe that consciousness is intimately tied to our status as living creatures, then we will have concerns about extending any moral protections to non-living beings. And at the moment, that makes perfect sense. But, what about in the future?

Seth uses the popular examples of the android Ava from the movie Ex Machina, and the androids in the series Westworld (both of examples of humans treating their creations quite terribly). By centering his theory on our status as living things, Seth seems unwilling to accept that these (fictional) creatures could be conscious. And he wonders about these kinds of cases: “Will we feel that these new agencies are actually conscious, as well as actually intelligent – even when we know that they are nothing more than lines of computer code?” (p. 269-70).

Seth does state clearly at other points in the text that he is claiming that he believes machine consciousness to be impossible. But, the tone of the book seems skeptical of the potential for machine consciousness, and I worry about that. If you read Being You, I would ask that you look at that part of the book very carefully. If you walk away from this book holding on to a theory that will make it harder for us to recognize machine consciousness, if it ever emerges.

If you end up believing that the take-away message of Ex Machina and Westworld is that we should be worried about being too nice to androids, I think you missed the point.

As work in artificial intelligence proceeds, there is no guarantee if and when one of these robots/androids/programs would become conscious, but if we don’t admit that it is possible, then I do worry that we will unintentionally (callously?) be introducing new suffering into the world.

And, if we are truly committed to freeing all sentient beings from duhkha, we should at least be ready to pay attention to the androids.

Categories
Ethics Zen

Our responsibility to life

In the last few months, as struggles in the U.S. have intensified over access to abortion, I have found myself conflicted as I reflected on the logic of my own attitudes. On the one hand, I see that access to abortion is an important part of reproductive medicine. But, I can appreciate that drawing a single, firm line to define when abortions could be allowed is difficult.

The life of a living thing begins when conditions are right, and will come to an end when conditions change. Much as a whirlpool emerges from the turbulent flow of a river, we exist as a temporary, dynamic structure. Our life is never really separate from the universe, in the same way that a whirlpool is not separate from the water of the river.

And, as every whirlpool stills eventually, it is natural for each life to come to an end. But, it is also natural, and right, to cherish our time as a living being – and I believe deeply that each life is a precious treasure. But, each human life, from conception to birth and beyond, is a process without sharp transitions. Each life takes its shape and structure gradually, much as a whirlpool begins with a gentle rotation, and only slowly takes its mature form. Where then does abortion fit into our responsibility to life?

Photo credit: Alex Wright, Children playing at sunset, Ko Tao, Thailand

Thinking about abortion as a Zen practitioner, one recent piece that I found interesting was by Sallie Jiko Tisdale about Buddhist views on abortion. Tisdale considers the tension that we see in some Buddhist traditions, observing:

… the conclusion of Orthodox Buddhist scholars has long been that a human being appears at the moment of conception. Because human birth is a rare and precious gift, to deprive a being of the opportunity is a grave mistake. Therefore, a one-day-old embryo must be accorded the same protection as living human beings.

Sallie Jiko Tisdale, Is There a Buddhist View on Abortion?

However, this view – of the absolute sanctity of human life – contrasts with some Buddhist teachings that human life is impure, or to be avoided:

Traditional Buddhism is anti-birth, based in a celibate and solitary life outside the family. Sexual desire is said to turn the wheel of samsara, and procreative sex is a greater transgression for a monastic than nonprocreative sex. The uterus is a disgusting place and babies begin to decay at birth, yet women are told to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the embryo… A human body is so rare and precious that we must protect it from the day of conception? … Wouldn’t the highest form of practice be to create more opportunities for human birth?

Sallie Jiko Tisdale, Is There a Buddhist View on Abortion?

In that essay, I was struck by the line, “Wouldn’t the highest form of practice be to create more opportunities for human birth?”

I put this question to myself: if I believe that to live as a human is a precious gift, then do I see an ethical obligation to increase human life, an imperative for procreation?  You can find similar arguments in other religious traditions, where procreation can be framed as a duty (and here, I think of the conservative Christian “Quiverfull” movement which received attention a few years back).

Personally, neither position – that procreation as a duty, or as a defilement – resonates with me. In the end, what is the real difference between these extremes?

Our human life is a rare opportunity. As we look out into the universe around us, we see great beauty. But, we have not yet seen other people, intelligent beings, looking back at us. Our own galaxy has hundreds of billions of stars. There may be other suns in our galaxy (or beyond) that have planets with life on them, and even intelligent life. However, from what we have seen so far, the universe does not appear to be bursting with life. And, intelligent life may be quite rare. In so many places, the flowering of the universe plays out to an empty room.

