Unified Mindfulness: An Interview With Shinzen Young

By Thomas McConkie, based on an episode of Mindfulness+.

You can listen to this episode here.

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Thomas: Of all of the teachers I've met along the path, Shinzen, your work has influenced me in such profound ways. We have some space here to hear from you and your very unique take on and formulation of the Dharma. But if I could just make an introduction. Shinzen is unique in that he not only has a deep mastery of the practice side—he's been practicing in different Buddhist traditions and styles for over 50 years now—but has just a staggering grasp of the academic side of Buddhism. So you might hear words from multiple languages in this episode, you might hear some jargony, mathematical speech here. You're really in for a ride on this one. And Shinzen I just want to extend a warm welcome to you. Thank you so much for sharing your time with us on Mindfulness Plus.

Shinzen Young: Sure. My pleasure.

Thomas: Excellent. Well, Shinzen, where do we begin? Do you have anything for us right out of the gate? I've got lots of stuff [laughs].

Shinzen: I guess my main message to the world is that there's something that I call modern mindfulness. I define modern mindfulness as contemplative practice coevolving with science. So to me that is a huge concept, potentially not just a game changer, but a meta-game changer. 

A game changer changes how the game is played, and this meeting of the most powerful disciplines of the human species could—I'm not saying will—but could give rise to something that not only changes how the game is played on this planet, but also changes what the game is. The game has, for millions and millions of years of evolution, been competition for limited resources. And the meta-game changer that may arise from the best of the east cross-fertilizing with the best of the west is that human beings’ ability to appreciate resources will be dramatically increased, resulting in complete democratization across the planet for everyone. So, everyone gets ten times richer because they learn to live life ten times deeper. That's an enormous concept.

Now, throughout the history of science, a well developed branch of science is often seen as having a natural relationship to some other well developed branch of science, and they cross-fertilize and create something new. That's happened over and over again in the history of science and in the history of math. But the notion that takes this to a meta-level is in the late 20th century we discovered that there is a natural meeting between contemplative practice and modern science. And I can specify precisely what I mean by that meeting, what their intersection is, and how each can potentiate the other, creating a synergy. I call it "The Big Idea."

It's just an idea right now, so we don't know for sure if it will deliver all the goodies that I can imagine it delivering, but it's not unreasonable that that might happen. So I guess that's my main message, to deeply understand in a precise way what the contemplative practices of our species have been—east, west, ancient, and modern. There’s a paradigm wherein we can sort of get a unified view of that, I call it "unified mindfulness." 

We have an appreciation for science both as a powerful cultural institution but also as a deep human experience. To understand the nature of science once you get a clear understanding of those two, suddenly you can see this natural way that they can reinforce each other moving forward in time.

Thomas: Beautiful, Shinzen. So this is what I love about Shinzen, everybody. He brings it out fast and hard, and he sets the bar high. So here we are, we're talking about a new world, we're talking about a new potential destiny for the human species, and we're about 3 minutes in. 

Shinzen: For the details they can read the last chapter in my book The Science of Enlightenment.

Thomas: It’s a gorgeous book, along with the audio series from Sounds True, which is beautiful in its own right, also titled The Science of Enlightenment. That audio series, Shinzen, changed my life as much as any single work from any single human being I've ever come across. It's staggeringly brilliant, and heartful, and compassionate. So I highly recommend that to people.

I've got a question for you, Shinzen. So you're talking about science. You're talking about the best of western civilization (science), the best of eastern civilization (this contemplative science we might say). If I could back it up a little bit, let’s get a little bit about your background. 

What originally piqued your interest, your curiosity around this potential marriage (if I can call it that)?

Shinzen: Yeah, I'd call it the marriage of the millennium [laughs]. Well, my background would not have predisposed me either to the practice of meditation or to a competency in science. I was, according to my mother, what mothers call a difficult baby. My earliest memories were of being miserable, impatient, I couldn't handle any kind of physical discomfort. When adults were going through strong emotions I would just freak out, I couldn't handle it. So I was not the kind of person that could really face themselves, I was sort of the opposite of that kind of person. And also, I failed all my math and science courses in school much to the chagrin of my parents. So when I would come home with these bad grades in algebra, geometry, these high school subjects, it was not a pretty scene. So I was very much an underachiever and just sort of wimpy and impatient, and unhappy all the time. 

Thomas: I love when you use this adjective, Shinzen. You describe yourself as a “wimp” and then you get into this new stage in your life where you go into eastern practice living in Asia, and nobody would describe that as wimpy, what you went through. 

