Exploring Cognitive “Buddhism”: Through Neurobiology & Vipassana

By Dr. Nazir Brelvi

In this latest book in the Cognition/Consciousness series, Dr. Brelvi hopes to reconcile the various scientific and religious thoughts in order to seek new and innovative answers to the age-old questions that have been lingering in our social consciousness since the ancient Egyptian, Greek and Hindu mythologies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Feb 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9781728346892

Dr. Nazir Brelvi

Dr. Nazir A. Brelvi graduated from SUNY: State College of Optometry in Manhattan, NYC and has traveled extensively in India, Africa, Europe and South America. After a 28 year stint as an Optometric Physician, he has now retired from a busy private practice to pursue his first love of writing. Dr. Brelvi’s fascination with animal and human cognition emerged from the numerous discussions and debates he undertook with several neuro-scientists at Sandoz Pharmaceuticals (now Novartis) while pursuing his Graduate studies in NeuroBiology at Seton Hall University under Dr. Stanley Kramer’s mentorship. However, exploring the puzzle of Cognition/Consciousness has always been a source of scientific curiosity and interest to Dr. Brelvi. His two non-fiction books, An Introduction to Cognitive Optometry and Cognitive Optometry 2, deal with the cognitive aspects of human vision and how various visual deficits or malfunctions can affect and misrepresent one’s perceptions of the world/Reality out there. In his latest book in the Cognition/Consciousness series, Dr. Brelvi hopes to reconcile the various scientific and religious thoughts in order to seek new and innovative answers to the age-old questions that have been lingering in our social consciousness since the ancient Egyptian, Greek and Hindu mythologies. Dr. Brelvi currently lives in the Panther Valley community of Allamuchy, New Jersey with his wife Sarah, and Suki, their little Shih-tsu.Their two wonderful adult children, Jeff & Jane also lead busy lives but added to the dialogue and aided in the endless necessary chores of getting this book published.

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© 2020 DR. Nazir Brelvi. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 02/17/2020

ISBN: 978-1-7283-4690-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-4691-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-4689-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020902901

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Author’s Photo Credit: Cathy Miller

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Some Opening thoughts

Preface

Author’s Note:

Author’s disclaimer:

Chapter 1 Ancient Faiths & Beliefs

God, Religion & the Limbic System

Chapter 2 The Buddha as Prince Siddhartha

Oriental Buddhism

The Eastern Way to Liberation or Moksha

Chapter 3 Development of the Nervous System

Embryogenesis according to the Kundalini Principle

The Cerebro-Spinal Axis and associated Chakras

Yoga: Some Deeper Concepts

Chapter 4 A brief tour of Brain morphology & Phrenology

The Prefrontal Cortex (PFC)

Corpus Callosum

Cingulate Cortex

Chapter 5 The Origins of Asian Buddhism

Chapter 6 Modern Buddhist Thought and Cognitive Neuroscience

Views of the Dalai Lama on Western NeuroScience

Human Intelligence

Chapter 7 Consciousness & Distributed Neural Activity

Hobson’s Brain-Mind Paradigm

Gopi Krishna on the Kundalini & Higher Consciousness

Chapter 8 Consciousness and Altered States

Unity of Consciousness

Meaningful Fusion

Drugs and Altered states

Chapter 9 The search for ‘Qualia’

Cybernetics, AI and Neurophysiology:

Quantum Theory & Consciousness

Intuition & ‘Gut’ feelings

Chapter 10 The Three Basic Facts of Existence

Buddha’s Eightfold Path to Nirvana

Additional thoughts on: Impermanence, Egoless-ness and Suffering

Equanimity

The Way to Liberation or Nirvana: A dialogue with the Buddha

Chapter 11 Renunciation

Reincarnation in daily life

Special Reincarnation

Bhagavad Gita: Karma & its Fruit

Chapter 12 Training the Mind

Default Mode Network (DMN)

Closing Thoughts

Further Reading

About the Author

List of Illustrations

cover.jpg

1. Ancient faiths & Beliefs

2. Cerebrospinal axis with associated Chakras

3. Brain Morphology

4. Phrenology model

5. Brain Cross-section

6. Prince Siddhartha of the Shakya clan

7. Meditating Buddha

8. Gilded Buddha idol

9. Teenager wearing Brain Test Cap

10. Acid Trip

11. Brain Networks

12. Mind Training

"It is a natural human tendency to regard only the

phenomena we are attending to as real and things we fail

to notice as epiphenomenal or simply nonexistent."

