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Zen and Neuroscience: Training the Brain and Awakening the Mind

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9/22/2018, Ryushin Paul Haller and Philippe Goldin dharma talk at City Center.

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The talk presents a discussion integrating Zen philosophy with neuroscience, focusing on how meditation practices impact mental health and awareness. The dialogue contrasts the concepts of centering in Zen with scientific ideas like de-centering, exploring the reduction in anxiety and the enhancement of psychological flexibility through mindfulness. It emphasizes the role of receptive awareness and how contemplative and scientific insights can enhance understanding of human consciousness.

  • Ehei Dogen Zenji's Teachings: Dogen represents the foundational aspects of Zen practice, particularly the term "jijuyuzamai" which denotes an engaging and playful approach to the self, promoting an unhindered experience of being alive.

  • Drulwa in Tibetan and Lila in Sanskrit: These terms illustrate an enlightened mind's playful and compassionate engagement with reality, analogous to Zen's approach to the self.

  • Neuroscience Research Findings: Recent studies on anxiety treatment show that mindfulness meditation increases curiosity and reduces reactivity, offering small doses of freedom by altering deeply embedded neural pathways.

  • Mindfulness and Self-Referential Processing: The talk highlights how self-referential brain networks, active during self-focused attention, can impede receptivity and awareness, whereas mindfulness may enhance psychological flexibility and satisfaction.

  • Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT): CBT is discussed in juxtaposition with mindfulness, noting that trust in mindfulness instructors impacts outcomes unlike in CBT, where technique alone is considered paramount.

By analyzing the intersection of Zen practice and neuroscientific research, the discussion underscores the importance of meditative practices in facilitating mental clarity and emotional well-being.

AI Suggested Title: Zen Mind, Science Pathways

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Transcript: 

This podcast is offered by San Francisco's Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. First of all, let me introduce Philippe, and then I'll say a little bit about how we're going to structure our time together. Philippe Golden, a neuroscience researcher with a unique background. At the age of 18, he went to Nepal and did your final two years of college there. Yes. And was also introduced to Tibetan Buddhism there. And then after he finished college, he went down to Dharamsala. What's the name of that lineage that does the debating? Oh, it's analytic debate. The Geluk and the Sakya are supposed to... Analytic debate in Tibetan. Yes. Yes.

[01:00]

And then spent another four years there doing analytic debate, learning Tibetan and being a Tibetan to English translator for the teachers there. And then you came back to... What did you do for the studies? What did I do? I did my undergraduate degree at University of Wisconsin, Madison, in Asian studies. And I worked for Tibet House in New York City for a year. Drove around... Tibetan monks and did sand mandalas and ritual dance and made food and drove the bus. And then I ended up going to India for four years. And I went with my mom. And I thought I was going for two months and ended up staying at the Dalai Lama's monastery for four years. And then Sweden, then back to United States. And I thought I had to do something with my life. And I went into a psychology program. And I did clinical psychology and neuroscience at Rutgers University. Wow. and ended up at UC San Diego, Stanford, and now a professor at University of California, Davis.

[02:04]

But I live just five minutes from here in the Castro. So I biked here. What we intend to start with is an interesting... Philippe said to me several years ago, he said, I mentioned reading a book on neuroscience. And he says... Why bother reading the books? You should read the most recent research papers. By the time the book's published, the field has moved on. So you get the benefit today of something he was working on two days ago. And what we'll do, we'll both open with a few statements. I'm going to read, surprisingly. I'm going to read a piece by Ehei Dogen Zenji, the finder of Soto Zen in Japan, that I think expresses its pivotal expression of Zen as he engaged it.

