Conducted July 27, 2010, at Boyle’s home in Albuquerque, New Mexico. This interview is included because while Austin has experienced awakening, he is a scientist rather than a Buddhist teacher—so his more clinical style of description makes an interesting contrast. It seems clear, however, that he and the eleven teachers are talking about the same thing.
BOYLE: What led you to begin Buddhist study?
AUSTIN: Back in high school, I got an early glimpse of the kinds of existential issues involved in Buddhism. During a severe case of pneumonia, I confronted the prospect of leaving the hospital feet first. Luckily, this illness responded to sulfadiazine, but that experience left me more sober than the average teenager. It contributed to an ongoing interest in the larger questions: Why are we here? What is all this? Going on into academic neurology was a way to further explore these questions and to become awed by neurobiology. But for decades, Buddhism held no particular interest for me. Unitarianism seemed quite adequate for my purposes. Then I chose to spend a neuropharmacology research sabbatical in Kyoto.
When some good friends heard that I was going to Japan, they gave me Eugen Herrigel’s book, Zen and the Art of Archery, to read on the flight over. I really didn’t understand what archery had to do with Zen. But after arriving in Kyoto in 1974 and settling into that wonderful atmosphere, my lingering curiosity encouraged me to discover what was really involved in Zen. So my interest in Zen Buddhism came about by chance, evolved from curiosity, and was superimposed on a long-standing deep question: What’s the big picture?
Dr. Yoshi Osumi was a faculty member in this same department of pharmacology at Kyoto University. He had trained at Yale, and his earlier visitors from America had found an English-speaking Zen master at Daitokuji, a nearby Zen monastery. I was curious to meet a Zen master, so I asked Dr. Osumi if he could arrange for an interview. That meeting with Nanrei Kobori-Roshi at the monastery introduced me to Zen Buddhism. I began formal
zazen practice with him in July 1974. On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, I practiced meditation and learned how to work outdoors, improving the landscape at Daitoku-ji with a dozen or so other trainees, most of whom were Westerners from different countries. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I was totally occupied day and night with research on the norepinephrine pathways that lead from the brain stem up into the cerebral cortex.
I was lucky to be introduced to Zen by an English-speaking Zen master. Kobori-Roshi had studied at Claremont College in California for a year after the war, and this experience helped him communicate with his students. He guided my early training in ways decisive for who I am today. My sense of gratitude to him is profound.
In December, I participated in an intensive seven-day retreat. Although leg and back pains were difficult, by the evening of the second day of this sesshin, I was feeling one-pointed, poised, alert, mentally calm, and physically stable. Few word-thoughts remained in my consciousness. We happened to be sitting in a small, unfamiliar zendo. During the final sitting, I looked up at the single electric light bulb that dangled from the ceiling, and then lowered my eyelids slightly to reduce the brightness. Then my consciousness went blank.
This blank interval lasted an indeterminate period of time. All during this, my posture seemed to have remained erect. As this condition of no awareness waned, consciousness then moved smoothly and seamlessly into a state of hyperawareness. A small red maple leaf suddenly materialized way up high in the extreme left corner of what was now a black visual field. Its colors glowed vividly. Along the leaf’s edges and veins, sharp contrasts and surface markings were intensified in exquisite fine-grain detail. Meanwhile, no one was doing this perceiving, because no sense of a personal physical self remained. When the leaf vanished, only a glistening blackness—blacker than black—was present throughout an absolutely silent, vast, 360-degree enveloping space.
Next to enter this enchanting scene was a deep, serene comfort, a profound sense of satisfaction, the way one feels on a cold, snowy holiday while sitting snug indoors by a warm fire. A blend of mental clarity and physical lightness developed as this feeling subtly waned. Finally, when I stood up at the end of sitting, my body felt so unusually light that all its movements seemed to perform themselves.
At my next interview with Kobori-Roshi, I started to tell him about the leaf. His face darkened, and he shook his head and said, “NO! When you concentrate too hard, you may see things.” This was disappointing, but the experience lingered in memory. Five years later, I returned to Kyoto again and paid Kobori-Roshi an informal visit. Without mentioning the leaf, I then described the rest of the experience. This time, his response was totally accepting, and he said, “Yes, when I had that, it was like being in a vacuum.” I gathered that such an experience might be welcome, but more as a matter of fact than as anything special.
