Introduction
1. Berger and Luckmann 1966.
5. See the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life,
U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, Pew Research Center (2008).
6. W. I. Thomas and D. Thomas 1928.
5. Interview with Martine Batchelor
1. M. Batchelor 2006, 41.
8. Interview with Stephen Batchelor
1. S. Batchelor 2010, 238.
10. Interview with Bernie Glassman
1. See Robert Heinlein,
Stranger in a Strange Land (New York: Putnam, 1961). Grok: to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed—to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience.
2. Matthiessen finished the novel based his experiences at the Auschwitz retreats, including the one referred to here, shortly before he died.
In Paradise: A Novel was published in April 2014.
12. Developing Capacities Necessary for Awakening
1. These categories, in one form or another, go back throughout the history of Buddhism to the early teachings of Gautama. See Shankman 2008.
2. Farb, Segal, and Anderson 2012; Lutz, Slagter, Rawlings, Francis, Greishar, and Davidson 2009; Wallace and Hodel 2009.
3. Brefczynski-Lewis, Lutz, Schaefer, Levinson, and Davidson 2007.
4. S. Batchelor 2010, 25–26.
5. Fishman and Young 2002; Young 2011.
7. S. Batchelor 2010, 30.
8. Ekman, Davidson, Ricard, and Wallace 2005; Condon, Desbordes, Miller, and DeSteno 2013.
9. Lutz, Brefczynski-Lewis, Johnstone, and Davidson 2008; Lutz, Greishar, Perlman, and Davidson 2009.
13. Properties of Awakening Experiences
2. A similar approach was used by Full, Walach, and Trautwein in analyzing the interviews they had conducted with expert meditators in Burma, with compatible results. See Full, Walach, and Trautwein 2013, 55–63.
3. Which is another reason for using the word “awakening” rather than “enlightenment.”
4. Goffman and Berger 1974; Lakoff 1996.
5. S. Batchelor 2010, 29–30.
6. There is an extensive literature on these issues, and several websites are devoted to current events. See Edelstein 2011; Bell 2002; Downing 2002; O’Brien 2011.
7. See Victoria 2006 and 2003.
8. There was nothing dramatic about my leaving. My practice was evolving at that time toward being more and more quiet, doing
shikantaza (mindfulness meditation) rather than working on koans. I tried to communicate something about this to Sasaki in
sanzen, but he would have nothing of it. He insisted that I stick with koans. So I decided that he was not a good teacher for me and ceased going to see him. But I remain deeply grateful to him for getting me off to a good start and pointing me in the right direction.
9. I first heard about Sasaki’s behavior from two women in the 1970s, who told me he would sometimes reach out and fondle their breasts during
sanzen. They didn’t seem terribly upset about it, and I didn’t hear anything else for about fifteen years, when a traumatic scandal broke out at Bodhi Manda Zen Center in Jemez Springs, New Mexico. By that time I was no longer a student, but I heard indirectly that Sasaki had promised not to behave that way anymore. Another twenty-three years went by, and the cover-ups worked well enough that only insiders really knew what was going on, until the story finally erupted on the website sweepingzen.com. One of his top-level monks broke the silence that Sasaki’s organization had maintained around him, and a flood of additional postings poured in.
10. Martin 2012. According to other postings on sasakiarchive.com (a website maintained by Sweeping Zen), Sasaki (who died in 2014) had been confronted with the problems caused by his abusive sexual behavior many times. He never explained or gave excuses, and he never changed his behavior. He also threatened, lied, and coerced to get students and monks to keep quiet and do what he wanted.
13. Many people are very attached to a conception of enlightenment that includes compassionment. That’s still another reason for calling it awakening.
14. Victoria, 2003, 2006.
18. Interview with Dutton on
To the Best of Our Knowedge (ttbook.org), January 3, 2013. CEOs ranked first.
19. Stephen Pinker has argued that the incidence of violence in societies has declined as “modern civilization” developed new forms of morality (Pinker 2012). For example, the moral principle of behaving toward others in the way you would want them to behave toward you requires either great empathy or the intellectual apparatus for a sophisticated “theory of mind” that allows you to “take the role of the other” in social situations and act accordingly. If you are able to put yourself in the role of the other person intellectually and predict her feelings and you have been trained by your culture to care about how other people feel, then even without intuitive emotional feelings of empathy, many potentially negative behaviors will be controlled.
14. Evolution of Ordinary and Awakened Consciousness
1. Where “awareness” means we take account in our behavior of at least some perceptual information about the here-and-now. Conscious awareness means we can talk about this.
