“Do not pursue the past. Do not usher in the future. Rest evenly with present awareness”
( Tibetan meditation instruction )
"Scène
de genres" by Jacynthe Carrier | "Born in Lévis (Québec) Carrier lives
and work in Quebec and Montreal. Through photography and video, her work
is an exploration of mise en scène and performance in modern-day
territory..." | Issue Nine, "The Contemplative Life": Gallery
It was 1972, and
Gary Weber,
a 29-year old materials science PhD student at Penn State University,
had a problem with his brain. It kept generating thoughts! –
continuously, oppressively – a stream of neurotic concerns about his
life, his studies, whatever. While most human beings would consider this
par for the course, par for the human condition (cogito ergo sum),
Weber wouldn’t accept it. He was a scientist, a systematizer, a process
guy. He liked to figure out how things worked, and how they could be
tweaked to work more efficiently. And at that moment his brain wasn’t
very efficient. It expended a lot of energy going over and over the same
anxieties and cravings and storylines. “Most of these thoughts had no
purpose,” he said. “They were not going to cure cancer.”
It so happened that shortly after he recognized the problem, in one
of those little life coincidences that some people like to call
“synchronicities,” Weber picked up a slim volume of poetry on his way
out of the library. He sat down on the green grass in front of the
University admin building, unpacked his lunch and idly opened the book.
He read:
“All beings are from the very beginning Buddhas.”
This is the first line of a famous Zen poem – Song of Zazen – written in the 18th century
by the Japanese Buddhist teacher Hakuin Ekaku. Weber knew nothing of
Zen. Still, within seconds of reading Ekaku’s words, according to Weber,
“the entire world just opened up. I mean it literally opened up. For
what must have been thirty or forty minutes, I dropped into this
magnificent expansiveness – a vast empty space without any thoughts
whatsoever.”
Weber had had what in Zen is called a “
kensho”
– an awakening, a glimpse into the unconditioned, a mystical phenomenon
described in different ways by countless texts and countless teachers
in countless traditions. It was a profound experience, but like so many
such experiences, it didn’t last. Weber’s thoughts returned – as
insistent and clamorous as ever. But now Weber knew another way was
possible. He was determined.
For the next 25 years, as Weber finished his PhD, married and raised
two kids and made his way through a string of industry jobs - eventually
culminating in a senior management position running the R&D
operations of big manufacturing business - he got spiritual. He read
lots of books, he meditated with Zen teachers, mastered complicated yoga
postures, and practiced what is known in Vedic philosophy as “
self-enquiry”
– a way of directing attention backwards into the center of the mind.
To make time for all this, Weber would get up at 4am and put in two
hours of spiritual practice before work.
Although he says he never had the sense he was making progress, Weber
kept at it anyway. Then, on a morning like any other, something
happened. He got into a yoga pose – a pose he had done thousands of
times before – and when he moved out of it his thoughts stopped.
Permanently.
“That was fourteen years ago,” says Weber. “I entered
into a state of complete inner stillness. Except for a few stray
thoughts first thing in the morning, and a few more when my blood sugar
gets low, my mind is quiet. The old thought-track has never come back.”
Now of course, the fact that Weber is telling this story at all would
seem to contradict this rather dramatic claim. Conventional wisdom
tells us that talk is the verbal expression of thinking; separating the
two makes no sense. And yet, this is the experience Weber reports. And
at the time he didn’t care if it was theoretically impossible. What he
cared about was that in an hour he needed to go to work, where he was
supposed to run four research labs and manage a thousand employees and a
quarter of a billion dollar budget, and he had no thoughts. How
was that going to work?
“There was no problem at all,” Weber says, which he admits may say
more about corporate management than about him. “No one noticed. I’d go
into a meeting with nothing prepared, no list of points in my head. I’d
just sit there and wait to see what came up. And what came up when I
opened my mouth were solutions to problems smarter and more elegant than
any I could have developed on my own.”
Over time, Weber figured out that it wasn’t that all his thoughts had
disappeared; rather a particular kind of self-referential thinking had
cut out, what he calls “the blah blah network.” Scientists now refer to
this as the “
default mode network”
(DMN), that is, the endlessly ruminative story of me: the obsessive
list-maker, the anxious scenario planner, the distracted daydreamer.
This is the part of the thinking process we default to when not engaged
in a specific task.
“What’s fascinating to me,” Weber says, “is I can still
reason and problem solve, I just don’t have this ongoing
emotionally-charged self-referential narrative gobbling up bandwidth.”
But the real surprise for Weber is what disappeared along with the
“me” narrative: any sense of being a separate self, and with it all
mental and emotional suffering. He has a theory about this: “If you
look at the self-referential narrative it’s all ‘I, me, mine.’ When that
cuts out, the ‘I’ goes with it. Now, for me, it’s very quiet and
peaceful inside – there’s no sense of wanting things to be other than
they are, and no ‘I’ to grab hold of ‘I want, I desire, I lust.’”
