10

Subconscious Background Qualities That Can Infuse Awareness

Explanations and demonstrations are only expedients to help you realize intuitive understanding.

Ch’an Master Foyan Quingyuan (1067–1120)¹

Actually true activity is intuitive activity, free from various desires and restrictions.

Shunryu Suzuki-Roshi (1904–1971)²

These two statements, eight centuries apart, emphasize that long-term meditative training cultivates intuitive skills. This chapter continues to explore how some background attitudes that infuse the form and content of our awareness could evolve in ways that slowly contribute to states of awakening.

To begin with, when we sense that some small insight rings true for us, the connections in our association networks are likely to have joined up in a special way (see appendix B). [ZB: 386–387] Many of these meaningful neural links that lend an impression of certainty will tap into ordinary varieties of our temporal lobe processing functions. These sophisticated networks reflect our covert conditionings, subconscious recollections, long-forgotten expectations, and primal preattentive codes not yet given names. [SI: 141–146]

Let’s be clear about what this last sentence implies. For meditators, it means that because most of their normal, ordinary waking awareness and perceptions are functioning at pre-conscious levels, they are probably developing new capacities—silent skills they are not aware of—to retrieve potentially useful portions of this subconscious information. [MS: 145–163]

Strick and colleagues conducted two experiments on Zen meditators that lend support to this statement.³ The 63 meditators in the first experiment had completed six months to five years of prior Zen practice. Between 6 p.m. and 9 p.m., one Zen group was led by a Zen master and meditated for 20 minutes. The second Zen group served as controls. They relaxed, without meditating, also for 20 minutes. Both groups then went to individual cubicles. There they performed three sets of five Remote Associates Tests using a computer screen. (For example, given three words, search your remote associations for that single fourth word that they all share in common.) The subjects who had just meditated solved more test items (7.00) than did those subjects who had merely relaxed (5.94). The results were statistically significant, p = .02.

In the second experiment, the response times of 32 Zen meditators were measured during similar word association tests. Again, the subjects who had just meditated solved more Remote Associates Test items than did the controls (6.82 vs. 4.87), p < .01. They also solved them faster (in only 13.22 seconds vs. 16.37 seconds), p < .05. In addition, the groups were then asked to free-associate to a new collection of 20 questions. However, in this instance, each question might have not one but three or four possible answers (e.g., “Can you name one of the four seasons?”). This time—before each question—a priming-word answer was supplied subliminally on the screen (e.g., “summer”). No subject could see this priming word consciously because it lasted only 16 milliseconds.

The question was: Could meditation unveil any subconscious receptivities for this subliminal priming? If so, would this hidden awareness enable the subliminal priming word to reshape the answer? The meditators’ answers did match the hidden priming words at the p = .06 level, just short of statistical significance. In contrast, the relaxed control group showed no priming effect.

The Remote Associates Test is often interpreted as a test for verbal creativity, a task that combines an initial divergent search with convergence functions. Therefore, the experiments suggest that these particular Zen meditators (who had been tested while meditating in the evening) showed evidence consistent with enhanced creative processing. [SI: 125–130, 154–188] Chapter 14 continues this discussion.

Maturing over the Decades

Functional MRI research confirms that adults develop more hierarchical depth in the ways they process awareness than do juveniles.⁴ [SI: 237–244] Decades ago, it might have sufficed to say that one’s brain simply learns by being exposed to life’s experiences. Now a more technical term for such learning is neuroplasticity. Both terms involve multitudes of implicit mechanisms and prompt us to ask how decades of practicing a living Zen might influence one’s development as a mature person. [ZBR: 137–141, 347, 399–401]

Carl Jung (1875–1961) drew attention to the fact that our moral capacities and attitudes evolve during the later decades. He used the word individuation to refer to this maturation. Individuation did not mean the selfish behavior of a Self-centered individual. Rather, it identified a normal developmental process, one that helps to unify each individual person’s modes of cognition and behavior at both conscious and subconscious levels. The results enable our full range of adult options to be actualized fruitfully in intelligent, affirmative, adaptive behavior.

Keil and Freund recently tested the responses of 217 subjects from rural Germany to a wide range of visual and verbal stimuli.⁵ This population ranged in age from 18 to 81 years. The subjects who were younger responded more to the emotional content of pleasant pictures and words. In contrast, the older subjects tended to respond with displeasure when they encountered topics that they perceived as arousing.

