TS: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today, my guest is Shinzen Young. Shinzen is a pioneering meditation teacher, the founder of the Vipassana Support Institute, and an expert in the field of pain management. With Sounds True, Shinzen has created several programs designed to help people work with physical and emotional pain through meditation, including a book/CD called Break Through Pain. Additionally, Shinzen has called upon his decades as a meditation teacher to create an introductory audio program on meditation: A Beginner’s Guide to Start Meditating Now.
In this episode, Shinzen and I spoke about what science and meditation have in common and how these two fields can collaborate in the future to create technologies of awakening. We also spoke about how it’s possible to grow from extreme spiritual practice situations. And then, finally, in Shinzen’s own life, how he has transformed through the practice of meditation. And then, an area in his life in which meditation seemed not to be able to accelerate his growth in the way that he wanted.
Here’s my very provocative conversation with Shinzen Young.
Shinzen, I know you have a great love for bringing together the world of science and the practice of meditation. And I’d be curious to know what you’re working on in this regard right now and why you’re so excited about it.
Shinzen Young: Well, basically, I look upon the endeavor of meditation in general, and particularly the form of meditation called mindfulness. I look upon that endeavor and the science endeavor to, in some ways, be parallel. What we do in the mindfulness form of meditation is we train people to be very precise about their sensory experience in terms of how much of what is happening when and where, interacting in what ways, and changing at what rates. If you think about the endeavor of science and someone with a background in science, the mathematics that they learn, the differential equations and so forth are about describing and, in some ways, explaining the natural world in terms of those kinds of categories, answers to those questions. How much of what, when, and where interacting in what ways and changing at what rates.
So, I look upon what we do in mindfulness as a sort of subjective version of what the scientist does with the outside world. Given an inscrutable, complex system in the outside world, the scientist will try to break that system down into its natural components—find out what the atoms are, the inner dimensions—and then quantify that. And then they can talk about those things that I was saying—how much of what, when, and where, changing at what rates, and so forth. So, I look at mindfulness as sort of doing that through the inside—we have this complicated and inscrutable experience called individual identity. Now, can we in some way break that experience down into natural components, track it in a way that gives us insight, empowerment, freedom, and so forth?
So, because there is a general parallel between the two endeavors, at least in my way of thinking (and I tend to look upon the Buddhist perception of impermanence as related to the very deep theme that pervades most of science), which is that rates of change indicate invisible force fields (that’s how you track them). So if there is a kind of spirit that underlies our sense of personal identity, you track the rates of change. That’s what we teach people in Buddhist meditation, we call it anicca, or impermanence. So, because there’s this general parallel in the endeavor, or we can at least choose to look at it that way, I decided as a meditation teacher I would try to formulate the categories that I use in teaching meditation to be convenient for scientists to monitor with things like EEG (which is brainwaves) or EMG (which is watching the magnetic fields of the brain). I wanted to formulate my techniques in terms of categories that would likely correspond to known functional neuro-anatomy to create a system that would be particularly easy for twenty-first-century scientists to research.
So, it took me years and years and years to hone those categories, but I got them down—they work very well practically for students—and now I’m starting to get the science community showing an interest in using these categories for research. And the research is in two areas. One is called basic science where we would use these categories in order to understand not just how meditation works, but the difference between pain and suffering and, in general, how the personal sense of self arises moment by moment and how a sense of liberating oneness and emptiness could arise instead of that. And that’s in the basic science area. And then there’s clinical application—how can we use these techniques for pain management or as an adjunct to psychotherapy or for addiction recovery and so forth. So I’m doing projects using these specially designed categories, both in basic science and in the applied clinical area.
TS: Now Shinzen, you’ve said a lot, so I want to break it down a little bit. Just to give our listeners an idea of exactly what you mean, when you say that you’ve broken down the practice of meditation into categories, can you tell us what those categories are?
SY: Very good, yes, I tend to get carried away. So, moment-by-moment, if we pay attention to how our sense of self arises, part of it arises through the experience of having a mind and part of it arises through the experience of having a body. So, one way to analyze our mental experience is to break it into two components—visual thinking (which is mental images) and auditory thinking (which is mental talk). And then it’s also possible to distinguish within the body-emotional type sensations that are related to something called the limbic system in the brain and then other types of sensations, which are purely physical in origin. So, I take this inscrutable and seemingly intractable and complex thing called body-mind-self and we first break it into, “Okay, there’s body and there’s mind,” but now we’re going to subdivide and analyze our mental experience in terms of images and talk, and our somatic experience in terms of emotional sensation and physical sensation.
