Since many viruses and scams are sent around this way, and I do not have time to check them out, I always delete any submitted comments or emails that are like this.

So if you have words to say, thoughts to share, great, but no referalls to URLs, please.

And as I say once in a while, I wish I had time for detailed responses to the many interesting comments posted here, but I would rather spend my too limited time creating and sharing new ideas about consciousness, parapsychology, altered states, spirituality, etc.  But thank you all for finding them interesting and commenting!

Charles Tart

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There’s a very funny (to my sense of humor) cartoon I saw at least 30 years ago that would illustrate this so nicely, and I have not been able to find it, even searching the New Yorker cartoon library with relevant key words.  If anyone has it, I’d be grateful if you’d scan it and send it to me.

The cartoon shows Dracula, carrying an unconscious maiden in his arms.  He’s standing in front of a wall of bookcases in  his castle’s magnificent library.  One bookcase behind him has swung out to reveal the secret stairs leading down to his crypt.  And, he’s saying, regretfully, something like “Who has time to read any more?”     

Just googling “Dracula” and “cartoon” turns up over a million hits, which I’m not up to inspecting, but hopefully someone on my lists out there has it?

Charley Tart

ctart@itp.edu

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

CTT: One of the jobs of the field of Transpersonal Psychology will be to someday find ways to evaluate the actual kind of changes that take place in people as a result of spiritual pursuits, and then start correlating those with what kind of techniques we use to bring them about, what kind of people they were in the first place, what their teachers were like, their support structures, and things like that. So that some day we won’t just kind of expose people to a hodge-podge of spiritual growth techniques and hope something takes, but be able to give something that is suitable for a particular person.

My fantasy research project for you young folks to devote your lives to is to take the next million people who go into various spiritual paths and test the hell out of them! And I say test the hell out of them because we don’t know what test is going to have any relevance at this point, but we can get a lot of data and eventually empirically find out. Then follow these people up every five years. What percent are still happy in the particular path they’re on? What percent of suicides in a particular path? Which ones have left it, denounced the whole thing? What kind of actual personality changes, hopefully for the better, have taken place in these folks?

Follow them up every five years, something like that. Do this for the next 30, 40, 50 years. Eventually you’ll be able to empirically condense this down into a test where if someone says “I want to become more spiritual,” you’ll be able to give them a test and then say something like, “Well, with 80 percent confidence, I warn you to stay clear of Zen because the psychosis rate for your personality type is too high with Zen. But Sufism works very well for your type.”

But the next person that comes in, you say, “You’re a natural for Zen. For your type, there’s only a 1 percent psychosis rate and a 20 percent enlightenment rate.” That’s a pretty good deal to be able to say things like that.

(Laughter)

Student: Does that take away the fun of finding out for yourself?

(Laughter)

CTT: Well there is the fun of finding it out for yourself, but then I think there are too many people who come toward the end of their life and find they’ve wasted it. Because they wanted to grow spiritually and they feel like they haven’t done that.

Student: Arms and legs, Charley.

[Retrospective comment: I consider my teaching of mindfulness quite successful when students are able to spot when I've lost it, instead of demonstrating it!]

It would be nice if we had tests that were already developed that could tell you a person’s spiritual strengthens and weaknesses, and be able to then rationally suggest particular things that they should do. But we don’t really have anything like that and we’re not sure how you could develop them. I mean, eventually we can develop them, but meanwhile this could be done in a purely empirical way. One of the most widely used psychological diagnostic techniques is the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI). I used to know it pretty well because where I went to graduate school, a couple of people who were the main developers of it were on the faculty. So we MMPI’ed the hell out of everybody.

The MMPI was developed empirically. That is, they gave up ideas of, “If you answered true to liking roses, that means you’re more likely to be schizophrenic.” Who the hell knows what a liking for roses has to do with schizophrenia or hysteria or manic depression or something like that?

