Appendix B Potentially Useful Words and Phrases

It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.

James Thurber (1894–1968)¹

Earlier pages, here and elsewhere, have explored the power of silence. [ZB: 633–636] Research committees are not likely to fund grant applications devoted to silence per se. Committees require you to identify explicit topics and label them with meaningful words that describe conceptual details on multiple pages. At the fertile interface between Zen and the brain, new words and phrases keep bubbling up to the surface. Some of these might be useful in helping to generate testable hypotheses. Among the samples cited here, research is already finding potential psychophysiological correlates in a few instances.

Achronia

Achronia defines the absolute lack of any notion about time. One’s own personal time drops out during the selflessness of kensho-satori. Time no longer exists as a general concept. [ZBR: 38–381, 465, 539] Within this zero state of time, consciousness is also beyond any notion of timelessness. Lessness might convey the notion that time was still a quality that was then felt to be missing. No such sense of lost time exists within achronia. Instead, the horizon of consciousness opens out beyond all prior boundary notions. Neither past nor future exist. This total vacancy of time enters direct experience, nonverbally, as Eternity.

Attentive Processing

Attentive processing is a generic term. Why does the word attentive precede processing? This particular order serves as a useful reminder: our very first milliseconds of attentiveness are incisive. Attention is the sharp point, the arrowhead, out at the very tip of our arrow-shaft of processing. Once this point impales the intended target, the processing of the target can then proceed. So, attentive processing specifies that attention serves this vanguard role. [MS: 154–155]

Awareness usually refers to a less intense level of attentiveness. However, this attentiveness remains globally sensitive. Its ambient receptivity can detect any faint stimulus. [ZB: 496] Event-related potential research suggests that bare awareness might take only a fourth or fifth of a second to detect the mere presence of such a simple stimulus. In contrast, attentive processing can take perhaps twice as long when the subject’s task is to completely identify a stimulus that is more complex. [ZBR: 185, 190; SI: 14–15; MS: 19] A bare awareness that attends to external stimuli is characteristic of our forms of bottom-up processing. However, an internal awareness also remains poised to react when subtle interoceptive cues arise from inside our own body. [MS: 83, figure 7]

Another term, intention, is also important, because it refers to our memory-based attitudes of mind. Some intentions remain so clearly registered in mind that they help keep our voluntary, top-down goals online for a short time. [MS: 14, figure 1] Often, however, our so-called best intentions are like long-range resolutions that we hope to keep online subconsciously. There, held in the recesses of long-term memory, their affirmative guidance systems remind us which goals to seek and how to behave.

Aurora Meditatorum

This term refers to the spontaneous appearance of colors that arise during meditation against a background of illumination. The way these epiphenomena arise and lateralize suggests some late implications of long-term meditative practice (see chapter 12).

Doing-Time

Doing-time operates preconsciously. It estimates how much we can actually do in a particular short interval of time. [ZB: 562–563; ZBR: 376–377] For example, it first surveys that unforgiving distance between two curbstones on either side of the traffic-filled street. Meanwhile, it scans our autobiography for details recording our past performance. We are then silently informed how fast our Self must run in order to cross this gap safely. All the dynamic correlates involved in this insightful realization and its yes/no decision have yet to be documented.

However, recent research establishes that (1) connections between the left cerebellum and the right superior temporal sulcus (STS) sponsor our visual perception that another person’s body is moving,² and (2) the posterior inferior frontal gyrus becomes activated during the inhibitory phase of our own go/no-go decisions,³ as does our subthalamic nucleus. [MS: 136] Extensions of such techniques make it theoretically possible to clarify how several Self-centered reflexive functions enter into the intuitive mechanisms of doing-time operations.

I-Me-Mine

This triad summarizes three key operational components of the Self. [ZB: 43–47, 50–51, 145, 569] Notice how they interact in a situation when, for example, My attitudes emerge into My opinions about politics and then govern how I “should” react to some other person whose aggressive political opinions have just injured Me. [SI: 110, 207–211] Meditation can help our youthful I-Me-Myopias to become more far-sighted in later decades.

Functional MRI is being used to uncover many autobiographical aspects of the I and the Me. [SI: 53–83] Less is known about every possessive attachment by the Mine.⁴ This intrusive Self clings vigorously to every tangible and intangible possession that it owns. These passionate attachments are concealed within the fixed opinions established by our personal and cultural belief systems. Caveats abound when meditators are being studied. [SI: 110]

Harris and colleagues conducted an informative fMRI study of such belief systems.⁵ They presented their 14 normal adults with a range of factual statements. These statements were expressed visually in words or numbers, e.g., “Eagles are common pets”; “There is probably no actual Creator God”). Their subjects could then respond in one of three ways: (1) I believe this (implying that I accept this fact as true); (2) I disbelieve this (meaning that I reject this fact as untrue); and (3) I’m uncertain (I’m still checking).

