Greetings from our Winter Break 2022, our own personal time for retreat and renewal. Like a time-tested ritual, our annual getaway kicks off religiously with a week or two spent at our own teacher Shinzen Young’s annual year-end/year-beginning retreat. Held virtually since the Spring of 2020 and start of the pandemic, I’ve written previously of retreating with Shin and his mighty dharma talks, including this former post from his first online retreat as well as an earlier talk that kicked off that first virtual venture. We’ve posted Shinzen’s retreat-ending Teishos for years, and it gives us great joy to share the latest, following piece. A Teisho is a presentation by a Zen Master during a sesshin, or period of intensive meditation practice, and here, again, Shinzen really lives up. He touches on the practice and the spirit of science, how it all relates to the intense changes humanity faces, as well as our future and great hope for surviving and thriving as a species in a new way. I’m proud, too, to reference and share with you all my own teacher, remembering how, over the years, Shinzen spoke of and pointed to his teacher, Joshu Saaki Roshi. and how taking the time for retreat and working with a teacher to renew one’s own practice, along with our relationship to life and death, just how good and edifying that can be.
While the following at first scroll may appear lengthy and a a bit heady, Shinzen points out how a mindfulness-based awareness practice can support and sustain human happiness during these times of intense, ubiquitous change, helping us to gain strength for living while uncovering true resources in the face of death and impermanence.
“I talked quite a bit about having a practice, and what the elements of having a practice are. When we say a practice, we mean a contemplative-based psycho-spiritual growth process. So you need a technique structure, as its in some ways like doing a physical exercise. So you need one piece of exercise equipment, or one process of working that you employ, but you may have more than one, so that they are organized in a certain way. It’s your tool kit. You understand the relationships between the techniques if you have more than one. You understand how they work together and so forth.
What else does a person need? A framework within which to apply those techniques. Ergo, we talk about the four pillars of practice — retreat practice, life practice, give support, get support. We talk also about accelerators, different ways that a person can push the envelope with their practice, in terms of motion, impact from the outer world, extending the periods of practice in stillness, and basically having the realization that all life situations, whether they offer an opportunity to make practice easier or make practice more challenging or has no relational impact, represent situations where one could have a strategy about a situation, and so that’s another accelerator. Those are implemented, and so then given technique and application, pillars and accelerators, what else do we need? We need a conceptual map; we need a framework that essentially is going to relate - practicing these techniques within this structure, what are you going to get, why do this? How does this relate to anything?
Well… (laughs) your conceptual framework says cause and effect. Do this, and the effect will be this. And the effect, the effect is broad and deep, deep happiness for the individual. At the center of broad and deep happiness, yes, understanding oneself at the deepest level, and that’s our way to normalize enlightenment really, the liberation aspect of the practice, just understanding who you are at a very deep level. People understand what it means to understand yourself at a personal level, at a psychological level, or even a depth psychology level, but take it a little deeper and you understand yourself more as a sensory system, and then you understand yourself as sort of this original O.K. ness, and then you realize that this path is an interplay between cultivated improvements on one hand, that bring the surface in some ways more like the source, in terms of how information is processed, the fluidity of the processing. But there’s also the fact that the source or the early processing, “the Original Face” as they say in Chan, the first moment of each See, Hear, Feel, each think, feel, speak, move, the subsets or combinations there of, there’s always that completeness. And that influence is percolating up on us. So it’s an interplay of cultivated improvements from the top down and the primordial perfection that is always there, if we just sorta knew what to look for.
In addition to that, there’’s the other half of the path, which is becoming a good person, individually, by ordinary cannons of humanity. And also making contributions to the happiness of others, as well as the surface happiness of large groups of people. Which brings us to the topic of scaling up. What works for the individual working that up to populations of people on the planet and doing that as quickly as possible. When we complete a retreat like this, we should feel good about ourselves. In the sense that, we are doing what needs to be done on this planet in terms of high quality. You might say, well, it’s a drop in the bucket, because how many people spend time doing what we’re doing here, versus other things. To which I say: sometimes quality totally trumps quantity especially at a deep level for the long term. I’m going to say that the kinds of things we’re doing here are very significant. And therefore, we have a lot of reasons to feel good about ourselves. Particularly when we come to the completion of a program like this. We’re not done yet though.
