Progress in Meditation?

Dear Shinzen,                              Date Composed: August 22, 2010

Some thoughts on the Path that are running around in my brain lately….Let me set the background and then describe the problem.

A basic premise of spiritual systems, to put it in a very general form, is that ordinary life involves a lot of suffering that does not have to be, and that there is a hugely more satisfying mode of existence that is possible – call it “enlightenment.”  Further, methods exist for reaching enlightenment.  But for most of us, reaching enlightenment or even getting close involves a lot of work, and the motivation to engage in that work while giving up other life things that could be relatively satisfying.

Buddhism, e.g., calls for work on three lines.  Ordinary morality and decent living.  Learning concentration skills.  Insight, using those concentration skills to investigate the nature of the ordinary mind, which can (not must, can) bring about a breakthrough, perhaps just occasional glimpses at first but getting more and more frequent, that breakthrough being enlightenment.

I have no inherent problem with the first line, morality training, I’m a decent person to begin with and want to live a life of increasing kindness, sensitivity, honesty, effectiveness, etc.  There’s been noticeable progression along this line in my life.

Concentration skill.  I’m spite of having a very active intellectual mind that constantly generates ideas under ordinary conditions (generally good ideas, I have little complaint there), my ability to focus reasonably well on one thing has certainly increased with meditation and self-remembering practice.  By “reasonably well” I mean if asked to focus on X, I will not have awareness of nothing but X for minutes at a time or more, but I can keep some varying awareness of X, with only small total losses, even while other thoughts and images come and go, i.e., I can keep X reasonably well in the foreground even if the background continues manifesting.  This is enormously better than, say, 20 years ago, where I would be lucky if I thought of X for 3 seconds and then my mind would go off completely for seconds to minutes at a time before I remembered that I intended to focus on X.

Insight.  To some degree I can, for short periods, experience flow, an occasional gone, mildly restful states in imagery or talk, and body relaxation.  I can not automatically identify with the varying content that flows on, i.e. “I” am aware of content flowing through without being exactly the same as that content…this is difficult to express…..it’s not a strong sense of a Watcher watching, but I don’t know how else to describe it….  It’s not a Big Deal experience, but certainly gives me the intellectual conviction that whatever “I” am, it’s not the content, which changes all the time, but a more basic ability to experience per se….

The problem.  A feeling of having reached a plateau, where my meditation and mindfulness practice is OK, I’m glad I can be more mindful and will continue to practice it intermittently, but it’s not a Big Deal, it doesn’t directly motivate me to want to put in a lot of time on it – half an hour a day seems plenty – so I can reach enlightenment or whatever.

I sit for designated vipassana practice, e.g.  My time then varies between, at best, feeling calmly present and aware, and, at worst, simply dozing through most of the session*.  In between there’s daydreaming, thinking about things, berating myself for not doing better, etc., all the stuff I imagine you hear about all the time.  At the end of a session I’m usually glad I did it, it’s mildly satisfying – but so is a good cup of coffee, a nice walk, writing a paper, etc.  That is, I’m not getting direct feelings that there’s some special satisfaction from meditating, so I’m not motivated to meditate much more.

I feel like the Buddhist deal offered is that I can see some slow progress in my technique of meditating, nice but not a Big Deal, and then there’s the promise that if I keep this up long enough (months?  years?  the rest of my life, but still not getting there?) the Big Deal of enlightenment might (or might not) happen.

You used to compare learning meditation to learning to play the piano, and the analogy may be very direct and accurate for some people.  Nothing but boring scales at first, then simple tunes, more complex tunes, eventually you’re enjoying the music you play, maybe you get good enough that people ask you to play, maybe Carnegie Hall….  In learning to play the piano you get tangible rewards as you see your skill increasing, it’s not like once you can play basic tunes you plateau and then nothing happens by way of improvement or satisfaction year after year, but maybe, for some people but not others, suddenly they are concert pianists.

So maybe it’s just me, and/or maybe I’m a fairly common type of person, but it’s hard to keep up or increase the motivation to practice more when I seem to have plateaued, and maybe I’d be better off putting my time into something else because the meditation isn’t going to go anywhere for me?

This is certainly reflected in my practical decisions over the years.  Like since I’ve been officially retired from UC, I could spend hours every day meditating, go to a zillion retreats, etc., but my expectation of getting somewhere if I do that is pretty low.  Whereas I know I’m doing something useful for other people in my writing and teaching, so I choose to put most of my time into that…. and get rewarded for that when people tell me my writings and lectures help them understand things better.

Anyway, that’s what I wanted to express.  If you feel like talking about it, give me a call when you get a chance – it will always be satisfying to talk with you anyway, my friend!  We’ll be here the rest of this week, then off camping for 10 days.

Charley

* Oh, the sleepiness when meditating I’ve complained about for years?  It turns out from sleep lab studies that I have both obstructive and central apnea, they will probably put me on breathing assist apparatus, maybe I’ve been sleep deprived for years without that being clear.  It will be interesting to see what happens if my night sleep gets deeper….

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Date Filed: August 23, 2010

Hi Charley,

I think part of the problem is from Buddhism itself. Most Buddhist literature gives one the impression that the path is supposed to involve some big spiritual orgasm that happens suddenly and changes one forever. The reason that Buddhist teachers (including myself ) talk about the path in this way is that occasionally something like that does actually happen. When it does, it's quite dramatic. However, it's been my experience that for most people who practice meditation, it doesn't happen that way. Rather the changes are gradual, so gradual that people acclimatize to them and don't really realize how much they've changed.

The other problem is that the changes are not necessarily best measured by insights that occur, but rather in most cases best measured by the amount of suffering that a person would have gone through but didn't go through because of the path. But since that measure is both hypothetical and a measure of absence, it's difficult for most people to realize how HUGE it really is.

So I would say don't worry if you're not getting epiphanies. Your practice as you describe it is just fine.
All the best,
Shinzen

———————
Shinzen Young
Shinzen@MeditationTraining.com
www.BasicMindfulness.org (Phone-based retreats and classes)
www.Shinzen.org (Articles, CDs, onsite retreats)
www.YouTube.com/user/expandcontract (Video talks)
www.YouTube.com/user/ShinzenInterviews (Interviews with Shinzen)

———-

Thanks, Shinzen.  Your understanding fits.  In many ways, I've had a lot of changes over the years of the "quietly dropping away" of negative stuff sort, often not even noticed for a long time.  My superego has high standards, though, so that isn't good enough for it!

