Introduction
Legend has it that soon after his enlightenment, Siddhartha Gautama was asked what made him different from other people. He replied, “I am awake,” so they gave him the title “Buddha,” meaning “one who is awake.” Now in Western culture enlightenment has a different meaning, having to do with rational inquiry. Immanuel Kant wrote “What Is Enlightenment?” as a proclamation that the age of enlightenment was open to everyone (or at least, to all those ready to cast off their “self-imposed immaturity” and use their “native intelligence” to begin thinking for themselves). Both kinds of enlightenment refer to natural capacities native to everyone, which if developed and used allow us to see the world more clearly and without distortion. This book is about awakening, but as an intellectual undertaking it proceeds fully in the tradition of rational inquiry. In fact, the two can work together, and chapter 16 examines how this symbiosis is operating in the modern world. One thing at a time, however, and to avoid confusion I will stick with “awakening” and leave “enlightenment” for the other path toward truth.
It was trying to understand awakening, and hopefully experience it directly, that started me on the project that became this book. I had spent almost forty years looking for an answer in the traditional Buddhist manner, first studying with an accredited teacher and then continuing with a sincere practice on my own. Life was good, those many years, except that I still had no answer to the question I had been pursuing. There comes a time, in many undertakings, when progress seems blocked and it might be better to try something else. So I began to think that if I couldn’t answer the question on the basis of personal experience, perhaps I should look for people who might know more about it and ask them what they had learned.
As a research sociologist, I thought interviewing would be the appropriate way to proceed. I wanted to maximize the likelihood that the people interviewed had themselves experienced awakening (although I was not sure at the time if such an experience was really possible). How does one go about finding an awakened person, especially given that many of them begin by denying that they have awakened? Because I had no idea what awakening really meant, and because there is no accrediting agency to certify levels of attainment (nothing equivalent to, say, the National Academy of Sciences), I decided to look for Buddhist teachers who were well known, had excellent reputations, had published or been interviewed extensively, and whose writings especially intrigued me. I tried to get representatives of the three major Buddhist traditions (Zen, Tibetan, and Theravada/vipassana) with good proportions of men and women.
I wanted interviewees who would be willing to talk about details of the path they had followed and about where it had led them, in their own words rather than by relying on Buddhist jargon. I stayed with Buddhists from Western nations in order to make communication simpler and minimize differences in cultural background. Consequently, the teachers interviewed here all come from North America, Europe, and Australia.
This procedure produced a list of nineteen Buddhist teachers, eleven of whom agreed to be interviewed. Only two teachers with predominately Tibetan training accepted my invitation, and both had rejected at least some of their Tibetan roots. Due to a much higher response rate among men than among women, I ended up interviewing eight men and only three women. Although this was a less representative group than I had hoped for, I was overjoyed by the quality and candidness of the interviews these eleven teachers provided.
All of the teachers described at least some level of experience with awakening. So by the time I had completed the first few interviews I already had an answer to my first question: Does awakening ever really happen in the modern (Western) world? Yes, it does!
The Interviews
The interviews were conducted between March 2009 and April 2010, all of them in person except the one with Shinzen Young, which was done by phone. At the start of the interview I asked each teacher to tell me about their path in Buddhism—how they got started, where it had led, and what their life was like now. Often that was the only structuring necessary, but at times I probed slightly to clarify what they had just said. The interviews lasted from one and one half to two hours, and were recorded, transcribed, and edited. The final edited version was then sent to each interviewee for corrections or additional comments, but no substantive changes were made. The final texts of the eleven interviews make up the heart of this book, chapters 1 through 11.
Here are biosketches of the teachers:
Shinzen Young grew up in West Los Angeles as Steve Young. He began his path intellectually, studying Asian languages at UCLA and then researching Buddhism in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin. In 1969 he went to Japan to do his Ph.D. dissertation on the Shingon School, which is derived from eighth-century Vajrayana Buddhism. While there he began both Zen and Shingon practice, learning to meditate while counting his breaths and then proceeding to some very brutal Japanese retreats. The discipline and pain worked for him; he learned that if he stayed focused, the discomfort wouldn’t bother him so much. After doing this for one hundred days in a row during a particularly intense retreat, he had mastered the ability to keep his mind quiet, concentrate, and stay attentive. On returning to the United States, he maintained this practice on his own for several years until his first awakening experience occurred. This is an almost prototypical example of what in chapter 13 will be called the “no separation” property of awakening, and is especially interesting because rather than gradually fading out, as these experiences typically do, it permanently changed a basic perspective of his consciousness.
