The Science of Enlightenment: How Meditation Works

260 Pages·2016·1.49 MB·English

by  Shinzen Young

To my teachers
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
T. S. ELIOT, “LITTLE GIDDING”
Contents Editor’s Foreword
Author’s Preface
CHAPTER 1 My Journey
CHAPTER 2 The Most Fundamental Skill
CHAPTER 3 Mysticism in World Culture
CHAPTER 4 Calming and Clarifying
CHAPTER 5 Insight and Purification
CHAPTER 6 The Many Faces of Impermanence
CHAPTER 7 The Realm of Power
CHAPTER 8 The Real No Self
CHAPTER 9 The Power of Gone
CHAPTER 10 Return to the Source
CHAPTER 11 My Happiest Thought
Index
About the Author
About Unified Mindfulness
About Sounds True
Copyright
Praise for The Science of Enlightenment
Editor’s Foreword
I
first encountered Shinzen Young while working as an editor at Sounds True
almost twenty-five years ago. We put out a couple of audio programs with
him, and as part of that, I helped create the tiny cassette-sized booklet that went
with his Break Through Pain recording. That meant working with him quite a
bit, going over the text, making edits, and so forth.
Sounds True was a dream job for me because of moments like this. Getting
to see the world through the eyes of advanced practitioners, talking with them
one-on-one about their understanding of their teachings and tradition, observing
how they solved problems, and so on. I was a gung-ho spiritual seeker at the
time, back from several trips to India, often paying good money to buy a book,
hear a recording, or sit at the feet of a spiritual teacher. The fact that I was
getting paid to work with them was almost too good to be true. It was like being
a student at a real-life Hogwarts or going to meditation college. Given that
meditation and spiritual practice was both my all-consuming personal interest as
well as my job, I thought I had seen it all, so to speak. But Shinzen was
something quite different.
This impression was confirmed a year or two later, when I was given the
assignment of editing a much larger audio program by him. He had come into
our new, spacious studio with five or six students who sat on the floor while he
spent a solid week talking to and meditating with them. I had sat in on several of
the recording sessions, and had been quite intrigued by what I heard. Tami
Simon had asked Shinzen to deliver a “brain dump of everything he knew about
meditation,” and it was fascinating. When the time came to edit this magnum
opus, the computer hard drive contained almost fifty hours of his talks. (We
edited digitally even though the program would be published on cassette.) My
job then was to sit in a small, dark, very silent room and edit this enormous pile
of material into a twelve-part cassette tape series to be entitled, “The Science of
Enlightenment.” The process of editing reminded me of some of the retreat
practices I had done.
The next couple of weeks were a revelation. Shinzen’s guidance, his
concepts, his outlook were those of the kind of meditation teacher that I had
sensed must be out there. He had a comprehensive grasp of Asian languages—
the original tongues of the books, scriptures, and terms that compose the bedrock
of many of the meditative traditions. He had a scholar’s grasp of the philosophy
of spiritual practice and was comfortable talking about not only the upsides of
various viewpoints, but also their potential downsides in a frank and
knowledgeable manner.
But he wasn’t just some dry theoretician either. He had done extensive
retreat practices in all three vehicles (i.e., types) of Buddhism, including three
years as a robed Shingon monk in Japan and decades of hardcore traditional Zen
retreats in both Asia and the United States. He had sat with vipassana teachers in
India. And he had done numerous sweat lodges and sun dances with the Lakota
Sioux in a fully traditional Native American context. He was even willing—
unlike so many American dharma teachers—to talk about enlightenment as a
serious goal of meditation practice, as something that a regular human being
could aim for and achieve.
But there was more. Shinzen is a classic nerd, the kind of guy who wants to
talk about arcane minutiae of word etymologies, and is highly conversant in
science and math. A dharma talk with Shinzen is as likely to include a discussion
of tensor calculus, the physics of fluid dynamics, or an unpacking of how the
Japanese word “Zen” and the English word “theory” sprang from the same Indo-
European root as it is to include an explication of meditation practice or aspects
of the spiritual path. What’s more, he relates such topics to each other,
interweaves them, and shows them to be interconnected facets of greater and
deeper ideas and teachings.
On top of it all, Shinzen is a compelling storyteller. He has the most amazing
tales, ranging from the often-shocking extremes of monastic practice in Asia to
hilarious and insightful anecdotes about meditation centers in America.
In short, I was hooked. He was exactly the kind of teacher I had been looking
for: brilliant, funny, learned, and steeped in a lifetime of serious practice. It took
me about two weeks of heavy engagement to edit the tape series into its final
form. The hardest part about it was the upper limit on the size of our tape sets,
which meant that I had to leave so much valuable material on the (virtual)
cutting room floor.
A decade later, I had left Sounds True, and that box of twelve audiocassettes
