The Science of Enlightenment: Teachings and Meditations for Awakening Through Self-Investigation

“you can dramatically extend life—not by multiplying the number of your years, but by expanding the fullness of your moments.”

“Such a Zen dialogue is basically a contest, but it’s really an anti-contest. It’s a kind of reverse or paradoxical contest. It works like this: two people talk, and the first one who speaks from the ego loses. The one who wants to win is certainly going to lose.”

“He then said something even more mind-boggling. “As a general principle, any positive state that you experience within the context of silent sitting practice, you must try to attain in the midst of ordinary life.”

“In India, there is a word that means both “cessation” and “satisfaction” as a single linked concept. The word is nirvana.”

“They made a profound impression on me. I sensed that they knew about some sort of “secret sauce,” a way to be deeply happy regardless of conditions. And I sensed that they would willingly share it with me but would never force it upon me. I would have to take the initiative if I wanted to experience it for myself.”

“Perhaps science could even discover things about enlightenment that would make enlightenment attainable by large masses of human beings. Perhaps science could democratize enlightenment as it had democratized other aspects of power, comfort, and convenience. This concept utterly changed my world. What had initially brought me to Japan was a fascination with the cultures of the East. In learning how to meditate, I felt I had discovered the pinnacle, the highest thing that Asia could give me. Having directly experienced Asia’s unique offering to the world, I asked myself, “What next?”

“It’s like you were driving from San Francisco to Los Angeles for an important meeting. But along the way, you turned here and there to entertain yourself with the scenery. Somewhere along the line, without realizing it, you’re no longer moving north to south. Instead, you’re now headed east toward Denver!Once you go out horizontally into the intermediate realm, there is no end to the new and interesting stuff you can experience: encounters with angels or entities, psychic abilities, out-of-body experiences, bright lights or colors, past lives, weird internal sounds. The scenery is really cool, but you’re never going to make that important meeting.”

“The relative rest states—a blank mental screen, a defocused external gaze, physical relaxation, emotional neutrality, physical silence, mental quiet—may begin to pervade your sensory experience as the result of noticing vanishings.”

“Five decades ago, some very kind people in Japan slipped me the secret: you can dramatically extend life—not by multiplying the number of your years, but by expanding the fullness of your moments.”

“Often meditation works this way: we measure its value in terms of the suffering that would have happened but didn’t—thanks to the fact that we have a practice.”

“meditation elevates a person’s base level of focus. By focus, I mean the ability to attend to what’s relevant in a given situation.”

“The Tibetans have an exclamatory cry reserved just for when that window opens. The cry is Emaho! which might be loosely rendered “Oh my God! Who would have thought it’s this simple!”

“Samadhi without a seed takes the concentration to an even more extreme level. In this state, awareness flows so completely onto the object of concentration that there is no time to fixate that object as something rigid, opaque, and extended in time and space. In other words, the object of concentration ceases to be an object, ceases to be a something. To draw a metaphor from modern physics, the object ceases to be a particle and becomes a wave. That waveform fills our consciousness, and we become that waveform, and we are that wave. As we merge with the wave, it links to all the other waves in the universe. Then the wave dies away into deeply fulfilling nothingness. Observer and observed both disappear. This is samadhi without a seed: a direct abiding at the Still Point of the turning world.”

“My current way of teaching mindfulness is, in part, informed by this early Shingon training. I have people observe self in terms of inner mental images, mental talk, and emotional body sensation, the three sensory elements used in the Vajrayana deity yoga practice. I’ve created a hybrid approach. What I have people observe is derived from the Japanese Vajrayana paradigm: self = mental image + mental talk + body. But how I have people observe is derived from mindfulness, which has its origin in Southeast Asian Theravada practice.”

“I learned that impermanence is not merely something that you experience in your sensory circuits. It also informs your motor circuits. It’s a kind of effortless energy that you can “ride on” in daily life. It imparts a bounce to your step, a flow to your voice, and a vibrancy to your creative thought. I also learned about the expansion-contraction paradigm for how consciousness works.”

“Creating a house of cards is difficult because one has to go against entropy to do so. Eliminating a house of cards is simple: just remove any one of the base cards and the house of cards spontaneously tumbles. That’s because the tumbling of the house of cards flows with entropy. Natural events tend to flow with entropy. If enlightenment is natural, it’s reasonable to assume that it flows with entropy. It’s more like collapsing a house of cards, less like having to build one.”

