My Happiest Thought
It is quite possible that in contact with western science, and inspired by the spirit of history, the original teaching of Gautama, revived and purified, may yet play a large part in the direction of human destiny.
H. G. WELLS
H. G. Wells wrote those words in 1920 in his classic opus The Outline of History. Eighty-five years later, in 2005, the Society for Neuroscience made an unprecedented invitation. They asked the Dalai Lama of Tibet to be the keynote speaker at their annual meeting. The Dalai Lama’s participation ignited a firestorm of controversy, some of which was motivated by political concerns outside the scope of science, but some of which involved the legitimate issue of whether someone representing a spiritual philosophy should be anointed with an aura of credibility by the scientific establishment. Although I was not there myself, I have been told that the Dalai Lama charmed many of the thousands of hard-nosed scientists who participated. During one of the question and answer sessions, one of them pointedly asked the Dalai Lama something like: “If I developed a purely physical surgical procedure that would result in spiritual awakening, as a Buddhist spokesperson, what would be your position on that?” The Dalai Lama replied, “I would want to be the first person in line to receive that surgery!”
When I returned to the United States from Japan, I set for myself a sequence of three goals for the rest of my life, with each goal more ambitious than its predecessor. Goal number one was to reformulate the path to enlightenment in a modern, secular, and science-based vocabulary. I wanted to create a system completely free from the cultural trappings and doctrinal preconceptions of traditional Buddhism yet capable of bringing people to classical enlightenment. In my opinion, I have made significant strides toward creating such a system. (You can find a detailed description of it at unifiedmindfulness.com.) What you’ve been reading here reflects that system but is still somewhat framed in the traditional language of Buddhism.
My second goal was to develop a fully modern delivery system that would make the practice of that path available to any person in the world, regardless of where they may live, what their work or familial responsibilities may be, what their health situation may be, or what their financial situation may be. I believe my monthly conference call–based home practice program has made that feasible. (It can also be accessed at unifiedmindfulness.com.)
My third goal was to help develop a technology of enlightenment—a science-based intervention powerful enough to make enlightenment readily available to the majority of humanity. Such a science-based technology is yet to be developed and most likely will not be developed in my lifetime. My “happiest thought” is the key concept that makes that goal feasible.
I got the phrase “happiest thought” from Albert Einstein. His happiest thought was a conceptual breakthrough that allowed him to develop the theory of general relativity. The thought was this: gravitational fields and accelerating frames are essentially the same thing. An example of an accelerating frame would be an elevator as it begins to lift you. When it’s gaining speed, for a few seconds you experience yourself getting heavier as if the force of earth’s gravity were increasing. That effect goes away when the elevator attains a constant speed—when the frame is no longer accelerating. The opposite effect occurs when you taste a bit of weightlessness as the elevator initially descends.
The significance of this insight—gravitational fields are equivalent to accelerating frames—may not be immediately evident to the nonspecialist, but for Einstein, the implications were earthshaking. It allowed him to apply the results of special relativity to issues regarding the nature of gravity. For example, to correctly predict that the presence of a gravitational field will affect the rate at which a clock ticks. This broader paradigm is referred to as general relativity. According to general relativity, matter and space are linked in a nonlinear dance: space is curved by matter, but matter flows along the curve of space. Einstein’s happiest thought allowed him to create a revolutionary new science that fundamentally changed humanity’s perspective on the nature of physical reality. If correct, my happiest thought will fundamentally change humanity’s perspective on the nature of spiritual reality.
Here’s my happiest thought: most likely, there are things that are true and important about enlightenment that neither the Buddha nor any of the great masters of the past knew, because to know them requires an understanding of modern science.
Enlightenment and Innovation
Buddhist tradition has long held that Prince Siddhartha Gautama was not the only Buddha. Prior to him, there had been Buddhas, and in later ages, there will be other Buddhas. Buddhist mythology tells us that the next Buddha will be named Maitreya. It is said that he now abides in one of the heavenly realms known as the Tushita Heaven, from which he contemplates the world, trying to figure out the best way to enlighten all beings.
Interestingly, Maitreya is the only Buddhist archetype who demonstrates what might be considered a somewhat Western body language. Traditionally, he is portrayed sitting in a chair with one elbow on his knee, one leg crossed on the other, one leg dangling from the chair, his cheek supported by one hand, as if engaged in discursive thought. His eyes are depicted as looking down, as if surveying the condition of the world below the heaven where he resides. The iconography is in striking contrast to the standard yogic representation of Buddhist archetypes, who sit in full or half lotus, hands joined in a symmetric gesture, and consciousness withdrawn into nondiscursive, formless states. If anything, the traditional iconography of Maitreya is reminiscent of Rodin’s famous sculpture The Thinker. The difference is that Maitreya has better posture, and his eyes are open looking at the world, because he is thinking about the next way to bring enlightenment to humanity.