There’s a story that I like to tell at the end of retreats — it was one of the first stories I can remember from Japanese school. It’s like public school but it’s all in Japanese. This story took place in pre-modern Japan, when they had villages, well, they still have villages, but this village is all abuzz because the Ki Nobori Masutā ki is coming to town, he’s passing through the village. In Japanese that means the tree climbing expert, so this is someone that was famous for climbing trees, that was his schtick, he just did it like no one else can do it. So everyone’s looking forward and there’s a big tree in town so the vibe is show us what you can do. So sure enough he goes whoosh right up to the top and then whoosh straight down to the bottom, but then like the last three meters or so, he goes super duper pooper slowly, and it’s like what was that all about? And the upshot on the story, his response, is that the last few feet are the really dangerous part, because you might get careless. So I would encourage you not to get careless at all, tonight, tomorrow, and all throughout tomorrow, and the subsequent days after the retreat, fortify your practice, fortify its elements.
How do we do that? Ask yourself - what’s my technique set? How am I working the pillars? How am I working the accelerators? Is my conceptual framework clear? And somewhat fortify your practice towards the end and then into the transition. As opposed to what might be the natural tendency, to say: OK I worked really hard, now I’m starting to think about daily life, and the real world, and there’s this Fibber McGee’s Karma closet I stuffed all my things into and somehow got the door closed so I could do this retreat but now the retreat is going to end and I’m already thinking about opening that and all that stuff is there waiting for me. Well, you know the gag — or maybe you don’t; it shows how old I am, this old joke from an old radio show. And the gag was that there’s all this stuff in the closet, and as soon as the sound-effect for a door opening there’d be this great crash of studio sounds. So yeah, daily life, you’re going to have to open that karma closet, but you’ve gone up the tree and you’ve come down — an amazing performance. So be careful. Be careful to optimize this experience by moving back into & forward in your life by fortifying the practice elements in the coming days.
And now, for this last part, you want to be present at a retreat from the beginning through the middle and all the way to the end. We’ve talked about a model for mindfulness-based, broad and deep happiness. Optimize the skills, spread the broad and deep happy. We’ve also been exploring possible extensions of that into some other skills that are also very related to happiness, but are related from a bit of a different point of view. And I’m going to say those are careful consideration skills, careful communication skills, and really, I’m going to say that those are the same thing, in that careful communication with yourself, the communication between the sub-personalities within us, the sub-systems within us, and hopefully a cooperative interaction with those systems, even the integration of our world, as we conceive of it each individual, is in internal, careful communication, and then of course there are the external careful communications and I’m tending to think that given current challenges, the scaling up of broad and deep human happiness which can be achieved, just through acquiring the attention skills through mindfulness, it can be achieved through that, but what I’m hoping is that we get lucky, and I’m not sure yet if we are, I have a hope that we will get lucky and I’ll be explain what I mean.
The development of the careful communication skills, the word power skills if you will parallels quite closely the development of the mindfulness skills, and if that is indeed the case, that’s a very good thing. Because with modern technology, what’s going to come on in the next ten or twenty years, I think that there is a clever way that we can distribute the task of survival over all the humans preparing us for a period of what is likely going to be a period of rapid and challenging change. So people I have noticed are sorta bummed out and pessimistic and very concerned about things. I find myself stirred… but not shaken. My gut tells me: we’ll be OK. That’s just a gut thing: we’ll be alright. For one thing, I say unprecedented change, but unprecedented change is precedented; it’s actually a big theme in the broad, biological history of the planet. It’s happened over and over again, challenging times. There was a time when the earth either completely froze over or mostly froze over and we’re talking miles of ice thick, maybe everywhere — snowball earth they call it and there were several snow ball earth events, and its argued whether there may have been a sliver of exposed water, or even land around the equator, but essentially, it was just ice, ice, ice, baby, all the way up and down, over the land and over the oceans. fora very, very long time. How did life survive? It did, and when the melt came, the thaw, a whole new direction. There was a time when almost everything had a certain virus. Coronavirus it has been horrible, it effects us, imagine if you had a virus that effected most species, and it lasted for over a million years. That happened once, the time-depth of the earth being very hard for the human mind to conceive. What is twenty million years? What does that mean in the life of the earth? Twenty million years, twenty million years, how I consider that is the time it takes for an animal, a deer-like animal, foraging around a river, going in and out of the water, to evolve into a great blue whale. You wouldn’t believe that, but that’s how malleable life is, and that’s what kind of change can occur in 20 million years and the earth has billions of years, several billion.