> The other problem is that the changes are not necessarily best measured by insights that occur, but rather in most cases best measured by the amount of suffering that a person would have gone through but didn't go through because of the path. But since that measure is both hypothetical and a measure of absence, it's difficult for most people to realize how HUGE it really is. <

Now there's a challenge for the experimental psychologist in me!  How do I quantify what hasn't happened?       

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Dr. Charles T. Tart, Mindfulness, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology,

Lecture 4, Part 8 of 17 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

Student: You can only handle as much pleasure as you can pain.

CTT: Sounds like a cool idea. I have no idea whether it’s true.

Student: But I mean, it seems like if you start trying to approach every situation with equanimity, do you eventually just dull your emotions so that you can’t experience pleasure?

Another Student: Yes.

CTT: Now you’re really focusing on an important part of the pathology. You can give yourself a sort of forced equanimity. If you basically just hold the lid down on your feelings, then you’re going to start losing things.

Now this is where Gurdjieff made the unique contribution with his concept of emotional intelligence. We’re just getting the idea of emotional intelligence in modern psychology, but Gurdjieff was talking about it 50, 75 years ago.

Gurdjieff’s basic idea is that we have three brains, he called them. I think “brains” was, you know, a good scientific-sounding word to pass muster in those times, but we can call it three processes if we don’t want to physiologize it and run down the physiological correlates of it.

So let’s say you’ve got three distinctive processes. The analogy I like is that each one of us is a ruler, and we have three advisers who give us advice about what’s happening in the kingdom and how to do something about it.

But, according to Gurdjieff, practically all human beings’ development was warped such that they basically only really listen to one adviser, and they didn’t pay much attention to the other two advisers. The one adviser might be very smart, very glib, but this was a person who saw things through their particular biases. The other two advisers, because they’d been neglected and ignored, and often actively suppressed, tended not to be heard or had gotten kind of neurotic about their views.

So he talked about the intellectual brain, which you all have developed quite well, or you wouldn’t have made it this far in the educational system. The intellectual brain’s got words – boy, has it got words! – words, concepts and theories, and puts things together, and talks really, really good.

But he also talked about the emotional brain, or the emotional center, whose job was to look at the world and have an emotional reaction that represented an assessment of what that part of the world was about. It was an information-gathering and decision-making process, and the decision – the evaluation – was presented to us in the form of an emotion.

Same thing with the body as the third kind of advising process. The body also takes in information about the reality around us and presents it to us in a pattern of feelings.

Now ideally, all three of these processes are well developed. They’ve been nourished. They’ve been educated. They’ve been experimented with to know how to use them best. So we’re all great rulers, because we have three smart advisers giving us three different perspectives on every situation, from which we then make some kind of final decision.

But the problem that Gurdjieff said is, again, that one of these advisers has risen to prominence, and that’s the only one we listen to. Some people live life through their emotions. What they feel is 99% of what matters in a situation, and they don’t give it much verbal thought, and they don’t pay much attention to their body.

Some other people live life primarily through their bodies. You meet resistance, you push it aside. Something like that, you know what I mean? Emotions and thinking don’t matter very much. Other people – especially in the academic world – think verbally about it.

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For several years I've been a member of an organization of “spiritual leaders” devoted to the question of developing a trans-traditional spirituality that would be more suitable to our time. Why me? I'm not a “spiritual leader,” but I think I'm their token scientist with a clear interest in spirituality.

A serious question was asked by another member about living in the here-and-now, especially as a way of dealing with our human suffering, and while it was directed to one of the Buddhists in the organization I felt like giving it a few minutes' reflection. You may find my answer of interest.

I'll paraphrase the question, since I wouldn't want to quote without permission…

"The challenge I have is to continue working on how to live in the Now! How much of the time can it actually be done? Can you, after years of practice, have only moments of living in the now, or can such nowness be extended to hours? It doesn't seem possible to me that a person could really live in the present for any length of time…."

My response:

You addressed your question to *****, ****, but I'll take a shot at it too.

Using the methods developed by G. I. Gurdjieff in his experiments with developing mindfulness techniques that worked for Westerners, I spent a lot of time living in the present years ago.  In a supportive environment, like other people working at it, I could spend much of my day very much anchored in the present.  Working on my own I could do it pretty well too, but it took more effort.  Nowadays I don't focus on it anywhere near as much, except when I teach this in my Basic Mindfulness class at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, where I try to stay anchored in the present for the whole 2 hours of class.  I often get intellectually excited by something we're talking about and lose touch with the present, of course – and I'm very pleased when my students start to catch me when I do this, and feel mindful enough and secure enough to tell me to come back to the present!    

While I don't formally try to be present and mindful all that much in everyday life anymore, I usually remember to do so when situations get sticky, and I feel there's been an overall shift in my level of consciousness/being from that earlier work, such that while I wouldn't describe myself as "awake" I could accurately say I'm not as deeply asleep, lost in consensus consciousness and my own story, as I used to be.

Oh, Gurdjieff's approach differs from classical mindfulness meditation techniques in that it's mainly about developing mindfulness in everyday life, rather than in special environments.  Few of us have every done anything really stupid while sitting quietly on a little black cushion, but our mindlessness in everyday life has sure gotten us in trouble!

You can get the flavor of Gurdjieff's methods from my blog, where I'm slowly posting a transcript of my mindfulness course (http://blog.paradigm-sys.com/), and or from my three books on mindfulness training ("Waking Up," or "Living the Mindful Life," or "Mind Science: Mindfulness Training for Practical People."

A final word.  We have to be very careful about using mindfulness techniques as a way of avoiding reality.  To be mindful is to be curious about what is actually happening, inside and outside at the moment, and to be courageous in looking at it.  Given our human condition, that means that while it's often satisfying and joyful to be more mindful, real mindfulness also makes us more acutely aware of our own and others' suffering.  If you try to turn mindfulness exercises into ways to feel good no matter what, that's exactly the kind of living in illusion, samsara, maya, that the Eastern spiritual systems say is at the root of suffering to being with.  I know mindfulness practice can be twisted this way – I've done it a lot of times!