Maitreya could be thought of as the next great friend to humanity, as his name indicates. Maitreya literally means “the friendly one,” derived from the Sanskrit stem mitra (“friend”). This word is also the basis for the word metta, which is usually translated as lovingkindness but literally means “friendliness.”
Buddhist tradition also states that there are individuals whose enlightenment is the equal of a Buddha in terms of depth of wisdom (prajna), depth of purification (vishuddhi), and impeccability of behavior (sila). A person who is equal to a Buddha in regard to wisdom, purification, and conduct is called a “worthy,” which in Sanskrit is arhat (if he is a man) or arhati (if she is a woman). Among the disciples of the historical Buddha were numerous arhats and arhatis. It would seem then that a Buddha is a special case of a “worthy.” So a natural question is, given that their enlightenment, purification, and conduct are on the same level, what is the difference between a Buddha and a “mere” arhat?
According to the Buddhist tradition, the Buddha was a creative arhat—an arhat whose creativity was of such power and relevance that the whole world changed as the result of his spiritual discoveries. Put in other terms, a Buddha is a deeply enlightened being who discovers something new about the nature of enlightenment and whose discovery leads to a dramatic increase in enlightenment in the world.
Certainly, this was true of Prince Siddhartha Gautama, the historical person who became known as the Buddha. Prior to his time, people in India had gotten enlightenment through some combination of high concentrative practices and ascetical practices. The Buddha took the spiritual technology that existed in his time, reformulated it and refined it, and added new elements. He discovered that you could use sensory clarity to analyze I-am-ness into its components and that this leads to freedom from the limited identity. This was definitely an innovative notion and formed the basis of mindfulness practice. He also reformulated the ascetic paradigm of “the more it hurts, the more it purifies” to “the more equanimity you apply, the more it purifies.” He referred to this distinctive approach as the Middle Way. These and other innovations of the Buddha propagated throughout India and the rest of Asia, profoundly altering the course of human history.
The idea that sometime in the future someone like Maitreya will appear in the human realm and revitalize the dharma seems reasonable to me. However, my view of how it might happen differs from the traditional view in several significant ways. The traditional view is that the teachings of each Buddha are new, but not revolutionary. They are essentially similar to the teachings of the last Buddha and all preceding Buddhas, because there is only one perennial truth that needs to be rediscovered from time to time. But my view is somewhat different. My view is that the teachings of the next Buddha will indeed harmonize with those of the Buddhas and masters of the past, but may in fact be radically innovative.
This view is based on how science grows with time. Einstein’s formulation of physics harmonizes with that of Newton, but reframes Newton’s discoveries within a broader, deeper, and more accurate paradigm. The jump from Newtonian physics to modern physics is huge. If we imagine a dialogue between Newton and Einstein, no doubt Newton would, at first, be shocked by Einstein’s claims, but after sufficiently deep and patient dialoging, he would realize that Einstein’s view harmonized with and built upon his own.
I imagine that the Buddha of the future, Maitreya, may discover a paradigm that on the surface appears to be quite different from traditional Buddhist teachings, but after sufficiently deep and patient dialoging would be revealed to be both in harmony with and building upon Siddhartha Gautama’s discoveries. The teachings of the next Buddha will also probably be based not merely upon looking from within (first-person perspective), but on some combination of looking from within and looking from without (combined first- and third-person perspectives). In other words, the next Buddha will have an internal practice, but will also utilize the discoveries of external, objective science.
Finally, there is a third way in which my concept of Maitreya differs from the traditional one. Traditionally, it is assumed that the Buddha-to-come will be an individual. I imagine that Maitreya will not be an individual enlightened being, but a team of enlightened beings, most of whom will be scientists, specifically neuroscientists. This team would use the power of post-twentieth-century science, combined with the depth of their personal experiences, to formulate a radically innovative paradigm for what enlightenment is and how to get there.
That new paradigm should have two characteristics. First, it should harmonize with the discoveries of the Buddha and other masters of the past. Second, the innovative part should be powerful enough to alter the course of human history. Here’s what I mean: along with a new, neuroscience-based model of enlightenment would presumably come new neuroscience-based technologies that could accelerate the practice of meditation, making classical enlightenment available to a significant percentage of the world’s population.
Objections
Sometimes, my happiest thought causes people to freak out. It’s not hard to come up with a series of “yeah, but” objections.