Shinzen: Well it was a bit of a shock, what I brought. Which was this non-meditative background. But in any event I did conceive of a passionate fascination with Asian cultures in my early teens and I was in L.A (it was not cool at that time to be interested in such things). I'm almost 73 years old. When I was born, World War 2 was still going on. My father was fighting the Japanese. And being interested in Asian things in general and Japanese in specific was not a cool thing in the 50's in L.A. But for some reason I just got interested in it. And I found out that they had Japanese ethnic school in addition to American public school so I decided I wanted to go to both. I went to Venice high school in Los Angeles but I also went to Sawtelle language school. Actually that started when I was in what's now called middle school but what we call junior high in those days.

So by the time I was out of high school, I had the privilege of growing up bilingual and bicultural with Japanese. But then I realized you could never quite understand—deeply understand—Japan without understanding the Chinese cultural background. So my parents dutifully got me a Mandarin tutor. I'm still in high school. So I could learn the official Chinese language, northern Chinese.

Thomas: I didn't know you started learning Mandarin in high school. That's new to me.

Shinzen: Yeah! And then I realized I'll never really understand China without understanding, at least academically, the Buddhist background. You need to know something about India, so my parents dutifully got me a Sanskrit tutor. I was still in high school, and my parents were terrific in that regard. 

I didn't do well with the math and science but I was really good at languages. Particularly these esoteric languages. So I picked that all up and then that led to an interest in Buddhism—but as a cultural phenomenon—but then the 60's were happening and I try every drug I could get my hands on and that started to change the way I was thinking about things and make meditation seem like something more than just a bunch of “hooey,” which was my original impression. That led to my eventually wanting to get a PHD in Buddhist studies, which lead to becoming a monk in Japan.

Thomas: Can I stop you for a second, Shinzen? That's really interesting that you say that, when you talk about experiencing meditation as a bunch of “hooey” at first. I know a lot of people who have that experience with meditation and I share your work with them. I say “oh you think meditation is a bunch of hocus-pocus and smoke and mirrors?” and I refer them to your work because I haven't met a teacher who brings as much rigor to the path of meditation, as much science to the path of language as you have. So it's really incredible that you've managed to take something eastern and mystical and ground it in the hard science of the west. It's really an incredible accomplishment.

Shinzen: My mission is to take the “mist” out of mysticism [laughs]. Yeah I'm pretty hard-nosed, it's all logic and evidence based. And a lot of traditional things have to be let go of but it turns out that the core transformative practices can stand the test of a rigorous evaluation: logic and evidence. So even after you drop the things that are superstitious or irresponsible claims of this or that, after that is shed there's still enough there to really powerfully transform a human being. And that's why this is so incredible that that is indeed the case. So I like to talk about what science can do for contemplative practice and what contemplative practice can do for science. One of the things that science can do for contemplative practice is validate its effects. And there are literally at this point, I would imagine, tens of thousands of articles, of course representing a spectrum of quality. But among those articles there are some that are very solid science that show that yeah, in the immortal words of my generation, “this works”! So that's one of the things that science can do for us.             

Another thing that science can do is something that I refer to in my own language as “in-formation”. What I mean by that idiosyncratic way of talking is that there's something called the spirit of science. It's what the human experience of science is. It's a combination of intellectual skills and certain kinds of emotional tastes that the best scientists have. And that spirit of science can inform the way that we teach mediation. And that's when you're referring to my work as having some distinct qualities. Those qualities that you're seeing, I describe in my own language as pointing to the fact that the spirit of science has deeply informed the way that I present the contemplative practices.

Anyway to answer your question quickly, I was in Japan, and I had sort of done some hippy stuff—I had lived in the Haight-Ashbury—but I was also an academic. That and certain life experiences that I went through made me get serious about doing meditation. So they made me do it the old-school way, it was very tough. And as I say, I was essentially not very strong. But you know, it's like any other kind of training. It's like lifting weights: you get stronger and stronger as you gain experience. So I proved to myself that even someone who doesn't have the natural endowments to meditate, shall we say, can with persistence get pretty good at it.

I did a number of years of the traditional training in Japan and at one retreat I met a Catholic priest named Father William Johnston. He was a Jesuit. He was another academic and we became friends, and through him I learned that meditation is not just found in Buddhism, it's found everywhere. It’s found in Christianity. It’s even in the tradition that's my family’s tradition of Judaism. I had no idea there was a whole Jewish meditation technology. I learned that from a Catholic priest. The other thing I learned from a catholic priest was that science was beginning to weigh in even in those days (this would be the late 60's and early 70's).

Thomas: Can I pause you on that, Shinzen? Can I ask you a question? It's curious to me that we don't know about Christian meditation, about Jewish style meditation, Islamic. Here we are having a conversation about how to draw from the technology of Buddhist practice, if you will. Could you say a word about why we don’t hear more about other traditions?