Learning to become more mindful is a great way to go, and, I believe, fully compatible with the essence of real spirituality.

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CTT

There are many points that I could respond to in these interesting and important comments on my interview….but, for lack of time, I can just touch on a few….Hopefully I do this in the Buddhist spirit we share of less attachment to opinions and ideas, and more accurate perception of reality….

Classical Buddhism, as I understand it, is about lessening and, hopefully, completely ending one’s suffering.  I believe we all think this is a desirable goal.  A major question for our times would then become “How effective are various aspects of Buddhist practice in doing this in today’s world?”  Reincarnation, gods and goddesses, spirits, etc., were an accepted part of most people’s reality in the Buddha’s time, e.g., but if they are not literally true – we won’t deal with their psychological functions here – then they can be big obstacles to effective practice for many of us moderns, distracting or confusing us.  Can we have a completely materialist or physicalist Buddhism that is an effective way of lessening or ending suffering?

By materialist, I mean a basic belief that nothing fundamentally exists but physical objects and forces of the type we are familiar with, stuff and forces that can be sensed with our physical senses or instrumental extensions of our senses.  For the complete materialist, our minds, our consciousness, our experience arises solely from the operation of physical forces in your brain, and cease when the brain ceases to function.  Your understanding of what you’re reading now, e.g., or any of your experiences, is, in principle, totally reducible to the electrical and chemical configuration of your brain.  Any suffering you have is an unsatisfactory configuration of your brain’s electrochemical state, any satisfaction is another electrochemical configuration of your brain.  Basic Buddhism, with it’s admonitions to live a moral life and practice meditation, is then a psychological method designed to lessen or eliminate unsatisfactory brain states and increase satisfactory ones.  I’m oversimplifying greatly, of course, but that’s the essence, as I see it, of Buddhism from the point of view of complete materialism.

Note I said “complete” materialism.  There are philosophical positions that admit the importance of the physical without assuming that only the physical is ultimately real.  They assume, as I do as a working, scientifically testable hypothesis, that there is something real we loosely call “mind” that is of a different nature than the physical  brain, but which can effect the brain and body.  This approach does not necessarily mean, as many committed complete materialists seem to assume, that the universe can’t really be understood because “mind” is some kind of “supernatural,” inherently non-understandable phenomena.  You can let “mind” be of a different nature and nevertheless assume it has its own properties and regularities, “laws,” that we can discover and use.  Classical Buddhism of course assumes this position: it knew nothing of brains, but felt it knew a lot about minds and minds’ effects, such that suffering could be lessened or eliminated.  Personally I think that knowing the properties and laws of both mind and brain will allow more effective functioning than knowing only one set, so I’m all for appropriate research on both.

By analogy, I am the “mind” as far as this computer I am typing on is concerned, but the real physical action and outcome is a set of electrical configurations in the material substrate of the computer – which ultimately convey my mind’s meaning to your mind via your computer.  That’s a dualist position.

Materialist Buddhism:

We could, then, have a completely materialistic adaptation of Buddhism.  No minds, spirits, gods or goddesses, psychic stuff, etc., just brain states and meditation practices to optimize our brain functioning, less suffering, more happiness.  “Mind” or “mental practices” are just semantically convenient ways of referring to processes that are actually physical processes in the brain.

Interestingly, I initially mistyped “meditation” in the previous paragraph as “medication,” so it read “medication practices,” my fingers (or unconscious mind or whatever) anticipating the point I’ll now make.  If complete materialism is true, then probably all this meditation stuff, taking so many years and not working well for so many people, will eventually be replaced as Big Pharma develops the drugs to optimize our brain states.  Then you have to wonder: how fast will Big Pharma get there?  How bad is my personal suffering?  Shall I put in all this time meditating, even though it may not work for me, before I die but it might, and so less suffering might happen before Big Pharma develops Nirvana®?  Or shall I spend all this time doing what pleasures me and bet that Big Pharma will ultimately eliminate all my suffering in time with Nirvana®?

Charles T. Tart

[the website says my comment is too long, so above is part 1, next will be Part 2.]

Part 2:

What I’m For and Against:

Understand clearly that I am not opposed to anyone having a completely materialist philosophy of life – as long as they admit that it’s a philosophy, a belief system.  Nor am I at all opposed to Big Pharma developing drugs that will lessen human suffering!  We’ll have to watch out for the side effects, and maybe they won’t work, but I’m all for trying things that lessen human suffering.

What I am opposed to is anyone claiming that (a) materialism is science or (b) that science has “proven” that all spirituality is nonsense.  I discuss the reasons for these positions at length in my recent “The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together” book, but I want to sketch them here as these issues are very important for Buddhists.  To put it one way, are you spending/wasting a lot of your time sitting on a little black cushion when you could be enjoying life and waiting for Nirvana®?  Or are you on to something deeper?  Or?

(The last “or” is to recognize how much oversimplifying I’m forced to do in this limited space….)

So, is materialism the same thing as science?

Jayarava, in this discussion, e.g., puts a lot of emphasis on publication in high-prestige, peer-reviewed science journals like Science and Nature as giving us the best factual, scientific information.  OK, I’ve had major – many pages long, not one page reports – articles published in both Science and Nature, as well as dozens of other papers in peer-reviewed journals, so if there’s a mantle of scientific authority to wear, I don it now….    

(This is fun: I’ve never played Authority before…..)

My Science article (many of my articles, including this one, are available on my www.paradigm-sys.com/cttart/ site) started with a detailed discussion of the nature of science, emphasizing that being scientific is primarily being factual, coming back to observables.  Theory, no matter how mathematical, elegant, fashionable, logical, etc., is always secondary in the sense that it must account for all known relevant data, and theory IS ALWAYS SUBJECT TO FURTHER TEST.  Always.  And if new facts don’t fit the old theory, it’s got to be modified or rejected, irregardless of its elegance, etc.

The rest of that Science article proposed the creation of state-specific sciences, a drastically new idea for that time (and still so).  I didn’t push it, but I was really proposing a scientific basis for both testing and expanding spiritual disciplines like Buddhism, arguing that altered states techniques like meditation could be used to advance our scientific knowledge of the world and self.

