From Savanna to Cushion: the Possibility of Awakening -- 2
"Religion without scientific knowledge is ineffective,
but science without spiritual perception is insignificant.1
Ravi Ravindra
Given all these separate neuro-regions responsible for often conflicting jobs, what about overall balance—a stable presence, sustained, resilient, and alert but not reactive? What help can the segregated brain provide to the seeker?
A tiny cluster of nerves in the brain stem’s pons, the locus coeruleus (LC), produces norepinephrine—at moderate levels, attention and flexibility; at high levels, the fight-flight-freeze response—and is connected to all those regions with Latin names: the prefrontal cortex, the amygdala, the hippocampus, the cerebellum, the somatosensory cortex, and the spinal cord.2 The LC manages intensity so that the brain does not chase every distraction.
One remarkable feature of the LC—suggested in the most recent literature—is its close coupling with our breathing.3 (Wow! Those of us who begin meditation with the breath have suspected that something amazing is working here.) Slow, deep breathing calms the LC; the LC calms the brain’s networks—a miraculous loop. Thus, the breath—four counts in, six out—helps to harmonize disparate regions, bringing them into resonance.4
Again, Mme. de Salzmann:
“I participate in life through breathing. … I feel that breathing is the life of this energy in me. Its elements could nourish this inner Presence. I feel that the routes, the pathways it travels, are important, that they could relate the life of one center to another. I need first to establish a contact through sensation, to become used to feeling the pathways, without expecting anything. … I watch; I do not intervene.”5
What we attempt to bring to a moment of awakening: a new, active, voluntary, unattached attention (one that sees what we are doing in the moment and the reason why we are doing it), relaxation, conscious breathing, sensation of the body, inner silence, perseverance, sincerity … and time.
What the brain can provide: a global connection of the brain’s usually segregated networks—which otherwise can feel like frustrating committee work without an intelligent chairperson—and the brain’s innate plasticity,6 which allows it to change its structure in response to learning, to long-term practice. This global connection and plasticity do not ensure attention, direct perception, and (oh, why not?) consciousness, but for a seeker to be delivered to the gate of individual responsibility and possibility, supported by the marvel of the brain, is no small thing. It is not only extraordinary; it is a gift.
What we attempt to bring to a moment of awakening: a new, active, voluntary, unattached attention (one that sees what we are doing in the moment and the reason why we are doing it), relaxation, conscious breathing, sensation of the body, inner silence, perseverance, sincerity … and time.
Mme Henriette Lannes, who worked with Mme. de Salzmann in Paris and London, and led groups in London and Lyon, speaks about attention:
“The quality of our attention is reflected in the quality of our real knowledge of ourselves. When our attention is automatic, a prisoner of our mental, emotional, and physical associations, all of the external and internal impressions we receive are fragmented. When our attention reaches a level of genuine awareness of ourselves, impressions are particularly alive and penetrating.”7
The “hard problem of consciousness”
It is here at the gate that neuroscience and a spiritual teaching part ways. "Scientists are occupied with experiments, whereas spiritual seekers are concerned with experience."[8] Neuroscience can measure the activities of the brain’s networks in everyday life and in deep meditation—what lights up on an fMRI, what goes dark, which brain waves activate, from where, and at what frequency, and which areas make up which networks. Neuroscience can tell us what the brain is doing and what the brain is attending to. It can even measure effects when one part of the brain is looking at another. But there it ends.
What neuroscience cannot do is explain what the experience of all this actually is—what it is like to be. Here we reach what philosopher David Chalmers famously called "the hard problem of consciousness."9 Measuring a brain at work—its neurons, its networks, its correlates—is not the same as explaining personal experience. Many philosophers argue that neuroscience, however detailed, cannot on its own account for why there is subjective experience at all!
For a growing number of scientists and philosophers ..., brains don't manufacture consciousness from non-conscious matter; they receive, filter, localize, and organize forms of consciousness that are already there in the fundamental building blocks of the universe.