Later on, he began serving as a translator for Joshu Sasaki Roshi in the Rinzai Zen tradition. However, he continued to explore other traditions of Buddhism, and studied with several vipassana teachers from various parts of Southeast Asia, including S. N. Goenka (with whom Stephen Batchelor also studied). Shinzen incorporated vipassana teachings and practices into his methods and philosophy of teaching, but has remained independent of any single lineage or school of Buddhism. He refers to his approach as basic mindfulness. He now lives in Burlington, Vermont, but travels extensively to lead retreats and consult on scientific studies dealing with mindfulness.
In 2012, the basic mindfulness system was utilized in fMRI studies at Harvard Medical School. Researchers used four of its techniques to help answer a fundamental question concerning what neuroscientists call the default mode network. Several of the system’s science-friendly features contributed to stunningly clear and credible results.
Shinzen is the author of The Science of Enlightenment (2005), Break Through Pain (2010), and numerous YouTube videos and articles (www.basicmindfulness.com).
He characterizes himself this way: “My life integrates many disparate worlds: I’m a Jewish guy who got turned on to science by a Jesuit priest. I teach the expansion-contraction paradigm of Japanese Zen mounted within the noting technique of Burmese vipassana, equipped with universal ethical guidelines derived from early Indian Buddhism.” He also says, “My life’s passion lies in exploring what may arise from the cross-fertilization of the best of the East with the best of the West.”
John Tarrant was born in rural Tasmania, Australia, in 1948, but when I interviewed him he was living among the vineyards of Sonoma County, California. In between working as a fisherman and then as a political activist studying and working with aborigines, he earned a dual degree in human sciences and English literature from the Australian National University. Throughout, however, two themes guided him toward Buddhism: first, childhood experiences of being “one with things . . . [where] you and the trees and the people are not different,” and second, the poetic sensitivity that continues to find expression in his writing. From early on, he was fascinated with Chinese poems and with the classical koans that he discovered in books. He studied briefly with two Tibetan teachers in Australia, then with the Korean Zen master Seung Sahn Sunim in New York, and finally with Robert Aitkin Roshi in the Harada-Yasutani tradition of Japanese Zen, from whom he received Dharma transmission.
During a sesshin with Seung Sahn in a borrowed martial arts dojo on Long Island, he had an important early experience: “I was sitting there, and the Korean pads were really thin and my knees were hurting and it was November and it was cold, and I realized, This is great. . . . Everything started to open up for me. It was perfect now. . . . All that stuff that happens when you’re meditating.” That sounds a bit like Shinzen Young’s description in its austerity and discipline, but neither Shinzen nor Tarrant is committed to that kind of approach. Tarrant also talks about the “warmth and the loving quality” that he found, of “the fundamental vastness . . . and kindness of the universe.”
Today, Tarrant directs the Pacific Zen Institute in Santa Rosa, California, and continues to be a rich and creative source of both prose and poetry. His books include The Light Inside the Dark: Zen, Soul, and the Spiritual Life (1999) and Bring Me the Rhinoceros (2008).
Ken McLeod was born in 1948 in Canada. He developed a strong interest in religion while in high school but felt frustrated by the books available for him to read. In his third year at the University of Waterloo he began looking into Buddhism, but in those days there were few books on the subject available in English. After graduation and marriage, he passed up a fellowship to do graduate work in mathematics in England and started bicycling east across Europe with his wife. In India they found Kalu Rinpoche and began studying Tibetan Buddhism with him, an immersion that became a total commitment and lasted more than twenty years. During this time Ken did two intense three-year retreats, translated for the rinpoche, and helped set up several Buddhist centers in Canada and the United States.
By 1989, however, McLeod felt increasing doubt and dissatisfaction with Tibetan Buddhism, and after Kalu Rinpoche passed away, he let go his ties to its institutions. Free to explore new approaches, he pioneered a successful new career as a meditation consultant and author. He also developed a consulting practice, coaching senior executives in leadership and communication skills. About this time he admitted to himself that he had long suffered from serious depression and sought help from psychologists, friends, and a diet that better suited a chronic digestive problem. Then, in 2008, something that he read led to what he calls his “road to Damascus” experience. This involved a complete release from ideas, Buddhist and others, and also from much of the depression and physical discomfort he had experienced. It was the start of new spiritual understanding as well, including the experience discussed in chapter 13 as an example of “not knowing,” of experiencing consciousness as coarising with action and perception in each new moment.
McLeod is known especially for his pragmatic, innovative approach to the path toward awakening. He founded his organization, Unfettered Mind, in 1990 in Los Angeles, where he has lived for over twenty years. Currently he is quietly wandering the globe, exploring and reflecting, and occasionally teaching. His writings include Wake up to Your Life: Discovering the Buddhist Path of Attention (2001), An Arrow to the Heart (2007), and Reflections on Silver River (2013), as well a steady flow of articles and translations in Buddhist magazines.
