Evolving Dharma: Meditation, Buddhism, and the Next Generation of Enlightenment

by Jay Michaelson

I’ve made a bit of progress, according to my quite traditional monastic teachers, and according to the way I seem to myself, my family, and my friends. And, surprise surprise, this particular mountain isn’t at the edge of the world either; it’s right in the middle of it, just like the sages, hippies, and pop songs have promised. The only difference is that my amygdala no longer drowns out my left prefrontal cortex. In other words, I am happy.

It’s structured according to the three-part framework found in some schools of Tibetan Buddhism: Ground, Path, and Fruition.8 Ground refers to the way things are, Path to the way they develop in practice, and Fruition to the way things are after realization—which, of course, is really the way they’ve always been the whole time.

Yet what is essential about practices is that they are meant to be done, not simply read or learned about. Map is not territory, the recipe is not the meal, and talking about exercise won’t shed you any pounds. There is no substitute for the experiential knowledge of meditation—indeed, the gap between conceptual knowledge and intuitive knowledge is one of the main reasons serious practitioners spend months on meditation retreat. After all, you can Google “the four noble truths” right now. But for the mind to intuitively “get it,” for the brain to habituate to them—that takes work.

Human beings are impelled, by these billions of years of evolution, to be dissatisfied with what they have, to want more, to over-perceive threats and act on them, to ignore what we mistakenly think is unimportant, to build and make love and achieve and flee danger—only to recognize, sooner or later, that we can never win the battle. On the grand scale, we will all die, and lose much of what we love along the way. Yet even in our mundane lives, we lose the battle every day—often in ways less tragic than comic. The damn webpage won’t load, the mortgage has to be paid, the boss is a jerk, I’m a jerk—every day, the God-or-evolution-given instinct to “want it all” butts up against a reality that rarely provides it.

This is the core of the dharma: the completely natural state of affairs is one in which human beings cause suffering for themselves and others. It’s not because we’re evil, or because Eve ate an apple in God’s garden; it’s because we are animals living on this planet, and we have evolved to want what we can’t get, and to run away from things we don’t like.1

If you like, you can think of meditation as a focused form of mindfulness, or of mindfulness as an expanded form of meditation. Both have in common the steady, regular cultivation of a kind of noticing or witnessing mind that, in its nonreactivity, exists in opposition to the usual fight-or-flight tendencies we all have.

In traditional contexts, bhavana is not meant to reduce stress or improve immune function but to generate insight; specifically, in this tradition, intuitive understandings that transitory phenomena are impermanent, not ultimately satisfactory, and interdependent with everything else. Trying to hold on to any one of those phenomena—my car, my spouse, my sense of self—may work for a while, but eventually it will lead to dukkha, suffering.

William James, who said that “the faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will.”42

Kornfield emphasizes that meditation and therapy are meant to be complements, not replacements for each other—and integrated with a variety of other modalities. (As we will see below, this is not without its perils; the dharma is not self-help, and its insights may reduce one’s level of adjustment to our rather insane society, rather than increase it.)

Buddhist scholar and pioneer Robert Thurman said, “Buddhism will not actually be able to succeed in its mission here in America unless it is able to perform that mission without being Buddhism. Buddhism has to go beyond being Buddhism in order to do the work that Buddha wants to do.”

The newest doors to the dharma are beyond even the dharma itself, beyond Buddhism, in what might be called a secular contemplative technology. Today, secularized forms of Buddhist meditation are taught in hospitals, to relieve pain;58 in schools, to improve concentration and learning;59 on corporate retreats, to improve teamwork.60 Meditation is used to relax, to have spiritual experiences, to reduce conflict and increase compassion, to aid in psychotherapy, to build focus, to lessen the pain of chronic or terminal illness, to teach hardened criminals new ways of working with anger and the challenges of confinement, to help students prepare for standardized tests, to be a better parent, and, of course, to soothe the worried minds of upper-middle-class Westerners.

Matthieu Ricard, the monk who was one of the first subjects of a study looking at the long-term effects of meditation on the brain—he was shown to have higher levels of gamma waves than most people, and to be able to suppress the “startle reflex”—put it this way: these techniques “don’t have to be labeled Buddhist, even though they are the fruit of more than twenty centuries of Buddhist contemplatives’ investigation of the mind.”