So this gives four categories that can be observed that are tangible. And it turns out, what people discover is that when they can keep track of an experience in terms of these categories, they’re not trapped in that experience. Conversely, as soon as you lose track of what part is image, what part is talk, what part is the physical body, what part is the emotional body, they tangle together into a web of limited identity that traps us.
TS: Okay, so let’s just make it very concrete. Could you give an example of an experience somebody might be having when they’re meditating and how they would apply working with these four categories, just to make it very specific.
SY: Sure, I’ll actually talk about my own experience. Once I had a student that had a fear issue and she asked me to help her work with it. So, what we decided to do was we would go on a scary ride in an amusement park together and I would guide her in meditation. That was a safe kind of fear, because it might be an intense fear, but there’s no object in danger. So we did it, we got on this ride, but as soon as we got on the ride, I was guiding her, but I realized that I was sort of freaking out. I was overcome with fear. So, there was a sort of sequence—as we were getting in the ride, I started to notice that I had fear coming up. And part of the fear I could track as a mental image, you know what if the ride crashes, I could see that. Then there was the talk about, “I really don’t want to be here,” then there was emotional feeling in my body, which was the actual juice of the fear. So I could feel that sort of coming on as we were standing in line for the ride and I was tracking it—image, talk, feeling—those are the labels I was using, mentally labeling. Then, when we got on the ride it was much more intense, I could still track it, but the images were coming faster, the mental talk was screaming louder, and my whole body had these intense fear sensations coursing. Then, when the ride started is when I freaked out. I actually became overwhelmed with fear. What was interesting is at that instant, I lost all ability to keep track of what part of the experience was image, what part was talk, and what part was feeling—I couldn’t track them anymore.
At the moment of freak out, the moment of overwhelm, I lost all ability to be precise about the components of my experience. It took me about ten minutes to fight my way back, literally, through this cloud of unconsciousness, fight my way back to being able to detect—okay, this part is the mental picture, this part is the mental talk, this part is the fear in the body. As soon as I could get back to tracking that, the overwhelm went away. You can try this experiment over and over again in your own experience and you’ll see going into an event, you’ll be able to track it and you won’t be overwhelmed. At the instant of overwhelm, you’ll lose your ability to separate the components. Conversely, if you never lose the ability to separate the components, you’ll never be overwhelmed, you’ll never suffer subjectively or act inappropriately objectively, which is huge, huge, huge—that’s just about everything for the human. So this notion of being able to keep track of the sensory components of self is, I would say, one of the major human discoveries, because essentially what it means is that suffering and the screwed up behaviors that come from suffering is avoidable through training. Because anyone can be trained with time to be able to keep track of these components no matter how intensely they arise.
TS: Now, just a clarification, Shinzen. You mentioned at first that there were two categories for the mind and two for the body. But in the example, I was following you in terms of image and talk at the level of the mind, but when we got to the body, it seemed like it collapsed into one.
SY: I only mentioned one of the categories, because it was only the feeling category that was relevant in that particular example. To give you an example where all four are relevant, the classic example is pain. How much suffering do you have from the pain? Well, let’s say that the pain is at level ten—is that all that’s there or do you have some disconcerting mental imagery, some mental talk, or some fear or sadness or irritation in your body. Let’s say that you have ten units of pain, ten units of negative image, ten units of negative talk, and ten units of negative emotion in your body. By what mathematical formula do we calculate what your aggregate suffering or your overall suffering? Well, I would say that the formula depends. In one extreme case, if you have no mindful awareness at all, no ability to keep track of what part is the physical body, what part is the emotional body, what part is the visual mind, what part is the auditory mind. If you have no ability to separate those whatsoever, which unfortunately is the average person’s situation, in that case, the function will be ten times ten times ten times ten, because they interact unconsciously and cross multiply. That would be ten to the fourth power, which is a perceived suffering at level 10,000.
In the other extreme, if you have perfect mindfulness, perfect ability to track, then your perceived suffering would be ten plus ten plus ten plus ten—that’s 40. So, compare the weight of 40 pounds to 10,000 pounds—huge difference without changing at all the content of the experience, but by merely changing one’s ability to keep the components from criss-crossing. You go from a 40-pound weight, which may be a bit of a burden, but at the other extreme you’ve got the crushing, devastating 10,000-pound weight. Yet, sensorially the experiences are identical, the only difference is the ability to keep track of the components.
TS: So you have these four categories and some experiences will evoke sensations in all four categories . . .
