The following is Part 2 of a two-part series. In this piece I take up the challenge of beginning to apply the theory of adaptive cycles to the processes by which we weave our perceptions into a coherent world. If Part 1 was on the academic side, this is decidedly more personal, exploring subjective states I have experienced, and their possible implications in terms of social history. Click here for Part 1

When I look out my window I see houses across a small valley, and the leafy tops of the trees that grow between the houses. The morning is hazy, and all the different surfaces of this landscape reflect the soft light toward me. The rays of light pass through my retina and become impulses along the branching lines of my optic nerves. My brain weaves these various scraps of visual sense data into a stable and familiar picture, and the sounds of birds singing and traffic on the 101 get woven in as well. My mind does all this work constantly, building on all the similar work it has done for years, re-composing a coherent-seeming world in which I can continue to seek out the things I need and want, preserve myself from what I do not want, and tune out all the rest.

One surprising recognition I have had lately is that the world I perceive – the houses on the hillside across the valley and all that surrounds them – is not, in fact, truly separate from me in the way I typically assume. When I look, I find that there is no me apart from these sense impressions and the memory of similar experiences of contact back through time. And, like other human beings, I myself am the product of a long, complex evolutionary emergence that has shaped my eyes and ears and mind to receive the sense impressions out of which I weave this picture of the world. It would be just as true to say, in fact, that those sense impressions of the houses across the valley ARE me, at least as much as anything else – my memories, my image in the mirror, my name – are me. And this basic error, this mistaken assumption of separation, explains why the kind of self-interested engagement described above – where I seek more of what I like and less of what I don’t – is always a deeply frustrating experience. When I stop making this error – when I open to the way in which that hillside across the way is not separate from me – I experience a sense of presence that arrives with an intensity verging on the ecstatic, but that also remains stubbornly mundane. A shift take place, an easing of tension in my shoulders. Often, a small bubble of elation will rise from the center of my chest to lift the corners of my mouth. Something stops not-fitting would be one way to describe this experience, but, at the same time, the mortgage still needs to be paid, my daughter needs to be delivered to dance class on time, and, at any moment, the Spanish Inquisition may show up at my front door. But perhaps the most interesting thing about looking out and being greeted by a world not-separate from me is how the experience registers not as a new discovery but, rather, as the affirmation of something I have always known.

The kind of fleeting recognition I’m describing here happens more often when I’m alone. It’s more challenging to have this experience of non-separation when other people are around, and the reason for this is how confusing and mysterious it is that they too could be not-separate from the world, which suddenly includes me as one of its minor details. Above and beyond the abrupt and, in my view, totally scandalous demotion this represents for me, I really just don’t get it, don’t understand how I could be so central and also so peripheral at one and the same time. In my confusion I assume, quite embarrassingly, that I was imagining the whole not-separate thing. Immediately I collapse all the way back into a hard-shelled creature scuttling along in search of the best deal I can claw for myself in a long, competitive haggling with an uncaring world. My sense, lately, is that this subtle cycling through states of connection and collapse – analogous to the four stages of adaptive cycles I wrote about in Part 1 of this post – happens continually, right on the edge of my conscious awareness.

Lately, I’ve found it helpful to view this odd fact about other people – that they too are not-separate from the world of their experience – not so much as a puzzle I must solve, but rather as a mystery I can be curious about. It occurs to me that I experience then something like the sense of wonder that can be found in the wide eyes of infants when they catch your gaze – that studious intensity it’s so much fun to get lost in. For a baby to recognize another being looking down over the edge of the crib, they must already be entering what the influential psychologist Jacques Lacan termed the “mirror stage.”  This is when the period of “symbiotic” union with the world of experience ends and the child begins to impute his or her own existence as a separate ego-form or self based upon what he or she sees in the eyes of the Other. The infant will become very interested in how the eyes of the Other respond to what they see. If those eyes are lit up with love, kindness, perhaps even longing, a warm bath of comfortable endorphins will wash over the infant’s nervous system. And if the gaze of the Other is full of anger and aggression, a buzz of destructive adrenalin courses through the infant instead. As the child matures, he or she will begin to theorize about what causes positive versus negative reactions in the gaze of the Other.

It’s generally assumed that infant development is a series of steps in the “right” direction, the direction of “reality.” But some modern cognitive scientists, Francisco Varela, for example, tend to agree with the non-dual wisdom traditions of Asia that our sense of separation is itself deeply delusional. Lacan, certainly, viewed the mirror stage as the beginning of a long flight away from the real into the neurotic alienation that is viewed in the West as “normal” ego development. For Lacan, the confusion of the mirror stage is cemented by the acquisition of language, the symbol system that allows us to navigate the social sphere, but that also seals us from our own groundless being. After this fall from Eden we are pursued by a sense of lack and diminishment, and a longing for completion. In our confusion we do crazy, destructive things like construct huge civilizations that drag the planet toward what Paleontologists now refer to as the third “great extinction.”

