The Correlates Light Up

My meditation teacher for the last decade, Daniel P. Brown, recently published a study about mapping complex mind states using electroencephalography (EEG). There are many of these meditation studies in recent years. What makes this one different? For one, it is designed in the context of a particular Indo-Tibetan path for awakening. The concept of awakening is not something easily understood by researchers who are not practitioners, and even by many mind-full practitioners who are limited by their path. So, 

Within this framework, ‘ultimate reality’ is essentially characterized by the constructs of ‘emptiness’, ‘non-duality’, ‘spaciousness’, and ‘vividness’; such that the intrinsic insubstantiality (emptiness) of all (internal and external) phenomena is part of a unified (non-dual), vast (spacious) field that  constitutes a brilliantly vibrant dynamically ever-changing (vivid) objective reality. Importantly, non-duality refers to the absence of separation between oneself and the rest of one’s world or subjective reality, and awakening refers to the absence of localization of individual consciousness so as to operate from an experiential mode of “being” the unbounded wholeness (of objective reality). Ergo, to practice essence meditation (Mahamudra and/or rDzogs-Chen) is to refine the mental capacities to their full clarity vis-à-vis emptiness, non-duality, spaciousness, and vividness, not in a uni-leveled intellectual sense, but from a direct experiential awareness that is completely free of ‘conditioned’ mechanisms and responses of self and other.

The breakdown of Essence-of-Mind states for this path and the study include:

1. State 1: timelessness (ocean & waves/freedom from conceptual elaboration). First, the practitioner refines one’s awareness so as to operate from a perspective of awareness beyond time and spatialization wherein phenomena of consciousness are experienced as an undulating timeless, ocean-like awareness within which events come and go like waves arising and passing in an ocean. Events are thus viewed from the vantage point of a changeless, vast awareness. Awareness of the field ‘opens up’. Once this high resolution perception is stable the practitioner recalibrates once again to coarse grain perception.
2. State 2: non-preference, non-duality, non-conceptualization (automatic emptiness to natural state/one taste). Second, the practitioner refines one’s relationship to the emptiness of all phenomena, wherein experience of the constructs of nondoing and non-conceptualization remain the central quality of the meditation. Any residual tendencies to “do” anything or to conceptualize about state or outcome are immediately expressed as ‘empty’ in such a way that neither doing anything nor conceptualizing can obscure the direct manifestation of awakened awareness. At this point, subject/object duality also disappears, and the realization of emptiness is spontaneous and automatic.
3. State 3: the view of luminosity and limitlessness (Lion's Gaze/non-meditation). Third, the aim is now to set up the optimal ‘view’ (termed Lion’s Gaze; or like a child viewing a temple taking in everything all at once and nothing in particular) for stabilized awakened awareness. In this state utilization of the entire, limitless visual field ensues so to envelop and transmute one’s awareness into the totality of the global field. This may be recognized via two pathways; (a) via focusing on the non-localization of the limitless infinity of the field, and (b) via identifying the lucidity or brightness of the field of awareness. Both pathways culminate in an appreciation of the ultimate luminosity and limitlessness of experience.
4. State 4: unified compassionate experience of oneness (stable awakened-awareness). At the stage of stabilized awakening, any residue of self-reference and localization dissipates, wherein the self-referential and localization of individual consciousness fully shifts to the limitlessness of lucid awakened awareness. This is considered a shift from ‘ordinary mind’ to ‘awakened mind’, within which this unbounded wholeness, unification, interconnection, and its expression as compassion pervades consciousness. The focus of the field spans out, from focusing primarily upon the visual field, towards all possible streams of perception, wherein phenomena are lively, vibrant, and indeterminate. Here, the practitioner works to stabilize the clarity (awakened) of awareness, to experience the shift from ordinary to awakened mind more frequently, for longer duration, and more immediately.

