Now this is interesting:

Self-Regulation and Depletion of Limited Resources:  Dose self-control resemble a muscle?
Mark Muraven & Roy Baumeister, Psychological Bulletin (2000) No. 2, 247-259

Abstract: The authors review evidence that self-control may consume a limited resource.  Exerting self-control may consume self-control strength, reducing the amount of strength available for subsequent self-control efforts.  Coping with stress, regulating negative affect, and resisting temptations require self-control, and after such self-control efforts, subsequent attempts at self-control are more likely to fail.  Continuous self-control efforts, such as vigilance, also degrade over time.  These decrements in self-control are probably not due to negative moods or learned helplessness produced by the initial self-control attempt.  These decrements appear to be specific to behaviors that involve self-control: behaviors that do not require self-control neither consume nor require self-control strength.  It is concluded that the executive component of the self- in particular, inhibition – relies on a limited, consumable resource.

So… some situations extract a cost in self-control resources.  If that cost is high, the next event requiring self-control can’t be “purchased.”  More important, not being aware of the cost, I may not gauge accurately my ability to be skillful in engaging with the next event.  Others authors/researchers have talked about mindfulness as a muscle that supports awareness in the service of self-control (not getting hung up here on the self-non-self issue).  In essence, it’s about how seamlessly we can re-set from one exertion to the next and, I think, only practice will strengthen that particular muscle and replenish that well.

Time to log more hours on the cushion.

Thank you for practicing,

Genju

Now, that’s the sticky point: applicability.  The further I get into practice, the more my romance with research on meditation has faded.  It’s not that I have lost respect for the researchers and philosophers who try ever so hard to connect the practice of mindfulness/meditation to something substantive that may lead to good health via new interventions.  But there you have it: the convolution and expanse in that sentence alone makes me take a deep breath and ask: how is this helping me understand and live Dharma?

Of course, some of these folks – Evan Thompson, John Dunne, Al Kazniak – could expound on the telephone book backwards and I would defend that as Dharma.  But I’m partial to brilliant minds with charming smiles.  Hence my very successful 30-year marriage to He-Who-Tolerates-All-Things-Genju.

After Zen Brain and a three-day excursion around Santa Fe, I dive into the second retreat of the Chaplaincy with Fleet Maull and Jimmy Santiago Baca teaching us to live “Dharma at the Edge.”  Last week, I met with a hospital Chaplain and we discussed the intensity of being with those who are dying.  For two hours we dug into what it means for a family member to not look away from the suffering of a loved one, to make life-and-death decisions on their behalf, and what being a supportive advocate means in that context.  I was infected with her enthusiasm and her commitment to living her livelihood.  I’m glad I met her before I set out on this second phase because I am having a hard time folding aspects of this process into my practice.  Again the question arises: how is this helping me understand and live Dharma?

Yesterday, the answers was to download my garden as an app.  Over the next 10 days, who knows?

Thank you for practicing,

Genju

Many thanks to Bob Seal for his awesome insights!

Thank you for practicing,

Genju

Some of the research Richie Davidson referenced in his Zen Brain talk included studies that showed “no unique circuit in the brain for self-processing.”  In other words, there is no part of the brain that is exclusive in conceptualizing, designing or managing “self” as we know it.  How freeing!  If the concept of self is not dependent on one thing, not localized in one place, everything is possible.  By extension this implies that there is no singular practice which will confer insight, enlightenment or liberation.  It also provides a powerful antidote to the posessiveness of identity.

The delusion of self-identification arises when I identify with something rather than identify it as something.  When a thought arises and I lay claim to it as “my” thought, I’m trapped in the net of self-identification.  When I release it as “a” thought, I release concepts of my Self as well.  Davidson described an interesting experiment in which training in meditation skills broke through the “attentional blink” previously thought to be hardwired and therefore not amenable to change.  The attentional blink is the period between two targets presented in close succession so that the second target is not detectable.  This failure in detecting the second target is thought to be because the observer gets locked or over-invested in the first target.  After a 3-month meditation retreat at IMS in Barre MA, observers were able to identify the second target more successfully.  The explanation is that the meditators have cultivated the capacity to not take ownership of the first target.  This allocates more attentional resources to sustain the nonclinging state and an openness to new incoming information.