6. Damasio, chap. 3; see also Francesca Frassinetti, Maini, Benassi, and Gallese 2011.
9. Recent neurological research gives some support for this: see Farb, Segal, and Anderson 2012.
11. Jocelyn Sze showed that that “people who meditate have greater interoceptive awareness than dancers who, although they also have trained awareness of their bodies’ movements, are perhaps less in tune with their emotional states.” Quote from Emma Seppala,
Scientific American, April 3, 2012,
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/decoding-body-watcher/. On the other hand, Khalsa, Rudrauf, Damasio, Davidson, Lutz, and Tranel (2008) found no evidence that experienced meditators were able to perform a laboratory heartbeat detection test any better than nonmeditators. However, this does not seem to have involved “primordial feelings” either.
12. Damasio has been criticized for some looseness and circularity in the way he defines “core consciousness.” For example, John Searle complains that Damasio has “smuggled consciousness into his conception of [self] without explaining how it got there” (2011, 52). See also Block 2010. My view is that you can define “self” in several ways, so long as you are clear about which definition you are using.
15. de Gelder 2010, 61–65. See also Koch 2012, 20–21.
17. That is, all cognitive processing could take place at an unconscious level. Quoted in Gallup 1998, 70.
18. Several studies summarized by Koch 2011, 22–23, show that unconscious processing is capable of rather complicated feats. See also Hassain, Uleman, and Baugh 2004.
19. My favorite “in the zone” sports story, and very close to property 1 of awakened consciousness, described in chapter 13, is Bill Russell’s. See Nelson 2005.
20. Insight has been studied among animals as mental trial-and-error learning, but though the animals are clever and their behavior hints at being able to work with nonpresent mental representations in the way humans do, the results are more tantalizing than convincing.
22. Suddendorf (2013) and Shuttleworth (2010) provide extensive overviews of this.
25. M. Tomasello and J. Farrar, cited in Reznikova 2007, 186. These findings could also be explained by higher levels of unconscious awareness, so, as with much animal research, the results remain ambiguous.
26. Gallup 1998; Reiss 2011.
27. Daniel Povinelli, cited in Gallup 1998.
28. See for example Premack 2007.
31. Hockett 1960; Hockett and Ascher 1964.
34. For an excellent coverage of the transition from animals to humans-with-language, see Hurford 2007.
35. Berwick et al. 2013; Chomsky 2011.
36. M. Somel et al. 2013.
37. Bickerton 2009. Bickerton is a respected linguist with a long career of important research, but some reviews have taken issue with his work on the basis of traditional linguistic principles. One ends by saying that while
Adam’s Tongue “doesn’t actually explain how language evolved,” it might account for how “some kind of protolanguage with displacement” evolved, which is a huge contribution. See Balari and Lorenzo 2010.
38. The evolution of cooperation is, of course, at least as deep and complex as, and certainly intertwined with, the evolution of language. Martin Nowak (2012) analyzed “several thousand papers scientists have published on how cooperators could prevail in evolution” and identified five mechanisms or scenarios which are most often mentioned as responsible.
39. Michael Tomasello, cited in Natalie Angier, “Thirst for Fairness May Have Helped Us Survive,”
New York Times, July 4, 2011.
40. A language that allows a spoken message to be decoded by another person with no loss of meaning or information.
41. Social reality is as much a part of us as the lexicon and grammar of the language that expresses it, so in one sense a social reality is the set of all verbal descriptions that a group of people can both utter and agree to be true. But just as a specific sentence is generated within the syntactic constraints of a grammar, the way social reality is applied to interpret and represent a specific situation must be generated within the constraints of some underlying, perhaps inchoate, set of themes.
42. Berger and Luckmann 1966.
43. This, of course, is a deep subject—see, for example, Kempson 1988.
44. One component or aspect of social reality is what is now called Theory of Mind, all the stored information that makes it possible for one person to infer what is going on in another person’s mind. For thorough coverage of the way children learn language and theory of mind at the same time, see the collection of research articles in Astington and Baird 2005. I do not know of similar developmental studies of the co-learning of language and other aspects of social reality, although they probably exist.
45. Searle 2010. Strictly speaking, Searle is concerned with the kind of speech act called a “status function declaration.”
46. We can approximate this by trying to see the world from another perspective, or by being thrust into a very different social world. But this is just changing social realities. From the perspective of awakened consciousness, once a social reality has taken us over, we cannot simply will ourselves to see the world the way it really is.
47. Berger and Luckmann 1966, 60.
49. Learning and practicing an extensive repertoire of stories is useful, actually necessary, for living competently in the social world. See the work of Keith Oakley, e.g., Oakley 2011.
52. This example helps explain why Buddhist practitioners spend so much time working to develop attention and detachment, as discussed in chapter 12.
