Self-knowledge today
Insights from neuroscience and the modern mindfulness movement
◆ Dr. Niels Detert is a Clinical Neuropsychologist working at the John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford. he teaches a group programme in mindfulness training for patients with neurological conditions, based on the work of Dr Jon Kabat-Zinn.
This article is adapted from a talk given at the SKGR Symposium in 2009.
Preliminary findings from neuroscience are consistent with what we know from spiritual masters and what we find through experience. There is no thing which is the self.
Several years ago I was called to one of the hospital wards to do an assessment. My patient impressed me with the kindness with which she treated the nurses who were helping her into a wheelchair. Once we were alone she completely surprised me by asking, “is there a perfect man in the hospital?” Taking her question at face value I replied, “umm, there was one once…” tailing off because I momentarily couldn’t remember the name of Akong Rinpoche, a Tibetan High Lama who years ago worked at our hospital. She said, “You should say you are!” I replied, “You’re right, I should”, but that’s not necessarily how I see myself most of the time.
Akong Rinpoche escaped on foot from Tibet after the Chinese invasion and came to Britain, living for a period in Oxford. Although a reincarnate lama and a doctor of Tibetan medicine, he worked as a hospital porter at the Radcliffe Infirmary to provide for the needs of a small group of Tibetan exiles, including Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, with whom he was to found Kagyu Samye Ling Tibetan monastery in the Scottish Borders, the largest outside Tibet. Trungpa later went to Boulder, Colorado, and was one of those who brought to the United States the knowledge transmitted through the Buddhist tradition. One of the many beneficiaries of the wider Buddhist movement in the USA was Jon Kabat-Zinn, originator of the rapidly expanding mindfulness movement in medicine.
In a parallel movement, from Turkey to Britain, came Bulent Rauf, who was instrumental in founding the Beshara School. He was a man steeped in the knowledge – transmitted through the great masters Ibn ‘Arabi and Rumi – that truth, god, one reality is the very nature of all things and is there to be discovered by each of us in and through ourselves. This knowledge is at the core of all spiritual traditions. In the same spirit, when Jon Kabat-Zinn asked the Dalai Lama, “is there any difference between the Buddha Dharma [way, teaching] and the universal Dharma?” he replied, “no”. In the tradition of Ibn ‘Arabi, the one who has realised this unity in and as themselves is referred to as the perfect human, and in other traditions as the saint, enlightened one, or Buddha.
When the lady asked, “Is there a perfect man here in the hospital?” all of these meanings crowded through my mind. How did she know to ask me that question? Her next statement, “You should say you are!” was checkmate. How could I square my vision of myself as far from perfect, with the universal perspective that I knew to be true? If I answer one way I miss the mark, if I answer the other I also miss the mark. In the Zen tradition this sort of question is a koan, a riddle for which thinking and analysis cannot provide the answer, but which has the potential to break open the mind’s limited perception of reality. This one is closely related to the basic question “Who am I?”
Bulent Rauf related a story in which a student from the Beshara School asked Akong Rinpoche, “Why is there suffering?” to which he replied, “Why is there I?” the Buddha said his whole teaching could be summarised in the statement “nothing is to be clung to as I, me, or mine.”
This question of ‘I’ needs to be answered experientially. It has to be investigated and directly perceived; thinking and analysis cannot reach an answer. One way this can be done is through meditation, observing the process of experience and discovering that this ‘I’ is nothing more than the very clinging to one thing, then to another; grasping at what is desired, rejecting what is disliked; taking credit, pride, blame and shame; judging self and other; constructing a self-narrative; re-running memories; pre-occupation with future possibilities. This ‘I’ arises only with the thought process, but it happens so habitually that we begin by mistaking it for who we really are. Is there an ‘I’ apart from this clinging to things? What happens if we let go of it?
Within the last ten years, neuroscience has begun to investigate the process of self. Much of this research uses functional MRI (FMRI), a brain imaging method that can measure the level of activity in different brain regions while the person in the scanner is performing various mental tasks. Converging lines of evidence point to a network of areas in the brain which are active during tasks such as judging the self-relevance of experience and engaging in self-referential thinking (e.g. Vogeley & Fink1). A mass of evidence established within psychological research indicates that self- referential thinking – ruminating about yourself – is associated with negative mental states and outcomes. Coming back to more recent imaging studies, a separate line of evidence emerged when researchers tried to establish the baseline of activity when the brain is ‘at rest’. It was discovered that certain regions of the brain, including areas of midline frontal and posterior brain, are in fact very active during ‘rest’ (Gusnard et al2 ; Raichle et al.3). These are the same regions as those associated with self-processing in the other research, and have become known in the field as the ‘default network’.
