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

Lecture 4, Part 7 of 17 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

CTT: Now this point you bring up about state of being is really a very important one, and it’s very hard to talk about adequately. We can talk about, say, personality. We can say this person has an aggressive personality, or that person has a generous personality, and we mean that there is an overall pattern to the way they live their life, and it’s a unique enough pattern – or distinct enough pattern – that it’s useful to know that kind of thing.

And you can talk about states of consciousness, where the mind can operate in a particular way, and so we talk about an altered state like dreaming, we mean the mind is operating in a different kind of fashion. But then consciousness goes back to its usual baseline. Altered states are transitory things.

But a state of being – well, first off, the abbreviation is not good, right? Because you start talking about SOBs and it’s going to be hard to get research grants to work it out.

But there’s very little formal recognition that people might be at different qualities of being, but – well, I’m just adding to the confusion, so I’ll shut up.

Student: I think that what happens is that there is a default state of being for most people, which is their preconditioned, cultural, hypnotized beliefs about themselves and what they deserve, and who they are. That’s certainly my default state of being. So in practicing being there, what happens is that my life unfolds in a way in which that perpetuates.

But then when I become more aware of the deeper truth about myself, then I have more choice in what I am being. And so what I choose to be in this moment, in terms of how I feel or how I perceive the world, then manifests – then becomes real – as I move through the world, and my actions flow from that state of being.

CTT: I mean, suppose your state of being is indeed a peaceful one. Then you can be in situations where people are agitated and aggressive and angry and in a lot of conflict with each other and not overreact to it, and sometimes have a calming influence just by being there. Whereas if you don’t have a peaceful state of being – if your normal state of being is kind of excitable – then you go into a paranoid situation, you get paranoid too, and you get into an aggressive situation, you get aggressive too.

Developing a peaceful state of being is an important aspect of a lot of spiritual paths. Partly it’s a practical one. If you’re highly agitated, you’re not going to learn many spiritual skills. Your mind’s too jumpy and caught up in things. You’re not going to learn meditation or prayer, or any kind of practices that require focus. Partly it’s simply because most of the time we like to feel peaceful rather than agitated, although once in a while, feeling agitated is really neat! There are some built-in pleasures to that kind of thing.

So you can work on spiritual development techniques to develop peace, but there’s a tricky part here. You can overdo it. You can develop peacefulness when you really should get agitated by a situation. You can develop a kind of forced suppression of your feelings so that you feel calm and peaceful, but it’s really not appropriate to feel that way in a situation.

Recall the example I gave you the other day of John Lilly, being deeply hurt as a kid and so deciding he wasn’t going to feel any emotions, and managing to pull it off for another 20-30 years of his life. It made him very calm and able to handle a lot of stress in a calm way, but eventually he realized what a terrible price he’d paid for basically not feeling anything.

Student: What was the price?

CTT: The price? Aliveness. Joy. If you’re starting to suppress all your feelings because you don’t trust the negative ones, it’s pretty hard to suppress just the negative ones and let the positive ones go. You tend to keep a damper on everything, and that means the positive ones don’t start either.

Student: Also you can’t really fully suppress them anyway. Because if I was always trying to be peaceful, and I was actually resentful or angry, then that would come out as passive aggression, and then that would manifest in my life.

CTT: That would be our particular Western psychological contribution to spiritual development, I think – that we know that when you suppress things like this, there’s going to be other kinds of prices paid for it, and things are going to come out in other ways.

It’s like in the early days of psychotherapy, when they discovered that hypnosis would cure hysteria. A hysteric would come in with a paralyzed arm or hysterical blindness or something like that, and with a hypnotic session or two, they get a complete cure. Then some new symptom would develop a week later. That was what led to the idea that if a person has a particular kind of symptom, that’s expressing a dynamic, a deeper process. They’re getting something out of that, and if you just cut it off, you may make this dynamic find some other kind of outlet.

Now I don’t think that turned out to be universally true, okay? I mean, the Freudians particularly carried this all the way. Every single thing you did carried tremendous psychodynamic meaning that needed to be ferreted out. But some things are relatively nothing when it comes to psychodynamics.