Multiple aspects of maturity can be nurtured in meditators who persist on the mindful, introspective Path of long-term training. [ZB: 125–129] The earliest steps along this continuum move us beyond our childish I-Me-Mine attitudes and selfish behaviors. The next steps transform these pejorative qualities in directions that represent the You-Us-Ours kinds of allocentric and ecocentric identification. In later stages, these ideal mature reprogrammings tap further into the native resources of our potential virtues. Ultimately, the gradual transformations of character can evolve toward unbounded kindliness (Sanskrit: maitri). Meditators who happen to drop into major awakenings along this Path can accelerate this slow process of subconscious ripening. [ZBR: 394–396; SI: 239]

Vaillant provides a useful analysis of the way this normal process of adaptive coping evolves longitudinally in a college population that was followed carefully for 75 years.⁶

Deep Awakenings

The state of kensho is infused by a direct, authoritative impression: these experiential perceptions are real Reality. [ZB: 543, 573–578; ZBR: 335–342, 366–371, 422–424] This novel comprehension of all things as THEY REALLY are strikes instantly. Its amplified interpretation of reality seems perfectly obvious. It penetrates internally with the same direct, unshakable certainty one feels when one swallows cold cider on a hot day. This immediacy of direct experience enters long before any notion might arise that words could burden the event with the label “cold cider.” [ZB: 599]

Geologists provided us with the term, “plate tectonics.” For meditators on the long Path, major awakenings seem to accomplish an abrupt shift in trait tectonics. The depths revealed during such deepenings leave a strong, residual impression: consciousness has undergone a shift at its core, not at its surface. In contrast, meditators’ other “continental drifts” of character change evolve so slowly as to be almost unnoticeable. On the other hand, old friends can appreciate the cumulative results of these incremental shifts in retrospect if they witness them after a long interval.

During ordinary events when we experience scenes in three-dimensions, the right hippocampus and amygdala coactivate early while we register the gross incidental details. In later milliseconds, the temporal lobe cortex helps us recognize finer, discrete patterns, aided by its right perirhinal region and the cortex at the temporal pole.⁷ During the state of kensho, it is plausible to consider that a brain could be registering several levels of somewhat similar comprehensions. Simultaneously, it could be accessing other pathways represented among value systems relatively near the allocentric pathways. These deeper levels that confer a sense of coherent perfection had not been tapped into before to this degree. [SI: 141–152] Once these rare semantic functions are engaged, they could be amplified by disinhibition at the same instant that one’s overintrusive egocentric networks had dropped out their prior sense of Self. [ZB: 605–607; SI: 180]

Non-Duality

Some traditions reserve the term non-dual, to describe major states of awakened insight that are impregnated with existential meaning. Non-dual implies that only one view of reality replaces our conventional commingled, (egocentric >> allocentric) versions of everyday reality. At whatever level such states of oneness are experienced, their perspective is novel. It seems to lie beyond every conceptual belief system that the person had used previously to divide the whole world into only two separate categories, Self versus other.

A visual attempt was made to illustrate that such a model state of insight-wisdom lacks this split into two divisions, (that it is in fact non-dual). [ZBR: 339–341] Those two parallel compartments, which had previously represented the Self/other split, were depicted as transformed into oneness. The concepts of non-duality and intersubjectivity are currently being applied to psychotherapy and meditation.⁸ Two recent books based on personal interviews are available for readers interested in the diversity of interpretation within this general topic of awakening and non-duality.^{9, 10}

Reality

Meanwhile, it is clear that the extraordinary states of awakening differ from those other kinds of conventional “realness” that researchers are trying to measure under artificial conditions. For example, some laboratory experiments describe tests for the usual sense of “realness” that infuses ordinary reality. The investigators create events that are actually experienced, then contrast them with make-believe events that the subjects had only imagined.¹¹ Under such experimental conditions, “real” events are still associated with increased fMRI signals in such appropriate limbic sites as the left posterior cingulate cortex and ventral anterior cingulate cortex (other sites include the right precuneus and presupplementary motor area).¹²

The insular cortex has extensive functional connections with limbic and paralimbic regions. [ZBR: 95–99; SI: 253–256; MS: 20, 102] These make it difficult to untangle an authoritative impression of certainty and attribute it solely to some defect of prediction caused by a dysfunction of the insula per se.¹³ [ZB: 542–544]

• Given that an authentic state of deep awakening is more intimately experienced than ordinary reality, what else might infuse this state with the impression that it is manifesting an ultimate degree of significance?

Some of its intrinsic sense of novelty could be explained by the fact that this moment —for the very first time—is now dominated exclusively by allocentric processing. Some of its special quality of direct salience could come by virtue of an accelerated rate of preattentive processing, one sustained at subcortical levels for longer than usual. [ZB: 529; SI: 35–36,139–141]

• What is the implication of the fact that each of this author’s two different alternate states of consciousness occurred in a novel environmental setting, a place where he had never been before?

I’ve always been a curious-minded person. Novelty stimulates me to ask adverbial questions.¹⁴ [ZB: 285–286; ZBR: 159, 165] Gallagher estimates that some 15 percent of normal people become highly stimulated when they are in fresh surroundings.¹⁵ They also tend to exhibit more approach behaviors when the environmental settings are unfamiliar. She uses the term, neophiliacs, to describe people who are especially drawn toward novelty.

In contrast, neophobes tend to show avoidance behaviors. This category of risk-averse people makes up another 15 percent of the population. Thus, the remaining term, neophiles, applies to the majority of people (some 70%). When they encounter the unfamiliar, neophiles respond with intermediate degrees of mild curiosity and interested awareness.

The next chapter provides examples of how remaining open and curious can lead to unexpected benefits.