‘Default’ is not a bad word for this ‘automatic pilot’ mode of thought. activity in the default network has a reciprocal seesaw relationship with another network, which becomes active when attention is other- directed. When one is more active, the other is less, and the pattern swings from one to the other and back. Austin,4 noting these findings and others, sees a link with the experience known in Zen as kensho, a spontaneous and very clear objective awareness which is selfless. This is occasionally experienced by Zen practitioners, usually spontaneously and not while meditating. He proposes that this may be associated with an unusually dramatic tilt of the seesaw to the other-directed side, revealing an experience of the world without the sense of self. There is a further suggestion in the (to my knowledge) unpublished work of Zoran Josipovic (2006, dissertation5) that an experienced meditator may be able to maintain activation of both internal and external networks simultaneously, which may be the neural correlate of unified consciousness.
On the basis of all this, it has been hypothesised that what is usually happening when we are ‘at rest’ is in fact not rest, but self-referential thinking and processing. Anyone who has ever meditated will have first hand experience of this, because when you start to meditate, you begin to notice how busy the mind is with an endless series of loosely associated thoughts, memories, plans, daydreams and thoughts about these thoughts. it seems very likely that these brain-imaging studies are observing the brain activity associated with these experiences. This idea has been further explored in an elegant study by Farb and colleagues.6 They looked at what goes on in the brain during different modes of self-reference, and at the effect of an eight-week mindfulness meditation training. to look at the ‘default mode’ type of self-referential thinking, people were scanned whilst being shown a series of adjectives (e.g. bitter, envious, anti-social, productive, lively, delicate). they were given the task of reflecting on whether each adjective describes them as a person, and in what way, and of allowing themselves to be caught up in the train of thoughts about that. they called this type of self-reference ‘narrative focus’ because it involves thinking about the self in a narrative way. it turned out that this produced a pattern of brain activity in keeping with the previously recognised default network.
They also looked at a contrasting mode of self-reference, which they called ‘experiential focus’. The same people watching the same words were asked instead to monitor all aspects of their present, moment-to-moment experience in response to these adjectives. This would be expected to activate a different brain network. They found that the group with training in mindfulness meditation were much better able to do this. Without mindfulness training there were differences in brain activity between these two modes of self-awareness, but people found it hard to maintain an experiential focus and there was still substantial activation of the default network. In the group with mindfulness training the differences were clear and large; brain imaging during the ‘experiential focus’ task revealed a network of activity quite different and clearly separate from the default network. this network includes brain areas more associated with sensory and bodily experience and characterised as more ‘objective’, and not involved in judgements of self-relevance and self-referential thinking.
Even more interestingly they showed that mindfulness training changed the way that different brain areas are connected. Without mindfulness training there was co-activation between the parts of the brain processing the sensory experience of self, and parts doing the narrative self-processing. This fits with the common experience that a process of ruminating about ourselves is easily triggered by all sorts of inner and outer stimuli. after mindfulness training, however, these areas were decoupled. this fits with the observation amongst meditators that mindfulness training enables a mode of self-awareness which is based in present moment experience, more ‘objective’, and characterised by experiencing thoughts, feelings and bodily sensations as transient events, rather than as good/bad or integral to the self. The researchers propose that all this is evidence for two distinct modes of self-reference. One of these, the narrative self, seems to share many of the characteristics of the ‘I’ to which Akong Rinpoche referred. The other, the experiential self-awareness, seems to be a mode of experiencing the self which is distinct from that.
Another study (Pagnoni7) worked with Zen practitioners of somewhat longer experience and novices practising awareness of breathing, and looked at brain activity when both groups were presented with distracting words during the meditation. The brain imaging showed that although the Zen practitioners did engage the default network, they did so much more briefly than novices. This suggests that a practical effect of mindfulness practice is to increase resilience to the automatic, habitual operation of self-referential processing. it would be interesting to see if this effect also operates outside periods of formal practice.
Other studies have documented a variety of long-term structural and physiological changes in the brains of long-term meditators, associated with length of training. of course these studies raise many more questions, and are just the beginning of investigation in this field.
So what happens when we let go of the ‘small self’? Preliminary findings from neuroscience are consistent with what we know from spiritual masters and what we find through experience. there is no thing which is the self. there is a process of thinking and analysis of experience. It is not even continuous: its aura of continuity is, I suspect, part of the image created in the present moment, but the process in fact comes and goes. through training it is possible to taste a mode of experience without this companion. This habitual tendency can be weakened, and an alternative selfless mode of experience inhabited. the ‘selfing’ process itself can be observed objectively, and its insubstantiality seen. However, something which does not exist in the first place cannot cease to exist. Neither are we going to cease thinking. the awareness which is clear and vast, is already clear and vast: it is not the mind which thinks it needs to clear itself. The only thing that can change is the ignorance of thinking this small ‘I’ is who I am. This can happen when we remember to practice taking up residence in open awareness, bringing attention to the process of ‘selfing’, seeing through it and recognising reality. In my experience this is an iterative process, repeated again and again. For most of us some form of education or guidance is helpful.
