From that time on, to greatly oversimplify, you can talk about two main streams of Buddhist activity.  The heart of Buddhism is the monastic tradition, monks and nuns so dedicated to achieving enlightenment for their own sakes and for the sake of others that they devote their entire lives to living in ascetic conditions and practicing meditation and prayer.  The other main stream is the beliefs of the common people, in essence, that the Buddha was some kind of god, or at least had supernatural abilities, as the monks and nuns also do to various degrees.  These people were too busy trying to survive and  earn a living, and so could not meditate very much themselves, but they could earn merit, which would go toward improving their future lives, by worshiping the Buddha and by supporting the monks and nuns with alms and other donations.  I'm speaking very generally, of course, and you can find many variations on these themes.

As Buddhism moved into cultures that were radically different from the Indian culture Buddhism originated in, it often had to make various and sometimes major adaptations to fit into its new culture.  One of the major adaptations some teachers of Buddhism are making in bringing Buddhism to the modern world, particularly the West is to try to reconcile it with what we know from science and psychology.  This has interesting results, some of which will probably make Buddhism more effective in the long run, and others which can greatly undermine the historical form of Buddhism.  In terms of the latter, I'm especially thinking of the way science is so frequently equated with an overarching philosophy of materialism.  It's not essential to equate science with materialism, of course – see my "The End Of Materialism: How Evidence Of The Paranormal Is Bringing Science And Spirit Together" book-  but science has had, by far, its greatest successes in learning about the material world.  We all like success, so an attitude of materialism, only what is material – known physical objects and physical energies – is real, pervades most of modern life.

From this materialistic perspective, Buddhism may be psychologically effective in reducing individuals' suffering, ultimately through meditation's physiological effects on the brain.  But it carries an enormous amount of superstitious baggage with it.  There are no divine beings, Gautama Buddha is not some kind of god, e.g., or bodhisattvas may be real historical people who reduced their own suffering and helped others, but they have not become minor gods that are worth praying to, or worshiping the Buddha is a useless and misleading thing to do except insofar as it may psychologically sooth you – albeit at the cost of having a fundamentally wrong belief about the nature reality, which will probably lead to a variety of negative consequences.

Incidentally, I have nothing against materialism per se as a philosophical approach to the world.  What I object to is the shortsightedness and arrogance that allows too many believers of it to believe that all truth is encompassed by this view, and thus that there's no need to actually check in with reality to see how well this kind of explanation actually works.  Many things can be explained completely and controlled effectively by material means, and I'm all for progress continuing on these fronts, but many important things can't be.

What led me to these thoughts today is thinking about the idea that traditional Buddhist monasticism is tremendously threatened by an attitude of materialism.  If you're very rich, of course, it's no big deal to help to support a few monks or nuns.  But for the majority of people, why should they spend significant amounts of their very limited resources supporting people who sit around trying to get enlightened and pray, when prayer is one of those superstitions we need to discard?  From a materialistic point of view, praying is talking to yourself.  Perhaps psychologically the monks praying is good for them, even if it involves a major illusion about the nature of reality, but why should we give donations for them to pray for us?  Wouldn't it be better to spend our money on socially useful projects, building schools and hospitals, e.g., or on our own security and pleasure?

My own understanding, drawing from my 50+ years of knowledge of research within scientific parapsychology, is that we have very high quality, scientific evidence that, for example, our minds are more than just the material functioning of the brain, that some things like prayer and psychic healing can sometimes have real effects in the real world, or that telepathy could be a mechanism for prayer to have real effects beyond the person praying, and so materialism is only a partial view of what reality is, it's foolish and unscientific to discard everything spiritual in a wholesale manner.

All religions, including Buddhism, are undoubtedly full of superstitions that are factually wrong, but to totally throw them out, to assume that anything about the spiritual is inherently nonsensical, is a major mistake.  It's not only a mistake in scientific terms – you don't ignore or irrationally reject data just because it doesn't fit with your other beliefs – it's something that psychologically harms many people.  That's because many people have various kinds of spiritual experiences, and to then have scientific Authority Figures say this is all error and nonsense on their parts is to devalue and reject some of their most essential aspects of their lives.  I've spoken and corresponded with innumerable people who have had this happen to them.  It hurts!

