Maybe his guttural voice was a result of severe tonsillitis he had as a child. Or maybe Chester Burnett's travails had somehow come out in his voice. He was born a hundred years ago, black and destitute, in Clay County, Miss. He was so poor, he once tied burlap sacks around his bare feet, and so hungry he once ate food scraps tossed off a train by railroad workers. While he was a young man sharecropping in Mississippi, Wolf apprenticed with Delta blues legend Charley Patton. As he said on a Chess Records album in , Wolf was deeply influenced by Patton's gritty singing and percussive playing.
Wolf started playing on weekends in country juke joints, then moved to Memphis, made a name for himself and finally settled in Chicago to become -- literally -- a giant of the blues. Williams played guitar alongside Hubert Sumlin in Wolf's band in So Hubert and rest of the band and I were onstage playing, and Wolf just howling and singing.
So he went out that door, down the sidewalk to the corner, he [was] just blowing his harmonica and howlin' and carryin' on. But that was the Wolf. Mark Hoffman, co-author of Moanin' at Midnight: The Life and Times of Howlin' Wolf , paints a similar picture of the wild-man performer. And people would watch him; they couldn't take their eyes off him. With his feral stage presence and growling vocals, Wolf fought his way to the top of the cutthroat Chicago blues scene during the s -- neck and neck with his rival, Muddy Waters.
In the '60s, young white rockers discovered his music and began to cover his classic renditions of "Little Red Rooster" and "Spoonful. They had one condition: Their idol, Howlin' Wolf, had to be there, too. Sure enough, he was. A hulking black eminence, he stood at the microphone in a dark suit, his huge head sweating as he stabbed the air with his finger, shaking his hips salaciously before a bevy of white go-go dancers.
It's surely one of the most incongruous moments in American pop music. Music journalist Peter Guralnick, who says he reveres Howlin' Wolf, goes even further. He calls it one of the greatest cultural moments of the 20th century. Likewise, the basic nature of the man can be obscured by afflictive mental states, but pure awareness can always be recognized beneath the screen of deluded thoughts. The nature of the mind is pure cognition or basic awareness.
It can be populated by all kinds of content, all of which are impermanent and changeable. The potential for change always exists. No one is intrinsically bad because mental constructs are impermanent. It may take time change the contents of the mind stream, and this process might be more or less difficult to achieve, but the potential of change always exists. Change does not occur easily and all at once. It is a matter of beginning a process that will bring gradual change, with patience and perseverance. Of course, for that to happen, there must be at least some eagerness on the part of the dysfunctional person.
To be deeply deluded is a mark of fundamental ignorance, extreme distortion of reality, and a lack of compassion and understanding of the law of cause and effect. To consider hate as acceptable or even promote it as a virtue is the archetype of mental delusion. Forgiveness is breaking the cycle of hate. It does not help to be caught in the same kind of hate that we want to punish.
All actions have short- or long-term consequences. If you forgive someone and forgo retaliation, the person will still face the consequences of her actions. From the Buddhist perspective, the self is nothing but a mental construct that we use to name our mind stream. If we are able to refer back to this pure mindfulness, then we have a way to deal with afflictive emotions. You train to become increasingly aware of the content of your mind so that you can rest in this awareness and continually recognize it without being carried away by your mental constructs and powerful emotions and without actively trying to suppress them [ let them go!
We need to experience this state of awareness and perceive awareness as being always present behind the screen of thoughts. We do have moments of peace, when we are spared for a while from the constant mental chatter that usually keeps our minds busy, when you sit quietly by the side of a mountain, for instance, or when you are exhausted after intense physical exercise.
For a while, you may experience a quiet state of mind with few concepts of inner conflicts. The experience might give you a glimpse of what clear awareness, unencumbered by thoughts, might be. To recognize the basic component of awareness might give you confidence that change can indeed take place. This intuition is at the origin of the fascinating question of mental causation, the question whether thoughts or insights that appear in consciousness can influence future neuronal processes.
This question is intimately related to theories of the nature of consciousness — a vast subject indeed, to which we should devote a separate discussion session chapter 6. The shorter the time for the measurement, the more energy is needed. An instantaneous measurement would therefore require infinite energy, which is impossible. So the dream of knowing all the initial conditions with a perfect precision is mere delusion.
Interdependence, a central Buddhist concept, refers to a coproduction in which impermanent phenomena condition one another mutually within an infinite network of dynamic causality, which can be innovative without being arbitrary and which transcends the two extremes of chance and determinism. It thus seems that free will can exist within such an unlimited network of causes and conditions that include consciousness. The brain is an established feature of complex systems with nonlinear dynamics, but it sounds counterintuitive to us because our cognitive systems generally assume linearity.