One objection that might come from very traditional Buddhists is to remind me that the role of Maitreya is not to create a new version of the dharma, but merely to revive the forgotten truth of the former Buddhas. This objection is interesting and deserves some careful attention. It is based on an assumption about how history works. The assumption is that conditions in the world only deteriorate as time goes on. Conditions started out very good, over time they have slowly gotten bad, and in the future they will get even worse. This notion pervades traditional Indian thinking and also impacts cultures influenced by India through Buddhism.
The idea that the process of history is essentially a process of devolution is of course not unique to India. It was also held by some thinkers in classical Greece. In China, Confucius voiced the same idea. Within the context of Hinduism, this notion takes the form of a belief that history moves through four successive yugas (eons), each characterized by the deterioration in the quality of human life. Because Buddhism comes from India, it inherits the traditional Indic view of history: The one true dharma is delivered by a perfect and complete master. Then, as the world situation deteriorates over subsequent centuries and millennia, the dharma deteriorates in three stages. During the last stage, human nature becomes so degenerate that no one can achieve enlightenment anymore, and the dharma is eventually forgotten until the next perfect expositor appears.
The assumption that the march of history can only run downhill is unsupported by evidence. Of course sometimes things do get worse—for example, Europe in the Dark Ages. But modern historiographers recognize that things can also improve. There can be evolution as well as devolution. In fact, futurists assume the exact opposite of the traditional Indic view, namely that, globally, things can only get better and better. Personally, I don’t see any strong proof of that either, although I would rather believe the futurist scenario than the “things can only get worse” scenario. Based on history, we can say for sure that sometimes the quality of human life progresses and sometimes it regresses. (Our old friends expansion and contraction again!)
It is true that by the ninth century, European civilization had experienced a catastrophic decline relative to the classical period. However, it is also true that while that was happening in Europe, Islamic civilization was flowering. Furthermore, after a thousand years of backwardness, European civilization experienced a renaissance, the likes of which the world had never seen. And although there is at present an unacceptable disparity in the quality of life among human beings worldwide, it is also true that thanks to post-Renaissance advances in science, medicine, sanitation, agriculture, and so forth, hundreds of millions of human beings are able to enjoy a level of knowledge, power, and convenience that would have been the envy of the kings and emperors of yore. From that perspective, we seem to be in a period of expansive progress. Clearly, the quality of human life does not just go downhill.
So if we look upon the Buddha as an innovator in the technology of enlightenment, then it is certainly reasonable to think that future Buddhas might do the same thing: take everything known from the past, the approaches to enlightenment that have come down to us from the contemplative traditions of the world, in addition to what modern science knows about the brain, and come up with something radically new and powerful—hopefully something powerful enough to democratize enlightenment, making it available to hundreds of millions of human beings instead of the purview of a handful of dedicated adepts.
When I give voice to my happiest thought, people often assume that I am advocating some process that automatically zaps you with enlightenment, circumventing any need for study or practice. There is nothing in my happiest thought that implies that. Even if a new technology-assisted path to enlightenment is developed, it is highly probable that there will still be a need for study and practice. But the amount of study and practice may be reduced to a level that is doable by just about anyone. Perhaps something like a yearlong course at any community college. During that time, a person would study and do focus techniques, in addition to receiving some sort of technology-based aid to their practice. The technologically boosted experience of liberation would be carefully integrated into that person’s life.
But even if it were possible to do what I am advocating, would that not cheapen the experience of enlightenment? Isn’t it better to do it the old-fashioned way? Indeed a technology-assisted spiritual practice could conceivably cheapen enlightenment, making it in some ways a secular product, like a LASIK surgery for consciousness. However, we have to weigh this undesirable effect against some important considerations. If hundreds of millions of people are able to live their lives ten times larger, I think it is worth the price of a little cheapening and secularizing, or even trivializing. Flying in an airplane is not nearly as graceful, spiritual, or natural as the flight of a bird. It destroys the charm of distance, does away with the richness of land journey—in a sense trivializing travel. But most people would agree that its practical consequences more than compensate for those losses.
I find that many people are quite pessimistic regarding the future: the degradation of the environment, acts of senseless violence, depletion of natural resources, and economic chaos all seem to bode ill for humanity in this century. It is impossible to predict the future, but if the forces of negativity are as deep and widespread as many believe, then it may be the case that humanity’s main hope lies in something new and fundamentally different, like a way to democratize enlightenment. If the patient’s medical condition is dire, the doctors must consider radical interventions.
Another objection to my happiest thought is that I am advocating something unnatural. But what’s unnatural depends on what you choose to call natural. There is a trend of thought in Buddhism, and in many other contemplative traditions, to speak of the enlightened state as natural. This means that the unenlightened state is the unnatural one. What prevents the natural state of enlightenment from being evident are “adventitious impurities” (agantukakilesa). The word adventitious literally means “coming from the outside,” that is, not intrinsic to the system itself.
