In this other marriage (for it is that) to his work, the medical researcher tries to escape from the trivial and the derivative. His method is to use his frontal lobes-to anticipate the result. His approach is always future-oriented. His goal: the germinal; his yardstick: the "so what?" test. This means that he will tentatively project conclusions from the hypothesis well out in front of his data. He asks: what important implications, if any, would a finding have? Is the projected goal not only original but really worthwhile? Thus, with regard to Francis Crick's epic DNA research with James Watson, we find Crick remarking: "The major credit I think Jim and I deserve ... is for selecting the right problem and sticking to it. It's true that by blundering about we stumbled on gold, but the fact remains that we were looking for gold."'
Certain kinds of information take on top priority. These priority decisions seem to be made at all levels of consciousness. In arriving at priority decisions, the researcher's humanistic tendencies will lead him to consider the needs of both patient and society. His scientific orientation will direct him toward "yeasty," provocative information that catalyzes the gathering of new information to an unusual degree. His pragmatic nature inclines him toward research that will attract financial support. These are not irreconcilable opposites, but I find myself forever wrestling with the order of my priority decisions. Fortunate is the investigator who always satisfies all his instincts in one field of inquiry.
The more novel and exciting the hypothesis, the more some colleagues will resist it. They will challenge the data on which it is based for all manner of reasons and in all manner of ways. Gradually, I have come to appreciate that these "reactionary" forces are also allies in disguise. Not without effort, I have learned to bend constructively to my advantage the energies that come from resulting conflict of ideas. Challenges guarantee the extra effort that makes for my best performance. Does the method really have a hole in it here? A gap in the logic there? If so, they will be plugged up more quickly if firm resistance is present.
Next, there is a lot of writing to be done. This, too, seems to follow a "factor of three" time scale. If the first experiments are successful, they may justify expanding the work into a full-scale research project, which takes money. A grant application must be written. Up to now, one has been humming a catchy tune; from here on it must be orchestrated fully. The area under investigation must be extensively documented, the research budget thoroughly justified. Grant applications are a headache. Increasingly, researchers have been forced to predict and to describe exactly how they will proceed months to years into the future. For more creative types of research, this requirement bears little relation to reality. It is like expecting a watercolorist to draw out clearly in advance, using color-coded numbers, each of the hundred or so brush strokes he will make in a forthcoming painting. The inherent rigidity of painting by the numbers bears little relationship to the fluid, creatingas-you-go-along approach of painting and of novel investigative work. However much they increasingly suffer, grant applicants bear it, and write on. They know (if bureaucrats don't) that it is the second and third generation of ideas-not even envisioned at the time of writing-that will give freshness and renewed vitality to their work.
In writing the application for funds the researcher must tread several narrow lines. How much documentation should he include at the risk of boring the reader or revealing "trade" secrets? How much enthusiasm can he convey about fresh ideas still to be tested without appearing "far out" and "unscientific"? Should he apply to several agencies for support or only to one; for two years' support or for three? If the proposal is interesting, a hard-nosed team of experts may be sent out to interview him, inspect his laboratory, and decide upon the merits of the research planned.
Later, assuming financial support is forthcoming, he will have to shift the pattern of his research. Initially, much of his work was designed to test whether his methods were good enough to answer his hypothesis. He performed his first tentative pilot experiments on the shaky framework of these early methods. This was the preamble-a time for laying the groundwork and "playing it by ear." It is something like exploring a vast swamp by extending a succession of thin planks out horizontally, each barely floating on the surface. One may visualize such early attempts as a time of "horizontal research." Later, with the foundations more secure underfoot the investigator will decide that all the methods are finally poised for the "big runs" of "vertical research." These will be the major experiments, a time of upward construction, of visible progress, of "putting it all together."
If the investigator's experiments are successful, his data and conclusions should now be good enough to share with his colleagues at large. When he then starts to prepare a paper to present orally at a meeting, he quickly finds himself in trouble again. The methods still have a quirk that must be ironed out; the data really aren't conclusive; someone else has evidence that may conflict with the conclusions unless further experiments are performed. And these additional experiments, necessarily, are done.
Oral reports are perishable; they have no permanent scientific value. The investigator must finally put all the information into a manuscript for publication complete with tables, figures, and bibliography, and must try to anticipate which editors of which journals will be the most receptive. By now, he has faced the factor of three so many times that nrontlis have gone by. The original ideas have lost their luster. Completing the manuscript is like giving birth to a cactus that has bloomed long before.
Still later, the editors suggest some changes. Swallowing pride, he finds that most of these will actually strengthen the paper. The jigsaw puzzle is now completed. Months later, the article is published. He reads it over, reminiscing now, and knowing only too well the fragile contingencies, the incredible complexity of the whole drawn-out process, he marvels how it all ever came to pass.
But the moment of pause is soon over, because new leads have opened up, a new generation of ideas is being tested out, the cycle is being repeated.
33
All Quiet on the Eastern Front?