The life that we have on this planet, then, seems to be a remarkable gift. And, it would have been a terrible shame, I think, if our planet had been yet another lifeless world. If the course of the river of the universe had run entirely straight, with not a single whirlpool, here on Earth. What if not even one person was ever to have taken a deep and authentic delight in this world? How tragic that would have been.

But on the other hand, what if the river of the universe was a chaotic, churning rapids? Full of whirlpools that came into a crowded existence, interfering with one another, full of suffering? We have seen great suffering where humanity increases beyond the ability to support each person. What benefit is there to bringing life into a world that will not support it?

Influenced by my Zen practice, I would love to see the universe more full of life, bursting with it. But, only to the extent that we can bring an end to suffering, to duhkha. Thinking about this delicate balance, I am reminded of a quote from Paul Broks:

To disturb someone from a state of non-existence is a terrible responsibility.

Paul Broks, Into the Silent Land

Broks was not advising us to avoid our responsibility to life. Rather, he was both acknowledging the precariousness of our life, while celebrating the preciousness of life. And the seriousness of creation, the responsibility we have to children. That resonates with me as a parent. I enjoy so much the delight that children take in the world, in all of the possibilities that their futures hold. And I am afraid, too, of where some of those paths may lead. The responsibility of a parent is awe-inspiring. Momentous.

Any conversations we have about abortion, about reproductive medicine in general, should be grounded in this responsibility to our children, to all of life. To all of children who we have called out of the void of non-existence. And, I don’t think that rigid rules (allowing or restricting abortion or any other reproductive medicine) will entirely satisfy this responsibility.

In this vein, I have appreciated a passage in Kōshō Uchiyama’s book, “Opening the Hand of Thought,” where he describes advising a young woman to get an abortion. Uchiyama felt that ending the pregnancy was wrong, but he also believed that it was the right thing to do in her case. And, if she would have suffered negative consequences for that decision, he was willing to suffer right along side of her:

… it’s not enough for a bodhisattva of the Mahayana to just uphold the precepts. There are times when you have to break them, too. It’s just that when you do, you have to do so with the resolve of also being willing to accept whatever consequences might follow.

Kōshō Uchiyama, “Opening the Hand of Thought”, from “The Bodhisattva Vow”

Most importantly, I feel that our responsibility is to care for life. That we nurture the flower that is human existence, for as long as it can bloom. And that we help those humans, and all sentient beings, escape from suffering and to take delight in existence.

In the end, I don’t know what our laws specifically about abortion should be. But our responsibility, one of the bodhisattva’s vows, is to free all sentient beings from duhkha (suffering). Knowing how to act skillfully in any specific case will require our complete engagement, and may lead us to avoid simple rules.

Categories
Meditation Science

How do we become our best self?

mudra

Many of us come to our meditation practice with the hope that we can improve ourselves, that we can become our best self. This is a natural, normal place to begin. But, in Zen Buddhism, we often encounter teachings that ask us to examine our motivation for our practice very closely, lest it lead us to greater suffering.

mudra
Credit: Kevin, “Day 47 – Zazen“

Note: a version of this essay was published recently by The Tattooed Buddha

For instance, consider the First Noble truth in Buddhism, that that human life is characterized by duhkha (often translated as suffering, but dissatisfaction is closer). Steve Hagan, in “Buddhism Plain and Simple” explains that our suffering has three major sources. We cannot avoid pain (physical and mental). Change is core part of our experience (so pleasure is fleeting). And, if we identify our life with our self (our existence as a separate being, one thread of identity that traces its way from birth to death), then we can suffer greatly as we worry about when that thread will be broken. ⁠

If we do not understand the causes of duhkha, or dissatisfaction, in a deep way, then our approach to our meditation practice may just continue our attempts to avoid pain, to resist change, and to turn away from the knowledge that our lives will end someday. Instead of working towards freeing ourselves from duhkha, our practice could end up being cosmetic, something closer to spiritual plastic surgery.

And in fact, the comparison to surgery seems appropriate here. In medicine, we have made great strides in our ability to heal the body, and repair injury. But, at our local dermatologist’s office this week, I was struck by the number of advertisements for purely cosmetic treatments. Rather than focusing on treating a medical condition, or conditions such as acne, the focus felt to be on fighting against the inevitable decline of our bodies. Or, helping us meet some standard of beauty that we felt we have fallen short of.  

And, this seemed like just more duhkha – any benefits we might obtain will fundamentally be unfulfilling, if we do not realize that we cannot stop aging entirely, or that there are limits to how much we can modify our bodies.

