Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.
Marcus Cicero (106–43 BCE)
Our brain stores a lifetime of memories. A rare few slip back into our awareness at odd times, taking the form of hallucinations. Hallucinations are peculiar, unguarded sensory perceptions. They do seem real, but no appropriate external stimulus explains them.
For the past 12 years, every two months or so, I’ve experienced a certain kind of brief auditory hallucination. This benign form recurs only in the early morning hours. I hear it only when I’m in light sleep, in bed, usually between 5:30 and 6:15 a.m.—never when I’m wide awake. Therefore, this curious sensory perception rides on the rising tide of my morning arousal into wakefulness. By convention, the term hypnopompic is used to describe these hallucinations that surf on the crest of one’s ascent from sleep toward waking consciousness. [ZB: 340, 381–386] (Hypnagogic hallucinations occur while one is descending into sleep.)
To Freud, our slips of speech were glimpses into the operations of our unconscious. We call these misarticulations “slips of the tongue.” They seem to issue more from the active, motor side of our psyche. In contrast, benign auditory hallucinations are clues that issue more directly from the sensory aspects of our psyche. These perceptual slips also allow us to glimpse subconscious levels of our sensory processing. The things that we can hear at such levels slip into awareness only if our association networks have free access to a particular kind of “lowly listening.”
Don’t confuse the minor, benign events recounted in this chapter with the kinds of major hallucinations that have a more serious import. [ZB: 30–34, 374] I present them here as clinical observations, together with these kinds of qualified reassurance: (1) hallucinations can be expected to happen on the meditative Path; (2) they are phenomena consistent with “mind-manifesting” quickenings that tend to arise during various physiological transitions [ZB: 371–465];1, 2 (3) they are not harbingers of disease and disaster to be avoided at all costs; (4) still, they can become temporary diversions from the essential Buddhist themes of insight-wisdom and compassion.
Meanwhile, why describe the three most recent phenomena? Because, as a matter of scientific interest, they illustrate the refinements of a nuanced remindful function that might serve a useful purpose. These incidents linked the emergence of a novel, practical, auditory repertoire with a definite increase in the frequency of my Zen meditation practices—indoors and outdoors. Clearly, repeated periods of mediation have acted as a catalyst for brief, remindful quickenings. [MS: 156–163]
Single, Soft, Bell Rings
It began with a single soft note: one ring of the familiar doorbell. On two occasions, convinced, I got up and went to the door. No one was there. Strange. Later it was usually one ring of the telephone. Again, only a single note.
No bell ring occurred in the context of any dream. Instead, these single rings interrupted my light sleep near the time when I would be about to awaken anyway. Occasionally, the sound was a single, short “cling” of the electric alarm clock. So then I wondered: Could some kind of electrical short-circuit in the house set off these bells? Later, the sound became the single note of the hand-wound alarm clock. No wiring in the house could account for this clock’s ring. Could such recurrent sounds arise spontaneously in my brain?
The neurologist finally accepted the obvious facts. Yes, these single note rings were all recurrent auditory hallucinations. When any bell ring was lateralized, it arose in the space vaguely off to my left. I never found my head turning reflexively to orient toward the apparent source of any bell (chapter 12).
The first benign auditory hallucination occurred during that period of turmoil associated with the final two years of my wife’s Alzheimer dementia. However, the later hallucinations were clearly related to different factors. For example, most brief rings had more immediate preludes. They occurred much more frequently when (1) I had been meditating more frequently, and for longer periods, (2) My everyday wakeful level of awareness was higher and clearer, and (3) I was also in good physical shape after having exercised the day before doing vigorous outdoor work, hiking, or playing tennis. During the next 12 years, as most of these same mild episodes kept recurring at their original frequency, I accepted them as just another personal idiosyncrasy on the Path of Zen. [ZBH: 124–143]
Something else was gathering momentum. In recent years, if the rings occurred somewhat earlier, say around 4:30 a.m., I found that this was when my bladder was reminding me that it was time to be attended to. Ringings of this kind introduced a new possibility: some of these stereotypical single bell rings were timed in a way that might also serve a subtle utilitarian function as a urological “wake-up” call.
