9
Mindfulness Starts as Present-Moment Awareness
Over time, you will begin to catch glimpses of your mind’s basic state of awareness . . . What begins as a glimpse can gradually be extended, and you can start to understand that the mind is like a mirror . . . images appear and disappear without affecting the medium in which they appear.
The 14th Dalai Lama1
Just resting in choiceless awareness, in open presence, moment by moment by moment . . . and reestablishing awareness if you get lost and carried away, which of course is bound to happen, over and over and over again—nothing wrong with that.
Jon Kabat-Zinn2
Caroline Rhys Davids (1857–1922) was a pioneer scholar in the Pali language. When she came to translate the old Pali word sati, “mindfulness” seemed to be its nearest single-word equivalent in English. However, the original meaning of the Pali term sati was much more elastic. Why couldn’t all of its aspects be described as just being aware of the present moment? Because the original meaning of sati also included its broad overview function: to “facilitate and enable one’s memory.” [MS: 92–97] Memory recalls past moments.
How does our memory operate normally? At the near end of each stimulus event—right now in this present moment—bare awareness of a stimulus takes less than one-third of a second. Our working memory can easily address simple tasks within such a short processing window. [SI: 14–21] However, the rose-apple tree incident illustrates Siddhartha’s remote memory. Remote memory can store a crucial event from childhood, but not recall it in a useful context until decades later (see chapter 4).
Ideally, as our memory unfolds on a long sliding scale of time, it needs to be serviced by: (1) a keenly focused tactical attention that incorporates current events into short term working memory, and (2) levels and degrees of discriminating awareness that can reach back into longer-term memory. Other resources then act, consciously or subconsciously, to pick out only the most useful item from a whole lifetime of strategic and policy options.
These several components of sati seem to have been encoded within the separate accounts of a large and very flexible memory bank. Its ample capacity has separate vaults in which we can store short-term recent deposits. Moreover, withdrawals can be made—without our willful, top-down signature—whether we had earlier registered such deposits subconsciously or only consciously.3
This is a remarkable continuum. So, let us acknowledge the full scope of these surveillance operations and the way they extend into our memory functions. The reason a new word, remindfulness, is introduced in the next section is to emphasize the practical implications of retaining the original broad overview meaning of sati. When and where would the huge topic of awakening called Buddhism have arisen had Siddhartha not recalled what happened under that rose-apple tree?
Remindfulness
Webster’s International Dictionary contains mindfulness but not this word. Let remindfulness refer to our normal, autonomous, affirmative memory skills. These are the kinds that stay poised on silent standby alert. They accomplish useful Self-correcting overview functions. Emerson considered that this involuntary faculty served as our natural source of “guidance.” How could such silent messages guide us? Not because we used high-brow logic to deliberately access abstract thoughts. This guidance arrived, he said, through a subtle kind of “lowly listening.” [MS: 145–150]
This complex system relies on the confluence of intuitive skills that arise subconsciously. Wordlessly, they
* detect the fact that our attention is not usefully focused on what now might be more appropriate,
* disengage this currently misguided attentive processing,
* identify and select the potentially more useful information held in our memory storage,
* retrieve this relevant information from its storage in memory.
With attention now reattached on the sharp tip of this latest topic, attentive processing functions can redirect this topic toward its more appropriate goal.
• How can we cultivate such an intelligent continuum of discerning remindful capacities?
By engaging in ongoing concentrative and receptive meditative practices, both on and off the cushion. As these broad overview skills co-evolve incrementally within everyday awareness, their priorities develop along lines that are increasingly intuitive. [ZB: 125–129, 295–298] Moreover, these newer dimensions of remindfulness orient themselves spontaneously toward larger Big Picture issues. Some of them might resemble that old-fashioned word conscience. The more competent our basic physical and psychic sense of Self becomes, by virtue of having dropped off its earlier maladaptive attachments, the more such novel insights seem likely to spring up effortlessly. On rare occasions, deep insights can be life-changing.