What was Freud’s famous saying? Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. It’s not a symbol for anything.

So are we focusing on being the way I'd like us to?

Student: Yeah. Thank you. I’m going to be in the bathroom.

CTT: Now that’s a state of being that requires a change!

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

Lecture 4, Part 3 of 17 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

CTT: What else did people experience this week?

Student: I thought it was easy to verbalize my sensations during the meditation, versus having my eyes closed. So verbalizing for me was easier to track the sensations in my body.

CTT: Okay. Yes. If you are ever having difficulty doing an exercise like this and you’re doing this at home, and your mind is really totally jazzed up and spaced out or whatever, you might try just verbalizing aloud. That can help you focus sometimes.

In formal Vipassana systems, this is a technique known as noting. Rather than just be aware of what the moving focus is – let’s say body sensations in this case – you specifically note each one, mentally look it over for a few seconds. You can either note just internally and/or you can put a verbal label on it – foot, knee, foot, right hand, foot, something like that if your focusing on location of sensations – or you can actually say the label out loud.

If you’re really flummoxed and distracted, saying it out loud will help you focus in much better. Then as your concentration improves and you follow it better, you can just drop it to just mental noting. And if you’re doing pretty well on that, you can actually stop the internal, verbal words and just follow the pure sensation itself.

The goal of this kind of controlled attention practice (CAP) – Vipassana – is to have a really clear and even-handed, equanimous perception of the whole flow of your experience. One of the reasons we don’t normally have that is that we’re caught up in talking to ourselves and imagining things to ourselves, and that makes us lose a lot of sensory input, a lot of bodily feelings, and so forth.

So you can just try to brute force stop it and say, “I won’t think. I won’t have any images. I’m just going to experience touch sensations.” Sometimes you can do it, but most of the time that’s pretty hard. So this way, as long as that verbal process is going to happen anyway, you put it to use in a way that helps you. Some part of your mind is just desperate to make words. Good. It can make labels that can fit with whatever the strongest body sensation of the moment is.

But you don’t want to stick with that forever. You want to come back closer and closer to the pure experience. Not that it’s bad to use words, but you don’t want to confuse the words with the realities that they are about. You want to keep those things distinct.

[Note added later – Shinzen Young's websites (www.shinzen.org, e.g.) have excellent and detailed info on this]

What else happened?

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

Lecture 4, Part 2 of 17 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

CTT: How was that for you? Any interesting reports? You look happy.

Student: Yeah. I feel good. I feel present in my body.

CTT: Good.

Student: I noticed that when I was doing it with my eyes closed the first time, I heard somebody a couple times say what they were feeling, and it made my mind go to that same place in my body, and it did that. It really did feel like the strongest sensation; like, one time, somebody said their forehead was hot, and then I went there. And it was interesting.

CTT: Now it makes you wonder how much of that happens in everyday life without you being aware of it. Whatever the people around you are talking about or describing, it’s creating a similar experiential reality inside your own body. Which then, of course, leads to big questions about what kind of company do you want to keep!

(Laughter)

Now one other thing first, it’s also good to be able to notice this kind of thing when you’re a psychotherapist. Because sometimes by having feelings induced in your body by what your client is talking about, you may be getting a more accurate, more complete picture of what they’re really experiencing. That is, of course, if you can really practice mindfulness and equanimity toward these things.

If instead, what they say kind of triggers off your own stories, then you may have very rich experiences that you might think have to do with the client, but it’s really that one of your own buttons got pushed and is leading you astray on that. That’s why it’s important to learn to get more and more sensitive to what you’re feeling moment by moment, and to practice it with equanimity.

Student: I was going to say that I felt your presence [the speaker’s partner’s presence] as if there was a bubble around you that moved closer to me. It’s almost like the sensation of just wanting to push me. When both my and my partner’s eyes were closed I could feel the presence there. So my guess is that I was sensing a little receptivity in that I didn’t feel a pushing-back presence in front of me when just my eyes were closed, and yet when both of our eyes were closed, there seemed to be a balance. I could tell where he was in front of me, and I thought that was very amusing.

