Set Up the Right Conditions and Let Nature Do the Rest

Shinzen Young, an incredibly gifted mindfulness teacher of mine, tells the story of visiting the laboratory of a biologist stem cell researcher. Shinzen walks into this lab and sees that they’re washing a pig heart, that they taken a pig heart and washed it in a chemical detergent that strips the cellular matrix off of the scaffolding of the heart.

Imagine this. Before washing, the heart is fleshy. It's got heart tissue made of heart cells on it and the scaffolding beneath is like a kind of cartilaginous structure. After the scientists have given this pig heart a bath, it basically has no cells left on it. It’s just scaffolding — a translucent shape of a heart.

Why do the scientists do this? Well, they want to see if they can regenerate heart cells. They coat the scaffolding with stem cells and sit and wait.

What happened in this particular laboratory is that after going through this process of stripping a pig heart of its heart cells and then essentially “re-coding it” with stem cells, it once again became a functioning beating pig heart.

This would be an interesting story in and of itself, but what Shinzen pointed out to me is how the scientist humbly described the process. He said, “Well, it's really a matter of just setting up the right conditions and letting nature do the rest.”

This is a bomb of a teaching. It has served me deeply over the years. And it reminds me that when I think I have to micromanage every last aspect of life and prevent the sky from falling, I can just set up proper conditions.

Nature will meditate us. That’s the take-home. And that's hard to remember a lot of times because the first thing we do when we're getting in trouble in our meditation practice, or when we’re getting in trouble in life, is to think that we have to intervene. We think we have to tinker, that we have to do something. So there's incredible wisdom in just learning the basic conditions that we can set up to allow nature to do what nature does so well.

What does nature do so well? There's a concept in Taoism of wu wei, which can literally translate as doing not doing. And it's the spirit of when we really just relax into the flow of nature, the flow of who we are at the deepest level, good things just start to happen. We enter the Tao, we enter the great flow, the great way of things. And even when we’re exerting tremendous effort, we have the experience of effortlessness. And that is very much the intention behind this teaching. It’s the territory that the teaching is disclosing.

You’ve heard the concept and hopefully just hearing the concept, you get a sense of, ‘oh yeah, this territory is alive in me. I know what it means to set up the right conditions and let nature do the rest.’ And oh, by the way, you are nature. Let’s practice.

Use this script as a meditation you might read to yourself or others:

*Begin Practice*

Take a moment to just settle in. Allow yourself to come to stillness. Even if you're in motion in this moment, you can find the stillness in the motion.

Let go of the breath and just allow the breath to breathe you. You don’t have to do anything. Just intend to come to stillness. Nature will do the rest.

Breathing in, oxygen saturates the lung cells and the bloodstream picks up the oxygen and delivers it to every cell in your body, nourishing you, sustaining your life. And you don't do any of this. Nature just does it.

You are awareness, the light of mind and heart. You don't try to be aware, you don't have to learn to be aware, you’re just aware. Awareness and the words of Plotinus, is the fountain ever on, it just flows, it gushes. And through this awareness, this intelligence we experience human life. it just happens. It’s a gift.

You breathe out carbon dioxide, the plant world takes it in as nutrients, breathing out more oxygen. In relationship with us, human world interwoven with the plant world, interwoven with the world of animals and the minerals, the mountains, the streams.

The Earth itself revolves around the sun at the perfect distance. Too close to the sun we would incinerate, too far away from the sun we would freeze solid. But as it is, the Earth revolves at the perfect distance that allows this incredible gift of life to roll-on.

The part of us that feels like we need to manage things and make things happen and if we become too infatuated by that mentality, we forget the stillness, the simplicity from which everything issues. Paradoxically when we enter the stillness, we're invigorated with life force, we have the capacity to spring forward into action when necessary, when appropriate. We do without doing, we exert effort without effort-fullness.

Feel the body breathe, the heart beat. Feel the quickness of the mind, the light of intelligence. Feel the ground beneath you, always supporting you.