Research Pointing Toward New Horizons of Remindfulness
Thoreau understood that “all memorable events transpire in morning time and in a morning atmosphere.” Indeed, he cited the ancient Veda saying that “all intelligences awake with the morning.” [ZB: 621] His comments are in accord with some fMRI investigations from Washington University.4 This research shows that greater normal connectivities normally develop in the morning hours among those medial temporal regions (including the hippocampus) that are significantly involved in our memory. [ZB: 180–189] Not until the evening hours will more connections develop that increase the links between our higher neocortex, striatum, and brain stem.
An important fMRI study of meditation was reported by Hasenkamp et al. in 2012.5 The subjects were 14 adult meditators. Their assigned task was to focus their attention on following their breath while their eyes were closed. The five meditators who had practiced for 3,000 hours represented a high-practice group. The nine meditators in the low-practice group had averaged only 450 hours or so.
This fMRI study was designed to distinguish between four adjacent events during meditation. Ordinary mind wandering occurred during the first of these intervals. The second interval was of greatest interest in the present context of remindfulness. Why? Because at this moment, the subjects first became aware that they were mind wandering. Suddenly, they realized—they detected—that they were no longer focused on their earlier goal of following the breath. A light bulb of remindful awareness now seemed to have turned on. This mismatch signal detected a conflict: what they were actually doing was not what they had intended to do. This remindful event had a particular neuroimaging signature. Its mismatch coincided with bilateral activation of the anterior/middle insula and the dorsal part of the anterior cingulate cortex. The authors used the term “salience network” when referring to this interesting circuitry.
Parenthetically, it becomes useful at this point to define salience. Why? Because we need to distinguish between its initial and later origins. Salience refers to a special meaningful quality, one that instantly infuses significant import into an event. Much prior evidence indicates that the immediate varieties of perceptual salience begin silently, subconsciously, deep in our brain. [ZBR: 175–176] Let’s refer to this immediacy as salience I. Most of this early significance is assigned to a stimulus by the pulvinar, the largest association nucleus in the thalamus. In recent years, our higher-level assignments of salience came to be associated with activity coordinated among regions of the cortex. [SI: 138, 238] These networks of salience II include the insula, its overlying opercular region, and their links with the dorsal anterior cingulate gyrus. [ZBR: 82–85]
Back now to the fMRI monitoring of those two groups of meditators who had just detected that their minds were wandering. The subjects who had more meditative practice showed more activity in their left inferior temporal region. This finding is interesting in view of the possibility that longer-term meditative practice could tend to be associated with some bottom-up forms of attentive processing along the “southern” pathways (see chapter 12).
This instant of remindful realization within awareness resembles a mini-insight. [ZBR: 271–275, 337] After it, the meditators could go on first to disengage and then to shift their focus of attention. At this point in the third phase (when attention had just been disengaged and was now detached), the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex showed increased activity. Other active cortical sites now included the superior, middle, and inferior frontal gyrus (see figure 2.2).
The evidence suggested that the cingulo-opercular networks were part of the subtle system that could bring higher-level salience II functions into the interval of discernment and detection. In contrast, the usual lateral frontoparietal executive networks were participating during this next interval of disengaged detachment. These findings are supported by other research into the general nature of problem solving skills that evolve slowly in the course of normal human development. [SI: 238]
Lutz and colleagues conducted an important multidisciplinary study of how changes in the cortical salience network and amygdala were related to the pain responsivities of 14 long term, advanced practitioners.6 These adepts, averaging 46 years of age, had meditated for over 10,000 hours in two established Tibetan traditions. They were also experts in performing the style called “open presence meditation” during fMRI monitoring. [MS: 89–90] They performed this practice for a brief, 45-second interval prior to their receiving the warm (32°C) or hot (49°C) thermal stimuli.
This hot stimulus felt less unpleasant to the adepts than to their matched controls. The adepts showed lesser degrees of anxiety-related baseline fMRI signal activity in three regions while they waited on the brink of being exposed to pain: their left anterior insula, anterior mid cingulate cortex, and amygdala. However, they also showed more fMRI activity in these insula and cingulate sites during the pain. Importantly, as the hot stimulus continued, the fMRI signals from these same regions then habituated more rapidly. The lesser degree of anticipatory reactivity found in the experts’ amygdala just before the pain was also associated with this faster neural habituation that occurred in their anterior mid cingulate cortex during the actual pain.
