Zen-Brain Horizons

How does one become familiar with this new way of experiencing the world? We have been swept up into an era when it might seem possible to condense meditative training during a quick fix. Item: People who practice a kind of integrative body-mind training (IBMT) for only three to eleven hours can improve their executive attention and change some Self-control networks in corresponding regions of their brain.³ [SI: 42–43] Zen maintains a longitudinal perspective. This chapter gives added weight to the first-person reports by seasoned professionals who have meditated for decades.

Matthieu Ricard, Ph.D., is preeminent in this respect. What does one do next, having been born to a prominent French philosopher father and an artist mother, after one begins a career as a gene-mapping biologist? One goes forth to seek something beyond the horizons of France. During the past four decades, Ricard became an exemplary Buddhist monk, practicing in the Tibetan tradition. He went on to play a key role both as a leading subject and as an interpreter in the pioneering neuroimaging studies of other skilled meditators by Richard Davidson, Antoine Lutz, and their colleagues at the University of Wisconsin. [ZBR: 396–398] When Matthieu Ricard devotes an entire book to the subject of happiness, readers discover the lived wisdom of a genuinely happy sage.

In his 2012 article, Ricard and colleagues distinguished between our short-term and long-term approaches to happiness (see table 1).⁴

Hundreds of human subjects undertook a series of psychological tests that confirmed the essential point of this table: durable happiness requires selflessness. One result of long-term meditative practice is attributable to the ways that it cultivates higher societal values and authentic meanings beyond our sense of Self. These meanings emerge incrementally in the course of our relationships with other people both inside and outside our local community of meditators (the sangha). Behavioral transformations evolve that no longer depend on advancing our own Self-interest or avoiding discomfort. The interpersonal lessons one learns in a Living Zen context endure in behavior. Their give-and-take aspects have been forged and tempered during a series of life’s emotional ups and downs.

Table 1 Measuring Happiness

	Fluctuating happiness	Authentic durable happiness
Role of Self	Self-centeredness	Selflessness
Characterized by	Longing for complex pleasures; Loathing displeasures	A stable plenitude expressing affirmative resources and simplified needs
Valuing	Self-enhancement	Authentic meanings beyond the Self
Prevailing attitudes	Mine!	Ours
Adapted from Dambrun, Ricard, Despres, et al., 2012 (see note 4).

Multiple books and articles have tried to define other ingredients of happiness. Somehow, they overlook the comment in Udana 2.1 attributed to the newly enlightened Buddha: “Getting free of the conceit that ‘I am’—this is truly the ultimate happiness.”⁵ A later wise man, the Stoic Seneca (4 B.C.E–65 C.E.) commented on the sense of liberation inherent in “the pursuit of wisdom.” Apropos of such pursuits, we now have an article in Time magazine, entitled “The Happiness of Pursuit.”⁶ Perhaps this topic is periodically rediscovered because a sense of stimulation occurs when we undertake a quest. This fact is a clue that powerful neurobiological motivations underlie our search for novel stimuli.⁷

Myokyoni wisely observed that the first step in Zen training is becoming familiar “with the workings of the emotional household.” [MS: 125] To the present author, a decade ago, it seemed that real happiness often depended on how these emotional ups and downs, coupled with basic traits of character, could influence events for better or for worse.⁸ Other important aspects of the emotions were reviewed on pages examining the Way of Zen Buddhism. [ZB: 347–352, 567–570, 648–653; ZBR: 239–265, 396–398; SI: 223–247; MS: 66, 143–145, 160–162]

But suppose one had to construct a short list of our major emotional responses, a list that was limited to the vernacular. Then, the first five might be oversimplified as mad, scared, sad, bad (revolted, disgusted), and glad. Notice the asymmetry: this ratio is four negative to one positive. If happiness depends just on the feelings associated with being glad, then it is not likely to last very long if all those negative emotions keep overcoming our better nature.

Panksepp’s latest book contains seven emotional systems.⁹ His list begins with seeking, a word that implies searching for something. The list continues with fear, rage, lust, care, grief, and ends with play. Even after we first identify our questing, instinctual appetitive drives with seeking (including the quest that motivates our hound), and then confirm that nurturing and play are positive, notice that the four remaining influences are negative. These powerful negative systems of fear, rage, lust and grief can still outweigh the effects of the positive systems by a wide margin.