The Bible is right — there was a flood. I think it rained almost everywhere on earth for about a million years. Talk about a flood. and then there was the great dying. Remember that? Probably not, because we weren’t around. When was that exactly, 250 million years ago approximately? I could be wrong on that I’m not exactly up on all the geological periods. A time when nearly everything died. Have you heard of the Siberian Traps? I had not, but imagine a mile-high, continent wide mass of lava pouring out of the earth. That actually occurred, surging forth and killing off nearly everything, but then things pop back. To say nothing of the great oxygen event. Do we like this oxygen? I like it a lot. Who produced all this oxygen on earth because it wasn’t here at the beginning. It was not an oxidizing atmosphere, it was a reducing atmosphere, they’re pretty sure. It’s the exact opposite, chemically. So where did all the oxygen come from? Sino bacteria they used to be called blue green algae, single celled photosynthetic microorganisms, bass bacterial mass covering everything , green and just pouring out fire, because it took life a long, long time to get used to oxygen. And they poisoned themselves eventually. But they gave rise to the plants and the animals, going into the plants. And we evolved to take the oxygen from the plants and 9takes a deep breath) love it.
So unprecedented change then is precedented. It is very much a part of this planet apparently. And we have to love it because we are not ready to leave it technologically. So my gut tells me we’re going to be OK, and my intellect tells me lets see if we can help the odds on that with some creative science, so that brings us to my basic lifework, which I call the third beholding. Theoria, in romanized script, but its a Greek word, same root as Thea, which means a show or a spectacle or something you’d look at, it has given us the words theater or theatrical and so forth. Theoria is a beholding; in Greek its the root of words like theory, or theorem, a theorem being a mathematically valid statement. Theory is a formulation from science that can become an established formulation, can become an established theory by passing many, many, many challenges over a long period of time. Math and science, theories and theorems, the Greek word would be a beholding, as you’re beholding how his whole thing works. But the other meaning of Theoria, it’s the Greek word for meditation. its the Greek word that was translated into Latin as Contemplatio, and from there the English Contemplation, and that is the Western term, going back to classical antiquity but it would have been what the Christians described their practice as when they wrote in greek, which is what they originally wrote in. Which goes back to the desert, going back to the eastern part of the Hellenistic part of the world, Greek being the language of the so-called Desert Fathers and Desert Mothers, the men and women who in the 4th, 5th or 6th century, with civilization more or less collapsing and facing dark times, they went out in communities or by themselves, pursuing a Semitic lifestyle, in order to perfect the Christian virtues, that was called Thearea, of the same root, you’re beholding the beatific vision, what Plato would have called the idea of the good, what I call the source.
The third beholding is how do we take the spirit of the spirit, as represented by contemplative-based psycho-spiritual growth and the spirit of science, as represented by however we’re going to define the sprit of science, and then how do we bring those together. So when I ask myself, what is magic about science? What is the secret sauce here, that in many ways could be called the spirit of this thing, that explains its extraordinary success. Well, there’s a lot of ways that you could think about that. One of them would be related actually to what might be called skillful communication. However, I would say, in addition that, there’s something distinctive to science, so I’m thinking, I mentioned science is for four basic areas, each one has applied the theory and the translation, its unified, all the parts work together and when they don’t, people know eventually they will, so they don’t freak out too much. That’s science as a cultural institution. There’s also maybe from an opinionated point of view, what science should be. Scientists develop certain skills, and they apply a method, called the scientific method; this improves human knowledge and power, which should then translate into broad, deep, and scalable human happiness. That’s a judgment on my part - I think science should be that. And as questions about neuro-ethics and bio-ethics become more and more sharpened, moving into this century, keeping that principle in mind might be a nice compass, when we start to look at, “Hey we could do this, we could do that, etc. etc.”, always relating it to broad, deep, scalable human happiness.
Then another way to look at science, as I was saying before, what’s the essence of it? What is the spirit? What’s the secret sauce. This could be very much a matter of opinion, so in my opinion, there are two things. And one is unique to science. But the other has implications for those us that practice contemplative-based psycho-spiritual growth, things that we could do to scale up the impact on this planet. What we may have to do in order to survive, may be sufficient to cause a new flowering or human flourishing. And those are the same thing, one is Anglo-Saxon, one is Latin. What’s unique to science, I won’t go into the details, because we are at a retreat and I want to leave you with some optimism. So we’ll talk more about the elements relevant to our concerns, those of human happiness, but I would say what’s magic about science is that it has the right mixture of elements — and it centuries and centuries for those elements t connect and cross-fertilize, and you can see it developing over the planet. And the fact is in Europe, there were two really big break through periods, and even though science evolved from all human cultures, a couple of the things that made the secret combination work, they did happen in the Western part of the Eastern hemisphere, Greece, and then not too far away from that in Italy and the rest of the Renaissance, so pre-Christian, Hellenic civilization, as opposed to the Hellenistic that came later.
