Shinzen Young's new book The Science of Enlightenment comes with 8 pages of recommendations from various Western meditation teachers, and they are not kidding. The book really is a great read, in that it summarizes Shinzen's teaching in 230 pages. If you would rather not spend time browsing his extensive collection of YouTube videos and the material on his web sites, then by all means get this book. Or get it as a reference. But don't expect to learn anything about science, though he does talk extensively about enlightenment. A disclaimer: I studied with Shinzen for two years and attended a couple of his residential retreats, so I'm familiar with his teaching from that angle as well.
Shinzen teaches that the goal of meditation is to develop better skills at achieving sensory clarity, concentration, and equanimity on the cushion, but also and more importantly, off, in everyday life. He recommends mindfulness meditation together with some amount of concentration. One of the hallmarks of Shinzen's teaching is that he has systematized and categorized the mindfulness or vipassana teaching in a way that is inspired by science and technology. Where most vipassana teachers who use Mahasi-style noting will tell you to note the arising of various sensory objects, they don't tell you what to use for the note. For example, you experience the arising of some feeling in your leg and you need try to figure out what to note. Is the feeling twisting, throbbing, or something else? With Shinzen, it's easy, you note the feeling as "feel out", in other words, feeling associated with the body, and then go on to the next sensory experience. "Feel in" is feeling associated with emotions, and so forth for the other two sense modalities (see and hear). Shinzen presents his system in a concrete and no nonsense manner.
He also talks about Flow and Gone. Flow happens when mindfulness of sensory objects becomes more or less constant. Shinzen's definition of Flow is a bit different than the definition in the the positive psychology community, where it is used to indicate the rewarding feeling that comes from entering a highly concentrated state. He does talk about that, but he doesn't use the term "Flow" for it. Flow for Shinzen means impermanence present in your sensory experience. In that sense, impermanence becomes something that you actually experience, and not an abstract philosophical concept.
Whereas Flow is about continuing, Gone is about ending. Gone is when some sensory experience suddenly comes to an end. The experience may not end for very long, but it must end. A vague impression doesn't count. Gone is really everywhere, even when you move your eyes from one scene to the next, a Gone happens as the scene shifts. As Shinzen says, one Gone is as good as another, and All Gone is the equivalent to a Therevada Path Moment, which counts as an enlightenment experience of which there are four: stream enterer, once returner, non-returner, and arhat, with the arhat being full liberation. All Gone is when your experience vanishes completely for some period of time, then returns. This may sound as if you've passed out or something, but it's not. When experience comes back online, you feel a tremendous burst of energy and positive affect, sometimes lasting for days.
Perhaps the least accessible chapters are the last two. In the second to last, Shinzen discusses his everyday experience now, after having undergone several of the Theravada Path Moments (he doesn't say how many he has experienced but its clear he's experienced several). His specific way of looking at experience involves what he calls expansion and contraction. In this view, experience expands out of what he calls the Source (most Buddhists would call it emptiness) and contracts back into that. He tends to agentify emptiness in a way that I think is inconsistent with the Madhyamaka and would probably be frowned upon by Nagarjuna but fits into his overall program of trying to find parallels in mystic traditions worldwide, including the theistic traditions, such as Christianity and Islam where emptiness is a Person. He provides a considerable amount of detail about this view, but the detail could be confusing and perhaps somewhat offputting for someone who hasn't experienced a Path Moment.
In the last chapter, he describes his vision about the merger of science, technology, and spirituality. He uses a particular brain disease, athymhormia, that occurs for people who have a stroke or otherwise have a brain lesion in a particular part of the brain, as an analog for enlightenment. They lose their sense of agenticity and just sit around, waiting for someone to address them. If you ask them to do something or pose a question, they do what you ask or provide a perfectly logical answer, but then relapse into silence. To me, this seems the weakest part of the book. As Shinzen notes earlier in the book, people who have profound enlightenment experiences tend to have rather strong personalities, and don't sit around like dishrags waiting for someone to tell them what to do.
What I think Shinzen misses here is that science and technology is all about mechanism, first discovering the series of cause-effect steps behind some natural or man-made phenomenon, in the science, then figuring out how to harness those steps for human benefit, in the technology. Nobody has a clue what the precise sequence of cause-effect steps are behind consciousness, to say nothing of enlightened consciousness. While real progress is being made, neuroscientists are far from understanding the whole picture, and it will likely be many years before they've worked it out.
So, overall, a definite two thumbs up, written in Shinzen's informal and entertaining style. If you have an opportunity to practice with Shinzen, I would definitely recommend it, especially if you want to practice in the hard-core or pragmatic Dharma style. His practice is definitely pragmatic and his retreats can be hard-core if you want to practice that way. He'll meet you where you are, whether you are just looking to improve your baseline everyday mind state or you want to go all the way to enlightenment.
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