Previously, I have transcribed some of my favorite tracks of The Science of Enlightenment series by my teacher Shinzen Young. Those tracks were about the “esoteric” side of Buddhist practice.
love this show
In this post I’ve transcribed Shinzen’s uber-geeky vision of a future when science and meditation will date and mate and give birth to a new kind of something — a new kind of knowing and learning. Keep in mind that the Science of Enlightenment series was recorded more than ten years ago, yet Shinzen’s vision, due to the advancement of neuroscience, is more feasible now than it was before.
Those who are familiar with Ken Wilber’s AQAL meta-theory would be in familiar territory. But I find Shinzen’s lucid articulation of his vision more appealing to the geek and meditator in me. I hope that my newborn son would get to see this frakkin‘ vision come true someday.
Session 24: Track 4 – A New Model for Enlightenment
Now let’s talk about the most significant thing, which is: We’ve talked about what science could contribute to meditation; we’ve talked about what meditation could contribute to science; What can come out of both of these things? What can they come up with together? What can the scientist and the meditator, if they are indeed different people, come up with together? Or what can a single person who is both a deep meditator and a scientist come up with bringing these two worlds together? Seems to me that it lies in basically two areas.
The first is very practical. As our brain-imaging technology advances. And as our knowledge of psycho-physiology, perceptual psychology, neuroscience, etc. advances, at some point it would be feasible to really look at the physiological concomitance, number one of high concentration, and number two of enlightenment itself. Now of course in the early part of this series I mentioned that we know some very gross and general things about the physiology of meditators in terms of their alpha wave, their electrical skin conductivity, these kinds of stuff. But this is general. It’s not specific at all because at this point we can’t really look at a real-time functioning brain.