B. Alan Wallace

Hidden Dimensions

This book is

dedicated, in perpetuity, to:

All members of the Brelvi/Buckley clan

All forward thinkers of the Scientific & Religious communities

And all Leaders of the Body Politic

That help promote World Peace & Prosperity

In a sustainable and meaningful way.

Namaste’. namaste---.jpg

Some Opening thoughts

This book is an attempt to reconcile the differences in the Science and Religion disciplines by exploring both: from an academic, lab-oriented environment to how various religions approach life’s dilemmas.

Science emerged in various countries of Europe as a form of Renaissance during the 16th century in order to seek new answers to age-old queries that have been lingering within our social conscience since Plato and Aristotle.

In my opinion, just as there are two sides to any story or two sides to a coin, science and religion are just two aspects of the human psyche; two different perspectives vying to describe or rationalize Reality as observed in the Natural World by our sensory systems.

A detailed study of life on Earth, be it through the rigors of scientific principles or religious gospel, does evoke awe and curiosity in the human mind spurring it to explore and seek out new answers.

This search or to many of us a life-long Quest usually begins in childhood and tends to get more detailed or nuanced as we become adults. To me it is more of an exciting journey, an intellectual Odyssey if you will, that hopefully will lead to some true findings, knowledge and possibly Wisdom.

In the process of writing this book, many colleagues and close friends that participated in my so-called ‘brain-storming’ sessions, invariably asked:

But why study Buddhism, to the exclusion of other faiths?

Why did I pick this ancient doctrine as a subject of study rather than the Old/New Testaments or even the tenets of Zarathustra?

Essentially, what drew me to Buddhism was the Buddha’s rational approach to the various trials and tribulations of human existence.

In other words, just as a physician would explore a patient’s medical history, various lab findings and data, the Buddha recognized the universality of what he termed dukh (suffering or mental anguish). He then proceeded to determine the cause of this suffering (craving/unfulfilled desires) and proposed a way (the eight-fold path) to come to terms with it.

The goal of the Buddha’s faith was to embrace the inherent suffering in this world without being overwhelmed by the attendant fear or attachment, craving or hatred, confusion or conceit that may come in its wake.

In his view, the Dharma (an organized religious doctrine) is merely a temporary expedient to your religious undertaking: analogous to using a ‘raft’ that has been cobbled together to get you across the River of Life. In his opinion, once you reach the other bank, the raft can be discarded or left behind for the others waiting/striving to get across.

According to the Buddha, to treat the Dharma or Buddhism as an object of reverence after your awakening, is as absurd as carrying the raft on your back forever, even though you no longer have any need for it!

I end this short ‘essay’ by sharing the wise words annunciated by William James, in his sojourn through the Cognitive realm: Nullius in verba! that loosely translates as ‘Take no one’s word for it i.e. try to experience it yourself’.

Couldn’t have said it any better myself!

Preface

There is one essential difference between Cognitive Science and Buddhism: Science is all about finding the truth for its own sake whereas Buddhism is looking to transform oneself via the search for truth.

Neuroscience defines Cognition as the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience and our sensory nervous systems. It is thought to encompass all the various aspects of attention, memory, evaluation/analyses, reasoning, problem solving, decision-making, comprehension and also surprisingly the production of speech & language. Essentially, cognitive processes use existing knowledge and memory to generate new concepts and solutions.

Metacognition, on the other hand, is ‘thinking about cognition’ i.e. becoming aware of how we think. It involves some basic "mind-training’ through various yogic regimens in an attempt to becoming lucidly aware of one’s own awareness. The term comes from the root word meta meaning ‘going beyond’. We will be elaborating on the various aspects of metacognition throughout the book.

Cognitive Biology is an emerging science that regards natural cognition as a biological function. It is based on the theoretical assumption that every organism is continually engaged in systematic acts of cognition or thinking that then mediate intentional or volitional behaviors. This occurs via a sensory-motor coupling in the brain i.e. if an organism can sense stimuli in its environment and respond accordingly, it is said to be cognitive.

While cognitive science seeks to explain human thought and the conscious Mind, the work of cognitive biology is mainly focused on the most fundamental process of cognition for any living organism.