Then came the three most recent reminders. Each recollection illustrated the emergence of a novel auditory repertoire. Nothing like these recollections had ever surfaced before. [ZB: 395–397]
First Episode: A New Kind of Bell with Two Novel Reminders
It is May 8, 2015. Early on this Friday morning, I’m still in a phase of light sleep. Abruptly, I hear a single soft resonant note. This gently struck bell sounds vaguely off to my left.
Had I heard this dulcet bell before? Yes, countless times during the past nine years. This was the regular meditation bell at Hokoku-an zendo. Meditating there, earlier this same week, I’d heard this real bell rung three times—not only on this past Monday, and again this Tuesday, but also yesterday. Starting at what time? At 5:30 p.m. Each cluster of these real bell ringings resounded in the late afternoon. In fact, three evenly spaced soft strikings of this same bell were the customary signal that would have opened each of those three extra, late afternoon, half-hour sittings in the zendo.
Now, back home in bed in the dark, I’m slightly aroused by this bell sound, just enough to recognize it as a new, minor variation on those other old, familiar bell hallucinations.* But then a quick glimpse at the clock reveals that it’s still only 6:00 a.m. Much too early to get up. Plenty of time to slip back to sleep, where I had just left off. So I drop back into sleep once again …
Maybe 20 minutes later, I’m still sleeping. Now I hear two short, single-note whistles, off to the left. The first note is higher than the next. Two seconds later, this pair of whistled notes is followed by a short “Psst!” Neither auditory event is recognizable as a sound that I had produced in the past or in the present. As I arose from bed and started walking, these three new events were easily recognized, and their sequences were readily interpretable:
The first two whistled notes sufficed to serve as an abbreviated alert. Why were these first two notes special? They were the start of the Austin family’s seven-note signal call. I have whistled, and heard whistled, this whole string of seven home-grown signal notes ever since I was a small child. These two notes were recalled from retrograde memories, way way back.
This “Psst!” was different. It was a sophisticated nudge. The intent to reinforce was subtle, yet obvious. The purpose of this novel sound was clearly to remind the laggard sleeper: that first bell was your initial wakeup call. It had been ignored. Now, it’s really time you got out of bed!
A single bell ring is a relatively simple phenomenon, a brief sound retrieved passively from memory storage. Whistles enter from a different operational level. Humans form whistles; bells can’t. A whistler needs to purse lips. Thereafter, even to create an audible “Psst!” requires a very complicated kind of human investment in intention, in pucker and articulation simply to enable this sound to be heard and recognized. This silent sound was no simple, ordinary, auditory hallucination!
Commentary
Never before, during the late afternoon of any week, had I supplemented my regular, daily routine (30 minutes of before-breakfast meditation) with three additional half-hours of before-supper meditation in the zendo. So, the first extra days of this week were exceptional: already a new total of five hours of meditation on the cushion. The extra hour and a half of meditation appeared to have helped sponsor the emergence of these three novel auditory events: meditation bell, whistled signal notes, “Psst!”
Never before had I heard any two-note abbreviation of our family whistle signal. Never before had a warning “Psst!” also arrived to jog this laggard sleeper into finally rising from his bed. Not in my usual vocabulary was such a “Psst!” used to attract someone else’s attention. On the other hand, suppose I had wanted to quietly alert a family member. Then these first two notes and this “Psst” would have been the simplest, quickest, best way I could have ever chosen to do so.
We are now searching for words to describe the presence of an unusual kind and degree of human behavior. This behavior, expressed in a benign hallucination, is manifesting itself creatively at some rarefied level of spontaneous cognition. It had just inserted itself into a sleeper’s “ordinary” 12-year, bell-ring repertoire. Had an almost “friendly agency” deftly condensed a seven-note family signal into only two notes? If so, it was some agency with a sense of tact, one that could issue a well-meaning, urgent reminder to this sleeper to finally get up from bed without further delay.
This whole episode provided a glimpse into a hidden autonomous capacity for guidance. It had the ability to monitor behavior in a time-sensitive manner. It could discern the gap between intention and reality, issue a signal, and act responsibly in anticipation of a sleeping person’s best interests.
