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The Science of Enlightenment: How Meditation Works
Enlightenment—is it a myth or is it real? Across time and culture, inner explorers have discovered that the liberated state is a natural experience, as real as the sensations you are having right now.
Few teachers achieve clarity with the application of scientific inquiry to these states of consciousness like Shinzen Young. Now in paperback, The Science of Enlightenment makes Young’s essential insights available to readers everywhere. The Science of Enlightenment merges scientific precision, Young’s grasp of the source-language teachings of many spiritual traditions, and his rare gift for sparking insight upon insight through original analogies and illustrations. The result: an uncommonly lucid "Aha, now I get it!" guide to mindfulness meditation—how it works and how to use it to enhance our cognitive capacities, compassion, and experience of happiness independent of conditions.
For meditators of all levels and lineages, this multifaceted wisdom gem will be sure to surprise, provoke, illuminate, and inspire.
Few teachers achieve clarity with the application of scientific inquiry to these states of consciousness like Shinzen Young. Now in paperback, The Science of Enlightenment makes Young’s essential insights available to readers everywhere. The Science of Enlightenment merges scientific precision, Young’s grasp of the source-language teachings of many spiritual traditions, and his rare gift for sparking insight upon insight through original analogies and illustrations. The result: an uncommonly lucid "Aha, now I get it!" guide to mindfulness meditation—how it works and how to use it to enhance our cognitive capacities, compassion, and experience of happiness independent of conditions.
For meditators of all levels and lineages, this multifaceted wisdom gem will be sure to surprise, provoke, illuminate, and inspire.
264 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1998
484 people are currently reading
3,195 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 170 reviews
February 12, 2018
The books biggest flaw is its title. Rather than approaching enlightenment through the scientific process, the author mostly speaks of subjective experience and broad ideas concerning meditation. Having said that, I really enjoyed the book. If you are into meditation or need extra motivation to follow through with your practice, this may be the book for you. Covering a very wide number of topics, the author describes the basics of meditation, various meditation practices, the history of Buddhism, tales of meditation masters that will inspire, and a number of metaphors making meditative concepts more concrete and approachable. There are also some nice guided meditation sections throughout. You have to take the author on his word, as most of the book has an "it sounds unbelievable, but trust me on this one" attitude. Indeed many of the anecdotes sound fabricated, though the author comes across as very genuine. All in all, this book left me motivated to practice meditation more and gave me many topics to research further. 4/5
October 4, 2018
I know that the author is an excellent meditation teacher with years of experience under his belt. It is because he has such experience and ability that I'm going to 'go hard' on this review. I'm not sure what went down with his publishing of his 'magnum opus' here, which should have delivered much, much more practical content and less fluff. I'll present the good, bad and ugly.
The good: The one redeeming factor which earned it 2-3 stars was the simple, elegant and effective technique he presents towards the end of the work, being "Just note 'gone'". It's an excellent method, simple, and delivers on actually giving readers/listeners a taste of what he has been going on at length for hours regarding anicca (impermanence), flow, contraction and expansion, etc. This little gem does make going through the whole laborious work almost worthwhile, even though this too is explained very briefly and not nearly in enough detail.
The bad: For a text/audiobook purporting to explain "How Meditation Works", there was about 5% of the whole work that actually explained how meditation works, and what to actually DO (assuming meditation or as he calls it 'concentration' is an activity, which most beginners and those alike, will interpret this word). The remainder (90-95%) of the work goes into minute detail about the author's own personal views and subjective descriptions on meditative states, processes, conceptual mappings, comparisons with different spiritual paths etc. Of course, this is all interesting brain-food, but remains on the level of interesting intellectual mind-stuff, while never getting down to the nuts and bolts of what processes are involved in actually attaining to these lofty experiences. I have no idea why the author makes up his own complicated jargon and maps for Noting practice, talks about how effective Noting and mindfulness practice is, and then never actually explains in detail HOW to do the Noting practice he refers to throughout! (Apart from the very brief Noting Gone technique). A lot more detail should have gone into Noting, how to do it, and exercises etc. I know that the author does this on retreats and in seminars. Why not include it in his greatest work? I found that there wasn't much of a need to keep comparing spiritual systems, and explaining the 'real meaning' of their practices, when essentially, most people reading this would be coming to SY from a Buddhist, Meditation, or Mindfulness perspective. If they wanted Christian Mysticism, Hebrew equivalents, or linguistic explanations of Japanese Zen terms, they probably wouldn't be reading/listening to this work. The book should have been entitled "Descriptions of Enlightenment : What to expect and how it all conceptually fits together according to SY".
The ugly: The author details his own history several times, and presents it in a way that demonstrates how excellent and massive his own spiritual journey was, and gives the impression that mere mortals in contemporary life would probably not be able to attain such levels mastery due to not having about 20 years of free time to live in temples, endure months of standing under cold waterfalls and endurance tests, or having the opportunity to study under legendary teachers. All this serves to dampen any newbie's hopes of every experiencing the lofty descriptions of meditative states and experiences herein (not helpful). There is so much complicated jargon throughout, that it detracts from the simple experience and approach to meditation and Noting proper. This over-effort on describing experiences and in giving explanations (according to how Master Shinzen sees things) goes off-track several times. His supposedly elegant and 'wow' explanations given for Zen koans, such as Joshu's Dog, might satisfy the intellectually curious mind and present a nice logical view of duality/nonduality as a concept, but that has just undercut the actual, REAL use and true result of using that Koan (which is to actually STOP intellectual explanations), and which, the proper use is never discussed in practical terms by the author. In another instance, he explains that in noting 'Gone', he has a special meaning apart from the usual usage, and that objects may keep 'coming back' once noted. From a surface view, this may seem true, but ultimately, something gone, IS in fact, really gone forever (which the author refutes). There is no identical, same experience that ever repeats again in time. He seems to demonstrate this with his 'dancing mountains' explanations earlier in the book. So why not actually use the regular, usual meaning for 'gone', instead of creating a new, special meaning that persists? (This is just one example). The use of psychological explanations and comparisons with Freud, Jung's mappings etc. is more distracting than helpful; likewise, the use of psuedo-science terms and concepts, which seems to be common in American literature in this category.
Overall, the book/audiobook may be worth it's labour for the Noting 'Gone' technique, but it takes some major effort to endure and complete. An author with his level of experience could have done much better.
