LETTER FROM THE FIELD: A Zen Scientist’s View
This letter comes to us from a long-term Zen practitioner in Idaho, with whom I had a Clarity Session a couple of weeks ago. He sent this fascinating email in the days that followed. Some of you will be put off by his scientific outlook and others of you will welcome it. Regardless, it’s fascinating stuff.
I will also tell you this: five years prior to my first large awakening I told Betsy, “When I do wake up, I guarantee you that it’s going to be about patterns.” I later learned I had been at least partially correct.
Hi Fred,
I’d thought I’d take this time and provide a follow-up to our meeting yesterday. Hopefully, I’ll be able to find the words to articulate what it is that seems to be being experienced at the moment.
Last night as I was walking my dogs in the foothills of Boise behind our home, a sensed a subtle shift in my perspective along with some cognitive thoughts that seemed to bridge my recent experiences with some of the research a fellow traveler, friend, and colleague (John Furey) and I have been conducting over the past several years. More on this in a minute.
During the walk, I realized that what I think of as Vincent; that is, my ego, or what you refer to as the character, and the characters of everyone else are nothing more than sets of embedded patterns. Recognizing the trap that what I’m discussing falls within the realm of the dream, as you refer to it, these patterns include those that might originally have been hard-wired, so to speak, in our genes, such as speed of information processing, sensitivity to stimuli, sensitivity to environmental threats, short term memory storage capacity, etc., as well as those that are influenced by early childhood experiences as well as subsequent interactions between our genetic predispositions and lifelong experiences.
This was a subtle realization – no bells and whistles – but profound on two levels. Personally and spiritually – I clearly saw my own nondual self as consisting of both oneness and a specific pattern that I think of as “me”. This seems somewhat simplified when put into words, but the sense of freedom that slowly began to permeate and continues to do so is profound. This, because what I recognized and what “opened my eyes” was that by becoming aware of our nondual nature, we allow ourselves to become free of our identification with those patterns, and in doing so, can free ourselves of the patterns themselves, to a greater or lesser extent, depending on how genetically encoded they are. Thus, ultimately seems to be what is meant by abiding awakening, enlightenment, or embodiment.
On the second level; one that is more cognitive and academic in nature is that because we still live in the world with other beings, go to work, form relationships, etc., we can identify not only that we have these patterns, but that these patterns themselves form specific patterns. These broad patterns are what John and I have been examining scientifically and applying to organizations in our work. For more about the patterns themselves, go to www.mindtime.com. More specifically, the set of patterns each of us manifest and from which we can free ourselves can be described by how we have approached our temporally-based existence. In the past, we have referred to these patterns as past thinking, present thinking, and future thinking.
After my experience yesterday, I see that now, we can refer to them better as past mind pattern, present mind pattern, and future mind pattern. Anyway, it wasn’t my point to go into the nuances of our theory here; but if you are interested, we did publish an article in 2014 in Cosmology (http://cosmology.com/
Now, from the point of view of the awakened self, the academic study and application of mind patterns is just more thinking added onto What IS. However, it seems as though the theoretical framework can be easily applied in “real-world” settings without any need to refer to spirituality or nonduality. By getting people to understand their own mind patterns, in particular, and the mind patterns of others (such as organizational leaders), people can be slowly “led” to free themselves of those patterns.
But me first! (LOL!) What I recognize is that any thought I have is just part of an habitual or conditioned pattern. When I even think about “me” or “I”, I am aware that that is just a thought. That I am just a thought. By becoming aware of the thought itself and the pattern from which it arises and seeing it for what it is, I slowly free myself from my who I think I am and actualize who I really am. Just this. This seems to be where the real work of post awakening takes place. Slowly becoming aware of our patterns, including those most existential!
But then, too, I also realized that not only am I nothing but a thought, but so is the world of manifestation. Taking this further, so is consciousness itself just a thought. In the end I seemed to be left with this: that consciousness itself, awareness itself, is just a thought. And if so, whose thought it is? Damned if I know. What seems to remain is that consciousness (awareness) itself is empty. Whoa! And yet, here we are.
I realize this is a long email; but in writing to you, I also gave myself an opportunity to articulate what I seemed to realize into words.
Thanks again Fred!
Vince