The findings appear consistent with the possibility that these advanced meditators had already arrived at subtle attitudes of openness and acceptance. Attitudes referable to our limbic and paralimbic regions underlie our awareness and covertly influence it. In expert meditators, these attitudes could still enable pain to be experienced but not to go on to develop its usual unpleasant subjective resonances. It is of interest that some advanced Tibetan practitioners can also include intervals of thought-free vastness during their openly receptive state of “open presence.” [ZBR: 397] (see chapter 11).
To review every important new advance in meditation research is far beyond the scope of this slender book. However, contemporary meditation research is beginning to meet appropriate basic standards [ZBR: 214–215], and comments on a sample of recent relevant reports are included in the Notes section.7, 8
Serial fMRI Changes as Awareness Becomes Thought-Free
Erb and Sitaram’s study of meditation specifies the particular kind of awareness that becomes free of thoughts.9 [ZB: 96–99, 141]. They monitored Thich Thong Triet, a meditation expert of decades-long experience, and eight experienced members of this master’s sangha. Their approach to Sunyata (emptiness) meditation is especially relevant to the thesis outlined in chapters 1, 6, and 13. Their practice centers on the “just this” kind of selfless advice that was condensed for Bahiya and Malunkya millennia earlier.
How do Erb and Sitaram summarize the way this technique guides its practitioners? They choose capital letters to characterize it with the explicit phrase “Not Naming the Object.” In short, these experienced practitioners have learned to settle into bare, open-eyed forms of wordless neural processing when they meditate. This natural approach enables them increasingly to see, hear, feel, and “know” the objects within their experience, yet to steer clear of any impulse to attach word-thoughts or allied concepts to what they are experiencing. Zen is on familiar ground with the “just this” approach (see chapters 3, 5 and 6).
In this respect, the condensed results of six separate study sessions with Master Thong Triet are noteworthy. They summarize how his thoughts drop out during four successively deeper levels of his meditative awareness. These successive levels are on the path of the meditative absorptions. [ZBR: 313–322] The words used by this Sunyata School describe these levels as
1. verbal awareness (the usual inner silent verbal dialogue that tags the in-breath with one word and the out-breath with another);
2. tacit awareness (the ordinary kinds of awareness that attend, in fewer words, to one’s usual daily activities);
3. awakening awareness (the states of increasingly clear enhanced awareness that can exist during walking, standing, sitting or lying down, after these acts have become relatively free from subjective wordy intrusions);
4. cognition awareness (the deepest stage of meditation, during which all thought stops and breathing can stop occasionally (e.g., for 15 seconds, in the case of this master).
In brief, as meditation deepens successively, certain initial fMRI activations fall. Especially reduced are those signals that had been so prominent in both superior temporal gyri during the person’s usual nonvocalized internal dialogue. Moreover, activation increases elsewhere at about the same time: in the right inferior frontal gyrus, right insula, right cerebellum, and visual association cortex (BA 18/19 L>R). (See figure 3.1, together with figure 11.1 and its color counterpart, plate 1.)
In the group analysis of all meditators, two deactivations coincided with the gradual disappearance of discursive thoughts. These deactivations occurred in their prefrontal polar cortex (BA 10) and in their posterior cingulate region (see figure 3.1). As meditation deepened, the semantic language regions of their superior temporal gyrus also became less activated at the same time as their visual association cortex became more activated (BA 18, 19). These several examples of reciprocal change will become of special interest with regard to a working hypothesis: occipital lobe disinhibition provides a potential explanation for the release of some visual phenomena during meditation (see chapter 12).