OK so what are these magic elements? Geometrical thinking, Algebraic thinking, logic, idealizations about how the physical world might work. All combined with observations. And then combined with the experimental method. All these elements cross-fertilized with one another. Geometry and Algebra cross-fertilized to create the ever-growing body of knowledge of mathematics. You might think there’s nothing new under the sun, nothing new in math, well think again! Think backwards of that. Think Oh my God! There is a plethora of applicable mathematics constantly being invented every month. Some of it will find application in ten years, some of it will find application in one hundred years, it will applied eventually. I have my eye on one of those very new esoteric forms of math… we’ll see what we can do with it. So this cross-fertilization, thinking in terms of shape and space which is geometry, and then thinking in terms of things like numbers, additions and multiplications, divisions and such, they all cross-fertilize. If you read Euclid which you did when you took high school geometry, you’ll recall there’s a lot of reasoning involved. Logical thinking, analogies, proportions - which are just geometrical analogies. When it comes to logical thinking, Aristotle was quite helpful in codifying early logic. Aristotalian logic looks like a toy compared to modern-type theoretical logic but represented an important early step, the syllogism, syllogisms exist in India also, maybe independently discovered, maybe ones influencing the other — that’s called term logic. But also Plato - Aristotle Plato - Plato idealized things, and theories are idealizations. So if you start to idealize — you remember, an ideal gas, an ideal solution — acoustic theory, we do ultra sound — it’s highly idealized. The real world is much messier, but you can make these idealized simplifications. And the combination of that with math geometry algebra with logic and then linking this up with experiments that are a reality check — you have a nice theory, it has implications, let’s do an experiment and see if it’s true and let’s do another and another.
So you use logic to prove theorems, there’s a. constraint on your mathematical imagination; you have to do experiments to basically to disprove wrong ideas, that’s the basic humility of science; it’s much more correcting mistakes then, ‘Hey we have the answer now!’ In fact, I would say a major element in the spirit of science is: if you think you’ve got the answer, think again. Part of the magic of science then is how all of those elements work together. But it took humanity centuries to bring it all together. You can see pieces of it were here, there, a lot in early Greece came together but then there were the dark ages, the Middle Ages. There were a lot of contributions from Islamic Science, people tend to forget about that but that was important, the dark ages in Europe being the Golden Age of Islam. They further developed those things, and then Europe had a Renaissance. And oh my then science just exploded and that last element was added, that being the experimental method, often associated with people like Sir Frances Bacon. But Al-Haytham had it, you can see it in the Muslim world, and if there had been a few dozen Al-Haytham’s, we’d perhaps be speaking Arabic and it’d be the national language of science at this time, but it so happened, the Renaissance did not happen in Baghdad or Cairo, it happened in Florence and other similar places. All of that coming together, all the pieces coming together harmoniously to grow, that is unique to science. It’s taken all these centuries and millennia to crawl up to this really, really good thing.
But then you begin to worry is it a really good thing? Are we ready for what might be coming next with science. That’s a legitimate concern. But it can also be a huge hope. And I’m trying to show the ways, particularly with A.I. and neuromodulation, the things we could get very scared about, to be just what we need in order to survive and then to flourish in a whole new way. Imagination centuries in which most people will be liberated plus science. What will life on this planet look like? Pretty nice I would say. Something I would be happy to be a part of, something we all would be happy to be a part of. You may not be all that interested and share a vision of science, but we are a part of evolution when we do this practice. I am pretty sure we are aligned with Darwin when we do this practice, and once again to feel good about ourselves. So then what can we take from the spirit of science, beyond what is magic and intrinsic to that combination of algebra, geometry and logic, observation, abstractions in math, abstractions in physical theory, experiments to confirm and disconfirm, implications of the theory, so there’s logical proof, there are constraints, constraints on the creativity that are good constraints, you can’t just make it all up as you go. It occurs to me that part of the spirit or essence of science that we can take and cross-fertilize with the mindfulness practice could all be looked upon as forms of skillful communication. And if that is case, and if skillful or careful communication is trainable by the same basic principles that we know for sure work for the mindfulness training, then we could be in very good shape, because… I won’t go into all the details, as I’ve already giving an overview and perhaps not the most inspiring sermon on science. But I do have a responsibility as a scientist to speak my peace about this.
