• Raj Yoga, based on the Hindu or Vedic philosophy of Samkhya, with the goal of achieving Samadhi, or "total self-collectedness".
• Zazen, based on Buddhism, with the goal of achieving Nirvana, or enlightenment.

Interestingly, although -- as we shall see later -- neuroscientists have become involved in studying what happens in the brain during meditation, both the Vedic-Hindu and Buddhist traditions hold that consciousness exists independently of the brain.  For an excellent account of the relations between the Eastern meditative traditions and contemporary neuroscience, see Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self-and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy by Evan Thompson (2014).  Thompson himself doubts that consciousness can exist independent of the brain, either in mediation or in states like the out-of-body or near-death experience, discussed in the earlier lectures on Mind Without Body.  Rather, he argues that OBEs and NDEs are experiential states correlated with particular brain states -- specifically states of the brain in the process of dying.  But I digress.

Yoga and Zen were introduced to America at the World Parliament of Religions, held in conjunction with the World's Columbian Exposition, a World's Fair held in Chicago in 1893.  The Parliament brought together leading authorities of most of the world's religions, who gave lectures and demonstrations of their beliefs and practices.  Among the most memorable of these was Swami Vivekananda, a prominent yogi from India, and Soen Shaku, a Buddhist monk who led the Japanese delegation.  Thereafter, both yoga and zen were gradually absorbed into American culture -- in the process of which they gradually became secularized, dissociated from their religious and philosophical origins, and commodified, taught for a fee.

• In Judaism, Hasidism and the Quabbalah.
• In Christianity, a tradition of contemplative prayer exemplified by Catholic monasticism, as well as the more ecstatic experiences (such as speaking in tongues) observed in Protestant Pentacostalism.  
• In Islam, Sufism and the "Whirling Dervishes".

• Visionary mysticism, exemplified by Julian of Norwich (1342-c. 1416), a hermit nun devoted to a life of contemplative prayer, who, during a period of serious illness, saw an image of Christ on the cross so vivid that she could see his face changing color when he died.  She recounted and interpreted this and other visions in Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love (c.1413).
• Here's an interesting footnote to Julian (from "Ecstasy: Losing Religion and Doing Drugs in Houston" by Jia Tolentino, New Yorker, 05/27/2019):

At age thirty, Julian experienced sixteen extended and agonizing visions of God, which she collected in a book called "Revelations of Divine Love".  She describes feeling "a supreme spiritual pleasure in my soul" and being "filled with eternal certainty," a feeling "so joyful in me and so full of goodness that I felt completely peaceful, easy and at rest, as though there were nothing on earth that could hurt me".  But, she writes, "this only lasted for a while, and then my feeling was reversed and I was left oppressed, weary of myself, and so disgusted with my life that I could hardly bear to live"

This kind of delirious experience is seemingly a human constant, recounted with more or less identical phrasing in many different eras and attributed to many different sources.  In 1969, the British biologist Alister Hardy began to compile a database of thousands of narratives that sound almost exactly like Julian's....  Technically, Hardy's archive is a compendium of religious experiences, but the accounts within it resemble transcripts from the supervised drug sessions that were conducted in the mid-seventies to the mid-eighties, during the brief period when Ecstasy could be used in therapeutic settings.

Well, maybe Ecstasy is the path to God and maybe not.  But what strikes me as more interesting is the aftermath of Julian's experiences.  She didn't just come back down to earth, as it were.  Instead, her emotional state went below zero, to something like its hedonic opposite: joy was replaced by disgust. This is exactly what we would predict from what is known as the opponent-process theory of acquired motivation, which I discuss at length in my introductory course.  Briefly, the opponent-process theory postulates that every affective state (call if the "A State") invokes its hedonic opposite (call it the "B State") as a sort of slave state.  When the stimulus that elicited the A State disappears, the B state comes rushing in with a vengeance.  These temporal dynamics of affect predict the "high", tolerance, and withdrawal associated with drug addiction -- and further suggest that addiction itself is motivated more by the desire to avoid the agonies of withdrawal than by the desire to obtain the pleasures of the high.  Be that as it may, one wonders if the opponent-process theory applies to mystical experiences as well: if they are followed by crashes rather than a simple return to baseline; and whether something like tolerance occurs as a result of their repetition. 

• Intellectual mysticism, exemplified by St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430), one of the "Church Fathers", whose Confessions is perhaps the first published memoir.  Augustine relied on introspection  and other intellectual functions to appreciate the "divine light" of God.  (It's to Augustine that we owe the traditional separation of cognitive faculties into "lower" sensory functions and "higher" intellectual ones.)
• Unitive mysticism, exemplified by Denys (aka Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite), a neo-Platonist theologian who lived in the 5th and 6th centuries.  Unitive mysticism seeks to go beyond "visionary" seeing and "intellectual " knowing to achieve union of the mind (actually, the soul) with God.
• Affective mysticism, exemplified by Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) who spoke of achieving a "spiritual marriage" when the Word of God (the bridegroom) enters the bedchamber of the bride (the individual soul).

• The Cloud of Unknowing (anonymous, 14th c.) teaches that we can achieve spiritual union with God through an act of "blind love", putting all thoughts except the love of God under a "Cloud of Forgetting".  Only then can we penetrate the Cloud of Unknowing that separates us from God.
• In The Dark Night of the Soul, St. John of the Cross (1542-1591), a Spanish monk, describes the spiritual crisis that occurs when we are separated from God.  We must detach ourselves from the world, and ascend the 10 steps of the ladder of mystical love, if we are to achieve union with God.  
• Closer to our own time, Thomas Merton, an American author and Trappist monk, delivered a set of lectures on prayer, meditation, silence, and the Christian contemplative life: Thomas Merton on Contemplation (1963-1964).

• Rote prayer, usually done as part of a ritual, and includes saying the Rosary, and reciting the Lord's Prayer. 
• Apophatic prayer closely resembles meditation.  Its purpose is to quiet the mind, and disengage from thought.  This is the form of prayer taught in The Cloud of Unknowing, whose anonymous author wrote that "Thought cannot comprehend God.  And so, I prefer to abandon all I can know, choosing rather to love Him whom I cannot know".
• A special form of apophatic prayer, in Luhrmann's analysis, is speaking in tongues.  Glossolalia, as this phenomenon has its roots in Pentecost, as described in the Acts of the Apostles, and was revived with the "Pentecostal" revival in the early 20th century.   
  
• Glossolalia lacks the formal syntactical structure of a natural language.  Interestingly, though people who speak in tongues employ the phonemes of their own native language.
• Speaking in tongues often occurs in group settings, like formal church services, but it also occurs in private prayer, where there is no "audience". 
  