Although his case is extreme, Weber’s experience is in line with
research showing that more DMN activation correlates with more
unhappiness – ‘
A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind’, as the title of one well-known paper puts it.
Weber has even found the changes have carried over into his emotional life:
“I still get angry, but it’s different now. If someone
cuts me off in traffic, I feel the energy come up, but it doesn’t go
anyplace. There’s no chasing somebody down the highway. The anger
dissipates immediately – it doesn’t carry forward. You don’t lose the
typical neural responses – thank goodness – what you lose is the desire
leading up to them, and, once the response passes, you don’t make up a
story about what happened that you repeat again and again in your head.
Those storylines are gone.”
Like other scientists before him who’ve experienced similar transformations - the neuroscientist
James Austin, the neuroanatomist
Jill Bolte Taylor,
to name two examples – Weber got interested in what was going on his
brain. He connected with a neuroscientist at Yale University named
Judson Brewer who was studying how the DMN changes in response to meditation.
He found,
as expected, that experienced meditators had lower DMN activation when
meditating. But when Brewer put Weber in the scanner he found the
opposite pattern: Weber’s baseline was already a relatively deactivated
DMN. Trying to meditate – making any kind of deliberate effort –
actually disrupted his peace. In other words, Weber’s normal state was a
kind of meditative letting go, something Brewer had only seen a few
times previously, and other researchers had until then only reported
anecdotally.
And here we come to a subtle but important difference of opinion
between Weber and Brewer. For Weber, true letting go means arriving at a
state of “no-thought” where the mind is permanently stilled of any kind
of “bandwidth-gobbling” inner monologue. Creative thoughts, planning
thoughts – these are fine, and are, according to Weber, in fact served
by completely
different parts of the brain.
The real suffering happens in the endless and exhausting internal
monologue. Thus, he argues, working to extinguish these kinds of
thoughts should be the explicit goal of practice, something he says
other contemplative traditions
also emphasize.
By contrast, further
study has
suggested to Brewer that the thoughts themselves – even a certain
amount of the self-referential kind – may not actually be the
problem; the real problem is our human tendency to fixate and grip and
get “caught up” in these thoughts. Some of his subjects attained
dramatic reductions in DMN activity while still thinking in a
self-referential way. They just weren’t attached to their ruminations.
One subject described watching his thoughts “flow by.” As Buddhists have
long argued, you don’t need to eliminate the self-thinking process, you
just need to change your relationship to it.
Whatever the exact case, both men agree that a reduction of activity
in the DMN is central to the elimination of suffering. That it is being
discussed at all marks an important advance in the scientific study of
meditation in particular and spiritual practice in general. The
Mind and Life conferences,
the big NIH grants, the explosion of studies on mindfulness – all have
generated enormous insights. They’ve demonstrated how positive emotions
can be trained, and reactivity softened, and concentration increased,
and attentional clarity boosted. Many researchers have
shown
unequivocally that stress and suffering can be dramatically reduced by
meditation and by mindfulness in life. But they have not yet
shown why this is so.
Have Brewer and his colleagues finally found a clue to how the
reduction of suffering looks in the brain? Not the activation of a
specific region, but a more general deactivation, a neurological letting
go that parallels the experiential one? Brewer: “Even in novices we saw
a relative deactivation across the brain – like the brain was saying,
Oh thank God I can let go. I don’t have to do stuff, I don’t have to do
all this high energy maintenance of myself. One interpretation of that –
and there are many others – is that the brain knows what it needs to
do. It’s a very efficient machine; we just have to stop getting in the
way.”
This kind of neurobiological perspective is a movement towards what
Brewer calls “evidence-based faith,” where science may be able to help
teachers and practitioners fine-tune the approaches they take to
practice. Contemplatives may recoil at the idea, but for Brewer,
addressing suffering is the priority, a project science can help with.
As proof-of-concept, Brewer has just published two studies [
here and
here]
that show how meditators can watch live feedback from their brains
inside the fMRI and use it to decrease their DMN activation in
real-time. And he’s just received an NIH grant to study how this could
work for non-meditators – more quickly, and hopefully, one day, more
affordably. “The aim is to see if neurofeedback can give regular folks
feedback on subtle aspects of their experience …stuff they wouldn’t
notice otherwise,” he says.
Weber agrees, “Right now we can get folks off the street and within
one or two runs in the Yale fMRI they can produce this deactivated
state. The more glimpses the brain gets, the more time it spends there,
the more it can stay there. It’s like riding a bike. With this
technology you may not have to spend twenty-five years practicing like I
did. It’s much more efficient.”
Like the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths with a psychotherapeutic twist,
Weber has it down to a terse progression: “I had suffering, it came from
my attachments. My attachments cause me to slip over into the narrator.
If I stop that, I lose my suffering. We have the tools to do this. They
require no scriptural texts or philosophy. All it takes is persistence
and curiosity. The old ego-motivated human existence, our 75,000
year-old operating system with its need to gratify our desires and
exploit the environment and have six of this and ten of that – that can
all fall away. It’s time for an upgrade.”