Feel the richness, the hyper abundance of life itself, nature itself, in this moment. We participate in nature, we draw our breath from creation and we are never separate from it like waves on the surface of the ocean, we are always wet as the ocean. As expressions of nature just happening we’re never not nature.

Take a final moment to savor the stillness. To be the stillness. And to be all the beauty, all the creativity that springs out from the stillness.

***

Want to deepen your practice? Download the Mindfulness Essentials course.

Interdependent Co-arising: A Perspective That Helps Prevent Arrogance

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

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Interdependent co-arising. It’s got a nice ring to it. But what does it mean? 

Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese monk in the Zen and mindfulness traditions of Buddhism, explains the principle in a simple way in his classic book The Heart of the Buddhist Teachings. 

He writes, “For a table to exist we need wood, a carpenter, time, skillfulness, and many other causes. And each of these causes needs other causes to be. The wood needs the forest, the sunshine, the rain, and so on. The carpenter needs his parents, breakfast, fresh air, and so on. And each of those things in turn has to be brought about by other conditions. If we continue to look in this way we’ll see that nothing has been left out. Everything in the cosmos has come together to bring us this table. Looking deeply at the sunshine, the leaves of the tree, and the clouds, we can see the table. The one can be seen in the all, and the all can be seen in the one.”

So, what is interdependent co-arising? It’s a recognition. It is a view of reality, a perspective that recognizes that everything, all conditions, are coming up at once and happening at once. And though we may live in a moment of human history where we’re encouraged to feel like an independent self, we can learn to take the view of interdependent co-arising. We can recognize clearly that yes, there is an aspect of individuality arising in this moment, and we can feel that and sense into it. 

If I’m sensitive enough I can even notice that I won’t get to do the kind of work I want to do in the world without the love and support of my family and my friends — without clean drinking water, a stable food supply, some education, and a bit of luck.

It’s that simple. It’s just recognizing in our independence how utterly dependent we are on conditions to exist and to be. 

I love that Thich Nhat Hanh talks about a table because he gets right into the elements — that without water and sunshine, we don’t have wood. And without the skills of a carpenter we don’t have the table. In a similar way, we know that infants can’t make it their first few days of life without contact from other human beings.

So this observation of interdependent co-arising, I would say, prevents us from becoming arrogant. We realize we can’t do it all. We need help from all the conditions. It’s how we celebrate interdependence: by simply recognizing all the beautiful conditions that support this precious human birth we’ve been given. 

Interdependence also means we can hold dependence and independence together deeply. We can recognize our independence (our agency and autonomy), and we can recognize our dependence (our relationship to all things and all beings). 

If we simply focus on independence we become arrogant. We become isolated. We forget the cost of our own arising, what it takes to sustain us moment to moment. 

But, on the other hand, if we’re only dependent — if we are only held in relationship and don’t express ourselves, our own will, our own agency, our autonomy — we become grovelers. We can’t stand up and express what feels right in our own being. 

I just want to point out that this polarity of independence and dependence, of agency and communion. It’s so important to hold both of these so deeply. And when we do, we can get a taste of interdependence, a higher order possibility that’s elaborated on really beautifully in the Buddhist tradition. 

Alright. Let’s take a moment to practice. 

Use this script as a meditation you might read to yourself or others:

*start practice*

Start by taking a couple deep breaths, and really just let go on the out-breath. Let go of everything you don’t need: the stale air at the bottom of the lungs, the tension in your body, the emotional baggage, the stale thoughts that roll over and over in your awareness. Just take a minute to let that go. 

Give yourself a moment to just let the dust settle. You don’t have to make anything happen. You don’t have to meditate. Just doing nothing, taking your foot off the gas pedal is enough. Nature will take care of the rest. 

And now you can bring your awareness into the physical body and really just soaking through all of the physical body like water soaking through a sponge. Just enjoying embodiment in this moment, feeling the boundaries of the physical body. Where you stop and the world begins. Notice what your sense of that boundary is. 