Assuming linearity is a well-adapted heuristics because most of the dynamic processes that we have to cope with in daily life can be approximated with linear models from which we can derive useful predictions for appropriate reactions. Once set in motion, its trajectory is nicely predictable. The same holds for a spear or a ball. However, if you take three pendulums and tie them together with rubber bands and set in motion, their swings soon become completely unpredictable because of the complexity of the interactions among the three pendulums and the flexing rubber bands.
When it comes to inner phenomena or mind events, the impossibility of knowing all conditions to make a prediction abut future mental states becomes even clearer. The moment you know the present moment, it is no longer present. According to the Buddhist view, our thoughts and actions are conditioned by our present state of ignorance and the habitual tendencies that we have accumulated in the past. But wisdom and knowledge can put an end to ignorance, and training can erode past tendencies. Freedom from conditioning [ from the personal Vicious Circle ] could be the essence of free will.
An enlightened being acts appropriately according to the cause and needs of everyone and is not influenced by past tendencies. It also seems that even before achieving the goal of enlightenment, when someone is able to remain for a moment in the limpid freshness of the present moment, a state of pure awareness on which rumination on the past and anticipation of the future haven no bearing, this should be a state conducive to the expression of free will.
Consciousness is fundamentally a fact of experience. In Buddhism consciousness is considered to be a primary fact. There are two main methods of approaching consciousness: We can also question someone in great detail on how he can describe what he feels. But truly, without subjective experience that we can apprehend introspectively, we could not even talk about consciousness.
The experience can never be truly and fully described from a third-person perspective. Buddhist scriptures tell the story of two blind men who wanted to understand what colors were. One of them was told that white was the color of snow. He took a handful snow and concluded that white was cold. The other blind man was told that white was the color of swans.
He heard a swan flying overhead and concluded that white went swish, swish. Therefore, to be coherent, we must fully pursue its investigation from that perspective, without constantly jumping from outside in and from inside out as we please. We must follow a consistent line of investigation until its ultimate point. I end up there when I refine and pursue further and further my investigation of subjective experience: This basic awareness does not necessarily need to have particular content, in terms of mental constructs, discursive thoughts, or emotions.
It is pure awareness. It allows me to recall past events, envision the future, and be aware of the present moment. If people conclude that a given condition evokes consistent experiences, they usually coin a term for the respective experience. Henceforth, this experience assumes the status of a social reality, of an immaterial object, of a concept on which different subjects can focus their shared attention.
Henceforth, this experience of CI assumes a status of a social reality, of an immaterial object, of a concept on which different subjects can focus their shared attention ]. If we take the first-person perspective as a source of insight into brain processes, we are aware of perceptions, decisions, thoughts, plans, intentions, and acts; we experience these as ours; and we can even be aware of being aware and communicate this fact.
Experienced meditators can apparently cultivate this meta-awareness to the point that they are aware of being aware without requiring any concrete content of that awareness. Humans are embedded in a dimension of social realities that they have created by interacting with one another, observing one another, and sharing their observations and subjective experiences. Through these communicative processes, humans exchange descriptions of their first-person experiences, establish consensus about the congruency of these experiences, and assure each other that these experiences are common to all human beings.
Because Buddhism refutes the ultimate reality of phenomena, it also refutes the idea that consciousness is independent and exists inherently, just as much as it refutes that matter is independent and exists inherently. The fundamental level of consciousness and the world of apparent phenomena are linked by interdependence, and together the form our perceived world, the one we experience in our lives. Dualism lacks the concept of interdependence and postulates a strict separation between mind and matter; Buddhism states that emptiness is form and form is emptiness.
In other words, Buddhism says that the distinction between the interior world of thought and the exterior physical reality is mere illusion. Buddhism does not adopt a purely idealistic point of view or argue that the outer world is a fabrication of consciousness. It just points to the fact that without consciousness, one cannot claim that the world exists because that statement already implies the presence of a consciousness. Consciousness is the ability to not only have an experience or a feeling, but also to be aware of that fact. Thus, attention is one of the mechanisms required to bring content into consciousness [ awareness ], suggesting that there is a threshold for contents to reach consciousness [ awareness ].
What could it be that it makes us aware of ourselves? Let us talk about the different levels of awareness [ sic! First, the most basic level is phenomenal awareness, to ability to be aware of something [ which we call awareness, i. Then there comes the ability to be aware that one is aware of being aware of something [ which we call meta-awareness, i.
Finally, there are the more self-related aspects of consciousness [ awareness! One is aware of being an individual who is autonomous, which capable of intentional acts, and separate from other individuals. I claim we are never autonomous, since we only exist through interconnectedness! This highest level of meta-cognition is [ in Buddhism ] called self-illumination awareness.
The expression conscious self could be easily be misunderstood as assuming the existing of an autonomous self at the core of ourselves [ at the core of ourselves their exist an Original Self and an Intrinsic Worth — expressions that describe the Creative Interchange process at that level — i.
