By Way of a Personal Introduction

I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.

Henry Thoreau (1817–1862)¹

It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect, he is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to the nature of things.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)²

This is the fifth book of words by a neurologist who has been on a decades-long quest to understand Zen at first hand. Direct personal experiences influence this account. The first occurred at Daitoku-ji in Kyoto in 1974. Following several weeks of meditation, I was astonished to discover how clear my awareness became after my intrusive word-thoughts stopped. Another experience happened months later, again while I was meditating. As I dropped into a state of deep internal absorption, my physical sense of Self completely vanished into a vast black, silent space. The major event happened seven and a half years later. My entire psychic sense of Self suddenly dissolved while I was traveling to the second day of a retreat in London. In Zen the technical term for this state is kensho. [ZB: 519–624; ZBR: 407–410]

Notice what happened just before each of these last two states. On each occasion I had first abandoned myself to circumstances, then glanced up briefly. Before the absorption I had looked up at a single electric lightbulb that dangled from the ceiling of the unfamiliar zendo where we happened to be meditating that evening. [ZB: 470; ZBR: 322] Years later, just before the awakening into kensho, I also happened to look up. This time I gazed up into the distant open sky, far out beyond that platform of the unfamiliar train station where I was standing. [ZB: 537]

Neither interval of surrender was deliberate. Nor was looking up intentional. Each glance was casual, automatic, free from any willful thought or anticipation. Everything that unfolded next in those fresh, unfamiliar settings was unexpected. Researchers would later discover that a novel context can prompt the ventral attention system to react. [SI: 29–34]

The first book in this series devoted six chapters to attention, a theme long emphasized in Zen. A ringing endorsement of attention by William James opened the first of those chapters: “The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will.” [ZB: 69–71] My indebtedness to William James was evident on so many other pages in that volume that friends jokingly accused me (rightly) of citing James more often than the Buddha.

Any homage overdue to the man who was first called Siddhartha or to William James is now expressed in chapters 1, 4, 6, and 7 of the present volume. In fact, the involuntary bottom-up functions of covert attention and awareness were known to James and to Emerson. This involuntary faculty of attentiveness is implicit in long-term Zen meditative training. We rely on these subconscious attentive functions to automatically detect and redirect our wandering attention. Their hidden, context-sensitive intelligence is crucial. It seems likely to prove at least as essential to our long-term survival and well-being as whatever we try so hard to achieve each time we make a conscious attempt to deliberately focus our attention.

Investigators are just beginning to study some normal skill sets in our brain’s automatic pilot that help accomplish such covert Self-correcting tasks. In view of my lifelong orientation toward hobbies that lead me into the natural world outdoors, I’ve been encouraged to see that researchers are now discovering that our brain responds differently when it is immersed in the green-space sanctuary of a forest atmosphere. These issues are reviewed in appendix A.

Meditative practices continue to evolve as they pass through different cultures. Whether the next chapters find us looking far back into the distant past to be reminded how much wisdom unfolded two millennia ago, or peering out toward each new horizon that promises to rise up ahead of us in the future, one thing seems clear: Human beings are on a long quest to clarify how the training of our attentional skills will help unburden us of our maladaptive sense of Self. Appendix D is a reminder that most of the key topics considered here remain to be clarified by rigorous future research.