SY: Exactly, and sometimes it’s just the mind, sometimes it’s just the body, sometimes it’s just the mind plus the emotional body, it will vary circumstance to circumstance. But this give us all the categories we need to track the body-mind self.
TS: Okay, there’s so much I want to talk to you about, Shinzen, I don’t want to get too nit-picky, but you’re actually the one who introduced this phrase to me once—subtle is significant. So, I do want to make sure I understand, at the body level, this distinction between physical sensation and what you’re calling just general feeling. How do you make that distinction at the body level?
SY: Well, actually, I use feeling for emotional sensation, that’s just my vocabulary.
TS: That’s what I’m trying to understand. Emotional sensation as distinct from physical . . .
SY: Any other type of sensation.
TS: Yeah, like I’m in pain, the emotional sensation—isn’t that an interpretation of some kind?
SY: Okay, you say you don’t want to be nit-picky, but actually you have to be nit-picky in this area. Science is about being nit-picky, which is why most people get bored with science. They just get impatient and they just want quick answers. But certain people are not impatient and they’re willing to really think things out, and that leads to new discoveries. So you ask a very good question. The complete answer would take about 90 minutes, which I don’t think we want to devote that, so I will try to give you a quick version of it.
Neuroscientists are aware that there is a system in the brain that they call the limbic system; it’s sometimes called the emotional brain. What I’ve attempted to do is create certain focusing exercises that will allow a person to be able to detect when their limbic system activates. So, then, well how do you go about doing this? Well, I can give you a tangible example. Let’s say you’re listening to music and, as you listen to music, you are monitoring how your body is reacting to the music. Your body may smile if you like the music, but then at some point if there’s something you don’t like about the music, you get some other kind of sensation reaction in your body. Or, you can listen to people talking, listen to people you agree with—politicians, philosophers, religious leaders—listen to them and then notice the impact on your body. Then, listen to people you disagree with—religious leaders, political leaders, philosophers—who have the opposite of your beliefs, then watch what happens in the body. Pay attention to that. By monitoring your body’s reactions to sounds, especially human speech sounds or music, and then by monitoring your body’s reaction to external visual impressions, with time you can develop a sensitivity to detect the locations and flavors of sensation that are emotional in nature. It’s a training and it takes a while, but if you’re willing to do it, your whole body becomes like this high resolution emotional radar screen. So, as soon as there’s an impact from the physical world, you’re aware if there’s any emotional juice, however subtle—subtle is significant. If there is, you’re able to detect it and open up to it. If there’s not, you’re also aware of that fact. So, by doing exercises in that way, eventually you learn to detect the subtle emotional reactions that we’re constantly having in the body that are triggered by other events. And, that’s how you go about doing it.
TS: Okay, so you started working with these different categories, because you were interested in talking with scientists and working with scientists so that they could demonstrate or illustrate what? What was your purpose? And then, in your work with scientists right now, what are we discovering about these categories and how the brain works.
SY: Well, my ultimate purpose is to bridge the physical description that science gives us of the brain and the subjective description that an advanced meditator gives about what their experience is due to their meditation. In other words, there are two kinds of experts in the world—there are experts in brain physiology and then there are experts in tracking their subjective experience. I want to create a dialog between these two experts, so that they can engage in collaborative research to develop new understandings that we never had before, we meaning the human race. So, the practical consequence of new understandings is, possibly, new technologies for getting to the classical results of the past in meditation. So, if I were to say, “What is my happiest thought?” my happiest thought is the thought that there are important things about enlightenment that none of the greatest masters of the past, including the Buddha himself, knew. Because they couldn’t have known. Because they didn’t have a scientific knowledge of the world. So, if that is indeed the case, then there are new and important things that can be said about classical enlightenment that is pretty much universal around the world in all of the meditative traditions.
If there aren’t new and important things to be said, if the last word and the best word on this subject was uttered 2,500 years ago and there’s no room for fundamental improvement, then there’s not much hope for humanity. On the other hand if, in fact, as the Buddha himself said, the meditative endeavor is a kind of science that can grow with time and that there can be new innovations, if that is the case, then there may be huge hope for humanity, because fundamental breakthroughs in science, fundamental new understandings, lead to practical results in the world. So, this may sound kind of abstract and I can make it more tangible, I can give you examples of what those might be, but there are two tiers. The first goal is to have a neurophysiological model of classical Buddhist enlightenment. The second is to then ask, “Okay, given that this is the case, what can we do to make this experience more readily available to large masses of human beings?” So, it’s a two-tiered agenda. First, get fundamental new understandings, then translate that into essentially new better ways to achieve the goals of meditation.