[03:15]

And then Philippe is going to read an inspirational poem that came up for him when he finished meditating. A week ago? Two weeks ago? Something like that. Something like that. And then with those two references, we're going to explore the data the scientific research has revealed. And then we will go back and forth. Because we were just discussing this. There's a term there where it says de-centering. And I was saying, actually, in our way, in the language that we use, centering may actually be more relevant or more appropriate for that notion. So we'll do some of that and then we'll also cross-reference. I will attempt to add a Zen reference to this modern scientific research. We'll go into a little bit after 11, then we'll take a brief break because that would be when the talk would usually end.

[04:21]

And if you want to leave, you can leave. And then we'll settle back down, and then we'll continue to noon. So the Dharma talk and the Q&A will all happen here. Okay? Okay. So I've begun trying to write poetry, not even to write poetry, but actually just to allow the meditation practice to create a poem. So I'm going to offer at least one this morning. But first, do you want to do this first? Okay. Please, Dogen first. So, Dogen Zenji went to China after extensive studies in his homeland, Japan. He met Ru Jing, a Chan teacher in China. He had a realization of what was the foundational aspects of Zen practice.

[05:24]

He came back to Japan and committed to trying to do two things, both promote the practice of that realization and articulate it, put it in writing. And so one of the first things he wrote, I'm going to read you the first two or three sentences. Now, all ancestors and all Buddhas who uphold Buddhadharma have made it the true path of unfolding enlightenment. to sit upright, practicing in the midst of receptive samadhi. Those who attained enlightenment in India and China followed this way. The teachers and disciples intimately transmitted this excellent art as the essence of the teaching. The term in Japanese for what Dogen described as the excellent art of embodying is jijuyuzamai.

[06:30]

When you take it apart, it means engaging or employing the structures of the Self with a disposition of almost playfulness, so that rather than being caught up in a kind of anxious struggle with the structures of the self, seeing them for what they are as a constant unfolding of what it is to be human. And Dogen goes on to say that realizing that transmits a profound experience of being alive. and actualizing that, living that out in how you think, how you behave, how you relate to others, the priorities you set up for life, is how it comes into being.

[07:40]

That will be the reference I will be using as we relate to Philip's data and perspectives from a scientific point of view. Can I riff on that exact term? You can. So in Tibetan, it's drulwa, and in Sanskrit, it's lila. And if you discuss that, if anyone has been to India, especially in Banaras in the fall, they have what's called the ram lila, which is sitaram, ram, and the story from the Ramayana, and they actually, for a whole month, get into this state of mind by, throughout the whole day and night for a month, performing the lila, which is this sport, play, manifestation. And it's actually a Sanskrit term that's really, it's actually hard to translate into English. We don't have any comparison, but it means it's an expression of the mind that's free, that can play with reality, ideally for the benefit of others, driven by compassion.

[08:45]

But it's this sport in its place. So it's an expression of freedom, being unbound by conditioned existence. And in Tibetan, tulku, which are supposed to be emanations of an enlightened mind, drul is this exact word. Lila, sport, play, the manifestation of the mind of an enlightened being that appears on the planet for the benefit of others. So that's even more context for this term. Want to read your poem? Sure. So here's one poem, just as inspiration. And I'll put it up here. So hovering awareness, just holding this space, quietly entering this wave, noting what happens, quiescence, stillness, willingness.

[09:51]

Why? Why not? When words no longer hold, then what comes next? Bold daring, like a waterfall that stands still, the chiasma, the opening of possibility, unnerving what was known before. The reason I share this is to actually make the connection to the neuroscience, from contemplative experience to neuroscience, the unnerving of what was known before, the releasing of conditioned habits, of thinking, labeling, conceptualizing, et cetera. And then the question is, when we actually unnerve those deeply

[10:55]

embedded neural pathways, those patterns that are traveling through all these incredible neural systems, which I'll show you a little bit in a moment, what actually happens. There's like a moment, a little moment of freedom. So I'm trained as a clinical psychologist, and there, in that context, as a clinical psychologist working with people with depression and anxiety, the way I conceptualize it, and I've actually seen it when I've taught this, is a moment... when a person has a direct experience that they do not have to act in this moment based on everything else that has come before. Unnerving, opening the ability to just boldly experience this moment, unfettered by before. And then that new experience does something to the brain, to the neural pathways, to these over-conditioned automatic habits that we mostly live in. So as a neuroscientist, what are these different pathways?