The good: The one redeeming factor which earned it 2-3 stars was the simple, elegant and effective technique he presents towards the end of the work, being "Just note 'gone'". It's an excellent method, simple, and delivers on actually giving readers/listeners a taste of what he has been going on at length for hours regarding anicca (impermanence), flow, contraction and expansion, etc. This little gem does make going through the whole laborious work almost worthwhile, even though this too is explained very briefly and not nearly in enough detail.
The bad: For a text/audiobook purporting to explain "How Meditation Works", there was about 5% of the whole work that actually explained how meditation works, and what to actually DO (assuming meditation or as he calls it 'concentration' is an activity, which most beginners and those alike, will interpret this word). The remainder (90-95%) of the work goes into minute detail about the author's own personal views and subjective descriptions on meditative states, processes, conceptual mappings, comparisons with different spiritual paths etc. Of course, this is all interesting brain-food, but remains on the level of interesting intellectual mind-stuff, while never getting down to the nuts and bolts of what processes are involved in actually attaining to these lofty experiences. I have no idea why the author makes up his own complicated jargon and maps for Noting practice, talks about how effective Noting and mindfulness practice is, and then never actually explains in detail HOW to do the Noting practice he refers to throughout! (Apart from the very brief Noting Gone technique). A lot more detail should have gone into Noting, how to do it, and exercises etc. I know that the author does this on retreats and in seminars. Why not include it in his greatest work? I found that there wasn't much of a need to keep comparing spiritual systems, and explaining the 'real meaning' of their practices, when essentially, most people reading this would be coming to SY from a Buddhist, Meditation, or Mindfulness perspective. If they wanted Christian Mysticism, Hebrew equivalents, or linguistic explanations of Japanese Zen terms, they probably wouldn't be reading/listening to this work. The book should have been entitled "Descriptions of Enlightenment : What to expect and how it all conceptually fits together according to SY".
The ugly: The author details his own history several times, and presents it in a way that demonstrates how excellent and massive his own spiritual journey was, and gives the impression that mere mortals in contemporary life would probably not be able to attain such levels mastery due to not having about 20 years of free time to live in temples, endure months of standing under cold waterfalls and endurance tests, or having the opportunity to study under legendary teachers. All this serves to dampen any newbie's hopes of every experiencing the lofty descriptions of meditative states and experiences herein (not helpful). There is so much complicated jargon throughout, that it detracts from the simple experience and approach to meditation and Noting proper. This over-effort on describing experiences and in giving explanations (according to how Master Shinzen sees things) goes off-track several times. His supposedly elegant and 'wow' explanations given for Zen koans, such as Joshu's Dog, might satisfy the intellectually curious mind and present a nice logical view of duality/nonduality as a concept, but that has just undercut the actual, REAL use and true result of using that Koan (which is to actually STOP intellectual explanations), and which, the proper use is never discussed in practical terms by the author. In another instance, he explains that in noting 'Gone', he has a special meaning apart from the usual usage, and that objects may keep 'coming back' once noted. From a surface view, this may seem true, but ultimately, something gone, IS in fact, really gone forever (which the author refutes). There is no identical, same experience that ever repeats again in time. He seems to demonstrate this with his 'dancing mountains' explanations earlier in the book. So why not actually use the regular, usual meaning for 'gone', instead of creating a new, special meaning that persists? (This is just one example). The use of psychological explanations and comparisons with Freud, Jung's mappings etc. is more distracting than helpful; likewise, the use of psuedo-science terms and concepts, which seems to be common in American literature in this category.
Overall, the book/audiobook may be worth it's labour for the Noting 'Gone' technique, but it takes some major effort to endure and complete. An author with his level of experience could have done much better.
March 12, 2017
Couldn't stand his "scientific" language. Instead of talking about meditation using scientific evidence, he uses scientific language and metaphors that obscure rather than illuminate to talk about meditation just for the sake of it. Not much meat here either, as far as I could see (the chapter on mysticism, for example, could have been a whole lot more informative and fascinating). He might be a great meditation teacher, but this wasn't the right book for me. Not worth it.
August 18, 2018
Gah!
Shinzen’s teachings and practices (at their best) are parsimonious, sober, useful and legitimately transformative.
I have been using Shinzen’s basic conceptual framework and meditation techniques for years and they have profoundly transformed my experience of the world.
I owe Shinzen an enormous debt of gratitude. His work has enhanced my life to an inestimable degree. And his work is the foundation for my work as a therapist. I’d literally be lost without it.
But there is something a little grandiose and fuzzy about parts of this book. Around two thirds in, the material becomes less clear, less germane, less crucial, and more than a little frustrating.
I’m concerned that the dirty notes will alienate a serious, critical reader. And that’s precisely the type of reader the book is (I think) intended to reach.
I love the man, and I love his work, and I love the editor of this book like a brother, in fact he’s my bestie IRL. So it pains me to give it 4 Stars.
But I feel the need to honestly raise these (albeit vague) objections. If for no other reason than as a warning to a would-be reader, not to let some of the kookier sections in this text turn you off of Shinzen.
In the final chapters, Shinzen discusses his vision for the friendly, synergistic merger of the western enlightenment project and eastern enlightenment paths i.e. the utilization of science and technology for assistance in the profound realization of ‘post-personal� states and traits.
This is where Shinzen’s work shines again. This aspect of his work may become irrelevant soon, or it may read like H. G. Wells in 50-100 years. But I think it’s important and progressive right now. And I believe it will have a lasting impact.
Speaking as a clinician. I desperately want (no need) more precise, more effective techniques, clinically useful vocabulary, tractable conceptual frameworks, and assistive technology for helping people find the pathway out of the darkened woods of suffering better known as the human condition, AKA addiction, depression, anxiety, trauma and what we currently refer to as personality disorders (but what we may someday be refer to as simply the disorder of being a personality).
Shinzen’s work is already completely useful in this regard. In fact, it’s the most useful one of these ever devised. It’s a hugely important dharma firmware update. If you’re a western meditation practitioner, you need this patch!
But getting non Buddhist people (the vast majority of people at present) to understand, value and use these techniques is still a hard translation problem to say the least.
Try explaining and demonstrating the value of abiding in metta, anicca and anatta to a heroin addict in hard withdrawal, or a trauma victim having a panic attack, or a suicidal depressive.
They need it bad, and I do it all the time, but it ain’t easy brah, take my word for it.