Ajahn Amaro was born Jeremy Horner in Kent, England, in 1956, and went through the English primary and boarding school system, which he calls his first raw experience of dukkha, suffering. This may or may not have led him to begin wondering, at the age of ten or eleven, What is God?, What is real?, and How can you be free?. Since he knew of no way to find answers, he went to the University of London and completed honors degrees in psychology and physiology. There he was able to connect, outside of the university, with the author and lecturer Trevor Ravenscroft and with the circle of people who had gathered around him. Getting to know and talk with them gave him confidence that others shared his questions and that there were ways to seek answers. So after graduation he bought a one-way ticket to Asia, and wandered around for a few months until he found a monastery in northeast Thailand that followed the Thai Forest tradition and the teachings of the late Ajahn Chah. This felt right to him, and he has remained a monk in that tradition and organization to this day—the only one of the eleven teachers interviewed here who has continuously followed a traditional monastic life.
After two years in Thailand, Amaro returned to England, where one of Ajahn Chah’s most senior students, Ajahn Sumedho (originally from Seattle) had established a monastery and teaching center. These were years when Amaro made great advances along his path. Although he says he never had a “Shazam!” experience, he reports progressing gradually but steadily to greater understanding and a deeper awareness of what life is really about. He also worked hard, in ways that he describes in detail, on overcoming some of his bad habits (like worrying, or taking himself too seriously). Whereas he describes himself at university as a partying carouser, he came across in the interview as witty and wise, but still fun-loving.
At the time of the interview Ajahn Amaro was coabbot of Abhayagiri Buddhist Monastery near Redwood City, California. In 2010 he returned to England to succeed Ajahn Sumedho as abbot at Amaravati Monastery.
Martine Batchelor was born in France in 1953. She was initially attracted to political activism rather than spiritual concerns, but when she read a collection of the Buddha’s talks that someone had given her, she was struck by the message that before you try to change others, it might be a good idea to try to change yourself. After some time in England exploring Asian gurus and their writings (none of whom impressed her very much), she decided she needed to encounter Buddhism firsthand. So she saved some money and traveled overland, through Nepal and Thailand, ending up in Korea. There she found her teacher, the Zen master Kusan Sunim, and became a Jogye Zen nun. Ten years of meditation and study with Sunim provided the foundation for the continued spiritual development that she tells about in her interview. She also met Stephen Batchelor when he came to Korea to study with Sunim, and in 1985 they left monastic life, got married, and moved to England. Since then she has been writing, teaching, and leading meditation groups in Europe and the United States, while living in a small town near Bordeaux. She is the author of Women in Korean Zen (2007) and The Spirit of the Buddha (2010).
Shaila Catherine grew up in a suburb of San Francisco, California. While in high school in 1980 she heard about meditation from a friend and immediately wanted to learn more. So she took a class, sat diligently, and continued meditating and attending silent retreats through college. In 1990 she finished graduate work and traveled to India. Her first stop was Bodh Gaya, the place of the Buddha’s enlightenment, where she attended a three-week retreat led by Christopher Titmuss, a Dharma teacher from the United Kingdom. Soon after this retreat, she met the Hindu teacher H.W.L. Poonja. Through a dialogue process, Poonjaji opened her mind to what might be described as a direct experience of emptiness. For several years she lived primarily with Poonjaji in Lucknow, India, and traveled periodically to Thailand to practice meditation in forest monasteries, to Nepal where she received teachings from Tibetan lamas, and to retreats led by Western Insight Meditation teachers elsewhere in India and the West. In 1996, Titmuss invited Shaila to teach. She then spent a year studying Buddhism in England, and returned to her home in the United States by 1998.
Shaila has an enduring appreciation for silent meditation and has accumulated more than eight years of silent retreat experience. In 2003, she devoted a ten-month retreat to the development of deep states of absorptive concentration, known as jhāna, and their application to insight. She authored Focused and Fearless: A Meditator’s Guide to States of Deep Joy, Calm, and Clarity (Wisdom, 2008) to encourage the development of jhāna as a basis for liberating insight.
Since 2006, Shaila’s practice of concentration and insight has been guided by the Burmese meditation master Venerable Pa-Auk Sayadaw. He teaches a systematic approach that prepares the mind with strong concentration and carefully analyzes mind and matter before progressing through a traditional scheme of sixteen knowledges that culminate in the liberating realization of nibbāna. She wrote Wisdom Wide and Deep: A Practical Handbook for Mastering Jhāna and Vipassanā (2011) to help make this traditional approach to meditation accessible to Western practitioners.
Shaila teaches meditation internationally, and is the founder and principal teacher for Insight Meditation South Bay, a Buddhist meditation center in Silicon Valley (imsb.org).