[11:57]

As a contemplative, what does it mean to scaffold, to help someone come into that direct experience and then make sense or not make sense of it? This is some data that's actually currently under review. And I literally was yesterday on the bus coming back, analyzing some brain data from 116 people, and I'll show you in a moment a little bit of it. And then we always ask the question, so what? Does it matter? Does it matter? I mean, that's to be really humble and honest is does it matter? This part matters. These are people suffering from primary anxiety disorders. And essentially in this study, we gave them, we randomly assigned them to 12 weeks of mindfulness meditation. So these are people who are brand new to meditation, not like all of you. So you probably already have experienced some of this, which is that over time, every single week, in a small group, immediately after coming out of a sitting meditation practice that was guided by a facilitator, we asked people to fill out a self-report questionnaire to reflect on their immediately preceding experience.

[13:08]

And what you can see is over time, over 12 weeks, there's an increase in the sense of curiosity about what's happening in my mind. Also, you can see, and we use the word de-centering, and this is something that we've actually become, that we've talked about. This is from the scientific literature, and it may not be the right term, but I'll give you the context. We think more from a Zen perspective or from contemplative perspective, it's more about stepping back and having this receptive, open awareness. In the scientific literature, that's not necessarily the term they use. In clinical psychology, they like to use this word, decentering from grasping at the sticky mind, the mind that wants to push things away or hold on to certain things. So decentering here means the ability to make this subtle shift. You can even do it right this moment, this subtle shift to just observing. And I would suggest that this and a person can actually experience this and sustain it, is a dose of freedom.

[14:13]

A small dose. But nonetheless, for somebody who is suffering from the stickiness to the cascade of negative thoughts and negative self-beliefs, this is a very significant freedom. So this is what we get via self-report immediately after coming out of meditation over 12 weeks in people who have anxiety disorders. Then again you say, so what? So here's a little bit of unpacking. What we found is that over 12 weeks, as people were able to self-identify that they were able to have this de-centering or moving out of this automatic habit mind, this led to a reduction in anxiety symptoms. It led to an increase in the ability to simply observe and notice moment-to-moment experience. And also... to a reduction in reactivity, automatically reacting to the content of experience. So in Zen practice, this is fundamental, taught in a slightly different way and in a different context.

[15:21]

So this is only one level, the self-report level. So now let me just show you a little bit about brain, and then we can dive further. Is it not on? Oh, clip it on. Sure. I'm going to just give you a punchline. So we spend a lot of time. So if I clip it on, let's make sure you can hear me. Is that okay? Good, good. So this is a punchline, right? So this is 116 adults that we did... functional MRI within, if anybody's been inside an MRI magnet, you know, scanner, it's not necessarily a pleasant experience, but these are incredibly willing participants who then went off to do some. Yeah, we gave them. So we gave them, we actually had people go, we had 100, oh, what did we give them?

[16:23]

We gave them cognitive behavioral therapy or mindfulness meditation training for free for three months and a lot of attention and love and attention. So punchline, in clinical psychology or clinical science, cognitive behavioral therapy is the gold standard non-drug treatment for all anxiety and depression disorders, problems. So here, one of the key aspects is reappraisal, the ability to reformulate your experience to something that's toxic, negative. In this case, it was their own negative self-beliefs. The brain patterns when a person is engaging language, logic, thinking, perspective taking. We actually know very well all the different parts of the brain that are necessarily recruited to be able to implement that capacity. What we don't know is this side, which was this instruction to simply observe and notice without implementing language, logic, perspective taking,