“Emptiness is the ultimate protection,” the Tibetan saying goes. “Emptiness,” as you may know, does not refer to “void” but rather to “empty of form.” Knotted with philosophical subtleties, the idea basically underscores the way any object or separate thing can be viewed as a complex set of factors arising together in an interdependent fashion that includes your perception of it. Part of the reason it’s so hard to express the nature of “emptiness” elegantly in a post of this kind is that words themselves are so much about the separateness of things, the “form” aspect of the pen that is, insistently, a pen. From the point of view of Buddhist psychology both these poles of the pen – its form aspect, and its emptiness or co-emergent aspect – are equally valid. The famous “middle way” of Buddhism involves holding both extremes in mind at the same time. Our problem, our “suffering,” arises from our inability to maintain this balancing act. Specifically, we have a strong bias in the direction of form.

It’s easy to see the Darwinian survival value of this bias – seeing the “form aspect” of the cave bear galloping toward you is central to your ability to pass your genetic material on to future generations. Today, though, the interlocking challenges of environmental degradation and social injustice that threaten the species can be traced to this same bias. I’m persuaded that this little glitch in human software explains certain mysteries – such as how, on our astonishingly abundant jewel of a planet, we could be so bent on self-elimination, and be pursuing exactly that with such single-minded fervor and devotion. It seems fitting that the urgent issues confronting us would prove so difficult to solve precisely because they are so complex and emergent – so much a result of the interconnectivity our reductive rationalism – our bias in the direction of form – runs counter to. Time to rebalance, in other words, in the direction of a protective “emptiness.”

Many people find it easier to form an emotional relationship to a state of mind when it is reified into a deity figure. Do that with this slippery concept of “emptiness” and you end up with the deity worshipped for millennia in large parts of Asia – Shiva. In the West the ancient Greeks handed down to us a version of Shiva, and we call this deity Dionysus, god of madness and ecstasy. You might be more intimately familiar with Dionysus than you realize – Sigmund Freud smuggled him into the culture in the guise of the subconscious mind, which he derived, to some degree, from the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. From this point of view, when you go visit a counselor or shrink you are actually talking to a kind of priest mediating your relationship to this powerful archetype.

For me, an even better place to worship Dionysus is at the theater. Whatever the specific content of the play or performance, what we cherish most, if only covertly, is the conjuring of an illusion of “reality” that we can experience fully, form and emptiness reconciled. Buttressing each other, shoulder to shoulder in our seats, we discover the courage to witness together the appearance of reality rising up out of nothing to dance for a while under the lights, and then dissolve again into nothing but the memory of our applause. Here we find Shiva, the dancer, who, in the Tantric traditions articulated over a millennium ago, weaves continuously through a cycle of creation, preservation, concealment, revelation and destruction. I find it comforting to note how well this sequence harmonizes with the four stages of adaptive cycles – rapid growth, conservation, collapse and renewal. The fact that some environmental thinkers have arrived at insights similar to those of ancient Asian wisdom traditions would seem to underscore the strength of these ideas, and to encourage us to revise our habits of mind accordingly.

On a visit to Santa Fe recently I read up on neuroplasticity and found myself haunted by the memory of a set of cement stairs. These stairs I encountered briefly when I was eight years old and my parents were hurtling toward their final separation. The stairs belonged to a monthly rental in Santa Monica where we had traveled for the summer from the East. They led up to a hallway and, at the far end, an apartment I never wanted to enter. At night the thin walls would shake with my father’s wounded bellowing and the sound of things breaking. We children would gather in the corner of the bedroom, the three of us, around our youngest sister as she cried from an ache in her chest that wouldn’t ease. There was no safety in the world for us, huddled there in the dark, and we knew it and were filled with fear.

I’ve come to Santa Fe to attend a workshop in science writing and I have been reading the recent books authored by the instructors. Sandra Blakeslee, one of the country’s top science writers, is leading the workshop, the 15th of its kind. Working with her is George Johnson, a writer duly celebrated for his ability to explain things like Quantum Chromodynamics in elegant, simple prose. On the first night the attendees gather in the courtyard of the Ghost Ranch for dinner and drinks. As I say hello I keep catching little glimpses of those cement stairs, the somatic charge of old remembered fears traveling up through my body.

