Autumn Light. Edwina Norton

to them. As a product of Western dualistic thinking, I had never questioned that reality exists “out there” and that my task was to perceive and understand it as best I could. If my understanding differed from that of others, I usually concluded that I was wrong or confused.

      But Reb described perception as a mental process of matching current experience with previous experiences: Our senses and brains respond to sounds, sights, smells, etc., based on our unconsciously stored memories of similar or identical phenomena. We first perceive and then immediately identify phenomena we encounter, such as bird song, apple tree, lavender. In this way, we bring our prior experience to each current sensory experience. In doing so, we actually co-create our experience.

      We add to this basic recognition and identification of an object our emotional associations with it. For example, when we feel warmth toward a person new to us, our positive feeling may arise from unconsciously associating him with someone we loved in the past. Or when we fail to recognize someone who greets us, we have not called up or perhaps ever stored a memory of that person from a previous encounter. In this way, our conscious and unconscious brains work with our senses to form and shape our present experience. As Reb explained it, a split second before we become consciously aware of a sound or a smell, etc., unconsciously we pre-select what and how we think about it based on our unconscious storehouse of past experiences. In fact we select for conscious acknowledgement only that which we recognize from past experience. Of course, this perception mechanism can also perpetuate misunderstandings we never corrected, potentially causing us no end of trouble.

      The idea of co-creation was electrifying. I can still picture myself in the cavernous, candle-lit zendo at Green Gulch, listening with fascination to Reb’s words. I could not then quite grasp how co-creation worked, but the truth of it resonated in me. Its implications were thrilling: If our brains actually help shape the phenomena we experience, we have more influence on its meaning to us than I had realized. And thereby more ability to relieve our suffering. Reb’s teaching, I later learned, was based on the third century work of Buddhist psychology called the Abhidharma. I looked for books about this but did not find anything until ten years later when I read Understanding Our Mind by Thich Nhat Hanh. It describes a similar process as the unconscious “seeding” of our perceptions (Hanh 2006, 23-33). I have since learned that Theravadan monk Bhikkhu Bodhi has translated an Abhidharma resource (Bodhi 2003).

      Contemporary neuroscience findings about how human brains work corroborate these ancient Buddhist teachings. Our unconscious pre-selection processes shape our experience of reality. Starting late in the first decade of the 2000s, some ten years after I first learned from Reb about co-created perception, developments in magnetic resonance imaging technology began to yield scientific insights into how the human brain works. Books for the lay audience about brain function began to appear. I intuited that this information might help me better understand Buddhist teachings about the mind, and I eagerly read everything I could find.

      A book particularly important to me was The Master and His Emissary. In “Part One, the Divided Brain” (McGilchrist 2009, 15-209) I learned that our left brain hemisphere (termed The Emissary) contains our conscious mind, which produces and controls language. It performs many important functions to insure our survival, such as finding and inhabiting shelter. The left brain analyzes, categorizes, and thinks abstractly; it has a sequential, linear approach to reality. It deals in facts, uses denotative language. It pins things down, makes them clear, precise, fixed. The left hemisphere seeks control over the environment. It wants to be in charge and because it is conscious, it usually seems to be.

      The right hemisphere (The Master), conversely, is largely unconscious. It is the storehouse of our previous experiences, the “seeds” Thich Nhat Hanh described, upon which we draw to identify and understand our present experience. The right hemisphere lacks vocabulary, but it accesses and inhabits the land of relationships, of the individual and of the ever-changing, evolving, and interconnected “between-ness” of things/beings (McGilchrist 2006, 95, 97). The right hemisphere “knows” that we exist only in terms of and through our encounters with other beings and things—the very insight of the Buddha. The left hemisphere is concerned with survival of the individual and seeks to dominate self and other. The right hemisphere’s forte is the broad awareness of and connection with other beings. Empathy and emotional understanding are largely right hemisphere functions. It appears that the insights of Buddhism into the interdependence of phenomena arise from our right hemisphere, whereas our persistent self-centeredness and desire to be in control, our penchant for having preferences, and our resistance to change arise from our left hemisphere.

      This information about how each of our brain hemispheres operates was life changing for me. It revealed faulty thinking patterns I had developed over a lifetime. The tension between the two hemispheres explained the difficulty I often had in believing the direct experience I accessed through my intuitive, right hemisphere—the kind of understanding one can have in zazen. I saw now that I habitually doubted my natural insights. When I sensed something but could not articulate it, my cognitive, verbal left brain jumped in, commandeered the nonverbal insight, and put it into language that wasn’t always sufficient to represent what I felt or knew intuitively. Instead of crediting my intuition, I discounted what I couldn’t articulate. I didn’t trust it. I didn’t trust myself.

      I had acquired this habit of self-doubt from my earliest years in part because I was repeatedly told, directly and indirectly, that the way I felt or thought about things was not right. “Don't be so sensitive,” Mother repeatedly urged. “You’re always Doing. Why can’t you just Be?” my husband complained. Implored to be different, I learned to doubt what I felt. When I sensed that a person was angry or fearful but claimed he was not, I routinely discounted my insight. In general, I persistently doubted my own judgment. How miraculous to discover, then, that though I might not always be able to verbalize my understanding, I actually could rely on it as my experience. This new information about the brain enabled me at last to trust the deep and broad awareness that zazen makes available. My beloved teacher Kobun had been acting from this knowledge when, to my amazement, he accepted what I told him was true for me.

      I was excited that contemporary neuroscience helped me better understand the Buddha’s teachings of twenty-five centuries ago, teachings I believed but had found hard to apply in my daily experience: If all phenomena are empty, co-dependently arising, and without separate, abiding nature, as Buddhism teaches, then everything, including ourselves, is continuously changing. It is impossible to cling to or push away something that is always changing. But because it still appears to us that things, including ourselves, are permanent or ongoing, we do cling and push away. And we suffer. We feel dissatisfied, frustrated (or hurt or afraid or grief-stricken) because we forget that everything is changing. Forgetting, we become attached to what we want and refuse what we don’t want. Either way, we (our left brains) suffer from not getting what we want.

      The Buddhist teaching is that since clinging and pushing away are what cause us suffering, we must relinquish both being attached to what we desire and resisting what we don’t desire. We must live in the immediate, present moment, without attachment. Accept that we and all phenomena are in flow. Know that pleasant will soon turn to neutral or unpleasant and back again. Grasping and pushing away are pointless. Worse, they perpetuate our mistaken belief that we are separate from our experience and can control it.