The phenomenon that we address with the term consciousness would not exist without dialogue among human minds, without education, without the embedding in a rich sociocultural environment, and without the mutual attribution of mental constructs. These constructs are internalized and become implicit properties of our selves [ they become the so-called Mental Models ].
We experience them as part of our reality and invent terms to name and describe them. They are similar to values. These, too, are social constructs and are not found in the brain; all we can do is identify systems that assign value to certain brain states and couple them with emotions.
The same holds for all the characteristics that one associates with consciousness. We do not find consciousness in the brain, but we can try to identify structures that are necessary for consciousness to manifest itself. Observation of facts and Interpretation of those which leads to — the middle of the Model — Emotions ]. None of these would ever arise without the constant interaction with the environment and other sentient beings [ we call that particular interaction Creative Interchange ].
A good metaphor is a beam of light — it reveals what there is without being modified by it. Likewise, according to Buddhist contemplatives, pure awareness [ naked or non-colored consciousness in my personal language ] is neither obscured nor modified by the content of thoughts; it is unqualified and unaltered [ we see reality as it is, not as we are — pure awareness is non dual ].
The process of non-dual awareness can become effortless and uncontrived. Without repressing them, you can simply let them vanish as they arise. There is no point trying to stop perceiving the outer world, hearing the birds that are singing. You simply let [ i. In other words, there is no point in trying to prevent thoughts that are already coming in and you can certainly prevent them from invading your mind [ i.
The essence of meditation freeing the mind from randomly intruding contents, and then you fill it with selected contents that you call on through intention — for example, empathy or compassion — granting them a privileged space. It means that we become familiar with something and cultivating a skill in a methodic, no chaotic way.
This is not a semi-passive way of learning [ as sometimes meditation is seen ] but a fully engaged one in a coherent way. After a long period of time such a skill can become consummate and effortless. Meditation does not require forceful attention. So you are not effort fully attentive, but you are not distracted at the same time.
So one of the levels of consciousness is the content-free or empty state of awareness. Empty in the sense of being free from content, not empty in the sense of perfect clarity.
Howlin' Wolf: Booming Voice Of The Blues
It is a state of extreme awareness of its own clarity. This awareness is called in Buddhism nondual consciousness , because there is no separation between subject and object. Neuro scientists call this meta-awareness , the awareness of being aware of being aware or conscious. So, there is pure awareness, where there is no split between a subject that knows something and an object that is known [ i.
The most fundamental form of experience is called in Buddhism: So the scientific question becomes: Anyway, consciousness is a fact. Without it, our subjective world entirely disappears. So to us CI is at the center of the spiritual path ].
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From the Buddhist perspective consciousness actually influences neuronal processes, in order to transform itself. Please remember that, as the philosopher David Chambers remarked, all biological functions, including the articulation of language that allows communication between two organisms, as well as meta-representation, can be formulated without having to refer to subjective experience.
This finding shows that experience is not a particular moment in objective biological functions but something we are aware of prior to any study of these functions. This makes it difficult to establish a causal relation between neuronal processes and consciousness. If consciousness did not have the capacity to transforms itself, know itself, and work to deeply change its contents, then it would really be worthless. Buddhism starts from the other end of the spectrum: Then it investigates how thoughts, emotions, happiness, and suffering arise from this pure awareness.
It tries to understand the processes of wisdom and delusion that are related to recognizing or losing recognition of this pure awareness. This allows one to maintain the recognition that all mental events arise within awareness simply because of many causes and conditions, which do not belong to pure awareness. As mentioned earlier, pure awareness is a primary fact. Pure awareness is what allows all mental constructs and discursive thoughts, and it is not a construct itself.
It leads you to recognize that, thanks to this, you always have the possibility to change the content of your mind because mental states are not intrinsically embedded in pure awareness. Consequently, with training and mindfulness [ Creative Interchange I would say ], one can rid of hatred, craving, and other afflictive emotions [embedded in the Vicious Circle]. Matthieu Ricard postulates that awareness impacts future neuronal processes.
If we consider pure awareness as a primary fact, and there is nothing that goes against this view, there is no reason to deny that mental constructs arising within the space of awareness could act through neuroplasticity. Thus, through the work of interdependent, mutual causation, one may have downward, upward, and same-level causation.
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One could talk about top-down causation in the sense that the immaterial constructs of cultures, the social realities, influence brain functions. In this case, the mechanisms are well established and not in conflict with the laws of nature. The belief systems, norms, and concepts shared by a society influence the self-understanding and action of its members. Creative Interchange ] Moreover, they imprint the brains of the next generation through education and epigenetic shaping and thus also have long-term effects on brain functions. For Buddhism, both matter and consciousness belong to the world of forms.