But working at the Minnesota General Hospital, they had hundreds of people in each category already diagnosed through intensive psychiatric interviews. Here were the manic depressives. Here were the hysterics and so forth. They gave them, I don't know, something in the order of a thousand true/false questions, all sorts of ways and then they simply saw which questions did the schizophrenics generally answer as true, especially as compared to a control group?

The control group being the visitors to the hospital who were, by and large Minnesotans, right? So Minnesotans were taken as a standard of normality.

(Laughter)

Something to be said for that!

And eventually narrowed this down into 400 and some questions which turned out to be one of the most valid tests around for being able to diagnose somebody. And you paid no attention to the meaning of any particular question. You just knew that if they answered true to a lot of these questions on the schizophrenia scale, the probability was getting higher and higher that they were schizophrenics.

You could do this sort of thing for various spiritual paths. You could find out that lots of true answers or particular choice answers to this question correlates with the fact that people who do a Zen path feel pretty enlightened after 15 years or something like that.

You could find it out empirically and, of course, you couldn’t help but analyze this stuff, and think about it, and come up with some ideas that way.

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Lately though I've commented a number of times on comments – and when I check later, they don't appear.  I've got some sort of software problem in WordPress, it makes me think I've done something when nothing is done.  My webmaster is working on it.  Meanwhile, sorry to be too absent.  Hope my regular posts are stimulating….

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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….

———–

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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I got an email this morning about being interviewed as an expert on air ions and their physiological effects for a Discovery program.  My response was "Good topic, but I know way too little to be an expert.  I was interested in effects of atmospheric ions on biological and psychological reactions, and read the literature, such as it was, 40 years ago!  I imagine there's been an immensely greater amount of research since then, and I know nothing about it nor do I know who the current experts are to refer you to….Sorry.”

And then I remembered that later this afternoon I had planned to write a little report to send out to my lists and friends and correspondents about a, to me, amazing event.

For the last year and more I have had bad tension headaches every day, requiring large amounts of both Tylenol and codeine to control. For the three and a half weeks since starting an unusual electrical treatment, which probably affects how my body deals with air ions, I have had almost no headaches! I can still hardly believe it, it even feels odd to not have my head hurting, I’ve gotten so used to it.

If this works for me it may work for other headache sufferers, so I’m sharing this info!

What did I do?

Last year I was asked to be the President of ISSSEEM (International Society for the Study of Subtle Energy and Energy Medicine), as their Board felt I was an outstanding example of openness to unusual ideas and discoveries while still remaining scientifically rigorous and creative.  At our meeting in June, the former President, Jim Oschman (thank you Jim!) handed me a recent book he had written a preface for, “Earthing,”  by Clinton Ober, M.D., F.A.C.C., Stephen Sinatra, and Martin Zucker.   It’s about health effects of electrically grounding ourselves.  The subtitle is pretentious, “The Most Important Health Discovery Ever?” but you get used to that kind of puffery as publishers try hard to grab our attention.  The book claimed that all sorts of diseases involving tissue inflammation, which have been more and more prevalent since the Second World War, may be partly due to the fact that we no longer walk barefoot on the earth, or wear shoes with leather soles, which are fairly electrically conductive.  Our shoes since the war usually have soles of synthetic materials which are strong electrical insulators, so we walk and live ungrounded in the earth-ionosphere static potential field (about 200 to 300 volts per meter – a generally  accepted scientific measurement).  The authors of the book claimed to have at first accidentally, and then more systematically, discovered that if they ground people, all sorts of disease problems lessen or cure.

I've always been interested in and pretty knowledgeable about electricity, and this didn't sound too pseudo-scientific to me, although I am generally skeptical that most alternative medicine stuff is psychological healing effects.  But I could see it wouldn't be dangerous to try having my bare feet on a grounding mat while working at my computer during the day*, and if there was any chance that it worked – boy, was I tired of constant headaches…..

(*The mat is grounded thru a one megohm resistor, so even if you touch a defective piece of electrical equipment you won’t get a dangerous shock.)