had become something of a cult classic. Never a bestseller, it “had legs” as they
say. The Science of Enlightenment was one of those rare programs about which
listeners were likely to say, “It changed my life.” Particularly, long-time
meditators who felt like their practice had become stale, or who had lost
momentum, were benefitting from it. This unassuming program from a nerdy
meditation teacher nobody had ever heard of had the secret sauce that could
transform a solid but lackluster meditation practice into something truly alive,
powerful, and life altering. Around that time, Tami approached me with a
question: Would I be interested in editing the audio series into a book for Sounds
True?
My answer was an instant and unequivocal “Yes.” We guessed it might take
a few months to complete. (Can you hear the Fates giggling in the background?)
Shinzen, Tami, and I were all excited about the possibilities of the book, and I
got going right away.
Initially, the idea had been to simply make the tape set into a book, but I felt
that here was a chance to rescue all that excellent material that I had had to cut
out of the audio. So I obtained a transcription of the entire raw recording and
worked from that. Making spoken word audio read well as text is not as easy as
you might assume. There are a lot of differences between the spoken and written
word, and sometimes things that make sense when said become ambiguous when
the context, tone, and emphasis of the speaker are lost. Furthermore, the
spontaneous wandering of live talks doesn’t translate well into the linear logic
we expect of books. It’s an arduous process, but for me it’s also fun and
fascinating. Within a few short months, just as we predicted, I had produced a
rough draft of a large portion of the book.
It was a decent first shot, but there were several things I wasn’t happy about.
First, during the intervening years, I had spent many hours in meditation retreats
with Shinzen, and I realized that while The Science of Enlightenment was a large
and comprehensive program, it was actually missing a great deal of Shinzen’s
vast storehouse of knowledge. I furthermore realized that Shinzen’s teachings
had themselves evolved and been refined since the set was recorded. He is a very
creative teacher, always refining and reworking his lessons. Thus, I felt
compelled to supplement the original material by both adding to it and
reworking it to fit his new formulations.
Little did I know the rabbit hole this would lead me down. Shinzen had a lot
of other recordings, some of which I thought would be helpful to add in, and
which I dutifully transcribed. I also interviewed Shinzen endlessly on the
telephone, asking him clarifying questions on a multitude of topics. This
produced many more hours of fascinating content, which also needed to be
transcribed. Then there were the hundreds of hours of dharma talks. And as the
years passed, dozens of hours of video also appeared. The project assumed a
Sorcerer’s Apprentice quality; it seemed that the more questions I asked, the
larger and deeper the scope of Shinzen’s answers became, and the bigger the
task grew. There was always another facet, and another story, and another
unexpected jewel.
Eventually all this raw material became so huge and unwieldy, that it was
necessary to break up many hours of dharma talk recordings into pieces, and
distribute them to a veritable army of volunteer transcribers who transformed
them into text files. (A heartfelt thank-you to you all!) The physical stack of
paper printouts was about a yard tall. All of which I read, evaluated, organized,
vetted, reshuffled, ranked, and then actually edited into something which reads
like a book. This process ended up not taking months, but years.
But it wasn’t just the size of the project that was challenging. Shinzen had
not been standing still while I was attempting to wrangle this book together. He
had continued to grow, change, and improve his teachings. His overarching
metaphors, the themes, organizing principles, labels, and even the ways he
talked about the basics of meditation shifted in ways great and small. As helpful
as these changes and additions were, they made writing the book an exercise in
what software programmers call “feature creep,” which means that the features
of the thing you’re supposed to make change before you’re done making it.
Chapters were written, only to become obsolete and require complete rewriting
as later chapters were completed. Tears of frustration were shed. Deadlines were
missed, and new deadlines passed away. All told, instead of a few months, it
took almost ten years to complete.
But as the years passed, something else was occurring also. I was attending
long retreat after retreat with Shinzen, dozens of them. I got a lot out of that
personally; my practice deepened, and my life improved dramatically. And my
understanding of his teachings, as well as the stories he liked to tell, and the
ideas that most deeply underpinned his work, grew clearer and more precise.
During dharma talks at retreats, I made notes about particularly interesting or
illuminating topics, often noticing how these fit together in ways not apparent on
the surface. Slowly, I assembled a list of what I considered to be Shinzen’s
“greatest hits”—the themes, stories, and concepts which he returned to most
often, which had the most impact, and which were the most uniquely his. And