Second Episode: “By the Light” … A Syncopated Refrain
It is three weeks later, May 29, another Friday morning. Again, I’m sleeping about 5:45 a.m. All those routine, daily prebreakfast meditations had taken place as usual on the four earlier mornings of this week. Yesterday (Thursday), I had occasionally hummed and whistled the usual opening note—in a slow tempo—to the melody of the old song, “By the Light of the Silvery Moon.”3 They went like this:
Now, sleeping, I hear three rising notes, whistled off to the left. These whistles seem on the same pitch—E, F, G—as those three notes for “By the light” that start the song I’d whistled yesterday. But this morning’s version sounds different. Its first two whistled notes are in a fast tempo, lively, syncopated. These two new notes have bounce! This tune had been corrected overnight, during my sleep, without my conscious participation. These dotted quarter and eighth notes no longer dragged!
Commentary
You might also have noticed something else: No extra sitting meditation had taken place this week from Monday through Thursday. So, could anything else have served as the prelude to the almost “executive-level” capacity of this early Friday morning’s musical hallucination? Yes. That day before was highly exceptional. In retrospect, it was unlike any other day I’d spent during the past 10 years.4
That Thursday, yesterday, in midafternoon, I had been the sole beneficiary of a silent, solitary, inspiring, hour-long Nature walk. [MS: 59–60; ZBH: 33–48] The trails on this 22-acre Audubon sanctuary led through a mature forest of magnificent old, tall trees and lush, fresh green foliage. This woodland sanctuary was a dedicated space for outdoor walking meditation and for re-creation. Yesterday afternoon, even the birds were observing silence. Scientific studies document the fact that such natural sylvan settings benefit both brain and body (appendix A). [ZBH: 186–189]
The ancient Taoists and Ch’an masters understood that Nature exerted a major influence on persons who followed a spiritual Path. Master Yongming Yanshou (904–975) phrased it as follows:
Mountains and rivers, earth and grasses, trees and forests— these are always emanating their subtle and precious sound. Day and night they demonstrate the ultimate truth to each of us. It’s right in front of our face. Everyone has this inconceivable capacity for great liberation.5
Third Episode: Two Flute Notes after a Previous Indoor and Outdoor Prelude
It is early Sunday morning, November 15, 2015. I’m asleep about 5 a.m. I hear two short, soft, airy flute notes. Both notes are on the same medium pitch. They are referable (first time ever) to the space off to my right. They are followed by a soft, dissonant noise that lasts only a second.
Why these distinctive flute notes? Only after several hours would I be reminded of their origin. Three weeks ago, I had heard the haunting timbre of music played on a Japanese bamboo flute (shakuhachi). This solo performance lasted for only five minutes or so. It was an impromptu, incidental part of the entertainment program at a Science and Non-Duality Conference.
Once again, I had spent three extra half-hours on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday meditating in the zendo between 5:30 and 6:00 p.m. (in addition to my regular morning zazen). Moreover, late that Saturday afternoon (the 14th) I had taken a rare 45-minute Nature walk down another wooded trail. Tall trees lined each side, but by then most of their leaves had already turned color and fallen.
Background Information: Normally, What Kinds of Internal Sounds Do People Usually Hear?
We hear a lot of our own inner spoken thoughts. Some of this inner speech is deliberate. How does this Self-cuing function solve simpler problems? By helping us to retrieve useful associations and to explore better options for representing a pending goal.6
These more voluntary forms of verbal thought activate many brain regions. We use them routinely when we perform other concrete, goal-directed acts of attentive processing. These almost intentional thoughts are in a different category from most of our more involuntary mind-wandering and unuttered wordy thoughts. We hear the latter, spontaneous discursions more typically when we are in the so-called “resting states” during times of external silence. Their Self-referent content tends to be more abstract in its associations. During fMRI monitoring, involuntary thoughts correlate with activations in those standard regions of the default mode network that can also include the lateral temporal cortex, hippocampus, and parahippocampus.