From his Zen perspective, Thich Nhat Hanh placed being hostile-mad-enraged at the forefront of our emotional problems. In 1992 he said, “The absence of anger is the basis of real happiness, the basis of love and compassion.”¹⁰ But the deep layers of fear (being really scared) can be profoundly traumatizing. They are much more disturbing than the emotion that we usually feel when we are angry. To help dissolve such deep fears he prescribes first gently acknowledging them nonjudgmentally, and later analyzing their origins.¹¹ He relates the intensity of our “original fear” to the harsh transitional question we faced at birth: can this vulnerable newborn babe, ejected from its warm home into the cold world, inhale its own oxygen, exhale its own CO₂? Life hinged on the ways that our brain stem and hypothalamic survival reflexes solved this existential problem. [ZB: 232–235]

James Ford is the minister of the First Unitarian Church in Providence, Rhode Island. An ordained Soto Zen teacher, he is the author of three books about Zen and Zen masters. His 2012 book bears the subtitle, Field Notes from a Zen Life.¹² In easily read pages, this seasoned observer shares what he has learned about the arduous spiritual Path during his last four decades. Helpful chapters clarify what Zen practice is and is not, describe what to look for in a Zen teacher, and culminate in seven key suggestions. These summarize the essence of any spiritual approach worth following in today’s complex world.

The seventh suggestion is a prescription for ongoing mental clarity (chapter 2 in the present volume considers clarity an attribute of sage wisdom). Ford warns readers against the kinds of “techno-shamanism” that might mislead them into using psychedelics. How do the closing lines in his chapter describe the authentic Path toward this desirable ongoing clarity? It is an approach to “opening up,” not “shutting down.” Ford offers a simple explanation for this statement about the particular kinds of an opening up approach that can access genuine clarity: The quest “is not about abnormal experiences, but the most ordinary of them all, just this, just this.”

D. T. Suzuki was in full agreement with this characterization of the basic ordinariness of Zen (see preface). And the origins of the words “just this” can be traced back to the earliest Buddhist sutras (see chapter 1).

We live in a permissive culture. It openly invites people to experiment with potent drugs. [ZBR: 291–302; SI: 267–268] A recent report from Johns Hopkins University is instructive.¹³ [ZB: 436–438] Its 52 psilocybin-naive volunteers (average age 46) were well-educated (54 percent had postgraduate degrees). Moreover, 90 percent were regular participants in religious services, discussion groups, prayer, or meditation. In their baseline (self-reported) personality assessment, openness ranked the highest (average score 64) among the standard domains that psychologists use to take an inventory of one’s personality.

We were introduced to this word back in chapter 2. There, the asterisk preceeding openness identified it another important quality associated with the mature attitudes of a sage. This openness implies a warm welcome—hospitality with open arms. One’s attitudes are no longer hostile, in-turned, insular. Psychologists include six subdescriptions in this standard personality inventory of openness. They include such attributes as: active imagination, aesthetic appreciation of art and nature, depth of emotional feelings, interest in theoretical and abstract ideas, tolerance for a range of lifestyles, and interest in learning new hobbies.

Openness feels good. Most people aspire to open their hearts to others, to empathize in ways that seem to express their native virtues of compassion. [ZB: 648–653] It might be anticipated that those university-educated participants who volunteered for this study would tend to rank themselves high in these six potential attributes when researchers asked them to assess their own personalities.

These adult subjects then completed either one eight-hour, double-blind session on oral psilocybin (30 milligrams/70 kilograms body weight) in a fully supportive setting, or four similar sessions (on separate days) when their daily oral doses ranged from 5 to 30 milligrams/70 kilograms. Thirty of the subjects who received the high dose of psilocybin went on to satisfy their researchers’ criteria for having a “complete mystical experience.” The other 22 subjects did not.

The subjects’ reports indicated that they had experienced further increases in openness while on this drug. These increases correlated with the degree to which these mystical experiences had just been evoked. The increases did not correlate with each subject’s prior report of a baseline level of openness.