Gil Fronsdal was born in Norway in 1954, and grew up in Los Angeles, Switzerland, and Italy. He has lived in the San Francisco Bay area much of his adult life. With an interest in ecology, living simply, and improving the natural environment, he first majored in environmental studies and then graduated from college with a degree in agronomy. His lifelong interest in Buddhist practice began during the two years he dropped out of school in the middle of college. Hitchhiking around the United States, he stayed in various communes, where he was introduced to Shunryu Suzuki’s book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind and Chogyam Trungpa’s Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism. This brought him to the San Francisco Zen Center. He stayed with that organization for ten years, practicing at its three centers: Green Gulch Farm, Tassajara monastery, and the main temple in San Francisco. He found the Zen practice quite beneficial and inspiring.
When San Francisco Zen Center had a leadership crisis in 1983, he accepted an invitation to go to Japan. As with several other teachers interviewed for this book, regulations required that he leave the country in order to apply for a new visa. The visa never arrived, but while waiting in Bangkok he became involved with vipassana training. He liked the long, intensive retreats, including an eight-month retreat in Burma during which he experienced a deeper and more intense meditation experience. On returning to the United States, he went to a three-month vipassana retreat at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts. Here the process of deepening the practice continued. Two years later Jack Kornfield invited Fronsdal to participate in a four-year vipassana teacher-training program held in Spirit Rock, California.
By 1990 Gil found himself on a “dual-track” Buddhist path. In addition to the vipassana training with Kornfield, he had continued his Zen training and eventually received Dharma transmission as a Zen teacher through Mel Weitsman in the Shunryu Suzuki lineage. At the same time he was doing academic work that culminated in a Ph.D. in Buddhist studies at Stanford. In 1990 he also began leading a small meditation group near Stanford. That sitting group grew into the Insight Meditation Center of Redwood City, California, which he presently directs.
Gil was married in 1992 and has two children. He says that monastic life was easy for him, but that marriage and a family pushed, stretched, challenged, and inspired him in ways that were as transforming as any other aspect of his Buddhist practice.
Fronsdal is the author of The Issue at Hand: Essays on Buddhist Mindfulness Practice (2008), A Monastery Within: Tales from the Buddhist Path (2010), Unhindered: A Mindful Path Through the Five Hindrances (2013), and The Dhammapada (2006), a translation of a Buddhist classic.
Stephen Batchelor was born in Britain in 1953, where he grew up immersed in the counterculture of the 1960s. At age eighteen he hitchhiked east through Europe and beyond. When the going got tough in Iran, his traveling companion mentioned Buddha’s remark that “Life is suffering.” This intrigued and disturbed him so much that when he reached India he went straight to Dharamsala, the capital-in-exile of the Dalai Lama. There he began studying Buddhist philosophy and doctrine with Geshe Dhargyey. He continued for two years and was ordained as a monk. But he also participated in vipassana retreats under S. N. Goenka (with whom Shinzen Young also studied), where he learned mindfulness meditation. This proved to be a fruitful combination—during the next three years he had several important insight experiences. There was a problem, however: what he was studying in the Buddhist texts did not seem to link up with what he was learning from the insight experiences. There was an “acute disjunction.”
Stephen found some help with this problem in the writings of Dharmakirti, a seventh-century Buddhist philosopher, whom he studied when in 1975 he followed his Tibetan teacher, Geshe Rabten, to a monastery near Geneva, Switzerland. Dharmakirti held that the function of meditation and spiritual study was to learn to experience and live in the world as it really is. Stephen has been guided by that teaching ever since, first through two years studying Zen Buddhism in Korea and then, after meeting his future wife, Martine, at that monastery, at Sharpham North Community in Devon, England, and in life as an independent author and teacher.
Since 1985 Batchelor’s path has focused on applying what he learned from fourteen years of Tibetan and Zen Buddhist training, and from the awakening he experienced, to everyday life in the world. In his most recent book, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist (2010), he concentrates on how Gautama lived his life after his awakening, studying all written records of his teachings and activities, and also paying attention to the political and social environment in which the Buddha had to live and the people (like King Pasenadi) with whom he had to deal for the (then unnamed) movement that had started around him to survive. A second way Batchelor resolved the disjunction between Buddhist teaching and his personal experience was to reject any parts of Buddhism that set up beliefs and ask followers to accept them. He has written, lectured, and debated extensively on the subject. With Martine, Stephen currently lives in a small town near Bordeaux.
Pat Enkyo O’Hara was born in 1942 and grew up in San Diego, where she graduated from the same high school I had attended several years earlier. The 1950s in Southern California were “rebel without a cause” years for many young people, and like the beatniks she identified with, Enkyo began reading what books on Zen she could find. For twenty years, while pursuing a Ph.D. in media ecology and becoming a professor at New York University, she read books on Buddhism and tried, occasionally, to sit on her own. Finally she started formal Zen study, at Zen Mountain Monastery near New York City, with John Daido Loori Roshi. She says it took her that long to submit to direction and be part of a group, but that when she did the discipline and social support provided just what she needed.
