Best of the West + Best of the East

For this post, I want to look further at the ideas of Shinzen Young. I think this guy is brilliant, and as long as I've been exposed to mindfulness and Buddhist teachings, I've never heard a perspective as unique as his. The following excerpts are from the Buddhist Geeks Podcast interview with him, which you can listen to here.

Shinzen, remember, defines mindfulness as a three-fold attentional skill-set, involving the gradual development of concentration power, sensory clarity, and equanimity. Concentration power here is defined as the ability to focus on what is deemed relevant. Sensory clarity is the ability to keep the components in your sensory experience separate in awareness. So when you have an emotion, you can break it down into a visual component (mental images), auditory component (internal talk), and somatic component (emotional feel). Equanimity is the ability to allow sensory experience to well up and subside, without supressing it as it wells up and without inappropriately latching on as it subsides.



So basically, says Shinzen, with mindfulness, you develop concentration, clarity, and equanimity, and "the more that you have concentration, clarity and equanimity, the more you will happy independent of conditions." He relates the attentional skill components to the following:

A. Your ability to experience physical discomfort without suffering
B. Your ability to experience emotional discomfort without suffering
C. Your ability to experience physical pleasure with enhanced fulfillment
D. Your ability to experience emotional pleasure with enhanced fulfillment
E. Your ability to understand who you are
F. Your ability to make behavior changes you need to make in your life

I think this is why mindfulness is appropriate for virtually everyone. Indeed, decades of research have explored how mindfulness can be helpful for individuals dealing with physical and/or psychological issues, as well as for healthy people seeking to live at their optimum.

According to Shinzen, mindfulness can be taught systematically and even as an algorithm. So, for instance: Do S. Then, X, Y, or Z will happen. If X happens, do A.. if Y happens, do B... if Z happens, do C until D happens. This means teachers "can loop and branch and optimize people's experience with [mindfulness practice]". Learning mindfulness with this sort of systematic guidance may be a personal preference for some. It also aligns more with the "doing" with which Westerners are accustomed, as opposed to just paying attention and "being".

Shinzen really gets you thinking with this next one. Using an analogy involving the history of mathmatics, he notes that, prior to the 17th century, math consisted of two branches: arithmetic (the study of numbers) and geometry (the study of space). When coordinate geometry was discovered as a link between the two, it paved the way for an entirely new branch: calculus. Shinzen proposes that if the greatest achievements of the Eastern and Western civilizations were brought together, "it could give birth to a completely new direction in human knowing, a direction difficult to even imagine at this time" (from his article, "Applications of Mindfulness Meditation in the Study of Human Consciousness").




In the podcast, he describes the best of the East as the "technology of internal psycho-spiritual exploration through meditation." In Shinzen's words: "Once you really appreciate how systematic, and in a sense, proto-scientific, Asian meditation is in general, and most specifically, early Buddhism--mindfulness, and you realize what an achievement this is, it's like you're standing on this pinnacle that is a high point of human achievement relative to all of humanity, the whole world, and our entire species' history."

There is another peak comparable in depth and power, as Shinzen sees it: "The mixture of physical reasoning, logical reasoning, skepticism, and experimentation. The West put that all together, plus a group cooperative culture, where information must be shared."

Shinzen goes on, "So there's this eastern science of understanding who we are at the psychological and deep spiritual level and achieving happiness independent of conditions, and then there's this western science that understands how the natural world works and is able to manipulate conditions to achieve happiness dependent on conditions but a much more powerful way than anyone ever achieved before. What if these could get together? What if they mated? Is that possible? If the best of the East and the best of the West were able to produce a hybrid child, of some sort..."

What are your thoughts on this? Any imaginative, dreamer folks out there? Shinzen really stretches me here, so I don't know quite what such a hybrid would look like. However, I love his teachings and the way he lays a broad framework and then breaks things down sequentially. It is my thinking that this sort of approach to teaching mindfulness has the greatest potential to be received by Westerners.