Living Zen Remindfully Retraining Subconscious Awareness
By James H. Austin MD

his is a book for readers who want to probe more deeply into
mindfulness. It goes beyond the casual, once-in-awhile meditation in
popular culture, grounding mindfulness in daily practice, Zen teachings,
and recent research in neuroscience. In Living Zen Remindfully, James
Austin, author of the groundbreaking Zen and the Brain, describes
authentic Zen training -- the commitment to a process of regular,
ongoing daily life practice. This training process enables us to
unlearn unfruitful habits, develop more wholesome ones, and lead a more
genuinely creative life. Austin shows that mindfulness can mean more
than our being conscious of the immediate "now." It can extend into the
subconscious, where most of our brain's activities take place,
invisibly. Austin suggests ways that long-term meditative training helps
cultivate the hidden, affirmative resource of our unconscious memory.
Remindfulness, as Austin terms it, can help us to adapt more effectively
and to live more authentic lives. Austin discusses different types of
meditation, meditation and problem-solving, and the meaning of
enlightenment. He addresses egocentrism (self-centeredness) and
allocentrism (other-centeredness), and the blending of focal and global
attention. He explains the remarkable processes that encode, store, and
retrieve our memories, focusing on the covert, helpful remindful
processes incubating at subconscious levels. And he considers the
illuminating confluence of Zen, clinical neurology, and neuroscience.
Finally, he describes an everyday life of "living Zen," drawing on the
poetry of Basho, the seventeenth-century haiku master.