APPROACHING THE SINGULARITY

Siddhartha Gotama, the founder of Buddhism, known as the Buddha — as well as the Ancestors of Zen — struggled mightily to express the essence of the practice, meaning, and implications of Zen's meditation in the language and idiom of their time, throughout the countries and cultures of origin: India of 2500 years ago; China from around 500 CE; Korea and Japan a half-century later. As Master Dogen reminds us in the closing section of Fukanzazengi—Principles of Seated Meditation:

The Buddhas and Ancestors all preserved the buddha-mind 

            and enhanced Zen training

And then goes on to give us our marching orders: 

So you should devote yourself exclusively to 

            and be completely absorbed in the practice of zazen

Their instructions were and are quite clear when it comes to the personal dimension of practice — just sit. But when we enter into the social arena, we face the same kind of dilemma that they did in attempting to express a direct experience of fundamental reality that is beyond the scope of conceptualization, let alone the reach of language. Buddha and Dogen used parables and analogies to illustrate their point, and along with other masters conjured various models and inventive paradigms to help their followers picture   

the reality they had intuited, which often contradicted the received wisdom of the period.

In our modern context, the closest analogy that I have come across to the process and effects of sitting still enough, upright enough, for long enough, is that of the black hole, or rather the description of what occurs to matter in thrall to the gravitational field of one.

Firstly and perhaps most obviously, we align ourselves with the planet by sitting upright. Our backbone comes to approximate a one-to-one correlation with the force field of gravity, visualized as a vector running from the crown of our head through the spine and spinal cord, straight to the center of the Earth. Like a mountain settling into place after the collision of two tectonic plates, our body enters into equilibrium, equipoise. With all forces equally balanced, maintaining the natural posture of zazen becomes relatively effortless. We experience a sense of floating in space, which is what we are doing.  

Once we have become physically comfortable in the posture, the body goes through its natural process of sensory adaptation, resulting in a blurring of the boundaries of our senses usually taken for granted. Beginning with the tactile sensations of the body, the adaptation extends to seeing, hearing, smelling and tasting. Eventually even thinking, the activity of the brain, adapts and settles into a profound stillness as well. Again, vintage Dogen:

In stillness, mind and object merge in realization

            and go beyond enlightenment

Dogen's choice of the verb "merge," it seems to me, captures the essential dynamic of the process of realization. Merging of mind and object, of self and other, of subjective and objective interpretation, of inner and outer — the resolution of all seeming dichotomies — and the non-separation, or nonduality, of the four fundamental spheres of activity and influence from my model of the real-world context in which we live: the merging of our personal sphere with that of the social, natural, and universal spheres.    

"Realization," in this context, points to a transformative event that is not the same as conceptualization, or even within the realm of recognition, as Dogen points out elsewhere. It is literally the "becoming real" of subjective and objective reality within the personal realm of intimate experience, known as the "hard problem" of philosophy. From our friendly online AI:

The "hard problem of consciousness," a term coined by philosopher David Chalmers, is the challenge of explaining how physical processes in the brain, such as neural activity, give rise to subjective, qualitative experiences—like the feeling of redness, the taste of sugar, or the experience of pain—which he calls qualia. Unlike the "easy problems" of consciousness, which involve explaining cognitive functions, the hard problem focuses on the subjective, internal feel of "what it's like" to be a conscious being, something that cannot be fully captured by objective scientific explanations alone

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5DfnIjZPGw&t=7s

 So we can take it from this that the process of merging that will ensue — when and if we sit still enough, straight enough, for long enough — is not something subject to our control. Which is why we do not try to control what happens in Zen meditation, other than exerting a modicum of discipline on the physical level, relinquishing our usual, restive proclivities for lounging around and fidgeting. In particular, Master Dogen does not suggest any mental regimens or disciplines for controlling the monkey mind, in his manuals of meditation (a key point made by Carl Bielefeldt in his analysis of Fukanzazengi — Google it). Current online gurus of mental health are finally catching up to this millennia-old wisdom, from one of several recent postings on the subject:

Why You Should Let Your Mind Wander

Cut your brain some slack

We've all been there. There's a test to study for, or a new concept to learn for work - but we can't help but daydream about something else entirely.

For a long time now, the general assumption has been that a wandering mind is counterproductive. According to new research published in the Journal of Neuroscience, we might have that all wrong.

The Study: Researchers at Eötövos Loránd University in Hungary designed a study in which they had 27 participants in their early 20s complete a simple probabilistic learning task while hooked up to an electroencephalogram, which measures electrical activity in the brain.  Participants who said they allowed their minds to wander demonstrated a boost in their ability to learn the information.

The Takeaway: Next time you're trying to learn something new, don't be afraid to let your mind wander a bit. It may very well help you retain the information you're trying to internalize.

Keep in Mind: This study was designed specifically around simple learning tasks that didn't require focused attention.

A