The bizarre science of enlightenment

- Enlightenment is often held out as a thing that we can get.

Sometimes people feel like, well, if I just have those experiences, then I'm enlightened.

But nobody lives in a kind of unusual, altered state all the time.

That, in fact, we move in

and out of states of being more awakened

or less awakened. - These are not experiences

that are happening only to the Mother Teresa's of the world

and the Buddha's of the world.

These are experiences that are happening to everyone.

And when we start to think about the brain,

we can look at the areas of the brain

that help us to determine

which things in our lives are particularly important,

are particularly intense to us. - A lot of people think

that somehow gaining knowledge about the world

and how the world works detracts from its beauty.

Quite the opposite.

The more we understand, the more we can appreciate,

the more we can find wonder

and awe. - We try to divide it into two basic ideas about enlightenment

and one is what I usually refer to

as the “small e” enlightenment experiences.

And these are the kinds of experiences

that people have- kind of the sudden epiphany about how to resolve some issue

you been working on for a long time,

and you suddenly figure it out

and you kind of understand things in a different way for the first time.

But that's the “little e” experience,

and the “big E” experiences are usually those experiences

that are kind of are life changing.

They’re mind blowing.

They change everything about the way you think about the world, about life,

about death, about spirituality.

It changes everything about who you are.

This usually occurs within an area of our brain called the limbic system,

particularly areas such as the amygdala and the hippocampus, which light up,

they go crazy when something really important happens in our life.

Another core element of these experiences, for example, is a feeling of unity, connectedness,

oneness.

There's an area of our brain, a parietal lobe,

which is in the back of our brain.

And this normally takes all of our sensory information

and helps us to reconstruct a sense of our self,

and how that self relates to the world in some kind of spatial way.

What we've found that this area of the brain in particular,

starts to quiet down when people have these profound experiences of oneness or unity.

And this makes a lot of sense.

If it's trying to create your sense of self and your sense of space,

if it starts to shut down, well, you lose your sense of self,

you lose your sense of space.

And I suppose ultimately one of the most important aspects of the enlightenment experience

is its permanence,

is that it rearranges the way our brain works for the rest of our

lives.

And one of the key areas

that seems to be involved in

that is a very central structure called the thalamus.

Some people think that the thalamus is actually the seed of consciousness.

Well, this is an area

that seems to be dramatically changed by these kinds of practices

and experiences.

So if you think about it, if the thalamus is changed,

it's really changing a person's overall perceptions of reality.

The way they think about reality, the way they sense reality,

and ultimately the way their brain interacts with

that reality. - There's this notion

that somehow scientists have this sterile,

clinical, logical, rational view of the world

that leaves no room for mystery

and awe and magic

and wonder.

On the contrary, everything I learn about how the world is tells me it's

full of magic and wonder.

It's often said that the more we know about the workings of the universe,

the more we don't know.

So our growing understanding really tells us about our growing ignorance.

I tend to think of our knowledge of the universe,

and of reality like an island.

The interior of the island is the well-established science

that we know very well.

The shoreline around the island, that's the limits of our understanding.

And beyond it is the ocean of the unknown.

Of course, we don't know whether that ocean goes on forever.

As we gain in our knowledge and understanding.

The island is growing in size, so we’re reaching out.

We can take a paddle out into the water to see some of the

mysteries that we're trying to tackle now

that we still don't understand,

but we don't know how much further our understanding needs to go.

We don't know whether we will ever one day know everything about the nature

of reality.

And in a way that's nice.

That's exciting. - Enlightenment; It's a concept that's very old

and it can mean

so many different things.

But in my Zen tradition,

it really refers to waking up to the truth of what life is.

Most specifically, the interconnectedness of everything.

The essential oneness of everything.

On one level, everything exists separately.

I exist separately from you, and at the deepest level,

none of it is separate.

All of it is completely interconnected and always changing.

That is awakening to the truth of life.

Shunryū Suzuki, a very important Zen teacher in the United States in the 20th

century,

was famous for saying that there's no such thing as an enlightened person.

There is only enlightened activity.

And what he meant by that was that no person is finally,

fully and forever enlightened.

There is only this moment’s activity.

So if I do something that is kind,

that pays attention to my interconnectedness with everyone and everything, that is enlightened activity.

If I do something that's selfish, if I do something that destroys the planet,

that is unenlightened activity.

And so the idea of pursuing enlightenment really is not pursuing a self-improvement project.

It's pursuing a way to be as compassionate as I can in each moment,

to pursue enlightened activity in

as many moments as I can string together in my life.

That's the goal.