Barn’sburntdown.
NowIcanseethemoon.
KusunokiMasashige(1294–1336)1
I’m still not clear: How can regular meditation practices that train attention enable my brain to change in ways that might lead to enlightened states?
Repeated periods of meditation sensitize our receptivities
andenhancesomereactivitiesselectively(figure7)[ZB:198,454,
457–460; SI: 82]. A regular program of meditative training culti-vatespausesthatuncover,andglimpse,operationsatsubconscious
levelswe’venotbeenawareof.“Openingup”meditationenables
moreoftheselittleopeningstooccur.
Earlierchaptersemphasizedthepathwaysthatprocessvisual
stimuli.However,one’shearingpathwaysalsobecomemoresen-sitive. Early in my own practice I noticed how certain auditory
stimuli evoked a reactive response. Sound stimuli became espe-ciallypenetratingafteronlytwoorthreedaysofrepeatedquiet
sittings during retreats. Then, each “crack” of the mallet on the
large wooden board outside the meditation hall caused my ears
to“click.”
This is nothing special; you can experience the same click in
yourownear.Simplyswallow.Youhear and feeltheclick.It’syour
middle ear muscles tightening your eardrum. It is reasonable to
postulate that this click reflects a local brainstem reflex, a sen-sorimotor arc that becomes enhanced when repeated periods of
meditationsensitizeaperson’sdopamine,norepinephrine,anda
varietyofotherneuromessengercircuits[ZB:197–208].Inthisman-ner can regular meditation practices develop a variety of “mind-manifesting”properties[ZB:418–426].
The following narrative serves to illustrate the dynamic range of such emergent, receptive properties. It describes only a minor quickening [ZB: 371– 404]. Yet the results were relayed up instantly from the brainstem into higher reactive networks. These instantly retrieved information from years ago that had lain dormant in my brain’s subconscious re-cesses. The message is that subconscious traces of earlier coded events remain in our long-term memory banks for more years than one can imagine.
Case Report: A Recent Auditory Quickening
It is January 2008. I am sitting in the zendo at Upaya during a retreat. Multiple sittings have taken place during the pre-vious two days and two sittings have already taken place this morning. I am turning to the right and looking slightly up to hear Roshi Joan Halifax. She is speaking 15 feet away.
I’m hearing her say three words: “Barn’s burnt down”—
the first three words of the epigraph that introduced this chapter.
Audition is on a hair trigger. Instantly, a major, prickly cold wave of “gooseflesh” begins over the back of my head and neck. It runs down the back of my arms and trunk, then down the back of my right leg more so than my left. The clos-ing line registers a distant sense of recognition: “Now I can see the moon.” During the next second or so, a flood of tears issues from both eyes. It continues much more abundantly down my right cheek than the left for the next half minute.
This quickening includes a much greater pilomotor (gooseflesh) response than I have ever experienced before.2 It is obviously more lateralized (to the right), and it has released much more tearing (also right-sided). Curiously, no corresponding wave of emotion accompanies the bare twinge of recognition. For centuries, Zen students have been prompted to ask their temporo → frontal lower pathways:
What is this? The neurologist also wonders: What has been going on?
Background I: Coda
For many summers barns were a significant ingredient in the author’s boyhood experiences.3 Yet this particular haiku didn’t enter into my consciousness until the year 2000. The first time I encountered these two spare lines was on an or-dinary 3 × 5-inch file card. Someone had appreciated their message, copied it, and posted this card on the bulletin board outside the zendo of our Mountain Lamp Sangha in Moscow, Idaho. The words resonated, so I copied them down on a file card of my own. It promptly disappeared for the next eight years.
It is tragic to lose one’s barn in a fire. Thereafter, de-prived of possessions, one could feel impoverished and hard-pressed to survive. Instead, we discover this poet who is undaunted, buoyant. Why? Now, he can see the moon rise. It fills the empty space where his own barn once stood and obscured the sky above the horizon. Liberated by his loss, he is free to bathe in the serenity of moonlight [ZB:
577– 578].
The poem unfolds one hidden symbol after another. (In much the same way, we slowly realize the many depths of meaning involved in Zen Buddhism.) What flames had con-sumed that barn? Could its burning hint at the same fires that Buddha referred to in an early sermon? He suggested that the heat of our emotions was what caused us to suffer.
Our longings, loathings, and delusions of Selfhood were responsible.
And what was the structural support in the roof of the barn that had collapsed? It was the lofty ridgepole of Self-deception that had gone down in ashes. No more could its
spine support the rafters serving as a ribcage for an emotion-ally overconditioned Self [ZBR: 6].
What does it mean to “see the moon”? It means that only after every Self-centered obstruction vanishes from view can one’s brain realize the stark, cool clarity of objec-tive vision. During such an awakened state of consciousness enlightenment simply means seeing all things as they really are. In such allusive ways does the old Zen literature connect the moon’s ineffable light with an extraordinary state of self-less mental illumination [ZBR: 403– 463].
To this meditator, barn was no four-letter word that could be heard lightly, no word forever misplaced on some file card. It resonated with me because seven decades earlier, barns fragrant with cows, horses, and new-mown hay were an intimate part of my everyday summer experience. “Barn”
was imbedded deeply in my lived experience. Barns and I shared a déjà vécu history, as it were. This vignette illustrates one more instance in which repeated periods of meditation, acting as a catalyst, have set the stage for a brief, re-mindful quickening.