• Luhrmann suggests that speaking in tongues is a way of emptying the mind -- talking about nothing, thus thinking about nothing.
  
• Kataphatic prayer involves becoming absorbed in ideas and images derived from Holy Scripture.  It is for this kind of prayer, presumably, that religious icons, stained-glass windows, statuary, and other objects were introduced into worship -- such as images of the Crucifixion (or, in Protestant practice, a simple cross). 
  

"Three Aspects of the Absolute", from a manuscript of the Nath Charit painted by Bukali (1823).  The left panel represents the origin of existence; the center and right panels, its "emanations" into consciousness and form, represented by a Nath yogi.  From Yoga: The Art of Transformation (see below).  Note the resemblance to "The Emergence of Spirit and Matter", the image at the top of the lecture supplements on Mind and Body.

• The earliest appearance of the word yoga in writing may be found in the Rig Veda, dating from before 1100 BCE. 
  
• The oldest image in Indian art, dating from 1900 BCE, may depict a yogi in the act of meditation. 
  

1. "This is the teaching of yoga."
2. "Yoga is the cessation of the turnings of thought."
3. "When thought ceases, the spirit stands in its true identity as observer to the world."
4. "Otherwise, the observer identifies with the turnings of thought'.

It's those "turnings of thought" that cause suffering, and there are five of them:

1. valid judgment;
2. error;
3. conceptualization;
4. sleep;
5. memory.
   

• Two of these entail ethical preparation r moral discipline before meditation even begins. 
• In Yama (restraint), the novice must abstain from injury, falsehood, lust, and avarice.
• In Niyama (observance), the novice must practice cleanliness, contentment, austerity, study, and devotion to God.
• The novice must also engage three stages of physical preparation. 
• In Asana (sitting or posture), the novice engages in exercises that will help him maintain the correct physical posture.  The Ocean of Life, dating from about 1550 and the earliest known treatise on yogic postures, illustrates some 22 of these.  Hatha yoga teaches literally hundreds of different postures.
  
• In Pranayama (breath control), the novice practices rhythmic, relaxed breathing.
• The fifth stage is Pratyahara (withdrawal), involving the withdrawal of attention from external objects -- remember, in Yoga mind as well as body is part of the material world.
• Finally, the novice must engage in three stages of mental discipline.
• The sixth stage is Dhyana (concentration), or uninterrupted contemplation of the object, without interference of memory or ego, not permitting your attention to wander. 
• The seventh stage is Dharana (holding on), focusing attention on a single object, and holding it in attention for a prolonged period of time.
• The eight and final stage is Samadhi (self-collectedness or absorption), in which the practitioner achieves an understanding of awareness itself, and abolishes the distinction between the meditator and the object of the meditation.

Patanjali also taught that, once they've achieved sanadhi, yogis could gain supernatural powers, like the ability to levitate, or read minds, or know the future.  That might all be fun, but the most important lesson of Yoga is that Descartes was wrong: it's when you stop thinking that you achieve true selfhood.

• Perhaps inevitably, in the American context, the Bernards promoted yoga as a technique for self-improvement, including enhanced sexual satisfaction through the practices outlined in the Kama Sutra.   Interest in the spiritual side of yoga was stimulated by the publication of Somerset Maugham's novel The Razor's Edge (1944).  This book, whose title is taken from the Hindu Upanishads, focuses on Larry Durrell, an American veteran of World War I, who (in part) seeks enlightenment and spiritual renewal in India at an ashram run by Sri Ganesha.  Maugham's portrait of Ganesha, in turn, was based on his own experience at an ashram run by Sri Ramana Maharshi (pictured here), in Tiruvannamalai, in Tamil Nadu [see "Somerset Maugham's Swami" by David Shaftel, New York Times Book Review, 07/25/2010). 
  
• In the 1940s, yogis were features in circuses, demonstrating their feats of physical posture.
• In the 1950s, yoga became a fad practiced by celebrities including Marilyn Monroe -- along with bodybuilding (think of Charles Atlas, and his fitness programs for the "97-pound weakling".
  
• In the 1960s, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert brought yoga into contact with the psychedelic movement -- a move that was resisted by traditional yogis.  Just as Vivekananda and others did not favor the American practice of yoga as a fitness and self-improvement regime, traditional yogis didn't think that drugs would help achieve the union of the individual self with the cosmic Self -- and probably would get in the way.
• More recently, interest in the spiritual side of yoga, without the drug enhancements, was boosted by Elizabeth Gilbert's memoir, Eat, Pray, Love (2006), which details her experience at another ashram, this one near Mumbai (in 2010, the book was made into a movie starring Julia Roberts).
  
• Still, these days, yoga is practiced in America more as a technique for physical fitness and rehabilitation than anything else.  Commodified versions of yoga are now promoted by Bikram Choudhury, founder of the Bikram Yoga franchise, among others.  An organization known as YogaFit promotes a "YogaButt" program to help practitioners develop a "sleek and sexy" bottom, which seems to be a radical departure from yoga's original practice as a mental and physical discipline whose aim is to transcend the body and achieve liberation of the mind and spirit! 
  
• As of 2016, there may have been as more than 37 million yoga practitioners in the United States, 80% of them women, most of them consumers of a "global wellness industry worth $25 billion"  (these figures come from "Yoga's Long Journey from Magic to Wellness" by Alistair Shearer, Wall Street Journal, 04/25/2020).  But all too often, they're not perfecting a single asana in the pursuit of spiritual perfection.  Instead, they're doing all 22, or at least a fair subset of them, in a sort of circuit training aimed at full-body conditioning.
• There has been some pushback to this trend, leading to a debate over the "ownership" of yoga -- going so far as to accuse those who have commercialized yoga of "intellectual property theft".  For example, a group of Indian-Americans has begun a campaign called "Take Yoga Back", supported by the Hindu American Foundation, which seeks to re-orient yoga practice.  Their goal is not to turn yoga practitioners into practicing Hindus, but rather to get secular yoga practitioners to recognize, and yoga teachers to emphasize, the Hindu spiritual foundations of yoga's physical practices.  (see "Hindu Group Stirs a Debate Over Yoga's Soul" by Paul Vitello, New York Times, 11/27/2010). 
  
• Of course, there has been pushback to the pushback.
  
• Some Christian Fundamentalists have condemned yoga practice precisely because Hinduism is a polytheistic religion.
• Others perceive, in the Take Yoga Back movement, an offshoot of Hindu nationalism, imported to the West from India. 
  
