Why Buddhas Don’t Get Hiccups
Why is the breath our point of return when we hear the bell of mindfulness? Why is breath our gathering place?
It’s always there. It’s always in flux. It’s inside and outside. It’s conscious and unconscious.
Fairly early on in our practice, we can learn the trick of stopping hiccups. Which is a convenient skill, to be sure, but there’s more to it than mere convenience.
For those who haven’t heard of it, it’s pretty simple really. The human body has a pervasive nervous system, a bio-electro-chemical mesh infused through the whole thing, always rippling with cascading, merging, dividing, and remerging patterns of impluses..
Pick a section of that mesh — there may be more than one pattern that will work for those impulses; but only a few, or perhaps a narrow range, will keep the body alive. That’s what heart defibrillators try to do, to knock the heart’s neural firing pattern back to one that works for pumping blood through the body.
Our breathing is co-regulated by a pair of complementary and overlapping chunks of mesh, allowing for a continually adjusted admixture of conscious and non-conscious control of the breath. When a person is deeply asleep or sedated or in a vegetative state, there is no conscious component to the breathing pattern.
An attack of hiccups is a nonfatal alternate pattern of neural firing, a kind of glitch, in that non-consciously controlled meshwork. As long as nothing knocks the firing pattern back over to its default glitchless pulse, the hiccup pattern can repeat indefinitely.
The trick is, it is possible to still the non-conscious network so that it simply resets itself to the default when it kicks back in. All you have to do is take one completely conscious breath. Get away from distractions, breathe in and out as deeply as you can, as slowly as you can without discomfort. Continually remind yourself to breathe exactly at the rate needed, without either rushing or else triggering an autonomic response to gasp or cough.
If you’re new to it, you won’t get it at first. You’ll likely be surprised how quickly your mind can begin to wander from its task, and the neural loop repeats. You have not taken a fully conscious breath.
No one can teach you how to do this, but you can learn it. You may be surprised how little distraction (or intoxication) it takes to make a single fully conscious breath impossible. Even overhearing music or conversation can borrow enough of your conscious attention to automatically fire up the non-conscious mechanism whether you want it or not.
Once you’ve taught yourself how to do it, you’ll have gained an insight into paying conscious attention to a continually morphing but disciplined posture. Now you can feel the mix of both networks because you recognize them. And just as it’s possible to remain conscious of the breath to the extent that the non-conscious control network can reset itself, it’s also possible to remain fully aware of one’s experience while stilling the breath’s conscious control network.
It’s not completely metaphorical to say that getting out of our own way in zazen is the hiccup trick in reverse.
Just as the pulse-networks that control our hearts and lungs can, and do, operate in a variety of patterns — some more conducive to life than others — it’s possible to remain consciously aware of mental states which normally switch off conscious percepts (such as the transition from waking to dreaming) and to recognize hallucinatory states as such (lucid dreaming, for example).
We sit on a dock somewhere and watch waves rolling in. “The waves” are the work of memory and imagination. Seeing “the wave” depends on seeing some thing in some place and then seeing something in a different place later. Our brains build “the wave” and our brains are surprised if their guesses about what happens next suddenly fail.
Can we pay enough attention to mind as-is so that memory and imagination can be still? Who are we then, and what are we doing?
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