[17:35]

or changing anything about your experience. In essence, what I just want to show you, there's some overlap in prefrontal cortex, which is our executive functioning, our higher order cognitive abilities to implement a strategy or a method. So that is in place, and that's common for reappraisal and what I call mindful attention. Because again, decentering is probably not the right term. But what I want you to see here is the absence Or the reduction, unlike reappraisal, during this mindful attention or de-centering, absence of the network that has to do with self-talk. So for me, that was a beautiful internal control or evidence that when people were implementing this strategy to just notice the sound, the light, the reactivity to your own negative self-beliefs, the patterns of tightness or anything, that they could drop language, linguistic processing, self-talk, which in and of itself can be a source of freedom.

[18:42]

Shall we try it? Ready? Okay. Do it! Do it. Usually, as we bring our mind to awareness, whether we intend it or not, we move into a kind of doing. Okay, I'm aware now and I should do Zen. Or I should do whatever notion we conjured up of what you need to do to do awareness. So, as you sit there, prime yourself for non-doing. Prime yourself for rather than directing attention, receiving. And receive... without any particular agenda. Nothing needs to change whatsoever from what's happening. Just cognitively take that in.

[19:43]

Nothing needs to change in the experience that's already happening. And then add to that a kind of a receptive attention that's just experiencing it as fully as possible. Thank you. So that's it. And as Philippe said, you know, in little snippets of about five seconds, it's like, that's easy. Then you try to add five seconds to five seconds to five seconds until you're doing it for 20 minutes and you realize it's an incredible challenge.

[20:54]

It's almost like the whole structure of your being has to be reorganized to sustain something even approximating to that sustained awareness. Yes. By getting a waterfall to stand still. Because the experience, as we all know, it's like a cascade. I don't know if I should sit or stand. What do we prefer? We all know, just being honest, it's a cascade of this pattern of negativity. And Empirical research has shown there's a five-to-one ratio of negative thoughts to positive thoughts. So one interpretation is that there must be an evolutionary function to this to help the human being, the human animals that we are, preserve ourselves. But at what cost? The toxicity, the wear and tear of these negative self-beliefs that even healthy people...

[22:00]

functioning people most of us carry. And one of the questions is, so where is the flexibility? So this receptive awareness or de-centering, I wouldn't even dare call this receptive awareness yet, because 12 weeks is very little in people who are brand new. But a little dose of freedom in the ability to shift the patterns of reactivity, the patterns of relating to the content of our mind stream, even just a little bit, leads to a little freedom. So then I dug further two days ago in the bus and I was analyzing. So from these 116 people, this brain pattern on the right, so what? So I found that actually it was related to less cognitive, well, greater psychological flexibility. What do I mean by that specifically? Less cognitive distortions. What does that mean? Example, I'm not okay the way I am. I'm not worthy of love. Something is fundamentally wrong with me.

[23:03]

Black and white thinking. Mental rigidity. So that was reduced, that there was less of that in people who could activate this mindful attention network in their brain. And then even more specifically, greater satisfaction with their own lives. So to me, as a scientist, that's like, let the data speak and go, aha. Now experientially, it's like, yes, I already know this. So in one case, you can think of lots of science. It's like, duh, of course. But there are a lot of people who need convincing or need inspiration or who need empiricism, like at Google and other places. So why should I even bother with doing any practice or going inside? Well, because there is the possibility of actually shifting our abilities, enhancing our physical capacities, of sculpting our mind-brain neural patterns so we can go from moment to moment in a slightly more free state of mind.

[24:06]

And if you bring in compassion and love before Brahma Viharas to actually be a fully mature being for the benefit of others. So this is just a tiny little nugget in a much bigger landscape. But it helps us to begin to try to delineate even 12 weeks of practice. What does that do? Now, what would this look like in all of you if we could do fMRI? How much more refined would the recruitment of these different brain patterns be? So we do have these canonical networks, and I don't know if this is a good time to bring that up. You see these areas just circled over here? Yes. Could you say a little bit about that? Sure. So before doing that, let me just say there's about nine or ten different types of brain imaging techniques. And there's not one that is the best. This is a functional MRI, just one. All of them have pros and cons. The fMRI, I like it, but it's actually pretty slow. But one thing that is good about it is it allows us to probe the whole brain.