TS: Now Shinzen, I realize this is an emerging field, but I do think it would be helpful if you just posited what some of these huge fundamental breakthroughs might be.
SY: Because it’s an emerging field, we can’t predict what specifically it will be. If in fact, I had a confident idea of what it was, that would be amazing. But, I can point out some things that are my justification for being optimistic about the possibilities. First of all, I would point to the fact that classical enlightenment experiences—we call it the experience of no self or emptiness or oneness and so forth—these experiences often come about as the result of years of cultivated practice. But, they also sometimes just happen to people for no apparent reason at all, without any meditation proceeding it. Sometimes people get spontaneous liberation experiences. So, the fact that it just sort of happens sometimes without any meditation or background indicates to me that it’s sort of a natural event, sort of just waiting to happen. So, that’s something.
A second point is that if you look at the way—I mean personally, I take the Buddha as being the Sir Issac Newton of world spirituality. There’s science before Newton and there’s science after Newton and there was just a quantum jump after Newton’s formulation. And I think 2,500 years ago we had something like that happen in human spirituality with the historical Buddha. The question is, there was Newton, but then within a short period of time there was Einstein and Plunk and, before that even, Maxwell, then there’s Richard Feynman. There are these people who took Newton and developed relativistic and quantum physics from that—it doesn’t replace Newton, but it takes it to the next step. So, I’m waiting for the next step—it has been 2,500 years, who will play the Einstein to the Buddha’s Newton?
Anyway, going back, by the way, I don’t think it will be a person. My suspicion is that it will be a team of enlightened neuroscientists. But anyway, that’s a whole other conversation. To make things tangible, if you look at the way the Buddha formulated his so called Four Noble Truths, there’s a logical structure to it. Essentially, what he says is that there is a situation that we’re all in called “unsatisfactoriness.” That situation has a necessary cause. A necessary cause means that if you eliminate that cause, the effect goes away. So, there is something that you can get rid of and all you have to do is get rid of it and satisfactoriness or happiness independent of conditions arises. So the Buddha said that a necessary cause for non-perfect happiness is something he called grasping. So, he said if you eliminate grasping, perfect happiness arises—happiness independent of conditions—that he called Nirvana. That’s the Third Noble Truth. So, First Noble Truth we’re stuck in this unsatisfactoriness, but there’s a necessary condition. If you eliminated Third Noble Truth, Nirvana, happiness independent of conditions, independent of time and space of everything will arise for you. And then the Fourth Noble Truth, there’s a sufficient condition—there’s something you can do that will guarantee the elimination of the grasping and that guarantees the automatic arising of this perfection. So, the implication of the Four Noble Truths is not that we have to go out and make enlightenment happen, what we have to do is have an intervention that eliminates something that’s sort of unnatural and is blocking the perfect happiness. And his intervention was something called the Eightfold Path. However, what we do in science is we generalize. Someone makes a specific discovery, then we say, well, maybe there’s a broader framework that contains that discovery. So, is there a generalization of this? Are there other necessary causes for suffering? Things that if they’re eliminated, suffering disappears and the same primordial perfection, nirvana, arises.
Now what’s very interesting is that my own teacher, Sasaki Roshi, says that there’s a necessary cause for suffering. But he doesn’t call it grasping, he calls it fixation. If we fixate the flow of consciousness, then suffering arises. As soon as we stop fixating the flow of consciousness, suffering disappears and primordial perfection arises for us. Now, he’s giving the same logical model as the Buddha, but he’s using a slightly different word and subtle is significant. Clearly fixation is related to what the Buddha called grasping, but it’s not an identical concept and it sounds very much like a physical variable, like viscosity in a hydrodynamic, or impedance in an alternating circuit, or friction in a mechanical system. Once he’s talking about fixation, it almost sounds like a variable that you could quantify in some way. So, now the question is, what he calls fixation. Does something have to happen in the human nervous system for fixation to arise in sensory events?
TS: Now Shinzen, can you and some of these scientists just make a daily vitamin I can take that will be the anti-fixation vitamin? Can you guys just come up with that formula for me?