When the subjects believed that a given statement was true (in terms of their personal frame of reference), the BOLD signal activity increased in their ventromedial prefrontal cortex, L>R. However, during their rejections, prominent activations occurred in their left inferior frontal gyrus and in their anterior insula on both sides. During uncertainty, activation increased in the anterior cingulate gyrus. Moreover, a deactivation occurred in the caudate nucleus that might be interpretable as a potential exercise of behavioral restraint on their part.

Just This

The two words happened to join when I was improvising a home remedy for my own mindlessness and distractibility during meditation. [ZBR: 33–37] “Just this” became a useful way to follow the breath in and out until a thought-free phase of bare awareness ensued. During those years, I was not aware that the phrase “just this” could be traced far back into the Buddhist history of China and Japan [SI: 11–13] or Korea (see chapter 13), let alone to the pithy words attributed to the Buddha in ancient India (see chapter 1).

I have since heard from several experienced meditators who, having read about this simple “Just this” technique, or having observed me demonstrating it, also found it helpful.⁶

So, this phrase has now taken on several optional levels of silent meaning. Here are some examples. One can:

1. Let just become a silent label for breathing in, while this evolves through several steps to become a silent label for breathing out.

2. Let this silent usage then drop out by itself during meditation. What remains is simply the bare, wordless awareness of breathing movements.

3. Later, allow the phrase to become a distant, accurate metaphor when referring to “just this” experience, namely, entering into the actual phase of clear silent awareness that neither hears nor knows such words.

4. Later, let the phrase evolve into a metaphor with even subtler resonances. Such an impression might be consistent with the soft realization that “Just this” clear, selfless awareness—right here and now—is a moment of immanence, an integral part of the immense Big Picture. [SI: 199]

5. Continue to allow the phrase and its usages to remain within the ordinary interpretations of neurobiology and Buddhist history, free from potential metaphysical extensions.⁷

Moodlight

Moodlight refers first to a soft eerie emotion. It is what any person might normally feel out in a quiet cemetery alone, on a cool dark night, at a time when the full Autumn moon provides the sole source of illumination. In this instance, the term serves simply to establish that one’s inner subjective mood is in a particular emotional category. This differs from the more objective, optical-visual perception of the actual moonlight that is shining from such an external moon.

Yet a feeling comparable with moodlight may gather momentum during the rare occasion when an unparalleled vacancy of Self arrives in kensho. [ZBR: 415, 432–440] The psychophysiological correlates of normal moodlight have not yet been documented, nor have they been studied in the core of the state of awakening called kensho.

Promethean Hyperpraxia

This term refers to several distinctive, creative liberations of behavior in the Zen context. On these occasions, the kinds of normal skilled movements released are enhanced both in their quality and quantity. [ZB: 674–677] In the first two instances, the liberations develop acutely, either at the close of the state of internal absorption [ZB: 508–510], or at the close of the state of kensho [ZB: 544, 611].

The third instance refers to an incremental, decades-long development. This is the kind of swift, efficient behavior that evolves as experienced meditators move along the Path toward the stage of ongoing enlightened traits. [ZB: 668–674] Each one of these several liberations of the person’s habitual behaviors is noteworthy in itself. For example, many preclinical studies show that the normal release of nitric oxide (NO^.) has functional consequences (potentially important for behavior) in the caudate nuclei, putamen, and substantia nigra. [ZBR: 279–288; SI: 260–261; MS: 138] The hope is that future investigations of this free radical gas, and of dopamine and related neural messengers, will extend the clinical research horizons of these intriguing preclinical results.

Remindfulness

This word itself serves as a reminder: complex, autonomous, affirmative, covert memory skills are poised silently, subconsciously online, to accomplish Self-correcting overview functions, consistent with our best intentions (see chapter 2). These functions are included in sati (Pali) and have affinities with the qualities of samprajanya (Sanskrit).

Trait Tectonics

This phrase points toward the deep transformations of behavior traits that evolve in the brain’s subterranean levels on the long-term meditative Path of Zen training. [ZB: 625–697; ZBR: 389–401]. These must be distinguished from those changes caused by aging.³