[25:08]

And what we see here in these areas of green, especially this dorsomedial, left dorsolateral, these are areas that are doing top-down cognitive control. So if I ask you to pay attention to a task, to implement a method or a strategy. These are areas that come online to be able to focus and implement. This area down here, the left ventral lateral prefrontal cortex is very important as well in cognitive control and actually directing your attention, maintaining it, noticing it when it drifts away and bringing it back. But also usually in conjunction with these other areas is the network usually left lateralized for self-talk, when you're talking to yourself, when you're speaking to yourself. There's a very clear set of one, two, three brain regions that constitute. So what's beautiful about having that is you can see when a person is engaged in self-talk or not.

[26:14]

Likewise, we'll show you in a moment, there are other patterns when you're thinking about yourself. If you say your name to yourself or you're feeling pain and you're thinking about yourself, there's actually... very clear pattern of self-referential processing or self-focused attention. What's beautiful about that is that you can see when that self-focused energy of the mind is on and when it's off. And when it's on, what else does it inhibit? When it's off, what does it allow to rise up? So we're beginning to probe that brain imaging, fMRI, EEG, training people in different forms of self-referential processing. So some of the things that we've seen is that you can actually begin to manipulate, well, to change with cognitive therapy, with mindfulness, with other things, even with compassion meditation training for eight weeks. The ratio of positive and negative self-referential thoughts actually can start to change over time.

[27:20]

So that raises the question, how far does this go? We don't know. What's the expansiveness of flexibility of different views of self? Should we do a practice? Yes. Yeah? Sure. To actually emphasize this. And then I'll show you what brain network you activate during this practice. So, ready? You can put your feet on the ground. You can take a position of dignity in your body. Relax the 42 muscles in your face. You can have your eyes open or closed as you feel comfortable. And you can begin by shifting attention to the breath, either the whole torso or just at the tip of the nose, and literally just letting the mind rest on the awareness of your breathing pattern. Breathing in and breathing out. Just letting the mind settle slightly.

[28:22]

I'm going to guide you in a short practice of noticing patterns of interpreting yourself across the lifespan. When you bring to mind an image of yourself at the beginning of this life, just moments after you were born, small infant, when you see that version of yourself, what do you notice? What are the qualities that you would ascribe to that version of yourself, moments into this lifespan? Just notice what appears in the mind. How would you describe this version of yourself? And moving forward in time to when you're about nine or ten years old, you can bring up an image of yourself as a child.

[29:53]

That version of yourself. What are his or her qualities? And moving forward in time to the present. The person who you are embodying right now. And you consider yourself now. What are the qualities? What are the words that describe who you think you are now? Then moving forward, say 10 years from now, this next version of oneself.

[31:06]

Bring an image to mind of how you might look. And then what are the thoughts, qualities that you would ascribe to that future version of yourself? then moving forward one step further, the last day of this lifespan, the last day of this life, that version of yourself, how would you describe that person? then metaphorically, just leaning back, seeing the full expanse from birth to death and all the steps in between, noticing the different versions of the self as it evolves and changes over time, and your relationship to that self in constant motion, change.

[32:47]

Is there a version of self that's more real or valid than any other one? Is there a version of self that I hold on to more tenaciously? Now take two deep, deep breaths at your own pace. And when you're ready, you can open your eyes. So this is the brain circuit that you were just activating in your brain.