SY: If we did that or something equivalent, we would be the first people in history to get both the Nobel Peace Prize and the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for the exact same discovery! (laughs) And will there be an enlightenment pill? I don’t know. Will there be enlightenment technological interventions that significantly aid the path to enlightenment? Okay, I’m choosing my words very carefully, so if anybody’s listening to these words and frightened or offended, please listen to exactly what I’m saying. Will that happen? Can’t say for sure, but I can say this—if humanity survives the next couple hundred years, I think it is highly probable that that will happen. It is also possible that unless that happens, humanity will not survive the next couple hundred years. The gods and the devils are running neck and neck as far as this planet goes; the same technology that could liberate humanity could enslave humanity—very interesting. So, the quick answer to your question is, “Has anybody done it?”—no, no, no! I don’t care what anybody says, no one has yet, to my satisfaction, developed a technological boost that significantly aids classical enlightenment, you know, sales hype notwithstanding. “Significant” means world history changes—that’s a consequence. Anybody who claims that they’ve come up with something new, we have to see world history changing in the next three or four decades—fundamentally changing— otherwise it’s not new enough and good enough to satisfy my standards for what I would call a significant breakthrough. But, if you want my opinion, is it likely that this will happen? It may not be a pill, okay, it could be something else.
TS: Yeah, that’s what I’m trying to picture is what kind of technological advancement could you imagine?
SY: The one that I can imagine would, since I go on the paradigm that we’re not trying to induce enlightenment, but we’re trying to eliminate what’s in the way of enlightenment. So, there are two models that I’m familiar with that have that structure, one is the Buddha’s model that if you eliminate grasping or craving—what he calls tanha in Pali language or trishna in Sanskrit—all you have to do is extirpate that and Nirvana arises. The other one that I’m familiar with is from Joshu Sasaki Roshi, the Zen teacher that I’ve been with for all these many years, and that’s the fixation. All you have to do is eliminate the viscosity, and the flow of your senses and the primordial perfection will arise. So, because I sort of am influenced by those two, what I imagine the intervention would be is scientists studying the addiction process, which there’s a lot of research going on with that now. At first they thought they were studying so-called pleasure circuits, but now they’re sort of shifting and thinking that what they’re actually studying is desire circuits.
So, one possibility is that we deeply understand the neurophysiology, that’s to say the anatomy and the chemistry and the electrical activity that underlies not just your addiction to cocaine or alcohol, but your addiction to anything. If we came up with a deep and broad neurophysiological understanding of all grasping, of all craving. In other words if we were able to ferret out the neurocorrelates of tanha and then we, either through some sort of very sophisticated biofeedback or perhaps through something called transcranial magnetic stimulation (which is a non-invasive magnetic field that can change brain activity) or through some other sort of technology we were able to show people what it’s like when those circuits are completely suspended, give them a taste of a grasping-free experience. That might be one possibility. Another possibility would be if we could ferret out the neurocorrelates of the viscosity factor in our circuits, which is probably related to the timing clocks within the brain. It’s always been a suspicion on my part that the timing loops are a little bit out of sync in our brains and that’s what prevents us from being in the moment. So there may be ways, sort of how we have heart pacemakers, there may be a way of having a brain pacemaker that keeps us completely in the moment, so there’s no fixation whatsoever, which would simply then induce an unfixated experience of self and world. You know, you’re asking me to make wild conjectures here.
TS: I think I get the directionality that you’re pointing to. Now, Shinzen, I have a question. You said, there are examples of people in history who have spontaneously awakened without meditation practice and, you know, I think many of our listeners, of course, have heard such stories of such supposedly, at least, enlightened people. What’s your understanding of how that happens? There are some people who meditate for 30 years and don’t feel like they’ve made that much progress and other stories of people, as you mentioned, who “spontaneously awaken.”
SY: First of all, I would say that there are degrees of spontaneous awakening. It’s probably not that uncommon that people get a little taste of it. I don’t know, maybe 20 or 30 percent of human beings actually get a little taste of it at some time in their life, but then it sort of fades after a few minutes or a few hours or a few weeks. But they have an experience of a sort of oneness of inside and outside, a sense of absolute safety and fulfillment that just sort of comes over them. Sometimes it can happen during particularly tranquil times, like you’re walking in the forest or some particularly significant experience of making love or something like that. There can be this state that arises for a little while and then it tends to fade and you sort of go back to the way you were, but you have this memory of this. I would say that that kind of spontaneous enlightenment is not that uncommon, many people can remember maybe once or twice in their life something like that happening. But it doesn’t latch and because it doesn’t latch we don’t call it really enlightenment, it’s sort of like a glimpse of what could be. They’ve never meditated and it doesn’t go away, it just stays month after month, year after year. I would say every year I talk to at least two or three people for whom that has happened. These are people without meditation backgrounds or without much, maybe they’ve heard of it, but they didn’t have a formal practice. In those cases, those people need to be given a context. In the most extreme cases, if something like this happened 40 or 50 years ago, they might actually not have anyone that they could talk to who would understand what they were going through. That actually happened to a friend of mind, her name was Flora Courtois, and she had a spontaneous permanent enlightenment and for years thought she was the only person in the world that had this experience and then she met a Zen master and realized, “Oh my god, there’s a whole tradition behind this.” So, he contextualized it.