54. Libet and Kosslyn 2005.
57. MacNeilage, Rogers, and Vallortigara 2009, 60–67.
60. In his “Dark Night of the Soul,” the Christian mystic John of the Cross talked of how, after all the preparations necessary along the path, one must wait for “an inflowing of God into the soul” for secret instruction. See
The Complete Works of St. John of the Cross, Vol. I, trans. E. A. Peers (London: Burns, Oates & Washburn, 1958), 381.
61. Austin 2009, 2006, 1998.
62. Davidson and Lutz 2007, 172–176; Brefczynski-Lewis, Lutz, Schaefer, Levinson, and Davidson 2007; Holzel, Carmody, Vangel, Congleton, Yerramsetti, Gard, and Lazar 2011.
15. The Awakened Baby?
12. Ferris Jabr, “Blissfully Unaware,”
Scientific American Mind 22 (2011): 14.
16. The Human Condition and How We Got Into It
2. Colapinto 2007 and Schuessler 2012.
3. For discussions of how language shapes consciousness, see Whorf 1964; Boroditsky 2011, 63–65; Fausey, Long, Inamon, and Borodistsky 2010.
4. Quoted in Colapinto 2007.
5. Pirahãs who worked for Everett helping him learn their language.
7. Frank, Everett, Fedorenko, and Gibson 2008.
15. Everett 2009a, 89–90.
16. The classic article is Richard B. Lee, “Eating Christmas in the Kalahari,”
Natural History (December 1969).
20. Everett 2009a, 216. As an example of this, the Pirahã do not indicate direction by pointing.
22. Everett 2009a, 278–279. Considering the recent surge of research on happiness and the serious questions that can be raised about basing the findings on self-reports, it is interesting to note the method the MIT psychologists recommended using to study happiness—measure the time people spend smiling or laughing. Complexities involved in studying happiness suggest this is a good idea. For an overview and references, see Pawelski 2011.
23. See among many sources Ivanovski and Malhi 2007.
26. A slightly more nuanced version of this is reported by the anthropologists Mehl-Madrona and Pennycook from their interviews with elders from twenty-one North American tribes. They had worked with these elders for up to fifteen years, so the informal interviews could explore in depth what these elders understood as “consciousness,” “mind,” and “self,” rather than imposing Western scientific concepts on them. Mind, the elders agreed, exists between people and not within individuals: “Mind consists of the stories told in a relationship that define and delineate that relationship,” and each relationship “has a mind of its own.” Which, of course, is how the social self of other Americans operates, as part of a shared social reality—we simply see it from a more egocentric perspective. Consciousness, on the other hand, was understood by the elders as being “unique to individuals” and is “what remains when all internal dialogue stops.” They stressed the importance of “stopping all thought so as to be able to appreciate who we are when the mind is still.” Mehl-Madrona and Pennycock 2009. Mehl-Madrona is of Native American descent through both parents, which also facilitated establishing rapport. The quotes are found on 94.
27. Everett p. 112. Furthermore, access to spirits is egalitarian: “Seeing spirits is not shamanism, because there was no one man among the Pirahãs who could speak for or to the spirits. Some men did this more frequently than others, but any Pirahã man could, and over the years I was with them most did, speak as a spirit in this way.” (p. 141).
28. Katz 1976, 298; Katz 1982. The practice consists of strenuous physical activity, maybe similar to trance dancing, accompanied by intense concentration.
29. The first clay tablets were found in a cave in Knossos, Crete, in 1400 b.c.e. Note that this is not mainland Greece; the effects on language may have taken longer to diffuse.
31. But however preposterous they might seem, Jaynes’ notions about hearing the voices of gods have some intriguing parallels, for example among the Pirahã. See also Tuzin 1984.
32. There is quite a literature on hearing voices in one’s mind, both schizophrenic and spiritual. See for example Luhrmann 2012. The framework to be developed in chapter 17 would say that if level four thinking is rudimentary and someone is not used to examining solutions that appear in their conscious display, unconscious processing will still propose solutions, but the person will have difficulty representing the process in conscious awareness. Instead, because the solution seems to pop into their minds mysteriously, they attribute this inner voice to gods or spirits (as do many literate modern people).
33. These dates for Gautama’s life are recent revisions. Dates for written language in the area of Buddha’s birth (in what is now Nepal) are unknown, but the existence of written language in the nearby Indus Valley has been argued by Rao, Yadav, Vahia, Joglekar, Adhikari, and Mahadevan 2009.
