Your eyes are always moving, in quick, sharp, jumps, several times a second. These movements are called saccades. You need to make these visual jumps since you can only see well right at the center of our eyes (“fovea”). Saccades can be exploratory, or confirmatory in nature. Even babies make saccades (more slowly, though).

My mind is also always moving in quick, sharp jumps, several times a second. What is the name for these? I’ll call them saccades as well: mental saccades. Like oculomotor saccades, they are both exploratory and confirmatory. Some people might call them “thinking”, but I don’t think they are “thinking” any more than visual saccades are “seeing”.

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with these mental saccades, just as there’s nothing wrong with visual saccades, which are indispensable to our visual perception. But there’s certainly such a thing as excessive mental saccadic activity.

(An aside: it would not surprise me if there were common mechanisms behind visual saccades, mental saccades, and possibly other types of saccades. What would be the equivalent of an aural saccade?)

Meditation slows and damps mental saccading. As a result the limited energy available for new synapse formation, instead of being consumed in excessive mental saccading, can be applied to higher-level cortical areas underlying the development of new behaviors and insights.

I am pleased to announce that the Open Directory Project has added a new category for Neurotheology, which after due deliberation was set up as a subcategory of Psychology and Religion under the Psychology tree.

Like many specialized categories, Neurotheology ends up being less an index of web sites (since there are few, if any, websites dedicated to the topic), and more an index of web pages (“deeplinks”). And it is a relatively limited resource for the topic, because much of the information in the field is still in printed form.

(The same holds for the other category which I’m editing, about the medieval Japanese religious leader and philosopher Dogen.)

The project says about itself:

The Open Directory follows in the footsteps of some of the most important editor/contributor projects of the 20th century, [such] as the Oxford English Dictionary. Its data is made available for free to anyone. It’s the most widely distributed data base of Web content classified by humans. Its editorial standards body of net-citizens provide the collective brain behind resource discovery on the Web. The Open Directory powers the core directory services for the Web’s largest and most popular search engines and portals, including Google.

Normal users who submit URLs play an important role in the directory building process. Those URLs are then reviewed by editors like me for inclusion. The “Submit URL” link is on each page of the directory. Send in your suggestions now!

The late Pope John Paul II, while clearly lacking in knowledge of Buddhism, also, it is worthy of note, called early in his papacy for a fruitful concord between science and faith, between the Church and the world.

Generally I’m skeptical of science and religion initiatives, finding them superficial and sterile. “Hey look, I’m a pious Catholic who believes that God could have used evolution to create the world!” “No, look at me, I’m a microbiologist who believes that Jesus rose from the dead!”

But the Pope’s call for cooperation between science and religion bore fruit in the form of a collaboration between the Vatican Observatory and the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, involving a series of conferences, one of which, held in June 1998 in Poland, dealt with relations between the cognitive neurosciences and Christian theology.

This conference resulted in the volume entitled Neuroscience and the Person: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action, a fascinating, if somewhat overblown and uneven mix of papers from every imaginable perspective. I recommend Dr. Michael Arbib’s essays in this books, entitled “Towards a Neuroscience of the Person” and “Crusoe’s Brain: of Solitude and Society”, although his rather reductionist perspective will not be everyone’s cup of tea.

edge.org asked 119 scientists and futurists: “What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?” Two answers impressed me deeply. The first is by Donald Hoffman of UCI (picture), which I excerpt here:

The world of our daily experience—the world of tables, chairs, stars, and people, with their attendant shapes, smells, feels and sounds—is a species-specific user interface to a realm far more complex, a realm whose essential character is conscious. It is unlikely that the contents of our interface in any way resemble that realm.

He goes on to point out that the nature of user interfaces is to simplify and symbolize:

Evolutionary pressures dictate that our species-specific interface, this world of our daily experience, should itself be a radical simplification, selected not for the exhaustive depiction of truth but for the mutable pragmatics of survival.

Nicholas Humphrey, a psychologist at the London School of Economics, contributed this:

I believe that human consciousness is a conjuring trick, designed to fool us into thinking we are in the presence of an inexplicable mystery. Who is the conjuror and why is s/he doing it? The conjuror is natural selection, and the purpose has been to bolster human self-confidence and self-improtance—so as to increase the value we each place on our own and others’ life.

Indeed. If we realized our true significance we’d just walk in front of a bus and forget about it.