• Others point out that yoga has its origins in Vedic scriptures that antedate Hinduism by centuries -- although this sounds a lot like pointing out that Christianity has its roots in Judaism.  
• The larger point is that xxxxx
  

• The Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga in America (2010) by Stefanie Syman.
• The Great Oom: The Improbable Birth of Yoga in America (2010) by Robert Love. 
• The Science of Yoga: The Risks and the Rewards by William J. Broad (2012).
• Yoga: The Art of Transformation, ed. by Debra Diamond (2013), catalog of an art exhibition originating at the Freer and Sackler Galleries of the Smithsonian Institution, at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, February-May 2014.
• Diamond also curated Garden and Cosmos (2008), an exhibition devoted to yoga and other Hindu mystical traditions that emerged in the 12th century CE.  An image from that catalog is at the beginning of the lecture supplements on "Mind and Body". 
  

For an account of the TM course taught in 1968 by Maharishi at his ashram in Rishikesh, and attended by the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Donavan, Mia Farrow, and other popular-culture figures, see "The Road to Bliss" by Mike Love (yes, that Mike Love), Smithsonian magazine, 01-02/2018.

• In the Theravada tradition, Nirvana is defined in terms of tranquility and peace.
• In the Mahayana tradition, Nirvana is defined as emptiness.

There are lots of other traditions and schools, not the least of which is Zen Buddhism and the Tibetan tradition associated with the Dalai Lama.

1. All life is suffering; any pleasure is temporary.
   
2. Suffering is caused by desire; our desires exceed our resources, leaving us unhappy.
3. You can stop suffering by stopping desire -- including the desire for nirvana.
4. You can stop desire by following the Eightfold Path, involving wisdom, conduct, and mental development:
1. Right views.
2. Right intention.
3. Right speech.
4. Right action.
5. Right livelihood.
6. Right effort.
7. Right mindfulness.
8. Right concentration.

• The Five Aggregates or Skandas: All sentient beings, including nonhuman animals, are composed of five elements:
1. A body, including the six senses (the five Aristotelian senses plus the mind itself, which "senses" dreams and other mental states).
2. Feelings, or sensations that are pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral.
3. Perceptions, including how we categorize the objects of sensation.
4. Dispositions, including instincts, habits, emotions, and personality.
5. Consciousness -- but not a soul: Buddhism teaches that all beings are transient and soulless; there's reincarnation, but it doesn't involve the transfer of a soul from one body to another.
• The Four Immeasurables that are attained when we get rid of all our illusions:
  
1. Friendliness.
2. Compassion.
3. Sympathetic joy.
4. Equanimity.
   

• The first stage in Buddhist meditation is the selection of an object of concentration: roughly 40 of these are described in the Pali Commentaries of Buddhaghosa, who lived in the 5th c. CE.
• There are then four Dhyanas, or stages of concentration.
  
• Detachment from the external world, accompanied by an awareness of joy and ease.
• Concentration, and the suppression of reasoning and an "investigative" stance.
• The passing away of joy, leaving the feeling of ease.
• And, finally, the passing away of ease itself.
• The dhyanas are followed by four Samapattis, or attainments.
  
•  Consciousness of the infinity of space.
• Consciousness of the infinity of cognition.
• A concern with the unreality of things.
• Consciousness of the unreality of things as the object of thought itself.

• Rinzai Zen emphasizes meditation on koans, riddles and paradoxes (like "What is the sound of one hand clapping?"), leading to "sudden" enlightenment.  Rinzai Zen is also known as the "Southern" tradition, because its origins were in southern China.  The purpose of the koans is to shock the person out of conventional, rational ways of thinking.
  
• Soto Zen emphasizes the practice of zazen (hence the name), or sitting meditation, leading to "gradual" enlightenment.  Soto Zen is also known as the "Northern" tradition.
  
• Obaku Zen emphasizes the ritual incantation of the devotional formula, namu Amida Butsu (or "homage to Amida Buddha").

The Current Scene

• Three of these are variants on Zen meditation:
• One-point meditation, or focused attention, which -- as its name implies -- entails focusing attention intensely on one object.  However, the meditator remains open to distractions. 
• Open monitoring, or mindfulness, which entails passively observing stimuli, thoughts, and the like as they pass through the mind, without focusing attention on any of them in particular.
• In a further variant on open-monitoring, known as open presence, or pure experience, the meditator attempts to clear his mind of all content whatsoever. 
  
• And one is a variant on Tibetan meditation:
• Compassion meditation, which focuses contemplation on the suffering of the world, and feelings of benevolence toward other people.

Based on both controlled research and personal experience with meditation, Lutz et al. (2015) have offered a 3-dimensional matrix for classifying various forms of meditation and related experiences (including mind-wandering).  It looks a little like Hobson's AIM model, introduced in the lectures on Sleep and Dreaming, but the axes are different.  Lutz's scheme consists of three independent primary dimensions targeted by all "mindfulness practices", such as meditation, and four secondary qualities, which distinguish among various practices.

The primary qualities are considered orthogonal to, or independent of, each other:

• Object Orientation refers to whether the person's attention is focused on one particular thing, or flits around among various objects.  In meditation, attention is intensely focused on one thing -- breathing, for example, or a mantra; while in daydreaming, the mind wanders promiscuously.
  
• Dereification: "reification" means to make a real, concrete thing out of something that is abstract and imaginary. In this context, reification means to mistake a mental state for something real in the world outside the mind.  For example, in addictive craving thoughts about food or drugs can be confused with the real thing. 
  
• Meta-Awareness, as with meta-cognition in general, has to do with monitoring your experiences -- turning your atention inward toward your own mental processes.

The secondary qualities are also more or less independent of the primary qualities.  You can think of them as four additional dimensions of mindfulness-related practices.  It's just that, in visual terms, they're hard to plot in the three-dimensional space that's already taken up with the three primary qualities.

• Aperture
• Clarity
• Stability
• Effort

The point of all of this is that there are lots of different kinds of "meditation".  When we try to bring meditation into the laboratory, to study is scientifically, it's important to be clear about what kind of meditation we are studying.  Yoga practiced to achieve samadhi may be quite different in its effects than yoga practiced to achieve six-pack abs.  Contemplating a Zen koan may have quite different effects than contemplating the suffering of the world.

Of course, even diligent meditators experience episodes of mind-wandering and daydreaming -- which is one reason that Zen masters wield a keisaku, a wooden stick which they use when a pupil falls asleep or otherwise drifts off.  Based on studies of the default mode network in the brain, an fMRI study by Hasenkamp et al. examined brain activity in a group of subjects practicing "one-point" or "focused attention" meditation.  The study is of particular interest because it brings together two literatures: one on meditation as mind-focusing, and the other on daydreaming as mind-wandering.