Two words describe this experience best: “internal absorption.” Direct experience had informed me that my physical sense of self could completely drop out of my awareness. Nothing I had ever learned as a neurologist had prepared me for a state during which the sense of my physical body would disappear. I realized that something powerful was going on during meditation. Several other phenomena were also part of that experience. First, the hallucination of the Japanese red maple leaf taught me that I had hidden compartments in my brain. Some of them could not only register a maple leaf (for I had repeatedly focused my camera on this very leaf several weeks previously) but also later recall its image out of memory, and then project it up to a spot so high that it could easily be seen by my “mind’s eye” but not be seen with my eyes, because my forehead was in the way.
Second was the huge, jet black, completely silent space. This space had opened up to envelop the “no person” awareness back in its center. Being in such a vacuum was another demonstration of the power of meditation. For a neurologist, internal absorption was a real eye-opener. How could consciousness be “turned on” inside such a 360-degree space when all sense of one’s physical body was also being turned off?
Fortunately, research developments worldwide were making it possible to propose an explanation for such a jet blackness (a total lack of vision), for its absolute silence (a total lack of hearing), and for the complete dropping out of the physical (somatic sensory) sense of self. Interpreted neurologically, these negative phenomena could represent “a
dearth of self.” Such a preliminary event could be referable to a small region down in the back and lower part of the thalamus. Moreover, the thalamic nuclei down there could be blocked by a very thin normal inhibitory layer called the reticular nucleus. This reticular nucleus encloses the thalamus like a tight cap. In a sense, its drawstrings can operate selectively.
I continued formal Zen training and daily life practice during the interval between 1975 and my next sabbatical. Most of this sabbatical, during 1981–1982, was spent in London. There, I kept sifting through the rapidly expanding neuroscience literature, trying to discern how the brain changed during meditation and during alternate states of consciousness. The setting at the London Zen Centre was also propitious because it was led by Irmgard Schloegl (Myokyo-ni), another excellent teacher, whose previous Zen training had also been in Kyoto.
On the second morning of a two-day retreat in March, I woke up early and got on a London subway train bound for the Zen Centre. It was a peaceful, balmy Sunday morning. Absentmindedly, I wound up at a station I had never seen before. I surrendered to the reality of having been so stupid that I would miss the start of the first sitting. Because I exited the train on a surface platform and was now above ground, I could look around and off into the distance. The view in the foreground revealed only the dingy interior of the station. Some grimy buildings occupied the middle ground. Fortunately, while idly surveying this ordinary scene—unfocused, no thought in mind—I happened to look up and out into a bit of open sky above and beyond.
Instantly, with no transition, the entire view acquired three qualities: absolute reality, intrinsic rightness, and ultimate perfection. Every detail of the entire scene was registered, integrated, and found wholly satisfying. The new scene was set gently, not fixed on hold. It conveyed a slightly enhanced sense of immediacy. Yet the scene’s purely optical aspects were no different from the way I had perceived them a split second before. This pale gray sky was no bluer; the light was no brighter; the detail, no finer-grained.
But the scene was transformed in other ways. There was no viewer. Every familiar psychic sense that “I” was viewing this scene had vanished. A fresh new awareness perceived the whole scene impersonally with the cool, clinical detachment of an anonymous mirror, not pausing to register the paradox that no “I-Me-Mine” was doing the viewing.
This new awareness further transfigured the scene with a profound, implicit, totally perfect sense of absolute reality. After what was perhaps only a few seconds, a series of deep realizations began to blend into this enhanced sense of reality. One of the unspoken messages was that this is the
eternal state of affairs—things have always been this way and continue just so indefinitely. A second insight conveyed the message that there is nothing more to do: this train station and the whole rest of this world were so totally complete and intrinsically valid that no further intervention was required. The third insight plumbed a deeper visceral level: there is absolutely nothing whatsoever to fear.