But no matter. There is no shortage of neuroscientists and philosophers with fascinating and promising theories about consciousness. I’ll mention only one here: Philip Goff—British philosopher, professor at Durham University, and defender of panpsychism—posits that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world, not some expansive property that is created in complex brains.10 For a growing number of scientists and philosophers like Goff, brains don't manufacture consciousness from non-conscious matter; they receive, filter, localize, and organize forms of consciousness that are already there in the fundamental building blocks of the universe.11 Mr. Gurdjieff would probably agree.12
One might say that the brain can serve as an instrument, a “receiver,” when tuned and cleared of clutter. For Ravindra, the ego imagines itself to be the doer (Does this remind you of the DMN?), and continually inserts itself in self-observation. (The first thing I noticed years ago about observing myself was how much my self disliked being observed. My ego was supportive—I can do this!—and was surprisingly enthusiastic about personal transformation, especially if there was any chance that nothing would change.)
One might say that the brain can serve as an instrument, a “receiver,” when tuned and cleared of clutter.
Ravindra posits that genuine understanding comes from a higher level—fundamental, universal consciousness—and we are capable of receiving these higher, finer energies.13 Goff and Ravindra are interestingly juxtaposed: Goff argues that consciousness is ontologically fundamental. Ravindra asks the reader to entertain the possibility that body and mind are instruments through which that fundamental Consciousness—The Divine, The Absolute, God, Atman, Brahman, Allah, the Dao, the Ground of Being, Ultimate Reality—acts in the world.14
This active awareness
Jean-Claude Lubtchansky, French filmmaker who worked closely with Mme. de Salzmann and led the Institut G. I. Gurdjieff in Paris, speaks about direct perception:
“There is no problem with the higher consciousness. It is always there. But it is blocked. The space is always occupied by beliefs, thoughts, emotions, protecting my image of myself. Beliefs are of no use. Only this active awareness. … Direct perception instantly bypasses all the old channels. … Recognize what is there, this life energy coming into me. It is always given, but not received. We are occupied. The line is busy.”15
A muscular, grasping effort of seeing oneself—arising from the projections of the brain in its default mode—is pretension. It feels calculated because it is. Self-observation—following oneself, being aware of oneself in the moment—can be effortless: a quiet movement of the whole Self, not from the head alone. Uncalculated. Quiet. Gentle. Like the breath. We find that with active attention, the brain can become a sensitive, receiving instrument not only of impressions from the material world, but also of higher energies that are sensed. Perhaps the aim is not uninterrupted self-observation or constant attention; rather, the simple miracle of remembering to begin again.16
Which leads us to the cushion.
Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin has documented improvements in sustained attention, emotional regulation, and stress resilience among long-term meditators.17 His research lends weight to the proposition at the heart of sitting—that training embodied attention can reshape the brain's habitual patterns of reactivity and inattention, producing durable changes in how a person experiences and responds to her/his own inner life. He explains beautifully:
“Just as mud settling in a pond lets us see into the water, so the subsiding of our stream of thought lets us observe our mental machinery with greater clarity. Along the way, the meditator sees a bewilderingly rapid parade of moments of perception that race through the mind, ordinarily hidden from awareness somewhere behind a scrim. … Strong negative feelings like greed and selfishness, anger and ill will, fade away. In their place comes the predominance of positive qualities like equanimity, kindness, compassion, and joy.”18
Whether following oneself on the cushion for morning meditation or in daily life, the key is attention. Always attention. Mme. Lannes speaks about attention:
“In us a conscious attention … Only such an attention, through the quality of its movement of energy, can hold together the three essential parts of our being: thought, body, and feeling.”19
Given openness and receptivity, consciousness is there whether sitting on the cushion, emptying the dishwasher, or suddenly seeing a green wall of breathtakingly beautiful, old-growth woods. We are blessed with mysterious grace.