If Shinzen has his way, the eastern enlightenment path will become a whole lot more direct, and that just might help in the project of steering the western enlightenment bus off of the path to total annihilation.
If that ain’t upaya, than I don’t know what is!
What’s the sound of one mic dropping?
Shinzen’s teachings and practices (at their best) are parsimonious, sober, useful and legitimately transformative.
I have been using Shinzen’s basic conceptual framework and meditation techniques for years and they have profoundly transformed my experience of the world.
I owe Shinzen an enormous debt of gratitude. His work has enhanced my life to an inestimable degree. And his work is the foundation for my work as a therapist. I’d literally be lost without it.
But there is something a little grandiose and fuzzy about parts of this book. Around two thirds in, the material becomes less clear, less germane, less crucial, and more than a little frustrating.
I’m concerned that the dirty notes will alienate a serious, critical reader. And that’s precisely the type of reader the book is (I think) intended to reach.
I love the man, and I love his work, and I love the editor of this book like a brother, in fact he’s my bestie IRL. So it pains me to give it 4 Stars.
But I feel the need to honestly raise these (albeit vague) objections. If for no other reason than as a warning to a would-be reader, not to let some of the kookier sections in this text turn you off of Shinzen.
In the final chapters, Shinzen discusses his vision for the friendly, synergistic merger of the western enlightenment project and eastern enlightenment paths i.e. the utilization of science and technology for assistance in the profound realization of ‘post-personal� states and traits.
This is where Shinzen’s work shines again. This aspect of his work may become irrelevant soon, or it may read like H. G. Wells in 50-100 years. But I think it’s important and progressive right now. And I believe it will have a lasting impact.
Speaking as a clinician. I desperately want (no need) more precise, more effective techniques, clinically useful vocabulary, tractable conceptual frameworks, and assistive technology for helping people find the pathway out of the darkened woods of suffering better known as the human condition, AKA addiction, depression, anxiety, trauma and what we currently refer to as personality disorders (but what we may someday be refer to as simply the disorder of being a personality).
Shinzen’s work is already completely useful in this regard. In fact, it’s the most useful one of these ever devised. It’s a hugely important dharma firmware update. If you’re a western meditation practitioner, you need this patch!
But getting non Buddhist people (the vast majority of people at present) to understand, value and use these techniques is still a hard translation problem to say the least.
Try explaining and demonstrating the value of abiding in metta, anicca and anatta to a heroin addict in hard withdrawal, or a trauma victim having a panic attack, or a suicidal depressive.
They need it bad, and I do it all the time, but it ain’t easy brah, take my word for it.
If Shinzen has his way, the eastern enlightenment path will become a whole lot more direct, and that just might help in the project of steering the western enlightenment bus off of the path to total annihilation.
If that ain’t upaya, than I don’t know what is!
What’s the sound of one mic dropping?
January 1, 2017
In a lot of ways this book failed to live up to my expectations, and I think the use of the word "science" in the title is misleading, but I still got a lot out of reading it. Shinzen Young makes a variety of claims that are not well supported (particularly about the connections between the spiritual traditions of different cultures) and general does more woo-ish speculation than I expected, but I can't judge poorly a book that inspired me to drastically increase my practice of meditation, or which introduced me to a meditation technique, which, on my first attempt, yielded what I think was my first real "insight" gained through meditation, and was at the very least one of my most interesting meditation experiences.
Also valuable is Young's clear description of how one may effectively engage in vipassana meditation. In the past I've been unsure of what exactly one is meant to be doing, but thanks to this book the path forward is clearer.
Ultimately I recommend this book, with the caveat that the "science" in the title doesn't mean what one might think.
Also valuable is Young's clear description of how one may effectively engage in vipassana meditation. In the past I've been unsure of what exactly one is meant to be doing, but thanks to this book the path forward is clearer.
Ultimately I recommend this book, with the caveat that the "science" in the title doesn't mean what one might think.
September 14, 2019
Shinzen Young is amazing! He studied Buddhism for many years in Japan from a Buddhist master, but is knowledgeable in all religions and philosophies as well as being a scientist, mathematician, and meditation instructor. Shinzen is American and you can find his teachings on YouTube.
Listening to his calm voice put me in a very relaxed state. I really "caught his calm." Unfortunately, I had to rewind a few times because his voice was so soothing that I missed some of his important messages!
I came upon this audio book in a very sychronistic way. I was about to give up on my meditation practice, when I was offered 2 free audio books and free 1 month trial of Audible.
Needless to say this is the one that caught my immediate attention.
It was the exactly what I needed.
The first 3 or 4 chapters were on meditation!! I started listening and received a dose of motivation, and inspiration that got me back on track.
The audio version was just right and I could see that had I read it, the impact would not have been so potent. Listening made me feel as though I was sitting in his class receiving his teachings.
The author/teacher includes several guided meditations. The first few in the early chapters are to help one work with body awareness. Later on, around chapter 10-11, he adds a few more meditations which are geared towards the mind
In just 24 chapters, Shinzen speaks of science, philosophy, physiology, religion, ritual, thought, feeling, mysticism...everything it seems. All is done with great clarity and simplicity, breaking things down so people of all levels can understand.
Highly recommended.
Listening to his calm voice put me in a very relaxed state. I really "caught his calm." Unfortunately, I had to rewind a few times because his voice was so soothing that I missed some of his important messages!
I came upon this audio book in a very sychronistic way. I was about to give up on my meditation practice, when I was offered 2 free audio books and free 1 month trial of Audible.
Needless to say this is the one that caught my immediate attention.
It was the exactly what I needed.
The first 3 or 4 chapters were on meditation!! I started listening and received a dose of motivation, and inspiration that got me back on track.
The audio version was just right and I could see that had I read it, the impact would not have been so potent. Listening made me feel as though I was sitting in his class receiving his teachings.
The author/teacher includes several guided meditations. The first few in the early chapters are to help one work with body awareness. Later on, around chapter 10-11, he adds a few more meditations which are geared towards the mind
In just 24 chapters, Shinzen speaks of science, philosophy, physiology, religion, ritual, thought, feeling, mysticism...everything it seems. All is done with great clarity and simplicity, breaking things down so people of all levels can understand.
Highly recommended.
July 1, 2019
A healthy mix of genuine insight and pure gibberish. Doesn’t live up to its scientific claims, sadly; it mostly uses scientific concepts as metaphors for what the author perceives to happen in his personal meditation.