I got lots of criticism from older scientists on the idea that we might do science in altered states of consciousness, how dare I suggest that!  Only our ordinary conscious was a rational state you could do science in!  Younger scientists thought it was a great idea and wanted to get on with it.  Those older scientists would see Buddhist meditation as basically crazy-making.  As practitioners of Buddhism, of course, we’ve heard a lot, and probably confirmed in our personal observations, that ordinary consciousness is largely a state of samsara, illusion, attachment.

But in the decades since publishing that Science article, no scientist has declared that I don’t understand the basic nature of science, so I wear my mantle of Authority on what science is comfortably.

So Is Materialism The Same Thing As Science?

No.  Materialism is a preference for explaining observations in terms of known material objects and forces.  Done rigidly, it’s a samsaric attachment.  Since science as organized activity has focused almost exclusively on the material world, surprise, this has worked very well!  But it’s a leap of faith to believe that material explanations will work to explain spiritual phenomena, especially when in the vast majority of cases where the “science has explained spirituality away” mantra is invoked, there has never been any actual observation of or experimentation with the spiritual phenomena.  We see attachment and samsara in operation.  The belief system I am attached to – materialism – says there are no spiritual phenomena (reincarnation, e.g., or psychic healing) to explain, so I don’t have to bother to look for evidence, much less examine it in a reasonable, fair way.  So, not having looked and so not having seen any evidence that contradicts my belief system of materialism, I then go on and say there is no contradictory evidence!

Psychologically this is all very circular and understandable, it’s one of the irrational things we humans do, it’s samsara, but it’s not science.  That a lot of people professionally identified as “scientists” do this is a reminder that scientists live in a state of samsara too.  They may be quite rational within the limits of their specialty, but can be quite attached and irrational outside it, “scientists” within their specialty, “believers” outside it.

[conclusion in Part 3]

Part 3:

There Is No Evidence for Psychic Phenomena?

If you accept that the Buddhist approach to ending suffering is based on the 8-fold path, not just exotic meditation techniques, then Right Speech, accuracy, is important.  I would like to ask that we use right speech when we discuss the evidence for psychic phenomena (like reincarnation or telepathy), which imply possible spiritual realities.  This evidence and its implications is what my “The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together” book is all about, and my book in turn refers to many other scientifically accurate books and articles on this area.

Right speech would not allow a statement that there is no evidence for psychic phenomena.

Right speech would allow statements like the following:

“I believe a priori that there are no psychic or spiritual realities and so neither look for nor pay attention to any evidence which might contradict my view.”

“I believe a priori that there are no psychic or spiritual realities, I look for articles and books which support my view and neither look for nor pay attention to any evidence which might contradict my view.”

“I apply my critical faculties extensively to look for flaws in arguments whose conclusions I don’t like but am quite uncritical and accepting of arguments whose conclusions I want to believe.”

These are honest statements which would be accurate representations of many people’s views.

Most of us could probably also accurately state:

“My beliefs and feelings about psychic and spiritual possibilities are largely the result of my cultural conditioning and person history rather than a result of rational investigation and thought.”

A commitment to Right speech would also note that if you want to make accurate and authoritative statements about this area, scientifically accurate statements, you have a lot of studying to do!  I got actively involved in parapsychological research, e.g., in the early 60s, and subscribed and read practically all the scholarly and research reports in the four refereed specialty journals for that field since then.  At two to five articles per issue, four issues per year, that’s a rough estimate of 50 years, 32 to 80 articles per year, that’s a total of 1,600 to 4,000 articles.  Plus many books, of course.  And there were hundreds of experimental articles published before I came into the field.

I could go on, but I’ve gone on at probably too much length already.  So I’ll just conclude with the basic theme of “The End of Materialism."  When you actually apply basic scientific method, you find humans occasionally demonstrating psychic abilities which are the sorts of things you would expect a spiritual being to have, so it’s reasonable to be both scientific and spiritual in your approach to life.

Can you still gain something valuable as a materialistic Buddhist?  Probably.  Should you believe everything labeled “spiritual” or “Buddhist?”  Of course not, there’s lot of nonsense under these labels….as there are in all areas of life.  Develop your sensitivity, discrimination, ethical character, meditative skill, and your logical abilities – we’re moving in an interesting direction!

Charles T. Tart

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One of you mentioned the God of the Gaps notion.  Materialists use this term to mean that if there is any area of reality that physical science can’t explain adequately, gaps in our knowledge structure, then religionists cite these as proofs of the existence of God.  The term is understandably derogatory as used by materialists, with its implications of worshiping ignorance and covering up the gap with an unsolvable mystery.

My argument – I call my position Pragmatic Interactive Dualism – is not at all like this.

To begin, I don’t personally believe in the God usually implied by Western religionists.  That God, call him Jehovah as so many do, is a bearded old man of great powers but has, to my way of thinking, considerable psychological problems: He’s jealous of the valuing of anything but Himself, demands constant reassurance of how wonderful He is, that’s He’s Number One, and rather capriciously and cruelly punishes those who don’t worship Him properly.  From the view of those of us who like and value science, Jehovah is the Great Spoiler, a powerful yet incomprehensible being who can unpredictably violate the lawful universe we’ve tried to map out at will.

Two qualifications before I go to the crux of my comparison of the God of the Gaps concept and my Pragmatic Interactive Dualism position.

Note that I said this is my personal belief.  I don’t know in any ultimate sense whether there are one or more such superior, powerful beings, and it would be nothing but logical fallacy and huge arrogance on my part to declare that no being superior to me could exist.  So logically I am agnostic about the truth value of whether such beings exist.  I also don’t like the idea of powerful, superior, outside-the-law-as-I-can-know-it beings, so I have negative emotional pressures affecting my ostensibly logical views, and they may distort my otherwise logical views.

Note too that in most arguments I have read over a lifetime about science and God’s existence or non-existence, it has looked to me like “spirituality” has been narrowly equated with this Judeo-Christian Jehovah concept, without recognition that the whole range of human spiritual experience is much, much bigger than this.  To put it another way, a lot of Westerners don’t believe in and/or are angry at and rejecting of Jehovah, but they really shouldn’t confuse this with humanities spiritual side in general.

Now back to the God of the Gaps.

