The Science of Emptiness
objective reality vs. subjective reality
Our culture places a high premium on "objective truth" whereby we attempt to understand the world independently of our own thoughts and perceptions. This is incredibly valuable. It has led to the development of countless technologies which improve the quality of life. This is also not the arena in which karma functions. Karma is not a natural law like gravity or the laws of motion. Karma is a mental law. It is the physics of a single being's subjective reality.
Common View
The common understanding of the world is one where a person navigates through the world. Each of us is a single entity that interacts with other people, animals, objects, companies, plants etc. We try to get things that we like and avoid things that we don't like. In this view, the more we get the things we like, the more successful we are. The less we have the things we don't like, the less we suffer.
It is common in our culture to think "I would be so happy if I won the lottery" or "I would be so happy if I had a great partner" or "I would be happier if I had a different boss." It is common in our culture to think that happiness relies on external circumstances. As soon as one investigates these views logically, or scientifically, they immediately fall apart. There are some very depressed famous people. Some very happy poor people. Growing up, I had a neighbor. A beautiful, blonde mother of three perfect children. She had a kind, rich husband. She was active in her community, fit and healthy. One day, her twelve-year-old son found her hanging from her neck in her garage. By all accounts, she led the perfect life and she was apparently miserable.
What's interesting about the previous paragraph is that many of the people reading it will feel compassion toward the woman. They will feel compassion for the depressed rich people and admiration for the happy poor people. Many of us recognize that it doesn't really make sense to believe that we would be happier if we had more money. And yet, in subtle ways every day we live our lives based on these logical errors. We go to jobs we hate so that we can have money because we think we need it. We go to bars to find a partner even though we'd rather stay in. We get upset with our boss because if they were just a little better we'd enjoy our job more.
Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky calls these logical errors that are so common in our culture "The Myths of Happiness." She wrote a book about it with the same title. She's a Harvard and Stanford educated research psychologist and one important finding she's produced is that external circumstances (job, marriage, children etc.) account for somewhere between 5 and 10% of a person's overall happiness and well-being. She didn't find this just in her own research. She found this when surveying hundreds of other happiness studies.
It will take years for these myths of happiness to work their way out of our culture (if indeed they ever do). Part of the staying power of these myths of happiness is another myth: "different things work for different people." We've all heard that we should try a bunch of things in life to see what we enjoy and then stick with it. Everyone has different tastes and something that makes one person happy may make another person unhappy.
Now, if you were about to board a plane and the steward greeting you said "welcome aboard! We hope you enjoy your flight, but we have to be honest and say that only about 30% of flights succeed. Most of them crash and everyone dies." Would you get on that plane? no. Would you think that the people who built the plane understand how flight works? Probably not right? This is what we do every day with common life advice. We try things to make us happy that have been shown in scientific studies to have little to no positive effect on our happiness. Bars? Alcohol? Money? Dating? Coffee? A good job? forget it.
Luckily, the common view of reality isn't the only view of reality. There is another view where our happiness doesn't rely on external circumstances and that is the Subjective View.
Subjective View
In the subjective view, we recognize the limitations of the objective view in giving us reliable courses of action to create happiness. We therefore take subjective experience itself as the main focus. The human mind is a system that functions on a set of rules. Psychology has done a lot of work to give us scientific evidence to understand what those rules are.
Each of us has a mind, complete with labels, stories, feelings, emotions, perceptions, expectations etc. Outside of each of us exists the phenomenal world which we never actually experience directly. At best, we experience our perceptions of the outside world free of preconceived notions, but this is very rare. This study shows that mothers who have been through traumatic events perceive their children's face differently depending on the type and degree of their traumatic events. (Knezevic, M., & Jovancevic, M. (2004). The IFEEL Pictures: Psychological trauma and perception, and interpretation of child's emotions. Nordic journal of psychiatry, 58(2), 139-146.).
One theory for object perception goes like this: 1)the organism gets prepared to perceive an object or set of objets with a hypothesis 2) the stimulus information is input 3) the hypothesis is either confirmed or informed and altered (Bruner, J. S., Postman, L., & Rodrigues, J. (1951). Expectation and the perception of color. The American journal of psychology, 64(2), 216-227.)