If I had to make a guess about the nature of a technology that could facilitate the attainment of classical enlightenment, it would be that the technology would not somehow zap you with enlightenment. Rather, if anything got zapped, it would be what gets in the way of the enlightenment that’s already there. If indeed enlightenment is natural and just waiting to happen, then using a technological intervention to restore a natural condition is a natural solution. A technology that eliminates an unnatural condition is, by definition, in harmony with nature.
Possible Directions
When I describe my happiest thought to people, they often ask me if I have any guesses about what kinds of new interventions might arise from the cross-fertilization of science and meditation. I certainly would never claim to make predictions in this regard. However, there are a few directions of research that I think might be promising.
When scientists first began to research which parts of the brain are associated with what functions, they did this largely through studying the effects of brain injuries. The field of functional neuroanatomy experienced a huge leap forward right after World War I because there were so many people with personally tragic but scientifically useful brain injuries. In some cases, scientists were able to figure out what part of the brain performs what job by studying what functions got knocked out when a particular part of the brain was damaged.
It turns out that certain very specific kinds of brain injury seem to knock out the sense of “self as thing.” Investigating the mechanism by which this happens might give us insight into the nature of enlightenment. Don’t get me wrong here. These traumas are pathologies. Such dysfunctional conditions are certainly not an enlightened state. However, some aspects of these conditions seem to imitate or emulate aspects of enlightenment. Since these conditions can be studied neuroanatomically and neurochemically, they may perhaps provide a hint of a direction in which to look in order to find the neurocorrolates of no self.
In her book My Stroke of Insight, neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor gives a vivid and moving description of how a hemorrhaging in her brain’s left hemisphere caused a radical and permanent shift in her state of consciousness. Her description of that shift sounds remarkably similar to the classical mystical experience where inside and outside merge, leading to a sense of freedom from the limited, egoic perspective. After her stroke, Dr. Taylor found herself facing two challenges. The first challenge was to reestablish her ability to function: walking, talking, thinking, and so forth. Her second challenge was to attempt to understand, as a scientist, how this particular form of trauma to the brain could produce such positive results. Some people believe that by diminishing the function of the left hemisphere, the right hemisphere is freed up to present its perspective on reality. Although that might be true, I suspect that the actual situation is more complicated than that. What is important about her case, however, is that it represents a clear example of an enlightenment-like experience arising due to losing something at the neuroanatomical level.
Recall my remark about the naturalness of artificial enlightenment. The point I made was that enlightenment will just happen automatically as soon as we eliminate what gets in its way. So perhaps, if you knock out just the correct portion of the brain, it can neuroanatomically eliminate something that is preventing enlightenment.
Dr. Taylor’s case involved the left hemisphere. The stroke condition that Dr. Taylor reports would seem in some ways to emulate “stream entry” (also known as kensho, or the initial experience of no self). There is a post-stroke condition that occurs in a different part of the brain, which leads to a condition that produces an even more stunning version of pseudo-enlightenment. This condition seems to emulate the completely selfless state of an arhat! As a meditation teacher, I can tell you that the experience of stream entry is relatively common. You probably know or have met someone who is a stream enterer. On the other hand, arhats—people who have completely worked through the egoic perspective—are exceedingly rare. In my entire career, I have met three or four masters who were perhaps arhats. I am utterly fascinated by the fact that there is a relatively well-understood form of stroke that induces a sort of a weird caricature of that attainment.
The condition I am referring to is known as athymhormia. Medically it comes about due to tiny and precisely placed bilateral lesions to the basal ganglia of the brain. For example, at the anterior tip of the caudate nuclei. The effects of this condition are both dramatic and strange. The victim essentially loses the ability to bootstrap selfhood from the inside. They just sit hour after hour, day after day, with their eyes open, fully conscious of their surroundings, apparently without any thoughts or desires or sense of suffering. If you activate their sense of self from the outside by engaging them in a conversation, they can often respond normally, without cognitive impairment. Furthermore, if you ask them to perform a task they may be able to do so without difficulty at least for a while. But if you don’t continually engage them from the outside, they will soon return to a default state of pseudo no self. Doctors find this condition mystifying. When they ask the victims what they think about all day, the answer is nothing. Their mind is simply blank all the time, even when their eyes are open. The other strange thing is that the victims usually don’t complain about their situation, or about anything at all for that matter. They do not perceive their obvious dysfunction as problematic. No self, no problem.