The final tantalizing information Davidson presented was that intention, aspiration and vow are members of the same family of mental processes which can be strengthened by meditation practice.  Unfortunately it was a broad brushed segment of his presentation and I’m hoping there will be more in the future on the sustaining of vow when it is in moments of conflict.  This has such powerful implications for understanding what creates sustainable behaviours from folding the laundry to honouring our commitment to each other.

In the final analysis, neurological studies may have little to do with whether or not I practice.  Delusions are numberless and I’m quite good at finding that single powerful one to distract me.  However, neurological studies with their message of infinite possibilities do provide us a way of encouraging ourselves and our companion practitioners who may feel they are not made for meditation or who feel discouraged by the sticky periods in a life of practice.

Thank you for practicing,

Genju

Notes from Zen Brain talk by Al Kaszniak.

Harkening back to John Dunne’s talk, in the five skandhas, we have a built-in systematic map of our lived experience out of which we create a sense of self.  Evan Thompson called this a process of “I-ing”, a continuous integration of external and internal perceptions that forms a feedback loop.  Under all the nuances and variations of developmental theories is an inescapable truth: without an Other, there is no I that can be created.  What is perhaps not so explicitly stated is that the creative process is one of discerning what is most useful to integrate and what is not required; in other words, it is a process of grasping and rejecting relational offerings.

Without this discernment, we can be overwhelmed by our perceptual experiences or take inappropriate ownership of things that are in proximity to us.  There’s fascinating phenomenon called the Rubber Hand Illusion – a disruption of the sense of body ownership in which we can feel as though a disembodied hand is actually ours:

Growing up is not that different.  We develop a belief of ownership by proximity to the object of our perception and the simultaneous stimulation that is called relationship.  That’s not all bad.  Love works that way.  So does caring, empathy, compassion, and the feeling of community.  It only causes suffering when reification and inflexibility set in.  When we are deluded in the belief that things not connected to us define us or are defined by us, we create the conditions of suffering.

At the Q&A of the Zen Brain talks, I asked about research that explored neurological changes related to the relational aspects of our experience.  I was surprised by the way I constructed my question.  Prefacing it briefly with the facts of my mother’s dementia, I noted that as I was watching her deconstruct herself, I was also deconstructing myself.  We were rapidly becoming no-mother and no-daughter, falling to signlessness.  In as much as the trajectory of the relationship for her was a natural course of neural deterioration, it was also crucial, in my mind, that I met it as a process of practice realization. I had to let go of the belief I owned the Rubber Hand of our developmental relationship.

When she and I were able to meet as two beings whose shared history could not longer be acted out, something shifted.  There were no past stories to live out, guard against, or correct.  There is only the moment of sitting, eating, holding, feeling.  Don’t get me wrong.  I also feel sadness – but not for the woman she was who would have been devastated to see herself now.  There is sadness that this is way in which she attains liberation.  For me anyway.  Perhaps you see it differently.

Thank you for practicing,

Genju

We have a commonsense notion of self.  Self is thought of as a given, unique, agentic, independent, integrated, cohesive source that is permanent, underlying the flow of our conscious experience.  We experience self as the independent cause of voluntary action.

Al Kaszniak, Neuropsychologist

from Notes on Zen Brain: Contributions to an understanding of self-awareness from the study of neurological illness

Al’s research examines how the constructions of self are dismantled through a disease process that we call Dementia which means “deprived of mind.”  Alzheimer’s disease is the most common one we identify as a Dementia and is the major cause of Dementia.  Memory loss, changes in behaviour, transposed timelines and relationships, and reduced intellectual function create a flowing parody of the Three Doors of Liberation: selflessness, signlessness and aimlessness.  Age is not protective, nor are accomplishments, intellectual prowess, wealth, fame, or any of the legacies of our actions.  And in its initial stages, it’s hard to discern the development of the disease from the assertion of personality.