Feel your own emotion. Your thoughts in this moment. Feel a sense of your own personal history. The journey of your life, of your soul, if you think in those terms. All the decisions you’ve made, the will that you’ve exercised to arrive in this very moment. And appreciate for a moment, the power of your own agency. Your own autonomy. Your own freedom to choose a life for yourself. To create a life like an artist. Feel what a gift this is. 

Notice that this gift of freedom, agency, autonomy, can’t exist without countless other conditions. Notice that the very air you breathe is a condition of your freedom. Just to have air to breathe is a profound gift that supports your life, your autonomy, your destiny. Take a moment to just appreciate it, to bring your awareness to it fully. 

Feel the ground beneath you, the stability of the ground. In this moment you can trust your weight to the ground. Relax into it. And allow it to hold you, to support you. 

Appreciate in this moment, that if you’re able to just enjoy this moment of awareness that you live in a place in the world that’s safe enough, that allows you to just venture inward for a moment. In this moment you’re able to let go and go inward. This is a gift. This is a luxury that many people on the planet don’t have. Civil unrest in Ethiopia. Immigrants. Syria. Crossing dangerous waters. There’s so many people who don’t have an environment where they can just rest and let go. 

And for a moment you can bring key relationships into your life. Who are the people in this time in your life who deeply support you. Believe in you. Give you their love. Imagine their faces in this moment. Their presence. The gifts they offer so freely to you just by way of who they are, not even anything they do, but just the people that they are to you. Their presence in your life. Feel of that goodness. Feel this condition co-arising with the condition of your own being. Your own individuality. Your own independence. Feel the way this supports you, sustains you, uplifts you. 

Notice the gift of love itself. Not even bound by a person, but this incredible love that permeates absolutely everything. It’s available if we just open our awareness. Open our hearts. If we raise our sails and feel it guiding us home. 

There are too many gifts to name. Too many conditions to name. That co-arise with our being every moment. To just stop and reflect on everything that makes us and supports us. That makes us possible. We celebrate interdependence. We become the activity of creation itself. Infinite conditions. Mutually co-arising. In a great symphony of life. Of love. Of light.

***

Want to deepen your practice? Download the Mindfulness Essentials course.

Photo by Tom Kenar on Unsplash

Thanks-giving: A Meditation on Gratitude

In the spirit of the Thanksgiving holiday, here is a guided meditation that centers on gratitude.

You can listen here and follow the script below. 

***

Whatever your state of being, your state of body and mind, you can take a couple of big breaths, drawing in and letting go.

And do that again.

Breathing out, extending the exhale, letting it all go. And for the next few breaths at your own rhythm, I invite you to continue to extend the exhale. Just breathe out a little bit longer than you normally do on the out-breath, getting rid of any stale air at the bottom of the lungs, triggering your nervous system to open up and relax. 

When we're anxious our breathing tends to be really shallow, engaging the sympathetic nervous system. When our breathing is deep, our exhale long, it triggers the parasympathetic nervous system, the rest and digest network in the body. 

So give yourself a moment to just settle in.

Good. As you do this, you'll notice distractions: thoughts in the mind, sounds activities in the world. That's fine. Just notice them and as you notice yourself noticing distractions, you can just keep coming back to the breath, letting go, letting go.

You can now just come back to normal breathing. Just feel the way the breath breathes, the way life just moves through you. And no matter what's present in the body right now — whether you're really comfortable and relaxed or whether you feel wound up and intense — it doesn't matter because at a more subtle level, you can just hold an attitude of acceptance towards the body exactly as it is. 

Notice the difference between struggling to relax, efforting to come into a mindful place, and accepting right now that the body is as it is. Maybe you like how the body feels, maybe you don't, but at a deeper level notice that you don't have to struggle with the body. And just the act of picking up this attitude of acceptance can help you relax at an even deeper level, deeper than the body for a moment. 

And you can just relax into this deep capacity of your awareness to be accepting, to let this moment fully inform you to not be in denial of things as they are at a more subtle level. You can do this with the emotions in the body and thoughts in the mind. 

Maybe emotionally you're feeling up positive, you never want it to stop, or maybe you're feeling down, dejected, gloomy, and you wish you felt better. But again, notice that you can just make space for what you're feeling and make space for what thoughts are coming and going the same way. 