You can’t pursue a meditation practice nowadays without bumping into a book on neuroscience. Advances in the technology of brain imaging have opened the inner realm of meditative states to empirical study. The Embodied Mind by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosche, first published in 1991, was a seminal text. A Buddhist himself, Varela, along with his co-authors, reviewed recent developments in the neuroscience of perception to buttress the core Buddhist concept of non-dualism. After The Embodied Mind, the stream widened considerably. Psychopathologist Richard Davidson began hooking Tibetan monks up to brain scan machines and recording the results. Davidson was soon joined by a growing circle of accomplished scientists and meditators including Jon Kabat Zinn, Daniel Goleman and more recent authors such as Daniel Siegel. Sensing the opportunity, the Dalai Lama lent his considerable weight to the endeavor, helping to create the Mind-Life Institute in Boulder, Colorado, where these investigations continue today. The controversies surrounding this research will continue for a time, no doubt. In the end we will arrive at a closer understanding of the underlying reality of how experience and neurology interweave. Also significant in this ongoing inquiry are non-Buddhist researchers into mind-body issues and brain science, such as Antonio Damasio, Vilayanur Ramachandran and Jeffrey Hawkins.

Dan Siegel’s book, The Mindful Brain, published in 2006, begins with an overview of the emerging field of contemplative neuro-science. Siegel then focuses in on how negative emotional experiences get hard wired into the brain, and how this wiring restricts our freedom and insures neurotic suffering. He presents a new explanation for how specific social and emotional circuits in the brain can be harnessed to transform our experience through basic meditation practices such as mindfulness. Here, I note in passing, are the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths – suffering, its cause, its cessation, and the way to achieve its cessation – in modern dress.

Change comes hard, but it can come, is the message. Affective Anxiety disorders, like the one that sends images of the cement stairs reeling through my mind, can be addressed through concerted effort. When somatic emotional charges are fully felt in the present they release their grip. We no longer confuse such strong emotions with who we are in any real sense, and after a while the conditioning ceases to express itself in neurotic behavior. Engaging with experience in this kind of non-dual mode begins to cultivate within us a sense of inter-connectivity with other beings, and an authentic concern for their welfare. And over time the momentum of practice calls upon us to engage with a larger effort to ease suffering in the world.

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On our first day together the group of us visit Santa Fe Institute which overlooks Santa Fe on a hilltop just outside of town. Founded in 1984, SFI is devoted to the study of complex adaptive systems. This study of “emergent” phenomenon widens the scientific gaze to include those complex processes that arise out of the interactions of much simpler elements. SFI’s Nobel-winning patriarch Murray Gell-Mann has summed up this view with elegant concision: “you don’t need more to explain more.” Whatever mystery there is in the universe resides below, in other words, in the basic particles and forces and how they interact, giving rise to miraculous complexities such as Gell-Mann’s intelligence.

At the Institute we gather around a very long table to hear Omidyar fellow Tanya Elliott talk about her current efforts to construct a model for sustainable development. Elliott is an inter-disciplinary researcher with a doctorate in theoretical physics and an on-going interest in language and cognition. The subject of her talk is how patterns of dysfunction have been hard-wired into the economic and social structures that are reducing our chances of survival. The coordinated, sustained effort required to undo this collective “wiring” clearly echoes the efforts we make as individuals to liberate ourselves from neurotic patterning. The tension between reductive patterning and expansive opening holds true across different scales, including the one where we live and breathe.

In his TED talk on Beauty and Truth in Physics, Gell-Mann points out the remarkable fact that beauty is actually a very successful criterion for choosing the right theory in physics. By beauty, Gell-Mann is talking about the distillation of complex phenomenon into equations with an elegant simplicity to them, E=MC2, for example. Our gradual approach toward a unified theory is like the peeling of an onion where the successive layers resemble each other. The equations derived to make sense of the last layer come close to explaining the new one: approximate self-similarity holds true across the different scales.

Listening to Tanya Elliott I wonder again what self-similarities underlie the long elaborate drama Freud called “Civilization and Its Discontents.” Psychologists often act as if emotional trauma were the exception to the rule, but perhaps trauma is, quite literally, our birthright. More so than any mammal we are dependent on our mothers for survival. The huge neocortex that provides our capacity for awareness is to blame. We can’t stay in the womb a moment longer than we do or our heads would grow too big to emerge. And so our sensitive brains are immature when we enter the world. A colt can get up and run at the end of its first day, while we must cling for dear life to our mothers into our second year. Whenever this external life-support system is unresponsive, even for a brief interval, we are viscerally traumatized, literally in fear for our lives. As they form, our brains are flooded again and again by this intense emotion, which shapes our neural pathways. Our sense of being an independent self is infused from the start by anxiety, and is perhaps entirely an expression of this anxiety.