And like Ricard, Kabat-Zinn sees his work as having evolved beyond “Buddhism” specifically: “There was a time that I considered myself to be a Buddhist,” he said, “but I actually don’t consider myself a Buddhist. Although I teach Buddhist meditation, it’s not with the aim of people becoming Buddhists, but with the aim of them realizing that they’re Buddhas.”65

Google’s “Search Inside Yourself” program, pioneered by Chade-Meng Tan,66 is one of a number of corporate programs using mindfulness to reduce stress, improve productivity, and increase happiness among workers. Legendary basketball coach Phil Jackson famously taught Zen Buddhist philosophy and meditative techniques to his world-champion teams.67 Congressman Tim Ryan has secured government support for mindfulness-based “social/emotional learning” programs in schools, and recently authored the first dharma book written by a sitting politician.68 The U.S. Marines train new soldiers in mindfulness as a form of mental discipline, part of the program called Mindfulness-based Mind Fitness Training, or M-Fit, and the Marines have reported lower stress levels as a result.69 The Prison Mindfulness Institute, founded by Fleet Maull when he himself was incarcerated, now has over 175 affiliates around the country.70 Daniel Siegel and UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center have taught mindfulness to football players and medical students, created certification standards for mindfulness teaching, developed secular mindfulness practices focused on “Recognition, Acceptance, Investigation, and Non-identification,”71 and combined therapeutic work with scientific study to inculcate values of curiosity, openness, acceptance, and love (“COAL”).72 Filmmaker David Lynch has promoted Transcendental Meditation to a legion of unlikely meditators.73 Mindfulness has been taught to teenagers as part o...

dharma practice is not a day at the beach, or the spa. It’s the opposite, really. If a vacation banishes all cares from the mind, a meditation retreat puts them right smack in front of you.

It’s also true that the contemporary uses of mindfulness are quite different from the traditional ones, which include (but are not limited to) training the mind, moment by moment, to reduce clinging to the evanescent and ultimately unsatisfactory formations we ordinarily look to for happiness; gaining an intuitive understanding of the four noble truths by carefully observing moment-to-moment experience; building concentration so that one may “cut off the head of delusion,” especially regarding the (non-)existence of the self; building concentration to enjoy “jhanic pleasure” (see Chapter Six); developing an attunement to the always-present knowing quality of consciousness itself; experiencing the incomprehensible, paradoxical truth of emptiness and form being identical; developing insight into the three fundamental characteristics of everything, namely, impermanence, satisfactoriness, and non-self/emptiness; uncovering the inherent radiance in the natural mind; and “just sitting” and transcending notions of emptiness and form. Obviously, stress reduction—even in very noble contexts, like easing chronic pain—is different from these original ends. Yet this (incomplete) Buddhist list is meant to convey two different conclusions. The first is that, yes, relaxation and corporate success are not among the traditional aims of meditation. But the second is that those aims have, themselves, always varied and always evolved. There may be, as Joseph Goldstein puts it, one dharma, but...

And along with all the neuroscientific studies reporting good news about meditation, there are some ants at the picnic, including studies that suggest that serious meditation practice can, well, get serious, opening up cans of psychological worms that might well have remain closed.

But I also want to applaud the very different notion that some measure of liberation is available to everyone, regardless of social class, gender, and station in life. We may not be able to go all the way, if we’re “encumbered” with careers, families, and property—but thanks to a remarkable series of developments over the last hundred years, we can all get a taste of the very subtle bliss of freedom.

Brainhacking works. By following a few simple instructions, you can, over time, change the nature of your brain to make it more resilient, more resistant to aging, and more capable of happiness, compassion, and clarity. The data is in, and it matters.

will become clear that mindfulness is among the most cost-effective methods ever for reducing hospital stays, advancing educational opportunity, and improving the functioning of organizations.