The findings are summarized as follows:

Within this shifted tonic brain meditative state (State 1 onwards), collectively, enhanced ACC [Anterior Cingulate Cortex] and parietal cortex current density vector magnitudes in concert with increased activation within the insula, suggest the onset of executive brain networks involved in saliency, conflict monitoring, emotion control and shifts in perspective-taking. We may infer that such neural activity contributed to the cultivation and sustainment of intricate internal states encompassing experiences of non-duality, and having no reference point (thus non-preference). Furthermore, decreases in cortical networks involved with self-referential processing, such as the PCC [Posterior Cingulate Cortex], support the down-regulation of self-orientation, while the continued attenuation of these regions with a simultaneous increase in executive network activity between meditative states provides initial evidence of a dissociability of these networks within an active, ongoing movement towards non-dual states. Such complex functioning is consistent with selfless (and thus effortless), yet active meditation in line with the construct of non-localized awakened awareness and its expression as “unified compassion”.

I find such work mildly compelling and appreciate the deep refinement of the practice, but it's not my main interest. I am more drawn to causation than correlation. Sure, it makes sense that the brain would be a conduit to spiritual practice and experience; however, Dr. Brown and his students do not believe the brain is the cause. And to me, that's where the fun comes in anyways. Yes, there is the direct experience! But then there is also the playground of intuition and intellection. What can we say about it, metaphysically, relationally, poetically and so forth? And most importantly, what virtues do we cultivate? How do we change and live from our Realizations? 

The de-mystifying of mystical experience through scientific endeavor is not the allure in my inquiry. I want the unified mystery to ensue so I can continue to not-know and discover beyond. And yet, it has its place for those that require such a doorway.

Byzantium Joy

Since Western civilization was founded on Judeo-Christian values and Greco-Roman law, we are fortunate that Constantine decided to shift the capital of his empire from Rome to Constantinople. At the time, Rome had become vulnerable to the barbarian tribes from the north. This move to an eastern capital allowed the Roman empire to last another thousand years. Constantinople was a fresh start, a city without a history, founded exclusively on the new religion. This is the place where Constantine would elevate Christianity from a persecuted sect to the official religion of the Roman Empire.

The Eastern part of the Roman Empire known as Byzantium mostly prospered, while the Western part of the empire eventually collapsed under the weight of the Germanic invasions. While this led to a Dark Age upon Europe, this was not the case with Byzantium. Unlike the Western Church, which struggled, but eventually thrived by engaging in worldly affairs, the Byzantine Church withdrew to more monastic and mystical affairs. This would eventually take root as the Orthodox tradition of the Christian faith.

As part of lent season, I am reading several Orthodox contemplative texts by Frederica Mathewes-Green, Kyriacos Markides, and Martin Laird. The appreciation you find with the Eastern Church is the deep and rich mystical tradition that allows for the experiential connection to God. Yet, we come to see God is beyond experience. I suppose if more westerners were aware of this historic thread, they would not necessarily seek out those other Eastern religious traditions. As Markides points out, “Christianity, a Catholic bishop in Maine once told me, has two lungs. One is Western, meaning rational and philosophical, and the other Eastern, meaning mystical and otherworldly.”

While the Church of Rome's focus on the rational and philosophical had its place, it was the Byzantium tradition that gave the Church its center. This lineage began with the Desert Fathers and Mothers who sought out loving communion with the silent depths of God. It was by centering in these depths, that a soul strength in the early Christians began to endure. Mathewes-Green notes, “How come Christians who lived in times of bloody persecution were so heroic, while we who live in safety are fretful and pudgy? How could the earlier saints “pray constantly,” while our minds dawdle over trivialities? How could they fast so valiantly, and we feel deprived if there's no cookie at the end of the in-flight meal? How could the martyrs forgive their torturers, but my friend's success makes me pouty? What did previous generations of Christians know that we don't?”

One such early practice from the Desert Father Evagrius of Pontus instructs the following: “Let him keep careful watch over his thoughts. Let him observe their intensity their periods of decline and follow them as they rise and fall.” As we go deeper into the cave of the heart, we can inquire: Are we these thoughts? Where do thoughts appear from? What is the nature of these thoughts, and who is aware of them?