In our lifetimes, we are going to see more of these kinds of advertisements, and we will see more that reach past our external appearance to try and shape our minds as well. Even today, our ability to repair the nervous system is improving, and cochlear implants for individuals with hearing loss are a good example. More interventions are on the horizon (for individuals with vision loss, or paralysis, for example). ⁠

And, there is considerable promise to intervene far beyond sensation (hearing, vision) and movement (paralysis). You may have seen a story recently, about a case where direct brain stimulation was used to help a young woman who had a long history of treatment-resistant major depression (for a good summary, see this summary by Dr. Francis Collins).

Credit: Ken Probst, University of California San Francisco

This case is remarkable, and one that will be very important as we work to create new, and more effective, options for mental health treatment. ⁠

Some of these treatments will change our lives for the better, as reconstructive surgery has done. But, following closely behind that work will be those companies that want to sell us all manner of neuroscience enhancements – perhaps as a kind of cosmetic surgery for the brain.

Recently, I listened to an episode of Shankar Vedantam’s Hidden Brain, that captured this tension – our interest in using new technology to improve our daily lives, and be more effective. In the second half of the episode, Vedantam visits George Mason University, to learn about research using transcranial direct current stimulation (dTCS) to help regular people improve their ability to focus their attention after being distracted. In the piece, he describes the allure of this kind of neurostimulation in a way that seems very familiar:

… the idea of running an electrical current through my head is not exactly appealing. But the possibility that I could juggle the many demands on my time? That’s irresistible.

Shankar Vedantam, “Work 2.0: Life, Interrupted” starting at about 34:56

In recent years, many groups have been studying the effectiveness of tDCS to influence our cognition and emotion. The basic technique is quite simple and essentially uses a battery to send a very weak current through the brain.

While research like that described in the episode have shown that tDCS has some potential to improve some cognitive skills, Dr. Melissa Scheldrup (who was a graduate student at the time), expressed hesitation about using the technology casually:

I personally don’t think that tDCS should be used in somebody’s everyday life. It should be used as a tool to look at the underlying physiological process. So, I don’t think that everybody should have a helmet that has this… it’s like cheating.

Melissa Scheldrup, “Work 2.0: Life, Interrupted” starting at about 47:54

While I personally am not as worried about this technology becoming a type of cheating, I do have concerns about adopting this technology to help us be better workers. I worry that this may just be a shortcut, that stops us from looking more deeply at why we feel we need to be better workers.

But, many companies are pressing forward with technology aimed at neuroenhancement. For instance, I recently came across an article from the Huffington Post from back in 2015. The story was about a device produced by the company Thync to help us decrease anxiety using transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) of the vagus nerve. The first line was interesting: “What if you could zap your brain into a state of calm or energy with only the push of a button?”

Indeed, what if we could?

Thync’s stimulator was based on at least one interesting research study (published in 2015 in Scientific Reports), but their early consumer devices never really caught on.

Today, Thync seem to be marketing some new products, like one that they call the “FeelZing” energy patch. An ad on their site promises “Energy and focus boost for 4 hours,” and “Reduced mental fatigue,” where a dose of electrical stimulation can give you a boost without needing to use caffeine or other stimulants. Images in their promotional video show a person apparently in seated meditation. The narrative appears to imply that the FeelZing gives the benefits of meditation (energy? focusing?) without needing to resort to caffeine or stimulants.

Personally, I find this work, to apply research findings to better our lives, to be very interesting. And, to also be fundamentally flawed if we use them in isolation. It feels that some of this work is focused on treating the symptoms of our dissatisfaction, rather than the root cause of the disease of suffering. To really benefit from any of these technologies, we need to look at the root of our suffering. Otherwise, we may just be leaning more heavily into duhkha.

And here, I think that some advice on Zen practice may be helpful. While there is no perfect way for us to ensure that our meditation practice is not just more duhkha, I have appreciated advice from Zen teachers such as Dainin Katagiri. Of zazen (the practice of seated meditation), Katagiri said that “Some Zen teachers tell us how helpful it is for us to do zazen… But I said just the opposite: zazen is useless” (Dainin Katagiri, “Returning to Silence”).

Meditation is useless?  This may seem like a contradiction, to recommend that we pursue a useless practice. But, the important point is that when our meditation practice is motivated by what we expect to “get” out of it (the benefits), then this can be an obstacle to ending suffering.

In a similar vein, Charlotte Joko Beck advised us that the fruits of a meditation practice may not be those we expected when we first sat down:

What we get out of practice is being more awake. Being more alive. Knowing our mischievous tendencies so well that we don’t need to visit them on others. We learn that it’s never okay to yell at somebody just because we feel upset. Practice helps us realize where our life is stagnant.