Meditation and mindfulness are tools, not a set of spiritual exercises whose merit depends on faith or some unknown forces. This is why I’ve used the word “technology” in describing the work of meditation, why Kenneth Folk calls it a form of “contemplative fitness,” and why I like the term “brainhacking.” We’re not referring here to actual, physical

meditation and mindfulness are tools—processes that lead to predictable results. When people go to the gym, for example, they know pretty much what’s going to happen, and how it’s going to happen. Lifting weights causes muscles to stretch and even tear a little, causing lactic acid to build up, causing the muscles to rebuild themselves bigger and with more capacity than they had before. It’s a physical process, and while trainers will debate the best methods until the end of time, the basic operation is clearly understood. Meditation is similar. If you do the work, predictable changes in the mind (experience) and the brain (neuroscience) tend to result, in a fairly reliable way. This, in a sense, is the very opposite of spirituality—and it’s certainly not religion either. It’s more like working out: Each time I come back to the breath, I’m strengthening very specific neural networks.

In 1980, not a single article was published in a scientific journal on the effects of meditation and mindfulness. In 1990, there were five. In 2000, twenty-one. But in 2010, there were 353; in 2011, 397; and in 2012, there were 526.

In the last ten years, there’s been a small raft of books explaining how meditation changes the brain and specifically increases its capacities for calm, compassion, generosity, and other virtues. Richard Davidson’s The Emotional Life of Your Brain, Norman Doidge’s popular The Brain That Changes Itself, Rick Hanson’s books including Buddha’s Brain and Meditations to Change Your Brain, Alan Wallace’s Buddhism and Science: Breaking New Ground, Jeffrey Schwartz and Sharon Begley’s The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force, Daniel Siegel’s The Mindful Brain, John Arden’s Rewire Your Brain,

two general types: clinical/behavioral and neurological. The first data set tells us what meditation does clinically, as measured by changes in behavior and mental health, the second set tells us how this happens in the brain.

One way in which studies have obtained the first type of data is to measure the effects of MBSR, the meditation and relaxation regimen that we discussed in the last chapter. Its effects have been measured by hundreds of research papers, more than forty projects at the National Institutes of Health,4 and by mainstream scientists at mainstream universities, including UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center, the University of Wisconsin’s Center for the Investigation of Healthy Minds, and labs at Yale, Brown, Duke, and elsewhere. In one long-term study, for example, Jon Kabat-Zinn showed that 225 chronic pain patients who were taught MBSR reported improvements in symptoms and mood, as well as fewer hospital visits.5 (Interestingly, the study showed no diminishment of pain intensity; in other words, the patients were experiencing the same degree of pain but coping with it better.) MBSR has been shown to reduce stress and anxiety by a number of measures: heart rate, cortisol levels, a shift in the left frontal activity of the brain, and of course people reporting that they’re not as stressed out as they used to be.6 More broadly, here are some of the things mindfulness has been shown to do: • Cut the relapse rate in half for patients suffering from depression7 • Reduce loneliness among elderly people8 • Quadruple the speed of healing from psoriasis9 • Improve overall immune function10 • Lower the rate of relapse among recovering addicts11 • Improve attention, planning, and orga...

In one study, just two weeks of meditating just a few minutes each day was shown to be more effective than simple relaxation at lowering stress responses.20 Even beginning mindfulness practitioners reported subjective improvements in awareness and nonreactivity.21 Such findings have potentially huge societal and financial impact; imagine the value of a corporation improving its aging executives’ mental abilities, or the impact of arresting memory loss in older adults.

Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to change itself, to paraphrase Norman Doidge,23 in response to learning, experience, and other stimuli. Scientists used to think that brain development more or less ended at adolescence. Now we know that isn’t true, and that, just like building muscles, you can build capacity in various regions of the brain throughout your life. This is true when you meditate, when you learn a new skill, and when you habituate yourself to various stimuli. A favorite example of neuroscientists is the study done on the brains of London taxi drivers, which found that the regions of the brain associated with visual memory (essential for memorizing London’s rabbit warren of streets) were significantly more developed among the taxi drivers than among the general public. Neuroplasticity can also have negative consequences: one example Doidge discusses is how the overuse of pornography rewires the brain’s pleasure centers, causing it to need ever-more-exotic visual stimuli to generate the responses associated with arousal.24 As the saying goes (possibly coined by Doidge himself), neurons that fire together, wire together—for better or for worse.25