It’s not hard for me to imagine AI that distributes out among all human beings an interface that allows differing opinions to communicate in an optimum way; we won’t go into the precise details but it is a specific plan, a specific program, and I model it after Raymond Llull. Who is Raymond Llull you ask? Raymond Llull is the answer to the Jeopardy question: Who invented artificial intelligence? You may have never heard of Raymond Llull, and he may be the most fame deserving person who no one has ever heard of. He lived in I think the 13th century, not yet the Renaissance, really the Middle Ages, and he noticed that distinguished Christians and distinguished Muslims would trot out their respected authority — the Koran, the Bible, the respected Church rulings, and then they would just argue, and then when that didn’t work you had the jihads and the crusades. And it occurred to him — he was of course a Christian — he had the out of the box thought, that it’s not them, it’s us; they are not creatures of the devil, we just don’t understand Christianity well enough, at a deep enough level, to just explain it. If we simply understood it deep enough we could convey it, and reasonable people would see that it’s true. THAT is out of the box, particularly for the 13th century. What else was out of the box? Well, the Muslims had these advanced astronomical instruments, and he knew it because he spoke Arabic in addition to Catalonian, he came from the Barcelona area of Spain, well known for its creativity. The other out of the box thing was they work well in combination, with different gears and complicated interplay, and so it’s a kind of computation that he realized. So it occurred to him that maybe we could build a machine that would run through all the logical computations of a question which no human mind can fathom, maybe a mechanical device could be set up with lots of wheels and gears and what have you, in theory, run through all the computations and give us the answer that we need in order to communicate without fighting. The assumption of course was that everyone would become Christian because that was the assumption on the part of Raymond Llull that that was the one true thing, but the trick is how do you convince everyone else? We know!
He invented the notion of AI to overcome the problem of human communication over religion of all things. Well, we still have a problem. And politics can become eerily reminiscent of theology in a not good way. I think Raymond Llull had a great idea. And the AI that we’re right on the border of could deliver that to the world. I’m not saying this is going to happen. I’m saying… we’re workin’ on it. As an idea. And if that’s first to market, then we’ll be in very good shape I would say. So I’m actually quite optimstic about our prospects. Yes, challenges. Unprecedented change, but, as stated, it’s precedented, and part of the picture here. I would like to leave you with an inspiration of some sort. But I have to say, when I think, ‘what would inspire people to practice?,’ what I’m immediately drawn toward is all those people — us, all of us — specifically all of you folks. Who are on the other end of this camera (Note: or later reading this blog) you people are the inspiration. You are my inspiration. Seriously. I know your stories because of the interviews and so forth. I know that the great majority of you have much greater struggles in life than I ever encountered. And I see you heroically following this very, very mature path. You are the inspiration. Just look at who you are. Look at what you are becoming. Quantitatively, maybe there are not that many, not now, but qualitatively we are doing what needs to be done on this planet at the fundamental level.
After a retreat like this, you may have afterglow — tranquility, energy, cascading insights. You may have aftershock — vulnerability, disorientation, a lot of stuff welling up, a lot of stuff getting through. It’s not a sign you’ve done anything wrong. It’s just part of the awkward intermediate zone between two coping mechanisms — the one that sorta works, known as tighten up and turn away and the other that works so much better, if you give it time — it’s called open up and turn toward. Diametric opposites, so you can’t avoid some awkward intermediate zones where the old coping mechanism isn’t solidified anymore and the new coping mechanism is not open enough, the mesh is not open wide enough for the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune to just pass through. So they stick a little bit, they cause aftershock. Continue to apply the technique structure, the support structure the conceptual framework structure that you have, it’s part of how it works. So aftershock, afterglow, a bit of both or neither, there doesn't have to be any fireworks. Remember - it’s about the whole happiness matrix, gradually converging over the period of a lifetime, to what we were originally meant to be, the original gift each one of us has, that potential for optimal personal happiness, all in relationship with everyone else’s optimal personal happiness. When the Buddha wanted to praise a person, he would say, ‘They did the work that needed to be done’. And this is always the phrase that comes to my mind at the end of a retreat like this, that we did what needed to be done. So thank each and everyone of you for the service done at this retreat — both taking care of the tasks, but also the mutual inspiration of the practice, thank the Yaza (all night sit) people, as it was as always a very cool thing. So thank you to each and every one of you; that’s what I take away. I take the inspiration that I get from your practice, that of a great hero of consciousness. My inspiring words are that you are my inspiration (Bow).