This from Michel de Salzmann at Chandolin:
“The body is quiet now, and it likes this quietness. There may be some busyness in the mind; let it be. I know better now where to retire from that more and more. Let a feeling arise of consciousness. Let this feeling arise. Breathe in through the top of the head. Breathe out through the whole body. Now … lighter … we come to a place of non-effort. Natural. No words. A place of real peace.”20
As for the seeker, understanding the struggle for real attention and an opening to consciousness, we might have some patience with ourselves and others.
The correlation between neuroscience and an authentic spiritual teaching is real. Each approaches the same mountain using different maps, and each map enhances the other when properly understood. If we understand that, for neuroscientists, the brain is attempting the difficult task of understanding itself while using itself as the investigating instrument, we might have some patience with the scientists’ struggle for each hypothesis and with the time required to understand. As for the seeker, understanding the struggle for real attention and an opening to consciousness, we might have some patience with ourselves and others.
But here, now, is Jean-Claude's exquisite wisdom as we approach our cushions in silence: “The only role the mind has to play is to leave the room.”21
1 Ravindra, Ravi, Webinar 2021: https://scientificandmedical.net/events/prof-ravi-ravindra-science-and-the-sacred/
2 Sapolsky, Robert, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (New York: Penguin Press, 2017), 36-47.
3 Melnychuk, M., Robertson, C., Plini, E., Dockree, P., “A Bridge between the Breath and the Brain: Synchronization of Respiration, a Pupillometric Marker of the Locus Coeruleus, and an EEG Marker of Attentional Control State,” Brain Science, 2021. https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3425/11/10/1324 (A thoroughly accessible scientific paper)
4 van der Kolk, Bessel, The Body Keeps the Score (New York: Viking, 2014), 267.
5 de Salzmann, 145, 149.
6 Barrett, Lisa Feldman, Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020), 50.
7 Lannes, 58.
8 Ravindra, Webinar 2021.
9 Chalmers, David, "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness," Journal of Consciousness Studies 2, no. 3, 1995. 200–219.
10 Goff, Philip, Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness (New York: Pantheon Books, 2019), 23.
11 The list is long: Giulio Tononi, David Bohm, Christof Koch, Karl Pribram, and a dozen others. Their theories will not be discussed here. (Those who vehemently disagree—positing instead that the brain “creates” consciousness, a survival mechanism—are familiar names: Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, and the like.)
12 Take a look at P. D. Ouspensky’s chapter on the Ray of Creation in his In Search of the Miraculous (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), chap. 5.
13 Ravindra, Webinar 2021.
14 Ravindra, Ravi, “Yoga and the Future Science of Consciousness.” Wider Horizons, 1999. Reproduced here: https://galileocommission.org/wp-content/uploads/Library(all)/Ravindra-1999-Yoga-and-the-Future-Science-of-Consciousness.pdf
15 Shaw, Fran. Being Attention: Meetings with a Gurdjieff Guide in Provence, Holland, and New York (New York: Indications Press, 2024), 5, 11, 24, 27
16 Although tempted to expand an already long essay into a discussion of Iain McGilchrist‘s left-hemisphere/right-hemisphere workings, I’ll mention only this from a synopsis: The right hemisphere is open to the unfamiliar, attends to the whole, recognizes ambiguity, and encounters the world as living, changing, and interconnected. The left hemisphere focuses narrowly on what can be isolated, categorized, measured, and manipulated. And this, an assumption of mine: One might infer, then, that the “attention” paid in each hemisphere is different in both quality and in kind. One can learn to see one’s individual self. The Master and His Emissary is worth reading.
17 Davidson, R. J., Goleman, D., Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body. (New York:Avery/Penguin Random House, 2017), 123-126.
18 Davidson, Goleman, 39.
19 Lannes, 59.
20 Shaw, Fran, The Next Attention: Chandolin, 1993-2000 (New York: Indications Press, 2010), 302.
21 Shaw, Fran, Being Attention: Meetings with a Gurdjieff Guide in Provence, Holland, and New York (New York: Indications Press, 2024), 5.