Both exist inasmuch as they are manifest, but they are also devoid of intrinsic, solid reality. The Dalai Lama says that consciousness precedes anything we could ever say about it and precedes any possible perception and interpretation of the phenomenal world. We cannot step out of consciousness to examine it as if it were merely one aspect of our world. The Dalai Lama states: We cannot remove ourselves from the equation.
No scientific description of the neural mechanisms of color discrimination can make one understand what it feels like to perceive, say, the color red. Buddhism says that the ultimate nature of consciousness is beyond words, symbols, concepts, and descriptions. You may speak of pure awareness devoid of mental constructs, but it is like pointing the finger at the moon and calling it the moon itself; unless you have a direct experience of this pure awareness, these words are empty.
Contemplatives who have mastered the capacity to clearly identify this pure awareness or this platform without content describe it as vivid and fully aware, as having a quality of peace. They see that thoughts arise from the space of awareness and dissolve back into it, like waves that surge from and dissolve back into the ocean.
The mastery of this process eventually leads to people who have an extraordinary emotional balance, inner strength, inner peace, and freedom. So there must be something quite special in having access tot such deep levels of mental processes. Pure awareness goes beyond attention, because attention implies being attentive to something, in a dualistic mode of a subject who pays attention to an object. It is more correct to say that within pure awareness, various mental functions can unfold, including attention focused on perceptions or any other mental phenomenon.
But an satisfactory explanation of the training aspect of attention is not enough to explain the whole range of experience; especially the fact that experience always comes first. This fact is inescapable fact! It would be interesting to consider phenomena that would, if they were valid, make us reconsider the general assumption that consciousness is entirely dependent on the brain.
One can think of three of those that merit consideration and for which we certainly need to distinguish illusions from reality, fact from rumor: One major problem with all these phenomena is their lack of reproducibility. They cannot be generated intentionally and hence cannot be investigated experimentally. One could of course again argue that they belong to the class of phenomena whose constitutive property is irreproducibility, that they are singularities of a dynamic that never repeats itself.
CI is a process that cannot be controlled, not from the outside in, and not even from the inside out. One can only provide for the conditions needed for CI to thrive, and CI will happen, we just cannot predict when it will happen. Research in Psychotherapy , ed. Columbia University Press, Taylor, Sources of Self: The making of Modern Identity. Harvard University Press, Action, Wisdom, and Cognition. Standford University Press, Tuan, The Quantum and the Lotus: Morgan Road Books, What is the unconscious? For the Buddhist monk the most profound aspect of consciousness is alert presence.
In Buddhism there is the concept of habitual tendencies that are opaque to our awareness. For Buddhism, the deepest, most fundamental aspect of consciousness is this sun-like awareness, not the murky unconsciousness. Usually we are not aware of the rules that govern the interpretation of sensory signals, the construction of our percepts, or the logic according to which we learn, decide, associate, and act.
Abundant evidence indicates that attentional mechanisms play a crucial role in controlling access to consciousness. When attended to, most signals from our senses can reach the level of conscious awareness. It cannot be emphasized enough, however, that signals permanently excluded from conscious processing as well as transitorily excluded signals such as nonattended sensory stimuli still have a massive impact on our behavior. In addition, these unconscious signals can control attentional mechanisms and thereby determine which of the stored memories or sensory signals will be attended and transferred to the level of conscious processing.
The phenomenon of change blindness , the inability to detect local changes in two images presented in quick succession, demonstrates impressively our inability to attend to and consciously process all features of an image simultaneously.
Perception is actually not as holistic as it appears to be. We scan complex scenes serially, and actually much of what we seem to perceive we are in fact reconstructing from memory. It appears also that we are not always capable of controlling which contents enter consciousness. Wolf considers the workspace of consciousness as the highest and most integrated level of brain function. Access to this workspace is privileged and controlled by attention. Moreover, the rules governing conscious deliberations such as consciously made decisions most likely differ from those of subconscious processes.
The former are based mainly on rational, logical or syntactic rules, and the search for solutions is essentially a serial process. Arguments and facts are scrutinized one by one and possible outcomes investigated.
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Root Cause Analysis ] Hence conscious processing takes time. Subconscious mechanisms seem to rely more on parallel processing, whereby a large number of neuronal assemblies, each which represents a particular solution, enter into competition with one another. Jump to Conclusion or Groupthink ] Thus, the conscious mechanism is suited best to circumstances in which no time pressure exists, when not too many variables have to be considered, and when the variables are defined with sufficient precision to be subjected to rational analysis.
The domains of subconscious processing are situations requiring fast responses or conditions where large numbers of undetermined variables have to be considered simultaneously and weighed against variables that have no or only limited access to conscious processing, such as the wealth of implicit knowledge and heuristics, vague feelings, and hidden motives or drives. Intuition is a highly adaptable faculty that allows us to make fast decisions in complex situations, but it also lures us into thinking that we have made a rational choice, which actually takes more time and deliberation.