I'm hardly the first person to notice that these two extremes of uncritical credulity for anything labeled spiritual on the one hand, and total rejection of spirituality for materialism on the other hand, are not very healthy for the human spirit.  Too many of our values are based in our spiritual and religious views, and to declare them  all superstition is to reduce us to the level of animals.  If we think we are nothing but animals, we are more likely to act that way, with the consequences of such actions.  The founders of the Society for Psychical research in England, more than 125 years ago, saw this problem and advocated that the methods of science could be used to start separating the true from the false, the wheat from the chaff in the sphere of religion.  I'm sad to say there has not been much progress yet.  We have slowly accumulated high quality, laboratory evidence of the reality of things like telepathy, so I have argued in my "The End Of Materialism" book, that it is scientifically invalid to simply throw out all spiritual and religious ideas without examination.  But there is so much more we need to know, so much more that research about the spiritual could clarify!

The basic theme running through my career has been to try to build bridges between the best of science and the best of spirituality.  Both these fields have much nonsense in them, although science has vital self-correcting mechanisms usually not found in religion and spirituality.  I have basically proposed that the testing methods of essential scientific inquiry be used to refine and clarify religious ideas, but I suspect that this proposal is too threatening to many people.  For those who have a strong investment in some religious or spiritual path, they may well see science as the enemy which has ridiculed their beliefs, and so want nothing to do with it.  Further, because spiritual beliefs are so important to our emotional well-being, the idea that some of them might be wrong, or that all are subject to examination by scientific method, might be very threatening to people.  Many scientists, on the other hand, have actively rejected religion in favor of a materialistic, but apparently scientific, worldview, and do not like the idea that they have been making a major mistake by not actually examining the phenomena of religion scientifically.  Or they have not so much made an active decision to ignore or reject the spiritual so much as this attitude has been conditioned into them by modern life and their conventional scientific education.

Coming back to traditional Buddhism, Western ideas, with their heavy materialistic bias, are spreading more and more over the world.  Traditional Buddhism, which supports monastics for the supposed benefit of their prayers, may go on for a long time in some parts of the world, but have little power to establish itself in the more modern world.  Personally I think this would be a great loss.  My best understanding of the parapsychological evidence to date is that monks and nuns praying for us may actually be doing something useful in reality, it's not simply a form of delusion.

As a scientist, that view is, of course, always subject to further test.  Some of what I believe along these lines may turn out to be correct, some research may produce further evidence supporting it, and, even more importantly, as we gain a better scientific understanding of what, for example, makes prayers (or psychic healing in general) more likely to be effective, we may be able to greatly increase the usefulness and efficacy of monastics (and us ordinary people) praying for the world.

Is there much chance of applying the essence of science, "essential science" as I called in my book, to improve our knowledge of and efficacy of spiritual work?  Good question!  I've worked to promote this idea in many rational ways, and I pray for it, in the hope that my prayers are somehow effective in reality, not just a psychological phenomena within me.  The chance of success?  Good question!

Finally I will note that my understanding of Gautama Buddha's ideas is that they were compatible with a basically scientific approach to reality.  In his Sutta to the Kalamas, for example, he constantly tells people to check ideas and beliefs against their experience, against what actually can be observed to work, rather than simply whether they are popular or supported by authorities (including himself), etc.  That's probably the most important part of essential science: all ideas must constantly be checked against observable, experiencable reality, and must be modified when new observations require us to go beyond the current conceptions.  Unfortunately I often get the impression that as Buddhism as became an established institution for many centuries, this call to check ideas against reality has been turned into a too fixed belief that Gautama Buddha's understandings were the last word on ultimate reality, he was omniscient, and so new observations and ideas are simply checked back for doctrinal compliance with what the Buddha thought about things, rather than against a wider observation of reality.  This is one of the things that I'm sure will have to change as Buddhism becomes more important in modern culture and tries to be more compatible with science.

Some modern teachers promote an atheistic kind of Buddhism.  Meditation practices have effects on your brain which make you happier.  I am all for anything which makes people happier in a healthy way – but if you reduce the effects of meditation to brain functioning then, as a scientifically inclined Westerner, my response is fine, the drug companies should be able to develop a pill to produce the same happiness, I hope they develop it soon as all that meditation can be pretty tedious……  But all I know, my "best estimate" as a widely-informed scientist, is that there's more to spirituality than nothing but particular electro-chemical patterns in the brain, and we need to understand that "more" to really benefit others and ourselves…..