So, there’s different levels at which it can spontaneously happen, I know that’s not the question you asked me, the question you asked me is why. Why do some people bust their buns for 30 years and, if they’re lucky, the best they have is a little bit of concentration to show for it, and other people just are sitting at their desk one day and they become their desk and then they become everything and it never goes away? That’s what happened to Flora.
TS: Yes, that’s my question.
SY: That was your question. And the answer is, I don’t know, I don’t know—big time, I don’t know—and no one knows. If anyone knew, we wouldn’t have all this shit going on in the world. But someday we’ll know, I suspect. I can’t even conjecture; I have no idea.
TS: Now, Shinzen, I know a little bit about you in that you’re interested in extreme meditation situations. I know some of your students have had sitting experiences where they sit all night awake in meditation posture. And I know that you’ve had very intense experiences yourself. So, first of all, I’m curious to understand your draw to these kinds of intense experiences and what you think the benefit is.
SY: There are different personality types, like with anything else. And some people are sort of drawn to, “Okay, we’re just going to take the bull by the horns, we’re going to do something extreme and, you know, we’re just going to do it.” So, people like that tend to do things like that. I do not think it is necessary to do that in order to get the classical results. However, there is a statistical tendency that if you are the kind of person that can naturally relate to pushing that way, then there is something of a tendency that that will make the process faster or deeper. But it is certainly not necessarily the case for the average person that the best way to go about it is to do intense, extreme things. That works for certain personality types, but I don’t think it’s a general formulation.
And, once again, why are there these different personality types? I don’t know. If you were to ask me personally, “Well, why do you do this crazy ass shit?”
TS: Yeah.
SY: Yeah, personally, it’s because I would prefer the discomfort of a vaccination to the discomfort of getting the disease. It might seem extreme to sit without moving for four hours or to sit all night, you know, without sleeping or to do some of these Native American things, you know, these shamanic ordeals and so forth. This may seem extreme, but given what’s likely to happen to any ordinary human being, I just look upon it as a minor discomfort that’s vaccination against future horrific suffering. Let’s just put it this way, after my father died, my mother began meditating. Now, my father had all of the amenities of middle class North American life, but when it came time to die of lung cancer, he went for a week without sleeping—forget about a night—while slowly suffocating. That is physically as extreme as anything anyone ever put themselves through in the name of spiritual practice. That was nonconsensual, okay? And there was nothing to be done about it; the best of medicine could only take the edge off. So the fact is really big stuff can very likely happen to anyone and if it doesn’t happen on the physical level, it’s going to happen on the emotional level. I would rather train myself now, train my body-mind circuits now, and go through a little bit of discomfort if it means I can live my life without being under the sword of Damocles that there’s only a separation of a phone call between everything’s going fine and your world comes to an end.
TS: Now, Shinzen can you give me an example of some of the extreme forms of spiritual practice that you’ve personally been drawn to?
SY: Well, as you mentioned, I was forced to sit through a lot of physical discomfort. But just about anyone who trains within an Asian influence, or anyone who has done the Japanese thing, you’re forced to do the things you mentioned, you know, sleep deprivation, those kinds of things. Sweat lodges, they’re not always uncomfortable, but some people run them as shared near-death experiences.
TS: Well, or as we know in recent history, shared death experiences.
SY: Yeah, although, I was in a sweat lodge, after that event in Arizona happened, with a bunch of Indians. And you know what they were saying? I mean, it’s gallows humor. The talk in Indian country after that was, “What do you expect, it was amateur night.” I’ve done those sweats for 30 years all over North America, I’ve never heard of anyone even being injured, much less dying. That’s what happens when people do things when they’re not properly trained and not authorized to do that kind of stuff. So, yeah, anyway, shared near-death experience, if it’s consensual, is very empowering. Actual death, or non-consensual, that’s a whole different issue.
TS: What began your interest in Native American practices?