34. The mystical tradition within Islam, dominant from about 800 to 1200 c.e. but very much alive today.
36. Giddens 1991, 16. See also Giddens 2003.
39. Giddens has much more to say than I have allowed here. In particular, he discusses two aspects of modern society that also threaten ontological security. First, whereas time and space were once joined together in immediate experience, in modern society they have become separated conceptually as abstract axes that exist independently of each other. What is happening right now, as immediate, locally situated experience, therefore plays a diminished role in consciousness relative to thoughts about the past and future and about events that might be happening outside of the present moment. Second, actual social relations (interaction between two or more people) become “disembedded,” “lifted out” from local contexts (18). Rather than interacting with people we know in settings that are familiar, we spend much of our time negotiating roles with people we barely know in situations in which we are not fully comfortable. Rather than the relaxation of a friendly conversation, negotiated interaction imposes a certain amount of stress on the people doing it. We need to keep the complex and sophisticated Theory of Mind we have been constructing since childhood in continuous operation. As Giddens notes, “The consequence of modernity for the individual is an increased cognitive workload and considerable existential anxiety.”
40. For a review of the tolerance for ambiguity literature, see Furnham 1995.
41. See for example Gilbert 2006.
43. My favorite way of identifying and classifying worldviews was developed by the anthropologist Mary Douglas and extended by the political scientist Aaron Wildavsky. Their starting point is the way a culture (or subculture) thinks people should relate to one another in order for the society to function effectively and harmoniously. Douglas found that cultures around the world could be classified according to which of four models for interpersonal relationships they advocated. In subsequent collaboration with Wildavsky, the models were adapted to subcultures within a society (Douglas and Wildavsky 1983). My slightly tweaked version looks like this: Hierarchical authority: people should be ranked (leaders over followers, men over women, parents over children, and, if extended to the supernatural realm, God over a priestly hierarchy over all others). Directives should pass down through these hierarchies. Individual competition: each person should act according to his or her own interests; the competitive systems that result will produce the best outcomes for that society. Egalitarian cooperation: people should take account of and respect the needs of others, and work together (each according to his or her own abilities) to ensure a good life for all. Isolation and apathy: people will try to take advantage of me and cannot be trusted, and the world around me is out of my control, so there is no use hoping, much less trying. “Escaping into drugs or alcohol,” mentioned earlier, is one possible response here. For more recent work in the Douglas and Wildavsky tradition see Kahan 2012. These worldviews would be only interesting observations about the curious ways people living with ordinary consciousness can construct their social realities, except that they can also cause a lot of trouble in the world. Hierarchical authority is exemplified by Christian and Islamic fundamentalism, which have a long history of inciting religious wars. But even secular people can advocate obedience to leaders and rules as the best way to live. Individualism is exemplified by people who have been inspired by reading Ayn Rand, which in contemporary America brings sympathies for the Libertarian Party, faith in the invisible hand of (unrestricted) free markets, and minimal government. The troubles caused by an Individualist worldview depend on whether you take the perspective of the rich or of the poor. Egalitarianism appeals strongly to many people interested in Buddhism, but has a troubling history of its own: Marx inspired many with his egalitarian message, but the people who put communism into practice turned to hierarchical command as the way to achieve “equality.” Efforts to achieve equality as hunter-gatherers typically have done, through consensus and cooperation, have only succeeded in small communities, which leaves a large gap if the Egalitarian worldview is to apply. Apathetic Isolates, sometimes called Fatalists, are a response to existing society, not a model advocated for shaping society.
44. Giddens 1991, 206–207.
45. Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life 2008.
46. Based on the 2010 census estimate for population ages 45–64.
47. It is even more interesting than that, however, because although the evangelical category increased from 31.0 percent of the sample to 34.2 percent, all of this growth took place in nondenominational evangelical churches. This category more than tripled in size, from 1.5 percent of all respondents as children to 4.8 percent as adults. Almost all of the other evangelical churches lost members (Baptists, the largest, lost 4.1 percent). The nondenominational category includes most of the megachurches getting so much attention today. The category is quite diverse and its churches have many interesting features, but in the survey 58 percent were biblical literalists. Part of their growth, therefore, might be attributed to people wanting a faith-based foundation for social reality. But their emphasis on providing strong group support suggests that megachurches may have found the right recipe for replicating the way humans lived with their social realities for thousands of years: no questioning of the prevailing social view combined with cohesive group support.
48. National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine 2007.
49. These data come from the Pew Research Center report “How the Faithful Voted: 2012” (November 7, 2012). Unaffiliated and non-Christian Obama voters supplied 19 percent of all votes cast in the election, and black Protestant and Hispanic Catholic voters provided another 14 percent, for a total of 33 percent. White evangelicals made up 23 percent of total votes. Hispanic evangelicals, a group almost as large as Hispanic Catholics, were not included in the publication, but were reported elsewhere to have voted strongly for Obama.