Then another wave of insight interpretations welled up. By this time, some kind of diminutive subjective sense—equivalent to a lowercase “i”—was emerging, because something vaguely conscious was stirring with faint discriminations. The insights were that:
This totally new view of things was too extraordinary to be communicated. No conceptual framework, no words existed to describe the depths and the quality of these insights. Only a person who had undergone the same experience could understand.
“i” couldn’t take myself so seriously any longer.
A wide buffer zone relieved this diminutive sense of “i” of any tendency to get involved in doing anything. The zone seemed almost to occupy space, because mingled with the feeling of literally being distanced from outside events was a disinclination to approach and to act in any way.
BOYLE: I remember experiencing that, a lack of motivation to do anything, a complete absence of even the slightest kind of desire or concern.
AUSTIN: Yes. This “unmotivation” is a singular quality. It seems to represent the ultimate dissolution of all approach behavior. In your case, how much time elapsed between the very first event that entered your experience and when your mind began later to interpret and comment on the experience?
BOYLE: The time interval must have been short, because almost immediately a voice in my mind said, “So this is what they mean by nothingness—no social reality.”
AUSTIN: In London, many seconds elapsed during which there wasn’t any “I” around that was doing any commenting. Everything was registering, but no “I” was in there personally enjoying it or appreciating it. It was just there anonymously. Just this.
As my physical and mental sense of self began to return, the combination conveyed an unparalleled feeling of total release. Clear, simplified, free of every limitation, feeling especially
good inside. Revived and enormously grateful! Yet this expansion of capacities remained silent and internal. It was quiet and profoundly peaceful, rather than exciting. In my case, because this awareness had just been directly experienced as no subject inside, “objective vision” was the short phrase that leaped easily to mind. As minimal degrees of self-reference began to grow within awareness, they gradually rediscovered a physical center within the body of a vaguely familiar person standing on the platform. A thoughtful I boarded the next subway train to the Zen Centre, feeling awed, deepened, and calmed within a profound, ongoing intellectual illumination.
This direct experience was a “death of self.” This person’s former intrusive psychic sense of self had dropped completely out of consciousness, taking with it all references to his physical, somatic sense of self. After that taste of kensho in London, my studies of the neuroscience literature intensified.
BOYLE: What do you mean by the “psychic sense of self”?
AUSTIN: I mean all those intangible mental attributes that you and I usually engage in, the ones we might choose to describe using operational terms that represent aspects of our “I,” or “Me,” or “Mine.” All these abstract mental operations are self-centered. Some are affirmative and adaptive; others can invoke fear or anger and prove counterproductive. Our word descriptions allow us usefully to conceptualize our sense of self—pro and con—using psychological terms. Notice how these intangible mental attributes differ from the tangible, concrete aspects of our physical bodies. In arriving at these mental/physical conceptual distinctions, I found the old Greek word, psyche, was helpful. I could use it to include the more complicated cognitive functions, emotional feelings, and instinctual drives implicit within our psychic sense of self. This allowed another Greek term, soma, to be used when referring to one’s physical sense of self.
There’s a neuroanatomical basis for this distinction between the soma and the psyche. For example, some regions in our cortex represent the somatic sensory functions of our body—our limbs, lips, tongue, etc. These are reasonably well defined higher up in the parietal lobe over the back of the brain. Networks up here in the dorsal parietal and frontal regions are ready to help us answer such practical physiological questions as: Where is this fruit on the table in relation to Me? Their functions combine to enable “Me” to reach out and grasp it. Our primary and secondary somato-sensory association cortex are each represented along this more dorsal, “northern,” self-centered route. Of course, our psyche is more complex, and its layers are represented among levels elsewhere in the brain.
In the decades after London, I continued to join and sit with various Zen groups, both Rinzai and Soto, and with Buddhists in the Theravada tradition. Important early during this period was the way the research literature started to refer to the self/other boundary. Issues related to the egocentric and allocentric processing systems of the brain seemed especially important. So, in
Zen and the Brain (1998), I began to introduce these two key prefixes: ego- (meaning self-centered) and allo- (meaning other-centered). Don’t be daunted by either one. The terms refer to the two different ways our brain represents the “reality” of items in space in terms of their three-dimensional coordinates. The brain defines egocentric coordinates with respect to our personal lines of sight. These point the location of some fruit on a table back to the axis of our own body and to our internal, subjective frame of reference.