SY: That’s an interesting story. I was running retreats in Tucson, which I still do, it’s one of the major cities that I visit, and this was about 30 years ago. We were using a venue that was the ranch of a man named Doug Boyd. Doug Boyd’s an interesting person, he wrote a book called Rolling Thunder about a Native American Shaman, and he had grown up in Asia and had this notion that he wanted to get the best representatives of Native American spirituality together with the best representatives of Buddhist spirituality. So, when I was running my retreats at his ranch, the first time I did it he said, “I have some contacts with local Tohono O’odum,” (which is the local tribe there—they used to be called Papago, but they didn’t like that name, their name for themselves is Tohono O’odum) “particularly one man, Rupert Encinas, he is a Sun Dancer.” I didn’t know what the Sun Dance was, but the way he said it it sounded like it was a big deal. And he said “He’d be willing to do a sweat lodge ceremony after your retreat for you and your retreatants.” And I didn’t know what a sweat lodge was. So, I asked him to describe it and it sounded like an interesting idea, so I said, “Yeah, let’s do it.”
So, we had our retreat and the retreat ended and Rupert came and they had a sweat lodge set up on the land and he did a traditional Native American sweat lodge ceremony for us in the Lakota mode. Although he is not a Lakota, he had studied with the Lakota, which are the Western Sioux. And that was my introduction. I remember there was a point in the ceremony where he was sitting at the door, I was in the back, and they opened the door and the sun was just going down, there were no sounds of airplanes or cars, there were no telephone wires, there was just the pristine Sonoran Desert. And the sun was going down, Rupert was sitting at the door, he had a long-stem pipe in his hand, long hair that was unbraided for the ceremony, the sun was coming in, the steam was going out, you could see the sunlight catching on his chest, these rows of scars from all the times that he had been pierced in the Sun Dance, and I remember thinking, “My god, this could be 10,000 years ago and here we are.” All my students were not Indians, just a whole bunch of white guys, and we were having the privilege of going down this time warp to experience the spirituality of our remote human ancestors. And I remember thinking that this ceremony impacts at every level—the physical, the psychological, the social, the shamanic power realms and, at the deepest level, the purification of consciousness, and the experience of oneness with nature. It hits at every level simultaneously. And I just knew, “This is for me.”
And from that time on, last year, I was in Arizona we sweated together and we’ve sweated every year since that first one. And eventually, after I knew him well enough, I finally got up the courage to ask him if I could come and support him during the Sun Dance. So, I got to be present, see him pierced, see him hung by his own flesh, and just see what that was and what that does.
TS: Can you just help illuminate me about how being hung from your own flesh purifies consciousness?
ST: It doesn’t have to be that dramatic. If you make it into a ceremony like that, you’re likely to go into a state that in Buddhism we call equanimity. But it doesn’t have to be something intense and it doesn’t necessarily have to be in a ceremonial context. Essentially, the general principle is, suffering equals pain multiplied by resistance. And spiritual purification and empowerment equals pain multiplied by equanimity. And resistance is the body fighting the pain and the mind fighting the pain. And equanimity is the opposite of that, the body and the mind not fighting pain. So, this is an extreme case within a formalized ceremony. And because of the extreme nature of it and because of the formal ceremony that goes with it, you are likely to go into a state of equanimity. However, it doesn’t have to be extreme and it doesn’t have to be within this context. If you deeply open to the sensations of a headache or menstrual cramps or it’s too hot, it’s too cold—anything, any physical discomfort. If your body relaxes into it and your mind opens up to it, after a few minutes or a few hours, it will turn into a kind of flow of energy that not only doesn’t hurt, but actually seems like it’s cleaning you out, softening the substance of your soul, breaking up the blockages from the past. There’s a kind of taste of purification that you can develop, it’s a very mature spiritual pallet.
And I remember asking him, “Why do you do this?” once I realized what it was that they did, “Why do you do it?” Because it’s not just about being pierced or hung by your own flesh. Actually, as dramatic as that sounds, that doesn’t last that long. You have to dance in the blazing sun without shade, without food or liquid for four days. Medical people will tell you, “Dead in two days, no doubt about it under those circumstances.” But every year, hundreds and hundreds of men, women, and children—I’ve seen Rupert’s children do this—four days, 110 degrees, no liquid. And they dance and no one dies and no one’s hurt. So, anyway, I asked him, “Why do you do it?” And he said, “Well, you get a spiritual high that lasts all year.” Now in the language of Buddhism, I would say that you experience physical discomfort with total openness, it turns into a flow of energy that you sense is working within you. That’s the original meaning of the word “energy”—in Greek, it means that which works within you to purify your consciousness. Energy was originally a Christian term, well it was originally a Pagan term, but when it taken into Christianity in the early period, it meant the working of the Holy Spirit within one. So, you can actually taste the pain turning into this purifying energy and once that happens there’s a positive feedback loop that’s created and the more that happens, the less you’re afraid of the pain and, therefore, the more equanimity you have and, therefore, the more that purification comes on. So, that’s what’s behind that.