CTT: I talked the first day, when giving a kind of overall theoretical model for mindfulness, about the fact that we live in a virtual reality, not a computer-generated virtual reality like we can set up outside of us with special equipment, but a biological-psychological virtual reality. It’s as if at every instant, part of your mind, or part of your brain, or both – whether or not you want to draw a distinction between them – is creating a model of the world around you, your place in it, and updating it with current events.

For instance, how many of you have noticed that the part of the room right in front of your eyes is clear, and the rest of it is all blurry? You think I’m putting you on? The reason I’m saying that is that physiological and psychological studies show that our area of actual sharp vision is really very small. I forget exactly what it is, but it’s like the size of a quarter held at this distance (holds arm out). This little bit is in sharp focus, and the rest is all much duller, just due to the physiological nature of the eye.

But we don’t experience it that way. We don’t experience a sharp little circle here and a lot of fuzziness all around it. That’s because our world generation process – the virtual reality that’s generated by our mind and brain – is generating a clear world. Why should you bother to generate a dull world?

So yes, you can feel these presences because your mind is building the map and constantly updating the map. Now, it does its best job when it has actual sensory input to guide it. So knowing you’re there, an acoustic sense of your presence there, or a touch sense, is very accurate because I just saw you. If I spun around a few times, it might get less accurate, but it could still be pretty accurate. We can use our other senses to help update that map pretty well.

Student: I did some study on that subject, and on the periphery.

CTT: If I got it right, it’s about the size of a quarter?

Student: [ These numbers add up right, go with the general principle] Basically you have about a hundred to a hundred twenty five million rods and cones in your eye, and that has to be reduced in each eye to about one and a quarter million, so how do you get that – whatever – the one to, let’s say, 1,000 reduction. In the center of your eye, your eyes have built up with these receptive fields; in the periphery, there is as many as 150 sensors, rods, and cones that make up this receptive field and in the macular center position, it’s pretty much one to one.

I’ve got photo at home in a book, if anyone’s interested, that shows a letter that’s in the center – it shows what you can see, and how big the letter would have to be for your peripheral vision to be able to see it. And it’s amazing to see these little tiny letters in the center, compared with letters that are literally a half inch tall in the periphery.

CTT: Could you e-mail that around?

Student: I will make a copy of it and do that.

CTT: Yeah. That sounds really interesting. And yet, it varies with your own experience. That’s not the way we experience the world, but that’s the way our best understandings of the world as a presence tells us it actually is.

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

Lecture 4, Part 1 of 17 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

CTT: A couple classes ago, I talked about an aspect of meditation practice, or spiritual practice in general, that I don’t usually talk about because it felt more personal; and yet it feels like it’s time to say more things about it.

Before you actually begin spiritual practice, you remember the context you’re doing it in. You remember that this is not just, “Oh, 6:34, time to do my ten minutes of concentrative meditation,” but you remember you have a larger life purpose or larger context or a spiritual context in which you’re doing that practice; that in some sense it’s not just me and it’s not just you, that you’re undertaking your spiritual practice as part of a larger movement of humanity, as part of a compassionate movement. I’m not quite sure how to express this.

At any rate, I’m going to start us with an experiential exercise tonight. To precede that I’m going to share with you something I listened to in the car on the way down, a little musical selection by a guy named John Astin , a song he created that I think is a good reminder of why a lot of us actually practice this sort of thing. It’s just a couple minutes long, but I really dig it.

(Plays song “Love, Serve and Remember” from John Astin CD, Remembrance. This deals with whether we remember our purpose in incarnating on Earth. Words not reproduced here because of copyright restrictions.)

Now the exercise I’d like us to do this evening to start things off is done in pairs, and it both deepens your ability to do Vipassana and, at a teaching level, serves to demonstrate something about the power of collective consciousness in influencing what we’re doing, usually for the better.

So without talking, quietly pick a partner – preferably somebody you don’t know that well – and sit facing them. You can move chairs around if necessary.