I originally read about this condition in an April 2005 Scientific American article entitled “Drowning Mr. M.” The article contains some remarkable stories. It starts with the description of a man swimming in his pool who suddenly loses all motivation to keep swimming. He is aware that he is sinking to the bottom of the pool, aware that he is breathing water, but has no sense that there is a problem. Then he hears his daughter screaming his name, at which point the notion of self-preservation kicks in again, and he swims his way to the surface. A second story in that article describes a French woman who went to the beach one morning and, as she was sitting in the sun, lost all desire to move to shade. She simply sat in one spot as the sun gradually burnt away several layers of her skin, resulting in massive burns. When asked if she felt the pain of the burning, she said that she felt it all poignantly and intensely, but did not perceive it as a problem!
Clearly, something very dramatic took place within the perceptual mechanism of these patients. A couple of tiny but strategically positioned regions of tissue damage apparently resulted in the elimination of all drivenness and suffering, whether physical or emotional. Once again, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that these people are enlightened in any sense of that word. Enlightened people are functioning humans who can bootstrap the activity of self from the inside. Arhatship is not a pathology. But the fact that a tiny lesion in the brain can create a state that in some way mimics arhatship, I find utterly fascinating.
It is not hard to imagine that there may be many regions in the brain that play a crucial role in maintaining the limited perspective on identity. Dr. Taylor’s stroke and the strokes that underlie athymhormia represent irreversible trauma to cerebral tissue and consequently result in varying degrees of dysfunction. However, it may be possible to temporarily and noninvasively suspend the function of such regions, perhaps for a few hours or a few days, allowing a person to get a glimpse of what the non-egoic perspective is like. If such an intervention were preceded by a certain amount of training in concentration skills, it is conceivable that the person could hold on to the non-egoic framework even after the temporary suspension wore off. But, you ask, how would it be possible to safely and reversibly suspend the function of a certain region of the brain for a period of time? Actually, scientists are currently pursuing a wide spectrum of approaches that will make it possible to do precisely that.
Many years ago, a retreat participant left me a note requesting some private meeting time. When we got together, he explained that he was a retired neuroscientist who had been part of the team that had first successfully recorded the electrical activity from within individual neurons. His name was David Stoney, and he had in fact built the glass microelectrodes that were first inserted into a living neuron. When I asked him why he had requested special time to talk, he drew my attention to an article that had recently been published about what was, at that time, a little-known process—transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS).
TMS involves placing a rather small magnetic coil an inch or so away from a person’s head, and then causing a high amperage current to switch directions very rapidly within the coil. A well-known result of basic physics is that a rapidly changing electrical current will create a strong magnetic field around its conductor. That magnetic field can in turn generate a current in any other conductor that happens to be nearby. This is the principle behind microphones, loudspeakers, and adapters. So a precisely placed changing magnetic field can create a pulse of current in a person’s brain, causing the functioning of that region of the brain to be temporarily impeded. That’s how TMS works.
The scientific article that Dr. Stoney showed me was about treating schizophrenics using TMS. One common symptom of schizophrenia is “hearing voices.” Various medications are routinely used to reduce that symptom, but for a certain percentage of schizophrenic patients, those medications do not work. The article discussed an extremely brief TMS stimulation that was done over the part of the left hemisphere known to control external and internal talk. The experimenters claimed that the stimulation resulted in week-long suspension of the “voice in the head” phenomenon for the schizophrenic patients. A single, isolated piece of research like that means relatively little unless it can be reproduced, but as a preliminary result, it was intriguing.
He reminded me that one of the main difficulties for beginning meditators was that they are constantly bombarded by and lost in internal conversations. He wondered if a TMS stimulus might be used to temporarily suspend the talk center in normal people, allowing them to experience what it is like to meditate without all that internal palaver. It occurred to me, though, that something like TMS might be used not just to temporarily cool out mental talk, but to cool out a person’s entire sense of self as thing. Perhaps there exists one or several sweet spots in the brain that function as switches to turn on limited identity. If so, a carefully aimed physical stimulus might temporarily turn the switch off. Another possibility would be to have three simultaneous stimuli: one to suspend mental image activity, one to suspend mental talk activity, and a third to cool out the emotional body. Such were some ideas that initially occurred to me during my conversations with Dr. Stoney.
Over the years, I have watched with fascination as interest in TMS research has grown exponentially. The problem with TMS is that it is very difficult to focus the magnetic field narrowly enough to aim it tightly at pivotal structures. But perhaps at some time in the future, it may be possible to temporarily and reversibly induce effects like those reported by Dr. Taylor or the victims of athymhormia, using other more easily aimed modalities: transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), focused ultrasound, fine-grained neurofeedback, and such.