Charlotte Joko Beck, “Nothing Special: Living Zen”

What I have appreciated about these approaches to Zen practice is the call to be aware, as much as we can, of when our motivations are driven by duhkha. And, to still act (to continue meditating, to continue to learn about our bodies and the brain).  Katagiri pointed out to how we can work to transform our “thirsting desire” – our ambition, our craving to get what we want – into something that benefits all beings:  

According to the story of Zen Master Rinzai’s life, he planted pine trees at the temple for two reasons: one was to make the scenery of the temple more beautiful, and the other was so they would be there for future generations. His activity was based on human thirsting desire, but his purpose was vast, extending in the universe. If you use thirsting desire in a selfish way it is really dangerous, but if you use thirsting desire for the benefit of others, your purpose, your hope extends far.

Dainan Katagiri, “Returning to Silence”

Our desire for pleasure, for power, and to hold off the inherent transiency of life can all lead to suffering. But, if we “know that thirsting desire is something that can be used for all sentient beings”, as Katagiri said, then we can transform that desire and through it, the world. ⁠

If we understand these points, then I think that the fruits of our meditation practice, and from our use of new technologies will lead us to our best self. And, that best self happens to be one that has let go of all of our gaining ideas.

Categories
Featured Meditation

This life is a precious treasure

Frosted zinnia

Recently, I wrote an essay about looking at our lives as humans through the window of metaphor. To see our existence as a complex structure, a pattern that depends on conditions, similar to a whirlpool.

This view of our lives is something that I have found very useful, in helping me explain what we are, and the arc that our lives follow. These metaphors have also given me comfort in my life. But, it would wrong to say that they have removed the sting of death and suffering. And, I have recently found myself worrying that the views in my last essay could be seen as cold, and indifferent when we come to the end of a life.

The very day after I published that last essay, I received a call from a close family member. They had just received some troubling medical news. While not conclusive, a scan had potentially revealed a very serious illness. The month that followed since has been a limbo as we have all waited for more information. And now, once additional tests have confirmed our original fears, we are shifting into trying to learn more about what options might be available.

I would love to be able to tell you that through all of this, that I found myself perfectly prepared for this moment by my meditation practice, by my faith. To be able to tell you that I have handled it calmly, and offered comfort to my relative and their family. To their young child. To my own spouse and children. But, to be completely honest, while I have been able to be present for my family, I have also struggled in deep way ever since I received that call.

I’ve cried more in the past month than probably in all of the past decade. With my spouse, on the phone with my family, alone in my car, in my office. For most of an entire month, this has been with me. In a constant, almost physical way that I am really not used to. Like carrying a heavy stone.

But, if endings are natural, and each life comes to a close when conditions change, then why do we lament the loss of a life? Is our anxiety about loss, or our grief, wrong in some sense?

Feeling stuck in this contradiction, I have thought of a poem by Issa many times over the past several weeks:

The world is a dew drop,
Yes, the world is a dew drop,
And yet, and yet . . .

Kobayashi Issa

⁠Our life as a conscious being, as a single person, is like a whirlpool that depends on the flow of the river and the rocks along the river bed. Our life is like a clear, bright note, trembling in the air, rising as our breath flows across a flute. Each whirlpool will subside. No song carries on forever. It is natural for each to come to an end.

And yet, and yet, it is also natural that we lament: each life is a precious treasure. The grief we feel is an important part of how we honor those lives, and our commitment to the wellbeing of all beings.

In his book, “Buddhism Plain and Simple,” Steve Hagan shared his reflections on the pain of losing a close friend suddenly. And, he pointed to how we must acknowledge that endings, that change, are fundamental to life: “This is human life. We cannot lose sight of it. Weeds will flourish, though we hate them and wish them gone; flowers will fall, though we love them and long for them to remain.“

Frosted zinnia
Zinnias from our garden, wilting suddenly after the first fall frost.

I have been deeply impacted by the teachings of Hagan and other Zen teachers who have not called on us to reject our grief. Rather, they have drawn us back to look more closely at how endings are inextricable from beginnings. And, while we will grieve, we can also see that in a deep, crucial sense, nothing is created in birth or lost in death.

As he reflected on a waterfall he saw in Yosemite National Park, Shunryu Suzuki captured this view well when he said,

… the water does not come down in as one stream, but is separated into many tiny streams. From a distance, it looks like a curtain. And I thought it must be a very difficult experience for each drop of water to come down from the top of such a high mountain… ⁠And it seems to me that our human life may be like this. We have many difficult experiences in our life. But at the same time, I thought, the water was not originally separated, but was one whole river.

Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

Zen practice, similar to a number of other meditation traditions, tries to help us look past our self, and to loosen the hold of our individual ego on how we see our life. But, the goal is not nihilistic, but rather to help us make a deep shift in perspective. Each drop in a waterfall emerges from the same river at the top, and all will merge again at the bottom. ⁠

Hagan, as he considered our desire to prevent or avoid the changes that we don’t want in our lives (loss, death), also pointed back to how the contingency of life is an important part of why it is precious. Considering how we regret seeing the flowers wilt and fade, he wrote:

One solution to this problem is to ignore the real rose and substitute a plastic one, one that never dies (and never lives). But is a plastic rose what we want? No, of course not. We want the real rose. We want the one that dies. We want it because it dies, because it’s fleeting, because it fades. It’s this very quality that makes it precious.

Steve Hagan, Buddhism Plain and Simple

This example that Hagan uses reminds me of many stories in science fiction about immortality. Many of which explore the promise of new technology to greatly extend the human lifespan. Or, to give our consciousness life in a new body (or perhaps in a computer simulation). Greg Egan’s book, “Permutation City,” is a good example, where Egan considers how humans might live if we could “upload” our consciousness to computer simulations.

What I love about Egan’s story is how much attention he gives to the problem that (really) long life, much less immortality, poses for us. How many of us would really be prepared to live for thousands, upon thousands, of years? Probably very few of us could, if we were to keep living in the ways that we do now. Egan thinks very carefully about this problem, and asks what a person would have to give up of themselves, how deeply they have to transform themselves, in order to truly be able to live indefinitely. His answer?  Quite a bit, and that point has resonated with me.

Like Egan, I think that most of us are not really prepared (emotionally, psychologically) to live forever. But, many of us also find the end of a life of a loved one to come too soon, no matter how old a person is. Some of our fascination with immortality, I think, is more motivated by our fear of death, rather than a real desire to exist forever.

I remember talking with my children about some story or movie about immortality, and I said to them that most people were not really looking for immortality, saying something to the effect, “It’s not that people really want to live forever; they are mostly afraid of dying.”  ⁠

An oversimplification, true. But, I think that for me, it captures an important part of how I feel. I don’t want to see the flowers wilt, or to lose the whirlpools. I don’t want the song to end. I know that they can’t go on forever, sure. I hope they will a little longer.

So, I personally have found this last month to be a difficult experience. There will be more tears in our future. And, that is ok. We don’t know how much time we have left together. But we can savor each moment. As Scott McCloud wrote in “The Sculptor,” (a graphic novel that is a beautiful meditation on death and the urge to leave a legacy):

“Every minute is an ocean… let them in… let them all in…”⁠

For me, my practice has been a comfort in this time. It has given me a refuge that I treasure. But, it has not been some kind of emotional insulation. And, I wouldn’t want that: to avoid suffering by cutting off those feelings. Each life is a precious treasure, and I am grateful for the chance to enjoy this one, and that this practice has helped me to better be present for each minute of it.

Categories
Featured Reality

A meditation on the breath of our life

Neon whirlpool

In our meditation practice, we hope to better see clearly the true nature of reality. What is it that we see, as we turn our attention to look at our own self? One fundamental insight is that our sense of self, the solidity of “I”, is a kind of illusion.

A tree near our home is showing its age, its branches losing leaves and the center slipping into decay. From a single seed, it grew to towering heights, reaching for the sky as it stood tall over us for many years. And now, it has reached the end of its life. We naturally think of this tree as one living being, the same thing that has been with us since we moved into our home. But, what really remains of that tree, even now, that was there at the beginning?

I have often asked this same question of myself: what really remains, or persists, of my self across time? Day-to-day, and moment-to-moment, it is easy for us to feel that the thread of our identity is unbroken. Of course, I tell myself, I am the same person now (the same, unique individual), that I was an hour ago, or last week, last year. But, why am I right to feel so confident about this point? Consider longer windows of time: as I look back at photo of myself as a child, what really, deeply connects the person who smiled so long ago for the camera, to the person holding that photo today?

As living beings ourselves, each of us is composed of a rich tapestry of cells, from our skin, to our muscles, and the cells that organize and oversee the construction of our very bones. Our brains are no exception, and trillions of cells (called neurons) make up that intricate web in our heads. Each of our thoughts, feelings, memories depends on the activity and integrity of our neurons. The cells that make up us work together, forming a community of sorts. But, they are separate units, and fundamentally replaceable. We could swap out pretty much any cell in our body for a physically identical copy, and we have no reason to think that our body, or our experience, would be impacted.