(Students select partners)

Okay. Good. We’ve got a nice, even number.

Now you know that when you do Vipassana meditation with body sensation as your primary focus, you try to experience with clarity –you just look at what happens with openness, curiosity, wonder – and with equanimity. You don’t try to grab the good stuff or push away the bad stuff, but just to look clearly at whatever occurs, without getting caught up in accepting or rejecting, grasping or pushing away; and you follow the strongest sensation within the body, as we’ve talked about and practiced a little for Vipassana.

What I’m going to have you do this time is first pick who’s going to go first. We’ll call that the A partner. And having made that big decision, what’s going to happen is the A partner is going to close her or his eyes and then do Vipassana. But they’re going to do it aloud, so that your listening partner can hear you. Loud enough so that they can hear you, not so loud you dominate the whole room. And be as straightforwardly descriptive as possible. That is, it’s fine to say something like “There’s a burning sensation in my right foot,” but then don’t go into “and that reminds me of a foot injury I had on the ski slopes back in 1983,” and blah blah blah blah. Keep coming back to simply describing the most prominent sensation you’re experiencing at this moment.

When it changes, describe the next one. If it gets larger or smaller, changes shape or size, say something about that.

If it’s a totally socially unacceptable sensation, “I really feel like I need to fart and…”

(Laughter)

You can cheat and not say anything about that particular sensation.

Your listening partner is also doing Vipassana. But as listening partner, your primary focus is to look at and listen to your partner’s words so that you, in a sense, are adding your concentration, your focus, your awareness to what your verbalizing partner is doing. You listen with equanimity, with openness, with clarity as much as possible. And of course, you don’t say anything. You just listen. So this expands the observing part of your mind in that very elastic sense.

So go ahead and start doing that. We’ll do that for five or ten minutes, and then I’ll have us switch roles, and I’ll wander around, so my focus comes into your peripheral field every once in a while, just to do God knows what.

Questions?

Student: Person B has their eyes open?

CTT: Yes. Person B has their eyes open. Unless you really want to try it with your eyes closed, just really listening to the tone of your partner’s voice. And you don’t have to try to reproduce their sensations in yourself. You listen to the tone of their voice. You obviously grasp the basic meaning of it and listen.

Okay. We have the big A-B decisions worked out now? Okay.

CTT: Ready?

[Bell rings, exercise begins]

[Random pickup of what students are reporting to partners....]

Student: My throat is expanding. My forearms – feel like there’s a pressure on the insides of my thumbs.

[Exercise continues]

Student: …feel my head. Also warm sensations throughout my whole head.

[Exercise continues]

Student: Still have a warmth in my hands. An itch right in the lower right hand side of ….

[Exercise continues]

Student: Now my left toe is – or my left foot – it’s telling, all the five toes are. Now a vibration moved to the right side. I feel a little perspiration coming from my forehead. I feel the flickering of my right eyelid.

[Exercise continues]

Student: My feet feel tingly. I feel a buzzing in my head, in the front of my head, like my brain’s being massaged. My hands feel tingly. Right under my nose feels like it itches a little bit.

[Exercise continues]

CTT: Remember to be open and equanimous.

[Exercise continues]

Student: I can feel additional cognizance in my aura, and I feel my hands – a bit more sweat, putting a presence on my legs. I feel the position of my body as I’m sitting, like I’m folded, on a chair, and a sense that I’m not standing straight.

[Exercise continues]

Student: Feel it’s cold. It is – it hurts. Pressure in my feelings. Throbbing under my left sole.

[Exercise continues]

CTT: Switch roles now.

[Exercise continues]

You don’t need to explain yourself to each other. Just stay aware and switch roles.

[Exercise continues]

Student: The itch in my head is still pretty permanent, and there’s still the pressure on my forehead.

[Exercise continues]

Student: I’m feeling itchiness in my hands and itchiness in my nose. I feel full, heavy, and my limbs are heavy.

[Exercise continues]

Student: I’m aware of kind of a numb, kind of still, like, vacuum of air just outside of my ears, under my ears now. It’s kind of weird. As if there’s this caught in a dead space, and I’m standing right next to my ears. My forehead feels kind of warm right now.