The Buddha formulated his path to enlightenment in terms of the four noble truths. Suffering has a necessary cause, meaning that there is a factor whose elimination will eliminate suffering. The Buddha named that factor trishna, usually translated as “grasping.” He claimed that he had found an intervention which would eliminate trishna, and he called that intervention the Path. The Path consists of sila (ethics), samadhi (concentration power), and prajna (insight). In other words, because the Path is sufficient for the elimination of grasping, and because grasping is required for there to be suffering, the Path is sufficient for elimination of suffering. Trishna is a characteristic of consciousness, but consciousness arises in the physical matrix of the brain. Is there a necessary physical condition in the brain that in turn is a necessary condition for the existence of trishna in consciousness? If so, then there may be a technological intervention that could eliminate the necessary physiological condition in the brain that gives rise to the necessary condition for suffering in general—any and all suffering.
A few years ago, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse publicly advocated intensive research on a region of the brain known as the anterior insular cortex. Some believe that this region plays a pivotal role in many, if not all, addictive processes. In other words, it may represent a physical center for trishna. And the director specifically suggested that TMS be used on that region as a general treatment for addiction. If it were to turn out that, instead of being an intervention for addiction, TMS ends up being a general intervention for trishna, then the consequences of this line of research could end up being scientific validation of the Buddhist four noble truths.
The four noble truths are the centerpiece of the historical Buddha’s teaching. If we look at the logic structure, it runs something like this: In order for suffering of any type to occur there must be grasping. There is a way to eliminate grasping; therefore, there is a way to eliminate suffering. When suffering is eliminated, a state of non-suffering arises, which the Buddha referred to as nirvana. It is clear from the Buddha’s description that nirvana is not just an absence of suffering in the sense of being anesthetized, unconscious, or dead. It is described as a highly positive state of deep fulfillment, empowerment, and freedom from limitation. The implication here is that the elimination of grasping reveals a state of primordial well-being that is always present, albeit hidden to most people.
Thus, if we unfold the logical structure of the four noble truths, the Buddha is, in essence, saying: There is a primordial well-being just waiting to show itself, but it is blocked by a habit of consciousness. There is something you can do to change that habit of consciousness. As soon as you do that, the primordial perfection presents itself automatically.
I find this logical structure very interesting. One of the major themes in science and mathematics is what is known as generalization. Within the context of mathematics and science, generalization does not mean “vagueness,” but rather the process by which one goes from a single instance of a truth to a broad perspective that contains that truth as a special case. In the historical Buddha’s model, what needs to be eliminated in order for the primordial well-being to appear is specified as “grasping.” But in order for grasping to occur, certain neurophysiological events may be required. In other words, if we assume grasping is a necessary condition for suffering, then there may be one or several physiological conditions in the nervous system that are themselves necessary conditions for grasping. If that is indeed the case, then medical or technological interventions become relevant to the Path of Enlightenment.
Viscosity
Let’s review. In the traditional Buddhist formulation, trishna is looked upon as a necessary cause for suffering. In a sense, it’s the opposite of equanimity. The corresponding word in Japanese is shujaku, which literally means “attachment.” Sometimes in the context of Japanese Zen, one hears an interesting re-languaging. Some Zen masters substitute the word kotei for shujaku. Kotei means “fixation” or “coagulation.” In this formulation, as soon as one stops fixating the self, suffering and incompleteness go away. Although coagulation sounds similar to the traditional Buddhist notion of grasping, it is not quite the same thing. To me, coagulation sounds a bit more like a physical parameter of the central nervous system, perhaps in some way analogous to friction in a mechanical system, or viscosity in a hydrodynamic system, or resistance in an electrical circuit.
When you look at senior Zen masters or some of the reputed arhats from Southeast Asia, you are immediately struck by their distinctive body language. There is a kind of graceful, “it just happens” quality to their movements, their gaze, and their speech.
All of the great masters that I have ever met had this same distinctive quality. It’s so distinctive that you can even spot it at a distance. Once, I was waiting in an airport when I noticed someone in one of the security lines. The person was so far away that I could not identify their race or gender, but I could detect the unfixated quality in the way that they were placing their luggage on the scanner. As I got closer, I noticed he was Asian, probably Chinese. I don’t know what got into me, but throwing caution to the wind, I initiated a conversation in Mandarin. Sure enough, it turned out that he was a senior Taoist master from mainland China.
Clearly, something has taken place on a neurophysiological level in such people. Something dramatic has occurred in the way all information flows into and the way all motor activity flows out of their central nervous system. It’s a global change. A dramatic global change such as that should have neural correlates. If we can identify those, we may be able to characterize the “unfixated self” with a mathematical model involving something like a quantifiable coefficient of fixation, analogous to physical coefficients, such as those of turbulence, viscosity, or friction.