The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the sower of all true art and science.... The cosmic religious experience is the strongest and the noblest, deriving from behind scientific research. No one who does not appreciate the terrific exertions, the devotion, without which pioneer creation in scientific thought cannot come into being can judge the strength of the feeling out of which alone such work, turned away as it is from immediate practical life, can grow.
Albert Einstein
Not too many years ago, if a Westerner engaged in "Eastern" forms of meditation, he was viewed as contaminated by mental leprosy. That attitude was changed by the burst of international travel and the traffic in ideas after World War 11. Now, many persons may practice various forms of meditation-a kind popularly known as "transcendental," Zen, or simple relaxation-without feeling especially unconventional. Professional coaches and athletes now embrace philosophical and physiological principles practiced in the East for millennia. East has met West. "Far out" has almost become "far in."
Anyone who hasn't meditated can only be confused about what the basic process really involves. First of all, you aren't thinking. Nor do you absolutely need to concentrate on a word, a paradox, or an idea, though these may assist the beginner, or be superimposed later. Rather, you "let go" to enter a realm of nonthinking. As your thoughts fall away, and breathing takes care of itself, you become relaxed and can experience at least at one stage a feeling of clear, expanded inner awareness. To me, the conventional outside world then seems (somewhat paradoxically) both closer and wider in terms of perception, yet farther away in terms of conception.
Some say that if you regularly practice a popularly known system of meditation, you will increase the fluency, flexibility, and originality of creative solutions.' Others suggest that teachers of this system are below average in certain standard tests of creativity,' yet how original these teachers might have been before they s
tarted their training remains to be determined.
In any case, meditation is increasingly used to explore and extend the frontiers of "inner space." As a result, it has progressed beyond the fad stage to become a phenomenon to reckon with, both sociologically and scientifically. What was once viewed as rare and mystical has evolved into something both commonplace and practical. Moreover, the scientist finally not only feels free to acknowledge his "mystical" depths, but knows that there should be nothing mysterious about them. He insists, indeed, that meditation and similar phenomena be studied scientifically like any others, still realizing that factual evidence and proof are going to be hard to come by.
The immediate goal of meditation is to reach a calm state of both mental awareness and physical relaxation. With practice, these states increasingly outlast the period of meditation. The next phase is to expand one's spiritual perceptions toward that feeling of enlightened "oneness" with the universe sometimes called "cosmic consciousness." The ultimate goal is to experience this not only momentarily, but to integrate it, effortlessly, goallessly into the fabric of a lifelong attitude of mind, a transformation that facilitates personal growth and appropriate social actions as well.
We still know next to nothing about the neurophysiological basis of the various steps in the creative sequence. However, we might understand some of these steps better if we examined parts of the meditative approach, for creativity does relate to meditation in two ways. To begin with, our "civilized" world forever blizzards us with a synaptic overload of unnecessary stimuli. These stimuli not only distract us from our essential selves, but even cause mental traffic jams that clog our thinking. In such a world, meditation could free up some moments for calm observation, open-minded scanning, or freewheeling rumination of the kind necessary in the creative sequence. As Alan Watts has said, "it is only when there is no goal, and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world."'
In one sense, the flash of creative illumination bears certain analogies with that "peak" moment of revelation which can be a high point of the meditative approach. Observations for millennia have confirmed that meditative training can help meditators access alternate states of consciousness. During the more advanced of such "awakenings" there also occurs an unparalleled sense of objectively clear reality: the witness realizes the living reality of "all things as they really are." If a flash of intuition has ever sent you up to the molehills of inspiration, you have experienced only the first wordless hint of what a monk might realize on the long, steep path toward the Everest of enlightenment.
The page proofs of the first edition of this book went off to the printer in 1977. Of all those early chapters, this chapter 33 about meditative training required the most changes for the present MIT Press edition of 2003. Why? For several reasons. Back in 1977, I was still a rank beginner in the art of meditation, and was much more naive about Zen. True, I had undergone an episode of losing my sense of a physical self during one deep meditative absorption in 1974. In fact, this preliminary state in Kyoto was only a shallow "wake-up call." It was only a "dearth of self" during hyperawareness, as are most absorptions in general.
Not until a later sabbatical in London, in 1982, did I undergo the first "taste" of prajna during a deeper "peak experience." This initial experience of insight was the real "eye-opener." A technical term for it is kensho. (Satori is reserved for more advanced degrees of sudden awakening). Zen training begins, not ends, during kensho's extraordinary alternate state of insights, and in the period of reflections that soon follow them. Yet nothing in my prior experience as a medical student, resident in neurology, or in my later academic experience had prepared me for this level of existential insights. For during this genuine "death of self," every physical notion and psychic sense of self dropped off.