The existence of gaps in any theory is, of course, a sensible reason to wonder if the theory is really comprehensive.  How much faith you then manifest that the theory will eventually fill those gaps on its own terms is highly variable.  At one end, you can have little or no faith it will work out, and call for new kinds of research.  At the other you can have total faith that it will, no matter how bad the gaps look – that’s a faith similar to religious faith, easily leading to the Dismissive syndrome, where you automatically and unscientifically dismiss any evidence contradicting what you want to believe.  In between you can compromise, both calling for new kinds of research that may lead to a totally new theory and calling for more research within the existing theory that may fill the gaps.  I think of myself as toward the middle of this spectrum, although transient emotions may push me in one direction or the other at times.  That’s what the pragmatism in my Pragmatic Interactive Dualism approach is – what works usefully?

I argue in The End of Materialism that there are serious gaps in current materialistic attempts to understand psi in particular – the emphasis in the book – and consciousness and various altered states of consciousness in general.

I do not, like the religionists, then insist that the gaps be filled with “non-material” mysteries, religious beliefs that we poor mortals can never understand.  Aside from my quarrel with the logic of that, it’s not fun, there’s no more science game to be played any more if you say “Don’t look at area X, you’ll never understand.”

What I do advocate is that we try to develop other ways of researching these gaps, psi phenomena, that, hopefully, will lead to greater understanding.  The criteria for understanding will be, as is usual in science, prediction and control.

I do not advocate giving up attempts to explain the psi gaps in material terms.  For all my inclination to suspect there is a “non-material” something that we need to understand, I’m a pragmatist.  The first paper I will be presenting at ISSSEEM (International Society for the Study of Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine) this coming Friday, e.g., will not be my presidential address about the need to create an evidence-based spirituality but a research paper about a possible physical method of increasing or decreasing telepathy, viz. Puharich’s Faraday cage work and my partial replication of it.

OK, this has been a long, perhaps too long, request to not lump my approach in with those tiresome Western arguments between science as nothing  but materialism (science is bigger than that) and clinging to the existence of Jehovah.  We need a much more sophisticated and differentiated approach to the “science and spirituality” topic.

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Dr. Charles T. Tart, Mindfulness, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology,

Lecture 4, Part 18 of 18 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

Student: So what’s the reason why you enlighten people?

CTT: It’s a friendship act. That’s all.

Student: Yes. Why would an enlightened person not say that they were enlightened? Because you keep being humble, and I just wondered.

(Laughter)

CTT: Let’s work around that this way. In ordinary situations in life, you like to have influence over people, or power over people. And there are some ways in which you have direct physical power over people, especially if you’re the head of an army, or you can have psychological power over people by controlling who they think you are by the way you project your image.

I would say any reasonably aware person would realize that if they let somebody else think that they’re enlightened or just very spiritually developed, they know that person is going to immediately project all sorts of strong and probably unrealistic expectations on them, and that may well block the learning process. It creates an impression. You’ll be expected to do miracles of one sort or another. You’ll be expecting to understand very deeply, and you’ll be expected to give blessings.

(Laughter)

And it just traps you in a role that is very limiting.

Student: Okay.

CTT: But what happens in life has something to do with flexibility. If you want to be of help to other people, you want to keep your options open to find what will work best with them and not be locked into a narrow concept.

Student: But there’s the whole marketing thing.

CTT: I’m impressed with my answer. I never thought of that before.

(Laughter)

Student: It is a good answer. It is a good answer. But marketing works too, right? And the thing is that presumably there’s a theory that the universe is trying to become self-aware, and according to that theory, you could say that – arms and legs – that…

(Laughter)

…that we, you know, why wouldn’t the universe… (inaudible, trails off) .

CTT: You see, when you keep some attention in your arms and legs, questions are more grounded.

Student: Yeah.

CTT: They make more sense. Yes, marketing matters. If you think you know some things you’d like to teach to people because it will make them happier, then clearly you need to get their attention in the first place. And so you have to market yourself at a minimum level so that they’ll want to pay some attention to you. Now ideally it will be the aura of sanctity that you project that automatically does the job for you. But if that doesn’t work, you can wear a robe.

Student: Yeah, but maybe not. Maybe people want to be drawn to their normal traditions, you know?

CTT: To some extent that’s true, but it is my belief that as you become more present and mindful, other people detect that on some level. Gurdjieff talked about these three brains: emotional, body-instinctual, and intellectual; but he really said we’re five brained beings. We have a higher emotional brain and a higher intellectual brain, and these brains are fully functioning already. If we could tap into them, that would feel like enlightened functioning to us, or at least a hell of a lot more enlightened than ordinarily.

We ordinarily pay no attention to the information in these brains. But they can have effects on us. So it could simply very well be that when you go into the presence of someone who’s more awake, some part of you picks that up. You may not know what you’re picking up. You may just get restless or whatnot, but it may attract you and make you want to do more.

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One of the things that stayed with me on this reading was her insistence that while there is enough commonality in the experience that we can talk about NDEs, there is not a “standard” NDE for all people. Rather the particulars of the NDE seem to be tailored to the individual. If someone's basic view and faith are OK, e.g., they are likely to have a wonderful mystical experience that reinforces and empowers their basic approach to life. If they need to be shaken up, they are liable to have one of the rarer “negative” NDEs – whose long-term effect on them is positive.

This is one of those things I want to believe. That is, I'm happy to think some smarter, more spiritual, more advanced “beings,” I'll call them Helpers, are watching over us and guiding our experience to maximize our growth, even if it involves some apparent suffering at times. I know it's not fashionable in academic and intellectual circles to think like this: after all, we, humanity, are the peak of life, and there aren't any spiritual beings anyway, right? But I have long followed, as best I can, a policy of being honest with myself and as honest as possible with everybody else, so yes, there's this side of me – this “childish” side – that wants to believe in helping, superior beings. I may well be wrong about the reality of this, but that's the way I feel….And maybe there's a quite realistic quality to this belief to, even if it appeals to the child in me.

While thinking about this off and on the past couple of weeks, I got an email from a colleague I hadn't heard from in years, asking if I would like to hear about his transpersonal experience – on the condition that I keep it confidential while he is alive. As he's a respected brain surgeon, and the surgical community is known for its hard-headed and skeptical attitudes, I understood this, and was happy to promise confidentiality.

He – let's call him Dr. Bill, not his real name, but reading better than Dr. Anonymous – sent the experience along, and I was quite impressed by it. I've heard hundreds of psychic experience stories in the 50+ years of my career, but this had a specificity to it, and it fit right in with my thinking about Helpers, so I'm going to share his story, altered a little bit in irrelevant details to maintain his and the other folks' anonymity.