Four or five years later the AIDS epidemic hit New York, and Enkyo plunged into working with dying men. This changed the focus of her practice completely, from improving her life to expressing compassion and helping others. Along with this flow of empathy came an increasingly frequent experience of one of the characteristics of awakening described in chapter 13—a “dropping of the distance between me and the other.”
Enkyo’s formal Zen training continued in the 1990s as she began studying with Loori Roshi’s teacher Taizan Maezumi Roshi, in the Harada-Yasutani lineage, and continued her work with koans. She found Maezumi to be both inspiring and an excellent teacher, and has kind and insightful things to say about this otherwise controversial man and about his contribution to her development. She was ordained by Maezumi in 1995. After his death, she received Dharma transmission in 2004 from another of his students, Bernie Glassman. She had known Glassman for some time, and worked with him in New York on the Greyston Bakery project and other social action efforts for which he is well known (see Glassman’s interview, chapter 10).
Enkyo is currently abbot of the Village Zendo in Greenwich Village, which began in 1985 with one or two people coming to meditate with her in her apartment. The group grew larger and larger, until she had to retire from her position at NYU and find a way to rent space in Lower Manhattan. Over the years, she and her students have built the Village Zendo into a large, vibrant, and socially active community.
Bernie Glassman was born in 1939 and grew up in Brooklyn. Initially his interests were in technology and engineering, although he does remember doing research, at age twelve, on the question, Is there a God? by reading what some classical thinkers had to say on the topic. Then in college he was assigned The World’s Religions by Huston Smith, which included one page on Zen. But that one page was enough to set Glassman to reading everything he could find about Zen Buddhism.
When he graduated, in 1960, and moved to Los Angeles to work as an aeronautical engineer at McDonnell-Douglas, he began doing zazen on his own. In 1962 he found a Japanese Buddhist temple in downtown Los Angeles, where he began meditating and met Maezumi Roshi, then a young monk, who a few years later started a center of his own and became Glassman’s teacher (initially Bernie was his only student). During that time Glass-man also earned a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from UCLA. But what he really wanted to do was to have “the classical awakening experiences.”
He had his first in 1970, an experience of oneness. Then in 1976 he had two deeper experiences, which he describes as states in which all attachments “to any of your conditionings” disappear. After that he felt no need for more experiences and changed his direction radically, from working on spiritual development in the traditional context of a Zen center to working in the world with all the different kinds of people who live in it.
Glassman received Dharma transmission in 1976, moved back to New York, began teaching at the Zen Center of New York, and wondered what to do about the hunger and suffering he saw around him. He felt that the Buddhist approach should not be thought of as “good people helping poor people” but as an opportunity to be shaped and informed by the people with whom one is working. In 1982 he and others opened Greyston Bakery in Yonkers, New York, an effort to help alleviate homelessness in that neighborhood by providing a job to anyone, regardless of background, and using the profits for wide-ranging community development projects. But he also understood that helping others can be a practice, in the classical Buddhist sense: a way practitioners can realize the oneness of life by opening up to the immediate presence of human diversity. In line with this, in the mid-1980s he began leading retreats not in the Zen Center but on the streets of slums, where the participants lived with the homeless as the homeless. These were highly successful and have been continued by his students around the world. Following this idea of retreats in environments that confront participants with realities that challenge their attachments to what they have always taken for granted, Glassman and his students have also held a long series of retreats in Auschwitz.
In 1996 Glassman founded the Zen Peacemaker Circle, which among other activities is currently working to develop “Zen houses.” These are located in troubled neighborhoods, where Buddhists will both practice meditation and minister to the needs of the people around them. His writings include Bearing Witness: A Zen Master’s Lessons in Making Peace (1999) and Infinite Circle: Teachings in Zen (2003).
Joseph Goldstein, born in 1944, grew up in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York. He studied philosophy at Columbia University, where in a class on Eastern religion and philosophy, one theme in the Bhagavad Gita unexpectedly awakened in him a new possibility for living in the world: “act without attachment to the fruit of the action.” Although at the time, this idea was just a small seed of understanding, it contributed to a sense of search and inquiry. After graduating in 1965, Joseph volunteered for the Peace Corps and was sent to Thailand, where he started going to a Buddhist temple that offered courses for foreigners. There he was introduced to Buddhist meditation, and although he had the usual beginning difficulties, it gave him a glimpse of how the Buddhist path could provide a way to explore the mind.
After his stint in the Peace Corps, Goldstein realized that he wanted to practice meditation more intensively. He traveled to India and met his first teacher, Anagarika Munindra, who had just returned to Bodh Gaya after nine years of study and practice in Burma. Since then, Joseph has continued to study and practice vipassana or insight meditation. More recently, he has also practiced with some renowned Tibetan teachers. To describe where this path has led him, Joseph likes to use a framework taught by the twelfth-century Korean Zen master Chinul: “sudden awakening/gradual cultivation.” Insights and openings occur suddenly; then they must be gradually cultivated in all aspects of one’s life.