[Exercise continues]

CTT: Just continue with your eyes closed and everybody silently doing Vipassana now, noticing whatever the most prominent sensation in your body is from moment to moment.

Bring your chairs back to their original position now, and try to maintain this attitude of openness and equanimity so that, in a way, we’ll be doing self-remembering, sensing, looking, and listening now for the rest of the class, even though we didn’t go through the formal morning exercise to get started. We moved into Vipassana.

And you can mindfully sign in when the pad goes around.

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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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Ouspensky weighs in on the 5%

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

Lecture 4, Part 12 of 19 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

Student: Before you said that I was thinking about this 5 percent and the Ouspensky book. In that book, doesn’t he talk about there only being a certain amount of knowledge?

CTT: Ah. Yes.

Student: And so that’s a little bit, not confusing, but sometimes uncomfortable. Sometimes it feels good, like, “Oh yeah, some privileged people,” but then sometimes it’s like “Oh, that’s not so nice.” Like it kind of reminds me a little bit of Christianity and that Jesus is the only Son.

Student: Is that where he says I need somebody who can be enlightened and those things like that?

Student: Same time.

CTT: Ouspensky uses the analogy of gold, there’s only so much gold in the world and if you gave everybody an equal share, then we’d each have a tiny grain that did nobody any good. I always hate that part of the book, and I refuse to believe it.

Student: Okay.

CTT: And I hope it’s not true.

Student: Okay.

CTT: But suppose it is. I mean suppose there’s a literal food of impressions to really take you into a higher level of consciousness, but its amount is very limited, then it could indeed be the case that you could have a few people who’d move to a whole new level by getting nourished enough. But if you spread it all around, it wouldn’t make any difference with anybody.

I’ll bet we could use an ordinary analogy: medical care. Fancy medical care can extend people’s life. If you do that for people say who are very productive people contributing to society, you’re going to think that’s wonderful, but it costs you a lot. If you take that same amount of money and spread it around equally to every single person on the planet, then what? Everybody will have one less cold, but we’ll all die at the same age.

Now see I really don’t like that part of Gurdjieff. I refuse to believe it, but I recognize my resistance. I rationalize that he said this to deliberately motivate people more. This is a variation of the guy lying in ambush with the stick to find out when you’re not practicing enhanced awareness. I hope this limited amount stuff is not true.

Student: But it’s like the lack of intelligence thing where, when you want to sell something, you say “Oh yeah, limited time offer.” Tomorrow the price is going up, so if you want it at this low, hot price you need to buy it today. And time’s running out, and we’ve got masses of orders coming in, and we might run out of stock. And when you call up a place and you say “Have you got that book?” and they go, “Let me see.”

If you want a room at a hotel and they go, “Oh, let me check. Oh yeah, there’s one room left,” and then you have a conversation and it turns out there were 8 or 10 rooms available. And anyway. (Laughter) I already went out of the mix. (Laughter)

CTT: Let’s just note this as another factor to keep in mind as you study various spiritual traditions. You know? There are realities here that are vitally important, and there are human distortions of the whole process, and there are styles of teaching. Okay?

For a lot of people, Gurdjieff’s methods were harsh, and he was obviously abusing people. There was no question about it. For others, he was the greatest spiritual master ever to come along. For others, he was a real pain in the ass who got them moving. And he would go out of his way to egg people on.

His philosophy was not, “Oh, oh you poor precious souls, we have to make you happy.” His philosophy was that most people were going to die like dogs. They’re not going to make any effort. It’s not worth wasting your time on them. So you’ve got to screen people very rapidly for the ones with potential for actually waking up and then you can treat those people in any way that will actually get them to wake up. If that means being nasty to them at times, no problem.

Waking up is so precious that you wouldn’t give a damn whether you felt like you’d been abused in the process. It’s like when they do CPR on you when you’ve had a heart attack and you’re going to die, right? If you survived, you don’t waste your time sitting around afterwards thinking “Oh, they were pounding on my chest in a very undignified way.”

