I am reading James Austin's, Zen and the Brain, a big fat wonderfully-written book, a combination of scientific analysis, philosophical exploration, and personal odyssey.
What I like most is neurologist Austin's emphasis that everything in Zen begins with the brain. He quotes Krishnamurti: " ...I don't know what you mean when you say Big Mind and Little Mind. First of all there is the brain."
Austin makes the distinction between the goal of Zen (and perhaps all spirituality) and that of religion. Religion is entering and exploring the world of an elaborated belief system. Zen is exploring the way things are or what is the case.
But what do we mean by exploring and accepting what is the case? Understanding how the brain works might help make this more clear. A few days back I wrote of Guy Claxton's book, Hare Brain and Tortoise Mind: How Intelligence Increases When You Think Less, in my post, The Shadow knows.
Claxton argues that there are several different kinds of intelligence and ways of learning found in our evolved brains. There are also different speeds in which our intelligence is deployed.
There is first a rational and calculating mode of thought where we work out the elements of a problem rationally and logically, weighing the pros and cons. This kind of knowledge which Claxton calls the d-mode (for deliberative or default) is much prized in the hurried, rationalized, and problem-solving modern world. This kind of learning and intelligence stands at the center of our educational system and the institutions that serve us in so many ways.
But there is also the slow, intuitive, and patient learning over time which all of us use but are seldom aware of it. Children learn language and to recognize faces, building on inherited capacities, in this relatively slow and intuitive way. Adults use this implicit form of learning all the time.
We all are able to “size up situations” in our fields of endeavor based on years of experience and in ways we cannot explain to ourselves and others. This is our unconscious intelligence or the intelligent unconscious of our Undermind which can take many confusing, perplexing, and even contradictory patterns and sorts them out silently, patiently, and ingeniously over days, or weeks or even years.
Subjects given tests to determine if they can recognize implicit patterns in sequences of numbers and to anticipate the next and upcoming sequence, for example, quickly learn to accurately predict the next sequence despite the fact that they cannot explain how they do so or even that they have learned anything at all.
We who live in an impatient, hurried “fast-lane” time value our d-mode ways of learning far more than the ways in which we slowly and intuitively build up implicit knowledge, even though the latter forms of knowledge are extraordinarily important in daily life, in artistic endeavors and in scientific progress.
While tacit or implicit forms of learning take time to allow our intelligent unconscious to do its thing, the use of this knowledge can often be swift and decisive. There is the lightening-fast intelligence of the motorcycle or automobile driver who swerves to avoid a highway hazard using skills that cannot possibly be thought out in advance.
Claxton terms the fast ways of learning that our brains use, “Hare Brain” thinking; the slower and more indirect and ruminative forms of learning are called “Tortoise Mind” or “Turtle Mind,” a distinction he takes from an American Indian fable.
The difference between the differences between the Turtle Mind and the Hare Brain modes of learning helps me to get a better grasp on Zen and its admonition to live in the present moment and to learn to accept life itself or to learn to love what is, rather than living in the world of should have been or might have been. I should mention that Claxton is also a Buddhist as well as a trained cognitive scientist and his book has helped me in rethinking what we mean by the spiritual and the mystical found in practices like Zen.
I am convinced that at the end of the day learning to live in the present moment is actually learning to steal past our default-mode of our Hare Brains and the quick "takes" on the world that our rational, calculating modes of thinking encourage, instead learning to live more out of the slower and more confusing and paradoxical life of our intelligent unconscious.
I am not saying that we are born knowing how to live in the present moment; I am saying that we are born with an intelligent unconscious that can be utilized to accept this way of viewing and experiencing the world, if only we are patient and trusting enough and can come to wait through the experience of confusion, paradox, and long periods of seeming lack of progress.
For example, one of the central doctrines of Buddhism is impermanence or learning that the things of the world are constantly changing and will all go away. Our Hare Brains seek to conquer or hide from impermanence by dividing the world up into subjects and objects that endure over time. Living in a hard and fast world of things seems to justify our rational way of looking at things.
Impermanence and its cousin imperfection is less a threat to our Turtle Mind. This is because the slower, embodied intelligence of Turtle thinking is more suited to seeing things as connected and whole; our Turtle mind is more able to see life and death joined together instead of separated by a vast chasm. Turtle thinking is more suited to accept the confusion, turbulence and impermanence of everyday existence as an unbroken stream that must be experience and accepted rather than avoided or resisted.
Psychologically, starting with the Turtle Mind keeps us tied down to the task of loving what is un-distracted by harebrained thinking, by an over-aggressive "I" and an overly-defended "me" and "mine," becoming small, rigid, and closed-off. To become who we really are is to view the world through our unconscious intelligence that is permitted to constantly open out.
If this task is undertaken by our more deliberative forms of intelligence, our rational and calculating judgments would simply rebel. The “good” and “bad” judgments and categories of our more rational ways of learning and acting seeks to organize life into hard and fast conceptual boxes, much like a sheep dog tries to keep the herd together and headed for home.
Zen asks us to embrace life itself and what is in all its guise. I am not a scientist and I am guessing here, intuiting and using my own Turtle Mind, but I believe that it is our intelligent unconscious that is up to the task of living with the confusion, the impermanence and the imperfection of everyday life.
More than this, I would go a step further: slowly and patiently learning better to accept confusion, contradiction, and upset expands us, enlarges us, creating the felt sense that we are on a journey toward our 'original face' or our 'true self," words that for me increasingly point to our intelligent Undermind.'
Barry Magid, a psychotherapist and Zen practitioner, says in his book Ordinary Mind, that the Zen practitioner learns that "Problems don't disappear from our life; they disappear into our life.
We can’t possibly understand what this means unless and until we come to appreciate and esteem our unconscious intelligence, our Turtle Minds. By accepting our problems and the suffering they bring into the life of our intelligent unconscious, our Undermind, we expand the boundaries of our self. Accepting the flux and transience of everyday life into the slow intelligence of the Undermind permits the confusion and paradox of our existence to be patiently absorbed and understood.
Speaking for myself, I would settle for something modest and mundane: accepting the ups and downs of the world for long stretches of time, hours for instance, without seeking to deform and reshape the world with my projections, fantasies, and anxieties.
A life lived at least part of the time from my Turtle Mind and its capacity to learn the implicit and confusing and non-logical task of serene acceptance of ups and downs of moment-to-moment existence or life itself would do quite nicely.
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