On returning to the United States in 1974, Goldstein, along with two other young Americans who had been studying Buddhism in South Asia—Sharon Salzberg and Jack Kornfield—founded the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts. IMS has grown and expanded steadily, helping to meet a strong interest in vipassana Buddhist practice in the United States. Shaila Catherine (chapter 6) and Gil Fronsdal (chapter 7) both studied at the Barre IMS and presently lead their own meditation centers in California.
Joseph continues to lecture and lead retreats, and has authored a number of important books, including Insight Meditation: The Practice of Freedom (2003), One Dharma: The Emerging Western Buddhism (2003), and Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening (2013).
Serendipity
A funny thing happened toward the end of the interviewing. Once you start a research project, especially one as exploratory as this, you can never be sure where it will take you. While doing their best to tell me about their experiences with awakening, the teachers also somehow managed to catalyze within me an awakening experience of my own. This was wonderful for me personally, of course, and it helped me tremendously in understanding what they said in their interviews. At the same time, “having an inner personal experience” doesn’t fit accepted research formats, because the trade-off for deeper understanding is subjective bias. This is a warning to readers: what I have to say from here on is unavoidably colored by that experience.
As evidence that scientists can have awakening experiences too, the appendix presents an interview with James Austin, neurologist and medical school professor. Austin has studied and practiced Zen for some years, and he tells a path story similar to those of the teachers. His awakening came early one morning on the outside platform of a London subway station. The properties of the experience are quite similar to those described by the teachers but, in my reading anyway, show even more of the objective attention to detailed description that should be expected of a scientist.
Analysis
Taken all together, the interviews provide strong support for the argument that the human species possesses—has within its physical being—the capacity for a mode of conscious awareness that is qualitatively different from our ordinary form of consciousness. After I had gathered this evidence, the next task was to focus that argument more clearly through qualitative analysis of the interview texts. In chapters 12 and 13 I try to identify shared patterns and common themes running through the eleven interviews.
Chapter 12, “Developing Capacities Necessary for Awakening,” examines the paths the teachers followed, paying particular attention to the practices they engaged in and the teachings that provided them with guidance and inspiration. All of the teachers devoted many, many hours to meditation. Although the specific forms and techniques varied, they didn’t seem to consider the technical details as important as what they learned along the way. In particular, the interviews mentioned three distinct capacities that must be developed and strengthened: control of attention (necessary for quieting the mind), detaching from or letting go of conditionings, and nurturing the growth of compassion. Whether nurturing compassion is a necessary or merely a desirable development is not resolved in this chapter, and starts a thread to be followed in chapter 13. The details of the path stories thus describe the way different practices and teachings were used to facilitate development of these three capacities.
In chapter 13, “Properties of Awakening Experiences,” all segments of the interviews that seem to refer to experiences of awakening, or awakened awareness, are pulled out for more careful analysis and sorted into groups on the basis of similarity. A considerable amount of interpretation was sometimes required to do this, but there are two checks on the process. One is that the phrases and my interpretations of them are laid out explicitly, with page identifications so that the quotes can be located in the interview chapters in their full context. The second check is that a preliminary draft of this chapter was sent to each interviewee so that they could see and comment on my interpretation of their quotes. Their responses are included following my analysis.
The final sorting of interpreted quotes produced three clusters that describe three distinct ways awakened awareness is different from ordinary awareness. A conceptual definition was given to each cluster based on its distinctive properties:
 
1.  No separation from one’s environment. Awakened awareness is generated from a perspective in which the environment is a whole system in which we participate as one more or less equal part, not from the usual perspective of the self as central focus and protagonist operating at some remove from others around it.
2.  No emotional attachments to the self or to social reality. We can observe what is going on in the world and act appropriately, but emotional connections with the scripts that normally govern this activity have been unplugged, and we watch the flow of awareness with freedom and equanimity.
3.  Awareness coarises with action, freely, as an interdependent process. What we become aware of and what we find ourselves doing in each moment emerge together spontaneously as we interact with our environment.
 
Although understanding each of these properties conceptually is not the same as experiencing awakening, the definitions provide a way of relating awakened consciousness to ordinary consciousness.
While chapter 13 attempts to sum up the positive aspects of awakened consciousness, it would be misleading not to also mention negative aspects. Western Buddhism has repeatedly been rocked by scandals in which some presumably awakened teacher has indulged in sex, alcohol, or drugs in ways that not only were self-destructive but also caused suffering to other people. Sexual abuse of students has been widely, and infamously, reported in recent years, particularly by teachers in Japanese Zen traditions. Hurting other people requires an absence of compassion, so chapter 13 ends by concluding that it is possible to have awakened consciousness without possessing compassion.