Cognitive science of religion is the study of religious thought and behavior from a cognitive and evolutionary science perspective. The field employs methods and theories from a broad range of disciplines, including cognitive psychology, evolutionary psychology, cognitive anthropology, artificial intelligence, cognitive neuroscience, neurobiology, zoology and ethology.

Scholars in this field seek to explain how human minds acquire, generate and transmit religious thoughts, practices and schemas by means of ordinary cognitive capacities.

We will be delving deep into this aspect of Cognition later on in this book by using the basic tenets of Indian & Tibetan Buddhism as an intriguing exploration of the human psyche and Mind.

However for now let us dwell on a general overview of what is known as Science, in popular parlance.

Science, for many of us, is basically a method of inquiry into the many mysteries of the Universe. Its main purpose is to pigeon-hole the immense and frankly overwhelming complexity of Nature into bite-size morsels so that humans can begin to understand and explore its intricate connectivity. Science has been an extremely powerful tool for investigating the nature of the Universe and in the last four hundred years or so it has provided us with some deep insights that have changed human perspectives and lives throughout the world.

However, the success of the scientific approach has, unfortunately, led to numerous speculative extensions of its discoveries into areas of human cognition, consciousness and metaphysics where in fact there is no recognition of experimental evidence or a peer review to confirm its validity, one way or the other.

This mindset is brought about by a belief in ‘Scientific Materialism’, which in my opinion is not really a scientific theory but mere scientific dogma. Uncritical adherence to this system of belief does a great disservice not only to science itself but tends to create confusion about the real nature, power and limitations of scientific inquiry.

Basically the Scientific Materialist worldview may be summed up as follows:

The physical world that we see around us is the only reality. It originates wholly from impersonal natural forces; it is devoid of any intrinsic moral order or values; and it functions without the intervention of what are dismissed as ‘immaterial’ spiritual forces of any kind, benevolent or otherwise.

That Life and consciousness originally arose in this Universe purely by accident, from complex configurations of matter and energy.

That Life in general and human life in particular, has no meaning, value, or significance other than what it attributes to itself. During the course of an individual’s life, all desires, hopes, intentions, feelings etc. are said to be determined solely by the physical body and the impersonal forces acting upon it from the physical environment.

That, the termination of an individual’s life, will result in the disappearance of consciousness and the total annihilation of the individual’s thoughts and feelings.

And that eventually this will be the destiny of all life in the Universe: it will simply disappear without a trace, fading imperceptibly back into the vacuum of Space.

In short, humans are fundamentally isolated: we live on the boundaries of an alien world, which is indifferent to our hopes as it is to our sufferings or crimes. Only by accepting this view of human existence and the Universe at large can humans live authentically.

Methodologically, it is quite reasonable for science to adopt the working hypothesis of Naturalism, that is, seek to understand the world in terms of natural, not supernatural agencies. Scientific theories, in contrast to philosophical ideas and religious beliefs, must be submitted to empirical observation and experimentation. However, scientific materialists commonly take the additional step of promoting a worldview whose claims go way beyond the scope of scientific knowledge.

For instance, the prevailing ‘wisdom’ doing the rounds within the hallowed Halls of Cognitive Science is that all mental processes are nothing more than functions (the Mind is what the brain does: Steven Pinker) or basic properties of the brain, a mere ‘epiphenomenon’.

Belief is central to both science and religion, but it plays a different role in each context. In science, the beliefs that are brought into research and teaching act as a set of working hypotheses. These are not meant to be dogmatic, but rather to be assumptions that allow scientists to ask specific questions. Ideally, all of these assumptions are subject to empirical refutation if need be.

Unfortunately, a religious group defines itself foremost by its so-called Creation Story: the supernatural narrative that seeks to explain how humans came into existence. And this story is also at the heart of tribalism. No matter how gentle and high-minded or subtly explained, the core belief assures its members that ‘God’ favors them above all others. It teaches that members of other religions worship the ‘wrong’ gods, use wrong rituals, follow false prophets and believe fantastic creation stories.

Acceptance of a particular creation story or myth and of accounts of miracles vouchsafed by it is called Faith. Faith is biologically understandable as a Darwinian device for survival and increased reproduction. It is forged by the success of the tribe, the tribe is united by it when competing with other tribes and it can be a key to success within the tribe for those members most effective in manipulating the faith to gain internal support.