October 9, 2013
An audio series that changed my life. As thorough an introduction to the practice of meditation and the experience of the spiritual journey as one could find, but also so much more. Shinzen is such a precise and articulate orator that listening to his words it's as though you are directly experiencing for yourself the deep states of consciousness he is describing. Of course, though, that's not the point, the point is to get you on to the cushion to actually practice yourself - for anyone who has watched Shinzen's YouTube channel and read his Basic Mindfulness manual will know he is an absolute master mediation teacher with a complete system on offer. I defy anyone to listen to the first two chapters of Science of Enlightenment alone and not be curious enough to get on to the cushion and find out for themselves what it is all about. I did, and I have never looked back.
January 3, 2009
Young makes the point that all religion and spiritualities have the same common goal of prayer and/or meditation. The nomenclature may be different but essentially, meditation is the common denominator of an enlightened life. He discusses the scientific proof of the power of meditation, which is interesting and powerful. This is certainly a good message and it was enjoyable to listen to but I didn't find the message to be well organized so I often felt like I was hearing the same thing over and over again.
December 10, 2018
I really enjoyed this book, however the end killed a possible 5 stars. It didn’t need it.
September 17, 2016
The title of this book might be a bit misleading. There is no actual science here. By "science" Young seems to mean only his fondness for metaphors drawn from popular science (the tired old ones about waves and particles, or about the table being "really" only a mass of moving particles, etc.). He warns us that he will use a "precise technical vocabulary" that might be difficult at first for the uninitiated, but what he means by that seems to be an awful lot of vague metaphors which avoid any precise meaning (e.g.: "The ultimate primordial self is the space itself, born in the cleft between expansion and contraction"; or, "You get a very clear perception...[of]...a stately undulatory movement, and within each undulation a more rapid vibratory movement").
His ultimate model of enlightenment is smoking pot and eating a brownie. Passive pleasant sensations are the goal, any attempt at thought or action is the cause of all suffering; Young's constant refrain throughout is that we must accept any conditions, and learn to experience them as pleasant, and "pure", sensations. This passive state is what he means by enlightenment, and in the last chapter he suggest that we might all achieve this by some kind of more sophisticated lobotomy. He even offers some examples of people with major brain injuries, which have rendered them incapable of self-directed action but who are indifferent to their surroundings, and suggests this offers hope that some kind of surgical enlightenment might some day be possible.
To be fair, he is explicit about the fact that what he is presenting was NOT taught by the Buddha, and that his techniques are twentieth-century inventions that most Buddhists objected to as being the opposite of the goal of Buddhism. He still wants to attach it to Buddhism, though, so he claims that each new Buddha radically reinvents the teachings (he compare this to the transformation of Newtonian physics by Einstein).
Overall, a sad mess of new age thought poorly yoked to bad popular ideas of neuroscience. The only thing more depressing than the popularity of this kind of new age nonsense is the fact that I read the whole book!
His ultimate model of enlightenment is smoking pot and eating a brownie. Passive pleasant sensations are the goal, any attempt at thought or action is the cause of all suffering; Young's constant refrain throughout is that we must accept any conditions, and learn to experience them as pleasant, and "pure", sensations. This passive state is what he means by enlightenment, and in the last chapter he suggest that we might all achieve this by some kind of more sophisticated lobotomy. He even offers some examples of people with major brain injuries, which have rendered them incapable of self-directed action but who are indifferent to their surroundings, and suggests this offers hope that some kind of surgical enlightenment might some day be possible.
To be fair, he is explicit about the fact that what he is presenting was NOT taught by the Buddha, and that his techniques are twentieth-century inventions that most Buddhists objected to as being the opposite of the goal of Buddhism. He still wants to attach it to Buddhism, though, so he claims that each new Buddha radically reinvents the teachings (he compare this to the transformation of Newtonian physics by Einstein).
Overall, a sad mess of new age thought poorly yoked to bad popular ideas of neuroscience. The only thing more depressing than the popularity of this kind of new age nonsense is the fact that I read the whole book!
October 14, 2021
Wow!
As someone who meditates, at times over the years I've reflected on how scientific and logical the world of meditation is. This book explains the path from a scientific point of view intending to demystify the mysticism surrounding meditation and the teaching of the Buddha. What this book does excellently is that it gathers all the different schools of meditation under one umbrella before delving deeper into the real core and common denominator of them all. The heart of the matter is finding the derivative of the human experience. This is a book I've found late in my meditation life but this one is best to read early on. This book is for everyone, it is for those who are curious and want to understand the path from a scientific point of view and for those who want a general picture of what this Buddha and his teaching is about.
As someone who meditates, at times over the years I've reflected on how scientific and logical the world of meditation is. This book explains the path from a scientific point of view intending to demystify the mysticism surrounding meditation and the teaching of the Buddha. What this book does excellently is that it gathers all the different schools of meditation under one umbrella before delving deeper into the real core and common denominator of them all. The heart of the matter is finding the derivative of the human experience. This is a book I've found late in my meditation life but this one is best to read early on. This book is for everyone, it is for those who are curious and want to understand the path from a scientific point of view and for those who want a general picture of what this Buddha and his teaching is about.
January 26, 2019
A very interesting book written from a particularly unique perspective. Shinzen Young explains his beliefs and perceptions from both scientific and personal perspectives. Regardless of where your beliefs fall in relation to the author's, you can benefit from knowledge he has to offer in his field. Mr. Young's work is an intriguing foray into a world few have explored - an existential conversation informed by physiological occurrences.
July 10, 2016
I imagine I will be dipping in and out of this for a long time. I've been reading around on mindfulness and Buddhism for about a year and Shinzen Young is definitely the one you communicates the ideas in the way that makes most sense to me. Very clear, very rational, technique-focused, wary of what he calls the "mystical-shmystical element." Full of useful, clarifying metaphors.
June 15, 2017
Inspiring me to get back to my practices :)
February 10, 2021
Words, words, words.
June 19, 2020
Shinzen Young tries to deexoticize enlightenment by taking a multidisciplinary approach to understanding human experience, drawing on a variety of religious disciplines as well as modern science. There's some good stuff in there, but also a lot of repetitiveness. It only occasionally describes in an actionably precise way things that I thought I could use to better tune my meditation. And the "science" part mostly means borrowing language from scientific disciplines to make somewhat forced analogies with Buddhist concepts or to describe metaphorically the sorts of experiences encountered during meditation.
