Appendix D Elephants in the Living Room
Enlightenment is the shedding of all delusions, errors, and notions . . . the voiding of everything that obscures truth and prevents it from revealing itself.
Soko Morinaga-Roshi (1925–1995)1
An elephant entered into the ancient Udana collection of sutras.2 Different blind men examined separate parts of this elephant in one of the better-known stories that the Buddha used in his teachings. Each blind man came to a different conclusion. When neuroimaging researchers examine the brain today, they may disagree but no longer seem blindfolded. Appendix C indicates that they now have access to 3-D visual brain mapping resources without parallel. Yet the literature still seems unready to acknowledge that large pachyderms remain present in plain sight. Consider a few examples of questions still outstanding:
• Attention regions undergo both fast reactive shifts and slow spontaneous cyclic shifts. Each of attention’s peaks coincides with reciprocal changes in the activity of Self-centeredness regions. The peaks and valleys shift in opposite directions. Which deep mechanisms mediate these normal, widespread, reciprocal shifts between cortical activation and deactivation? How do deeper thalamo ↔ cortical connections enable our frontoparietal and cingulo-opercular control networks to normally communicate effectively with the default system?3 [SI: 98–108, 237–239]
• How do these underlying mechanisms govern the shifts that enable allocentric attentive processing to prevail anonymously and meaningfully during states of kensho-satori? [SI: 109–117]
• How can we normally register a discrete personal event in our memory, then consolidate it into our extensive autobiography? It cannot become part of our personal story unless we simultaneously integrate our personalized sense of Self into the immediate topographical details of an actual locale. These scenic details represent where such an event, as we say, actually “took place.” Each such memory represents coherent linkages, a merger that integrates a person, a time, and a place. An innate, subconscious Self-othering process seems to be linking networks of the anterior prefrontal cortex with their posterior parietal counterparts. Major co-activations occur both medially and in the angular gyrus. [SI: 58–59, 72, 74]
• Which objective neuropsychological test procedures most accurately assess not only the normal surface layers of the I-Me-Mine4, 5 but also those deep primal dimensions at the existential core of our psychic and somatic Self-centeredness? (see chapter 15)
• How do such comprehensive psychological test procedures change, longitudinally, in carefully selected subjects? For example, how do they change in those subjects who (1) are reasonably stabilized patients after having sustained discrete structural damage to certain regions? Regions of particular interest are parts of their medial prefrontal cortex, or parts of their medial posterior parietal region, or parts of their extended amygdala on one or both sides; (2) are meditators, and have just undergone an acute loss of Self-centeredness during kensho-satori? [SI: 206–207]; (3) are long-term trainees and exemplify the exceptional stage of ongoing enlightened traits? [ZB: 637–645] To reach such an advanced stage means that they continue to manifest appropriate degrees of sage wisdom, especially simplicity, stability, and authentic compassion. [SI: 211–215]
A recent review article expands on these and other related topics.6