Dr. James Hardt on Finding a Brain-Wave Marker for Zen Mastery
Out of roughly thirty people I had recorded, only a single one showed even a faint version of the pattern I had measured so strongly in the Zen master, the Roshi. I could tell it mattered, so I wrote it up, but I could not say what it stood for. Seven years went by. Then the Zen master died, and he did it on his own terms: a conscious departure, the kind where he announces that he will leave his body next Thursday and invites people to stop by. Around forty-five people gathered in the room.
Several of those present were people I knew about secondhand. They told me that at the moment he died, they sensed something leave him and move into one of the others in the room, a student who was far along in his practice. That student turned out to be the exact one person in thirty whose recordings carried a trace of the pattern I had first seen in the Roshi.
At that point I got genuinely excited. It looked like I had a physiological marker for Zen Roshihood. I filed another report. And yet underneath the excitement I was still in the dark about what any of it meant. Sure, call it a marker, but a marker of what, exactly? That not-knowing stretched on for at least another decade.
It broke open at a conference on chaos theory applied to the analysis of brain waves. Most of the presentations were heavy on mathematics, and while they held my attention, none of them were the sort of thing that would stir a general audience. Then Dr. Arnold Mandell took the stage. His introduction made me sit up. He was a mathematician, but before that he had chaired the psychiatry department at UC Davis. Think about the position that carries: authority, standing, the power to help define what counts as reality. He walked away from all of it to take a junior spot in a math department, purely because math was what he loved. So I listened to him closely.
During his talk he described a brain-wave pattern in which two separate frequencies hold coherence at the same time. In phase space, that configuration produces something any electrical engineer at the master's or doctoral level would recognize as a mathematical object: a torus. He said this pattern would trace a torus in phase space.
I did something I had never done before and have never done since. The hall held maybe fifteen hundred people and I was sitting toward the back. I shot up out of my seat, threw my arms in the air, and yelled as loud as I could that I had two people in my database who showed that very pattern, that one of them had been a Zen master, and that the other had received transmission at the moment the master died. Fifteen hundred heads turned toward me. Mandell was gracious about it. He said to come find him after his talk so we could discuss it. The session ended right before lunch, so the room emptied out.