I just got my iPhone 4 today. The reviews are unanimous: iPhone 4 rocks (but not without some issues)! So I won’t bother reviewing it. I’m just excited with the upgraded camera, video, FaceTime, IOS 4 and its awesome elegant design. It really is a work of art.

We just got back from our trip to L.A. I spent my first Father’s Day in Hollywood.

The Apple iPad is a winner! My only gripe with it is that it doesn’t have a webcam, camera, USB and SD card slot. Maybe in the second generation… But in general, I agree with this review. It’s, indeed, one brainstem-level pleasure after another.

love this show

In this post I’ve transcribed Shinzen’s uber-geeky vision of a future when science and meditation will date and mate and give birth to a new kind of something — a new kind of knowing and learning. Keep in mind that the Science of Enlightenment series was recorded more than ten years ago, yet Shinzen’s vision, due to the advancement of neuroscience, is more feasible now than it was before.

Those who are familiar with Ken Wilber’s AQAL meta-theory would be in familiar territory. But I find Shinzen’s lucid articulation of his vision more appealing to the geek and meditator in me. I hope that my newborn son would get to see this frakkin‘ vision come true someday.

Session 24: Track 4 – A New Model for Enlightenment

Now let’s talk about the most significant thing, which is: We’ve talked about what science could contribute to meditation; we’ve talked about what meditation could contribute to science; What can come out of both of these things? What can they come up with together? What can the scientist and the meditator, if they are indeed different people, come up with together? Or what can a single person who is both a deep meditator and a scientist come up with bringing these two worlds together? Seems to me that it lies in basically two areas.

The first is very practical. As our brain-imaging technology advances. And as our knowledge of psycho-physiology, perceptual psychology, neuroscience, etc. advances, at some point it would be feasible to really look at the physiological concomitance, number one of high concentration, and number two of enlightenment itself. Now of course in the early part of this series I mentioned that we know some very gross and general things about the physiology of meditators in terms of their alpha wave, their electrical skin conductivity, these kinds of stuff. But this is general. It’s not specific at all because at this point we can’t really look at a real-time functioning brain.

The deep and subtle changes that must take place physiologically when a person goes into high states of concentration and when a person goes beyond concentration to enlightenment, those we cannot yet view objectively, but someday we’ll be able to. When we can we can talk about creating an entirely new model for enlightenment, one completely different from anything that anybody ever came up with including the Buddha. The Buddha could still only describe, brilliantly, subjective experience. The Buddha was not in a position to say something like, “when the rate of processing of the hypothalamus falls beyond a critical ratio to the rate of processing of the amygdala then the fixated self dissolves.” I’m not saying that that’s true, ok. What something that links function, structure, on one hand, to mystical experience on the other hand, no human being at this point in history has been able to make a statement along those lines. Someday we will be able to. That will represent a tremendous contribution that science will have made to the meditative path. Because if we have really precise description of the relationship between physiological changes and mystical experience, then we can start to talk about using biofeedback to facilitate the process of meditation.

Now, I’m quite aware that biofeedback is a technology that we now have, but I would suggest to you that the biofeedback that we now have is almost useless in terms of enlightenment. It may help people relax, and get a little more in contact with themselves, and it has good effects for sure. However, the kind of thing that I have in mind would require and exceedingly precise kind of biofeedback where we knew exactly what kind we were dealing with, we knew the necessary and sufficient physiological correlates of enlightenment itself, and then we could use biofeedback to train those correlates more efficiently. Now, having said that much, please do not think that I am so naive as to think that that in it of itself is going to bring a person into enlightenment. However, I would strongly suspect that it could cut the time required to a tenth. There’ll be all sorts of other ancillary trainings and learnings and life experiences that would have to go around that. You’re not just gonna hook somebody up to a machine and just because their physiology emulates enlightenment think that they’re gonna get enlightened. But boy, it could sure make my job a lot easier, if we could do stuff like this. And that’s what I’m looking towards from practical point of view. Why?

Well, this planet is going to hell in a hand basket. We may not last long enough to discover all these neat things. And when the patient is mortally ill you start considering heroic treatments. What I’m describing is, I realize pretty radical, may seem pretty radical, but meditation addresses, as I have endeavored to point out, the fundamental problem on this planet, the fundamental cycle. It addresses it directly. And it is able to crack the fundamental cycle — the cycle that underlies all of the specific problems. It is able to crack that. Great, but, it’s an elitist thing at this point. Only a small number of people participate in the meditation endeavor. Not elitist because meditators don’t want to spread it. Meditators do their best to spread it. But it’s too hard, it takes too much time, people aren’t interested, it doesn’t seem relevant. If we had a way of bringing deep experiences more easily, then we could reach a significant portion of the population, and we could start to make a change on this planet.

I have an acquaintance who is a brain wave scientist who also speaks Tibetan and is a many decades meditator, and he knows the Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama told him a personal conversation, “You’re a scientist, you work with brain waves. I wish you would create a device that would make it easier for people to meditate. A scientific device of some sort.” No less than an authority than the Dalai Lama, who if anyone on this planet speaks for world Buddhists, is thinking along these lines too. This would be one important thing that could come about as a cooperative endeavor: Scientists using advanced tools — not what we’ve got now but what we may have someday — to really understand what goes on with the neurophysiology of a person as they go through the different stages on this path.