Unflattering though it may be, embracing this view allows us to understand how the pursuit of “normal” happiness might lead to the collection of ills – nuclear proliferation, peak oil – that currently darken our horizons. Perhaps we need to redefine the paradigms of what constitutes “normal” if we are going to gain any traction over the large scale imbalances that threaten us. Perhaps it is this “background” anxiety hidden behind the “normal” self that is expressing itself in environmental degradation and our addiction to unsustainable levels of consumption.

In books such as A Buddhist History of the West, historian David Loy unpacks the issue of “lack” as a historical and cultural force driving human history. The history of the West, to Loy, is defined by our ongoing attempt to escape or explain away our experience of groundlessness in the world. We are not “real,” in the way we long to be, Loy writes in a remarkable essay titled “Self Transformation and Social Transformation” (Tikkun): “the sense-of-self is a psychosocial construct, it is ungrounded and ungroundable—hence always insecure… we try to bolster an illusory construct by focusing on something outside ourselves, which cannot provide the grounding we seek from it…no matter how much money I may accumulate, it will never be enough. The same is true for fame, power, beauty, and so forth.”

The foundation of Western political thought is the recognition by the ancient Greeks that political systems were themselves social constructions. Loy points out that this is, in fact, an invitation to rearrange our collective life so that it works better for us. Surveying our current situation Loy laments the mass suffering that arises when the “three poisons” of greed, ill will and delusion provide the foundation for social interaction. “Today,” he writes, “our economic system has institutionalized greed, our militarism institutionalizes ill will, and our corporate media institutionalize delusion.” Such a situation might seem daunting and unworkable, but, as many of us know from direct experience, change truly is possible if we first have the courage to look at dysfunction in all its lurid glory.

Each day my wife visits the Kali machine at UCLA. The techs lay her down on a metal pallet and bolt to her head a hard white plastic mesh that’s been molded to fit her face. The linear accelerators of the IMRT (Intensity Modulated Radiation Therapy) device, big as a small car, start up. Seven beams of X-ray radiation target the zone beneath her right ear where the parotid gland used to be. This gland, the largest of the salivary glands, was surgically removed in January, along with the malignancy that had grown within it. Any cancer cells that lingered in the wound would eventually sprout into new tumors, so they need to be destroyed. Each day the X-rays of the Kali machine tear into the exposed DNA of cells in the process of replicating. Since cancer cells do almost nothing but replicate the X-rays kill them off with great efficiency, leaving the delicate surrounding tissues damaged but capable of regeneration. The Kali machine hums and hovers around Jenny’s head for about fifteen minutes and then the techs unbolt her and we drive back East toward Silver Lake.

Merciless and potent, tongue protruding, Kali dances with a belt of skulls dangling from her waist below her many blue arms. The destructive aspect of the divine feminine, Kali takes away what currently exists in order to open a space for what will come. She dissolves form to reveal an underlying “emptiness” full of potential. Cancer cells, meanwhile, with their blind, obsessive self-copying, strike me as the ultimate triumph of “form.” A single note tapped over and over, cancer replicates with endless uniformity, confronting us with the monomania of the death instinct in its purest manifestation. By ending death’s sovereignty Kali, paradoxically, is a bringer of life.

When I first heard about the seven beams of IMRT my mind immediately turned to the Seven Points of Mind Training, the Tibetan meditation sequence that has been a part of my sitting practice for half a decade now (a good translation is important). First brought to Tibet in the 11th Century by Lord Atisha and written down in the 12th century by the Kadampa master Chekawa, Mind Training turns the engine of the self into reverse, amplifying the experience of compassion and presence. The idea is that we cut ourselves off from fully experiencing our lives by pushing away the things we don’t like and by clutching the things we do like too tightly. This pattern of aversion and attachment becomes a fixed and rooted structure of separation, a false self progressively alienated from authenticity. With Mind Training you practice the opposite: giving away what you’re attached to and taking in what you don’t want. Counter-intuitively the result is an energized presence that reminds us of our innate freedom, a rising up out of the meaningless struggles of samsara. Deceptively pithy, the adages of the Seven Points interconnect with a subtle logic, like a complex and beautiful score one can only begin to appreciate after long exposure.