(added 1-28-12)

A while after posting the above, I had a "vision" (small v, image arising, rather than big V, Vision from Above) of where Buddhism without any reality to the spiritual, Materialistic Buddhism, could go with the right research.  It's a sarcastic, critical vision in some ways, as well as humorous – but insofar as it could reduce human suffering, I'm all for it!  As long as it doesn't further distract us from the vitally needed research on what's real about the spiritual and how to optimally live with it…..

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Mindfulness

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

Lecture 4, Part 7 of 18 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 or not!

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, my question too.

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, 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 Gurdjieff 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! – concepts and theories, and putting things together, and talks really, really good.

But Gurdjieff 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 its conclusions 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 we have is, again, that one of these advisers has risen to over-prominence, and that’s the only one we listen to. Some people live life through their emotions, for example. 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 except for the bodily correlates of their emotions.

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 problems and situations.

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All seriousness aside, however, sometimes we need to have a little fun with Dismissive Materialism.

Back in 1992, Tom Greening, psychotherapist, poet and editor of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology sent me one of his poems, A Single Case Study, that played with Dismissive Materialism (although I hadn’t coined that term yet) in an amusing way, and which inspired me to write a poem in return.  Greening’s poem and my I Am Stuff response were discovered by me a couple of days ago during an archeological dig.  (Archeological dig is a high-class way of saying my wife was making me clean up my office)  Greening gave me permission to publish his poem here, although he did add the condition that after I made the first million dollars from it we would then split the second million dollars equally…..     

A SINGLE CASE STUDY

I am an anomalous surge,

A bioelectromagnetic burst.

Study me with EEG topographic mapping

(a great advance over phrenology),

ferret out my subtle energies,

record the markers of my emotion,

sift my positive and negative ions

for signs of virtue,

and measure the build-up and collapse

of my electric dipoles

while I indulge my mood swings.

I'll gulp down any placebo,

ignorant as I am of

psychoneuroimmunology.

When you've done with

the biofeedback stress profiling

please give me copies of the charts and graphs

to frame and hang over the fireplace

so on cold nights when my current flickers

I can remember who I am.

Tom Greening

What came to me was the following:

I AM STUFF

In case I get lonely

Or too spectral, too wispy

I can believe in my brain,

Bio-computer extraordinary.

I've never actually seen my brain, of course,

But they – we know what authorities they are –

Say they know all about it.

Lonely?  Just a little serosomething imbalance

Between the thingamabob nucleus

And the ascending reticular tract.

A few little molecules can fix that up.

Sad?  Nothing to it, really.

No existential angst,

No psychodynamic dramas,

Nothing to face or fight or philosophize about,

When a little applied electric current

Can whisk all that grief away!

Meaning?  Purpose?  Lack of purpose?

All states of the neurons,

Organized by speeding chemical messengers.

Give them a few more years of R and D,

And we'll have meaning states brewed to order.

Me lonely?  Come, come now.  Can a hemisphere be lonely?

A caudate nucleus?  A rhinencephalon?  A hippocampus?

Me?

Me, my self, my soul?

All out of fashion now, gone away

Into a cold, solid, material universe.

Unfeeling stuff, really, when you get down to basics.

Out of fashion?

Try a shot of neuro-humero-physio-enkephalon brew.

You'll feel all right!

While entropy breaks me – stuff – "me" – down

And we fade into the unfeeling night.

Charles T. Tart

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3-17-11

Hi Charles –

I've just been doing some corrections to the manuscript of my book Pluralism and the Mind and as a result been thinking a lot about different worldviews; specifically between the difference between materialist worldviews and animist ones. And it struck me — are there altered states that are associated with a particular world-view? Or conversely, does a particular state of consciousness maybe *produce and sustain* a given worldview?

Now, I'm sure these thoughts are not original; in fact, if you could direct me to any author who's had similar thoughts (including yourself), I'd be very grateful. But the main reason I wonder it is from personal experience. When I was a kid — up to the age of about eleven or twelve — I lived in what I'd now call a thoroughly animistic reality. I remember, for example, accepting ghosts as real but somehow continuous with the rest of nature, if scary. I remember experiencing nature as alive and immanent. And whilst I still experience similar feelings, they're very muted compared to before.  It's as if what I experience now is a mere dream or fragment of a former reality (although meditation can enhance them). I suppose lots of adults feel this way!

Anyway — I have also realized that analytical, intellectual thought can kill these feelings, or at least mute them; and I wonder whether the main difference between 'believers' and 'skeptics' is essentially that they really do live in different worlds from one another. When I go into town and watch shoppers, too, I wonder whether consumerism doesn't require/generate a particular state of (un)consciousness.