By dwelling in the clarity of the present moment, you are free from all ruminations, upsetting emotions, frustrations, and other inner conflicts. If you learn to deal, moment after moment, with the arising of thoughts, than you can preserve your inner freedom, which is the desired goal of such training. In the end what we need is to be freed from inner conflicts, one way or the other.
If you become an expert in meditation methods, the so-called afflicted thoughts no longer have the power to afflict you because they undo themselves the moment they arise. But that is not all. Experience shows that by repeatedly doing so, you not only deal successfully with each individual arising of afflictive thoughts but you also slowly erode the tendencies for such thoughts to arise.
So in the end, you are free of them entirely. To openly confront our differences can be a way to pacify a conflict, but it is not the only way. To begin with, a conflict requires two protagonists confronting each other in antagonistic ways. As far as your own inner conflicts are concerned, if you use meditation simply as a quick fix to superficially appease your emotions, you temporarily enjoy a pleasant deferral of these inner conflicts. Unfortunately, these cosmetic changes have not reached the root of the problem. True meditation is not just taking a break.
Meditation goes to the root of the problem. You need to become aware of the destructive aspect of compulsive attachment and all of the conflictive mental states that conflicts create. They are destructive in the sense of undermining your happiness and that of others, and to counteract them you need more than just a calming pill.
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Meditation practice offers many kinds of antidotes [ cf. Creative Interchange practice ]. One of the antidotes is to be aware of desire or anger, instead of identifying with it. Then the part of our mind that is aware of the anger is not angry, it is simply aware. In other words, awareness is not affected by the emotion it is observing. Understanding this makes it possible to step back and realize that the emotion is actually devoid of solidity.
We need to provide an open space of inner freedom, and the internal affliction will dissolve by itself. As for romantic love, there is usually a strong component of grasping and self-centeredness that will most often turn into a cause of torment. In this kind of love, one often loves oneself through the guise of loving someone else. To be a source of mutual happiness, genuine love has to be altruistic. This does not mean at all that one will not flourish oneself. Altruistic love is win-win, whereas selfish love soon turns into a lose-lose situation. Milan writes extensively about the love between Man and Dog.
In chapter 4 one can read: Tereza did not want anything of Karenin; she did not ever ask him to love her back. Nor had she ever asked herself the questions that plague human couples: Does he love me? Does he love anyone more than me? Does he love me more than I love him? Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short.
Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something love from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company. The reason she trained him was not to transform him as a husband tries to reform his wife and a wife her husband , but to provide him with the elementary language that enabled them to communicate and live together.
No one forced her to love Karenin; love for dogs is voluntary. The love between dog and man is idyllic. It knows no conflicts, no hair-raising scenes; it knows no development. The universal nature of extended altruism does not mean that it becomes a vague, abstract feeling, disconnected from reality. It should be applied spontaneously and pragmatically to every being who presents him or herself in the field of our attention.
Living Creative Interchange from within ]. You give your full, undiminished love to those who are close to you; those for whom you are responsible, and you also reserve a complete openness and readiness to extend that altruism to whoever crosses your path in life. Unconditional altruism is a state of benevolence for all sentient beings, a state of mind in which hatred has no place.
The aspiration of the bodhisattva: Having inner peace and equanimity does not mean that you cease to experience things with depth and brilliance, nor does it necessitate a reduction in the quality of your love, affection, vivid openness to others, or joy. In fact, you can be all the more present to others and to the world because you are remaining in the freshness of the present moment instead of being carried away by wandering thoughts. He also noted similarities in the application of procedures and meditation techniques aiming to reduce the mental fabrications leading to these afflictions: Beck notes that people suffering from psychotic problems experience intensified self-focalization: They relate everything to themselves and are exclusively concerned with the fulfillment of their own wants and needs.
Buddhism tries to diminish these characteristics. We need to be more skillful in paying attention to all the nuances of what is actually happening in our mind and in successfully freeing ourselves from being enslaved by our own thoughts. This is how we can gain inner freedom. If we are able to transform the way we perceive things, then we will transform at the same time the quality of our lives. Society and its institutions influence and condition individuals, but those individuals can in turn make society and institutions evolve as well.
As this interaction continuous over the course of generations, culture and individuals keep on shaping each other. Edwards Deming once stated: Can we understand reality as it is? On the level of ordinary perception, the neuroscientist and the Buddhist thinker say no: Is there an objective reality independent from our perception? In this chapter the first-person approach will be distinguished from the second- and third-person exterior approaches.
We have two different sources of knowledge to call on. The primary and most important source is our subjective experience because it results from introspection or our interactions with the world around us. The second source is science, which attempts to understand the world and our condition by extending our senses with instruments, applying the tools of rational reasoning to interpreting observed phenomena, developing predictive models, and verifying our predictions through experiments.