“There are two reasons why I currently teach within the framework of mindfulness. The first is that mindfulness is the least culture-bound of the three Buddhist practice traditions. It is relatively easy to extract it from the cultural and doctrinal matrix within which it arose and to present it as an evidence-based, secular, and culturally neutral process. The second reason is that the general method of mindfulness shares some features with the general method of modern science. I”

“It’s fine to sometimes use these archetypes as a conduit to get information from the depths, but I recommend that you mostly use them as a conduit to bring clarity and equanimity to the depths. Become fascinated with how they move, and less tripped out with what they mean.”

“It took me twenty years to hone my current definition of Gone.”

“On one hand, deeper and deeper meditative states become available. On the other, you are able to maintain those states throughout more and more complex activities of life. We might refer to the first dimension of growth as depth and the second dimension of growth as breadth.”

“Most growth modalities—from nineteenth-century psychoanalysis to twentieth-century Scientology, and just about everything in between—share a common paradigm. It goes something like this: we store influences from the past in the subconscious, those influences inappropriately affect our behavior and perception in the present, and our job is to somehow remove those distorting influences.”

“The medicine for that is to remember that the main goal in meditation is not to get to certain good states, but rather to eliminate what gets in the way of those good states. If you do that, those good states will be available any time you wish.”

“Shinzen had not been standing still while I was attempting to wrangle this book together. He had continued to grow, change, and improve his teachings. His overarching metaphors, the themes, organizing principles, labels, and even the ways he talked about the basics of meditation shifted in ways great and small. As helpful as these changes and additions were, they made writing the book an exercise in what software programmers call “feature creep,” which means that the features of the thing you’re supposed to make change before you’re done making it.”

“it may require ongoing and intensive support from teachers and other practitioners to remind you to keep applying these interventions.”

“Prior to that, the things I had read about in my Buddhist studies seemed to me to be nothing but mythological ruminations and philosophical conjectures, elaborated by scholars with too much time on their hands. Now, for the first time, I realized that they were not just concocting speculations. They were trying to describe something that human beings actually experience. After a couple of weeks, the experience faded into a pleasant memory, but it left me with a permanent intellectual shift.”

“There is one possible negative effect from working with vanishing and the related themes of emptiness and no self. In extreme cases, the sense of Goneness, emptiness, and no self may be so intense that it creates disorientation, terror, paralysis, aversion, or hopelessness. Unpleasant reactions such as these are well documented”

“The same cosmic forces that mold galaxies, stars, and atoms also mold each moment of self and world. The inner self and the outer scene are born in the cleft between expansion and contraction. By giving yourself to those forces, you become those forces, and through that, you experience a kind of immortality—you live in the breath and pulse of every animal, in the polarization of electrons and protons, in the interplay of the thermal expansion and self-gravity that molds stars, in the interplay of dark matter that holds galaxies together and dark energy that stretches space apart. Don’t be afraid to let expansion and contraction tear you apart, scattering you in many directions while ripping away the solid ground beneath you. Behind that seeming disorder is an ordering principle so primordial that it can never be disordered: father-God effortlessly expands while mother-God effortlessly contracts. The ultimate act of faith is to give yourself back to those forces, give yourself back to the Source of the world, and through that, become the kind of person who can optimally contribute to the Mending of the world.”

“You simply notice which part of your void-triggered bum-out is emotional body sensation, which part is mental images, and which part is mental talk. Keep those clearly delineated.”

“Is meditation really that valuable? Yes it is, because a person’s base level of concentration is, in a sense, the most valuable thing that they have. Anything a person may want will be more easily attained if they are functioning from a high level of effortless focus. The entire range of human endeavors relies on concentration, and if your base level of concentration is elevated through practice, it means that you can function from a continuous state of extraordinary focus every day.”

“Sometimes a person can become stunningly proficient with regard to certain dimensions of spiritual empowerment while under-emphasizing other aspects. In my way of thinking, the ultimate reason to experience liberation is to better serve others. And a sine qua non for effectively serving others is to be a decent person by the ordinary canons of society, or as my father would have put it, a mensch. Freedom should be manifested within clear ethical guidelines and an egalitarian feedback structure.”