Where then, is the “I” among all of the trillions of separate cells that form the community of my body? How is it that I persist from moment-to-moment, and day-to-day? Personally, I have found it useful, when thinking closely about our bodies and our selves, to see that what is critical is the pattern of activity that those cells, especially those in the brain, maintain over time.

Neon whirlpool
Photo credit: Creativity103

When I was younger, and beginning to explore Zen, one metaphor that shaped how I understood my self came from a talk given by Charlotte Joko Beck (collected in her book Nothing Special: Living Zen).

We are rather like whirlpools in the river of life… Though for short periods it seems to be distinguishable as a separate event, the water in the whirlpools is just the river itself. The stability of a whirlpool is only temporary. The energy of the river forms living things – a human being, a cat or dog, trees and plants – then what held the whirlpool in place is itself altered, and the water passes on, perhaps to be caught again and turned for a moment into another whirlpool.

Charlotte Joko Beck, “Nothing Special: Living Zen“

The image of a whirlpool, something that we recognize is, at its very core, a transient process – ephemeral – was very useful. With living things, it can be easy to treat them as solid and firm, like the tree near my home. But, we ourselves are no less a dynamic process than is a whirlpool. Across our life, from conception, to birth, aging and death, our physical bodies play out as a dynamic structure of matter and energy. Even in adulthood, after our form has stabilized (for the most part!), we are constantly taking in physical matter (through food, drink, and even the very air we breath).

Beck used the metaphor of the whirlpool to explore the ways that we become defensive, protective, if we identify ourselves only on the basis of our temporary form.

We’d rather not think of our lives in this way, however. We don’t want to see ourselves as simply a temporary formation, a whirlpool in the river of life… We want to see ourselves as permanent and stable. Our whole energy goes into trying to protect our supposed separateness.

Charlotte Joko Beck, “Nothing Special: Living Zen”

In Beck’s talk, she considers how as becoming protective of our transient form, our whirlpool, can lead us to try to hold on to what comes through our whirlpool. Or, to try to erect barriers, turning ourselves into “stagnant pools.” She asks us to consider shifting our view, from identifying solely with our self as a separate being, and to turn our attention back to the ways in which we are deeply connected to everything (the river).

For me, the metaphor of the whirlpool has also been useful in other ways, to help me think about what we really are, in this world. We often treat living things (my self, my family, our pets, the tree outside of our home) as real things that have a stable existence. This attitude has value for us – it is fundamentally useful to us – and for our ability to function in the world. As social beings, the ability to take into account the history of another being in our interactions is key, helping us to know who is likely to be a source of support, or who might put their own desires above the needs of others.

But while it can be useful to think of living things as stable, and enduring, this firmness turns out to be an illusion. Much as whirlpools begin with gentle rotation, mature, and then fade, living things typically go through a rapid development of their physical form, reach some stability in adulthood, and experience a decline towards the ends of their life. Even if we look the same from one day to the next, we are fundamentally dynamic processes, changing in every moment.

Across this arc, what persists that could be a self? Physically, there is little to nothing left in terms of my actual body today that was with me when I was an infant. In many parts of our body, our cells age, die and are replaced with new cells. Even in those cells that persist (in our brains, for instance, many of our neurons will survive for most of our lives), proteins and other molecules are constantly being replaced. Through respiration, we let go of a part of ourselves, the carbon that has been bound to the oxygen we brought in: we shed something of ourselves with every breath.

In the same way that a whirlpool is a stable pattern, living beings are a stable structure, but not static: physical matter pours into them, and through them, with every breath, meal, and drink.

But, while living beings, ourselves included, are transient patterns of matter, could the stability of our identity be in the mental, rather than the physical, domain? If we look closely, we can see that this is probably not the case. Each thought, memory, emotion we have or experience depends on the activity of the brain. So, anything that appears to be stable in our mental experience is weaved from the activity of a body that is in constant flux.

To look at the relationship between our brains and our conscious experience, another piece that I have personally found meaningful is the short story, “Exhalation,” by Ted Chaing. In the story, Chaing’s unnamed narrator describes a strange world, where all of the inhabitants appear to be mechanical creatures, powered by compressed air. The people living in this world must refill their metal “lungs” regularly from a source of compressed air, some vast underground reservoir. If they fail to do so in time, and their lungs run out of air, they will go limp. Replacing their depleted lung with a full one will bring them back to life, but with all of their memories erased. Indeed, it is not clear if the dead who are revived in this way are able to function at all.