The way cognitive science describes our experience of the world is like this: our senses pick up signals from a sensory object. Then a small portion of those signals are translated into conscious sensory experience(find citation). The way that sensory experience becomes conscious is a mystery, but there are people studying consciousness itself at reputable organizations like (person) at the contemplative sciences center at UVA. While that process is a total mystery, psychology has discovered some guidelines for which sensory experiences come into conscious experience, and even which sensory experiences which don't come into conscious experience but still affect us behind the scenes. We will talk about these later, but the main point of this paragraph is to highlight the point that we do not experience the external world directly, but only mental representations of the external world.
This is similar to Buddhist (Mind-Only School) teachings on emptiness and dependent origination. Emptiness is the fact that we experience nothing independent of our mind or everything we experience is "empty" of existing for each of us independently of our mind. Dependent Origination is the fact that everything we experience originates for each of us in dependence upon our mental representations. Subject, object, and perception are all mental representations. We never experience any of these things directly because while mental and physical processes are intricately linked, they are not the same.
The "Structure of Experience" is not meant to be comprehensive or definitive, but simply a useful tool for discussing how to achieve the life we desire.
At the top, we have our conscious experience. This is all we are ever aware of. The rest of the "structure of Experience" is devoted to subconscious and physical processes that are related to our conscious experience. There are plenty of subconscious processes that direct the flow of mental energy. Underlying these subconscious processes are the physical structure of our brain and nervous systems. These physical structures are malleable. These physical structures are involved not only in mental processes, but also in sensation, and therefore the environment.
There is a difficulty in talking about the Science of Experience (besides its complexity and our lack of scientific understanding). This difficulty is that experience occurs in two directions: top-down and bottom-up. This means, basically, that our thoughts affect what our senses pick up from the environment and what our senses pick up from our environment affects what we think. In the following paragraphs, I will make some of the important connections that are going to be useful for our discussion of karma later in this book.
Bottom-Up
Bottom-up processes are those that people with the "common view" understand. Something outside of us is perceived by our senses, translated to our mind and then projected into conscious experience.
Top Down
Top-down processes begin with conscious thought and end up affecting our perceptions and physiology.
Neuroplasticity is like muscle memory in the brain. The more I think a thought, the more that thought becomes hardwired into my brain. Neuroplasticity is important when considering Implicit Bias.
Implicit Bias is the unconscious pairing of two distinct ideas. Implicit Bias was made famous in a study which demonstrated that people in the USA unconsciously pair "black person" with "bad" and "white person" with "good." This unconscious pairing is assumed to be associated with hardwired neuronal pathways in the brain. To reiterate the point in the above paragraph, these associations and underlying physiology can be changed. This ability to train implicit bias is also scientifically demonstrated(CITE). This supports the assertion that neuroplasticity and implicit bias are related.
Cognitive Penetrability is the phenomenon whereby a person's thoughts influence their perceptions. Here's a simple example:
What do you see? Some people, when viewing this photo for the first time, see a duck. Others a rabbit. Now that you've heard that both animals are present, you will forever see both. Have you ever looked at clouds with friends? Your friend points to a cloud and says "look! It's a pony." You don't see it. Your friend says "see? the neck is there and the eye is there." Finally, you see it. But this doesn't just happen with bunny pictures and clouds. Have you ever met someone with a friend and felt like the interaction was pretty positive, and then your friend pointed out something negative about the person and the interaction? "oh ya, I didn't notice that." Or had a friend who was in love with a certain song and told you to listen to the way the vocals compliment the bassline. Now you're listening to a whole new song.
Cognitive Penetrability is related to the findings linking mood and perception (Vanlessen 2016) where our mood literally affects the way that the sensory cortex fires. It's worth mentioning the Broaden and Build Theory of positive emotion here which explains that positive emotion broadens awareness and encourages novel, varied and exploratory actions. Alternatively, stress causes catecholamine in the body which decreases brain function. (CITE and bring more research and discussion) (thinking of good deeds makes room brighter. Thinking of bad deeds makes room darker http://jonlieffmd.com/blog/how-does-expectation-affect-perception)
Expectation plays a significant role in perception (basketball court man in a gorilla suit) (top down neurons far exceed bottom up neurons)(feedback loops between top down and bottom up neurons). This is seriously different from the "common understanding" that thinks humans operate mostly off bottom up perceptual processes.
The False Consensus Effect is related to some of the topics we've arleady covered. It is an effect where a person interprets other people's behavior through the lense of what they would do in the same situation. For instance "hunters holding a gun are more likely to perceive another person as holding a gun" (md blog cited above, find original source), find two or three more good false consensus effect examples. People who act in a trustworthy way are more likely to perceive the world as a trustworthy place to live.