Session 24: Track 5 – New Pespectives On the One Reality

The other area where science and meditation come together is, it may turn out that they’re both investigating the same reality from different angles. The parallels are rather striking. One can’t help think that it’s not just a coincidence, it’s not just projection. But when we see parallel after parallel in the deep areas of modern science and in the things that meditators and mystics report, we have to at least take seriously the conjecture that this might not be a coincidence, and that what we might be talking about here is finding a paradigm that is broad enough to include both science and spirituality as a single new discipline, that is neither science nor spirituality but the next human paradigm. Once again the Dalai Lama has called for something like this, something very much along these lines.

Spiritual teachers in general, and meditation teachers specifically, like to use parables or metaphors to describe aspects of the path. And for me personally, my best metaphors, the ones that speak to me most directly, are all derived from science. The issue is: Are these just useful metaphors, or is there a little bit more to it than that? Is the fact that there seems to be so much parallelism, an indication of an underlying common reality that both the scientist and the meditator are viewing, one from the subjective world of studying consciousness (which is the meditator’s world), and the other from the objective world of looking at time, space, matter and energy. If it is the case that the experts in the subjective world and the experts in the objective world are agreeing because they’re seeing the same thing then this gives us some very important information about the nature of reality. In the sciences one always works for greater and greater generality. Generality doesn’t mean vagueness in science as it does in colloquial English. Generality means universality. So they speak of GUT — The Grand Unified Theory. And they even speak of TOE — The Theory of Everything.

Certainly, any theory of everything would have to include mystical experience because that is a major part of human experience around this planet and in all ages. If nothing else, for sure, the sciences provide wonderful metaphors for situations and experiences that come up in meditation. But as I say, there’s so many of them and the parallelism is so consistent that it may mean something, and certainly this is something that will be interesting to see as it develops in the future.

Hello World! My name is Francis Raven. I was born on March 10, 2010 @ 5:41pm weighing 6.1lbs via normal delivery. I got my Mom’s ravishing looks and my Dad’s long legs and sexy butt. I’m looking forward to having lots of fun and making this world a better place. See you around!

Big thanks to Chade Meng (aka the Buddha in the Googleplex) for making this happen. I hope that someday Shinzen’s approach and style of teaching meditation be taught in universities as part of the humanities, health, and science departments.

Thanks, Shinzen! Today, Google Talks. Tomorrow, TED Talks… moment by moment, just this…

Take your time, son. Keep on dreaming of ten million fireflies. Your mom and I are just right here waiting and dreaming with you.

Last night I tweeted this question to all my geeky Buddhist cyber friends.

“to all geeky Buddhists out there, here’s a question: What did the Buddha awaken to?”

I’ve received a lot of interesting answers on Twitter and Facebook.

Tweet responses:

jimcollins: Venus

erisb: The realization of his own mind.

SamTheButcher: Things as they are instead of how we want them to be.

majidrazvi: I’m not sure that question is truly answerable from this side of the dream.

thedazman: I think he basically decompiled reality.

nivarasa: To the nature of suffering, and to the path which leads to its cessation.

hovila: This

MonstrousVermin: The four noble truths.

crazywisdom: imho he awoke to the truth about our existence which is fundamentally one of suffering: the diagnosis,cause,prognosis & treatment

necroichthus: One answer I like is the “lack of truth” a-la: http://bit.ly/90fimp

VincentHorn: Can’t say.

ZenDirtZenDust: A Hangover

dkcarey: ME a cup of coffee?

hokaisobol: A useful answer must be 2fold. Conventionally speaking, to dependent origination. Ultimately, awakening has no distinct object.> >jointly thus, one is directly awake to suchness, allowing recognition of dependent origination everywhere, in many ways.

fivedirections: no self… no separation…the emptiness that’s fully of everything.

will_simpson: 4NobleTruths

jimparedes: MU!

Replies on Facebook:

Eric Calhoun: identity

Gary Sanders: Freedom from clinging….freedom from suffering.

Adam Richards: The 4 noble truths & his own nature

Mila Jake Stetser: being.

Ryan Oelke: this discussion wouldn’t be fun without paradox, so let’s reword the question – What did the Buddha awaken from? in, out, in, out.

Tara Bisgaard: the reality of now

Mike Redmer: to what he couldn’t not be.

Eileen Workman: what is.

Joel Morrison: the integration of the relative and absolute

Aley Crooker Martin: Now, being. Both sounds right.

Scott Zimmerle: mu

As you can see, the responses range from the ineffable (“Mu”), to reality, to “a hangover.” At first glance the answer to the question should be very straightforward. The Buddha, after all, is the icon of awakening. So how come geeky Buddhists have different concepts and assumptions with regards to the question?

Frankly, I don’t know the answer. I would’ve probably answered, “self as no thing,” or as a corollary to that, the Buddha awoke from “separation.”