Perrone-Bertolotti et al.7 recently reviewed the last half-century of (often controversial) research into this inner speech that is sometimes called “the little voice inside our head.” They estimate that this pervasive internal language occupies at least one quarter of our conscious waking life. In many people, inner speech buzzes like a bee hive. For centuries, Zen has offered an antidote. This approach to meditation means an explicit emphasis on no word-thoughts. This will gradually allow intrusive emotional reverberations to drop off. [ZB: 293; SI: 150–152; MS: 145–150; ZBH: 155–156]
Auditory hallucinations of speech are a special kind of word thoughts. [ZB: 395–397] The lowest prevalence rate for auditory hallucinations in the general population was a mere 0.7 percent. It was obtained when researchers asked this specific question: “Did you at any time hear voices during the past year saying quite a few words or sentences when there was no one around that might account for it?”8 (We’ll discover later that other estimates can be as much as 100 times higher.)
The fMRI connectivity data obtained during auditory verbal hallucinations were recently reviewed.9 The results were mixed and often contradictory. Some evidence suggested that connectivity is disorganized in the left temporal lobe in general and in the left superior temporal gyrus in particular. These findings could reflect (1) an imbalance in temporal lobe glutamate and GABA mechanisms or (2) a reduction in the inhibitory tone from the frontal lobe.10 Other contributory factors are worth further investigation.
For example, normal subjects can be entrained to react to a rhythmic sound stimulus. This phenomenon is referred to as the auditory steady-state response.11 One current theory is that this 40 cps auditory steady-state gamma response serves as a useful index of one kind of excitatory transmission. Enhanced responses, “driven” by excitatory amino acids, could underlie the heightened temporal lobe perceptual sensitivities that develop in meditators. This theory could be tested during rigorous meditative retreats.
Affective resonances from the limbic and paralimbic systems generate the emotions that modulate what we normally hear. These varying emotions infuse notions of pitch, intensity, tempo and voice quality. When normal subjects hear such cues, fMRI signals in their auditory association cortex and amygdala appear to be relayed into the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), where they could undergo further evaluation.12
Researchers can use transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to transiently disrupt the normal right parietal cortex.13 [ZBH: 115–116, 238 n. 15] The results confirm that the right hemisphere is the more specialized for directing our immediate attention to higher-order auditory events that exist out in left hemi-space and global space. [SI: 31]
Lowly Listening
When Emerson introduced the phrase, “lowly listening,” he was referring to a subtle form of wise guidance (chapter 7). [MS: 145–147] “Lowly” does not mean that only the lower levels of our brain would be contributing every necessary ingredient. In fact, networks high and low feed back and forth normally in the process of integrating the requisite information (chapter 18). This means that top-down supervisory functions continually monitor and adjust our sensitivities to fresh perceptions. When doing so, expectant networks first scan some likely options, and then recall—selectively—only those relevant experiences that had been coded minutes to years before. When a clinician discloses a first-person report about the kinds of unusual auditory hallucinations described above, the scientific purpose is straightforward: contemporary research can benefit by reminders that we still have much to learn about how (seemingly unusual) brain mechanisms (currently obscure) can accomplish such extraordinary integrations and recollections of memory.
Lowly listenings seem to attend to both our internal and external global landscapes. Their subconscious, supervisory, scanning activities have tacit permission to access skillful means (Skt: upaya). Having thus detected a mismatch of events, they seem ready to sponsor an executive role that issues off-stage cues, sotto voce. These remindful receptive functions resemble those of some invisible guardian—reminder—coach. It’s easy to overlook such insightful communiqués. In my case, an aged brain has issued only brief, prosaic messages. The sensory data condensed in these heralds of morning arousal had been laid down hours, weeks, decades earlier. No high-level, career-changing decisions have been suggested (as would happen during the auditory events that the wild parrot protector describes in chapter 25). Still, notice how such small, ordinary reminders might serve a practical memory role in everyday life.
Disclaimer
Nothing esoteric, mystical, or supernatural is implied in this account of benign auditory hallucinations. They are recounted solely to illustrate the dynamic range of subconscious neural resources that a reasonably normal long-term senior meditator’s brain might tap into. When? During discrete surges of early morning arousal activity. [ZB: 457–460] These are hints of a forthcoming reveille. They reflect this person’s individual cyclic, endogenous brain-body rhythms, not his immediate, overt reactions to an actual external sensory stimulus.