The narrator of the story describes his attempts to understand the workings of their own mechanical brains, and in that way understand the source of their memories. He doe this by examining his own brain in great detail. I won’t go into specifics (as I would not want to ruin the story for you, and I would highly recommend it!), but part of the key insight is that pressurized air is used to power a set of tiny switches (essentially air-based transistors), to accomplish the same kinds of computations that our own brains use.

This insight, seeing clearly the relationship of the air to the narrator’s own conscious experience, produced a profound shift in understanding of their own identity.

… I saw that air does not, as we had always assumed, simply provide power to the engine that realizes our thoughts. Air is in fact the very medium of our thoughts. All that we are is a pattern of air flow. My memories were inscribed, not as grooves on foil or even the position of switches, but as persistent currents of argon.

Ted Chiang, “Exhalation”

With the metaphor of the whirlpool that I described above, often I have thought of our whole bodies as whirlpools: intricate patterns of matter, spinning across the arc of our lives. But, when we focus on our mental experience, our thoughts, feelings, memories, I think that this view can be refined, and I have found the image that Chaing has crafted to be very helpful here.

If we (our conscious experience, our persistence as a person over time) are a whirlpool, then our bodies (including our brains), are the rocks and structure of the river bed, which steers the water of the river into the shape of a whirlpool. Just in the same way as the mechanical brains of the beings in Chaing’s story, where the air flowing from the lungs was harnessed as it flowed through them. Their thoughts were made from the air, but were also separate from it, in the same way that a whirlpool is made from water, but is a different kind of thing.

While we need to breathe to live, just as the narrator in Chaing’s story, the nature of our respective needs are different. For us, breath is critical to bring in fresh oxygen (so that we can make use of the energy that is stored in our cells) and to remove the waste products of respiration (such as carbon dioxide). The breath was the very energy that animated Chaing’s beings: all of their lives depended on the reservoir of pressurized air that powered their minds.

For humans, and most of the rest of the life on our planet, our energy doesn’t come from pressurized air, but instead from sunlight. The force that propels our limbs, drives our blood, and gives speed to our thoughts comes from our sun. That energy could have fallen simply onto the earth itself, warming the planet a bit more. But, some of it was captured by plants, and stored away until it could be released, slowly, and (in a sense) intentionally. In the same way that a windmill harnesses the force of the wind that would otherwise pass by, or a solar panel harnesses light, plants store the energy of sunlight in chemical form.

Every thing that we have done, each word we have spoken, each home we have built, each moment of delight we have felt, has been powered by the sun.

So, instead of air, “the very medium of our thoughts” is, fundamentally, sunlight. The power for our thoughts comes from the energy that has been stored from the sun. That energy powers the neurons of the brain. The activity of those neurons (in the electrical and chemical signals that neurons use to process information and communicate) leads to our conscious experience, the whirlpool that is our self.

Chaing ends the story ruminating on the deep connection of life to entropy: his narrator’s life plays out in the movement of the universe from order (pressurized air) to disorder (equilibrium, where there is no difference in pressure).

The universe began as an enormous breath being held. Who knows why, but whatever the reason, I am glad that it did, because I owe my existence to that fact. All my desires and ruminations are no more and less than eddy currents generated by the gradual exhalation of our universe. And until this great exhalation is finished, my thoughts live on.

Ted Chiang, “Exhalation“

But what about us? In an important sense, all of our motion (each movement, thought, memory) depends on a “breath” that was taken when our universe began in the Big Bang. Our existence depends on the creation of the stars, including our own sun. While in principle there are other sources of energy that we can harness, every food that we consume represents energy that was captured and stored from sunlight that fell on our planet.

Most of that light, a vast amount of it, races past our planet, out into the vastness of space. Perhaps some of that light will be detected someday, by some other civilization, and spur some impact there. But, the majority of it will never have a strong effect on the universe at large, or on sentient beings at all.

That tiny, tiny fraction that falls on Earth though? Living beings harness only a fraction of that light (our plants absorb a tiny slice of light, a small range of wavelengths), and that sliver of the bounty of our sun is enough to power the vast web diversity of life on our planet. Each and every thing that we do depends on using that energy. It is true that someday, our sun and the other stars will exhaust their reserves, and the universe will reach some new state (possibly to settle into its own quiet non-existence, perhaps to head to some new rebirth).

But, just as each whirlpool will merge back into the river, the moment that our universe settles back into stillness will come when it will come. Well beyond the limit of our own lives, and very likely beyond that of our species. For us, the present is more properly our concern. If we can preserve our own planet, we can continue to nurture the miracle of our collective whirlpool, the communities of sentient beings that spring into existence on the Earth, and we can continue taking delight in existence and in this great exhalation of the universe.