[34:19]

This is a side view. This is a top view, front, back, front, back. This is a slice. This is an extremely robust brain network called self-referential processing, sometimes referred to as a default mode. But this is our essentially evolutionarily sculpted brain circuit that allows us to consider ourselves, which actually is a good thing. There's nothing wrong with that. But when this self-absorption, which allows us to have a sense of identity as me being separate from you, is functioning well, it can actually be helpful. But as we all know, there are times when this self-absorption or self-referential processing can get in the way. And I think as... All of you already know there are moments in waking life, there are moments in meditative experience, or even in dream state, when this circuit is not recruited.

[35:24]

And I would suggest, for some people, that's a moment of freedom. It's not all about me. And some of the questions are, as this self-focused attention drops down, What is it like, does it unleash or open up more space for receptive awareness? Or from a compassionate or caring perspective, actually seeing others? And then as I did yesterday with a whole bunch of doctors and nurses, when you drop the self and you walk into a room with a patient, how much does that open up the awareness that in fact the visual appearance of separateness, just from a scientific perspective, neuroscience perspective is not accurate. It's not an accurate description of the universe. We know that brains, hearts, physiology are constantly pinging each other, interacting with each other.

[36:26]

A person walks into the room and suddenly your heart rate changes, your skin conductance changes, your breathing pattern changes. We actually know this just from science, let alone contemplative practice. that we are not actually individual floating islands. That's completely false appearance. Although rodents have huge olfactory, smell parts of their brains. We don't. What we have is huge visual processing because it helps us with survival at the cost of overemphasizing separateness. So as I said at the hospital where I worked yesterday, the medical center, the greatest illness is not diabetes, schizophrenia, depression, anxiety. It's loneliness, isolation. And part of it is the curse and the beauty of the visual cortex. You look separate from me. But from a scientific perspective, that is not the way things exist.

[37:28]

And from a social perspective, we know that. So this is part of the struggle, is... Actually using what the brain has given us and then what methods, practices can help elucidate this struggle. Could I add something there? Please. So that notion of what method or what practice helps elucidate this. This balance between realization and actualization. And as I was saying earlier, these are the two dynamic functions that Doga Zenji proposed to awakening within the human condition. And then the heritage of Zen is how exactly does that happen? Because you can take any prescription. We could say, well, eat your meal like this.

[38:31]

And then you can put an overlay of self on it. I succeeded. I got it wrong. I succeeded and I am a good person. I got it wrong and I'm a bad person. You can add in your own psychological disposition. Oh, this reminds me of this. And even more mysteriously, the embodied psychological disposition that you're not quite awareness can be aware of, can be triggered too. And so the constant inquiry and hopefully curiosity of Zen is the exploration. Okay, given this experience, what does it teach about awakening? And then within the realization, what is it to be so thoroughly present immersed in experiencing all that clamor, intrigue, and in some ways, existential ways, determination to be alive.

[39:45]

What is it to drop it? And then on the other side, on the side of actualization, what is it to engage this moment so thoroughly that that clamor, at least takes a backseat. Or maybe even more wonderfully, quiets down and this activity becomes vibrant in itself. So both of those, the dropping and the fully actualizing. And the mind that says, and what's this? how's this enabling awakening? And then to kind of look at neuroscience and see, how does it answer that question? Only we knew.

[40:47]

Because when you were talking earlier about saying, oh, and they did a 12-week course and the MBSR teacher guided them, you know, from our perspective, like, well, what exactly did he say? Or what exactly did she say? And how much attention to posture, how much attention to breath, just in resonance with what you were saying a few moments ago, with all these processes that constitute the human experience, they're all relevant. Yes, and I would add to that, and this is something we actually did measure in one study, which is... there's something called the working alliance inventory. And it's been used a lot in psychotherapy research, which really is, how much does a person trust or find the therapist or the meditation instructor worthy of my confidence? And does it matter? So in cognitive behavioral therapy, where the technique is what's most important, it should not.