Theoretical Integration
Chapter 14, “Evolution of Ordinary and Awakened Consciousness,” approaches awakening from a different direction. The properties of awakened consciousness derived in chapter 13 are, intellectually, neither complicated nor esoteric. Why, then, do almost all humans in the world today spend their lives blinkered by ordinary consciousness? This chapter says it is no accident, but rather a natural twist in a long process of evolution. While the evolution of consciousness began with one-celled organisms, the important story begins with vertebrates and has four parts. First, some species of mammals and birds became more and more clever, including those closest to our line (apes and australopithecines). Second, some early hominid species, perhaps Homo erectus, began to use that improved cognitive capacity to develop their communication systems into protolanguages that allowed communication about objects and events not present in immediate perceptual experience.
Third, as protolanguages progressed into the “true” languages of Homo sapiens, something else completely new developed. As our species began using language to link perceptual experience with words and symbols, and then went on to talk and think about things that happened in the past, things that might or might not happen in the future, or abstractions with no basis in perceptual experience at all, we began to have at our command a symbolically represented world existing parallel to the perceptually represented world of animals. This is usually called “culture,” or at a finer-grained level, “social reality.” Social realities are built by humans talking with each other, and infants born into a group begin learning its social reality at the same time that they learn language.1 This version of reality becomes internalized so deeply that it becomes virtually unquestionable, so that as adults we experience life through a layer of social reality placed on top of perceptual reality. The word “carapace” has been used to describe the way social reality creates a shell within which we live and through which we experience the world around us. I sometimes think of my personal symbolic representation of the world as an exoskeleton.
The fourth part of the evolutionary story took place at the biological level. As language and the elaboration of social reality proceeded and became the basis for social life and social institutions, the hominid brain both grew in size and differentiated into specialized areas and systems capable of processing all the information and computations necessary for living in social reality. When the brain interprets perceptual experience by filtering it through symbolic systems representing social and personal reality (and in the process forces perceptual reality to fit into the structures of social reality), we have ordinary consciousness.
To understand awakened consciousness, we have to begin by going back to some hypothetical time before language and social reality began to be invented, and then try to imagine what it would be like to live solely in perceptual reality. The suggestion of chapter 14 is that the core of awakened consciousness is like this early, purely perceptual mode. Our brains are larger than those of animals, of course, and we have language and the symbolic representations that it makes possible. These are incredible resources but also set two traps: reification of social reality and construction of the social self. As long as we think social reality is real and the self-construct is us, and care as enormously as we do about how that self is doing as it wanders around in that reality, we are trapped in ordinary consciousness.
As soon as we began to talk, as children, we began constructing the social self as a proxy version of ourselves, just as we began constructing our own version of the rest of social reality. Following this theme, chapter 15, “The Awakened Baby?” looks at what developmental psychology has to say about the transformation of human babies into adults. The starting point is that babies have yet to acquire language, and so they have no social self, no concern about social reality, and no apparent sense of separation from the world around them—all properties of awakened consciousness. Furthermore, the loss of these properties and the development of ordinary consciousness in children seems to parallel or follow slightly after corresponding stages in the development of language. So there are some intriguing connections. While they don’t prove that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, they deserve further investigation.
The story of human consciousness continues in chapter 16, “The Human Condition and How We Got Into It,” by examining the final stages leading to the dominance of ordinary consciousness. Here the question turns from why most humans today live their lives within ordinary consciousness to the consequences of modern ordinary consciousness for subjective experience and for behavior. Although we think of our species as the crown jewel of evolution, many people admit that life in ordinary consciousness has not turned out to be all that great. Chapter 16 therefore looks at how human societies and individuals have tried, historically and today, to live with what the Buddha called dukkha. Dukkha is usually translated as “suffering” or “dissatisfaction”; it means that life in ordinary consciousness is inherently unsatisfying and anxiety-provoking. In modern terminology, the human condition is life within the shell of ordinary consciousness. Our species has always had to deal with this condition, and the kinds of remedies with which we have tried to prevent or relieve its symptoms make quite a list.
The first strategy, the one recommended and taught by the Buddha and discussed at great length in this book, is to awaken, that is, to transcend ordinary consciousness. A second strategy is more or less in line with this. It involves following the Buddha’s advice about how to prepare for awakening, whether or not it actually takes place. For people living in modern postindustrial societies, this is the rationale for meditating, for trying to live mindfully in perceptual reality and follow a moral path based on wisdom. This solution is also evident in preliterate societies, where attention to perceptual reality is typically part of the culture and way of life. Chapter 17 therefore begins by examining a prototypical preliterate society, the Pirahãs of the Brazilian Amazon. They are of special interest because according to the linguist Daniel Everett, their language and culture seem almost intentionally designed to focus attention on immediate experience.2 When day-to-day Pirahã life is compared in detail with the practices that chapter 12 says are basic to the Buddhist path, there is a very close resemblance. And if we then compare what Everett says about Pirahã personality traits with the properties of awakened consciousness described in 13, the Pirahãs come out looking very much like awakened Buddhists. So the implication is that a whole society can keep alive and healthy the capacities needed to enjoy awakened consciousness by structuring their culture and lifestyle in ways that promote activities and attitudes similar to those of Buddhism. Like almost all humans, Pirahãs have a social reality that they accept as true, but their emphasis on mindful attention to perceptual reality seems to provide enough balance to keep the dukkha of ordinary consciousness at minimal levels.