I had not been a meditator before going to Kyoto in 1974. However, by a happy accident as I was leaving, old friends from medical school (Jock and Holly Cobb) gave me a book, Zen in the Art of Archery. It proved too opaque for me to appreciate at that time, but it did stimulate my curiosity. Fortunately, a colleague in the pharmacology department knew that a local English-speaking Zen master was willing to instruct foreigners. This remarkable person, Kobori-roshi, inspired me to begin the long path of Zen and to stick to it. As a result, I have since continued to repair my ignorance about Zen and its psychophysiology during an ongoing process of adult reeducation.' '
Within Zen Buddhism, two notions have developed about how "enlightenment" occurs. Clearly, the two concepts are not mutually exclusive. In the Soto school, more emphasis is placed on the enlightenment that transforms incrementally and on meditative practices that need not employ the koan as a concentration device. In the Rinzai school, more emphasis is placed on the sudden transforming flash of insightwisdom (prajna) during kensho, and on meditative practices that do utilize koan studies as a form of concentration.
At first glance, these two approaches might seem reminiscent of the two ends of the spectrum of the creative process itself. That is, one's understanding might either evolve slowly, or in an inspired flash of illumination. But any similar analogy that might exist between one's spiritual quests and one's creative quests requires further comments and qualification.
These begin with the fact that Zen training is oriented toward the slow transformation of traits of character, and toward rigorous meditative retreats that help access more advanced states of insight-wisdom. Along this ancient Path, many different Buddhist practices complement one another. As Zen is now conducted worldwide, many of its practices overlap, and the various schools (far more than two) often tend to employ mixtures of receptive and concentrative meditative approaches to arrive at enduring transformations."
Consider, for example, the observations during a pioneer longitudinal psychological study of thirty-one male and female monastic trainees in the Soto tradition. MacPhillamy found that seven subjects had experienced kensho during their five-year period of residence. Serial MMPI tests suggested that the brief enlightenment experiences of these seven trainees may have played a role in enhancing the rate at which they had matured psychologically, more rapidly than had their cohorts, in the direction of becoming more integrated and well-adjusted individuals.'
Then, too, the states of consciousness are not qualitatively identical in the spiritual and creative quests. One result of the vast, ill-defined recent interest in states of consciousness was the founding of the new Journal of Consciousness Studies in 1994.' ` Its readers and contributors discovered that the subject of "consciousness" seemed even more difficult to pin down than the subject of creativity. Here, let us try to simplify such complexities. For our purposes here, let us view our usual states of waking consciousness as the melding of two very different perspectives."
While these different perspectives do begin on the basis of some "hard-wired" physiological distinctions, the way they usually merge daily reflects one remarkable paradox. For yes, we do seem to inhabit a dual situation: our skin obviously divides self from other, inside from outside, me from you. Yet our brain usually blends these two perspectives seamlessly, so that we still go on seeming to experience only "one" phenomenal state of consciousness at a given time, almost invariably with our self as its center.
The first of the two different perspectives is the familiar egocentric one. It expresses the functions of sensory channels that serve as the physical framework for our own subjective, self-consciousness. Bodycentered to begin with, this personal perspective on the world is infused with emotionally charged conditioning, and it soon develops the egocentric psychological biases of the I-Me-Mine. Does such an egocentric perspective really have an anatomical basis? Studies confirm that when visual stimuli from the outside world pass through the primate brain, some of them do enter circuits that first relate back to the actual position of the head, eyes and physical axis of that recipient monkey."
The second category of sensory channels serves an allocentric, or other-referent, perspective. Allo simply m
eans "other." How can this kind of perception register its unembellished, objective view of items and events in the other world out there? Because its other-centric circuitries are not obligated to make any direct physical references to the bodily self. Nor, as kensho makes abundantly clear, are such allocentric pathways firmly bound to any of its over-conditioned layers of emotional baggage. Instead, their function is to register percepts selflessly, impersonally. "'
Given this kind of ego/allo distinction, how can we interpret what happens during the major deep, insights of kensho? In this extraordinary alternate state of consciousness, all physical notions and psychic conditionings of the I-Me-Mine drop off. Only when this egocentric self drops off totally are the remaining allocentric channels now free to register their own basic, totally anonymous, open perspective: "all things as THEY really are."
We have grown comfortable with distinctions made since the time of the Greeks between mental states (psyche) and physical states (soma). Yet other words exist in both Christian and Buddhist doctrines (Greek: kenosis; Sanskrit: anatta) that have also pointed for centuries to a fact much more difficult to believe: states of consciousness exist that are empty of all sense of self. And this includes both our physical and psychic sense of self.''
The above distinctions (ego/allo, soma/psyche, inside/outside, mine/yours etc.) serve as a preamble to illustrate other basic distinctions between the spiritual and creative quests. For example, the insights during this author's taste of kensho differed markedly from the two more intuitive moments of creative inspiration that occurred during his earlier MLD research. The first of these took place at that library table in New York (chapter 3); the second episode happened at the desk in the laboratory in Portland (chapter 6). Each moment retained, in the background, some sense of my residual physical and psychic self. This ordinary-self-at-a-distance was still participating in the ongoing mental activity, and continued to observe this activity from its customary vantage point on the same plane. Therefore, each experience seemed more akin to the sharpened perceptual awareness, cognitive fluency and mental diplopia of a shallow absorption, of that kind in which external vision and hearing are still acute."
Chase, Chance, and Creativity Page 22