Objectivity of perception i. We know today that we only perceive a narrow spectrum of the physical and chemical properties of this world. We trust our cognitive faculties; we experience our perceptions as reflecting reality and cannot feel otherwise. In other words, our primary perceptions, whether mediated by introspection or sensory experience, appear to us as evident. They have the status of convictions. We believe that we experience reality as it is, without realizing how much we interpret and distort it. Indeed, a gap exists between the way things appear and the way they are.
Neither our sensors nor our cognitive functions have been adapted by evolution to cope with these aspects of the world because they were irrelevant for survival at the time when our cognitions evolved. For example, it is quite difficult to imagine something that appears either as a wave, which is not localized, or a particle, which is localized depending on the way we look at it. Buddha himself called the proper investigation of the ultimate nature of reality: Our basic cognitive functions were initially selected to help us cope with the conditions of a pre-social world.
At later stages of biological evolution, there was with all likelihood some coevolution between the emerging social environment and our brains, a coevolution that endowed our brains with certain social skills, such as the ability to perceive, emit and interpret social signals.
These abilities were then further complemented and refined by epigenetic modifications of brain architectures that occur during the development of individuals and are guided by experience and education. Our brains are the product of both biological and cultural evolution and exist in these two dimensions. The possibility needs to be considered that, not only our perceptions, motivations, and behavioral responses, but also our way of reasoning and drawing inferences are adapted to the particular conditions of the world in which we evolved, including the world of social realities that emerged during cultural evolution.
We consider perception as an active, constructive process, whereby the brain uses its a priori knowledge about the world to interpret the signals provided by the sense organs. Brains harbor a huge amount of knowledge about the world. The use of this knowledge is implemented in and determined by the functional architecture of the neural network This functional architecture is the way in which neurons are connected to each other, which particular neurons are actually connected, whether these connections are excitatory or inhibitory, and whether they are strong or weak.
When a brain learns something new, a change in the functional architecture occurs: Certain connections are strengthened, whereas others are weakened. Hence, all the knowledge a brain has at its disposal, as well as the programs according to which this knowledge is used to interpret sensory signals and structure behavioral responses, resides in the specific layout of its functional architecture. This leads to the identification of the three major sources of knowledge about the world. Still we use it to interpret the signals provided by our sense organs. Because after birth neuronal activity is modulated with the environment, the development of the brain architectures is thus determined by a host of epigenetic factors derived form the natural and social worlds.
Although young children learn efficiently and store contents in a robust way through structural modification of their brain architecture, they often have no recollection of the source of this knowledge. Because of this apparent lack of causation, knowledge acquired in this way is implicit, just as evolutionary acquired knowledge is, and often assumes the status of conviction — that is, the truth is taken for granted. Like innate knowledge, this acquired knowledge is used to shape cognitive processes and structure our perceptions.
Yet we are not aware that what we perceive is actually the result of such a knowledge-based interpretation. This has far-reaching consequences: The genetic dispositions and, even more important, the epigenetic, culture-specific shaping of different brains introduce profound interindividual variability. Thus, it is not surprising that different persons, particularly those raised in different cultural environments, are likely to perceive the same reality differently. Because we are not aware of the fact that our perceptions are constructions, we are bound to take what we perceive as the only truth and do not question its objective status.
According to two American researchers, Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson, two evolutions occur in parallel: For normal human perception, assume linearity is a well-adapted strategy. As a consequence, we seem to have difficulty imagining processes that have nonlinear dynamics and drawing the right conclusion about these processes. For example, because we intuitively assume linearity, we misperceive the complex dynamics of economic or ecologic systems, nurture the illusion that we can forecast and hence control the future trajectories of these systems, and then are surprised when the outcome of our interventions differs radically form what we had expected.
Given these evolutionary limitations of our cognitive abilities and intuitions, we are left with the burning question of which source of knowledge we should trust. Especially when we are confronted with contradictions among our intuitions, primary perceptions, scientific statements and collectively acquired social convictions. Buddhism also emphasizes the fact that a correct understanding of the phenomenal world acknowledges the fact that all phenomena arise through almost numberless interdependent causes and conditions that interact outside of a linear causality.
Consciousness associated with sensory experiences never directly experiences reality as it is. What we perceive are images of past stages of a phenomenon that are already devoid of intrinsic properties. On a macroscopic level, we know, for instance, that when we look at a star, we are looking at what that star was many years ago because it has taken that many years for the light emitted by the star to reach our eyes.
In fact, this is true of all perceptions. We are never looking directly at phenomena in real time, and we always distort them in some way. All this proceeds from what Buddhism calls ignorance or lack of awareness. This basic ignorance is not just a mere lack of information re.