• Sustained focus: Meditation begins with an intense attentional focus, activating the usual "task-positive" attentional networks in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.
• Mind-wandering: Eventually, however, the mind begins to wander away, activating the "task negative" DMN, involving the medial portions of the frontal and parietal lobe.
• Awareness: At some point, the subject himself becomes aware that his mind has begun to wander, which activates a "salience network" involving the anterior cingulate cortex.
• Reorientation: And finally, the subject reorients himself, disengaging attention from his daydream and refocusing his attention where it belongs -- a process involving the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the inferior parietal lobe. 

With increased practice at meditation, these episodes become less frequent in occurrence and shorter in duration.

Here's a nice depiction of the entire cycle, from "The Mind of the Meditator" by M. Ricard, A. Lutz, and R.J. Davidson (Scientific American, 11/2014).  the implication of this study, however, is that from a cognitive-neuroscientific point of view, meditation is just a special case of focused attention -- different in quantity, perhaps, but not different qualitatively from focusing attention on any other object of interest, such as a symphony or a football game.  

• After World War II, the aforementioned D.T. Suzuki embarked on a lecture tour of the United States, and taught at Columbia University, and the California Institute of Integral Studies, where he came into contact with Alan Watts and other members of the "Beat Generation".
• In the mid-1960s, the Beatles came under the influence of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, founder of the Transcendental Meditation movement.
• At roughly the same time, the Hare Krishna movement, known formally as the International Society of Krishna Consciousness, or ISKCON, was established in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco by Swami Prabhupada (1896-1977).

How to Meditate

1. Desire for insight and change, knowing that meditation can challenge your most deeply held beliefs.  No point in meditating unless you really want to change something about yourself and the way you think and experience the world.
   
2. Preparation through relaxation and awareness exercises.  This reduces your stress levels so you can adopt the proper mindset.
   
3. Engagement in an intense ritual designed to interrupt everyday consciousness and habitual thoughts and actions.  Newberg argues that any repetitive movement or sound will do, or any posture -- the more unusual, the better to disrupt your ordinary habits of thought and behavior.
   
4. Surrender, or a complete immersion in the ritual.  Newberg likens this to flow, discussed in the lectures on Absorption and Daydreaming, where you become so immersed in the ritual that you lose track of time and your usual sense of self begins to disappear.
   
5. Reflection on the sensations, thoughts, and feelings that occurred while you were practicing the ritual.  This enables you to integrate what you experienced during meditation into your everyday life.

"De-Automatization"

Setting these non-trivial problems aside, why should anyone want to do this research?

Based on his research, Deikman believed that meditative experiences came in two broad forms:

• Sensate, in which there is an intensification of perceptual, cognitive, or motor activity occurring more or less spontaneously in such states as Maslow's peak experiences, daydreaming, absorption, and flow.
• Transcendant, in which there is a suspension of mental activity, an "emptying of the mind", resulting from training in some meditative discipline, such as meditation or contemplative prayer.

• Contemplation is the nonanalytic apprehension of objects and ideas, which banishes discursive thought and empties the mind of everything but one percept.  In contemplation, thought is interference, and the general idea is that knowledge of the essence of reality is obtained through perception alone.
  
• Active contemplation is the initial phase of contemplation, in which the subject excludes and devalues both inner and outer stimuli -- hunger pangs and aching backs, as well as potentially distracting events in the external environment.
• Full contemplation is the final phase of contemplation, involving what Deikman called the de-automatization of contemplation where the contemplative mode occurs spontaneously, and autonomously, not as the result of active effort.  Full contemplation entails a stance of passivity and surrender with respect to the object of contemplation.
• Renunciation is the shifting from "doing" to "allowing" that eliminates worldly goals and pleasures that might distract the practitioner from contemplation.  Renunciation is an extension of the contemplative mode, by which one frees oneself from worldly distractions, permitting the perception of "higher realisms".  Obviously, renunciation also entails the "monastic" virtues of poverty, chastity, and obedience -- as well, perhaps, as a life of solitude.

• Action mode
• Active manipulation of the environment
• Increased muscle tension
• Focalized attention
• Logical thought
• Firm ego boundaries
• Receptive Mode
• Passive experience of the environment
• Decreased muscle tension
• Diffuse attention
• "Alogical" (not necessarily illogical or irrational) thought
• Self merged with objects of perception.

• Reality transfer, in which thoughts and images become "real".
• Sensory translation, in which mental processes are experienced as physical sensations, associated with heightened attention, the absence of analytic thought, and a receptive attitude.
• Unity between self and object, including direct perception of the structure of the mind, and the perception of the "real structure" of the world, by virtue of perceptual expansion.
• Ineffability, a primitive, pre-verbal experience of trans-sensate phenomena beyond ordinary sensation, memory, and thought -- an experience too complex to describe or explain to someone who has not experienced it (and who, by virtue of having experienced it, requires neither description nor explanation!).

Brain Activity During Meditation: The Early Years

Early experiments on meditation involved either attempts to perform controlled, quantitative studies of religious practitioners, or attempts to develop laboratory models of meditation exercises which could be performed by novices. 

Much of this work has employed EEG measures, and much of the EEG work has focused on alpha activity.  

 

 

 

Perhaps the most provocative of these early studies were two psychophysiological experiments on yoga and Zen meditation.

In the yoga experiment, Anand et al. (1961) recorded EEG activity in two experienced yogis, and in a larger group of yoga students. They found increased density of alpha activity during meditation. 

 

 

More interesting, however, they found no evidence of alpha blocking -- a reflexive orienting response in which alpha activity disappears when the subject orients to a novel stimulus. The abolition of the blocking response was interpreted as consistent with the goal of yoga meditation, samadhi, which is to become oblivious to environmental stimuli.

In the Zen experiment, Kasamatsu & Hirai (1966) studied Zen masters and students, all of whom were practicing the classic zazen form of meditation -- sitting, with eyes open and focused in front. 

 

 

 

Again, they found increased alpha activity -- despite the fact that the subjects' eyes were open. Towards the end of the meditation periods, they also observed an increased density of EEG theta activity. 

The density of alpha activity in the EEG was positively correlated with both the amount of experience of the subject with meditation, and with the master's evaluation of the subject's progress in training.

 

 

In contrast to yoga, however,they observed that alpha blocking to the novel stimulus was not abolished. To the contrary, alpha blocking did not habituate with continued presentations of the stimulus. 

The persistence of blocking, and the abolition of habituation, was interpreted as consistent with the goal of Zen meditation, satori, which is to free the mind from preconceptions and be attuned to each new experience as it presents itself.

Both studies revealed an increase in slow-wave activity in the EEG: an increase in alpha density, a decrease (i.e., slowing) in the frequency of alpha activity, and an increase in theta activity. Of course, some of this could have been an artifact. Alpha activity increases when subjects close their eyes, and even with their eyes open, alpha increases when subjects are "not looking" at anything in particular. More important, taken together, the yoga and Zen studies seemed to show that the physiological effects of meditation were in line with the philosophical-religious goals of the discipline. Yogis seek to become oblivious to the world, and they don't respond to novel stimuli. Zen meditators seek to dissolve preconceived categories, and they don't habituate the alpha-blocking response.