Instead, I want to bullet-list out some of the neurological changes that have been found to result from extended meditation, to give a sense of what we are beginning to understand: • While meditating, meditators show enhanced frontal brain activity, enhanced gamma power in the occipital cortex, and decreased frontal reactivity to distracting and unexpected stimuli.27 • When MBSR students focus on body parts, alpha waves increase in the areas of the brain corresponding to the areas of the body under attention. • When Richard Davidson measured Tibetan monks doing compassion meditation, he measured gamma activity—“the high-frequency brain waves that underlie higher mental activity such as consciousness”—greater than ever recorded in scientific literature.28 • An fMRI scan on the same meditators showed heightened activity in the insula, also associated with emotion and consciousness.29 • When Davidson tested meditators after a three-month retreat in 2005, he found their “attentional blink”—the brief gap all of us experience when we try to pay attention—to be much less than that of ordinary people.30 • Long-term meditators were shown to require less brain activity to perform cognitive tasks than non-meditators.31 • Mindfulness revealed activation in the anterior cingulated cortex (ACC), a “crucial node in the attentional network.”32 • Meditators practicing focused concentration showed increased activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, visual cortex, and other areas invol...

The amygdala is the part of the so-called “reptilian” brain, the brainstem, that reacts quickly to threats, that has saved your life dozens of times by instinctively getting you out of a dangerous situation, and by firing off quick “fight or flight” responses. We all depend on our amygdalas, but if we’re controlled by them, we’re apt to be their marionettes, jumping when they say jump, fearing whenever they perceive a threat. (Indeed, you can see how the amygdala can be manipulated during any political campaign.) Animalistic impulses to anger, desire, fear—this is what the amygdala produces. How does meditation affect the amygdala? Davidson found that after two weeks of training in lovingkindness practice, there was less activity in the amygdala when subjects were shown distressing images.40 In other words, they didn’t react as strongly. Meanwhile, other parts of the brain that moderate the impulses of the amygdala are strengthened by meditation, including the medial prefrontal cortex, adjacent precuneus, and other areas necessary for self-regulation. For example, the prefrontal cortex is associated with body regulation, communication, emotional balance, response flexibility, empathy, insight, self-knowing awareness, and fear modulation—the last of which it accomplishes by releasing an inhibitory neurotransmitter (GABA) that actually counters the impulses of the amygdala.41 In a study of MBSR practitioners, left side prefrontal cortex activation tripled after only four mon...

In other words, activity in the reactive mind—the impulsive, want-it-don’t-want-it, have-sex-with-it-or-kill-it parts of the brain—decreases with meditation, while activity in the reflective, regulatory mind increases.

He notes that Buddhism has a long history of being presented as (or reduced to) science, and that the Buddha came not to prop up the conventional world, but to destroy it.50

The neurodharma movement is very exciting and interesting … but we don’t want to reject the tantric juice, the transformative, the creative imagination of it all—in favor of a left brain, over-rational, and scientistic neurodharma. That would be a loss.

Religious people love to imbue objects with symbolic and mythic meanings. This bread is the body of Christ. This bread is what our ancestors ate at the Exodus from Egypt. This bread has social, cultural, even theurgical meaning. This is the critical move of most Western religion: away from the thing itself, and toward a web of significance.

Meditation is less about having a certain kind of experience than about seeing any experience clearly, richly, and honestly. It’s not the what—it’s the how. It does not require a taste for the touchy-feely, a belief in God, or a suspension of healthy skepticism. It’s an empirical, mechanistic, and scientific process: by using one or another technique, the mind is gradually trained in a new way. The brain is trained in a new way.

If the generation of the hippies saw meditation first as a way to get high, then as a way to get connected with spiritual experiences, and finally as a way to relax amidst their stressful, upper-middle-class American lives, today the dharma exists more as a diverse set of technologies for upgrading the mind.

Cause and effect: do the practice, obtain the results. No need to believe anything, or be a certain kind of person, or take anything on faith or authority.