August 13, 2016
Can I give this 10 stars out of 5? If you happen to be in search of a beautiful and inspiring narrative about ultimately feeling at one with this world around us, I can't recommend this highly enough. When I have more time, I'll try to write more about this...
September 13, 2016
I can't think of a better place to start learning about or deepening your meditation practice than here.
January 4, 2018
One of the best books i have ever encountered. powerful, beautiful.
December 28, 2020
Never been a meditation practitioner myself. Picked up this book because it was mentioned in Real Magic: Unlocking Your Natural Psychic Abilities to Create Everyday Miracles (which is another interesting book). Out of this strong curiosity I just feel like I need to see what this book is about!
I like how Shinzen talks about these abstract concept in plain English. There might be jargon but never something he doesn't explain with clarity. A lot of well phrased descriptions and metaphor, which made it fairly easy to understand what he's trying to convey between the lines.
Most people depend solely on things like health, wealth, reputation, relationships, appearance, family, or children for happiness... these things are not eternal. The greatest favour we can do for ourselves is to come to a state where our happiness is no longer dependent on conditions. You can lose your health, you can lose your wealth, you can lose your reputation, you can even lose your ability to think, and still be deeply happy.
How? Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha) figured it out: he discovered how to microscopically investigate in real time the nature of sensory experience, how to break the complex experience of self into manageable sensory elements, which leads to enlightenment, or the Source, the formless womb whose peristalsis gestates time, space, self, and world into existence.
Enlightenment is a natural process. However we cannot reach that process because of this blockage, which is the thingness of self, an artifact caused by habitual nebulosity and viscosity around your mind-body experience.
If you have something between your two hands, like a ball, it will impede your hands from touching each other. The impurities and blockages in the intermediate realm are like that ball, separating the everyday mind from the enlightened mind, If we were to pop the ball, then the two hands could automatically come together and stay together.
You don’t have to get enlightenment, all you have to do is get rid of what’s keeping you from enlightenment, i.e. the purification.
To get purified we need Concentration + Sensory clarity + Equanimity + Time .
Concentration means to focus attention on just what you deem relevant. Sensory clarity involves discerning the components that constitute an experience and detecting their subtle essence. Equanimity means that we give permission for these components to expand, to contract, or to be still—to do whatever they naturally would do.
We need to use these three tools to be mindful of everyday life and dissect all the relevant experiences into pieces so that we can feel where they come from and where they are going.
When we are directing attention to the place where things go when they cease, we are directing attention to the place where things go when they cease, we are directing attention toward the Source where things come from when they arise. That, ladies and gentlemen, is enlightenment.
Enlightenment doesn’t belong to any particular religion or culture or period. You eventually come to a point where you are so present that there is a kind of merging of inside and outside. When that happens, focus becomes more than an extremely interesting and pleasant experience; it becomes a spiritually transformative experience. You begin to get an insight into the nature of oneness. The â€Àáâ€� would vanish.
Study Notes
I like how Shinzen talks about these abstract concept in plain English. There might be jargon but never something he doesn't explain with clarity. A lot of well phrased descriptions and metaphor, which made it fairly easy to understand what he's trying to convey between the lines.
Most people depend solely on things like health, wealth, reputation, relationships, appearance, family, or children for happiness... these things are not eternal. The greatest favour we can do for ourselves is to come to a state where our happiness is no longer dependent on conditions. You can lose your health, you can lose your wealth, you can lose your reputation, you can even lose your ability to think, and still be deeply happy.
How? Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha) figured it out: he discovered how to microscopically investigate in real time the nature of sensory experience, how to break the complex experience of self into manageable sensory elements, which leads to enlightenment, or the Source, the formless womb whose peristalsis gestates time, space, self, and world into existence.
Enlightenment is a natural process. However we cannot reach that process because of this blockage, which is the thingness of self, an artifact caused by habitual nebulosity and viscosity around your mind-body experience.
If you have something between your two hands, like a ball, it will impede your hands from touching each other. The impurities and blockages in the intermediate realm are like that ball, separating the everyday mind from the enlightened mind, If we were to pop the ball, then the two hands could automatically come together and stay together.
You don’t have to get enlightenment, all you have to do is get rid of what’s keeping you from enlightenment, i.e. the purification.
To get purified we need Concentration + Sensory clarity + Equanimity + Time .
Concentration means to focus attention on just what you deem relevant. Sensory clarity involves discerning the components that constitute an experience and detecting their subtle essence. Equanimity means that we give permission for these components to expand, to contract, or to be still—to do whatever they naturally would do.
We need to use these three tools to be mindful of everyday life and dissect all the relevant experiences into pieces so that we can feel where they come from and where they are going.
When we are directing attention to the place where things go when they cease, we are directing attention to the place where things go when they cease, we are directing attention toward the Source where things come from when they arise. That, ladies and gentlemen, is enlightenment.
Enlightenment doesn’t belong to any particular religion or culture or period. You eventually come to a point where you are so present that there is a kind of merging of inside and outside. When that happens, focus becomes more than an extremely interesting and pleasant experience; it becomes a spiritually transformative experience. You begin to get an insight into the nature of oneness. The â€Àáâ€� would vanish.
Study Notes
December 27, 2022
Misleading title, but great book.
December 7, 2017
Somewhat a surprise due to a misleading title and different expectations that I had.
I follow Shinzen Young since a few years now. His science-mindedness and meticulous systematism is very appealing to me. His ego on the other hand quite a bit off-putting.
The title could lead you to believe that this is (yet another) review of psych. research on mindfulness. Rather than that, it is just using some science-inspired metaphors to expose Shinzen's system and views. And that is actually more valuable.
I wouldn't recommend this as an intro to meditation, but it is a good intro to Shinzen's work (more detailed and technical work is available for free on his web pages).
I follow Shinzen Young since a few years now. His science-mindedness and meticulous systematism is very appealing to me. His ego on the other hand quite a bit off-putting.
The title could lead you to believe that this is (yet another) review of psych. research on mindfulness. Rather than that, it is just using some science-inspired metaphors to expose Shinzen's system and views. And that is actually more valuable.
I wouldn't recommend this as an intro to meditation, but it is a good intro to Shinzen's work (more detailed and technical work is available for free on his web pages).