In contrast, the brain defines its allocentric coordinates with respect to an external frame of reference. In doing so, it uses pattern recognition systems that chiefly reside in the temporal lobe. Having asked “What is it?” questions, they then identify the fruit and specify that it is an apple, an impersonal object residing “out there” in space. During the next decade, functional MRI research became increasingly sophisticated. This enabled many of the links between the concepts of attention, and self and other, to be assembled into a plausible model hypothesis for kensho. I do appreciate that these attempts at reductionism carry the dual risks of seeming not only premature scientifically but also irrelevant within some traditions of Buddhism that I also value highly.
However, while writing the chapters for Zen–Brain Reflections (2006), I thought it reasonable to expand on the earlier model role of the reticular nucleus. How could its normal functions and the inhibitory roles they appeared to play in internal absorption be extended to kensho? A working hypothesis suggested itself: the “cap” of its inhibitory functions could be tightened over other thalamic nuclei farther forward in the thalamus. Now the blockade could include the so-called “limbic” nuclei. These are crucial to the functions of our psyche. If the reticular nucleus inhibited the limbic nuclei for a brief interval, this could create a novel wakeful state during which the person’s overconditioned psychic sense of self could vanish.
Day and night, our usual states of consciousness depend on the discrete physiological selectivity of this reticular nucleus. We rely on its fine-tunings to open up and enhance, or to close down and block, the co-arising oscillations that link our individual thalamic nuclei with their critical target regions up in the cortex. Still, an important question remained: Where do the signals come from that normally activate, or deactivate, the pivotal gatelike functions of this inhibitory nucleus? Might some answers begin in the ways meditation trains our brain’s array of attentional responses? If so, then what about those old Zen stories that describe monks and nuns having been triggered into states of
kensho-satori when their attention was suddenly captured by an unexpected sensory stimulus?
At this juncture, it helps to recall three points that have received major emphasis in Zen Buddhist traditions. First, the key issue: our becoming liberated from the maladaptive, overly reactive influences of our overconditioned personal self. Second: the long necessary prelude—our training awareness to attend to each present moment. Third: the fact that words and concepts mislead us. With regard to the self, studies by Marcus Raichle and colleagues at Washington University emphasized that several “hot spots” exist in the normal brain. These special regions stay active in normal subjects even when their minds and bodies might seem to be resting under passive conditions. The two largest of these normal highly metabolically active areas are located deep along the midline of the brain. One is in our medial prefrontal cortex. The other is in the medial posterior parietal cortex. As research in this new century progressed, a consensus emerged that would correlate many of our basic self-referential, autobiographical functions with the activities linking these two hot spots (and including that of the third spot, out in the lateral parietal cortex of the angular gyrus).
We further activate these three regions each time we need to access a broad spectrum of our self-centered processes. We access the short-term, working memory end of this spectrum in order to accomplish our daily tasks. We can access other personalized memories only by including those specific links to the particular details of our outside environment that anchor each such incident in one brief instant of our long life story.
The research team at Washington University also went on to study three other conditions. The crucial point here is that during each occasion, the three self-centered regions became deactivated. Notice when these self-referent “hot spots” became “cooler”: first, when the researchers assigned any goal-oriented task that, overtly or covertly, caused their subjects to focus their executive attention on this task from the “top down.” Second, when any fresh, unexpected sensate event occurred, one that could also capture their subjects’ attention, but this time from the “bottom up.” Third, during slow, intrinsic brain rhythms. These arose normally, only two to four times a minute, on an almost independent, endogenous cycle.