You might be starting to get the picture that the world isn't a certain way for everyone. A lot of mental factors go into how a person sees the world. This will be important later. The fact that the world doesn't exist a certain way independent of the observer's mental factors is called emptiness. The fact that the way the world exists for us is dependent upon our mental factors is dependent origination.
Nervous System Plasticity works similarly to neuroplasticity, although it hasn't been discussed in the same way. Obviously the nervous system is trainable because we are able to learn new bodily skills like crawling, walking, musical instruments etc.
First, I want to talk about the normal ways that people train their nervous systems every day. Any time you learn an instrument you are training your nervous system. Deep breathing to help relax trains your nervous system. If you have a craving for sugar and then indulge the craving, you are training your nervous system toward the habit of indulging craving. Basically, everything you do trains your nervous system to fire in that direction. (study more?)
Attention is important for training our nervous system. When we don't pay attention to what we're doing our nervous system still becomes trained in a habit, but it's one we don't choose. We are also training our nervous system (body) to function outside of conscious awareness by not linking our neural impulses to nervous system impulses. Attention is crucial for training our nervous system in directions that we desire.
Mindfulness is useful for affecting the central nervous system positively. That means that by simply paying attention to sensory input we are able to rewire our nervous system. This is not just referring to mindfulness meditation but any situation where we are paying attention to something on purpose. Here are some examples:
Musical Instruments: People who practice an instrument for a long period of time begin to hear that instrument more often when they listen to music. As a bass player, whenever I listen to music I pick out the bass line from all the other music. My friend, a drummer, listens to the same music and mostly hears the drum beat. It's the first thing he hears. He can shoose to listen to something else, but his nervous system is tuned toward drums because he's applied so much focused attention toward the drums. I suppose this also has to do with his mental expectation that he's created that he is going to be hearing drums when there is music playing. This is the same for athletes. Athletes can look at a person's body and tell you what sport they probably play. Martial artists can tell you if a person does martial arts simply by the way they move. Our senses become attuned to stimuli that we lend a lot of focus to.
Another aspect of attention and perception is called Implicit Attentional Bias. "Implicit" here means that it is unconscious. "Attentional Bias" means that a person pays more attention to a certain type of stimuli than others. An example of Implicit Attentional Bias is demonstrated in a study: alcoholics sat down at a computer and different picture showed up at different locations on the computer screen. A camera measured their eye movement. Alcoholics eyes spent a longer time devoted to alcohol related stimuli than non-alcoholics. There was a similar result for people with generalized anxiety disorder. People with GAD spent a longer time seeing dangerous stimuli than subjects without GAD. Said another way, alcoholics literally see more alcohol in their environment than non-alcoholics. Anxious people literally see more danger in the world than non-anxious people. Implicit Attentional Bias does not try to explain why certain populations have an attentional bias toward certain objects. But it is important for us to note that this is a phenomenon that occurs related to sensory stimuli because it is evidence showing that nervous systems behave differently, creating a different reality for different people. We will discuss theories for causal mechanisms in the science of karma portion of the book.
Another point (closely related to cognitive penetrability, but specifically related to the CNS rather than the brain) that will be important later is that words and thoughts trigger our nervous system. (kicked the ball - legs) (http://jonlieffmd.com/blog/how-does-expectation-affect-perception)
Compassion Meditation and the Vagus Nerve: The vagus nerve was long considered to have the same "tone" throughout your whole life, but now it is understood that vagus nerve tone can change as a result of compassion meditation. Vagus nerve plays a role in heart rate, gastrointestinal peristalsis, inflamation, relaxation and much more. This shows how thoughts affect our CNS and our experience of the world.
Main Points:
Each of us has a mind, complete with labels, stories, feelings, emotions, perceptions, expectations etc. Outside of each of us exists the phenomenal world which we never actually experience directly. At best, we experience our perceptions of the outside world free of preconceived notions, but this is very rare. This study shows that mothers who have been through traumatic events perceive their children's face differently depending on the type and degree of their traumatic events. (Knezevic, M., & Jovancevic, M. (2004). The IFEEL Pictures: Psychological trauma and perception, and interpretation of child's emotions. Nordic journal of psychiatry, 58(2), 139-146.).
