Tag Archives: Zen Brain

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laying down a path in walking

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From Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind by Evan Thompson:

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

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i-making

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The self is a performance and therefore not substantial.  It emerges out of conditions but is not reducible to them.

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