Surging into experience, quickenings tap into networks looping high and low. They connect the links of symbolic and autobiographical memory traces that could have lain dormant for decades. In the previous chapters on precon-scious processing and koans, it was suggested that authen-tic, advanced koan practice might have a subtle, hidden role to play in a program of balanced meditative training. Here, we’re not referring to some obvious top-down intellectual role. Rather might such a role lie in its dynamic potential to help open up deep layers of implicit meanings and values.
These might be widely dispersed in the form of coded hints and associations not accessible to a person’s ordinary rules of conscious, logical processing.
The reactions to the poem that morning also have implications with regard to some of the unsentimental,
emotionally unattached qualities that develop later along the meditative Path. Similar qualities of objectivity also infuse kensho. For example, on this occasion, despite the florid autonomic phenomena of gooseflesh and tearing, the psyche of this meditating witness developed no corresponding tug of an emotional feeling. This uneven profile of diverse phe-nomena suggests that the several components of an episode of quickening can be fractionated. Perhaps in an older per-son who had been meditating for decades, the neural tra-jectory of the activations does not always ascend through the limbic system to mobilize higher levels of emotion [SI:
228–244]. Parenthetically, the selfless realizations and in-sights that arrive during the state of kensho enter free from the immediate attachments that could bind them to the very different, culturally acquired, intellectual propositions of religious ideology.4
Background II: Hearing Pathways in Relation to Quickening Normally our hearing pathways conduct: (1) the ultrafast,
“hot-line” auditory messages that race up through the infe-rior colliculi and pulvinar; and (2) the usual fast messages that rise up through the medial geniculate nucleus of the thalamus [ZB: 240 –244]. The colliculi are for immediate re-actions. They service our lower, hot-line, reflexive pathways.
The geniculate pathway relays from the thalamus up into the cortical networks which service our higher degrees of conscious cognition.
On the other hand, certain kinds of relevant sensory stimuli are quickly shunted into messages that relay into our hypothalamus. From here they descend in the autonomic nervous system, soon emerging on the skin’s surface as the phenomenon we call “gooseflesh.” These pilomotor path-ways began their surge into activity just as I was hearing the next five words of the second line.
What about the ascending hearing pathways, the ones that could also enable impulses coded for words like “Barn’s burnt down” to rise up through the pulvinar and geniculate nuclei of the thalamus? These messages—now tagged with salient properties—speed up toward the region of the right temporo-parietal junction that includes the right superior temporal gyrus [SI: 32, 133–134, 140]. This right TPJ has been assigned a priority function (figure 2). It serves as our “cir-cuit breaker.” This phrase describes the way it enables atten-tion to disengage from its previous orientaatten-tion, so that it can shift instead toward the newly salient stimulus.
From then on, implicit auditory messages can be de-coded by the pattern-recognition functions distributed along the temporal lobe networks that engage in bottom-up atten-tive processing. A relevant finding is the way that Lutz and colleagues have shown how expert meditators, long prac-ticed in a Self-induced form of loving-kindness-compassion meditation, respond to sounds with a greater activation of their right TPJ and their right posterior superior temporal region.5
We’re not the only animal species sensitive to certain sounds. Tears flow from the eyes of a distressed mother camel when she hears plaintive music. These musical sound vibrations trigger a pivotal shift of her mental set. The result softens her emotional distress, liberates her native maternal instincts, and allows her to nurse her previously abandoned newborn colt [SI: 146 –149].
Positron emission tomography (PET) scans were used in an early study of human subjects who were undergoing an intensely pleasant emotional response to music. During their so-called shivers-down-the-spine phenomena, blood flow actually decreased in the right amygdala, left hippo-campus, and ventro-medial prefrontal cortex.6 One expla-nation for the author’s emotional unattachment during the auditory quickening in the zendo might be a similar
decrease in activity of the particular circuits of the right amygdala that convey positive emotion. The pilomotor
“chills” described in this personal vignette were also lateral-ized more to the right. This suggests that the uncrossed pathway descending from the right hypothalamus was the more sensitive on this occasion, as was the parasympathetic tearing response from the right eye [ZB: 189–196].
Henke’s recent review of short-term and long-term memory systems emphasizes the fast, implicit processing mechanisms that instantly engage our hippocampus and parahippocampus, not just the distinctions based simply on whether or not we then become conscious of this information.7
The immediate reactivity during this episode of quick-ening illustrates the speed with which the brain accom-plishes so much. Some reactive circuits seemed to complete their initial closures in milliseconds, long before the con-cluding word of the poem was uttered. To begin to study such early sequences will require the millisecond resolu-tions of the latest magnetoencephalography spatial tech-niques. Already, the three- to six-second lag of the usual fMRI signals seems too sluggish.
Behavioral tasks were recently assigned to experienced Vipassana meditators who were not meditating during the study.8 The subjects reacted less during this complex inter-sensory (visual + auditory) facilitation task. The data were interpreted as suggesting an attenuation of their lower level, bottom-up attentive processing. In normals, fMRI signals in the ventral attention system are suppressed during those more deliberate searches which also require the subjects to focus their top-down attention.9
Having encouraged readers to pay bottom-up auditory attention afield, let us close with a selection from the note-book of the poet, Rainer Rilke (1875–1926). His pen still
speaks to how a penetrating avian stimulus could set off a concordant unification over a century ago.10
“. . . a bird-call was there, both in the outside and in his inner being” . . . a call that did not stop at the boundary of his body. Instead, it “formed of the two together an uninter-rupted space.” Herein, “mysteriously protected, only one single spot of purest, deepest consciousness remained.”
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