Unfortunately, the findings with respect to alpha blocking were not confirmed in a replication attempt by Becker & Shapiro (1980). Their study included practitioners of traditional Yoga, Transcendental Meditation (a secularized form of Yoga -- see below) and Zen, as well as control groups of nonmeditators who were instructed either to attend to or ignore the stimuli. The five groups performed essentially identically in the experiment. although the meditators did show an increase in EEG alpha activity, no group showed any particular effect on alpha blocking or on habituation. Failures to replicate are surprisingly common in science, and this discrepancy remains to be resolved by further research.

 

 

EEG Biofeedback and the "Alpha State"

One offshoot of the initial psychological interest in meditation has been research and clinical application of alpha-wave biofeedback. In biofeedback, information about the functioning of internal organs and systems, normally unavailable to conscious perception, is picked up electronically and fed to the person in the form of an auditory or visual signal. The person is then taught to engage in some activity which will alter the internal function, as reflected in changes in the signal. Research by Neal Miller indicated that nonhuman animals could learn to control levels of autonomic function through biofeedback (with physiological changes in the desired direction rewarded by electrical stimulation of the brain), and researchers and clinicians quickly came to apply biofeedback technology in the treatment of a host of physical, psychological, and psychosomatic problems.

In a pioneering study, Kamiya (1969) reported that subjects could learn to discriminate levels of alpha activity (i.e., alpha density) in the EEG, and could also learn, through biofeedback, to increase the levels of alpha activity in their brains. The subjective characteristics of the "alpha state" appeared to resemble those of meditation, leading to the peculiarly American idea that people could achieve satori through technology rather than through religious discipline.

 

Kamiya's initial report was subsequently confirmed by Nowlis & Kamiya (1970) and by Brown (1970), but critics soon discovered methodological problems with these studies that cast doubt on their conclusions and implications.

For example, the ability to detect the presence of alpha activity may be an artifact of response bias. Under ordinary circumstances, as subjects habituate to the experimental situation, alpha activity increases over time. Therefore, if alpha density is increasing, subjects who are biased to say they are in the alpha state will be right more often than wrong, just by chance. This is a situation that signal-detection theory is able to unconfound, but signal-detection theory requires the presence of the stimulus (in this case, alpha activity) to be under the control of the experimenter -- which is not possible in the case of endogenous EEG variables.

 

In addition, it is known that visual activity blocks EEG alpha, and that this blocking habituates over time. It is possible that the appearance of learning to increase alpha density reflects this habituation process. Alternatively, the appearance of learning could reflect nothing more than disinhibition of alpha produced by disengaging from looking activity.

A series of studies by Paskewitz and his associates (1969, 1971, 1973) found no evidence that subjects with their eyes open could learn to produce levels of alpha activity exceeding those observed in an eyes-closed baseline session. Furthermore, equivalent increases in alpha activity were found in a "yoked" control group of subjects who received the same feedback as the experimental group, regardless of their levels of EEG alpha. So, despite appearances, there appears to be no contingent learning in alpha biofeedback. Moreover, Paskewitz et al. found that subjective reports of the "alpha state" were influenced by demand characteristics of the biofeedback situation, a finding confirmed by Plotkin. Biofeedback may help people to gain control of certain autonomic functions, but brain-wave biofeedback does not appear to be a route to instant satori.

John's Excellent Adventure with Shibayama As an undergraduate, I read the Anand and Kasamatsu & Hirai studies of meditation, and Kamiya's initial report on alpha biofeedback, as reprinted in Charles Tart's pioneering anthology, Altered States of Consciousness (1969).  I had determined that my senior honors thesis in psychology would be a replication of Tart's research.   At the time, the campus was being visited by Zenkei Shibiyama Roshi, chief abbot (kancho) of Nanzen-ji Monastery in Kyoto (garden pictured below), who was giving a seminar on Zen Buddhism as part of one of his frequent lecture tours to the United States.   Shibayama (1894-1974) was ordained a Buddhist monk in 1908: Among his disciples was Keido Fukushima, abbot of Tokufuji" (see The Laughing Buddha of Tofukuji: The Life of Zen Master Keido Fukushima by Ishwar C. Harris); and D.T. Suzuki, who is primarily responsible for bringing Zen to the United States in the 1960s (see his Zen Buddhism and the Way of Zen).  Shibayama's writings include A Flower Does Not Talk: Zen Essays (including a number of lectures delivered to students in training), and The Gateless Barrier: Zen Comments on the Mumonkan (a set of 48 koans used in training). A little background: There are two principal schools of Zen Buddhism, with differing views on how one may attain enlightenment (satori).  Soto zen emphasizes sitting meditation (zazen).  Rinzai zen emphasizes the exploration of koan, spiritual riddles like "What is the sound of one hand clapping?". Nanzen-ji ("Southern Zen Temple"), in turn, is the "mother house" of the Rinzai sect in Japan, and is the "presiding temple" of the Kyoto Gozan, or "Five great Zen Temples of Kyoto".  First built in 1264 as a retirement villa for Emperor Kameyama, the structure became a temple in 1291.  Most of the temple buildings were lost to fire in the 15th century, and the present structure dates mostly from the 17th century.  The San-Mon Gate was built in 1628.   Nanzen-ji offers a stunningly spare rock garden for contemplation, and includes a number of subtemples, including Nanzen-in, Tenju-an, and Konchi-in. It anchors the southern end of Kyoto's Philosopher's Walk (the northern end is anchored by Ginkaku-ji (the Silver Pavillion), a popular tourist attraction).   Anyway, I did not have room in my schedule to take Shibayama's seminar, but I had met him on a couple of occasions under the auspices of Chapel House, a meditative retreat center at Colgate where he was staying.  So while I waited for the psychology department's technician to breadboard a biofeedback device, I set about attempting to replicate the Kasamatsu experiment -- on Shibayama (as it happened, the tech was unable to get the equipment working in time, so I did my thesis on hypnosis instead).  In one of our meetings I described the research on Zen and Yoga practitioners, and later  provided him with copies of the papers.  His response on both occasions was "It's very interesting, but what does it mean?".  Eventually, I screwed up my courage and asked him if he would allow an EEG recording while he meditated.  Never mind that Rinzai Zen focuses on koans, not zazen!  His response: "If the Pope were here, would you ask to record his brainwaves while he prayed?".  When I admitted that I would not, he asked "Why not?".  I had no answer, and that effectively ended the discussion.   In The Laughing Buddha of Tofukuji, Ishwar Harris reports that, at one point, Shibayama told Fukushima (also known as Gensho) that he should return to his university, "implying that Gensho thought like a scholar not like a koan student".  Perhaps Shibayama was offering me similar advice.  But in retrospect, I think that his question about the Pope at prayer was my own little koan -- and that when I solved it, I would achieve at least a little bit of enlightenment.