Alex Smith (not his real name) was a kindly, round faced, retired airline mechanic of sparse receding gray hair. His lively hazel-blue eyes mirrored, to Dr. Bill, both mirth and a warm compassionate humility. Mutual friends had told Dr. Bill that Alex was quite psychic, and while Dr. Bill didn't believe in that kind of nonsense, he thought he should meet Alex and see for himself.

Dr. Bill wrote me,

“On a warm March evening in 1971, Alex relaxed in his easy chair as we sat across from each other in his modest Southern California home. I'd given him my wrist watch and he leaned back with eyes closed as he idly fingered it. Then he spoke haltingly, describing various visions and impressions which danced before his mind's eye. Among other things I clearly recall him saying, "You're going to meet a man named John. He will have had an injury to his left leg. He'll be working not in the military but associated with the military…. I hear the name Monmouth."

“At the time I did not yet know Alex well but I knew that some psychic persons claimed to sense things about people by handling their personal belongings. Being a product of years of medical and surgical training and with some fifteen years of surgical practice, I was dubious. This background preempted my placing any credence at all in such uttering. Though I'd no inkling of it then, this and subsequent impossible events were to secure a dynamic restructuring in my own comprehension of what nature and life are all about.”

“Some three weeks having passed, I stirred one morning from my normally sound sleep to a half awake, fugue state. It was still dark out. A strange thought-voice was seemingly speaking right inside my mind, 'He needs to make a telephone call.' A separate part of me seemed to hear my own mind thinking the reply, 'Okay give me the number.' Having then come fully awake, I switched on the bed lamp. What possessed me I still don't know, but I hastily scribbled ten digits across the face of the telephone book on my night table.”

“Being unsure of the first area code digit I penned both 201 and 401.”

“During odd moments throughout the day the thought, 'He needs to make a telephone call,' kept popping into my mind in the same way that a catchy tune sometimes annoys one by repeatedly surfacing and resurfacing. Since it was utterly ridiculous I, of course, kept rejecting the whole thing and putting it out of my mind.”

“By the following afternoon things were different. By then I'd done some rationalizing. It would cost only a dollar fifty or so to place the call, and it would put my mind at ease. At that price the remedy was cheap and then I'd know for sure that the whole thing was as silly as it seemed.”

“I telephoned.”

“Upon twice dialing 401 and the additional seven digits, there was only the automatic non-operative number signal and I heaved half hearted sigh of relief. Probably I'd simply had an odd dream.”

“Then I tried the same number but with the 201 prefix – and my well ordered cause and effect scientific world tumbled.”

“Having previously rehearsed what I might say, I quickly introduced myself as a physician researching psychic matters when a surprised male voice answered. That voice belonged to one John P. Crumbaugh. The name "John" caused Alex Smith's prediction to explode in my mind.”

“Yes, Mr. Crumbaugh had had an injury to his left leg, but it didn't bother him. It was true that he didn't work in the military but his job did involve elaborate checking of electronic gear purchased by the military.”

“As for "Monmouth," he worked at Fort Monmouth, N.J.”

“Through our subsequent correspondence, Mr. Crumbaugh and I discovered that we had common interests both in problems of electronic guidance for aircraft and in the question of the biological effects of radio energy. The latter is electromagnetic energy and should not be confused with the toxic energy problems of X-ray devices or atomic reactors. In short, we seemed to be kindred souls.”

“The correspondence further deepened the mystery.”

“His telephone number was doubly unlisted. Having been installed privately by Mr. Crumbaugh, this particular telephone was unlisted at the telephone company and wasn't even listed inside the plant where he worked. Had he not been in his office when I dialed, it would have gone unanswered.”

“Alex Smith's prediction that I'd meet a man named John was fulfilled when a medical colleague and I subsequently visited Mr. Crumbaugh in New Jersey. Our far ranging discussion held us long into the night.”

“Signal events sometimes change lives and these happenings certainly had precisely such an effect upon mine. Having matriculated in the orderly time sequenced cause and effect world of physics and chemistry, I was confident that the nature of biological energy processes would be equally orderly. Having dissected brains as a medical student and actively practiced surgery for many years, I knew something of the mind's perceptive possibilities. By such standards these events couldn't happen. Ever!”

“Researchers often become truly disturbed by phenomena which cannot be fitted into known scientific dogma, but a scientist never discards his evidence. Rather, the conscientious worker pays a homage to science by cataloging all results and, where necessary, elaborating new more inclusive theories. But the events related here were just too much.”

“Was I to believe that an inert wrist watch could perform as a radio in sending messages? No way! Watches told the time of day and nothing more. Even then you had to look at them.”

“Furthermore, if it did send messages like a radio, where was the radio receiver? And where was my neat time ordered cause and effect scientific world if the inert watch somehow enabled tuning into events lying yet in the future? This would be like watching the Superbowl struggle on TV three weeks before the game was even played. Impossible!”

It is amusing to watch Dr. Bill's mind struggle to make the uncanny go away….

“A more comfortable argument is that Alex simply guessed that a man named John (a common enough name) with an old left leg injury (not an uncommon complaint) worked in a paramilitary group (lots of them around) at a place called Monmouth (England has a county so named), and that I'd meet him.”

“The argument feels spurious. It rings hollow and is unconvincing. But even if this premise were to be accepted, still further difficulties lie ahead. From where in creation and by what process was this particular John's doubly unlisted telephone number conveyed into the awareness of my half asleep mind? It is certain that the most complex prognostication of contemporary neurophysiology can provide no comprehensible mechanism whereby I might have perceived these ten digits. On the other hand, my having written them down proved that I did perceive them.”

“Furthermore, the deepening dilemma would not be resolved even if the perceptive aspect of this enigma were to be explained. We remain in deeply troubled water because of a still more perplexing mystery.”

“Who sent the messages?”

Coincidence? Possible, I suppose, but, as Dr. Bill discusses, trying to write this off to coincidence feels like an act of irrational materialistic faith rather than sound reasoning. Helpers? I'd like to think so, whether it's true or not.

If Helpers, why?

Sometimes I think Helpers or whoever/whatever they may be, just want to stimulate us. “There's a nice lady or guy down there, lots of potential, but stuck in a mental belief rut, let's make some sort of thing happen which won't fit at all and so might awaken her or his curiosity a little…..”