September 26, 2018
Awesome depth and nuance on a topic that is usually explained in less consciously useful ways. At the same time, I appreciate Shinzen’s use of poetic and metaphorical language, which honors the value of subconscious utility too. A great aid in seeing AND feeling my way into seeing, hearing and feeling.
December 14, 2021
As Shinzen Young himself says in one of the later chapters, Zen teachers are known for under-explaining meditation, vipassana teachers for over-explaining. It’s as if vipassana teachers want to tell you everything that might possibly happen, so you never have a moment that makes you uncomfortable, while Zen teachers tell you nothing, throw you in the water and say, Swim! They go into enormous detail describing the posture, then say almost nothing about the mind.[1] And as you walk out the door, they say, by the way, this is it, there’s no advanced practice, no future instruction, just sit for the rest of your life. Now get the hell out of here.
But when you try it for a while and come timidly creeping back to ask a question, they fill in the gaps. I vividly remember the first time I went to my teacher, during sesshin, and told her I was experiencing extreme anxiety (on a beautiful Sunday afternoon, when absolutely nothing was happening; what the hell was there to be anxious about?). She said, “Where is that feeling in your body?� And I thought, my God, this is a strange practice.
This whole book is meditation instruction. It says things about meditation I’ve never heard anyone else say (perhaps because I mostly read Zen books). In a way, Young doesn’t tell me anything I hadn’t already figured out, over thirty years of practice. But he comes out and states things that my experience had only hinted at. And he systematizes it. He has that kind of mind. Check out his outline of practice.
The man has a fascinating background. He began as a linguist, a totally unpopular nerd and underachiever at his regular high school in Los Angeles but the valedictorian at the local Japanese ethnic school, which he went to at the same time. He studied languages at UCLA, did graduate work in Buddhist studies at Wisconsin. He traveled to Japan in the hope of doing a dissertation on Shingon Buddhism, but the monastery’s abbot told him it wasn’t an intellectual study, that if he wanted to work there he would have to do menial tasks. The man wouldn’t compromise. It was his way or the highway. Almost by accident Young began to meditate with one of the monks who had a separate sitting group, arrived at some level of samadhi, and realized the menial tasks were a way of taking his burgeoning samadhi into everyday life. They weren’t just to keep the place clean. They were a vital part of practice.
It was while he was studying in Japan that he met a Jesuit named William Johnston, who had come as a missionary but became devoted to sitting, and who let Young know that there is a contemplative tradition not just in the East, but in all traditions; while the doctrines of different religions might contradict each other, the experiences of their mystics all sound alike. Of all the teachers I know, Young is the most open to, and most knowledgeable about, what Aldous Huxley called the Perennial Philosophy, the way so many traditions describe the same thing.
Young eventually wound up at the International Buddhist Meditation Center in Los Angeles, where he studied and taught vipassana meditation, but he also did some time at Mt. Baldy with Joshu Sasaki, the infamous Zen teacher who lived to be 108 years old but was outed late in life as a sexual predator. Sasaki Roshi had a unique teaching (which he expounded in every dharma talk, basically the same thing again and again), and it has obviously influenced Young, with his talk of expansion and contraction and zero. He’s picked up teaching wherever he could find it. Somehow he manages to pull it all together.
Young actually begins at a place where most Zen teachers end, with the word enlightenment. Ask a Zen teacher what that is, and how to achieve it, and he’ll burst into a furious diatribe and tell you how stupid you are, trying to obtain something from your practice. You’ll be lucky if he doesn’t hit you with a stick. But Young is happy to tell you what enlightenment is. He does so quite casually.
He also tells you how to attain it, and here he gets into the same things my Zen teacher has been telling me for years, but is more particular and precise. He says that the three basic facets of practice are concentration power (coming back to some object of focus again and again), sensory clarity (seeing what is actually happening, and deconstructing it into simpler parts), and equanimity (not being calm or happy all the time, but being okay with whatever emotion arises. It’s like what Eihei Dogen apparently said, “The enlightened mind is the mind that is intimate with every mind state.� You might be burning with rage, but you fully experience the rage).
His description of clarity is especially interesting. Young emphasizes how helpful it is to deconstruct our experiences. The anxiety I was feeling on that sesshin—like every other strong emotion—was composed of mental images, verbal thinking, and strong feelings in the body. My teacher’s advice—concentrate on the feelings in the body, see the thoughts and images but let them go, don’t get caught up in them—is essentially what Young advises us to do. Over time, as we sit more and more, especially if we sit for long periods, we become confident that we can sit with any physical sensation, especially because, when they get difficult, they sometimes break up into pure energy. We also see how bizarre our thoughts and verbal images are[2] (or at least don’t fixate on them. We don’t give them oxygen). We take an overwhelming emotion like fear and break it into smaller things that we can handle.
The problem with Young’s approach (which I’m sure he understands, and deals with as he teaches) is that someone might sit down and expect all this to happen, and if it doesn’t, be worried that they’re not doing it right. That’s why the Zen approach—which leaves you flailing around in your experience, but also urges you to have the experience you’re having, not look for anything special to happen—is effective. It’s actually what I prefer. I can’t do all the things the vipassana teachers instruct me to do (like become so focused on the breathing that I never notice anything else). I sit there and try in my half-assed way, and see what happens. What happens becomes the great teacher.
Still, it’s good to encounter the other thing now and then. It’s good for a Zen student to go on a vipassana retreat (which I used to do all the time; I loved those retreats, but kept wanting the teacher to shut the hell up and let us sit in silence. Quit babying us! Let us do this!), or a vipassana student to go on a Zen retreat (why’s it so quiet in here? They don’t give us any help at all! Everybody’s eating so fast!).
I also don’t like his focus on enlightenment (it’s as if you just started jogging and somebody tells you that if you don’t finish in the top twenty of the Boston Marathon you won’t have done anything[3]). It’s setting up a goal, and even vipassana teachers usually admit that the way to screw everything up is to have some imagined goal for your practice.