Shinjin datsuraku (身心脱è?½) is Dogen’s trademark phrase. It’s said to be a phrase his teacher Nyojo was fond of; some say it’s the phrase which Dogen became enlightened upon hearing. It is found throughout both Shobogenzo and other writings by Dogen. English translations invariably render this as casting off body and mind. Reading these translations you can almost hear the translators saying to themselves, great, there’s something I don’t have to think about how to translate, and the readers saying to themselves, my, what a very Zen-like thing for Dogen to say. But this translation is not just wrong, it’s harmful. I’m just imagining all the poor Zen students sitting there on their cushions trying to figure out how to cast off their bodies and minds like the book says!

Chinese has thousands of two-character words, each of whose meanings is some composition of the meaning of the individual characters. Take seishi (生死), composed of the characters for “life” and “death”. Superficially, we have no clue what the compositional semantics are. It could be “and”, yielding the meaning life and death. But the meaning could just as easily be living death, life vs. death, the unity of life and death, life then death, or death via life. In other cases, the two characters mean approximately the same thing and the effect of combining them is emphasis.

In the compound shinjin, the first shin means physical body, the second kokoro (mind, heart, spirit). The “default” compositional semantics are “and”, giving us mind and body. But wait. Let’s apply the test of common-sense that so many translators fail to. Is it logical that Dogen would be telling us to let our “mind and body” fall away? How can we possibly let our body fall away? And Dogen teaches, in Bendowa among other writings, that the very concept of a body-mind distinction is a fallacy, so why would he be talking about something which he himself doesn’t think exists dropping away? Dogen, the down-to-earth teacher who instructs us to just sit, is now suddenly telling us to enter some kind of disembodied state?

It makes far more sense that Dogen would be using the term shinjin in the sense of the distinction between body and mind, whether or not that was a common sense in medieval Japan, or a sense he or his teacher pioneered. What needs to be cast off, or rather dropped off, then, is not a non-existent mind, or a body that is who we are, but rather the mistaken dichotomy between them. Or our fixation on that dichotomy.

As for datsuraku, or totsuraku as it’s sometimes spelled. I don’t think the meaning of this word has changed very much during the last 800 years. Its meaning in modern Japanese is drop out (of a race, or school).

That’s why my translation of shinjin datsuraku is drop out of the body/mind game.

58% of the American population now say that God’s importance in their lives ranks 10/10. Church attendance is up.

Good news? Hardly. For one thing, while spending more time sitting in church we are still electrocuting retarded black teenagers and killing Iraqi civilians with smart bombs. And much of the increased interest in things spiritual is frittered away listening to lectures in buildings with stained glass windows or dabbling in ESP, UFO’s, astrology, or yoga.

On a related note, in 2001 59% of all Americans said they were deeply interested in the meaning and purpose of life—a higher percentage than other societies, and up from 46% in 1995. What accounts for this fixation? In his new book, America’s Crisis of Values: Reality and Perception, Wayne Baker presents a novel theory: we are desperately trying to resolve the contradiction between the traditional and the self-expressive.

A contradiction which is uniquely American, as the fascinating World Values Survey shows. According to the four surveys carried out in 80 countries over the last 25 years, the USA ranks below zero on the traditional vs. secular/rational scale—far below our industrialized sister countries and at the same level as Poland. (Japan is tops here.) At the same time, America falls on the high end of the survival vs. self-expression scale, which you would expect given its level of economic development. The chart below shows this in the form of the so-called Inglehart Values Map.

Baker is saying, in other words, Americans’ fixation on meaning and purpose is pathological, a desperate, misguided, and ultimately futile attempt to bridge the gap between an almost medieval religious traditionalism and the self-expressive possibilities of modern society.

I shall have more to say about Jeff Hawkins’ book On Intelligence in later posts, but for now I wanted to share his refreshingly hylomorphic views on reality (pp. 63-64):

All our knowledge of the world is a model…This is not to say that the people or objects aren’t really there. They are really there.

Can we trust that the world is as it seems? Yes. The world really does exist in an absolute form very close to how we perceive it. However, our brains can’t know about the absolute world directly.

Jeff is right on target. Personally, though, I wouldn’t use the phraseology “very close”, preferring instead something like “substantially well-mapped”.

The last line of Dogen’s famous verse starting To study the Way is to study yourself (see previous post) is often omitted when quoting it—probably because people can’t figure out what the heck it’s supposed to mean, even after (or especially after) being “translated” into English.

One translation is No trace of enlightenment remains, and this traceless enlightenment is continued forever.