50. Durrheim 1998; Furnham 1995.
52. Edelman, Crandall, Goodman, and Blanchar 2012.
53. See Lewandowsky, Oberauer, and Gignac 2013; Shermer 2011.
56. Cited in Krugman, “Grand Old Planet,”
New York Times, November 22, 2012.
57. Joe Hagan, “Blues Cruise,”
New York Magazine (December 23, 2012).
17. Modeling Consciousness, Awakened and Ordinary
1. Definitions of consciousness get very tricky. For a good overall discussion, see Searle 2011.
2. Science assumes that even mysterious phenomena like “awakening” can be explained at a material level, presumably in the body and probably mostly in the brain. B. Alan Wallace makes a carefully considered case for not ruling out nonmaterial explanations—see Wallace 2012. I make the working assumption that material explanations are all that are needed, to get on with the work of trying to construct such an explanation. If that approach ultimately fails, then other directions could be tried.
3. Recent developments in research on perception have featured the concept of “predictive coding.” See Seth 2013.
4. Thomas and Thomas 1928.
6. Where awareness is defined being able to take account of information, whether or not that information is part of the experience we call “consciousness.”
7. Paas and Sweller 2012.
8. Another example of a radically transformed underlying perspective has to do with mapping the planet Earth onto a two-dimensional Mercator projection rather than a three-dimensional globe.
10. See also Suddendorf 2013.
11. But see Kouider, Stahlhut, Gelskov, Barbosa, Dutat, Gardelle, Christophe, Dehaene, and Dehaene-Lambertz 2013.
12. For example, Bloom 2013.
13. This is the preferred term of the foremost researchers on inner speech: Hurlburt, Heavey, and Kelsey 2013.
14. Interview with Jack Kornfield in Shankman 2008, 116.
15. See also Shaila Catherine’s experience as analyzed in chapter 13.
16. This may not be true—further laboratory experiments will be necessary, and unfortunately they will probably have to be done on awakened subjects.
20. Damasio and Carvalho 2013.
21. For a similar theoretical system, see Seth 2013.
22. All of these examples were posited as immediate responses in face-to-face situations; it is not clear that fleeing requires fear, that fighting requires anger, that feeding requires craving, that sex requires lust, or that any of the other emotions related to these four (e.g., anxiety, hatred, food obsession, or pornophilia) exist in someone who has let go of the social self.
24. Fast thinking probably also describes animal cognition. For some interesting thoughts on thinking without language, see Terrace 1985.
25. A good research example found that in laboratory tasks that require mental rotation of images (conscious processing), recognition of the object took place first, as an unconscious process, followed by “double-checking” in the form of consciously rotating the object to its usual orientation (DeCaro and Reeves 2002). It also fits in well with the concept of “work space”; see Baars 2006.
26. See Brass and Haggard 2007.
27. The research by Raichle and his associates that identified “default areas” suggests that systems for wandering thinking may have become built into the human brain. See Raichle 2010, 44–49; Christoff, Gordon, Smallwood, Smith, and Schooler 2009; Mason, Norton, Van Horn, Wegner, Grafton, and Macrae 2007. Obviously, acquiring control over wandering thinking is a primary objective of meditation practices.
28. Of course, where and what constitutes a “satisfactory explanation” depends on the criteria used by the person.
30. Austin 2009; Austin 2006; Austin 1998.
31. See especially the work of Davidson and his colleagues (2007).
32. There seems to be some resistance on the part of neuroscientists to combining qualitative or subjective data with their sophisticated brain scan technologies, and that is a sad thing.
34. Buckner and Krienen 2013.
37. When I asked Austin about this, he suggested some possible mechanisms but left the question open.
38. For example, research has found that performance on the Raven Progressive Matrices test of cognitive ability improves with practice, and that with the proper training, both children and adults can “get smarter”—that is, improve their scores on the test. This was not just a matter of improving specific abilities—the tasks used for training were quite different from the tasks used on the tests. After careful analysis, the researchers concluded that what was being developed was improved ability to concentrate attention on the tasks, not expertise with the tasks themselves. But, one might ask, if improving one’s power of attention is the critical skill, then wouldn’t meditation also improve performance on the Raven? That is exactly what an experiment directed by cognitive psychologist Michael Posner discovered: subjects who went through a mere five-day training in meditation significantly improved their scores, relative to a randomly assigned control group. See Tang, Ma, Wang, Fan, Feng, Lu, Yu, Sui, Rothbart, Fan, and Posner 2007.