Ajahn Sucitto, a British-born Thai monk, once described our situation as being like that of a donkey, tethered to a cart, with a carrot dangling just in front of its face. The donkey strives for that carrot, pulling the cart along, convinced that if it can just get a bite, it will be happy. When really, of course, what would make the donkey happiest would be to set down the burden.

There are many carrots we humans chase after, some profound and others quite ridiculous. New cars, love, success, fame, promotions, property, spiritual merit-badges; it doesn’t matter, really, whether they are absurd or sublime, because no matter what they are, they pale in comparison to the mind that has relinquished the burden it carries. Setting down the burden takes some retraining, some serious brainhacking, which in this case changes not only the software but the hardware of the brain as well. But on small and large scales, it does work. It works for the child dealing with pain in the hospital, it works for the yogi liberating herself from primal forces of greed and fear, and, yes, it works for the privileged Westerner at a cozy retreat center.

Personally, there were times sitting at some meditation centers when I felt like the only non-Baby-Boomer-psychotherapist in the meditation hall.

the looming orthodoxy of sweetness which pervades the New Age world. I like art, not kitsch; Leonard Cohen Dharma, not New Age Music. (Cohen’s Dharma name when he was a Zen quasi-monastic was Ryokan—I named my computer after him.) Maybe this is just style, but I feel like it’s more than that.

There is an extremely lively and diverse Buddhist blogosphere, ranging from post-Buddhist mavericks to traditional monastics: Buddhanet, The Buddhist Blog, Elephant Journal, Meaningness, Sweeping Zen, Thousands of Buddhas

Look these up

the metaphysical questions with which religion often concerns itself are probably not resolvable, and definitely not the point. Who knows whether the soul exists after death? And who cares? What difference does it really make, in terms of the suffering (or joy) you experience? I’m reminded of something Eckhart Tolle is reported to have said, that it doesn’t matter who you were in your past life if you don’t know who you are right now.

Most spirituality is, in large part, a state-change business. Before you pray, do yoga, meditate, et cetera, you’re thinking about mortgages and to-do lists, but during your practice, something shifts and you feel opened to something that feels “greater.” Afterward, you feel refreshed and reenergized. This is what state-change is: moving your mind from one way of being to another. And spiritual seekers have developed a wonderful array of tools to enable it to happen. These are good things, right? Sure they are.

I mistook something conditioned for the unconditioned. You just can’t relive those peak experiences after a while. I’ve tried. I’ve tried really hard. It just leads to suffering. The only thing you can do, over and over again, is let go. Let go of everything. Every desire, every identification, every place where your ego is hiding out and saying “I’m this.” Let go, let go, let go, and keep on falling—because there ain’t no place to land. Yet this falling, I am here to tell you, is the same as flight.

Fetishizing the trigger happens when we find a trigger to amazing mystical states, and then mistake the trigger for the state, the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself. This is the root of fundamentalism: this ritual is holy, that one is not; this religion is right, that one is not; this experience is real, that one is not. States are powerful, and that means they can be dangerous.

The self is like a bundle of sticks taken from elsewhere—“we” are neither any individual stick, nor the string that ties them together. And what you discover in meditation is: There is never any time at which the bundle as a whole does anything. It’s always one stick or another. A desire. A fear. A thought. Some will feel deep, some will feel shallow—but those are just sensations, nothing more. There’s no truth to them. Here’s another journal entry:

So much of religious practice, ethics, even basic human decency is based on the conventional model of conscience, in which you “trust your heart” or in some other way access that “deep” part of the self. But that is bullshit. “Deeper” doesn’t mean more reliable, or truer, or better—it’s just a sensation that feels “deep down.” The mind’s “deep down” impulses are unreliable—“gay is wrong” felt just like “prayer is good,” simply because both ideas were drummed into me from a young age.

People don’t become liberated in general; we become liberated in our specificity, in our times and places and names. The only way out is through.

I find what works for me is practicing enough to upgrade the mind and build its emotional resilience, its ability to slide in and out of difficult (and pleasant) mind-states with less and less friction along the way. What doesn’t work is indulging in story and thinking that I can solve whatever problem has arisen. To solve these problems doesn’t take more tinkering—it takes a better set of tools—and acquiring those tools, not psychoanalysis, is what meditation does best.