5D Library › The Default Mode Network, the Entropic Brain and Neural Oscillations · 中文
Chapter 7 The Classics of Mind
Two selves
Cognitive neuroscience now distinguishes, at least roughly, two ways of being a self. The narrative self is extended in time: it is the story I tell about who I am, what happened to me and what I want, and it relies heavily on the default network. The experiential self is the self of the present moment: the felt sense of seeing, hearing and breathing now, with less elaboration. Farb and colleagues found that these two modes engage different brain regions, and that training in mindfulness shifts the balance towards the second (Farb et al. 2007).
The great contemplative texts of East Asia describe a similar shift in their own terms. Read beside the neuroscience of the earlier chapters, three short passages are striking for how precisely they describe a way of attending rather than a set of beliefs.
Not abiding
Source text
应无所住而生其心。(鸠摩罗什 译 402 AD)
“Without abiding anywhere, let the mind arise.” (Diamond Sūtra, in Kumārajīva’s translation)
The Diamond Sūtra tells the bodhisattva to give rise to a mind that does not settle or “abide” on forms, sounds or ideas. The instruction is not to have no mind, but to have a mind that does not attach. In the language of Chapter 4, it describes attention that notices whatever arises without being captured by it: a high rate of return, , rather than an empty set point.
No-thought as the principle
Source text
我此法门，从上以来，先立无念为宗，无相为体，无住为本。(惠能 述；法海 等集 1291)
“In this teaching of mine, from the beginning, no-thought has been established as the principle, no-form as the substance, and non-abiding as the basis.” (Platform Sūtra of the Sixth Patriarch, chapter on concentration and wisdom)
Huineng’s “no-thought” (无念) is often misread as a blank mind. The Platform Sūtra explains that it means not being carried away by thoughts while thinking, not the absence of thought. That is close to what the neuroscience of mind-wandering describes as the difference between having thoughts and being lost in them: the default network can be active without dominating attention.
Turning the light around
Source text
回光者。非回一身之精华。直回造化之真气。……所以一回光。大地山河一切皆回矣。(托名吕洞宾, n.d.)
“Turning the light around does not mean turning back only the essence of one’s own body; it means turning back the true energy of creation itself. … So when the light is turned around once, the great earth, the mountains and the rivers all turn with it.” (The Secret of the Golden Flower, chapter 3, “Turning the Light Around and Keeping to the Centre”)
The Secret of the Golden Flower, a Daoist meditation text of the Qing dynasty, became known in the West through Richard Wilhelm’s translation and Carl Jung’s commentary. Its central practice, “turning the light around” (回光), directs attention back towards its own source rather than out into the world of objects. The passage above claims much more than any neuroscience can test: that the world itself “turns” with the light. What can be tested is the attentional practice the text describes, which belongs with the focused-attention practices of Chapter 4.
Note
These texts belong to religious and philosophical traditions with their own aims, which are not the aims of cognitive science. Comparing them with brain imaging is an analogy that can illuminate both, not a claim that the authors anticipated neuroscience or that brain scans confirm their teachings.
Hypothesis · not established
Not established. The three instructions, not abiding, no-thought and turning the light around, describe the same attentional move: disengaging from the content of self-related thought and returning to awareness itself. The hypothesis predicts that meditators trained in any of these instructions show the same pattern of change in the mind-wandering cycle of Chapter 4, a shorter time to notice and return, rather than different patterns specific to each tradition. It would be refuted if practitioners of the three traditions showed consistently different patterns on the same measures.
References
Fan, Y. (2026). The Default Mode Network, the Entropic Brain and Neural Oscillations: 5-HT2A Receptor Kinetics, Pineal Calcite Microcrystals and the Computational Neuroscience of Meditative Attention [默认模式网络、熵脑与神经振荡] (Version 1.0.0). 5D Library. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23697320 · Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).