First-Person Reports of Long-Term Transformations of Awareness
The subtitle of this book refers to Living Zen. To live Zen is to be grounded in directly experiencing, and responding to, the fresh living reality of each present moment. [ZB: 76–77; SI: 13, 203–205; MS: 137–138] The title of this chapter specifies that these mindful qualities begin as awareness of the present moment. [ZB: 125–129] Chapter 2 indicated that as meditation evolves, an interesting tendency develops: the scope and clarity of one’s mental space seems to expand. To these two impressions, we have just now added sati’s original overview attributes of remindfulness. Some practitioners notice other refinements of their awareness. One variety can be described as “ever-present awareness.” [ZBR: 184–187] Transcendental meditation practitioners report that this sense of an ongoing awareness extends itself even into their sleep. This particular quality is then described as “witnessing sleep.”
Robert Forman is a professor of comparative religion at City University of New York. He has practiced transcendental meditation for the past 43 years. He once described this extra quality of awareness as being “ready for things, even in the depths of sleep.” [ZBR: 237] Forman’s introspective accounts can serve here as a useful springboard for further discussion. They are summarized in a long article in the Network Review.10 He describes how his consciousness changed as the result of a significant shift that occurred in January 1972. Four sentences condense the nature of this change: “Behind everything I am and do now came to be a sense of silence, a bottomless emptiness, so open as to be without end. This silence bears a sense of spaciousness or vastness, which extends in every direction. This silent expanse is not something I have to remember to be; it takes absolutely no effort to maintain it. It is as effortless to be this as it is to have a right hand.”
Forman’s vast new silence had four main features:
1. Background thoughts disappeared. Yet an element of promise was implicit in this seeming absence. By this, he means that a gratuitous subconscious process of incubation was still going on. The example he gives is what happens when a student asks him a question. Although he is aware that his conscious mind is “completely silent,” yet the correct answer still pops up to the surface of his mind out of the background of this “richly pregnant silence.” (Chapters 12, 13, and 14 in the present volume provide other examples of the creative, problem-solving potentials that are inherent in this less cluttered mental space. It is suggested that one’s intuitions become free to bob up to the surface of consciousness once the chattering distractions drop off that had previously entangled the whole mental field.)
2. A shift occurred in who or what I am. Forman’s earlier tight subjective sense of “who I am” became more like an “it.”
3. A further shift occurred into “witness consciousness.” While this involved both “seeing and at the same time being aware of the seeing,” these intervals did not seem dual. Instead, each moment was witnessed in a “quite natural and integrated manner.” Each moment was “utterly effortless” and “astonishingly fresh!”
4. A similar natural and unobtrusive witnessing awareness occurred during sleep (as referred to above).
As a long-term meditation practitioner, Professor Forman’s apt descriptions are in keeping with the first-person reports of many others who describe a persistent, ongoing shift in the relationships that had previously existed in their perceptual awareness and in their underlying sense of Self.11 He is familiar with the religious literature that describes enlightenment as “glorious gloriousness” and “absolute perfection.” However, none of his personal experiences presented themselves in this exalted manner. Instead, to him, “Enlightenment is the unmingling of a commingled reality.”
• What does this last sentence mean?
Let’s begin with what seems to constitute our everyday ordinary sense of reality. We have observed that it actually contains a blend of two components: the Self frame of reference (dominant, overt) and the other frame of reference (subordinate, covert). Therefore, when Forman refers to a commingled reality, his words would seem to be describing the components of this everyday duality, this complex merger of these two versions of reality: egocentric and allocentric (see chapter 3).
• How do we blend these two functional compartments into one impression?
Our brain registers stimuli as signals from the outside environment. In the early milliseconds, it reorganizes these messages into patterns. We use our own powerful Self-centeredness to squeeze these patterns into our own personal frame of reference and co-opt them as our percepts.
The last three sentences help us understand the concise “unmingling” to which Forman referred. In neural terms, unmingling corresponds with a deep shift. This shift allows the existing, yet hidden allocentric frame of reference to assume a novel overt prominence throughout the whole foreground field of consciousness. No longer must this other-centered perspective play its former subordinate role to our Self-centeredness. Now out in the open, so to speak, it infuses consciousness with an astonishing, fresh perspective.