Shinzen: Well, if a person wants to look that up, they can. There are numerous online resources on the contemplative practices in those traditions. And people that belong to those traditions do know about these things. What you're saying is true though, Buddhism in terms of this dialogue between east and west, Buddhism in general, and specifically the mindfulness type practices from southeast Asia. They're the thousand-pound gorilla. They sort of dominate the dialogue. However, I would say that that is actually justified and that there's a reason for it.                   

Because the Buddhist traditions of all the other ones compared to the other traditions of the world, are the ones that although they are not scientific by modern standards, they are rather science-like in a number of ways. So there's already basis for dialogue.

Furthermore, meditation is the center piece in Buddhism and in the other traditions it may be viewed as important or marginal, depending, but it's not the name of the game the way it is in Buddhism. Christianity in the middle ages was quite meditative. But it also believed in rituals and doctrines and those were very important for salvation. Where as in Buddhism, your salvation is the result of your practice. So I would say that contemplative practice is central in Buddhism and it is also the case that just about every approach to contemplative practice that has been used anywhere in the world has an example somewhere in the Buddhist tradition.                 

There's a wide range of technologies that are in Buddhism. Buddhism does, in a sense, contain all the basic ways to meditate—or most of them anyway—and then couple that with the fact that Buddhism has certain science like qualities. It's not for nothing that it dominates the dialogue.

Anyway, just to complete your thing that you asked me originally. Father Johnston knew Japanese researchers who were doing brainwave research on meditators, and he clued me into the fact that this was happening. So it occurred to me that I'm going to be leaving Japan in a little while, I'm going back to “the west”. Maybe I should go back to my bête noire, the thing that I had done so poorly with, which was the math and science, because I can bring a new power to it because now I've got a number of years of meditation under my belt. I have concentration power, I have the ability to deconstruct my limiting beliefs. So I used my meditation skills to revisit math and science, and sure enough like I say: “this works.” 

And not just for spiritual or liberation things, it works for performance skills. Academic performance skills. It raised my IQ significantly and gave me the ability to actually excel in math and science. So I did it on the spec that someday in the future—once again we're talking early 70's here—maybe there would be this marriage of contemplative practice and modern science. Well, sure enough, the Dalai Lama started to talk to the Nobel laureates, the Mind and Life Institute, and it started to gain momentum and now it's everywhere. Most academic institutions around the world have some sort of research going on with mindfulness or meditation type things and it's like “oh my, it actually happened.” And fortunately I had prepared myself to have a place in this brave new world [laughs]. 

Thomas: Wow. Amazing, Shinzen. Yeah, I'm curious, you know I have a lot of different memories of you and stories you've told in the past going through my head. For the moment I just want to open up this question to you: for all of these listeners here at Mindfulness Plus, what would you say to them about what this new union is yielding in terms of science and contemplative practice coming together? What do we know now about meditation that we didn't know—that we couldn't know—two-thousand years ago as the Buddhist tradition was evolving, being formulated. Yeah, if you could just let us into that research.

Shinzen: Yes. Well, remember the old 'Sopranos' series? That T.V series?

Thomas: I remember it. Not familiar with it [laughs].

Shinzen: That was one of my favorite TV shows and there's in the first episode the main character, Tony Soprano, who says something to the effect of “it's good to be in on the ground floor”. He was comparing the Mafia in the 50's to the current Mafia, ok? He wasn't in on the ground floor. His father and their fathers, the previous generation were the ground floor. He's coming too late to the game so there's this line “it's good to be in on the ground floor”. 

Thomas: [laughs]

Shinzen: Now that has a lot of meaning to me because my buddies and I were in on the ground floor, which is both an agony and an ecstasy. The ecstasy is we know we're onto something. The agony is we're really not there yet. A lot of claims are maid and I mean, there's a lot of good research in certain areas of practice, but the holy grail in my way of thinking is an actual science of enlightenment. And we could see that that could happen in this century, but don't let anyone fool you with pictures of peoples brains and colored blobs to make you think that we really understand these things well yet. So what I compare us to is the Age of Galileo.

There's this great painting, famous painting of Galileo showing the Doge of Venice his invention, the telescope. And it's a crude device, right, his original telescope. So they're looking through this crude device but they know they're onto something because it's an awareness extending tool that doesn't distort, and when you look at the moon, the moon is not perfectly spherical the way Aristotle says it has to be. It's not that way at all! And in fact, the earth is not stable, ok? The earth turns etc, etc. So they knew they were onto something but they weren't there yet. Kepler hadn't lived yet, Newton hadn't lived yet, Einstein, Maxwell hadn't lived yet. So they knew they were onto something but the details and the bulletproof evidence wasn't there yet. So that was the ground floor. It's exciting because you're pretty sure that you're onto something, but it's also sort of frustrating because we're not there yet. So I would say we're on the ground floor and there is a potential that may manifest in this century for what I would refer to as a true science of enlightenment.

