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Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves . . . Live the questions now. Perhaps you will gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)

In Zen, a mondo is a question asked and replied to. The reply can be far from the answer expected. In this chapter we also use a question-and-answer format, but do so in the conventional way. Here we use it to summarize some major conclusions of parts I through V. I hope this dialogue form will prove useful, and invite correspondence in these matters. But please note: many questions and answers are overstated in a brief, simplistic way. This does not always imply that the questions are valid. Nor does it mean that the answers are unqualified. In fact, many of the replies remain speculative.

What is Zen?

It is a form of Buddhism that emphasizes meditation as a way to enlightenment. This spiritual awakening is called kensho or satori. It will dissolve the egocentric self and reestablish the sense of a direct relationship with things as they really are, the universal reality principle.

What does Zen training focus on?

The ongoing perception of each moment as it really is. This means an awareness stripped of those obscuring layers imposed by our mindless thoughts, self-referent attachments and prior dogma.

Does this imply doing away with my whole personality, and leaving it "blank," as it were?

No. It is true that the Zen approach does address the whole personality, but it transforms chiefly the unfruitful parts of the I-Me-Minecomplex. It is a process of liberation. It will transform an over-conditioned, self-centered person into a more humane being, one who is actualized, buoyant, and compassionate.

What causes cravings? How can one stop them?

In the broadest sense, cravings express a physiological "need." Recent research in substance abuse su ggests that craving occurs when activation has been withdrawn from previously overstimulated receptors. Our everyday feelings of "needing" something stem from psychophysiological attachments. These attachments are a root cause of suffering. Meditation contributes to an optimal approach: to a life of moderation which avoids overstimulating such receptors in the first place.

What happens during breathing out?

Breathing out quiets down the activity of many nerve cells. Expiration slows the firing of nerve cells in the amygdala and in the nucleus of the solitary tract, for example. Such slowings, taking place in the limbic system and elsewhere, may contribute to the basic calming effect that meditation has, and that chanting has as well.

Why could quieting down the brain during zazen go on to enhance conscious awareness instead of promoting sleep?

Our ordinary waking lives are beehives of distraction, swarming with overstimulated thoughts and behaviors. Zazen decelerates. Many systems in the brain may operat e more effectively at a lower speed. Some of its intuitive functions seem to flow best from settings of undistracted awareness.

In general, barbiturates depress and inhibit behavior. Why does excitation occur when the lower brain stem is inhibited by a local infusion of a barbiturate?

An important principle is involved. Lower brain stem regions normally inhibit the activating mechanisms higher up in the midbrain reticular formation. Remove this usual restraint from below, and it will release some of these higher excitatory mechanisms. This release of prior inhibition is called disinhibition.

What causes fine-grained visual perception during sudden quickenings?

The phenomena may reflect the way the cortex develops fast desynchronized activity in response to complex shifts at subcortical levels. For example, the intralaminar nuclei of the thalamus may recruit cortical dendrites more effectively when the functions of other thalamic nuclei are reduced. Similar perceptual changes sometimes occur shortly after LSD is given intravenously.

What could explain an enveloping light?

Acetylcholine nerve cells down in the brain stem normally send volleys of impulses up to influence the visual pathways. The net result of this is that more visual messages now flow through the lateral geniculate nuclei. These moments of enhanced visual transmission occur especially during that transition period between slow-wave sleep and desynchronized sleep. An extra surge of visual excitation could be perceived as light as it goes on next to relay through the superior colliculus, the zona incerta, and the pulvinar of the thalamus. Normally, it will also be within such higher-order projections that we start to develop a subliminal awareness of the space all around us. The experience of an enveloping light could arise when additional impulses, signaling "light," spread throughout this normally subliminal "sense of place."

What are some of the steps through which meditative training could facilitate the entry into states of absorption and kensho?

Meditation changes the rhythms of our two natural, cyclic trends toward desynchronization. Waking is only one of these major states. The other state is desynchronized sleep (D-sleep, also known as REM sleep). Repeated meditation shifts the usual entry times of these two activated states. It also changes their momentum. And while our major physiologic al trend is to wake up once a day, we also have a lesser tendency to become more awake every 90 minutes or so. Rigorous meditative retreats will change a person's sleep-waking habits, destabilize each of these biorhythms, and open up consciousness to new options.

What else could prompt the brain into sudden surges of enhanced desynchronization?

Stressful circumstances, or triggers that arrive during moments of open detachment. By creating brief physiological instabilities, these sudden events could in a sense jar loose and dissociate some "looser fragments" of adjacent physiological rhythms. And when these coalesce, the person could experience the resulting new constellations of functions as extraordinary states of consciousness.

How else could meditative practice encourage more frequent peak experiences?

It might create more, longer, and deeper detached pauses. Into these, random novel physiological events might thrust up more effectively. As noted above, outside events could provide destabilizing influences. But less obvious events could also intrude along the potential fault lines of internal rhythms. And these two kinds of vectors could converge.

A cluster of acetylcholine nerve cells lies in the dorsol lateral part of the pons? What special attributes do these cells have?