Someone with insight will understand that the world we perceive is defined by a relational process taken place between the consciousness of the observer and a set of phenomena. It is therefor misleading to ascribe intrinsic properties to outer phenomena, such as beauty, ugliness, desirability, or repulsiveness. This insight has a therapeutic effect: It will disrupt the mechanism of compulsive attraction and repulsion that usually results in suffering.
Anthony de Mello — Awareness: It is possible to transcend the deluded perception and achieve a valid understanding of the nature of the phenomenon for instance the flower as being impermanent and devoid of intrinsic, autonomous existence, as being devoid of any inherent qualities.
Achieving this understanding is not dependent on our sensory perceptions or past habits. It comes from a proper analytical investigation of the nature of the phenomenal world, culminating in what is known in Buddhism as all-discriminating wisdom , an insight that apprehends the ultimate nature of phenomena without superimposing mental constructs on them. Evidence from psychophysical investigation of perception and neurophysiological studies on perceptions underlying neuronal processes suggests that perceiving is essential reconstruction.
The brain compares the sparse signals provided by our eclectic sense organs with the vast basis of knowledge about the world that is stored in its architecture and generates what appears to us as a percept of reality. When we perceive the outer world, we first arrive at a coarse match between sensory signals and knowledge-based hypotheses about the world, and then we usually enter an iterative process to obtain approximations that gradually converge to the optimal solution — a state with a minimal number of unresolved ambiguities.
In other words, we perform an active search for the best matches between signals and hypotheses until we obtain results with the desired clarity. This latter process of active search-and-match requires the investment of attentional resources, takes time, and is interpretative in nature. What is actually perceived is the result of that comparative process.
It appears that this scientific scenario is fully compatible with Buddhist views! So, there are two different ways of phrasing that: The first described how our perception of the world is shaped by evolution and the increasing complexity of the nervous system. From a Buddhist perspective, one would say that our world, at least the world we perceive, is intimately intertwined with the way our consciousness functions.
Buddhism says that our phenomenological world, the only one we perceive, depends on the particular configuration of the consciousness we have and is shaped by our past experiences and habits. Perceiving is always interpreting and hence attributing properties to sensory signals. In this sense, perceptions are always mental constructs. This gives rise to all kinds of mental reactions and emotions that are not attuned to reality and will therefor result in frustration. Buddhism calls phenomena events. In quantum mechanics, too, the notion of object is subordinate to a measurement, hence an event.
To believe the objects of our perception are endowed with intrinsic properties and autonomous existence is, to take again a comparison with quantum physics, like attributing local properties to particles that are entangled and belong to a global reality. There are only different perceptions: This has far-reaching consequences for our concepts of tolerance. Solving such problems with majority votes is clearly no fair solution.
What we therefor should do is grant everybody that her or his perceptions are correct and assume that this attitude will be reciprocated. This being said, social and cultural perceptions can be as deceptive as cognitive delusions, and they are built up in similar ways. From our mental fabrications arise many of our human-made problems. The idea is not to coerce people into seeing things as we see them or adopt our own aesthetic and moral values and judgments, but to help them reach a correct view of the ultimate nature of things as being devoid of intrinsic reality.
In truth, people from different cultures are all superimposing their particular mental fabrications on reality. The problem can be solved if these people investigate reality through logical reasoning and realize that they are simply distorting reality and that neither the object they are looking at nor the subject who perceives it exists as independent, truly existing entity.
As long as the mind is under the influence of delusion and of any afflictive mental state such as hatred, craving or jealousy, suffering is always ready to manifest itself at any time. To take the example of impermanence, at each moment everything changes, from the change of seasons and of youth at old age, to the subtlest aspects of impermanence that that take place in the shortest conceivable period of time. Once we have recognized that the universe is made not of solid, distinct entities, but of a dynamic flow of interactions among countless fleeting phenomena, it has major consequences in weakening our grasping onto reality we see before us.
A proper understanding of impermanence helps us to close some of the gap between appearances and reality. All this means to me: Continuous Improvement in closing the gap between our perceptions and realities through Creative Interchange. There is no way to prove that a reality exists out there behind the screen of appearances, a reality that exists in and of itself, independent of us and the rest of the world.
Even if it did exist, such a world would be utterly inaccessible to us. We all keep on assigning an element of truth in our superimpositions on the world. What Buddhism does is deconstruct ordinary perceptions by conducting an in-depth investigation of the nature of what people see to make them understand that they are all distorting reality in different ways. People simply give different interpretations. Objective is not just one of the many versions of what various people perceive but the irrefutable understanding that all phenomena are impermanent and devoid of intrinsic characteristics.
This applies to all appearances, all perceptions, and all phenomena. Distortions, therefore, is not defined in comparison with a true, self-existing reality. Distortion is to attribute any kind of intrinsic reality, permanence or autonomy to phenomena. The realization that the phenomenal world is a dynamic, interdependent flow of events and the knowledge that what we perceive is the result of the interactions of our consciousness with these phenomena is, in fact, the understanding of the process of delusion.