Categories
Meditation

Sitting down and opening up to life

Toad in zazen

After a run recently, we came across a small toad along our path. This little one seemed to have perfected just sitting: relaxed, unperturbed, but ready to act in a moment. I wish that I could say that I’ve mastered sitting in the same way!

While their posture is very different from that of sitting meditation, I do feel that toads are a wonderful model for the attitude we cultivate in our sitting meditation practice. At least outwardly, a toad appears to be still, but relaxed. But, they are perfectly attentive to everything around them, from the insects that will be their next meal to animals that will try to eat them.

And, of course, the annoying hiker who stops to try to take a photo.

While there are many approaches to meditation, those that I prefer remind me of the attitude of a toad: relaxed, still, but entirely alert. In a lot of ways, this attitude is similar to how I have approached my own practice, which has been most strongly shaped by shikantaza (just sitting) meditation in the Soto Zen tradition.

The Zen teacher Shohaku Okumura describes shikantaza in Mind and Zazen:

This is a really simple practice; we do nothing but sit in the zazen posture breathing easily, keeping the eyes open, staying awake, and letting go. That’s all we do in zazen; we do nothing else. Yet even if you try to sit just five minutes in this way you will find it really difficult.

This practice is very simple but simple does not necessarily mean easy. So whenever we become aware that we have deviated from that point of upright posture, deep breathing, keeping the eyes open without focusing, and letting go of whatever comes up, we try to return to that point. In whatever condition we find ourselves in, we just return to posture, breathing, waking up, and letting go. That is what we do in meditation.

Shohaku Okumura

The Zen teacher Dainin Katagiri gave similar advice:

When you are sitting in zazen, don’t think. Don’t use your frontal lobe. Your frontal lobe is sitting with you already, so don’t use it to think. This doesn’t mean to destroy thinking or to keep away from thinking. Just rest; don’t meddle with thinking.

Dainin Katagiri, “Returning to Silence: Zen Practice in Daily Life“

What is the point of a practice like this? That is a complicated question (and teachers such as Dainin Katagiri have said that meditation is useless). But for me, I think that meditation is a key part of how I have tried to put my own life under a microscope, and to look carefully at everything we take for granted. This can help us loosen the grip of a strong emotion, it can help soften the boundaries that seem so rigid between ourselves and others. It can open up more space in our lives.

And, while I do believe the transformative potential of a mediation practice, if I am perfectly honest, I have often struggled with meditation! For much of my adult life, I have felt that I should meditate for a significant amount of time every day, but I have rarely achieved that for more than a few weeks at a time. It has frustrated me, because I do believe that meditation is an important part of my life, to turn my attention back on to itself, as much as I can.

When I saw that toad on the trail, it would be fair to say I envied that little one, to be able to sit so easily!

But truthfully, while I used to feel bad about how difficult it was for me to maintain a regular practice, more recently I have felt that meditation is (for me) similar to exercise (which I also have a conflicted relationship with). I don’t enjoy exercise (usually) in the moment, but I keep at it, because I feel that it is a critical part of my life.

Changing my attitude has been helpful, as I’ve been able to step back from being concerned that I am a fraud (someone who espouses an interest in meditation practice, but who doesn’t genuinely live it). And, I feel that my practice is richer today, for that.

This type of practice has long appealed to me, as it feels built on a premise that it is valuable to turn our attention to our experience, to the totality of life, as much as we can outside of our thinking about the world.

If you have any interest in exploring this style of Zen meditation, I would very much recommend reading as much as you can find. There are many wonderful books out there, and I have especially found it useful to explore collections of talks by Zen teachers. I would recommend Katagiri’s book, “Returning to Silence,” and another collection of his talks, “You Have to Say Something.” I have also found Charlotte Joko Beck to be very influential in my own practice, and would highly recommend her book “Everyday Zen.” And, I am also quite fond of Steve Hagen’s “Buddhism Plain and Simple.”

I think that these readings are a good place to start (but, I would also encourage you to reach out to a community of practitioners as well!). I personally have felt that it has been most beneficial to be part of a community (and have valued times when I lived near a Zen center).

But, I’ve also spent much of my life in locations where going to a center was not feasible. There are many excellent resources today, such as this post, How to do Zazen for the basics of sitting meditation and good visuals. I personally cannot sit in the full lotus position (and usually sit in something close to a quarter lotus pose =) )

Whether in books or through a community of practitioners, I think that you will be able to find many others who have used the opportunity of practice to look carefully at their own life. And, I hope that you too will take some time to just sit.