Forman had commented decades before that most of the “pure consciousness events” that occur during meditation tend to be “rudimentary.” [ZBR: 391–392] Some of these simpler forms of conscious awareness would seem to represent only minor changes within meditators’ ventral and dorsal attention systems, those co-sponsored by the more ordinary shifts that can occur in thalamic and subthalamic regions. [ZB: 402–404] During such rudimentary events, some trivial word thoughts and other dispensable mental processing could be bypassed and briefly drop out of the field of consciousness.
• What about those other key qualities of our mental space—the complete silence, effortlessness and spaciousness—that Forman also mentioned?
To the degree that they permeated and transformed his own awareness, they could appear consistent with what he currently conceptualizes as “the first state of enlightenment.” Such an ongoing development would represent an entry stage on the very long Path toward the culmination that words might try to describe as “the great unmingling.”
Forman’s account describes the fact that he suffered from acute anxiety when he was an adolescent and a young adult. In candor, he then explains that neither his many years of meditation nor these qualities of silence that had entered his ongoing awareness served to reverse his severe anxiety problems. Therefore, he still sought psychotherapy for these symptoms,12 a reminder to all readers that meditation is no panacea.13
One of his current goals is intriguing. He says this goal is “to live jazz in the soul, and under any circumstance, on the subtle ground of spiritual spaciousness.” Qualities of spaciousness were among those included in that mature ripening of awareness that can develop during long-term meditation (see chapter 2).
• But where does living jazz fit into a book about living Zen?
Its spontaneity is part of the competence that can arise and be manifested in intuitive behavioral responses. [ZB: 119–125; 668–677] (Soon it will be hinted at by Louis Armstrong’s remark in the epigraph that opens part IV). Jazz also entered into a report about meditators by Brown and Engler.14 [ZB: 132–134] These authors used the Rorschach test to study trainees who were at different stages along the Path of Theravada Buddhist meditation. Four of the subjects in the more advanced group had previously experienced states of insight. Given that these prior insights had struck an impersonal note, would their responses to inkblots also be more impersonal? No. Instead, these meditators’ Rorschach responses proved to be “deeply human and fraught with the richness of the living process.” The advanced meditators were responding in ways that were not only creative but that also made abundant metaphoric use of color. [ZBR: 229–232] Their behaviors demonstrated “a very unusual quality and richness of life experience.” Indeed, it was described as like “the extemporaneous music of a jazz musician.”
In 2008, Limb and Braun reported an excellent fMRI study of professional jazz pianists.15 [SI: 149] Notably, during their spontaneous jazz improvisations, the pianists were activating two high-level association regions. One was their prefrontal cortex at its dorsal medial pole (BA 10; see figure 3.1). The other was their anterior temporal cortex (BA 20–22; see figure 2.1 and chapter 14). Simultaneously, they were deactivating their dorsolateral frontal cortex, their lateral orbitofrontal cortex, and many sites in their limbic system. [ZBR: 159–160] In contrast, the task for the jazz musicians in a different study was simply to listen to someone else playing on the piano. These 22 subjects then had only to decide whether those melodies were being improvised or were merely being imitated.16 Those melodies judged to have been improvised did strike a responsive chord, in one sense, for they generated more activation in the listener’s amygdala. Improvisations also activated the listeners’ anterior insula/frontal operculum region.17 [SI: 253–257]
The creativity we hear expressed in authentic jazz improvisations seems to flow effortlessly, from the bottom up. The fluid creativity expressed in some art forms provides a visual counterpart for this auditory receptivity. Robert Henri (1865–1929) was an outstanding art teacher most noted for creating realistic oil paintings spontaneously. He said this about his own style of letting go: “The object isn’t to make art. It’s to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.” [SI: 123, 143, 313]
Vago’s review illustrates why awareness is more complex than is generally appreciated.18 This chapter began by considering subtle ways that the normal background processes of awareness evolve in form and content in during years of meditative training. The next chapter continues to discuss the emergent qualities that can permeate the matrix of awareness of long-term meditators.