How does microfixation arise at the neurophysiological level? I’m not aware of any breakthrough research on this question, but I suspect that the answer could lead to significant practical consequences. Perhaps microfixation has something to do with the delicate timing mechanisms that control the flow of data in and out of the central nervous system. Or perhaps it’s related to phase relationships within the thalamic system clocks at the center of the brain. If so, there may be highly sophisticated forms of biofeedback that reset those phase relationships and, thus, eliminate fixation at the deepest level and broadest scope. Or it may have something to do with the brain’s ability to erase a data wave quickly, so as not to interfere with the next propagation of data. In other words, in the unenlightened person, the “blackboard” isn’t erased quickly enough, and so the brain is constantly microscopically jamming at the millisecond level, creating viscosity.
Recently, neuroscientists have come to identify a physical parameter they call “stickiness,” which essentially refers to how long the brain hangs on to an experience before moving on to the next. This quality is related to a phenomenon called the “attentional blink.” Perhaps the base level of stickiness in a person’s nervous system can be radically reduced through biofeedback or direct intervention. Stickiness is a well-defined physical phenomenon that can be monitored by analyzing a person’s EEG signal. Perhaps stickiness is a necessary condition for grasping and, hence, a necessary condition for limited identity and suffering.
Some people say that the four noble truths represent a pessimistic view of things, but I derive a lot of optimism from them. On the surface, the formulation would seem to imply that life sucks, but the deeper implication is that enlightenment, unconditional wellbeing, is the natural state, just waiting to happen. All we have to do is negate that which is negating it. In other words, you don’t have to get enlightenment, all you have to do is get rid of what’s keeping you from enlightenment. Moreover, it is entirely possible that the unenlightened state requires many necessary conditions, and some of them are physiological. All we have to do is eliminate just one of those, any of those, and enlightenment will spontaneously show itself. This point of view could be seen as expanding the Buddha’s four noble truths into a more general paradigm.
If we were to give scientists the task of creating liberation, it would be a daunting project indeed. On the other hand, if it is true that liberation happens automatically as soon as some necessary condition such as fixation has been eliminated, the project now becomes tractable. All the scientists need to do is identify what’s getting in the way and then devise a process to neutralize it.
Perhaps a simple physical example will serve to make the contrast tangible. Creating a house of cards is difficult because one has to go against entropy to do so. Eliminating a house of cards is simple: just remove any one of the base cards and the house of cards spontaneously tumbles. That’s because the tumbling of the house of cards flows with entropy. Natural events tend to flow with entropy. If enlightenment is natural, it’s reasonable to assume that it flows with entropy. It’s more like collapsing a house of cards, less like having to build one.
Another reason people sometimes get upset when I talk about my happiest thought is because they assume I’m claiming more than I actually am. In the field of consciousness studies, it’s become common to speak of easy problems and the hard problem. Easy problems are the ones we can settle with the standard methods of science—mapping out neural circuits, monitoring neurotransmitter levels, modeling certain aspects of attention, and so forth. The hard problem is to figure out what consciousness is and how it relates those biophysical processes. Among the so-called easy tasks, the holy grail is to create a complete simulation of the human nervous system as it processes sensory information (including thought) and responds motorically. “Complete” in this case means that the simulation’s temporal and spatial resolutions reach down to the finest relevant levels. We might refer to this task as the “hardest easy task.” Most neuroscientists are confident that the hardest easy task can be successfully tackled; it’s just a matter of time, given how quickly the relevant technology is growing. I suspect that the science of enlightenment I dream of will only arise after the hardest easy task has been resolved. It will probably require that level of biophysical knowledge. Conversely, I strongly suspect that once the hardest easy task has been completed, the biophysical markers of enlightened brains will be clearly evident, and our species will be able to use that information to develop powerful new ways to facilitate freedom. When I say freedom, here I’m referring to the “liberated from mind-body” aspect of the Path. As far as the “be-a-good-person” aspect of the Path goes, well, that’s a whole other question—which brings me to my next point of clarification.
When I describe my happiest thought, some people assume that I’m saying that science will explain (or even explain away) enlightenment—“Oh, it’s all just electricity and chemicals.” But that’s not what I’m claiming—not at all. The question of what enlightenment is is similar to questions like what the experience of blue is or what the experience of love is or what consciousness is. All of those are part of the other problem, the so-called “hard problem.” I don’t have a clue as to whether science will solve the hard problem. Fortunately, I don’t think we need to solve the hard problem in order to create a science of enlightenment. Solving the hardest of the easy problems will probably be sufficient to give us the spatial and temporal resolutions we need in order to say to the world “Just look! Here’s your brain on self. Here’s your brain on no self. Get it?!”