Sadly, I had to excise the chapter on altered states due to space, but once I've finally handed in this book, I wish to write a paper on just this topic: the Link between altered states and worldviews. I would be grateful if you could direct me to any reference you think may be useful.

Sorry if this seems a little rambling — these ideas are in the formative stage, and so are not rigorous!

BTW: I recently bought, read and enjoyed your book, The end of materialism. I especially enjoyed the bit on the Western Creed. I must admit to have found it a little depressing to plough through so many neuroscientific papers that just seem to reinforce materialism.

One book in particular annoyed me a little — Thomas Metzinger's ego tunnel. In this, he used recent work on the neural mechanisms of OBEs as evidence for a materialist view of the self. He totally ignored evidence for psi functioning in OBEs! Have you read this book?

Finally, I thought you might enjoy my new blog on consciousness. I plan to put a review of your book on it in the near future.

http://mattonconsciousness.blogspot.com/

Many thanks for your attention,

Yours,

Matt Colborn.

My response:

Dear Matt,               Date Composed: March 18, 2011

>– are there altered states that are associated with a particular world-view? Or conversely, does a particular state of consciousness maybe *produce and sustain* a given worldview?<

That's more difficult to answer than I would like.  On the one hand, I could note that drug-induced states with a substance like ayahuasca are reported to be full of snakes and panthers and other jungle animals, in god-like intensity, so that would conduce to animism.  On the other hand, that particular drug. mostly taken by people as part of their religious ceremonies, live in jungle covered countries…..

When I extensively researched hypnosis years ago, it was clear that I could probably induce almost any kind of experience with great reality, perhaps even greater than normal reality, but I felt it would be unethical to do this with spiritual experiences, so did not.  But it was an example of how an altered state of consciousness (ASC), and perhaps most altered states, can be programmed or biased to produce particular experiences, so you could in general (a) take people dissatisfied with the comprehensiveness of their ordinary world view, (b) give them some kind of altered state which would appear through novelty alone, as well as whatever inherent properties the state had, to (c) be a "higher" view of reality, and thus (d) give pseudo-validation to whatever beliefs you wanted.

I make this point a lot in my States of Consciousness book (not my Altered States of Consciousness book), describing my systems approach to ASCs and their induction.  It's not enough to know the particular, overt procedures and suggestions in inducing an ASC, you've got to know the covert expectations and demands that further shape the state.

Does this mean we are forever stuck in our subjectivity and cultural conditioning, even in altered states?  I don't think so, as we can apply the methods of essential science (not scientism with its commitment to materialism) to see what is an artifact, what is more basic.  We certainly haven't done that yet, of course.

> Or conversely, does a particular state of consciousness maybe *produce and sustain* a given worldview?<

Yes, that's a good way of expressing it.  "Ordinary" consciousness “contains” and/or creates a world view.  It's accurate enough most of the time that we survive and prosper, but it can distort perception, thought and feeling quite a bit too…..

> But the main reason I wonder it is from personal experience. When I was a kid — up to the age of about eleven or twelve — I lived in what I'd now call a thoroughly animistic reality. I remember, for example, accepting ghosts as real but somehow continuous with the rest of nature, if scary. I remember experiencing nature as alive and immanent. And whilst I still experience similar feelings, they're very muted compared to before.<

One of my students, Craig Schlarb, did his dissertation at ITP a few years ago on the suppression of the "bright shadow."  Not shadow in the sense of Jung's idea of the nasty parts of ourselves we don't want to acknowledge, but some kids have fabulous mystical experiences – and no cultural support for them but, more likely, cultural antagonism against them, so they have to suppress a major part of themselves.  Sad, probably a lot more common than we think, and similar to what you report.

> Anyway — I have also realized that analytical, intellectual thought can kill these feelings, or at least mute them; and I wonder whether the main difference between 'believers' and 'skeptics' is essentially that they really do live in different worlds from one another. When I go into town and watch shoppers, too, I wonde whether consumerism doesn't require/generate a particular state of (un)consciousness.<

Indeed!  I usually conceptualize it now that we live in a biological-psychological virtual reality (see paper on my website) which is partly a useful reflection of the actual world around us and strongly a set of habits on how things are to be perceived and interpreted…..Although we are so used to it that it seems “natural,” we are working away all the time constructing, adjusting, and reinforcing this virtual reality.