The most read post on this blog is losing and letting go, an exploration of my relationship with my mother who was diagnosed with vascular dementia three years ago.  I can only think that the popularity of the entry is because so many of us are trying to cope with the transformations this disease brings not just to the self of the person afflicted but to our own identification with the Other.  In our commonsense understanding of Self, we hold to the belief that under the expression of wild words and bizarre behaviours there is a solidity that will re-assert itself – given time, rational discourse, and a good night’s sleep.

It was easy for friends and family to lionize my mother.  She was certainly larger than most lives, passionate, fierce, and dominantly generous.  Her independence was legendary and there were few who returned for forgiveness after encountering her cold rage.  She and my father walked from Rangoon to Mandalay, a distance of some 400 miles, to escape the occupation of Japanese forces.  There are stories told from that period that cast her as an avenging protector, a trait that did not serve her well when transplanted to the West twenty years later.  In an environment that conceptualized relationships differently, she entrenched, refusing to reconstruct herself.  Or perhaps, there were no pathways, never had been any, that allowed a perception of experience as relational.

As she lost the world she understood, she had little choice but to disavow the world she had.  Having watched this from childhood to adulthood, I wonder why I pushed back against her unravelling self when the dementia began to flourish.  In the first few visits with medical personnel, I took great pains to explain that “this” was who she was: the rage, the lack of tolerance for not getting what she wanted immediately, the blaming, and the shaming.  They tried to explain that “this” was involuntary, a dismembering of neural networks that left her blameless and a candidate for equanimity and compassion.  I watched her put together the fragments of her identity, like a kaleidoscope, creating new combinations yet only ever arriving at the same place of desiring, rejecting, and confusion.  All observers agreed on the impact of her behaviours.  Yet I went home each night from the hospital where she lived for three months feeling like I had been transported into a strange universe where I knew everyone was finally seeing what I saw but were not bearing witness to it.

As she became disconnected from the concepts and ideas about her I had built for decades, she said as much about me in that way she had of highlighting my deficiency in making the world easier for her to cope with.  We were responding involuntarily to who we were to each other but remained unaware of it.  It reminded me of a phenomenon called Alien Limb in which the person afflicted claims their limb (an arm usually) is not their own.  The arm acts in various ways that are often embarrassing or oppositional to the person’s wishes or intentions yet the person will insist it was not their actions.  Combine this with a phenomenon called anosgnosia (an unawareness of having a deficit) and we had a pithy metaphoric recapitulation of what our mother-daughter relationship had become.

There is Dharma in this if we can get past the drama.  It raises for me the question of how to drop under the surface of losing identities and see, feel, realize the selflessness, the interbeing, the interconnectedness that is the mystery of relationship.  There is nothing lost.  There is only an observation of what is letting go.

Thank you for practicing,

Genju

Robinson Jeffers, The Tower Beyond Tragedy ( quoted in Coming Back to Life: Practices to reconnect our lives, our world by Joanna Macy)

You are not the same as or different from
Conditions on which you depend;
You are neither severed from
Nor forever fused with them -
This is the deathless teaching
Of Buddhas who care for the world.

To have become a person means to have emerged contingently from a matrix of genetic, psychological, social and cultural conditions.  You are neither reducible to one or all of them, nor are you separate from them.  While a person is more than a DNA code, a psychological profile and a social or cultural background, he or she cannot be understood apart from such factors.  You are unique not because you possess an essential metaphysical quality that differs from the essential metaphysical quality of every one else, but because you have emerged from a unique and unrepeatable set of conditions.

From Verses from the Center: A Buddhist Vision of the Sublime (commentary on Nagarjuna’s Mulamadhyamakakarika) by Stephen Batchelor

We living organisms are historical and developmental beings.  We descend by reproduction, not only from our human ancestors, but from countless other living beings, forebears who preceded the human species, all the way back to the earliest bacterial organisms….  Although our parents and ancestral organisms supply our bodies with developmental resources and help to guide our bodies on the path they tread in life, that pathway does not lie pre-determined within us – in our genes or anywhere else.  Rather the path is our footsteps laid down in walking… there is no clear separation between path and footsteps, the way and its walking.