Binaural Beats and Meditation

Binaural beats are an auditory illusion.  When two pure tones of slightly different frequencies are presented to each ear, their loudness appears to fluctuate at a frequency equal to the difference between them.  So, for example, if a tone of 440 hz is presented to the left ear and a tone of 445 hz is presented to the right ear, the tones will appear to fluctuate at a rate of 5/second.  They were comprehensively described in an article, "Auditory beats in the Brain", by Gerald Oster, a biophysicist, that appeared in Scientific American for October 1973. 

These beats are familiar to any musician who has tuned one instrument to another, but after Oster's article appeared some 'New Age" types began to make claims that these beats "entrained" brain waves, and thus could influence consciousness.  So, for example, it was claimed that beats in the range of EEG alpha activity (roughly 8-14 cps) would increase levels of alpha activity in the brain, and thus induce a meditation-like state (based on evidence that meditation also produced an increase in alpha activity).  And "binaural beat generators" are sold by a number of firms, for just this purpose.

But the scientific base for these claims is very thin.  A quick PsycInfo search turned up only two articles bearing on the question, both from the same research group (Wahbeh et al), and published in the Journal of Complementary Medicine for 2007.  In the first study subjects who got 60 days of binaural beats showed a reduction in trait anxiety.  The second study had something like a placebo control group: it didn't measure anxiety, but the subjects did show an increase in depression.  That's it.  That's the scientific base.

I'm sure that there's a placebo effect here -- frankly, there's a placebo effect in almost every treatment!  

But, like alpha-wave biofeedback, I suspect that the attraction of binaural beats is that they offer another way to achieve "instant satori -- enlightenment without all the hassle of disciplined contemplation.

• Students must enter and leave the classroom in silence; they may not eat, drink, or use electronic devices during class time; they must dress according to a strict code, and participate in in-class chanting exercises.
• The asceticism continues outside of class, in a progressively imposed discipline that ends with a month-long period of silence. During this period, students must awaken at 5 AM without benefit of an alarm clock; they must meditate daily, and also perform a daily act of kindness; they cannot use electronic devices, they can't touch other people, they can eat only unprocessed food, and then only during daylight.

There's an App for That

One example of the popularization of mindfulness meditation has been the proliferation of smartphone application software (apps) for mindfulness meditation. Among the most popular of these is Headspace (for iPhone); also buddhify, Calm, Insight Timer, and GPS for the Soul.  A subscription to Headspace costs $13/month (2015 prices), and supplies meditation "packs" on various topics.  For a discussion of Headspace, see "The Higher Life" by Lizzie Widdicombe, New Yorker, 07/06-13/2015.

Alpha Blocking, Startle, and Binocular Rivalry

• Focused "one point" meditation, concentrating attention on a fixed point.
• "Open Presence" mediation, attempting to achieve "pure awareness" lacking any object of concentration.
• Cognitive distraction, while recalling details of a past personal episode.
• A control condition of unanticipated startle.

In the unanticipated startle control condition, Ricard's psychophysiological responses to the startle stimulus did not differ from that of the control group.

During meditation, however, Ricard often showed substantial modification of the startle response, even compared to a non-meditative distraction condition.  This was especially the case for the "open presence" form of meditation, which attempts to clear the mind of all content whatsoever.  That is, the open-presence meditator is attending to nothing, and thinking about nothing.  Focused attention, by contrast, had less effect on the startle reflex (though it had some).

A study by Carter, Presti, and their colleagues (2005) , employing a large number of Tibetan monks and other experienced meditators, employed another automatic behavior, binocular rivalry.  In the BN paradigm, subjects are presented with two different images to each eye -- one a horizontal, the other a vertical grating.  Normally, the visual system would fuse the separate 2-dimensional retinal images into a single 3-dimensional image, but with such radically disparate images this is impossible.  Instead, the subject experiences a random alternation between the images.  This phenomenon occurs automatically -- it's caused by a hard-wired feature of the visual system.  But, it turns out, one-point meditation essentially abolishes binocular rivalry.  During meditation, a majority of subjects experienced a slowing of the rate of alternation, and some subjects experienced a stable image.  Even after the meditation period had ended, half the subjects continued to experience a slower rate of alternation -- though some showed a kind of rebound effect, alternation at an even faster rate.  Compassion meditation, by contrast, had no effects at all on BN.  That meditation can modulate something as hired-wired as binocular rivalry is pretty interesting -- as is the fact that the two types of meditation studied in this experiment had quite different effects.

A Miscellany of Cognitive Tasks

De-automatization entails the reorganization of cognitive schemata so that habitual modes of thought no longer operate automatically, and it is possible to view the world in other ways.  When Deikman introduced the concept of de-automatization, psychology did not have a technical concept of automaticity. Now that it has one.  Automatic processes are defined as those that are inevitably executed in response to some cue, incorrigibly executed, and consume no cognitive capacity.  With such a definition in hand, it becomes possible, at least in principle, to determine whether training in a meditative discipline really does de-automatize cognitive processing.  Arguably, the gold standard test of automatization, and thus of de-automatization, would be performance on the Stroop color-word interference test (or some variant on the Stroop paradigm). But investigators have also employed other paradigms in the quest to document de-automatization.

An early laboratory study by Dillbeck (1982) compared two different groups of TM practitioners against a non-meditating control group. One group "N/TM", waited for two weeks prior to initiating TM training; another group, "R/TM" practiced passive relaxation for two weeks prior to TM.

• Subjects in the N/TM group showed improved tachistoscopic recognition performance with both random and word-like sequences of letters.
• The R/TM group showed improvement only on recognition of the word-like sequences.
• More interesting, perhaps, the subjects in both groups showed improved recognition of tachistoscopically presented playing cards (e.g. "10 of Hearts)" -- but only if the cards were incongruous -- for example, if the hearts and diamonds were black instead of red). This last is an especially interesting finding, as it seems to indicate that TM breaks down deeply engrained, habitual patterns of thought. There were no significant effects on subjects' ability to solve anagrams.

Later work by Alexander et al. (1989) suggested that TM could improve cognitive functioning in the elderly.  This study involved a group of elderly residents of a retirement home, who practiced TM for 20 minute sessions, twice daily, for 12 weeks. Control groups engaged in a "mindful", guided attention activity intended to foster "new and creative" ways of thinking; mental relaxation; or nothing at all.