One theory for object perception goes like this: 1)the organism gets prepared to perceive an object or set of objets with a hypothesis 2) the stimulus information is input 3) the hypothesis is either confirmed or informed and altered (Bruner, J. S., Postman, L., & Rodrigues, J. (1951). Expectation and the perception of color. The American journal of psychology, 64(2), 216-227.)
The way cognitive science describes our experience of the world is like this: our senses pick up signals from a sensory object. Then a small portion of those signals are translated into conscious sensory experience(find citation). The way that sensory experience becomes conscious is a mystery, but there are people studying consciousness itself at reputable organizations like (person) at the contemplative sciences center at UVA. While that process is a total mystery, psychology has discovered some guidelines for which sensory experiences come into conscious experience, and even which sensory experiences which don't come into conscious experience but still affect us behind the scenes. We will talk about these later, but the main point of this paragraph is to highlight the point that we do not experience the external world directly, but only mental representations of the external world.
This is similar to Buddhist (Mind-Only School) teachings on emptiness and dependent origination. Emptiness is the fact that we experience nothing independent of our mind or everything we experience is "empty" of existing for each of us independently of our mind. Dependent Origination is the fact that everything we experience originates for each of us in dependence upon our mental representations. Subject, object, and perception are all mental representations. We never experience any of these things directly because while mental and physical processes are intricately linked, they are not the same.
The Structure of Experience:
conscious thoughts, emotions, and perceptions
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Subconscious Processes that affect conscious processes:
Cognitive Penetrability
Expectation and Perception
False Consensus Effect
Implicit Bias
Implicit Attentional Bias
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Physical Processes that affect subconscious and conscious processes:
neuroplasticity
nervous system plasticity
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Sensation:
smell, taste, touch, hearing, sight
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
External Environment
The "Structure of Experience" is not meant to be comprehensive or definitive, but simply a useful tool for discussing how to achieve the life we desire.
At the top, we have our conscious experience. This is all we are ever aware of. The rest of the "structure of Experience" is devoted to subconscious and physical processes that are related to our conscious experience. There are plenty of subconscious processes that direct the flow of mental energy. Underlying these subconscious processes are the physical structure of our brain and nervous systems. These physical structures are malleable. These physical structures are involved not only in mental processes, but also in sensation, and therefore the environment.
There is a difficulty in talking about the Science of Experience (besides its complexity and our lack of scientific understanding). This difficulty is that experience occurs in two directions: top-down and bottom-up. This means, basically, that our thoughts affect what our senses pick up from the environment and what our senses pick up from our environment affects what we think. In the following paragraphs, I will make some of the important connections that are going to be useful for our discussion of karma later in this book.
Bottom-Up
Bottom-up processes are those that people with the "common view" understand. Something outside of us is perceived by our senses, translated to our mind and then projected into conscious experience.
Top Down
Top-down processes begin with conscious thought and end up affecting our perceptions and physiology.
Neuroplasticity is like muscle memory in the brain. The more I think a thought, the more that thought becomes hardwired into my brain. Neuroplasticity is important when considering Implicit Bias.
Implicit Bias is the unconscious pairing of two distinct ideas. Implicit Bias was made famous in a study which demonstrated that people in the USA unconsciously pair "black person" with "bad" and "white person" with "good." This unconscious pairing is assumed to be associated with hardwired neuronal pathways in the brain. To reiterate the point in the above paragraph, these associations and underlying physiology can be changed. This ability to train implicit bias is also scientifically demonstrated(CITE). This supports the assertion that neuroplasticity and implicit bias are related.
Cognitive Penetrability is the phenomenon whereby a person's thoughts influence their perceptions. Here's a simple example:
Cognitive Penetrability is related to the findings linking mood and perception (Vanlessen 2016) where our mood literally affects the way that the sensory cortex fires. It's worth mentioning the Broaden and Build Theory of positive emotion here which explains that positive emotion broadens awareness and encourages novel, varied and exploratory actions. Alternatively, stress causes catecholamine in the body which decreases brain function. (CITE and bring more research and discussion) (thinking of good deeds makes room brighter. Thinking of bad deeds makes room darker http://jonlieffmd.com/blog/how-does-expectation-affect-perception)
Expectation plays a significant role in perception (basketball court man in a gorilla suit) (top down neurons far exceed bottom up neurons)(feedback loops between top down and bottom up neurons). This is seriously different from the "common understanding" that thinks humans operate mostly off bottom up perceptual processes.