Will this then cause all our big global problems to go away? No. But certainly many of them will be solved more effectively and quickly, and problems that seem at this point to be utterly intractable may well turn out to have feasible solutions within a few generations, certainly within a few centuries—which, by Darwinian standards, is a mere wink.
But how about the technology itself? Solving the hardest easy problem might lead to technologies that can effectively enslave people, in addition to possibly setting them free. That’s certainly a legitimate concern, but it’s part of a different discussion. It’s unlikely that anyone is going to prevent neuroscientists from completing the hardest easy task. The new field of neuroethics seeks to address the consequences of this and related developments. A lifetime of meditation has made me an optimist, so I tend to think this powerful knowledge will, in the end, be put to good use—indeed, the best use.
In science, there is a dialectical interplay between fundamental research and practical application. When scientists seek funding from governments, the politicians will often ask what the practical application of their research is. This can be a frustrating experience for the scientist, because politicians may find it hard to understand that numerous powerful but unpredictable applications will arise from a single fundamental breakthrough. There’s a parallel here. Enlightenment is to the specific issues of a person’s life as fundamental science is to practical applications. If science were to make enlightenment massively available to humanity, we should expect to see numerous and stunning positive improvements in the human situation: dramatic reduction in conflict and violence from the interpersonal level to the international level, reduction in crime and substance addiction, vast improvement in the global baseline of physical and mental health, and probably even a general elevation of human intelligence.
Will hard-nosed science and contemplative-based spirituality in fact cross-fertilize to create new understandings and technologies that accelerate classical enlightenment on this planet? I don’t know. But I do know that there is plenty of evidence that suggests this could happen; it’s not a ridiculously impossible prospect.
Some people claim that there are currently known technologies that significantly accelerate enlightenment. I disagree. Although it’s true that some of the brain hacks currently available seem to marginally help some people do better in meditation, they still fall far short of reliably and effectively fostering classical enlightenment. The breakthroughs I’m envisioning are planet-changing. Anything short of that cannot claim to be a science-based technology of enlightenment. Does any currently available process provide that level of clout? I sincerely doubt it. Might we develop something in the next century that carries that level of clout? I sincerely wish it.
Good, new technology typically requires good, new basic science. Our current imaging technology is probably woefully insufficient to capture the biophysiology of enlightenment, and our neuromodeling methods are probably far too crude.
My happiest thought involves two steps. First, discover a biophysical model for enlightenment (assuming one exists). Then, create technological boosts that reliably facilitate it (if that’s possible). Anything short of that is, in my way of thinking, insufficient—indeed, trivial. Causes have consequences. If my happiest thought is correct, the entire course of human history could dramatically change for the better. Enlightenment could go viral.
Neuroscience is progressing rapidly, and thanks to organizations like the Mind and Life Institute, many young neuroscientists—perhaps even most—have been exposed to meditation. If we can hold out for another century or so, we may well create the kind of science I dream of. A pessimistic person might say that a technology powerful enough to liberate the planet will also be powerful enough to enslave it. That may be so. Perhaps the devils and the angels of our species will run neck and neck to the end. My gut tells me that the angels will win. A happy thought indeed.
Of course, I’m not claiming that this hopeful scenario will inevitably unfold, only that it’s not ludicrous or far-fetched. Knowing that this research program could be successful helps me cope with the senseless litany of horrors that is the news I watch each evening. And knowing that I am in a small way part of this research energizes this aging body when I get up each morning.
I began this chapter with a quote from H. G. Wells, who is credited with an impressive string of accurate predictions. In his nineteenth-and early twentieth-century works, he describes things like the Internet, Wikipedia, and role-playing war games. He accurately predicted when World War II would begin and that it would be aerial in nature. Most famously, he described a then-fictional mechanism whereby splitting atoms propagate in a chain reaction releasing huge amounts of energy for use in war and peace. Leo Szilard, a key figure in the early development of atomic energy, explicitly acknowledged that the fictional writings of Wells had influenced his real-world research.
Will Wells turn out to be right about the Buddha and humanity’s future? Let’s look again at what he said nearly a century ago.
It is quite possible that in contact with western science,
and inspired by the spirit of history, the original
teaching of Gautama, revived and purified, may yet
play a large part in the direction of human destiny.
H. G. WELLS, 1920
I would rephrase this slightly with a twist:
It is not unreasonable that in contact with modern
science, and inspired by the spirit of history, the original
discoveries of Gautama, rigorized and extended, will play
a large part in the direction of human destiny.
SHINZEN YOUNG, 2015