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Dr. Charles T. Tart, Mindfulness, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology,

Lecture 4, Part 17 of 19 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

CTT: But let’s throw in one more factor here that’s important, especially since so many of us are going to become clinicians, and that’s projection and transference reactions. Every one of us has had the experience of relating to God-like teachers, and that was our parents. When we were infants and little children, our parents, by comparison, were so incredibly knowledgeable and powerful, and could give love or take it away. Freud was quite right in pointing out that this creates very deep, very primitive kinds of attitudes toward powerful figures like that and, without buying all of psychoanalysis, these things happen in later life, so you get transference reactions. Okay?

So these primitive feelings that you had toward your father or mother get transferred to some other living human being who, of course, isn’t your father or mother, and isn’t magical. But some parts of you regard them that way. And I’ve seen a lot of this happen in various spiritual teaching situations. When it first begins to happen, it’s wonderful for the person who experiences it.

You fall in love with your guru. They are so wonderful and what they do works. You have experiences. When you were a little kid and you hurt yourself you ran to mommy and she kissed the boo-boo and made it better. It works! The guru kisses the (psychological) boo-boo and makes it better, and that draws from and stimulates this deep transference kind of reaction in you.

The trouble is that this devotion and appreciation and energy toward following the guru is based on a fundamental error. This person is not your father or mother. You are not a little child. Whether they have any magic abilities or not is a wide open question, but you deep down feel that way. And of course, you rationalize it all as this is their spiritual ability coming through.

The problem with building on this foundation is that transferences can flip from positive to negative if the right circumstances come along. And all of a sudden, this wonderful emissary from God, who loved you and taught you everything you know, is a God damn fucking charlatan who’s been exploiting you the whole time, and you lose everything! All the effort you put in, all the skills you learned, you don’t want to have anything to do with it because it’s gone to a negative transference! All the things you hated about your parents suddenly become projected on to the relationship, smothering the positive projections.

As far as I can tell, most spiritual teachers have very little awareness of the phenomena of transference (or counter-transference, which swells up the ego of the spiritual teacher). And so they have a lot of problems with these sorts of things. They don’t know how to handle them.

One of the early groups I was in was led by Claudio Naranjo, when he was on a very spiritual “high.” And no, I don’t think he was “enlightened,” but he was in touch with something really important. He was also a psychiatrist, and he made his students write essays on their transference relationships with him every once in awhile.

Student: Wow.

CTT: Very unusual kind of approach, which some people, who I think had big transferences, said “This is our opportunity to tell him how much we know he really is God.”

(Laughter)

Scary. Scary.

Let me just finish one other item in this story. Maybe you’ve read about it in the book already; maybe you haven’t. When I ran a mindfulness training group along Gurdjieff lines for about a year and a half, two years, I tried to keep people aware of this transference dimension because I didn’t want that kind of psychological distortion confusing the skills people were learning to be more present.

But it started happening, and I could see it happening. Somebody would ask me a question and I’d say “I don't know the answer to that.” And they’d get this look in their eye that this was a very profound answer on my part.

(Laughter)

And it wasn’t a profound answer. I just didn’t know! So I tried to explain that to them, you know? “Don’t act like that’s profound. I just don’t know.”

(Laughter)

And the look would get deeper.

(Laughter)

He’s very humble, as well as profound!

(Laughter)

I saw this starting to go out of control, so I ended the group, because I didn’t want that kind of crap happening. I didn’t know how to take people through that in a sensible sort of way. But it’s something to always watch out for in any spiritual path that somebody’s on. Transference and a countertransference.

You know I don't know how popular Freud is among clinicians nowadays, but that part of it you should be familiar with, because it’s a very real thing in spiritual circles. And especially because it’s not understood at all, by and large. That makes it all the more powerful. And it’s one of these things that, if you understand it, you have a chance to do something about it.

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Dr. Charles T. Tart, Mindfulness, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology,

Lecture 4, Part 16 of 19 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

Student: I have a question that I’ve been wondering about. Have you actually met anybody personally that you would think of as an enlightened being, or…?

Student: Or admitted to being enlightened?

Student: Admitted is one thing. Anyone that you thought was actually enlightened though?

CTT: Well let’s take the admitted part first because that’s easier. I’ve met people who let their students claim that they’re enlightened, but they are too humble to actually claim to be enlightened. Now from one point of view, yeah, if you felt relatively enlightened it would be sensible and courteous not to make any claims to that effect. On the other hand, if you are in the guru business for fun, profit, fame, and money, it’s good to let people think you’re enlightened and just have a little secret smile when they ask you about it, but don’t actually answer them. I mean there are lots of games that could get played here.

Now so have I met anybody that’s enlightened? I’ve met people that I think are more enlightened than me. Now that’s easy to say because I know I’m not at all enlightened. Okay. But let me put that more precisely. I’ve met people who I think have kinds of spiritual knowledge which I would like to know, that I think are very valuable, and I have a special kind of respect for those people.

But I don’t think of “enlightened” in absolute terms anymore. I don’t think there’s some certain point a person gets to and then, click, they are now perfect in every single thought, word, action, feeling, experience, etc. I tend to think more about how there are moments when a person is more or less enlightened in particular things they do. So you may have someone who is pretty enlightened in certain ways or when they do certain kinds of things and then in other areas of life, they screw up.

One example, a good controversial example, is we have a whole history, even in this brief 30, 35 years of Transpersonal Psychology, of famous Eastern gurus coming to teach in this country, and they were thought so enlightened by so many people. Then it ends up that they sleep with little boys and sexually exploit people and do all sorts of things and it makes you wonder. The thing I wonder is, some of these people were charlatans, but I don’t know how many of them were actual charlatans.

But it could very well be that when you’re raised in a certain cultural setting, there are certain human skills and problem areas that you never have to deal with, because the culture handles those things very well. And you come into another cultural setting and you may have gotten pretty enlightened in your first setting but now you don’t know how to handle things in this second setting. And so stuff that hasn’t been worked on comes out. So I’ve met people I’ve respected a lot and wanted to learn from, but nobody that I have thought was enlightened in any absolute sense. And how would I know?

Student: But there’s no test certainly.

