"The story of your life is not your life, it is your story." - John Barth

The first time I've heard anyone other than myself use the term "schema" in a Buddhist context was in a recent dharma talk by John Dunne and Al Kaszniak posted on the Upaya Zen Center web site.

According to Dunne and Kaszniak, we conceive of ourselves as agents in a world full of objects, some of which we want, some of which we want to get away from, and some of which we ignore. This subjective agent, this “I,” or “autobiographical self,” is conceived of as a character in a story.

This story needs rules in order to be coherent. Often the rules that govern our stories about ourselves are not even apparent, yet they structure our lives at many levels.  These rules are the "mental maps" of Erich Fromm, the "schema" of the psychologists.

Transformation in contemplative practice is about deliberately transforming ourselves into a different story, ultimately seeing the contingency of any story we tell about ourselves. Through meditation practices, we temporarily suspend any intention, any expectations, hopes, or fears in order to take all stories off line, and give ourselves the freedom to experience life devoid of story. From this freedom, transformation is possible. 

The human nervous system is highly interconnected, made up of networks of cells that generate firing patterns termed “attractor basins.” These firing patterns are thought to contribute to our habitual actions, ways of thinking, and even conceiving of our selves. Although our genes certainly contribute to the structure of these patterns, so do our experiences. 

From a neuroscience and complex systems perspective, when we engage in certain meditation practices, we allow our neural patterns, these “attractor basins,” to come into widespread synchrony across the brain, perhaps signifying a “release” from patterned firing, and from habitual action. When this release occurs, the opportunity may arise for something else to occur, for the nervous system to reconfigure, to transform. So from both the contemplative practice and from the scientific perspective, transformation involves a temporary suspension or freedom, and then a reconfiguration.