This way of self-knowledge is beginning to become more easily and widely accessible than at any time in human history. One sign of this is that forty-five years after Akong Rinpoche worked there, the Radcliffe infirmary – now relocated as the John Radcliffe hospital – offers a training in mindfulness for patients on the NHS, almost impossible to imagine back then. The mindfulness-based Stress Reduction (MBSR) programme, developed by Dr Jon Kabat-Zinn at the university of Massachusetts medical centre thirty years ago, has become available in hundreds of hospitals/health settings around the world. In the form of mindfulness-based Cognitive therapy (MBCT) it has the approval of the National Institute for Clinical excellence (NICE) in the UK. it is being adapted and applied in education and in business, and the mindfulness in schools project in the UK appears poised to grow rapidly.
MBSR/MBCT consists of a systematic training in mindfulness through daily meditation, yoga and mindfulness in all aspects of everyday life. Participants practise bringing moment-to-moment, non-judgemental attention to present experience. In weekly meetings participants are lead in guided practices, and then speak about the experience afterwards, allowing reflection and insight into the developing practice. Stability and flexibility of attention are developed through practising with different foci of awareness, bringing attention non-judgementally and over and over again back to the current focus. This is then expanded to include progressively all aspects of present experience, inner and outer, including thoughts and emotions; and finally, letting go of all scaffolding and resting in open choiceless awareness, in which whatever arises is witnessed without attachment or distraction – or maybe in which there is just being. This awareness is all-encompassing and intrinsically loving, accepting of all experience, self and other.
Although put to work as a healthcare intervention, this programme is no other than the authentic Buddhist practice, but without Buddhism or any religion, or even spirituality. it is simply a training in discovering and developing the natural capacity for awareness which is the birthright of every human being, and bringing this to bear in the full appreciation and facing of the present moment, whatever form it may take – so finding a way of living life rather than enduring or escaping it. Because it is not overtly spiritual there is no explicit spiritual aim towards discovery of the nature of the self and reality, god, emptiness, enlightenment or Buddha nature. although there may be reference, the approach leaves these matters implicit, and is not directive of what people may discover for themselves.
This possibility of a modern, secular ‘spirituality’ came up when Jon Kabat-Zinn had an audience with a venerated Zen master in Japan who showed deep interest in this work. He talked about the way this practice has been taken up by all sorts of ordinary people with no interest as such in spirituality or Buddhism. The question arose of whether mindfulness could be properly presented outside the teachings of Buddhism. The response of this master was, “throw out Buddha! throw out Zen!”
The mindfulness movement is apparently growing and expanding. Underlying the overt mindfulness movement seems to be a readiness and desire for it in people, which suggests a deeper, more wide-ranging change. It is not clear where this will lead, but if people are on a path of discovering their own nature, especially in a way which is not based on belief, this will tend to open a pathway for seeing commonality with all people. This is heartening in our world situation. as we face the very practical risks of increased suffering and conflict, it is becoming evident that we will need not only practical solutions, but a shift of consciousness towards compassion and love for ourselves and others.
- Vogeley, Kai, and Fink, Gereon R. (2003) ‘Neural correlates of the first-person perspective’. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(1) 38-42
- Gusnard, Debra A.; Akbudak, Erbil; Shulman, Gordon l.; and Raichle, Marcus E. (2001) ‘Medial prefrontal cortex and self-referential mental activity: Relation to a default mode of brain function’. PNAS 98(7) 4259–4264
- Raichle, Marcus e., and Mintun, Mark A. (2006) ‘Brain Work and Brain imaging’. Annu. Rev. Neurosci. 29, 449–76
- Austin, J (2009) Selfless Insight: Zen and the meditative transformations of consciousness. MIT Press
- Josipovic, Z (2006) ‘neural correlates of nondual awareness’. Dissertation, Union Institute and University, AAT 3232654
- Farb, Norman A. S.; Segal, Zindel V.; Mayberg, Helen; Bean, Jim; McKeon, Deborah; Fatima, Zainab; and Anderson, Adam K. (2007) ‘Attending to the present: mindfulness meditation reveals distinct neural modes of self-reference’. SCAN 2, 313–322
- Pagnoni, G., Cekic, M., Guo, Y. (2008) ‘‘‘Thinking about not-thinking’’: Neural Correlates of Conceptual Processing during Zen meditation’. PLoS ONE 3(9): e3083. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0003083