(Laughter)

“You know they should have respected me more,” or something like that. You can all see the sense of that approach in a way.

At the same time, what abuse potential that idea has! What a rationalization for charlatans who are not genuine spiritual teachers, but who like to push people around and abuse and exploit them and then claim that it’s for their own good. Don’t we have a preference for the saintly ones who sit up there and beam smiles at us and give us blessings?

(Laughter)

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Motivation and the Five Percent

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

Lecture 4, Part 11 of 19 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

Student: What comes to mind is motivation: what brings people to meditation, and the extent to which someone understands the suffering that they’re experiencing, whether it be psychological or physical. I think that plays a lot into how successful they are and how much they keep up with the practice.

One thing popped out to me when you said that 5% figure. Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction has really crazy high numbers of people who are still doing it a year and two years later, but they’re also motivated by being in excruciating pain or having their life falling around their feet if they don’t keep up the practice.

So that’s interesting because I think there’s a lot of people who, if they were to realize the impact of the psychological and spiritual suffering that’s going on in their lives, and how it’s rippling around them, would probably be just as motivated. Physical pain is empirically a greater motivator to stay focused.

CTT: They need to hire assistants who watch them and beat the shit out of them every darn day that they don’t sit for at least an hour.

(Laughter)

Student: That sounds like a great business plan.

(Laughter)

CTT: Actually there are advanced forms of martial arts training, kind of like Peter Sellers in his Inspector Clouseau movies and in Aikido, where at some point you do hire somebody to try to ambush you. It’s very good training.

(Laughter)

We were thinking of introducing that here at ITP.

(Laughter)

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

Lecture 4, Part 9 of 19 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

Student: I think you can bypass the mundane with anything, really. Can people do it because they’re drunk on Jesus too? Too drunk to recognize their family problems? And they do it with theory, abstracting everything away.

CTT: My wife and I are reading a biography of Einstein. When things weren’t going well, he really got into his theoretical work. I know about intellectual drunks like that. It’s a wonderful way of getting away from the realities of the mundane world. But of course, they’re still there waiting for you, and the people you got away from by thinking yourself away from them are now pissed off at you because you didn’t pay any attention.

(Laughter)

Student: Can you do that mindfully sometimes though? Knowing that you’re not doing it all the time, but knowing that okay, right now I just really want to be intellectual, so I’m going to go…

CTT: Yes. I think the general rule in the mindfulness tradition is not that “At every moment I must be perfectly enlightened and deal with everything in the optimal way,” but to be mindful of what you’re doing. And sometimes that may involve recognizing “This situation drives me absolutely bonkers and bananas and I’m going to kill somebody if I don’t distract myself for a minute! So, damn it I’m going to concentrate on my breathing and not on what that son of a bitch over there is saying to me. Or go watch a movie!” Yep. It’s not as if there’s any one behavior or internal strategy that is the optimal thing for all situations. And, of course, one of the virtues of mindfulness is that you get to know yourself better. When you do have to use a less than mindful, but effective, distraction or happiness inducing technique, you could probably use it more effectively.

Student: Do you think they work in the long term if you don’t have any of those sort of work that you’re doing?

CTT: Do which work? The –

Student: Like psychological work, or like therapy. I mean, say that you get really angry when people disagree with you, so I have to distract myself every single time I get angry. But I do that knowing that I’m going to get angry if I don’t stop myself. But do you think that works in the long term if you don’t have some other sort of practice combined?

CTT: No. I don’t think it does. Well, I mean it might work in the sense that you don’t kill anybody, so you don’t go to jail, but you do get ulcers.

Student: Yeah.

CTT: Or at least that used to be the fashionable theory that anger gave you ulcers. I don't know if that’s true anymore, but there’s a level of behavioral suppression of stuff that will get you in trouble. Even if it may be psychologically stirred up and boiling inside, that’s much better than acting out in a way that gets you into really bad trouble. But then you want to go further and not just boil inside, but you want to get at the psychological source and begin to change it.