> In this, he used recent work on the neural mechanisms of OBEs as evidence for a materialist view of the self. He totally ignored evidence for psi functioning in OBEs! Have you read this book?<

No, and I won't waste my time reading it.  These folks, these fervent materialists, drive my crazy!  They take one or two aspects of OBEs or NDEs, act as if they are the whole, and thus have explained them AWAY!  Like somebody has a weird, distorted body image when their brain is stimulated and they say this is THE explanation of OBEs…..It would be like my claiming that I understand how high air pressure inflates tires, and so I now know EVERYTHING of importance about automobiles…     ;-(

> Finally, I thought you might enjoy my new blog on consciousness. I plan to put a review of your book on it in the near future.<

Thanks.  If you do review The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together, though, remember it is not a technical philosophical book about the philosophy of materialism, it's about the psychological syndrome of what I call (but forgot to put in the book by this catchy name) Dismissive Materialism, an emotional as well as intellectual commitment that justifies just ignoring or explaining away with fallacious logic any spiritual stuff that makes Believers in Dismissive Materialism uncomfortable….

Very thought provoking ideas you've put out here.  Do you mind if I quote you and my responses in my blog?  Would you prefer anonymity, or can I use your real name?

Good luck on your book!

Charles T. Tart

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Lecture 4, Part 6 of 19 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

CTT: Comments on the comments on your papers, or things you want to bring up?

Student: I was going to say that last year I took some time off. When I came back here one of the things I really noticed was the satisfaction I feel because the interaction in this school feels very different from an intention point of view. Most times when one’s interacting here it really feels like there’s good intention going back and forth and that somebody’s listening. And I discovered that I have really missed that and that I wasn’t getting the same dose of it anywhere else.

CTT: Yes. I think that’s part of the ITP educational strategy. There’s a lot of attention floating around that you could nourish yourself with. To some extent you can get attention from other people, but the main thing you need to learn to do is to be more attentive yourself, and then the “ordinary” impressions that come in nourish you more. You don’t have to have a fancy car and expensive works of art on the walls and going to the symphony every other night or something like that if you really know how to pay attention.

One of the Gurdjieff groups I was in used to meet two or three nights a week in somebody’s commercial garage to work on rebuilding an old car. By ordinary social standards, what a grimy, unattractive place! But paying increased attention to it and what you were doing, it was a fascinating place! Being actually present, being there, was very nourishing. It didn’t have to be some fancy kind of place. Lots of ordinary places, lots of ordinary situations can be very nourishing when you’re present. And also that will tend to call out presentness in other people.

Student: I was working with an ADHD kid, it was more of a friend’s kid, and so I was trying to create a relationship with him, have a conversation. So I asked questions that people ask kids. How was school today? What are you playing now? And he had so much trouble with it and I realized he was already connected.

CTT: Remember not to look fixedly but to shift your gaze every once in awhile. Go ahead.

Student: But he seemed really connected. He was present. He was presently exploring this object, and he wanted me to shut up and join him, right? I was talking at him from a more removed place trying to establish connection and he was already connected. So I just stopped the conversation and got more present and it was great. It was like all of the sudden there was a connection.

CTT: Arms and legs.

Student: But it was interesting. I wonder if some people are misdiagnosed or misunderstood because of that. Because we walk around separated. They’re not behaving as society does because maybe they’re more connected.

CTT: They’re walking too slow or too fast.

Student: Yeah. They’re really in the present.

CTT: Yes. But think about the issue you raised there. You know we do have… I wanted to call them “classical” diagnostic categories but I guess they’re not old enough to be called classical yet… We have fashionable or currently popular diagnostic categories. But if you think about what people do with their attention and intention, you could come up with a lot of sets of categories applying to all people, not just people labeled odd in some sense, based on how they deploy their attention.

So, for example, it could be possible to be too much in the present. If you were always caught up in the fantastic qualities of stimulation and could never abstract yourself from the situation and plan ahead and learn something as a result of past experience, that would be very maladaptive. If, at the other extreme, you never noticed what’s in the present, you’re always caught up in your internal story and plans, that’s pathological too. It’s a different style of pathology. There’s a range in the middle where you tune in enough to present time, ongoing reality, to be adaptive.

You know what you need to know to function adaptively in that situation, and the adaptive range can vary. Sometimes it can go more toward the kind of, what should we call it, the sensory enjoyment, the sensory nourishment thing. You know? So if you’re stuck at a boring lecture and you’re not going to be tested on what the speaker is saying, maybe really noticing the fabrics of the clothes people are wearing would be a really cool thing to do. Much more amusing and nourishing than listening to somebody drone on and on about something boring.