So what is the “right” answer to the question, “What did the Buddha awoke to?”

I would refer to Stephen Batchelor for the “right” answer to this question. According to Stephen the Buddha awoke to the Four Noble Truths. He has an excellent discourse on this. Listen to the audio below from Upaya Dharma Podcast.

Godless Religion or Devout Atheism? Part 8 of 14 – Session 4

Stephen looks at the Buddha’s central metaphor of “awakening.” According to early Pali texts, the Buddha awoke to the Four Noble Truths. Often, we are taught that the Buddha awoke to original nature, or the Truth. The Four Noble Truths are alive, and they challenge our lives to act appropriately at every moment. In this seminar, Stephen also discusses the meaning of “dukkha,” and that the Buddha urges everyone to fully know it, to go directly into the darkness, where we may ultimately know a deep beauty.

So a few of my geeky Buddhist cyber friends nailed the answer to the question. Nice. Very geeky.

I highly recommend listening to the entire Godless Religion or Devout Atheism series for more context on Stephen’s discourse. I think mainstream Western Buddhists could learn a lot from Stephen’s careful reading and radical interpretation of the original Buddhist texts. In addition, Martine Batchelor (Stephen’s wife) presented a very heart-warming and insightful dharma talks in the series, with emphasis on lovingkindness and compassion.

Readers who are not familiar with Stephen Batchelor might ask why I consider his interpretation to be the “right” answer. First of, I don’t know if there’s even a “right” answer to the question. But given Stephen’s background — long-time practitioner of different Buddhist traditions, scholar, translator of dharma texts — I think he deeply knows what he’s talking about. To me, Stephen’s interpretation is the most probable and logical answer since he carefully quoted, analyzed, and cross-checked the sources from the earliest Buddhist texts.

Finally, Stephen’s interpretation of the recursive and fractal nature of the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path appeals to my intellect and my intuition. For Stephen, the Four Noble Truths lead to the Eightfold Path, and the Eightfold Path leads to the Four Noble Truths — hence its recursive and fractal nature.

In short, the Buddha awoke to a process, not to a static metaphysical transcendent ultimate absolute nature of reality. Nirvana is not some ultimate state or stage. Nirvana is a verb. Nirvana is a continuous process. I like that.

Here’s to all our awakening to the Four Noble Truths.

it is official
hello, Mr. President
please be more ballsy

i think i’m ready
my geeky teacher appeared
with kick ass dharma

sitting, lying down,
surfing on impermanence
this Open Practice

migraine headaches suck
i’ve found a temporal cure
mindfulness it is

joined Toastmasters club
delivered an ice breaker
voted best speaker

riding a hybrid
like flying in a blue dream
Optimus Prius

our little buddha
Francis Raven is his name
free as a black bird

Shinzen once said that, “When the teacher is ready, the students appear.” I guess Shinzen is ready for me. For those who are wondering why I picked Shinzen as my main dharma teacher, here’s a welcoming video wherein he summarized the reasons.

Another reason is that I like his geeky approach to the dharma and his unique interactive meditation style. But most importantly, he’s a no non-sense teacher who’s not afraid to talk about enlightenment and his first-hand experience as a “liberated” person (Shinzen never calls himself liberated or enlightened, but I believe him to be, otherwise I won’t pick him as a dharma teacher. but that’s just me.).

Finally, on top of it all, his humility and honesty is disarming and he laughs like a geeky kid.

Most you of who are following this blog, my (hyper)stream, and tweets are probably sick of me pimping out Shinzen. But what can I say? I find tremendous value in his teaching so I’m just paying it forward. I hope you find value in them as well. And if you do find value in them, please pay it forward. It’s good karma

May you be safe, be healthy, live with ease… and may Happiness be.

P.S. As of this writing more videos of Shinzen Young are being added to his YouTube channel (big thanks to HPK for recording and uploading these videos). There’s also another YouTube channel with Shinzen’s up-close interviews conducted by Stephanie Nash. Collectively, these videos contain all the up-to-date version of Shinzen’s teachings condensed from his four decades of experience. As an example, here’s the technical foundation of Shinzen’s contemporary reworking of the Buddha’s five aggregates – see The Human Sensory (TSSFIT) System.

I’m glad that Shinzen is doing this “brain dump” online so that many more people will benefit from his style of teaching (which in my opinion is the best that I’ve encountered out there). The best part is that, from what I know, whatever Shinzen talks about in those videos are the same things he teaches in his home-based retreats. This means that Shinzen is making his teachings available as “open source”. You don’t have to pay him anyting to get the gist of his teachings. You don’t have to buy any of his books (though I highly recommend The Science of Enlightenment). You don’t have to pay him squat to benefit from his teachings. You can basically just watch all the available videos and implement it in your daily practice. That’s essentially what I’ve done. I have never met Shinzen in person. I have never attended (yet) any of his residential retreats. Yet, I feel that he’s provided me with all the information I need through his free videos. If that is not Open Source Enlightenment, then I don’t know what Open Source Enlightenment is.

Thank you, Shinzen for your teaching, generosity, humility, and openness. May you live long and kick more ass.