Incidentally I am not a placebo reactor, and I’m not hypnotizable, although I was an expert in hypnosis research in the early part of my career.

Bottom line: nothing happened for a few days, just the usual heavy headaches, and then I suddenly dropped to hardly any headaches, have had many headache-free days, and it's held up! I've been plotting my level of headache pain, based on how much medication I have to take, for years, and I attach a chart of the 24 days since the headaches stopped and 24 days earlier as a control.  A too typical bad day for me before could mean I needed to take something like 90 mg of codeine and 6 Tylenols throughout the day….

I hope this  keeps working for me.  If you have a lot of headaches, I hope it will work for you!  The grI hope thisounding mat you can buy on the web at (http://stores.homestead.com/HughesLtd/-strse-3/Earthing-Connection-Un iversal-Mat/Detail.bok) for sixty bucks isn’t much of investment for years free of headaches….  I have  no financial interest in the book or the mat, incidentally.

Is this a “pure” experiment in the sense that the only thing of possible significance that changed in my life was the grounding?  No, on July 30^th I had a visit to the Kaiser Oakland pain clinic because of sleeping poorly due to a combination of pains waking me up, viz. night-time headaches, bursitis in my hip, and an old shoulder injury aching.  Since I’ve been taking 60 mg codeine at bedtime, maybe another 15 to 30 mg during the night if the hip or shoulder gets bad, but haven’t had but one nocturnal headache in all that time.  The pain ratings in the above chart are strictly for Tylenol and codeine taken during the day for headache.  I doubt if this increased codeine at bedtime is related to the enormous drop in daytime headaches, though, as that started a few days before I started the higher codeine dose at bedtime, and any codeine taken early in the night should have been pretty much metabolized out by morning waking. anyway…  But I mention it to be thorough.

Am I enthusiastic?  You bet?  Could my headaches come back?  Maybe, but I hope not.  Heck, I’m going to get a second ground mat that you can put under the sheet in your bed so I’m grounded at night….

Charley

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I recently received a most surprising email from a young man from abroad, I'll call him Aaron, regarding my recent book, The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together. He wanted my permission to pirate it! Here's his email, and my response. Interesting….

name: Aaron email: topic: Piracy comments: Dear Dr. Tart, My name is Aaron. I'm a 23 yr old student of whatever from a small island nation. May I scan my copy of "End of Materialism" (or nick it from Google books somehow) and release it on the internet? Usually I won't ask but out of immense respect to you I felt I had to.

Do you feel you have made more money than you deserve for writing the book? because only then, i think, will you be content in knowing that your book has been pirated.

People still would buy the book. We love to hold a book in our hands when we read it, do we not? eBooks just don't do that for us, thus the invention of whatsitcalled.. er.. the Kindle and stuff alike.

Where do you stand on Piracy?

I know this is a contradictory subject. So you may not reply and I will assume your answer is "No, you may not pirate my book, thank you". Thank you for your time, Aaron

P.S. Weird eMail I agree too… sorry if I insulted you in any way… That was not my intention :

( I felt moved to repond: Dear Aaron,

> Weird eMail I agree too… sorry if I insulted you in any way… That was not my intention

Yes, certainly one of the most unusual emails I've ever gotten – and I get a lot of them from people who want to tell me about their unusual experiences. Because you seem sincere and are unsure about pirating my book, I think we share enough values that it’s worthwhile to share some thoughts with you.

> Do you feel you have made more money than you deserve for writing the book? because only then, i think, will you be content in knowing that your book has been pirated.<

What a complicated question! Who knows how much I "deserve?" Or anyone? I hope I am never put in a position of having to decide what someone does and doesn’t deserve. When I was young the “good” guys and the “bad” guys were quite distinct, now I have some appreciation for how complex we all are.