When you are in a protected situation, a safe situation like formal meditation, it’s fine to go way toward that sensory awareness end of things. I mean there is no external situation you have to cope with. So you know you don’t have to worry about the intentions of the people around you. You can trip out on the sounds, the sights, the body sensations, what have you. When you’re in a normal life situation, you want to be sensorily mindful and bodily mindful, but not so caught up in just the sensory level of things that you don’t come up with any ideas about people’s intentions.

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I was very intrigued when I saw the heading on your email, “Ghost Dream and More,” as I’d been thinking about you and your dreams off and on for a week or so.  Remember you once told me years ago over a lunch downtown that  you had a lot of nightmares, and I elicited from you that you often watched horror movies at bedtime?

That’s not a rigorous experimental design, but it was hard not to infer cause-effect connections……   

Now one of the things that’s always fascinated me is why are horror movies so popular?  Why would any intelligent person want to frighten themselves?  Aren’t there enough real-world perils if we want to worry about something?  I’m sure the answer is multi-faceted, but my guess is that part of it has to do with the fact that most horror movies involve “supernatural” elements.

(In my scientific parapsychologist role I hate that word supernatural, as it says we can’t figure out what’s going on, by definition, some non-understandable being just interferes unpredictably, and reality is hard enough to figure out without talking ourselves out of it in advance).

So here we are in an intellectual culture that’s quite materialistic, no God, gods, goddesses, etc., people who think about them are frowned upon or institutionalized, just dismissed as “believers,” etc.  Yet so many people love these horror shows.  A sneaky way to indulge a feeling toward the spiritual, a disguised way?  If there are devils there must be angels, and then on to…..  ???  I don’t know, but I’ve always wondered about your and other people’s fascination with horror movies.  I hate them myself!

Anyway….

> I am pleased we are both still on the same side of thegreat divide. I am at the age when my friends are starting to disappear.<

Ain’t it the pits?

I have convinced myself that there’s good evidence that they are not really gone, just “transitioned” to another kind of consciousness – but that’s rather abstract, and meanwhile they are gone…..      ;-(

> I think the reconnection with you is giving me the willies.

Should you thank me or be pissed?  I know there’s a very humorous piece about the willies, I think it’s a short story by James Thurber, worth looking for.  Got to learn to distinguish the willies from the heebie-jeebies, the shakes, etc.      

A few years back I took a new drug for my atrial fibrillation and it threw my heart into ventricular fibrillation, which can kill you pretty quick.  Luckily I was seeing my cardiologist at the time – he took a listen, pushed me into a wheel chair and personally rushed me into the ER at Kaiser Hospital.  All these doctors and nurses appear from nowhere, electrodes taped on, IVs attached, they give me a short-acting drug (can’t think of the name at the moment – oh, I think it was Brevitol) which knocks you out without depressing respiration, and then they are using the paddles to shock my heart.  I’m out for a few minutes, didn’t feel the shocks, then in a stupid state for a few minutes, knowing I was stupid, but glad to be alive.

Now here’s the funny thing.  Until they injected me with the stupid drug, I was wide awake, cheerful, engaging the docs in nice technical conversations about what they were doing, even though I knew that I might be dead in a few minutes.  The part of me that self-monitors was quite impressed, as a big part of me was repeating, “Hey, Charley, if you want to freak out, you couldn’t find a more appropriate time to freak out than now!!!”

In retrospect I put it down partly to knowing of all the evidence that we survive death in some form, not enough to convince me in any absolute sense, but enough to make me think the next few minutes might have been quite interesting if I died, rather than just eternal blankness.  And that was a safe and useful position, of course, for if there is eternal nothingness after death I’d never be embarrassed by knowing I had the wrong idea!    

And those years of meditation training and Aikido, staying calm in difficult situations, had to have helped.

“So,” I say to myself, mentally stepping back, “why am I telling you all this?”

Partly as reassurance.  Yes, our friends are dropping like flies and we’ll go too one of these days, but it might indeed by quite interesting afterwards.  I’m not worried about Hell.  Insofar as I think there’s a God, this God must be better than me, and I’m not so cruel or stupid as to punish anyone for all eternity.

Partly as continuing some conversations we had years ago, and which I suspect are of more interest to you now as death comes closer.  If you want my best thinking on this whole area, try my book of last year (2009), The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together, which is my attempt to make sense of it all and to show people why it’s rational to be both scientific and spiritual in orientation.