[41:54]

And the question is more open for any kind of contemplative training Does it matter? And so we actually did find, we just published a paper that showed that for cognitive behavioral therapy, how much you trusted the therapist during these 12 weeks did not predict improvement in anxiety, but it did for the mindfulness course. So now that's just one level. So then you want to go further, as you mentioned just now. You know, what exactly is the juice there? What exactly, if we could measure it, is it... What imbues... It gets infused in students or patients or clients that really makes you trust someone. And what does that trust do? What does it open up? A fearlessness? A willingness? And do you have any response to your own questions that you just asked? What are the characteristics that enable... Not empirically.

[42:58]

but I have an opinion. Okay. And that's different. And I want to make that very clear, right? So there's what's data shows and then what is our opinion. And those are not the same. That's why first-person experience, you know, through your own meditation practice or just relational with other people and seeing where we fail. But there is, and I've actually talked to John Kabat-Zinn about this because this is an ongoing struggle in all these codified programs. And I even talked to people who teach jhana. or supposedly teaching John on it, it's like, how do you know that somebody is getting it? And with John Kabat-Zinn, I said, how do you teach embodiedness instead of bullshitness? If I can make up a word. So what does it actually mean? How do you measure and how do you know and teach a person to actually embody and not just conceptualize? And how does that come across to people that you're working with? And I think we all know that. We all feel it. We may not be able to measure it and even have terms for it, but we feel it.

[44:03]

We feel it. I think that's very hard. One thing I can say from one study, that's a beautiful study that hasn't gotten much attention, and it was two people sitting talking, and sometimes not talking, and what happens is one person was a great meditator and actually meditating on compassion for this person, but what we were told is... Here's some text. Just sit down. There's another person sitting in the room with you, and you're just both going to read. First 10 minutes, you were just reading. I was reading. Next 10 minutes, they cue the person to meditate on compassion for this person. While this person is just reading, has no idea what you're doing. And they repeated it. And you're hooked up to physio, heart rate, skin conductance, blah, blah, blah, me too. And they actually found this person, non-meditators, reactivity, skin conductance, breathing pattern, et cetera, change as a function of when you were or were not meditating on compassion, beaming it this way.

[45:05]

Only one study. Never trust one study. Any journalists in the room? Please don't go nuts about one study. Bad science. So what you want is replication. But that study that came out, I thought, fascinating that the presence and then the active... sending forth actually had influence on another person unbeknownst. So that's a clue that we already know. You already know this, but most people don't. And here scientists are trying to actually experimentally control and measure some aspects of that. So we are constantly modifying each other, mostly unaware. What about this notion? Dylan, whose jisha was sent to me, well, how are we going to do it? And I said, let's adapt what we usually do into a recognizable form for initiating this exchange. That our formality forms a certain collective influence.

[46:12]

As we do the bows, as we do the pre-lecture chant, that we are... cultivating that collectively, a sense of presence, a sense of openness, a sense of embodiment. And then, so each of us is supporting everyone else and everyone else is supporting us. Because we need that... direct experience of the supportiveness of another human being when we're facing something that's really difficult, which is our own mind. Yes. And our collective weight of our own mind, our family, our culture, our identity. We need that confidence of another pillar of clarity. And then from a Zen perspective, we need the courageous trust of being willing to

[47:14]

to not cling to any structure, anything that's constructed about existence, but to be willing to explore it with question. And so in the Zen, the word koan is like public expression or lived expression of being. What is it? How is it? How does it become stuck? How does it become free? That any and every expression of being is available for that kind of inquiry. I love that you said that because I have a great honor to work briefly and see the person who created cognitive behavioral therapy. And he was not attached to any forms. Everything has been formed and structured. His thing was just the technique of inquiry. seeing the person in front of you and finding the question that opens the crack that allows some light.

[48:23]

And it's similar. And I actually saw him at the age of 80-something working with a patient, a client, for the first time. We were in another room watching it. And it was like a Zen master with simply asking questions to try to bring the other person out and to understand. and what questions would help this person open up and be free from suffering. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, please visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[49:19]

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