It took me quite a while to get the point of publishing this book—many years actually. That may seem like a strange statement. How can someone not get the point of publishing something they themselves wrote? Let me explain.
A central notion of Buddhism is that there’s not a thing inside us called a self. One way to express that is to say that we are a colony of sub-personalities and each of those sub-personalities is in fact not a noun but a verb—a doing.
One of my doings is Shinzen the researcher. Shinzen the researcher is on a mission to “take the mist out of mysticism.” Contrary to what is often claimed, he believes that mystical experience can be described with the same rigor, precision, and quantified language that one would find in a successful scientific theory. In his opinion, formulating a clear description of mystical experience is a required prenuptial for the Marriage of the Millennium: the union of quantified science and contemplative spirituality. He hopes that eventually this odd couple will exuberantly make love, spawning a generation of offspring that precipitously improves the human condition.
Shinzen the researcher also believes that many meditation masters, current and past, have formulated their teachings with “less than full rigor” by making unwarranted, sweeping philosophical claims about the nature of objective reality based on their subjective experiences—claims that tend to offend scientists and, hence, impede the science-spirituality courtship.
Shinzen the researcher has a natural voice. It’s the style you would find in a graduate text on mathematics: definition, lemma, theorem, example, corollary, postulate, theorem. Here’s a sample of that voice:
It may be possible to model certain global patterns of brain physiology in ways that feel familiar to any trained scientist, i.e., equations in differential operators on scalar, vector, or tensor fields whose dependent variables can be quantified in terms of SI units and whose independent variables are time and space (where space equals ordinary space or some more esoteric differentiable manifold). It is perhaps even possible to derive those equations from first principles the way Navier-Stokes is derived from Cauchy continuity. In such fields, distinctive “flow regimes” are typically associated with relations on the parameters of the equations, i.e., F (Pj) → Q, where Q is qualitative change in field behavior. By qualitative change in field behavior, I mean things like the appearance of solitons or the disappearance of turbulence, etc. Through inverse methods, it may be possible to establish a correspondence between the presence of a certain parameter relation in the equations modeling a field in a brain and the presence of classical enlightenment in the owner of that brain. This would provide a way to physically quantify and mathematically describe (or perhaps even explain) various dimensions of spiritual enlightenment in a way that any trained scientist would feel comfortable with.
That’s not the voice you’ll be hearing in this book. This book is a record of a different Shinzen, Shinzen the dharma teacher, as he talks to students engaged in meditation practice. Shinzen the dharma teacher has no resistance at all to speaking with less than full rigor. He’s quite comfortable with words like God, Source, Spirit, or phrases like “the nature of nature.” In fact, his natural voice loves spouting the kind of stuff that makes scientists wince. Here’s an example of that voice:
The same cosmic forces that mold galaxies, stars, and atoms also mold each moment of self and world. The inner self and the outer scene are born in the cleft between expansion and contraction. By giving yourself to those forces, you become those forces, and through that, you experience a kind of immortality—you live in the breath and pulse of every animal, in the polarization of electrons and protons, in the interplay of the thermal expansion and self-gravity that molds stars, in the interplay of dark matter that holds galaxies together and dark energy that stretches space apart. Don’t be afraid to let expansion and contraction tear you apart, scattering you in many directions while ripping away the solid ground beneath you. Behind that seeming disorder is an ordering principle so primordial that it can never be disordered: father-God effortlessly expands while mother-God effortlessly contracts. The ultimate act of faith is to give yourself back to those forces, give yourself back to the Source of the world, and through that, become the kind of person who can optimally contribute to the Mending of the world.
Shinzen the hard-nosed researcher and Shinzen the poetic dharma teacher get along just fine. After all, they’re both just waves. Particles may bang together. Waves automatically integrate. Just one problem though. The researcher is a fussy perfectionist. He is very resistant to the notion of publishing anything that lacks full rigor. Spoken words return to silence from where they come. Printed text sits around for centuries waiting for every tiny imprecision and incompleteness to be exposed.
So it took a while for me to see value in allowing my talks to be published in something close to their original spoken form.