TS: Now Shinzen, there are so many things I’d like to talk to you about, but we are coming to a conclusion today. So I’m just going to ask one final question, then hopefully we can talk again sometime and have a follow-up conversation. But the last question I wanted to ask you was, here you’ve been a meditator and a meditation teacher for what, over four decades?
SY: I’m in my fourth decade now.
TS: In your fourth decade now. And what I’m curious about is do you feel that there’s some part, either of your own process or working with your students, that just isn’t touched by meditation, is not transformed by meditation, meditation can’t help you with this part of your life. Or, do you think meditation, the way you’ve been describing it and breaking things into categories, can actually help you in absolutely every area of your life?
SY: Wow, what a great closing question. I would say meditation, properly done, so that means you understand what you’re doing and you do it. Or another way to put it is, meditation under competent guidance, can in theory take care of everything. There’s nothing it doesn’t touch, nothing that cannot be eventually dealt with through meditation. But, and this is a huge but, some of those things might go unaddressed for unacceptably long periods of time if you only use the meditative path and you don’t supplement it with something else. So I would say, in theory, yeah, it can take care of everything. But, in practice—and I’m choosing my words very carefully here—in practice, you may need something else. I did.
TS: Can you be specific about that?
SY: Of course! I can look back on maybe a half dozen huge changes in my being, I mean like major revolutions in who I am as a person, maybe a half dozen that have occurred over those 40 years. Now anybody in the psychotherapy field will tell you if you can get one major change in a lifetime you’re doing pretty good. I think I can look at four or five biggies. So, some of those changes happened directly as the result of meditation only, but with also a great effort to try to make a change. So, I was using the meditation and I was making an effort to change and the two together, with time, the change happened. Some of those changes happened as the direct result of meditation without any effort to make a change. After one ten-day course in the U Ba Khin tradition of body sweeping my ten-year addition to marijuana simply vanished without any on the wagon-off the wagon. In fact without any intention on my part to even change the behavior—it just happened. So, some of the behavior changes happened as a result of meditation and effort to change. Others just happened spontaneously as the result of meditation.
But there was one area of my life that just wouldn’t change. Year after year, decade after decade, I am an inveterate procrastinator and avoider of responsibilities. And, eventually, it became so painfully evident to me, and this wasn’t all that long ago, maybe five years ago, so already in my fourth decade of practice. It’s like, you know what, this isn’t changing. And it probably will change, but maybe I’ll be almost dead by then—that’s unacceptably slow. So, I found out who was the best psychotherapist in my area by reputation—turns out it was a psychiatrist, an MD. And I went into therapy for 18 months—behaviorally-oriented therapy, not therapy that’s uncover my past or make me a happier person, meditation does that just fine. It was behaviorally oriented and to change an avoidance behavior and procrastination behavior on my part was the goal. I asked the therapist the first day, I said, “I don’t need to know myself better, I know myself just fine; I don’t need to be a happier guy, I’m very very happy; I have a specific behavior that I need to change, it’s objective—are you confident that you can help me make this behavior change?” And he said, “I can’t guarantee, but I have professional confidence that I can help you in that specific area with that specific task.” So, I visited a therapist once a week for a year and a half working on that issue. With that plus the momentum of my meditation, I started to get traction, started to see that it could change, and it’s accelerated from there.
TS: Very interesting. Are you not so much of a procrastinator anymore, Shinzen?
SY: It’s pretty dramatic, the improvement.
TS: Very good.
I’ve been speaking with Shinzen Young and hopefully we’ll have a follow-up conversation at some point. There’s so much that I’d love to speak about with this very pioneering, innovative, and forward meditation teacher. Shinzen Young has created several programs with Sounds True, including an audio learning series called The Science of Enlightenment, and a book/CD combination package called Break Through Pain, as well as an audio program on Break Through Difficult Emotions, and a Beginner’s Guide to Meditation audio program.
Shinzen, thanks for speaking with me today.
SY: Pleasure, as always, Tami.
TS: SoundsTrue.com: many voices, one journey. Thanks for listening.