I also don’t follow Young into his final wish (what he calls “My Happiest Thought�), that someday science and spiritual practice will not only come together (they seem to be doing that), but that science will find some way to speed the enlightenment process up, so that people will be more easily enlightened, and many will become enlightened. As he points out, the teaching is that we’re already enlightened, but that something is standing in the way of realizing it, and if we could just get that thing out of the way, voila, we’d be enlightened. He speaks of Jill Bolte Taylor’s book My Stroke of Insight and a medical condition called athymhormia, where people seem to be fully present but don’t have any idea that it’s time for lunch. To me the idea of speeding up enlightenment is like saying, “Hey man, you don’t need to climb Mt. Everest, I can get a helicopter and fly you up there. Let me set that up for you. I got this.�
In Zen we feel that the whole experience is the thing, not just getting there (and to Young’s credit, he devotes plenty of space to the long process of purification. What about that endless process, I can’t help wondering. You’re going to speed that up?). The point is not to get to the top of Mt. Everest, but to have the experience of climbing. And if you do that, and still don’t reach the top, it’s just as valuable. It’s called human existence. A human life.
Or as my wife would say—she’s a contemplative Catholic—all the struggles we’re going through are purifying our soul. That’s the point.
[1] A case in point is the great Eihei Dogen. Here’s his instruction for how to handle the mind: “Think not thinking. How do you think not thinking. Beyond thinking. This is the essential art of zazen.� Thanks, Eihei (if I may call you that). You’ll all heart.
Actually, this is perfect instruction, once you understand it. It’s exactly what to do.
[2] I may just be speaking for myself.
[3] Young, however, is not overly fixated on enlightenment experiences. He thinks it can kind of sneak up on you.
But when you try it for a while and come timidly creeping back to ask a question, they fill in the gaps. I vividly remember the first time I went to my teacher, during sesshin, and told her I was experiencing extreme anxiety (on a beautiful Sunday afternoon, when absolutely nothing was happening; what the hell was there to be anxious about?). She said, “Where is that feeling in your body?� And I thought, my God, this is a strange practice.
This whole book is meditation instruction. It says things about meditation I’ve never heard anyone else say (perhaps because I mostly read Zen books). In a way, Young doesn’t tell me anything I hadn’t already figured out, over thirty years of practice. But he comes out and states things that my experience had only hinted at. And he systematizes it. He has that kind of mind. Check out his outline of practice.
The man has a fascinating background. He began as a linguist, a totally unpopular nerd and underachiever at his regular high school in Los Angeles but the valedictorian at the local Japanese ethnic school, which he went to at the same time. He studied languages at UCLA, did graduate work in Buddhist studies at Wisconsin. He traveled to Japan in the hope of doing a dissertation on Shingon Buddhism, but the monastery’s abbot told him it wasn’t an intellectual study, that if he wanted to work there he would have to do menial tasks. The man wouldn’t compromise. It was his way or the highway. Almost by accident Young began to meditate with one of the monks who had a separate sitting group, arrived at some level of samadhi, and realized the menial tasks were a way of taking his burgeoning samadhi into everyday life. They weren’t just to keep the place clean. They were a vital part of practice.
It was while he was studying in Japan that he met a Jesuit named William Johnston, who had come as a missionary but became devoted to sitting, and who let Young know that there is a contemplative tradition not just in the East, but in all traditions; while the doctrines of different religions might contradict each other, the experiences of their mystics all sound alike. Of all the teachers I know, Young is the most open to, and most knowledgeable about, what Aldous Huxley called the Perennial Philosophy, the way so many traditions describe the same thing.
Young eventually wound up at the International Buddhist Meditation Center in Los Angeles, where he studied and taught vipassana meditation, but he also did some time at Mt. Baldy with Joshu Sasaki, the infamous Zen teacher who lived to be 108 years old but was outed late in life as a sexual predator. Sasaki Roshi had a unique teaching (which he expounded in every dharma talk, basically the same thing again and again), and it has obviously influenced Young, with his talk of expansion and contraction and zero. He’s picked up teaching wherever he could find it. Somehow he manages to pull it all together.
Young actually begins at a place where most Zen teachers end, with the word enlightenment. Ask a Zen teacher what that is, and how to achieve it, and he’ll burst into a furious diatribe and tell you how stupid you are, trying to obtain something from your practice. You’ll be lucky if he doesn’t hit you with a stick. But Young is happy to tell you what enlightenment is. He does so quite casually.
He also tells you how to attain it, and here he gets into the same things my Zen teacher has been telling me for years, but is more particular and precise. He says that the three basic facets of practice are concentration power (coming back to some object of focus again and again), sensory clarity (seeing what is actually happening, and deconstructing it into simpler parts), and equanimity (not being calm or happy all the time, but being okay with whatever emotion arises. It’s like what Eihei Dogen apparently said, “The enlightened mind is the mind that is intimate with every mind state.� You might be burning with rage, but you fully experience the rage).
His description of clarity is especially interesting. Young emphasizes how helpful it is to deconstruct our experiences. The anxiety I was feeling on that sesshin—like every other strong emotion—was composed of mental images, verbal thinking, and strong feelings in the body. My teacher’s advice—concentrate on the feelings in the body, see the thoughts and images but let them go, don’t get caught up in them—is essentially what Young advises us to do. Over time, as we sit more and more, especially if we sit for long periods, we become confident that we can sit with any physical sensation, especially because, when they get difficult, they sometimes break up into pure energy. We also see how bizarre our thoughts and verbal images are[2] (or at least don’t fixate on them. We don’t give them oxygen). We take an overwhelming emotion like fear and break it into smaller things that we can handle.
The problem with Young’s approach (which I’m sure he understands, and deals with as he teaches) is that someone might sit down and expect all this to happen, and if it doesn’t, be worried that they’re not doing it right. That’s why the Zen approach—which leaves you flailing around in your experience, but also urges you to have the experience you’re having, not look for anything special to happen—is effective. It’s actually what I prefer. I can’t do all the things the vipassana teachers instruct me to do (like become so focused on the breathing that I never notice anything else). I sit there and try in my half-assed way, and see what happens. What happens becomes the great teacher.
Still, it’s good to encounter the other thing now and then. It’s good for a Zen student to go on a vipassana retreat (which I used to do all the time; I loved those retreats, but kept wanting the teacher to shut the hell up and let us sit in silence. Quit babying us! Let us do this!), or a vipassana student to go on a Zen retreat (why’s it so quiet in here? They don’t give us any help at all! Everybody’s eating so fast!).
I also don’t like his focus on enlightenment (it’s as if you just started jogging and somebody tells you that if you don’t finish in the top twenty of the Boston Marathon you won’t have done anything[3]). It’s setting up a goal, and even vipassana teachers usually admit that the way to screw everything up is to have some imagined goal for your practice.
