Sunday, October 16, 2011

James H. Austin

Little insights come as grace notes, usually when one is in solitude. Lighting up our ordinary lives, insights arrive more often after the meditative Path has incubated difficult questions for a long time and begun to ripen into open moments of no-thought clarity.
Meanwhile, regular daily life practice and meditative retreats have continued to hone a variety of subtle top-down and bottom-up skills, both attentive and intuitive. First, the mental landscape is quickened by small surges, then opened partially by the absorptions, and finally turned inside out by kensho’s seismic transformations. Only in that rare, deep selfless state does our generic process of intuition unveil its innate other-relational mode of operation. This underlying version of consciousness, shorn of Self-centered intrusions, finally sees into all things as THEY really are.

4 comments:

  1. "Selfless Insight: Zen and the Meditative Transformations of Consciousness" by James H. Austin

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  2. Little insights come as grace notes, usually when one is in solitude. Lighting up our ordinary lives, insights arrive more often after the meditative Path has incubated difficult questions for a long time and begun to ripen into open moments of no-thought clarity.

    Meanwhile, regular daily life practice and meditative retreats have continued to hone a variety of subtle top-down and bottom-up skills, both attentive and intuitive. First, the mental landscape is quickened by small surges, then opened partially by the absorptions, and finally turned inside out by kensho’s seismic transformations. Only in that rare, deep selfless state does our generic process of intuition unveil its innate other-relational mode of operation. This underlying version of consciousness, shorn of Self-centered intrusions, finally sees into all things as THEY really are.

    The meditative neurosciences are just beginning to study these Self/other issues. Some newer psychophysiological techniques detect subtle changes in waveforms during the early milliseconds of the brain’s responses (ERP, EEG, and MEG). Others reflect changes during the first seconds of the brain’s activity as indexed by the varying degrees of oxygenation of its local blood supply (fMRI) or metabolism (PET). The Zen Way looks far beyond the initial results of these first milliseconds, seconds, and early months. It asks, what influence will they have on the lifelong commitment to practice a living Zen?

    A few current theories, plausible today, address Self/other issues in ways that clarify how meditation can gradually transform one’s consciousness during the daily life practice of mindful attention and the rare moments of insightful illumination.

    Now the reader is invited to let go of all such intellectual concepts. Instead, let your footsteps lead you toward that more open awareness first awaiting you on the cushion and the mat. Remember, Zen isn’t what you think it is. It’s more about what is revealed when you let go of your thinking Self.

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  3. Why is the concept of other-referential processing so difficult to grasp, and to retain?

    It is difficult because Self-centered processing dominates our experience. In addition, only recently has a critical mass of information begun to clarify howcortical and subcortical processes combine in different brain regions to generate consciousness. Moreover, only recently have we appreciated all of the implications to Zen of the normal physiological mechanisms of attention. When sudden shifts into attention deactivate the networks of the Self, con- sciousness can become transformed toward an other-referential state.

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  4. http://www.scribd.com/doc/20275281/Selfless-Insight-Zen

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