The Japanese is go-shaku no kyuukatsu naru ari, kyuukatsu naru go-shaku wo chouchoushutsu narashimu. Breaking down goshaku, “go” is “englightenment” while “shaku” is traces, tracks. Kyuukatsu is more difficult. Some commentators say it means not existing, while others follow more closely the meaning of kyuu (to rest).

The Tanahashi translation is No trace of realization remains, and this no-trace continues endlessly. But both it and the first translation suffer from problems beyond the question of the correct translation of either goshaku or kyuukatsu. For instance, the first translation has traceless enlightment is continued forever, whereas the Japanese can only be read the non-existent traces of enlightenment (are continued forever). Neither translation captures any nuance of chouchoushutsu (lit. long-long-emerge), which to my mind has almost a “pulsing” feeling, much more dynamic than “continue”. Both translations also are plagued by the fact that they do not connect to the preceding sentences.

My translation is based on reading a number of commentaries in Japanese, and interpreting the kyuukatsu in the direction of “resting”, as follows:

Once you’ve realized this, the process by which you did so will, laying itself aside, resonate on and on.

In a recent blog entry, Hokai Sobol maps the steps of Dogen’s famous syllogism:

To study the Way is to study the self.
To study the self is to forget the self.
To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things.
To be enlightened by all things is to remove the barriers between one’s self and others.

to the stages of the Buddhist tradition.

Interesting. But we must tread carefully when dealing with poor English translations of Dogen.

The word translated as “study” is “narau”, which, like many Japanese words, has a broader sweep of meaning than its counterparts in a Western language. Some of its nuances, in addition to “study”, include “learn” and “follow” and “master”, with a hint of “by imitating someone”. Here I’ll go with “follow”.

Next, the Japanese that was rendered as “To xxx is to yyy” in the translation above is “xxx to iu wa, yy nari”. Although subject to interpretation, the “to iu wa” part has the flavor of a definition—that the first part is a verbal construction, whose real content is given by the second part. The syntax here does not really support that Dogen is describing temporal stages of development. It seems that he’s really trying to correct misconceptions people have about, or amplify on, what xxx really is. I therefore prefer the construction “xxx’ing really means yyy’ing.” But that’s just one of a dozen ways to express this.

Then, we have the word “self”, a translation of the Japanese “jiko”. Many translators automatically translate this as “the self”, but I prefer the friendlier “yourself”. Beware, though, that Dogen often also uses this term in subject/object dichotomies.

Moving ahead, we have “enlightened by all things”, for which the Japanese is “manpou ni shou-seraruru”. “Manpou” is indeed often translated as “all things”, and you should consult a Buddhist dictionary for its myriad nuances, but the word which evokes the same nuance in modern English speakers is “reality”. As for “shou-seraruru”, this “shou” is indeed commonly used for enlightenment, but also “prove”, “validate”, “establish”. Personally, I don’t know what it means to “be enlightened by something”; do you? It could be “hear the testimony of reality”, but I’ve chosen the simple “trust reality”.

The “remove barriers between one’s self and others” part is most tricky of all. As currently translated, it sounds like some kind of international friendship program. The Japanese here is “jiko no shinjin oyobi tako no shinjin wo shite, totsuraku seshimuru nari”. Note that the English translation has also completely omitted the “shinjin”, lit. “body and mind”, which follows both “jiko” (your own self) and “tako” (the self of others), and is at the heart of what Dogen is saying here!

The “oyobi” connecting “jiko…” and “tako…” is clearly an emphatic “and”, and cannot possibly mean “between”.

“Totsuraku” is the famous “cast off” or “fall away”, so most translators would immediately render this as “cast away body and mind of your own self and that of others”, but that has many problems, not least of which is that it doesn’t mean anything. Dogen teaches that there is not distinction between body and mind, so how could he be telling us to cast them off? What does it mean to cast off your body anyway? My reading is that he is telling us to cast away that distinction. In other words, “shinjin” is not “body and mind”, but “body vs. mind”.

Overall, then, I’d translate this famous paragraph as:

Following the Buddha Way really means following yourself.
Following yourself really means forgetting yourself.
Forgetting yourself really means trusting reality.
And trusting reality really means not setting your body against your mind, nor the bodies of others against their minds.

One of Dogen’s key insights is the unity of practice and enlightenment. If we adopt the position of neurotheological congruency, that insight must have a physioneurological analog. I’d hypothesize something along the lines of a low-level neuronal adaptation process which raises the organism’s fitness level in the immdiate present while simultaneously creating conditions for improved future fitness.