The unending conflicts that generated this powerful social practice were widespread through the Paleolithic Era and have continued unabated to the present time. In more secular societies faith tends to be transmuted into religion-like political ideologies. Religious faith offers enormous psychological benefit to the believers. It gives them an explanation for their existence.

It makes them feel loved and protected above the members of every other tribal group. The price imposed by the gods and their priests in more ‘primitive’ societies is unquestioning belief and submission. Throughout evolutionary time this bargain for the human soul was the only bond with the strength to hold the tribe together in both peace and war. It invested its members with a proud identity, legitimized rules of conduct and ‘explained’ the mysterious cycle of life and death.

Obviously, no two creation stories can both be true. All of those invented by the many known thousands of religions and sects in fact have certainly been false. A great many educated citizens have realized that their own faiths are indeed false or at least questionable in their details. But they understand the rule attributed to the Roman stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger that religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false and by the rulers as useful.

Any so-called ‘working hypotheses’, can be accepted for the purpose of making progress in science, but they must be tentative as well, even if some of them are taken as facts. By their own standards of skepticism, scientists must be open-minded enough to recognize that any of these hypotheses could ultimately be discarded.

Over time, however, working hypotheses can easily transform into closely held beliefs and it is here that dogma creeps in. The term dogma refers to a coherent, universally applied worldview consisting of a collection of beliefs and attitudes that call for intellectual and emotional allegiance.

As such, a dogma has a power over individuals and communities that is far greater than the power of mere facts and fact-related theories. Indeed, it may prevail despite the most obvious contrary evidence. Take for instance the media frenzy evoked by Childhood vaccinations. It was broadcast on national television no less that vaccinating school children with an attenuated viral injection was causing various illnesses when no credible scientific studies or evidence of such happenings exist.

And also, it is found that an avid commitment to such conspiracy theories may grow all the more zealous when obstacles are met or explained away by truly knowledgeable scientists. Unfortunately, there are many kinds of dogmas, including religious, philosophical, political and scientific.

It is commonplace to ignore evidence that conflicts with a scientist’s most fundamental working hypotheses and summarily dismissed as being a fluke, fake or merely an outlier. For all its emphasis on the ideal of skepticism, science is conservative and a paradigm shift doesn’t happen easily. In that sense, dogma can be conceived of as relative rather than absolute.

On the one hand, doing science entails taking many assumptions as beliefs to varying extents. On the other hand, scientific inquiry is conducted by people and people are governed by various forces or ‘agendas’: political, sociological and others so the ideals of science may be quite different from its actual practice or allegiance.

For example, Pythagoras advocated a theory of metemspsychosis or reincarnation according to which the soul is immortal and is reborn in both human and animal incarnations. This view was allegedly an empirical finding based on his own experience of recalling up to twenty of his own and other’s past lives.

In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates addressed this issue of the transmigration of souls by first commenting that the soul is dispersed and destroyed at death. However the truth, he added, which is known only to those who have practiced ‘philosophy’, is far from that. The soul of the philosopher, having practiced death by shunning sensual craving and corporeal desires, departs to a place which is like itself invisible, divine, immortal and wise, where on its arrival, happiness awaits it and releases it from…all…human evils.

But the souls of those who have not practiced philosophy, being permeated by the corporeal, become wandering spirits after death, in a manner virtually identical to the ‘bardo’ state described so graphically in the Tibetan Book of the Dead following death and prior to the next rebirth. Eventually, Socrates declared, through craving for the corporeal, which unceasingly pursues them, they are imprisoned once more in a physical body. And as you might expect, they are attached to the same sort of character or nature which they have developed during their previous life.

Origins of the human psyche were largely ignored by scientists from the time of Copernicus until the rise of modern psychology. William James, who founded the first neuroscience laboratory in the United States at Harvard University, proposed three hypotheses to explain the origins of mental processes in relation to brain functions:

1. The brain produces thoughts, as an electric circuit produces light

2. The brain releases or permits mental events as the trigger of a crossbow releases an arrow by removing the obstacle that holds the string, and

3. The brain transmits thoughts as light hits a prism thereby transmitting a spectrum of colors.

He wrote:

When finally a brain stops acting altogether, or decays, that special stream of consciousness which it subserved will vanish entirely from this natural world. But the sphere of being that supplied the consciousness would still be intact; and in that more real world with which even whilst here, it was continuous, the consciousness might, in ways unknown