Weather patterns aren't a problem for the sky. You don't need to make a problem of the weather patterns of emotion and thought. You can just rest as the sky, letting it all come and go. Letting it all pass through, changing somehow. All of the conditions of this moment, all of the conditions of life can easily fit within awareness and because everything fits, everything belongs, and you don't need to struggle. 

You can deeply relax from this place of rest and relaxation. I want you to open up your awareness, open up your senses to just feel into the fullness of this moment, the fullness of sensation in the body, the fullness of emotion and thoughts, the fullness of all of your life's conditions, the favorable conditions, the challenging conditions, everything. Whatever your sense of total fullness is in this moment, I want you to just open up to it. And open yourself to the fullness of the world — over seven billion human hearts and minds, feeling, thinking, yearning, and dreaming. Open up to the fullness of all of humanity, the fullness of the earth itself — this living, breathing organism that sustains life, the rock, the plants, animals, the mountains, the seas, the plains. As you open up your awareness to all of us, to all things, you might sense a quality of abundance, overflowing, everything happening at once. 

Oftentimes when we think of giving thanks, when we think of being grateful, we think of things we're grateful for: Our health, our family, our dreams, our hopes, running water in the tap, sunshine in the sky. All good things. But at the deepest level when we really just relax into a sense of being, just our own beingness, we intuit that we are always and already in deep exchange with everything or part of everything. We're connected to everything, all of life, all of creation pours forth its abundance in this moment, and we are the recipients of all of those gifts. And receiving deeply we can't help but be generous with everything we have. Life itself infuses us in this moment. Life breathes us in and out, sustaining our life, connecting us to all of life everywhere. And a profound and pervasive sense of love sustains us, supports us, gives us our very being and love we and move and have our being. 

Feel at the level of the heart, the way you're connected to everything, so how much you care and this love seems to be an exhaustible. The more we love, the more love there is. 

And the light, a gift of light, the simple fact of being awake and alive and present to have any experience at all. It's a gift and we received this gift every single moment of life. This gift of being, this gift of wakefulness, the gift of experience at the level of our personality. We give thanks for the blessings that we recognize in our lives, the things we love, and sometimes we even managed to give thanks for the things we don't love, but at the deepest level of our being pure intelligence, consciousness, spirit, whatever your language for it.

At this deepest level, we are Thanksgiving. We are pure gratitude, which is to say fully receiving the abundance, the fullness of this moment and fully pouring out from this abundance as generosity and action. So how deeply life gives to you on this moment with an in-breath, a new lease on life and with each out breath, you give yourself back. Offer yourself fully to the bloom of this moment.

***

Take the momentum of this practice into your Thanksgiving week with your loved ones. If you find yourself feeling cramped, small and claustrophobic, caught in your outworn patterns of feeling and thinking number, you can just feel your feet on the ground. Take a relaxing breath and open up as wide as the sky fully receiving these gifts of life, of love, of light, and giving back in your own unique way as mindfulness.

***

Want to deepen your practice? Download the Mindfulness Essentials course.

Unified Mindfulness: An Interview With Shinzen Young

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

You can listen to this episode here.

***

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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Everything You Need Is Right Here: A Meditation for the Exhausted

By Thomas McConkie, adapted from an episode of the Mindfulness+ podcast

***

Sometimes it may seem like no matter where you go in this modern world, people are exhausted.

Perhaps you’ve felt it. Maybe you've gone back to school to get a better job. Maybe you aren’t feeling fulfilled in a relationship and want to trade your partner out for another to see how you fair in the lottery. Maybe your mind is wandering from the present moment, fixating on an even better moment that might, you imagine, lie just around the corner.

Whatever the specifics, chances are that you’re exhausted in part because you’re reaching for that which you don’t have.

Of course, I'm not suggesting for a moment that it’s a bad thing to get further education and a better job. Or that it's inherently bad to leave a relationship that's not working anymore. Or even that it's bad to let your mind wander. These experiences are all just part of human life. They're what it means to be human.