Now the mindfulness traditions would claim that the practice of mindfulness is all you need. No, no, I shouldn’t say all. It’s the main thing you need to eventually recognize those sources and change them. That eventually you’ll have insights into your personality that will let you change some of the more maladaptive psychological things, but eventually you’ll have the more important insights as to who you really are, which will make the big change. I don’t want to use the words “all you need” because they’ll always put this in context.

Buddhism is an eight-fold path. Meditation is one part of that, but you’ve got to have right livelihood, you know? If you make your living making land mines designed to blow up children, you’re not creating very good karma. And your actions toward other people have to be decent because they have consequences, which will again have psychological effects.

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

Lecture 4, Part 8 of 19 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

Student: Is that where the subpersonalities come in? And do we maybe need to acknowledge it and then let it go? I wonder.

Student: So you have to be somebody before you can be nobody?

Student: Yeah. I remember you were talking about that.

CTT: Yeah. You have to be somebody before you can be nobody. Jack Engler, a Buddhist meditation teacher and psychotherapist, is famous for being the first one to say that, I think. Disidentification is a tricky process because it can be used in a very pathological way. You can use disidentification to basically distance yourself from your human feelings and attain a kind of peacefulness that way, but at the cost of impoverishing your life. Didn’t I talk about John Lilly a couple of classes ago?

Student: Yeah.

CTT: He was a famous psychiatrist whose brother or something died when he was a kid, and he was so upset for several days, and then he vowed he’d never feel an emotion again. And he managed to pull it off for the next 30 or 40 years of his life, without realizing how much he’d lost. The whole spiritual path can be used that way. The spiritual path can be a very effective psychological defensive mechanism.

It’s an attitude of “I’m not going to quarrel with you. I’m at a higher spiritual level. I don’t concern myself with mere Earthly disagreements like that.”

This is something you always have to watch out for in yourself as well as in the clients you’ll have. I was talking with somebody today about spiritual bypass as a defense mechanism. Everybody mentions it now, but apparently there’s not much actually written about it.

But it’s so easy to use spirituality as a way to not deal with your ordinary psychological problems. Now that doesn’t mean, at the extreme, that you must be an absolutely, perfectly psychologically functioning person before you dare to spend a moment on anything spiritual. But I think it does mean that if you’ve got significant psychological problems, you’ve got to be real careful about not using spirituality to bypass them. It’s commonly attempted, but it doesn’t work.

Student: How would somebody go about doing that? Using spirituality to bypass. I can’t even imagine having to do that.

CTT: One example that came up quite prominently during the hippie era – you folks are probably too young to remember hippies, but…

(Laughter)

CTT: Most of them, well I can’t say most, a lot of them lived by basically sponging off other people and didn’t feel in the least guilty about it because they were pursuing love and enlightenment. They weren’t going to get trapped in earning a living, which would support a corrupt society anyway. And hey, in one way that’s true, but it’s also a wonderful rationalization for just sponging off people instead of taking responsibility for yourself.

I can see Buddhism misapplied that way too. One way of looking at Buddhism is it’s the ultimate way of being cool, right? Nothing fazes me! Nobody can get to me! I don’t have any suffering! Well, that’s because you’ve stifled all the feelings that might arise within you. You’ve stifled them either by some kind of active suppression process or by a distraction process.

Let me elaborate that. I was thinking about that earlier today. If you’re in a situation that makes you unhappy and you want to be happy, what do you do? Well one thing you might do is to change the actual reality of the situation so it makes you happy. It’s too cold in the room. You turn the heater on. It gets warmer.

But a lot of times we’re in situations where we can’t really change the external situation. So the external situation is making us unhappy, it’s just going to go on for some long period of time. But we can do something about our reaction. Remember that equation, suffering equals pain multiplied by resistance? .

S = PxR

You can do something to reduce the suffering

One way is some sort of distraction technique. Here’s the pathological use of concentrative meditation. The situation bothers you. You concentrate so strongly on neutral sensations, like your breathing, you don’t notice the situation at all. So it doesn’t bother you.

