Illusions

From:
Zen-Brain Reflections
James H. Austin, M.D.
MIT Press
(Univ. of Texas Call Number: BQ 9288 A967 2006 MAIN)

The psychic self is a higher-level, bilateral interpretive process. It links the cortex with many lower regions of the limbic system and their connections. These vast circuitries resonate with countless instinctual and acquired emotional overtones. They help us condition not only the psychic responses fo our whole brain, but especially those associations reverberating beween our big frontal and temporal lobes. One result is that rich admixture that we accept as “normal” everday consciousness: swirling thought-streams, quasi-cognitive concepts, emotion-laden memories, and biased interpretations.

Valenced messages arising from these networks do more than polarize our interpretations and attitudes. The also mobilize our behavior. Some positive message leave us feeling attracted toward an event, longing to approach and connect with it. Negative messages fuel fear, causing us to withdraw, or perhaps to boil with anger, and to take aggressive action. These network biases have been pulling and pushing each of us since birth. They generate our unfruitful longings, anxieties, hostile behaviors, and loathings in countless unsuspected, overconditioned ways.

Zen views such personal prejudices (and our legacy of cultural distortions) as layers of subjective veils. They obscure our view, shut us off from a more objective view of reality, and prevent us from reaching our mature potentials. Our over-inflated, subjective self distorts all our percepts.

Only when the veils of the old, overconditioned personal self drop away do we liberate the innate capactiites of our “original self” to see deeply into the reality of this outside world. Only at the deeper levels of such an emancipation can our true nature register objectively. The result is an extraordinary, fresh impression: things as they are, not what they had always seemed to be in our overconditioned imagination.

What we see then are the ways individual things complement one another, as do yin and yang. As Paul Valery phrased it; “Seeing begins when you forget the name of the things you see.”