As an academic book writer, I have been far more successful in terms of sales than 90% of academic writers – but if I figured out how much I made in terms of the hours I spent doing the writing, not even counting the many years of relative poverty as a student that I put in preparing myself so I would have something to write about, I would guess I earn something like a dollar an hour from my book sales.

Of course I think the path I have followed in my career of research and teaching has been a good one, and will hopefully be of help to people. I think, e.g., that we are spiritual beings in some real sense and the too widespread denial of this in Materialism is harmful to people. Hopefully the book will help people recognize what is really spiritual in them. Readers have already written me that the book has helped them, that’s very rewarding.

Now the bigger question than what I deserve personally. Do authors deserve to make a reasonable living as authors?

Almost all books commercially published are financial failures – they don't earn enough money for the publisher to pay for the costs of publishing, and the author is only getting a fraction of that. You never hear about these books, of course, only about the best sellers, which makes being an author sound lucrative. Less than one percent of authors have best sellers, the rest, going by a survey the Authors Guild did a few years ago, can't earn enough to make a living, they have to depend on working at another job or a working spouse to get by. The consequence of this on the publishing industry is that they are less and less inclined to publish a book simply because it has valuable information: if it's not likely to appeal to mass tastes and become a best seller, they don't want it. You can't get statistics on what doesn't happen, but more and more books that would be of great value to some readers never get published since they won't be popular best sellers.

Now add in pirating. If a publisher thinks he may only sell a thousand copies before a book is pirated, and he needs five thousand sales to recoup his expenses, he's not going to publish the book.

Personally, at the money level, I don't care too much if my books are pirated. I can live on my retirement income from my years of teaching. I care very much for authors trying to earn a living, though, as pirating is going to kill the publishing industry, and so many good authors are never going to publish.

I felt like telling you the above as I don't think people who are starting to pirate books realize they are going to kill book publishing. I've heard the argument for pirating music, it give bands exposure they would never get otherwise and they make money from people who come to their concerts. When was the last time, if ever, you paid to hear an author speak, though? I’m a good speaker and occasionally get paid to speak, but I’m one of the very few authors who does – and I couldn’t make a living and support my family even if I added speaking fees and book royalties together.

> May I scan my copy of "End of Materialism" (or nick it from Google books somehow) and release it on the internet?<

It's very courteous of you in a strange way to ask for my permission, but no, I won't give it. Indeed my publisher would probably sue me if I did! If I'm ever held up at gunpoint, though, I hope the robber is as courteous…. I’m also pleased that you find “The End of Materialism" worthwhile enough to want to share it with others, even if I can’t approve of the way you plan to do it.

Charles T. Tart

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Antelope Canyon, near Lake Powell in Arizona, has a slot canyon on it, a tortuous, twisting, narrow (6-12 feet or so) deep defile between curved canyon walls of red and other colored stone. The sun only penetrates for a few minutes at noon, but when it does, the colors and shapes are out of this world. Even at other times of the day, it's fantastic. If you ever have a chance, go!

My wife and I went there, on the photographers' tour last week, while on our camping vacation. She got off hundreds of fabulous photos, but I knew I didn't have the skill to take in the panorama of this place, so I looked for interesting people at interesting moments, while just appreciating the beauty generally. The prime result is this, my first attempt to put a photo in this blog, what I call Child of Light.

A beautiful little Japanese girl stepped into this tiny shaft of sunlight, and…..wow!

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Needless to say, perhaps, but then I forget it all the time, so perhaps needful to say.

We get so caught up in our concerns, our "stories," our struggles about so many things that have only a psychological reality, but little or no basis in the physical world….So it's good to get out in nature, where the plants and animals are just living moment-to-moment.  No, we can't live lives that simple and still be human, but it's nice to be reminded once in a while of the basic, simple side of life…..

The story of mindfulness at ITP continues with my next post – sometime in the next few weeks….

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"But," I told her, "I won't be at home."

Then I realized that under "Home Number" on the paperwork they wanted, of course, my cell phone number, not my old-fashioned wired telephone number at home!

Silly me…..

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