A third strategy for living with dukkha goes in a different direction. It probably dates back to the evolution of specialized brain systems for language and ordinary consciousness, which became part of our genetic heritage. This strategy involves two tactics: first, construct as a special component of social reality a set of beliefs that explains why things happen in life the way they do. Life will still include some physical suffering, but we don’t have to feel anxious or afraid because we know that whatever happens makes sense as part of some larger plan. Second, support and reinforce those beliefs with the strong consensus of a cohesive social group. The ontological basis for social reality is the shared belief by a social group that it is real and cannot be questioned. This strategy has worked fairly well throughout human history. In today’s world, however, shared trust in social reality has been challenged and disrupted by forces that have developed within social reality itself.
For an analysis of these forces at work that is remarkably consistent with Gautama’s original dukkha theory, chapter 16 turns to Anthony Giddens’s Modernity and Self-Identity. Lord Giddens begins with the most distinctive feature of modern society, its extreme dynamism, producing not only rapid social change but also rapid acceleration in the rate at which change is taking place. Social reality no longer provides satisfactory explanations for what is happening. As a consequence, its taken-for-granted nature, “the main emotional support of a defensive carapace or protective cocoon which all normal individuals carry around with them as the means whereby they are able to get on with the affairs of day-to-day life,”3 is increasingly called into question and made to feel less and less solid. When social reality is disrupted, people experience higher levels of dukkha, which Giddens calls ontological insecurity: “On the other side of what might appear to be quite trivial aspects of day-to-day action and discourse, chaos lurks. And this chaos is not just disorganization, but the loss of a sense of the very reality of things and of other persons.”4
Giddens applies his version of the dukkha model by first asking what has caused this extreme dynamism of modern society. He identifies as a primary culprit the fact that we no longer protect the sanctity of our social reality but actually encourage people to question it. That is, questioning social reality and the nature of the self—a tradition that has existed in the West at least since ancient Greece—now has actually become institutionalized, built into our social reality and given positive value. This is a remarkable and unprecedented occurrence—a social reality that is continuously questioning itself. A major consequence of the blooming of ordinary consciousness, therefore, has been not only social change caused by science, technology, and improvements in the material quality of life but also an unrelenting intellectual attack on the beliefs people had previously taken for granted. And one consequence, of course, has been increased dukkha; unsurprisingly, we find more energy being put into attempts to reduce or resolve the problems it causes.
Three kinds of response to dukkha are strongly alive today and play an important role in shaping modern life. One response has been to reassert traditional social reality, in particular traditional religious belief systems that provide people with answers and group support. Data on the growth of fundamentalist churches and on the popularity of science denial as a way to reject ideas that do not fit traditional beliefs document this.5 The second response has been to embrace skeptical inquiry and learn to tolerate, even enjoy, the existential ambiguity it engenders. This shows up in the steadily increasing numbers of “religiously unaffiliated” people in the United States today. The third response, and the subject of this book, tries to move away from the dominance of ordinary consciousness by practicing some form of meditation or following something like the Buddhist path. The number of people responding this way has also been growing.
Chapter 17 pulls the most important ideas laid out in the previous chapters together into two conceptual models, one for each mode of consciousness. Aside from providing a concise summary, these models are meant to help researchers formulate hypotheses and design methods for investigating them, so that the study of awakened consciousness can proceed energetically in company with the more established traditions of scientific research. Because to ask, as this book does, What is awakening? is not to float an esoteric question somewhere out beyond the realm of practical and intellectual discourse. It is at least possible that the future of the planet depends on finding an answer and applying it.
By displacing perceptual reality with symbolic representations based heavily on social reality, ordinary consciousness opens wonderful possibilities for creative achievement but also dooms us to live with a reflected, refracted, and edited view of the world. We live according to the Thomas theorem: “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.”6 If we believe that something is true, we may act in ways that are crazy or murderous as a result—and humans have shown themselves capable of believing an incredible variety of things and acting accordingly. When those traditional beliefs are threatened, as they are today, efforts to reassert them can be strong and sometimes violent, causing the “culture wars” and political conflicts manifest in the United States today. Finding ways to live in health, peace, and happiness with our own invention, language, is the crucial challenge we may finally have to face.