Laird says,

“Precisely because our deepest identity grounding the personality is hidden with Christ in God and beyond the grasp of comprehension, the experience of this ground-identity that is one with God will register in our perception, if indeed it does register, as an experience of no particular thing, a great, flowing abyss, a depthless depth. To those who know only the discursive mind, this may seem a death-dealing terror or spinning vertigo. But for those whose thinking mind has expanded into heart-mind, it is an encounter brimming over with the flow of vast, open emptiness that is the ground of all. This "no thing," this "emptiness" is not an absence but a superabundance.”

While we can't escape metaphysics and discursive thinking, such reasoning can be in service of the whole. As Theophan noted in regards to thoughts about God only make God appear outside you, it is the Byzantium practices of the Eastern Church that allowed for the Kingdom of God to be within you.

“In an age when people claim to be "spiritual, not religious"—not really knowing what they mean by either—lack of proper motivation is common. We must long for truth, freedom, loving communion with the silent depths of God. (Laird)”

A Taste of Thomism

The rationalist is always downstream of the poet. Right brain can contain left brain, but not vise versa. That's why we can't logically prove the existence of God, and tie it up in a neat little bow like the theory of relativity. Proof will always be probabilistic, not demonstrative.

St. Thomas Aquinas understood this. Although he said proofs can be demonstrative for believers, because they already took the leap of faith. This is the whole point. God requires each of us to work for it: to find our own path towards salvation and liberation, to make belief and faith our own, and to discover Truth in our minds and hearts. We would never value anything that was easily provable anyway.

I spent the last couple weeks taking an abridged class on the St. Thomas and the Philosophy of God. I've always felt I've leapfrogged over some essential philosophy by taking on the modernists and postmodernists first. I realize now many of the errors from modern philosophy resulted in its disdain for tradition. 

Much of modern philosophy assigns greater reality to the parts of an organized whole than to the whole itself, while the postmodernism maintains that the only the parts have reality and that the wholes they constitute are illusory. Aquinas started with metaphysics as the study of being knowing that Truth could be found in a natural reason that was in service to what was above reason. Reason and logic can only prove tautologies; so we start with existence to prove what exists antecedent to it. Simple (or maybe not).

One of the most fundamental distinctions in traditional philosophy is that between act and potency. This is just a more fancy way to make the distinction between permanence and change, or necessity and contingency. But for something to change sans chaos, there must be something that stays the same. As such, the ultimate cause of all change does not change. And that is ultimate act, or God.

Since the ultimate act is perfect (not lacking excellence), God is perfect in intelligibility, love, beauty, truth, goodness, and so on. The big insight that went along with this is that potency is always correlative with the act, so God being the ultimate act of intelligibility gives man faith in reason to discover creation.

Not everyone prefers this version of God. For one, it comes off as God is outside the whole order of creation, and man is ordered to Him, and not conversely. Therefore, there is no dynamic relationship between God and the world. This is sometimes viewed as a sort of deism, where God creates all at once and then does not engage in creation. This isn't exactly the nuance Aquinas was pointing towards. He says, “It ought to be said that the gifts of grace are added to nature in such a way that they do not take away nature but perfect it; whence the light of faith, which is instilled in us by grace, does not destroy the light of natural reason, instilled in us by God.” Grace (or the Holy Spirit) is the mediator between God and man, but in the vertical over the horizontal.

In regards to the spiritual modernists who want to immanentize and depersonalize God (via process theology or evolutionary panentheism), Chesterton makes a clever quip in his book about St. Thomas: “By their superficial theory everything can change; everything can improve, even the nature of improvement. But in their submerged common sense, they do not really think that an ideal of kindness could change to an ideal of cruelty. It is typical of them that they will sometimes rather timidly use the word Purpose; but blush at the very mention of the word Person.” 

He then later concludes, “the essence of the Thomist common sense is that two agencies are at work, reality and the recognition of reality; and their meeting is a sort of marriage. Indeed it is very truly a marriage, because it is fruitful; the only philosophy now in the world that really is fruitful. It produces practical results, precisely because it is the combination of an adventurous mind and a strange fact.”

Very strange indeed.