Partly maybe as I just need to write a lot of this kind of stuff, I think I have another book in me which is going to be about how an honest, intellectual scientist struggles with the “spiritual path.” without the comfort of simple faith, and maybe, or maybe not, gets somewhere….

Or maybe partly I’ll put some of this musing on my blog, disguising your identity, as this writing may be practice for that future book…..

Or maybe……???

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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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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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It's easy to think of "spiritual" implying all the good virtues – generosity, faithfulness, control of negative emotions, a reverence for life, etc., and "non-spirituality" as implying nothing but greed, cynicism, evil, immorality, etc. Certainly many people who label themselves "spiritual" claim they represent all that's good and everybody else is evil.

But let's step back a bit.

First, the way a person is conventionally labeled can sometimes be useful, especially when your dealing with general characteristics of large numbers of them. "Short people don't make winning pro basketball players" is a useful generalization when you're putting together a team, but not absolutely true. So some of the nastiest people may label themselves "spiritual" and fool others into buying into that label – we humans are good at deception – and some who call themselves "atheists" may be among the nicest people around.

Second, let's remember that having a philosophy or belief system about the world that you derive the "spiritual" and "non-spiritual labels" from is an intriguing and often fun intellectual activity, to usually be engaged in when times are easy. But when you're under stress and things get tough, intellectual philosophies may go out the window, without you even noticing, and you are run by instincts (psycho-biological programs built into the human bio-computer) and emotions. On the one hand, we have the saying from some general that there are no atheists in foxholes. On the other, many a person has gone from a sweet idea of a benevolent God to a "Fuck you, God, you don't even exist, you phony!" attitude when a loved one dies of cancer or the like.

Indeed I'd argue that if we were good at self-observation, we would probably notice our position on "spiritual" vs "non-spiritual" changing many times per day with mood and circumstances.

Third, let's also remember that there are many variations in the beliefs associated with words like “spiritual,” “materialist,” “atheist,” etc.

So in a group, general sense, then, when I'm talking about "spiritual" versus "non-spiritual" people or belief systems, I'm making generalizations that have to be modified in individual cases. If I say someone is a “materialist,” e.g., of the kind I discuss in The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together, I'm talking in general about people whose intellectual philosophy is that everything is made up of material objects, moved only by material forces, and that there's no logical place to talk about “ideals,” “morals” or the like except as biological outcomes of mindless and purposeless physical forces operating over billions of years since the (meaningless, it just happened) Big Bang. If, as I discuss in the book, you truly believe this, then looking out for your material welfare is certainly the most sensible thing to do: it's all you have, really. All those emotions, satisfactions, hopes, fear, loves, etc. are biological byproducts and are totally dependent on your physical well being.

If I describe someone as “spiritual” or spiritually inclined, on the other hand, I'm describing someone whose intellectual philosophy (and perhaps some deeper experiences) is that there is some other kind of real level of existence than the material, and the goals and values stemming from contact with this “higher” level are much more important than mere material ones. When Canadian physician R. M. Bucke, e.g., whose Cosmic Consciousness experience is described in The End of Materialism says

“Among other things he did not come to believe, he saw and knew that the Cosmos is not dead matter but a living Presence, that the soul of man is immortal, that the universe is so built and ordered that without any peradventure all things work together for the good of each and all, that the foundation principle of the world is what we call love and that the happiness of every one is in the long run absolutely certain…”

we may be deeply touched, especially if we think of ourselves as “spiritual.” If we are logically materialists, though, our only sensible conclusion is that Bucke experienced some sort of seizure where his brain malfunctioned, for the cosmos is dead, man has no soul, and the universe has no care whatsoever he we live or how our lives come out.

Dr. Alan Smith, whose Cosmic Consciousness experience is described later in the book, was an agnostic before his experience, now he's quite spiritually inclined. That's an illustration of what I briefly alluded to above, that our “philosophy” may be created by much more than intellectual speculation about life.

So a person may be an “atheist” and a very nice person – they can blame in on the human firmware, the biological instincts they inherited. Or a person may strive to be good because of what they believe and seek about the “spiritual.” Or a person may be good or bad as the result of enormous social and psychological pressures in their upbringing. Or, or, or….