The evidence points to two prior conditions that favor their arrival: (1) more frequent meditation on the cushion indoors and (2) leisurely walks outdoors among tall trees. [ZBH: 186–189] The delayed hallucinations that emerge only in the early morning—long hours after these earlier conditions had reinforced each other—might seem to be “little openings” or “little quickenings.” [ZB: 371–465]
Provisional Nomenclature, Scientific and Vernacular
Which words best describe these subjectively real, brief, elusive, supervisory/advisory functions? Let’s begin with their singular early morning onset. Hypnopompic is a technical term for events that strike on the threshold of a person’s arousal toward wakefulness. Decades before, this witness had experienced the visual hallucination of a maple leaf. Retrieved from the past, it heralded an internal absorption (chapter 16). [ZB: 376, 390, 470–471] Now, the events were all auditory hallucinations, also lateralizing mostly to the left side of space. Once again, these correlated with the increased frequency of meditation on the cushion supplemented by meditation practices in the outdoors.
Benign? After 12 years, almost certainly.14 Frequency? A recent World Health Organization report estimated that the lifetime prevalence of auditory hallucinations was only 2.5 percent.15 In other recent surveys of the population at large, the frequency of auditory verbal hallucinations reached 7.3 percent.16 Among healthy college students, as many as 71 percent would report auditory verbal hallucinations while they were awake, and 39 percent reported hearing their own thoughts spoken aloud.17 When nurses and nursing students were surveyed, as many as 84 percent(!) described hearing voices.
Lewis-Hanna et al.18 identified 12 healthy subjects who had auditory hallucinations either when they were on the verge of waking up (hypnopompic) or falling asleep (hypnagogic). They then gave these normal subjects the task of deliberately directing their auditory attention toward a number. During this auditory focusing task, these subjects activated their anterior cingulate gyrus more so than did their controls. [SI: 20, 23, 172] This observation could fit in with the suggestions that the two subjects to be described in chapters 11 and 25 were under some degrees of increased attentiveness and stress.
So, benign auditory hypnopompic hallucinations can serve as a provisional scientific term to identify a particular kind of little quickening that merits further investigation.
Yet what about the basic character of this present author’s three recent auditory hallucinations? Obviously, they’re not the voices referred to either in the reports just above or in chapter 25. Most of the recent ones are simple reminders—sounds retrieved from the past: a stored treasury of bell sounds, condensed musical notes.19 But then came the syncopated whistles and the furtive “Psst!” These new developments suggest some kind of guardian agency that seems poised to do more than supervise. It can act, with discretion, on one’s behalf. Its emergent repertoire hints at functions that provide the unwitting recipient with access both to a kind of “private eye” and “private ear.” Moreover, as dawn approaches, these nuanced functions have the capacity to act tactfully. This is more than might be expected from the simplest kind of “inner voice” or “inner sound.”
Recent recollections of this kind can be viewed in a positive light. Too often lately have we given our memory a bad rap. We’ve been thinking of memory in terms of negative ruminations, psychic trauma, PTSD, painful flashbacks, and guilt-ridden associations. It’s time to emphasize those positive qualities of remindfulness that can help redress this imbalance.
Could some short, vernacular wording suggest such an affirmative “presence”? A subtle presence perhaps slightly more accessible in the case of a senior meditator who was already on a decades-long “spiritual” Path? Earlier centuries had floated notions of an invisible, friendly “genie,” one that could exercise mysterious beneficial powers. Today, perhaps for people in a lighter, playful mode, “altar ego” might seem to be one possible candidate. Altar could convey the notion that whatever “presence” of mind might exist, it could function in ways that were more substantial than ethereal. Indeed, if any such underlying elevated structure were to be raised on an imaginary transept, it would seem to represent a sturdier, more pragmatic phenomenon than an exalted concept lying forever beyond reach.
The play on the words, alter ego, serves as a reminder: these guidance functions resemble those that might be served by a kind of trusted second Self. Ego keeps the phrase grounded. It specifies that such an altar ego is a resource of neural origin. Subtle mechanisms are waiting for researchers to discover in a recipient’s brain,20 rather than in some metaphysical belief system of extra neural origin.