They excite the thalamus, stimulating two kinds of ACH receptors. Nicotinic receptors respond with brisk excitatory responses; muscarinic receptors respond more slowly.

What is so special about the large acetylcholine cells farther down in the medulla?

They also excite the thalamus, plus the midbrain reticular formation. They are sentinels which initiate desynchronization. Usually, they fire both during the activating prelude when the sleeping brain rouses up to full wakefulness, and during the transition period when S-sleep leads on to D-sleep.

What could cause sudden feelings of relaxation, euphoria, and profound satisfaction?

Humans report similar "positive" feelings during electrical stimulation of the frontal lobe, temporal lobe, and brain stem. Positive feelings might arise when impulses spread into these regions, and into their many connections elsewhere.

Sometimes even a gas mixture of oxygen and carbon dioxide can precipitate religious and mystical states. But the subjects must already be late in their course of a long series of repeated doses of LSD. What does this mean?

Carbon dioxide produces an acidosis that strongly arouses the brain and body. This is a major physiological arousal. Even though the process operates nonspecifically, it does serve as a kind of prolonged triggering event. For it appears to "tip over" the person who happens to be already on the brink of entering one of these alternate states.

Low LSD doses prompt REM episodes to enter earlier than usual. They also thrust micro-REM intrusions into S-sleep. What do these observations signify?

They suggest that the REM mechanisms within desynchronized sleep are targets sensitive to the arousing effects of LSD. They reinforce the view that some kinds of LSD imagery represents dreamlike intrusions. They also remind us that psychedelic drugs tend to enhance functions that, in a sense, are "already there," in the brain, not supernatural imports from "outside."

During stage 1 and stage 2 sleep, a person's normal dream like images may lack emotion. But on other occasions certain dream images have potential gaps of meaning filled in by "understanding" and emotion. And these latter images enter at the times when alpha EEG activity coincides with REM episodes. Could some of these normal aspects of sleep imagery help clarify why the average meditator sometimes experiences similar extremes of emotional involvement?

These observations suggest that a drowsy meditator's brain may sometimes draw upon, and express, whatever degree of affective tone might be nearby, and available, in his or her adjacent states of S-sleep and D-sleep.

How else can meditation encourage alternate states?

By promoting more frequent transitional periods, and by training the meditator to remain experientially aware for longer intervals during them.

Does desynchronized sleep really resemble waking?

Yes. D-sleep and waking are each physiologically active brain states. They employ many of the same acetylcholine pathways which ascend from the brain stem to activate functions at successively higher subcortical and cortical levels. On the other hand, norepinephrine and serotonin functions drop during D-sleep.

How could stressful circumstances affect the brain in ways that precipitate alternate states?

Stressful events prompt the brain to release many of its primary and secondary messenger molecules. In particular, stressful events prompt peptide nerve cells within the hypothalamus to send pulses of their corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF), ACTH, and beta-endorphin widely throughout the diencephalon and brain stem.

Brain peptides coexist with other messenger molecules. Which sets of these peptide combinations have the most intriguing implications for Zen and the brain?

CRF has excitatory properties, and it coexists with enkephalins in the hypothalamus. CRF also releases both ACTH and beta-endorphin from the arcuate nucleus of the hypothalamus. Nitric oxide and dynorphin coexist with ACH in the potent activating ACH pathways which rise up from the dorsolateral pons. Substance P also coexists with serotonin in some descending pathways. These can increase the tone of extensor muscles along the spinal column. Cholecystokinin (CCK) levels are relatively high in frontotemporal cortex, where CCK coexists with dopamine.

Enkephalin and dynorphin systems also contain coexisting dopamine. The beta-endorphin system does not. What does the difference imply?

A surge within enkephalin or dynorphin systems could create additional effects secondary to their corelease of dopamine. In contrast, beta-endorphin surges could create their additional effects due to the additional release of ACTH, not dopamine.

What difference does it make if the eyes are open or closed during psychedelic drug-induced experiences of "cosmic unity?"

In each instance, the brain responds differently. When the eyes are closed, the LSD subject perceives the experience as an independent complex pattern. In contrast, with the eyes open, the person may develop a sense of merging with the environment and of becoming one with the objects perceived. Investigators who study alternate state phenomena need to be aware of these differences.

What is special about the cortex of the anterior temporal lobe?

Into it converge both ACH and opioid pathways. Moreover, the temporal tip plays a major role in the complex ways that LSD changes perception.

All along, there has been an emphasis on the way that meditative training encourages the aspirant to pay specific undivided attention to the events of present experience. But what does this imply in psychophysiological terms?

Bare, mindful attention is a mode of clear awareness. It focuses on the concrete realities of this present moment. This "now" moment is far removed from our usual thought congestion, and it provides an open, undistracted setting. Into this mode, many lesser insights will enter, cresting on their own little-known intrinsic rhythms. Moreover, the awareness of this present moment is a few steps closer to that instant, extraordinary grasp of things as they really are, a topic that will be further clarified in part VII.