Bottom line in my writing: I'd like to do a bit to make the world a little better place, I think generally (not exclusively) having “spiritual” values leads people in that direction more effectively than having just “material” values. My concern in The End of Materialism was to help people who have been denying their spiritual aspects because they think science had “proved” that spirituality was all nonsense. The next book, Explorations on the Spiritual Side, will be to share some ideas and reflections about getting on with developing our spiritual side in modern times….

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Lecture 3, Part 3 of 13 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

Student: I’ve been having really lucid dreams as well. It’s really been helping my dream states. I mean, last night was sweet. I was playing bike polo the whole night.

(Laughter)

And I even got up, went to the bathroom, and jumped right back in the dream; like reentered a dream state really easily. So yeah, tight.

(Laughter)

CTT: Is there a real life sport of bike polo?

Student: It’s a small subculture, for sure.

CTT: Small subculture. It sort of sounds like fun, but I imagine there are some horrendous crashes sometimes.

Student: Yeah, definitely. But yeah, they’ve been very active dreams. I had a great skiing dream, and whatnot. I mean, it might just be the kind of person that I am, but I don’t dream that much. I don’t typically, or I don’t have recall of my dream. So that’s been nice.

CTT: Yeah. That’s good.

Student: A nice fruit of the practice.

CTT: Some people will find that as you practice various kinds of mind training during the day, it will start to slide over into the sleep state. You’re liable to recognize that you’re dreaming, or your dreams become more vivid, or various combinations of those.

And in fact in some branches of Buddhism, the Tibetan ones particularly, they have a whole bunch of dream yogas where you’re expected to become aware of your dreams as dreams and practice various meditative exercises in them. And then become aware of the state in between dreams. And no, it’s not easy for most people.

(Laughter)

Student: I recall reading somewhere, there was that National Geographic cover with the Buddhist monk with the EEG electrodes hooked up to his head, that alpha wave activity and deep states of meditation have, I think, been associated with REM sleep states. So that just strikes me as some kind of correlation between….

CTT: I wouldn’t take that too seriously.

Student: No?

CTT: But see, partly there’s politics here. Okay? When I was in graduate school, back in the 1960’s, I wanted to do my thesis and dissertation work on dreams, and my advisors really discouraged me from doing that. Dreams were subjective; they weren’t things that you could study scientifically. It would be a real waste of time.

And then along came a publication in Science that showed eye movement and brain wave correlates of dreaming and, given the materialistic values of the time, overnight dreams became “real.” I mean, if your brain changed, it must be real! So I was able to do my experiments. Politically, the discovery justified all sorts of studies of dreams that would have been hard to do otherwise, because of the ethos that this was a waste of time.

And then I saw the same thing happen about 12 years later. Before that time, meditation was something done by foreigners who were probably schizophrenic and sat cross-legged in the mud and did superstitious things. And all of a sudden they found some brain wave changes with meditation and meditation became real! Gosh! Gee whiz! But the brain waves… while there can be some brain wave changes in meditation, it’s just barely beginning to touch the surface of what meditation is all about. You know, if you like those justifications, that’s fine; but don’t take them too terribly seriously.

When I published my Altered States of Consciousness book in 1969, I had a section on scientific studies of meditation, and I bragged that I had reprinted two thirds of the world’s English language scientific literature on meditation. It sounded impressive until you realized it was two of the three studies! (Laughter) Now there are, last time I checked when somebody had counted, there were over 1,500 studies, and it’s probably up to at least 2,000 or more now. And most of them are “trivial” in the sense that meditation is prescribed like aspirin. It turns out to be good for anything related to tension. All right, not bad.

So doing almost any kind of meditation for 20 minutes a day will make you more relaxed, and that’s good for people in a stressed out, tensed up culture, like ours. But the size of the effects they find, well you could get the same by taking a nap or running around the block or something like that. There are still almost no studies that have looked at the deeper aspects of meditation, namely the ones concerned with beginning to have insight into the nature of your own mind, which is really where we want to go.

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Neuroglamorizing. Noun. The hyping of ordinary speech by the use of frequent but superfluous terms relating to the brain and brain functioning.

Instead of talking about becoming less fearful, for example, you make it sound like your understanding is much deeper and very scientific by talking about reducing activation in your amygdala.

Dogmatic materialism is so prevalent in scientific and academic circles that you find neuroglamorizing everywhere.

I love research on brain functioning and it's very useful. The more we understand about the brain the better. But when we slip into a habit of making ourselves seem smarter this way, we may well be thinking less deeply and accurately, charmed by our own glamor, being fashionable in in the scientific know….

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