During the follow-up evaluations 16 months later, only those same 30 subjects who had earlier undergone a complete, short-term, evoked mystical experience reported that their induced increases in openness had persisted. This self-assessment becomes more important because, by this later date, openness reports were back near the baseline screening levels in the other group of subjects who did not undergo such an experience. The persistence of increased openness is in contrast to the natural decline that is observed in self-reports obtained from the aging adult population. It also exceeds that reported by patients whose depression had been reversed successfully while they received antidepressant drugs.

Researchers in future studies are encouraged to go beyond the obvious limitations of self-report measures, to seek hard objective evidence indicating that actual trait changes are expressed in transformed openness behavior. When this is accomplished, by applying rigorous psychophysiological and other behavioral tests, it will emulate the hard-nosed example set by Zen masters in past centuries. Their exacting attitude has been “Show me, don’t tell me” (see chapter 5).

It is not clear what the short-term and long-term structural and functional MRI findings might be that could serve to complement the data of this oral-dosage study. [ZBR: 300] Nor is it clearly established that all the complex acute mechanisms evoked by a rapid intravenous dose of psilocybin ¹⁴ are relevant to the very different setting and comfortable conditions maintained during this oral-dose experiment.

Considerable latitude exists among the six personality subdescriptors that are included in openness. Given this variability, it could be a thorny task for researchers to localize such openness to a few specific neuroimaging sites. For example, one recent neuroimaging study was based on the structural MRI and DTI data of 265 Norwegian adults. It was conducted at a single point in time. It found no reliable neural associations with the trait of openness.¹⁵ However, a recent longitudinal structural MRI study was designed to follow 274 normal Japanese adults, aged 24–75, over a six-year interval.¹⁶ Lesser degrees of atrophic change were found in the right inferior parietal lobule of those adults whose self-reported personality traits were consistent with more openness. This large lobule is packed with a complex array of association functions. [ZB: 244–247; ZBR: 148–152] Among them are our normal capacities to attend to the orderly timing of events during visual processing, and to help us distinguish between our own Self and other persons. [SI: 194–196]

Chapter 1 introduced us to the Udana, and to the way the Buddha distilled his pithy message of selflessness for two old men, Bahiya and Malunkya. Chapter 3 then began to examine the neural correlates of meditating selflessly. Let’s return now to an earlier thesis by Thich Nhat Hanh. He said that we must first drop off our pervasive negative emotions (become less angry and fearful) before real happiness begins to ensue. What other evidence supports it?

During kensho, multiple agitations referable to the pejorative aspects of the Self are extinguished. They vanish from lived experience for at least a short time afterward. These profound egocentric subtractions do not simply cut off those six high-level descriptors that psychologists use to inventory an open personality. [ZBR: 200] Indeed, kensho’s acute deletions appear to amputate one’s motivational legs, as it were, at the Self’s two most fundamental levels of dynamic behavior: they cut off all impulses that might drive one to advance or start to retreat. These acute subtractions—of approach behavior (+) and aversive behavior (–)—sever the expressions of one’s deepest, most polarized longings and loathings. [ZB: 607–608] The teachings confirm that insight-wisdom at this deep level means being liberated from both polar excesses: from bliss and pain (see chapter 1).

Sitting mindlessly in one’s cozy armchair, it is difficult to feel the distinctive impulses and primal survival codes that drive one’s approach behavior to seek oxygen, water, food, sex, or drugs that stimulate specific receptor sites. However, rigorous meditative retreats help one recognize how powerfully these appetitive drives compel our behaviors. [ZB: 138–140] Carl Jung knew that formidable resistances would greet any such quest that probed our subterranean depths. [ZB: 129–137] The outlines of such a task are barely glimpsed, let alone recognized, during an abbreviated eleven-hour or eight-week introduction to meditation.

During the long-term ancient Path that leads out of their grand delusion, trainees must keep learning how to harness and gentle the deeply contending instincts of their imperious (yet fearful) Self. [SI: 218] LeDoux ¹⁷ and Denton et al.¹⁸ recently examined these deep survival circuit functions that empower our primordial, instinctual, appetitive emotions. Every day, these networks help us manage our deepest visceral comforts and discomforts even as our implicit fear of dying still lurks quietly in the background.