But what I want to point out is that when we're stuck in this mode, when all we can do is seek better things that don’t yet exist, we tend to feel exhausted. If we're constantly in a posture of reaching, we can't let go, relax, and be with exactly what is right now.

It doesn't have to be that way.

Instead, you can practice taking up the attitude that everything you need is right here.

Take a moment and see what it does to your body when you internalize these words: "everything I need is right here."

In one sense, the practice of mindfulness is the practice of giving that thought more time each day.

Of course, that thought can itself be pitfall. You might pick up mindfulness because you hear it will help you relax more, and all of a sudden mindfulness becomes a new task — a new form of seeking. In that instance, mindfulness itself puts you back at square one, where you're in a posture of reaching.

So I want to invite you to really sit with the thought that wherever you are and whatever you're doing right now, absolutely nothing is missing.

When I teach this concept, people often ask, "If nothing is missing, why would I get out of bed in the morning? Why would I do anything at all if everything is right here?”

It’s a good question, and it’s important to note that the point isn’t to learn mindfulness and then become so passive that there's no need to ever leave our meditation cave for the rest of our lives. Rather, mindfulness is a practice that helps us replenish. It's a practice that helps us rejuvenate so that we become deeply present and then paradoxically become more vibrant in our actions.

Let’s see what this feels like in practice.

Whatever you're doing right now, come to stillness.

Starting with the experience of the physical body. Just notice in this moment how you feel. You can notice any pleasant sensations as well as any challenging sensations — any physical discomfort.

It's deeply instinctual to want to move away from discomfort, but what you can do here is just invite all of your experience to be present right now. Notice the comfort and discomfort in the body. And then notice that there's a part of you that’s even deeper than the body, a part of you that can just allow comfort and discomfort to exist as they are. Be present to this full experience.

And you can notice what emotions are present. Maybe pleasant emotions, maybe neutral emotions. Maybe you’re not feeling much of anything — an emotional idling. Or maybe you’re aware of challenging emotions, or negative emotions. Whatever the case, notice that you're able to just stay present to all of it.

If you're feeling really good, you don't need to grasp on to that good feeling. If you feel negative emotions at the moment, you don't have to drive those emotions away and go looking for a better experience. You can just rest in this moment exactly as it is.

And now notice what thoughts might be going through your mind. Maybe thoughts about things that have happened in the past. Maybe thoughts anticipating what needs to happen today or what you hope will happen in the future.

Rather than struggling with the thinking mind, rather than trying to stop thought, you can just allow thought to flow without diving into the stream yourself, without pursuing thought or elaborating on it.

You can just allow thoughts to flow as naturally as blood flows through the veins.

Notice that whatever the state of the physical body and whatever the state of the thinking mind, there's a part of you deeper than the physical body and deeper than the thinking mind. And this part of you is just aware.

For this moment, you don't have to struggle. You don't have to strive. You can simply rest in this moment that is full. Rest in this moment where absolutely nothing is missing. Everything you need is right here.

***

So, why would we want to experience this?

Again, because we live in a world where we are constantly driven to exhaustion.

We are constantly reaching for what comes next, to the point we forget that there's a moment right here. We forget there's a moment right now where we're already complete. And when we rest deeply in this sense of completion. When we really take on this posture and attitude of nothing is missing and everything you need is right here, something really amazing happens: we start to move in life.

Improvement itself is not the problem. Striving for all the things we care about most in our lives is not the problem itself. The problem is the forgetting.

When we remember we are complete, we paradoxically start to reach the things we care about most. Not from a place of lack. Not from a place where we feel like something’s missing and we just need to work harder and won't be ok until we have it.

Rather than moving from a place of scarcity, trying to get more and trying to bring more in, we start with a quality of deep fulfillment.

You could say we start from a place of abundance and from that place where everything is complete and everything we need is here, we move to the next moment where everything we need is already here again.

And in that way we let go of exhaustion.

***

Transcribed by Seth McConkie, edited by Jon Ogden

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