The False Consensus Effect is related to some of the topics we've arleady covered. It is an effect where a person interprets other people's behavior through the lense of what they would do in the same situation. For instance "hunters holding a gun are more likely to perceive another person as holding a gun" (md blog cited above, find original source), find two or three more good false consensus effect examples. People who act in a trustworthy way are more likely to perceive the world as a trustworthy place to live.
You might be starting to get the picture that the world isn't a certain way for everyone. A lot of mental factors go into how a person sees the world. This will be important later. The fact that the world doesn't exist a certain way independent of the observer's mental factors is called emptiness. The fact that the way the world exists for us is dependent upon our mental factors is dependent origination.
Nervous System Plasticity works similarly to neuroplasticity, although it hasn't been discussed in the same way. Obviously the nervous system is trainable because we are able to learn new bodily skills like crawling, walking, musical instruments etc.
First, I want to talk about the normal ways that people train their nervous systems every day. Any time you learn an instrument you are training your nervous system. Deep breathing to help relax trains your nervous system. If you have a craving for sugar and then indulge the craving, you are training your nervous system toward the habit of indulging craving. Basically, everything you do trains your nervous system to fire in that direction. (study more?)
Attention is important for training our nervous system. When we don't pay attention to what we're doing our nervous system still becomes trained in a habit, but it's one we don't choose. We are also training our nervous system (body) to function outside of conscious awareness by not linking our neural impulses to nervous system impulses. Attention is crucial for training our nervous system in directions that we desire.
Mindfulness is useful for affecting the central nervous system positively. That means that by simply paying attention to sensory input we are able to rewire our nervous system. This is not just referring to mindfulness meditation but any situation where we are paying attention to something on purpose. Here are some examples:
Musical Instruments: People who practice an instrument for a long period of time begin to hear that instrument more often when they listen to music. As a bass player, whenever I listen to music I pick out the bass line from all the other music. My friend, a drummer, listens to the same music and mostly hears the drum beat. It's the first thing he hears. He can shoose to listen to something else, but his nervous system is tuned toward drums because he's applied so much focused attention toward the drums. I suppose this also has to do with his mental expectation that he's created that he is going to be hearing drums when there is music playing. This is the same for athletes. Athletes can look at a person's body and tell you what sport they probably play. Martial artists can tell you if a person does martial arts simply by the way they move. Our senses become attuned to stimuli that we lend a lot of focus to.
Another aspect of attention and perception is called Implicit Attentional Bias. "Implicit" here means that it is unconscious. "Attentional Bias" means that a person pays more attention to a certain type of stimuli than others. An example of Implicit Attentional Bias is demonstrated in a study: alcoholics sat down at a computer and different picture showed up at different locations on the computer screen. A camera measured their eye movement. Alcoholics eyes spent a longer time devoted to alcohol related stimuli than non-alcoholics. There was a similar result for people with generalized anxiety disorder. People with GAD spent a longer time seeing dangerous stimuli than subjects without GAD. Said another way, alcoholics literally see more alcohol in their environment than non-alcoholics. Anxious people literally see more danger in the world than non-anxious people. Implicit Attentional Bias does not try to explain why certain populations have an attentional bias toward certain objects. But it is important for us to note that this is a phenomenon that occurs related to sensory stimuli because it is evidence showing that nervous systems behave differently, creating a different reality for different people. We will discuss theories for causal mechanisms in the science of karma portion of the book.
Another point (closely related to cognitive penetrability, but specifically related to the CNS rather than the brain) that will be important later is that words and thoughts trigger our nervous system. (kicked the ball - legs) (http://jonlieffmd.com/blog/how-does-expectation-affect-perception)
Compassion Meditation and the Vagus Nerve: The vagus nerve was long considered to have the same "tone" throughout your whole life, but now it is understood that vagus nerve tone can change as a result of compassion meditation. Vagus nerve plays a role in heart rate, gastrointestinal peristalsis, inflamation, relaxation and much more. This shows how thoughts affect our CNS and our experience of the world.
Main Points:
- Our conscious and unconscious thoughts/feelings are dependent upon/correlate with physical neuronal and nervous patterns in our brain and body.
- These patterns are trainable.
- Training our mind-body to function a certain way is far more useful for happiness than finding certain external conditions that will "make us happy."
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