Kensho - The Transition from Neuroscientist to Philosopher

	Book review on Selfless insights by James H. Austin (2009) Reviewed by Peter Fenwick, 2011 published in Network Review No 106
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A delight has been on my bookcase for over a year, and I feel very guilty at not having shared it with you before now. I am of course referring to Selfless Insight: Zen and the Meditative Transformations of Consciousness,  by James Austin.  Those of you who have read James's other two Zen books - Zen and the Brain, 1998, and Zen Brain Reflections, 2006, will be pleased that this is not quite so thick and heavy, although saddened that the pages are fewer.  However, as we know, good things often come in smaller packets, and that is certainly true about this book.

It was again a real pleasure to be able to absorb this book over the last year.  In his thorough way, James reviews his present understanding of the Zen meditative process, but after each thought he gives the reference to either Zen Brain Reflections, or Zen and the Brain. Thus the three books are woven into one seamless text and provide a master class in the  integration of  Zen with neuroscience.  Those of you who have read fMRI expert Chris Frith's Making up the Mind - How the Brain Creates our Mental World, will know that there is some doubt about whether agency, the ability to act voluntarily, in fact exists.   However, there is less doubt about our ability to direct attention.  Iain McGilchrist points out in his book The Master and his Emissary that the universe we inhabit is created by the use of attention. So it is no surprise that James rates attention very highly and starts his book with a clear discussion of attentional mechanisms.  He describes receptive meditation,  a more open, universal, bare awareness, or  more 'other referential, ' and concentrated meditation,  more deliberate, more self-referential, one-pointed attention.  The key to Zen is the cleaning of perception by stilling the mind and he comments that the first taste of Nirvana is reported to arise out of the deeper stage of concentration and attention. 

Neuroscience continually moves on, and so does James's thinking in his understanding of neuroscience in relation to Zen.  This book emphasises two of the major systems in the brain; the alocentric system, that is, the system that characterises the outside world, the 'not me', the distant, the 'other', the thing; and the egocentric system which is all to do with me, myself, my moods, my thoughts, my idea, my feelings, my body image, anything centred on me.  And here the great leap forward in James's understanding has occurred.  He suggests that Zen kensho is the collapse of the egocentric system, if only temporarily, allowing the alocentric system to shine forth in all the trueness of the other.  He points out that with regard to truth, Pascall said "We know truth not only by reason but by the heart.  It is from this last that we know first principles." 

He then quotes Keats' Ode to a Grecian Urn, saying "Beauty is truth, truth beauty - that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know."  He goes on to quote Coleridge "The beautiful arises from the perceived harmony of an object, whether sight or sound, with the inborn and constitutive rules of the judgment and imagination:  and it is always intuitive."  Zen, James says, prefers silence, quiet mindful observations. In solitude, beauty strikes immediately.  Beauty's aesthetic judgements have universal harmonious cause, as does the essence of Zen.  In this book, one can see further James's movement from the neuroscientist to the philosopher- mystic and this adds a depth of understanding and a rare quality of intuition to what he writes.   

Much of the book is centred around Kensho, the moment of Zen illumination, which James experienced on the London Transport system - apparently a fertile field for ecstatic transformations.  He writes as only someone who has experienced can write. "Kensho conveys an impression of authenticity.  At that moment, at the phenomenal level, the experience comprehends it as 'ultimate reality.'" He suggests that "Such an episode would unfold as follows.  1.  The mental field opens up with major fresh intuitive qualities, transparent clarity, efficient processing, and a total release from the clutter of prior, burdensome, self-centred content. 2. In combination, these additions and subtractions reinforce the entire mental experience in an affirmative direction." Like many other authors who have described the effects of an illumination, he details the changes in appearance that it brings about.    It is said that the enlightened move differently, and look different, which allows them to be recognised for what they are.

This book is a wonderful scientific complement to John Crook's World Crisis and Buddhist Humanism, in which he, like James Austin,  examines the fall of the ego at the moment of enlightenment.  The Buddha then saw a new and unified world without the ego, and had a deeper understanding of reality.  A new philosophical movement, the Direct Path method,  is arising in the West.  Amongst its practitioners are a number of Westerners (for example Merrill Wolff, and more recently Tony Parsons, Rupert Spira, Jeff Foster, and Alain Forget), some of whom have followed more traditional Zen methods, and others who have applied the very essence of Zen to their elimination of the personal ego.  Through rigorous discipline of  self-observation they have come to understand from a practical point of view that what science is telling us about the nature of our experienced world is correct.  Our experienced world is a mental construct.  The latest work on attribution theory shows how the brain constructs our reality, makes us feel that we move and think and choose when in fact these processes are grounded deeply within our neurophysiology and there is little that the self-constructed image of self can do. 

The Direct Path and Zen (are they not the same?) lead us through the steps of ego etiolation and disintegration until finally it collapses and there shines through the absolute nature of reality. This is called 'bare awareness.' With the subject/object mode of perception destroyed, bare awareness links all perception together in a field of unity and love. And that, it seems to me, is the true message of Kensho.  James, in this book gives it the underpinning of neuroscience.

Peter Fenwick is President of the Network. 

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