CHAPTER 1 Meditation and the Brain
That understanding is correct in all situations. In Buddhism, absolute truth refers to the recognition that phenomena are ultimately devoid of intrinsic experience. Relative truth is to acknowledge that these phenomena arise not in haphazard ways but according to the laws of causality. There is a difference between apparent, relative, conditioned properties and intrinsic ones, but typically we ignore it. This not a mere intellectual distinction — ignoring its causes us to act in ways that stands at odds with reality and are, therefore, dysfunctional.
To conclude that phenomena are impermanent and interdependent is the only outcome of a careful, logical investigation. Brains construct their views of the world on the basis of inherited and acquired knowledge. Because different brains have different knowledge bases, they may arrive at different views. We perceive the world as we do because our brains are the way they are.
All parties can free themselves from cognitively deluded ways of apprehending reality. In other words, one would continue to see what one sees, but one would become aware that this not the only way that it can be seen. When all mental fabrications are unmasked, you perceive the world as a dynamic flow of events, and you stop freezing reality in various deluded ways. Introspection has long been discredited because the subjects who were asked to engage in it in laboratory studies did so with minds that were distracted most of the time. Distraction creates an unsteady mind. In addition, an untrained mind lacks the limpid clarity that allows one to see vividly what is happening within oneself.
So whether the mind is carried away by distractions or sinks into a cognitive opacity, it will not be able to pursue proper introspection. A clear and stable mind brings inner peace and deeper insights into the nature of reality and the mind itself. The second-person perspective involves an in-depth properly dialogue between the subject and an expert who leads the dialogue, asking appropriate questions and allowing the subject to describe his or her experience inall its minute details. Meditation is not mathematics but rather a science of the mind, and it is conducted with rigor, perseverance, and discipline.
The Buddha encouraged contemplatives to practice assiduously by saying: What is not clear to you can become completely clear in the future through investigation and training. A trained contemplative will be highly aware of his cognitive processes, of the way thoughts unfold, and of the way emotions arise and how they can be balanced and controlled. The meditator will also have some experience of what is known as pure awareness, which is a clear and lucid state of consciousness devoid of mental constructs and automatic thought processes. The meditator may also understand that there is not such thing in the mind as a central, autonomous self, which I think fits quite well with the views of neuroscience.
It is the reality of recognizing the nature of pure awareness, as well as the nature of suffering and its causes — the mental toxins — and the possibility of getting rid of these causes through cultivating wisdom. And it is also apprehending outer reality in a more correct way, as interdependent events devoid of intrinsic existence.
Not all information is equally useful. It also depends on your purpose. Valid knowledge about the process of cognitive delusion is immensely useful if one falls prey to compulsive attachment or hatred because this will help dispel suffering. Knowledge obtained through scientific inquiry has no moral value on its own. It is the way we make use of such knowledge that morality comes in. In Buddhism, which invokes no divine authority, ethics is a set of guidelines from empirical experience and wisdom to avoid afflicting suffering on others and yourself.
The Buddha is not a prophet, a God, or a saint but rather an awakened one. Ethics is really a science of happiness and suffering, not a set of rules proclaimed by a divine entity or dogma thinkers. Because ethics is all about avoiding inflicting suffering on others, having more wisdom and compassion, together with gaining a better understanding of the mechanics of happiness and suffering and the laws of cause and effect, [ meditation ] will foster ethical systems and practices that are more likely to fulfill their purpose.
Once again, in Buddhism knowledge is used to relieve suffering. So one needs to distinguish the kinds of actions, words, and thoughts that will cause suffering from those that will bring fulfillment and flourishing. Values can also be related to a correct understanding of reality. Understanding the interdependence of all beings and phenomena is the logical ground for growing altruism and compassion.
Reality is neither good nor bad, but valid and invalid ways of apprehending reality exist. These various ways have consequences: A mind that does not distort reality will naturally experience inner freedom and compassion, instead of craving and hatred. If you recognize that reality is interdependent and impermanent, you will adopt the right attitude and be much more likely to flourish.
Otherwise, as Rabindranath Tagore wrote: The brain can impose on itself a training process that induces lasting changing in its own cognitive structures [ We call this process, the Creative Interchange process ]. And this is more than mere theoretical understanding. Training implies cultivation, repetition that leads to slowly remodeling your way of being, which will be correlated with a remodeling of your brain.
You need to acquire correct understanding and then cultivate that understanding until it becomes fully part of yourself [ Thus not only understanding the Creative Interchange process, one has to live it fully from within until it becomes fully part of oneself ]. The internal drive [ to live the Creative Interchange process from within ] arises from a deep aspiration to free oneself from suffering [ i.