In short, this new evidence pointed to a vital, inverse, reciprocal relationship. You might think of it as resembling a seesaw. On one side of this seesaw relationship are our top-down and bottom-up forms of attentiveness. These dorsal and ventral attention systems, respectively, are each represented over the outside surface of the brain. On the other end of the relationship are those mostly medial frontal and parietal regions, the ones just described that are so essential to the operations of our psychic, autobiographical sense of self. They reside chiefly inside our brain.
This seesaw metaphor is of particular interest to meditators for two reasons. First, it reemphasizes that attention plays a crucial vanguard role in all of their meditative training. In fact, only when attention plays this role, directing our brain into particular processing channels, can we normally accomplish any task. Our conjoined attentive processing functions ensure that we respond to an explicit task, or to an implicit task when unexpected circumstances call for a brisk, reflexive subconscious reaction.
Second, the seesaw metaphor helps clarify what happens when a sudden triggering stimulus captures the attention of a sensitized brain, as the sharp call of a crow once did for Master Ikkyu. The neuroimaging results clarify how in these first milliseconds the loss of self-centeredness so distinctive of kensho could be precipitated when such an unexpected event commands a shift in attention.
In general, the research findings also suggest that when meditators adhere to a long-term, balanced program of training, their attentiveness, the blended assets of such a top-down/bottom-up approach, will become both complementary and more effective than any single concentrative or receptive practice of training per se.
The evidence that our self-centered functions decrease at the same instant that attention increases is relevant to kensho’s brief state of awakening, not only because it helps clarify how the person’s old, intrusive egocentric “I-Me-Mine” could drop its overconditioned limbic fears. This same inverse relationship also provides room to envision what happens—simultaneously—when the “other” innate functions of the brain’s allocentric processing networks are finally released. During these same crucial milliseconds, the person’s bottom-up systems of reflexive attention can take the lead in directing their adjacent other-centered modes of insightful processing. To what end?
In this model, what opens up during this allocentric release is a one-phase, unified field of nondual consciousness. The model envisions that these “southern” pathways of the brain are now liberated to draw on their inherent semantic resources of meaning. Normally, we’ve seen that these same lower pathways are asking “What?” types of questions of the pattern recognition functions in the lower cortical and subcortical processing networks, and are receiving meaningful answers. Now, during
kensho, their trajectories along the ventral occipital → temporal → inferior frontal regions can provide a fresh glimpse of ONE world. This one-phase, enhanced mode of allocentric perception is transfigured by an enhanced sense of all things as they really are. This novel perspective arrives only when those old, intrusive veils of our dominant egocentric self are no longer interposed.
Can large compartments of our normal brain really register “their” independent perspective on the world “out there” in such a highly objective manner? Can such a state be liberated from every grasping attachment and rejection that issues from the subjective core of our own self-centeredness? Don’t expect that our conventional sovereign egocentric logic will easily welcome such far-out notions. These normal covert allo-mental functions arise so subconsciously and anonymously that such notions seem counter-intuitive. Even so, these same “southern” pathways are normally interpreting implicit meanings every second into what they see, identify, and reify “out there.”
In a 2008 article in the New York Times, David Brooks coined the term “neural Buddhism.” The story I’ve been narrating is of a wandering “neural” Buddhist path. I don’t know how its meanderings might parallel or depart from the path stories of the more accomplished full-time teachers you’ve also been hearing from. Decades after a severe case of pneumonia first made me really aware of impermanence, this neurologist was a relative latecomer to Zen. Ever since, for thirty-six years, I’ve been trying to repair my ignorance, aided by language and concepts drawn from a field of biomedical research that has been exploding exponentially. My writings can best be viewed as one meditator’s attempt to clarify this very complex field at the dynamic interface between the Zen Buddhist path and the neurosciences.
The glimpse today from this biased perspective suggests that four key issues are involved on the Buddhist path. The crucial distinctions are between top-down and bottom-up attention—between ego- and alloprocessing—between self and other—between the focused concentrative and openly receptive styles of meditation. Will these major distinctions and all their implications sink in before another three and a half decades have elapsed? Let’s hope so, for future generations will need to clarify how their ongoing awareness becomes more enlightened—not just for the brief formative moments we’ve discussed so far, but awakened throughout each minute and hour of their ongoing daily life practice.