• A Dementia Screening Test confirmed that random assignment of residents to conditions had been successful.
• All three treatment groups performed better on a paired-associate learning test than the untreated controls.
• The TM and mindfulness groups performed slightly better than the relaxation and control groups on a test of word fluency.
• In a clever test of over-learning, the subjects were asked to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. All of the subjects were old enough to have learned the Pledge before 1954, when the phrase "under God" was added. They were asked to review the new version, and then dictate the Pledge from memory. The TM subjects were more likely to dictate the Pledge correctly than the subjects in the other two groups. Again, this is consistent with the proposition that TM helps break down habitual patterns of thought.

From time to time, meditation researchers have employed other tasks to study the effects of meditation on various aspects of cognitive and emotional processing (for an overview, see Ricard et al., "Mind of the Meditator", Scientific American, 11/2014).

• As noted earlier, Hasenkamp and her colleagues (2012) showed that practice in focused-attention reduced both the frequency and duration of mind-wandering episodes.
• Van Vugt & Slagter (2013) found that practice in mindfulness meditation reduced the duration of the attentional blink.
• Klimecki and her colleagues (2013) found that, after training in compassion meditation, subjects showed less distress, and more benevolent feelings when watching video clips of other people suffering; subjects who received more convention empathy training, by contrast, experienced an increase in negative emotion. 
  

Meditation and the Stroop Task

As noted earlier, the Stroop task is widely considered to be the primary exemplar of automatic processing.  The study by Alexander et al. (1989) did, in fact, find that TM reduced Stroop interference.  Unfortunately, however, that reduction did not reach statistical significance. 

 

 

However, a doctoral dissertation by Heidi Wenk-Sormaz (2006) Systematic research by Wenk-Sormaz did find that a "mindfulness" meditation exercise reduced Stroop interference (unlike many meditation researchers, who tend to be trained in clinical psychology, Wenk-Sormaz was trained as a cognitive psychologist). Her subjects, who were adult professionals participating in a short course on meditation, practiced a 15-minute exercise in which they focused on their breathing. This study was conducted before MBSR became popular, but the procedure was very similar to that employed in MBSR. Wenk-Sormaz assessed performance on the standard Stroop task before and after meditation.

In Experiment 1, the meditators were compared to two control groups: one consisting of college students recruited through a subject pool, the other of subjects who were matched in age to the meditators. Comparing pretest to post-test performance, all subjects showed a reduction in Stroop interference, but this was greatest for the meditators, especially in the critical condition where the color words were printed in incongruent colors.
Experiment 2a employed a different set of control groups. One group simply rested between tests; the other, who served as an active cognitive control, were taught to use the Method of Loci as a mnemonic device to learn a word-list. This study again found a reduction in Stroop interference for the meditators, though the effect was smaller than in Experiment 1.

Experiment 2b, employing the same conditions and subjects as 2a, examined the the effects of meditation on the generation of category instances.  Subjects were provided with 10 category labels, and were given 30 seconds each to generate instances. Initially, she hoped that meditation would lead to a "freeing up" of thought, manifested in a tendency to generate less frequent, more atypical instances.  In her first attempt, this didn't work out.

However, Experiment 3 found enhanced production of atypical instances during a category generation task -- but only when subjects were specifically instructed to produce atypical as opposed to typical instances. In the earlier attempt, subjects were unconstrained, and may have construed "typical" responses as appropriate to task demands. But this new experiment involved explicit requests for "typical" or "atypical" instances, in different conditions. When atypical instances were legitimized in this manner, meditators were better able to generate them -- again, apparently, demonstrating a freeing of thought from conventional patterns.

• The research comes with the official endorsement of the Dalai Lama, who has long been interested in the connections between Tibetan (not Zen) Buddhism and the American "positive psychology" movement.
• As a corollary to the connection to positive psychology, the focus of the research is less on the brain correlates of cognitive changes associated with meditation, and more on the correlates of emotional changes.

• The dorsolateral area of prefrontal cortex (PFC) seems to be activated in emotional states.
• The ventromedial area of PFC seems to be activated in motivational (goal) states.
• Positive emotions and goals activate the left PFC.
• Negative emotions and goals activate the right PFC.

• The effects in the Davidson study are generally weak, and often fail to reach conventional standards of statistical significance.  They are published because of their groundbreaking nature -- certainly the most extensive brain-imaging study of any form of meditation to date -- not because they are definitive.  At the very least, one would want to see a replication.
• There is a certain lack of specificity to the brain changes observed.  Note that the figures above are for electrode sites that are not particularly close to the PFC (C3/C4 lie at the vertex of the skull, while T3/T4 are over the temporal lobe).  Presumably, more compelling results would have come from electrode sites located nearer to the PFC itself.
• As noted earlier, the focus of Davidson's research is on the emotional effects of meditation.  One would like to see research on its cognitive effects as well.  MBSR reduces stress, presumably -- but does it promote de-automatization of thought?
• It would be very interesting to compare the results of different meditation disciplines -- for example, TM and the Relaxation Response, vs. MBSR (publication of the 2003 study already initiated a sort of rivalry between promoters of TM and promoters of MBSR).  
• It would also be interesting to examine the effects of religious or philosophical context.  Raj Yoga and Zazen developed within particular philosophical and religious worldviews, and have express philosophical or religious goals.  TM and MBSR represent a kind of "secularization" of these practices (a secularization achieved most radically in Benson's Relaxation Response). 
  

Then again, it might be possible to have what Ronald Dworkin, the philosopher, has called a "religion without gods" (see his posthumously published Religion Without God, 2013). Many people characterize themselves as "spiritual" or even "religious", even though they don't identify with any particular religious tradition, or even believe in God. And the Supreme Court has determined that the "free exercise" of religion enshrined in the Constitution includes "religions" that do not recognize a god of any sort, such as secular humanism. While some might prefer to reserve the term "religion" for theistic beliefs that entail the recognition of a God or gods, Dworkin argues that, in fact, religion does not necessarily entail the belief that the universe is governed by some supernatural being -- much less one that acts in history and communicates directly with believers. Albert Einstein, for example, was an atheist. But he also described himself as "devoutly religious" (in an essay reprinted in Living Philosophies, edited by Clifton Fadiman, 1990). Dworkin argues (in Chapter 1, reprinted in the New York Review of Books, 04/04/2013) that the "metaphysical core" of this "religious attitude" consists of two values:

1. "[H]uman life has objective meaning or importance. Each person has an innate and inescapable responsibility to try to make his life a successful one: that means living well, accepting ethical responsibilities to oneself as well as moral responsibilities to others, not just if we happen to think this is important but because it is in itself important whether we think so or not.
2. [W]hat we call "nature" -- the universe as a whole and in all its parts -- is not just a matter of fact but is itself sublime: something of intrinsic value and wonder.