Your life situation is poor, getting worse. You can’t get a job. You don’t have any friends. You don’t feel good about yourself. Concentrative meditation. Get into these abstracted states where you’re beyond any kind of suffering. Ahh!.

You come back out of a meditative state. All these things that make you suffer are still there. Damn! Pee quickly, have a bite to eat, and go back into meditation again. And maybe, if you’re lucky, you can spend your whole life meditating. Maybe you can join a monastery or a nunnery, or somebody else will take care of all the physical stuff and you get to spend all your time meditating; distracting yourself. So in that sense, meditation can be a distraction.

I think this is one of the reasons why the Buddha thought that concentrative meditation, for all that it was an incredible technique, wasn’t a complete technique for enlightenment. If you can distract yourself, you can simply take all your attention and put it somewhere else so there’s none left over to go into the suffering thing.

You need to have specific techniques for dealing with what bothers you, and this is where Western knowledge of psychopathology becomes valuable.

Remembering our arms and legs now. [for readers coming late to this series, the occasional reminder to students to remember their arms and legs is to remind them of the principle technique they have been taught to be more present, more here-and-now, and to practice that technique. Being more here and now helps keep these discussions more real, more concerned with reality, rather than just intellectual exercises]

All we know about classical defense mechanisms; repression, sublimation, rationalization, things like that; these are also ways of dealing with suffering. But again, they don’t solve the problems. They provide you with a temporary happiness, but they don’t solve the root problem, the core of the problem.

So this discussion started from pointing out that spiritual techniques like concentrative meditation can be an incredible accomplishment to get into these jhanas, concentrative states, to get into these incredibly abstracted states. But while you may rationalize that you’re working on your spiritual development, it may actually in fact be a kind of spiritual bypass, be a way of trying to not have to deal with the real life problems that you’re not very happy with.

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

Lecture 4, Part 7 of 19 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

Student: I just want to tell you to go back to the broader conversation about thought and thinking. In the Buddhist context, as well as in the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction version of Jon Kabat-Zinn's work, the concept of nonjudgment about what we’re thinking, or that we are thinking, is very important. And I just think that’s important, especially as a clinician, because not everyone’s going to necessarily have that goal of becoming enlightened. A lot of times people are just struggling to work with a particular issue and you get them to understand how to work with the mind as a tool instead of having it control them.

CTT: You could think about that in terms of disidentification too. That normally every thought that comes along, it’s ME!, and how could I go against me? But if you create the larger container in which thought is one activity among a number of activities, then it’s not such automatic identification. Then thoughts don’t have quite so much power.

You’ve probably read about it at this point in Living the Mindful Life, but did you read about the exercise I gave people with the milk carton to see identification at work?

(A chorus of “Yes” “The cup.”)

CTT: OK. I’ve done it with a milk carton too, but milk cartons are messy. You tend to get old milk splashed all over the place. (Laughter) But it really is amazing how just by a simple request of telling people to identify with something for a minute, and then stomping on it, it literally hurts some people. That identification process can be so powerful.

Student: If we know how to do that so well, do we know how to disidentify well too?

CTT: I don’t think so. For most people the identification process is automatic. It’s not like, “Here’s a skill. I want you to use it now.” Identification just keeps happening as a result of your particular life history and conditioning. If you tell them to disidentify with something, most people would probably be skilled, able to do it, if it’s an unimportant thing you tell them to disidentify with. But if I tell you, “John, did you see that kid with the sledge hammer working over your motorcycle?”

(Laughter) (John rides a motorcycle to ITP)

That’s a little harder to disidentify with, isn’t it?

(Laughter)

Student: Yeah. I think that’s the problem with disidentification. The problem that people have with it is it’s a spiritual practice in some sense. You know, “That is not me. That’s not me.” But the problem is people get to a point where if you try to keep disidentifying yourself from all these things that you think of as parts of yourself, you get to a feeling of, “Then, what is it?” You know, “What is the self?” or “What is me?” And that’s scary, and difficult to figure out.

Student: Well, I think there’s no description once you get to that point, which is the problem. Because what you are is going to unfold next, and it hasn’t happened yet.

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