Not until kensho arrives, much later on this long Path, does the trainee comprehend what it feels like to be cut so free from the bonds of primal fear itself that the ensuing deep peace “passeth all understanding.”¹⁹The words, “just this” or “suchness” serve to remind us that words are but feeble attempts to express the ineffable attributes of this brief state. [ZBR: 357–387]

Certain persons cannot feel normal fear when they reach adult life. Why not? Because these rare patients have developed a chronic progressive degeneration of their amygdala.²⁰ Under which special conditions can these adult patients again experience fear? When they volunteer to accept a challenge approximating the situation that they faced at birth: an experimental panic attack. This is induced by breathing an excess of carbon dioxide. These CO₂ experiments illustrate that some deep primal fears could normally enter through avenues other than the amygdala. If we are to exclude such standard limbic system sites as the amygdala and the hypothalamus, what other normal gateways exist where inhibition could cut off some maladaptive roots of our Self?

The periaqueductal gray (PAG) in the midbrain is an obvious candidate. It must be added to the standard limbic and paralimbic sites involved in our normal fight or flight responses. [ZB: 217–218, 233–235, 657–658; ZBR: 15, 243–244] The recent human fMRI studies by Buhle et al. indicate that aversive stimuli (pain and negative visual images) normally activate this central gray region.²¹ Moreover, we normally co-activate this core brain stem region along with the anterior mid-cingulate cortex, merely by anticipating that negative consequences loom ahead.²²

But the large omni-Self constellation is not limited to only these several deep sites. Approach and retreat behaviors link into multiple, diverse regions. For example, suppose you are a researcher who would like to positively motivate your experimental subjects to approach a goal. Kinnison et al recruited their volunteers by offering them a potential reward of 20 dollars.²³ Where did the various reward cues induce increased fMRI signals in these subjects? In 22 nodal regions of a very large network. Just at the cortical level alone, these sites included the anterior insula, medial prefrontal cortex, and middle frontal gyrus. Subcortically, this omni-network included the midbrain, caudate, putamen, and nucleus accumbens.

To elicit their subjects’ instincts to retreat, the researchers wielded the threat of subjecting them to an actual electric shock. After their subjects became fearful, the experimenters then used neutral cues to condition these subjects to anticipate this aversive threat. When these conditioning cues arrived, they prompted increased fMRI signals from 16 nodal regions. Cortically, these included the anterior insula (again), the inferior frontal gyrus, and the medial prefrontal cortex (again). Subcortically, this cue conditioned network included the thalamus, the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis [ZBR: 468] and the basal forebrain [ZB: 167, 260, 269]. Notably, cues that induced the fearful threat of an impending shock also reduced the functional connectivity that linked several cortical regions. This finding points toward one of the mechanisms which can enable emotional stress to interfere with our normal cognitive performance.

The introduction mentioned what happened just before the author dropped into the states of internal absorption and kensho. On each occasion he first let go, passively abandoned himself to circumstances, then briefly glanced up.

• What happens when one lets go, gives up, abandons plans, surrenders the sovereign Self, accepts whatever consequences might ensue?

In each surrender, the person reaches an extremity of Selfhood. Minutes before the start of the episode of internal absorption, the nerve-compression paralysis of my left leg had proven that my sitting practice was flawed. [ZB: 467–472] All willpower had then dissolved passively, releasing a mode of simple acceptance.

Just before the episode of kensho, that same meditator (who would consider it unthinkable to be late for the first morning sitting) had made an error and had taken the wrong train on his way to the retreat. Clearly, this person was no longer in full control of events that might happen next. [ZB: 536–539]

Neither prelude was felt as an occasion for Self-chastisement. Rather, each one was simply accepted as a matter-of-fact illustration of incompetence.

A working hypothesis might suggest that these submissions of the psychic Self had contributed little openings that happened to coincide with other, deeper shifts. These could have been developing incrementally during the previous days when meditation was being practiced more frequently. [SI: 113–117]

A Living Zen practice gradually establishes the primacy of affirmative, realistic attitudes over unwholesome appetitive drives. When openings of various sizes to “just this” are repeated, they gradually dissolve your grand delusion of being an absolute sovereign Self. The ancient sutras contained an original prescription for “just this.” As you keep refilling this prescription, let your long-term approach be regular meditation, not medication.