I went into the woods a few days ago, an appointment with life I have missed for many years.  From the house to the barn, the path is clear, the grass and snow thrashed down by tractor and truck each Summer and Winter.  At the barn, long empty of horses and now the domain of raccoons, wild cats, and pigeons, the path curves down to the fields and then up to the woods.  On this day, the snow is pock-marked with prints of dogs, coyotes, and deer.  Up in the woods, there is, among the hoof prints left by the neighbours’ horses drawing a sleigh, a trace of of moose tracks.

The woods are tight and close but I’m familiar with them. Yet as I wind my way through the new p ath cut for the sleigh rides, I’m anxious because there is no internal map that tells me which curve leads out onto the road or back to the fields. I see the trail but have a little faith in it.  In fact, it’s no path to my mind because it was designed to and constructed by someone else’s agenda.  Half an hour into it, I want out.

One of my teachers pointed out that when things are difficult, the common assumption is that getting out of the situation is the solution: The only way through is out.  In practice, however, we see that only way out is through.  So, I plod along wishing I had brought my walking stick if only for defense against a rampaging coyote.

Thompson writes that “the human body, unless it is dead, is always the lived body.”  As I tread down this path of practice, I am caught by how defenseless I am, I must be, in order to fully experience this “lived body.”  The feedback from brain to environment and back to brain not only generates but orients and grounds me.  I have to let go of the signs and directives that suggest safety in old understandings, that lulls the body and mind.  Even my understanding that the path is defined by edges and borders can be misguiding.

And yet, this practice of laying down a path in walking has its challenges – especially when my lived body is flat on its back because it interacted with the ice under the non-path.

Thank you for practicing,

Genju

Life is a process of “I-making”.

Notes from Evan Thompson’s talk at Zen Brain retreat Upaya Zen Center

Thompson is a professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto and author of Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind.  There are many reasons to admire someone like Thompson: the dedication to precision of thought and word, the commitment to an embodied practice, the ability to pronounce “autopoiesis.”  I admire the man simply because the backflap of his book articulates his history in very pithy terms: Evan Thompson is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto.  That’s it.  That’s all.  No overpowering list of books he’s authored (although he wrote The Embodied Mind with Francesco Varela).  No list of imposing journal publications, presentations, or the cheery notes about spouse, kids, and anipals.  Just a simple statement going to essence.

So, with faith in his ability to get to essence, I have dug into Mind in Life and struggle with the implications when Thompson writes in the chapter Autopoiesis: The Organization of the Living:

In every life beginning is unique, but none is isolated and self-contained….  Every beginning has a beginning before it and another one before that, leading back through the receding biological past to its time and place of origin, the beginning of life on Earth.

I’ve made several false starts at trying to understand and summarize autopoiesis here; I’m proud to say I can now type the word without misspelling it.  My limited understanding is that it is the process in which a cell uses the materials at hand to create both itself and the materials at hand in a cycle of continual self-production.  That very process of self-generation also renders it separate from and self-contained in its environment yet continuing to need the materials in the environment to support the self-making.

This is a picture of e. coli.  It’s an autopoietic organism, dynamically interacting and adapting to its environment.  It orients to a food gradient and moves uphill to greater concentrations.  It is focused on self-generation, creating a world in which its needs are met.  The emergence of this world of nutrients and the self-made-thus leads to sense-making of its self-environment dynamic relationship. Sense-making leads to valuing and creating significance of parts of the environment that are critical to life.  That is, value and significance are brought out of (enacted) by the interaction of a living being with its environment.  They are not intrinsic to the environment.

As it proceeds to create itself, it creates value and discernment of its environment.  Not bad for a bacterium.

In all our complexity, moving through our environment, with a type of I-making that arises from a feedback loop of perception and action, we too engage in this “I-making”.  This performance that arises out of the conditions through which we enact living.

Thank you for practicing,

Genju