Thomas: Can I stop you there? Let me just say this for people who aren't familiar with your work. What I've noticed about you—I came across your work in 2005, I've been following you very closely for the last 12 years—I've noticed that you, more than most teachers, don't shy away from this term enlightenment. And that's unique about you and you take it a step further and suggest that there's a potential science of enlightenment where enlightenment could be common currency in the human experience at some point in the future. So if you'd say a word about the science of enlightenment, what does that look like?

Shinzen: Well, to appreciate that you have to appreciate two things: science and enlightenment. So I'm not sure I can say a word that will lead to the appreciation of both of those. First of all, I'm not the only teacher that isn't afraid of the “e” word. In fact, in the Zen tradition it's routinely talked about—particularly in Rinzai zen. And my very first meditation teacher was a Japanese Rinzai zen practitioner, Okamura Keishin Sensei. So he would talk about Satori or Kenshō—these are the Japanese words that roughly, roughly, correspond to what in Theravada Buddhism is called Sotapatti. So he would talk about this as a feasible goal and something that I should work towards. So there are teachers, even whole traditions that talk about this. However, it is also true that many teachers do not talk about it and there is a long list of good reasons not to talk about it. And of course I know those reasons and I respect those reasons, but I have elected to ignore those reasons [laughs]. But it's not for nothing that most teachers don't explicitly talk about this.

For one thing it's an ambiguous term—what one teacher might confirm as an enlightenment experience, another teacher might say that's not. That it’s the beginning of a beginning. So it's a little bit of a moveable feast. as to how it's going to be defined, that's a problem and a reason not to talk about it. It's not necessarily something that happens suddenly (even though the books often describe it that way). In my experience, most of the students that I've worked with that I would say have some degree of enlightenment, it did not happen suddenly. Every now and again you do get those sort of huge epiphany things that you've read about in the books; that certainly does happen sometimes. But it's usually not sudden, it sort of sneaks up on people. And it's not an attainment. But you can't talk about it in any other term. You talk about it and it sounds like it's this thing you’ve got. But it's not an attainment, it's not something you can take credit for or adorn yourself with, it's paradoxical. It's simultaneously the most empowering and the most devastating thing that can happen to a person [both laugh]. So there's no informed consent! Ok so you can see there's a lot of reasons not to talk about this, to say nothing of the fact that very quickly you're saying a lot of weird stuff like I just said, because it's quite paradoxical [laughs].

Thomas: So here we are at Mindfulness Plus speaking to the Buddhist crime boss of the western world, Shinzen Young, straight talk on enlightenment. Shinzen, if we could, I think we're going to wrap it up here for the day. If I could ask you to lead us in a bit of a pointing out instruction, just give the listeners a bit of a flavor of how you guide and we'll drop an episode next week with the concluding half of this conversation that you've led us in.

Shinzen: Very good. So you’d like me to give a little guided meditation? 

Thomas: I’d love that if you would. 

Shinzen: Sure.

*start practice*

Take a moment to stretch up and settle in. And if you wish you can close your eyes or have them open. Whatever appeals to you. Now bring your attention to your body experience. Let your awareness move within your body however it wants. Maybe it will go to one place, maybe it will circulate around, maybe you'll be drawn to the whole body at once. Any pattern is fine. Focus on body and let your thoughts come and go as they wish in the background. You'll hear mental conversations, you may see mental images, that's fine. Totally give permission for thoughts to arise or not, but your intention is to place attention in somatic experience. Every few seconds say to yourself the mental label "feel" to remind you that you are feeling. It could be physical, it could be emotional. It could be pleasant, unpleasant, both, neither, subtle, intense. It could be stable, it could be flowing. Just feel.

Now continue to focus on your body experience and we're going to raise the challenge level just a bit because I'd like you to slightly open your eyes. the outer world of color and form arises. That's fine but let that be in the background, sort of soft focus, defocus. See if you can keep attention in the body even though your eyes are open a bit, and then gradually open wider and wider until your eyes are completely open but your awareness is back. Back in the body, the physicality, the perhaps emotionality. And in a moment when this program ends and you make your transition to life, make it smoothly. See if you can retain some embodiment, perhaps coming back to this with a little micro-hit here and then during the day. Just feel.

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