Together these two comprehensive value judgments declare inherent value in both dimensions of human life: biological and biographical. We are a part of nature because we have a physical being and duration: nature is the locus and nutrient of our lives. We are apart from nature because we are conscious of ourselves [emphasis added] as making a life and must make decisions that, taken together, determine what life we have made.

• The conventional definition goes something like this: "Religion is a system of communal beliefs and practices relative to superhuman beings" whose "miraculous powers set them apart from ordinary mortals" (from the aforementioned Encyclopedia of World Religions,1999). 
  
• This definition has been adopted by the New Atheists, such as Richard Dawkins, who defines God as a "hypothesis" about a supernatural agent whose existence and activities explain puzzling natural phenomena such as earthquakes and floods.  And it's this "hypothesis" that, Dawkins argues, has been definitively refuted by science.
  
• Similarly, the sociologist Christian (yes!) Smith defines religion as a system of "culturally prescribed practices" whose aim is to enable people to gain access to "superhuman powers" in order to obtain good things and avoid bad things, "in conditions and situations they cannot control and with problems that they cannot solve" (Religion: What It Is, How It Works, and Why It Matters, 2017).  Religion, then is a way to try to get an A on an upcoming test without having to study.
• On the other hand, the Philosopher Tim Crane thinks you can have a religion without an "archaic cosmology" of God (or gods) in Heaven who know(s) and control(s) everything.  He argues that the religious worldview entails "a sense of the transcendent, or an unseen moral order to the universe" combined with "a community that tries to 'makes sense of the world' by attempting to bring its members into alignment with this moral order through a tradition of narratives and rituals" (quoted from "Unknown Unknowns: Three Inquiries Into Religion" by James Ryerson, New York Times Book Review, 10/22/2017).  This is the religion of Thomas Jefferson, among others, who assembled a version of the New Testament by cutting out all the miracles, and leaving just the biography and moral teachings of Jesus.  And it may be all the religion anyone needs.
  

A deeper objection to the attempted reconciliation of contemporary science and Buddhist practice flows from the nature of scientific storytelling....  The contemporary generation of American Buddhists draws again and again on scientific evidence for the power of meditation -- EEGs and MRIs and so on -- without ever wondering why a scientific explanation of that kind has seldom arisen in Buddhist cultures.... What Wright correctly sees as the heart of meditation practice -- the draining away of the stories we tell compulsively about each moment in favor of simply having the moment -- is antithetical to the kind of evidentiary argument he admires.  Science is competitive storytelling.  If a Buddhist Newton had been sitting under that tree, he would If a Buddhist Newton had been sitting under that tree, he would have seen the apple falling and, reaching for Enlightenment, experienced each moment of its descent as a thing pure in itself. Only a restless Western Newton would say, "Now, what story can tell us best what connects those apple-moments from branch to ground? Sprites? Magnets? The mysterious force of the mass of the earth beneath it? What made the damn thing fall? That's a story we tell, not a moment we experience. The Buddhist Newton might have been happier than ours -- ours was plenty unhappy -- but he would never have found the equation. Science is putting names on things and telling stories about them, the very habits that Buddhists urge us to transcend. The stories improve over time in the light of evidence, or they don't. It's just as possible to have Buddhist science as to have Christian science or Taoist science. But the meditator's project of being here now will never be the same as the scientist's project of connecting the past to the future, of telling how and knowing why [i.e., classifying, explaining, and predicting].

Both Wright and Batchelor end with a semi-evangelical call for a secularized, modernized Buddhism that can supply all the shared serenity of the old dispensation and still adjust to the modern world -- Batchelor actually ends his book with a sequence of fixed tenets for a secular Gotama practice. But does their Buddhism have a unique content, or is it simply the basics of secular liberalism with a borrowed Eastern vocabulary? What is the specifically Buddhist valence of saying, as Batchelor does, that the practitioners of a secular Buddhism will "seek to understand and diminish the structural violence of societies and institutions as well as the roots of violence that are present in themselves"? Do we need a twenty-five-hundred-year-old faith from the East to do this --  isn't that what every liberal-arts college insists that its students do, anyway, with the help of only a cultural-studies major?

All secularized faiths tend to converge on a set of agreeable values: compassion, empathy, the renunciation of mere material riches. But the shared values seem implicit in the very project of secularizing a faith, with its assumption that the ethical and the supernatural elements can be cleanly severed -- an operation that would have seemed unintelligible to St. Paul, as to Gotama himself. The idea of doing without belief is perhaps a bigger idea than any belief it negates. Secular Buddhism ends up being . . . secularism....

A faith practice with an authoritarian structure sooner or later becomes a horror; a faith practice without an authoritarian structure sooner or later becomes a hobby. The dwindling down of Buddhism into another life-style choice will doubtless irritate many, and Wright will likely be sneered at for reducing Buddhism to another bourgeois amenity, like yoga or green juice. (Batchelor refers to this as a "dumbing down of the dharma".)

If there is something distinctive about a Buddhist secularism, it is that the Buddhist believes in the annihilation of appetite, while the pure secular humanist believes in satisfying our appetites until annihilation makes it impossible. Appetite, though, has a way of renewing itself even after it's been fed; no matter what we do, some new gnawing materializes. Dissatisfaction with our circumstances, the frustration of our ambitions, something no bigger than a failure to lose enough weight or to have an extra room to make a nursery out of: even amid luxury, the ache of the unachieved seems intense enough. It is these dissatisfactions that drive so many Americans -- who cannot understand why lives filled with material pleasure still feel unfulfilled -- to their meditation mats.

Secularized or traditional, the central Buddhist epiphany remains essential: the fact of mortality makes loss certain. For all the ways in which science and its blessed godchild scientific medicine have reduced the overt suffering that a human life entails, the vector to sadness remains in place, as much as it did in the Buddha's time. Gotama's death, from what one doctor describes as mesenteric infarction, seems needlessly painful and gruesome by modern standards; this is the kind of suffering we can substantially alleviate. But the universal mortality of all beings -- the fact that, if we're lucky, we will die after seventy years or so -- is not reformable. The larger problem we face is not suffering but sadness, and the sadness is caused by the fact of loss. To love less in order to lose less seems like no solution at all, but to see loss squarely sounds like wisdom. We may or may not be able to Americanize our Buddhism, but we can certainly ecumenicize our analgesics. Lots of different stuff from lots of different places which we drink and think and do can help us manage. Every faith practice has a different form of comfort to offer in the face of loss, and each is useful. Sometimes it helps to dwell on the immensity of the universe. Sometimes it helps to feel the presence of ongoing family and community. Sometimes it helps to light a candle and say a prayer. Sometimes it helps to sit and breathe.