Student: I know a group of people who have been asking this question for the last 15 years: the editors of the magazine, What Is Enlightenment?

CTT: Oh yeah.

Student: I don’t know if they have answers yet.

CTT: They don’t have a list of the approved enlightened beings?

Student: I don't know. The editor himself, Andrew Cohen, wrote a book of Enlightenment Is a Secret. That’s a big answer to me.

Student: Yeah.

CTT: Yeah.

Student: I don’t think they’ve got a real investment in figuring the answer to that question out, right?

(Laughter)

CTT: There’s a book – I don't know if our library has it but it would be well worth reading if you could get your hands on it – and the title is something like How to Become a Modern Guru, by Norman Livergood.

(Laughter)

And it’s got all the tricks to make yourself look like a major spiritual teacher and acquire lots of influence. [the book is now (April 2010) available for free downloading on the web]

(Laughter)

Norman, Norman Livergood. That’s the guy who wrote it. Norman Livergood. I met him. Nice fellow. He had his own group of course.

(Laughter)

So even while he was writing a book on how to fake it all, he had a group that thought he was pretty enlightened.

(Laughter)

Student: That’s a testimonial.

CTT: Yeah. But when you read the book and see how easy it is to fake it, it really makes you wonder.

Student: I just thought of Enlightenment for Dummies. That would be…

(Laughter)

Student: That’s a great one.

Student: That would be really good.

Student: You should send them an email.

CTT: There is a Meditation for Dummies book that actually is a very good book on meditation.

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For years I've been part of a private discussion group of scientific parapsychologists, mostly experimentalists. Recently we heard from one of our members, Professor Brian Josephson, a Nobel prize winning physicist, that he and another physicist had been dis-invited from participation in a small physics conference this summer because the organizers learned he was interested in parapsychology. He was not scheduled to speak on it, knowing he was interested in it was enough to condemn him.  [NOTE: This is a corrected version, I left out the "not" in the previous sentence the first time I posted.]

I found this insulting and unusually blatant – there is lots of prejudice against people who even show an interest in psi phenomena, but it usually manifest behind the scenes rather than a blatant “We don't want to associate with heretics” kind of style.

Professor Josephson wrote a apt haiku about it on his website (http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~bdj10/articles/uninvite.html )(the dis-invitation letters are there too), which I won't quote as I haven't had time to get his permission*, but he did inspire me to my own effort:

Scientists fear ghosts!

Pull up covers, hide, hide, hide!

Away damned psi, away, away!

I figure it's better to have a little fun with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune (Shakespeare gets the credit on that phrase….) than just worry about it…. But it does illustrate, too well, as I've discussed in The End of Materialism, how much irrationality and unconscious emotion goes into supposedly scientific discussion of the paranormal…

* I've since gotten Professor Josephson's permission, here's his haiku:

Madness season is here
Scientists waxing furious
To what end?

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Dr. Charles T. Tart, Mindfulness, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology,

Lecture 4, Part 15 of 19 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

Student: What if that would test for enlightenment.

CTT: Pardon.

Student: What about a test to measure enlightenment?

CTT: Yes. What about it?

Student: Is there anything like that available for people?

(Laughter)

Is it possible to create something like that?

CTT: Well I know of one test created by the wife of a friend of mine and that is if you want to know if somebody’s enlightened, you ask their spouse.

(Laughter)

That’s a tough test. I don’t think many people would rate as enlightened that way.

(Laughter)

Student: That’s like (name unclear) was supposedly enlightened; and could levitate and move objects by his will, do all this fancy stuff. And his wife didn’t think he was enlightened.

CTT: Who?

Student: (answer unclear).

CTT: Yeah.

Student: His wife didn’t know for years and years and years, and she used to nag him and admonish him. And then one day she was admonishing him about something and he just disappeared. (Snaps fingers) (Laughter) And then she was like well –

CTT: Was this enlightenment or just avoiding confrontation?

Student: Yeah. (Laughter)

CTT: You know, it would be wonderful if some day we had a test of enlightenment. We don’t have anything near that. And enlightenment traditions would claim that we probably never would because it’s not something that can be inferred from the kinds of things we could ask on tests. But who knows, you know?

One of the things we have to remember about Transpersonal Psychology is this is a very young field. It’s what, 30, 35 years at most since some people got serious about the idea of let’s take spiritual realities seriously, but then apply scholarly and scientific methods to try to find out what does work and what doesn’t work and what’s just a cultural relic and what’s really applicable and so forth. And we don’t know much yet.

We’ve borrowed from all sorts of traditions. I don’t think I told you folks yet, but usually I welcome the new first-year students and tell them we are going to teach them all sorts of really vital spiritually important truths — and at least 50 percent of what we teach is bullshit and we don’t know which 50 percent!

(Laughter)

When I’m in a more transpersonal mood, I call it unicorn shit rather than bullshit.

(Laughter)

We’ve borrowed an awful lot from a whole variety of spiritual traditions, and we think that it has value for at least some people, but we don’t have much discriminating wisdom yet. You guys are all in the experimental group and there is no control group.

(Laughter)

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An amusing and perhaps insightful incident….

My wife and I were hiking in Zion National Park this morning, the Emerald Pools trail. Judy had gone on ahead to see something I wasn't that interested in, so I'm sitting on a big boulder beside the trail, waiting for her to come back. The surface of the boulder is tilted, so the only way to comfortably sit is cross-legged, “loose lotus,” with my hiking staff over my knees and my pack beside me. I wasn't particularly “meditating,” but thought I looked like I was and was self-conscious, this was a public place with lots of parties of people coming up the path. So I looked around a lot to look more “normal,” like a guy sitting around waiting rather than a funny fellow “meditating.”

After a while I decided my self-consciousness was silly, let people think I was meditating if that was what they wanted to think, maybe it would, in some very small way, help introduce meditation into our culture. Hardly had I thought this when some cute little kids climb up on the rock below me and a passing man calls out, “Oh Great Guru, what advice do you have for us?”

“Take a breather once in a while,” I instantly reply, with a smile. He ponders this a moment and asks “Is this advice just for hiking or for all of life?” “All of life,” I reply…. And the cute little kids get their photos taken by their mom….

So, all those years of spiritual practice, and now this!

And I didn't even have a white robe on or a beard like all the great guru cartoons….and was wearing my cowboy hat…..

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