I also don’t follow Young into his final wish (what he calls “My Happiest Thought�), that someday science and spiritual practice will not only come together (they seem to be doing that), but that science will find some way to speed the enlightenment process up, so that people will be more easily enlightened, and many will become enlightened. As he points out, the teaching is that we’re already enlightened, but that something is standing in the way of realizing it, and if we could just get that thing out of the way, voila, we’d be enlightened. He speaks of Jill Bolte Taylor’s book My Stroke of Insight and a medical condition called athymhormia, where people seem to be fully present but don’t have any idea that it’s time for lunch. To me the idea of speeding up enlightenment is like saying, “Hey man, you don’t need to climb Mt. Everest, I can get a helicopter and fly you up there. Let me set that up for you. I got this.�
In Zen we feel that the whole experience is the thing, not just getting there (and to Young’s credit, he devotes plenty of space to the long process of purification. What about that endless process, I can’t help wondering. You’re going to speed that up?). The point is not to get to the top of Mt. Everest, but to have the experience of climbing. And if you do that, and still don’t reach the top, it’s just as valuable. It’s called human existence. A human life.
Or as my wife would say—she’s a contemplative Catholic—all the struggles we’re going through are purifying our soul. That’s the point.
[1] A case in point is the great Eihei Dogen. Here’s his instruction for how to handle the mind: “Think not thinking. How do you think not thinking. Beyond thinking. This is the essential art of zazen.� Thanks, Eihei (if I may call you that). You’ll all heart.
Actually, this is perfect instruction, once you understand it. It’s exactly what to do.
[2] I may just be speaking for myself.
[3] Young, however, is not overly fixated on enlightenment experiences. He thinks it can kind of sneak up on you.
November 29, 2020
I've read the negative reviews of this book and understand their points, but I appreciated and enjoyed (unlike other readers) the author's autobiographical material. Both his manner and his teachings are idiosyncratic and seem to be quite polarizing--you love him (you're a "Shinhead") or you hate him. I indeed found much of the material in this book to be a bit abstruse and to be more theoretical than practical, but I also agree with the reviewer who praised his "Just Note Gone" technique, despite there being a few problems with his explanation of that as well! I also am both intrigued by and also suspicious of grand overarching schemes such as his "Basic Mindfulness," which appears as a free download (see ) with a notation that an updated version ("Unified Mindfulness") was planned for late 2016. I'm not sure what happened to that; it's still not available, at least for free online. And although some aspects of his mindfulness technique are freely shared, there's also a decided marketing effort to get people to purchase participation in courses. I sometimes think of Shinzen Young as a Ken Wilber, formulating grand paradigms that end up being not quite so transformative as they were initially intended to be. Having said that, I incorporate many of the elements of Basic Mindfulness into my own meditations, finding them to be a very practical modification of Mahasi Sayadaw's original noting practice championed by, among others, S.N. Goenka and Daniel Ingram. This book refers to the various portals, both interior and exterior, of qualia, but the PDF file of Basic Mindfulness is a better guide to actually using noting through those portals. All in all, I liked this book and would recommend it.
April 15, 2023
Pretty good book by a well-known meditation teacher.
Some interesting autobiographical sections, some basic Buddhist philosophy synthesized in secular terms geared towards the modern, scientific-minded; very little praxis.
His chapter on the spiritual experience across different traditions was one of my favorites. An ode to a flavor of perennialism.
I also liked Young's section regarding the Buddha, and Maitreya, the prophesied Buddha. In it he also touches on the difference between an enlightened person, an arhat, and the historical Buddha, with great clarity.
Maitreya, the alleged coming Buddha, is said to build upon the original message of Siddartha with a modern vernacular; and is also said to be just as monumental as the Buddha himself.
Shinzen Young's overarching goal is to get a science of enlightenment, that would make it accessible to anyone willing to put in the necessary effort; akin to a bachelors degree in today's world.
Some interesting autobiographical sections, some basic Buddhist philosophy synthesized in secular terms geared towards the modern, scientific-minded; very little praxis.
His chapter on the spiritual experience across different traditions was one of my favorites. An ode to a flavor of perennialism.
I also liked Young's section regarding the Buddha, and Maitreya, the prophesied Buddha. In it he also touches on the difference between an enlightened person, an arhat, and the historical Buddha, with great clarity.
Maitreya, the alleged coming Buddha, is said to build upon the original message of Siddartha with a modern vernacular; and is also said to be just as monumental as the Buddha himself.
Shinzen Young's overarching goal is to get a science of enlightenment, that would make it accessible to anyone willing to put in the necessary effort; akin to a bachelors degree in today's world.
September 12, 2021
This book is unparalleled! Must read!
Overall, 10/10. On par with other rarest books. In fact I would decrease the rating of some other books because of this one.
Shinzen is great in demystifying the intricacies of reality.
His concept of looking at experiences as expansion and contraction is way deeper than traditional arising and passing away in Buddhism.
You have to meditate daily to understand the depth of this book. The knowledge given in it is waste if you don't try to implement it as a moment to moment reality.
Most of the things written in the book is about the insight you get as you keep dissecting your experience (vipassana).
The insight will change your perspective of looking at pleasure and pain. And a time comes when both are part of the same divine, which is infinitely BLISSFUL. Basically life is Unlimited Satisfaction and Love!!!
Overall, 10/10. On par with other rarest books. In fact I would decrease the rating of some other books because of this one.
Shinzen is great in demystifying the intricacies of reality.
His concept of looking at experiences as expansion and contraction is way deeper than traditional arising and passing away in Buddhism.
You have to meditate daily to understand the depth of this book. The knowledge given in it is waste if you don't try to implement it as a moment to moment reality.
Most of the things written in the book is about the insight you get as you keep dissecting your experience (vipassana).
The insight will change your perspective of looking at pleasure and pain. And a time comes when both are part of the same divine, which is infinitely BLISSFUL. Basically life is Unlimited Satisfaction and Love!!!
February 13, 2022
To me, this book was interesting and useful mostly because it provides a glimpse of how a very experienced meditator thinks about his practice. A lot of metaphors and anecdotes that clarify an often quite confusing space of ideas. I didn't really care for the connection-to-science framing, but appreciate that it might contribute to some people will finding it more credible.
April 7, 2019
An interesting read, useful piece in the tapestry of understanding
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