In the waiting room I sometimes unpack the parallels between the seven beams and the Seven Points. Implied in the comparison is the notion that the emotional patterns and self-images composing the reactive ego echo the replicating monomania of cancer cells. In left-brain thinking mode we impose a single interpretive straightjacket over all our experience – must be this! Can’t be that! We view ourselves as separate and apart and continuous in time, blinding ourselves to the imbalances and dysfunction we create in the world around us. The path of practice involves a steady engagement with the retreating forces of the ego, which sprout everywhere, cancer-like, distorting the energy of the awakened aspects of mind. In this view the purpose of practices like the Seven Points is to search out every hiding place of the reactive self – paging Sidhattha Gotama, head oncologist.

Opinion is divided on the extent to which the current prevalence of carcinoma is the result of environmental degradation, but everyone knows toxicity plays a role. On my iPhone as we make the trip across the LA basin I tap into satellite imagery of the globe as it appears from outer space. The healthy greens and blues are shot through now with the necrotic tissue of asphalt and concrete, the socio-economic carcinoma of 21st century human development. On a geological time frame this burst of growth is abrupt, beginning back only three hundred spins around our small star. The black spot would have started in the mill towns of Southern England and spread quickly East and South before jumping the blue Atlantic (on trade ships loaded with textiles and slaves) to metastasize in the fertile tissue of the resource-rich Americas.

And yet tonglen, the Seven Points, and all the other Asian imports (Zen, Theravada, Tantric practices of all kinds) come to us via the era of unprecedented wealth and plenty created by that same fire. The oil fat post-War American consumer paradise generated enough light to crack open the fortress of the Western mind. In its pragmatic materialism liberal democracy produced a sustained experience of what the Buddhists mean by the “Human Realm.” One of the six “realms” of samsaric existence, the Human Realm is defined by the pursuit of mundane material satisfactions. The satisfactions may be real enough…but so is the disappointment as time continues on, sweeping us along. As sure a recipe for suffering as the other five realms, the Human Realm is different in one regard – in classical depictions it’s where the stem of the lotus of Nirvana – non-dual awareness – finds its roots. The Human Realm is where we enter “the way,” in other words.

It’s important to understand this today because the stem of the lotus is delicate and under attack. The neocons and other proto-fascists, whose moment was the presidency of George W. Bush, are devoted to shifting our political realities in the direction of the lower realms. Descendents of Thomas Hobbes, who viewed humans as inherently evil and life as a war of all against all, the neocons embrace the solid feeling that comes when the self is under attack. They are denizens of the Hell Realm, in other words. What makes them particularly dangerous is that they recognize the utility of scarcity. Scarcity propels us into our brain stems toward reptile mode where we are easily controlled. The neocons have an advantage in that scarcity is easier to generate than abundance, and the coming short fall in oil reserves, to choose just one example, will provide them with a wealth of opportunity.

Hobbes counterweight on the left would be Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “Man is born free but everywhere he is in chains.” Rousseau’s ideas took a hard hit in the mid 20th century as the idealistic revolutions in Eastern Europe and China gave rise to totalitarian forms of state socialism. As a result, the emotional reserves of the left are in much worse shape than the last time Capitalism faced a crisis like ours – the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. But Rousseau’s ideas seem less foolish when viewed from the perspective of non-dual thinking. The concept of private property, to choose one example, stops making so much sense when we abandon our determination to separate from the underlying contingency of our lives. If you give a man a way of relating to this aspect of experience, that man will stop wasting precious time amassing a huge fund of private property and then rigging the game to protect it. Great private wealth is famously useless in the end, a false promise that has seduced many lives into a compromised existence.

To me it seems clear that Western political thought, aided now by advances in brain science, is knocking on the door of the non-dual. Empirically speaking there really is no world separate from what we experience in the here and now. There is great mystery in that – how could this vast world exist non-separately from my experience, and also from your experience? Not to mention non-separately from the experiences of the multitude of other souls breathing right now? How can we begin to make sense of a paradox like that? I certainly can’t…but maybe it’s possible to live with that mystery instead of needing to resolve it. Mystery and paradox, after all, define the material world down to its quantized roots.

My hope is that a new mode of thought will emerge to help us ride out the assorted crises confronting us. A series of questions announce themselves: how could the bedrock of laws be modified to retain all the creativity and energy of a capitalist economy but in a more balanced way? What socio-political practices would allow us to mitigate the trashing of the planet? My sense is that the shadows created by the harshly analytical Western mind may yet conceal solutions to the complex of interlocking crises on the horizon. The empirical traditions of Western science remain a potent tool for correcting the imbalances we have created. I write this as a man who feels as grateful right now for the medical technology of the Seven Beams of IMRT as I have felt for the transformative power of the Seven Points.