Deep gratitude to my editor Michael W. Taft; Tami Simon, founder and publisher of Sounds True; Todd Mertz, my business development manager; and my genius assistant, Emily Barrett, for their encouragement, support, probing, and astounding levels of patience over the many years that it took for this book to see the light of day. I would like to thank Danny Cohen, Martin Hoy, Har-Prakash Khalsa, Don McCormick, Chade-Meng Tan, Chris Trani, and Jeff Warren for their comments and suggestions. I sincerely hope that you, the reader, find it fun and useful.
Furthermore, let me express my appreciation (in no particular order) for: Bill Koratos, my friend and business partner, who supported me in so many ways through the long process of developing this material; Ann Buck for her warm friendship and generosity of spirit; Choshin Blackburn for her impeccable grace in organizing my retreats and creating such a welcoming atmosphere; Charley Tart for his constant encouragement and thoughtful as well as thought-provoking dialogue; Shelly Young, Stephanie Nash, Soryu Forall, Julianna Raye, and Peter Marks, among others, for helping me create my system; Magdalena Naylor, Dave Vago, David Creswell, and Emily Lindsay for their interest in applying the rigors of scientific research to this work; Markell Brooks, Bob Stiller, Dave Stiller, Christian Stiller, Greg Smith, and Judith Smith for all they have done to support my work. If I forgot to mention anyone, it is due to the limitations of memory, not appreciation.
Lastly, I’d also like to thank all my students for their enthusiastic collaboration in all the meditation experiments I’ve tried over the years.
One final note about the terminology in this book. I like experimenting with language. Over the years, I’ve created an idiosyncratic jargon for describing both ordinary sensory experience and certain special phenomena that can occur in the course of practice. Often but not always, I’ll employ capitalization to alert you to the fact that I’m using language idiosyncratically. For example: “See” refers to any and all visual experience, “Hear” refers to any and all auditory experience, “Feel” refers to any and all body experience, “Gone” refers to the instant when a sensory experience vanishes, “Flow” refers generically to change in a sensory experience, and “Source” refers to the deepest level of consciousness.
I should also mention something about how I use the word “space” as it can refer to several rather different things. There is physical space, which Einstein showed is inextricably mixed with time. Then there is formal space, which refers to various mathematical abstractions: Euclidian spaces, projective spaces, topological spaces, and so forth. Then there’s the sensory experience of space.
If you observe carefully, you’ll notice that everything you see, hear, and feel has width, depth, and height. It’s spatial by nature. Even the mind is spatial. The mind has a front part, which I call the center of image space (for many people this is located in front of and/or behind their eyes). And the mind has a back part, which I call mental talk space (for many people this is located in their head and at their ears). Some people refer to the center of image space as their mental screen, which is a two-dimensional paradigm, but for other people, the center of image space is more like a stage; that is, it has width, height, and depth. Similarly, mental talk space has width, height, and depth, although for most people, those parameters are rather ill-defined. So mental experience is spatial: image space + talk space = mind space.
Physical and emotional experiences are also spatial. Physical sights appear in front of our eyes, and they obviously have width, depth, and height. External sounds can be localized: right, left, front, back, above, below. Physical-type body sensations occupy regions within or around the body. The same holds for emotional-type body sensations.
Being aware of the size, shape, and location of sensory events represents clarity with regard to the spatial nature of experience. As your focus skills grow, you increasingly appreciate the spatial nature of experience. But at some point, a qualitative shift may occur. You begin to notice the spacious nature of sensory experience. Sensory events seem to arise within a vast openness and are pervaded by a feathery thinness. It’s as though the inner self and the outer world are literally made of space.
To sum it up, the word “space” can mean four different things depending on the context. There’s what the physicist means by space, there’s what the mathematician means by space, there’s the ordinary experience of space (i.e., the spatiality of the senses), and then there is the extraordinary experience of space (i.e., the spaciousness of the senses).
Throughout this book, the word “space” usually refers to experiential space, the third and fourth meanings described above. I’m not claiming that those necessarily have any link to what physicists or mathematicians mean by space. That’s a philosophical question above my pay grade.
Appreciating the spatial nature of sensory experience has great practical value. It makes sensory experience trackable and, therefore, tractable. Appreciating the spacious nature of sensory experience goes beyond that. Taken to the deepest level, it’s synonymous with enlightenment itself.
SHINZEN YOUNG
BURLINGTON, VERMONT, 2015