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

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

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

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

My response:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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CTT

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

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

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

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

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

Materialist Buddhism:

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

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

Charles T. Tart

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

Part 2:

What I’m For and Against:

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

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

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

So, is materialism the same thing as science?

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

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

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

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

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

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

So Is Materialism The Same Thing As Science?

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

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

[conclusion in Part 3]

Part 3:

There Is No Evidence for Psychic Phenomena?

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

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

Right speech would allow statements like the following:

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

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

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

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

Most of us could probably also accurately state:

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

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

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

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

Charles T. Tart

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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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Just left you a phone message.  To preview what's puzzling me – I'm a writer, and it helps me to get things out on paper – it's the idea I've come across repeatedly in Buddhist teachings that the realization of emptiness naturally makes you more compassionate, that it sort of follows logically.

I'll take emptiness here as realizing that everything is process, subject to change, although the general form of a process – me or you, e.g. – may stick around for a while, even while particulars change, rather than the world consisting of solid, unchanging things.  The program on this computer that I'm writing with now, e.g., is a result of all sorts of processes interacting with "things" that are themselves the result of processes, rather than this computer being an eternal, solid lump of unchangium (a new element I just postulated for fun).  I can see things change in subtle as well as often obvious ways all the time, especially when I meditate, so at least intellectually I accept the idea that everything is process, impermanent.  I'm sure there are much deeper experiential realizations of emptiness available that I haven't gotten to yet, of course.

What confuses me is that the various teachings are phrased in a way that implies that it is obvious, logical that when you understand impermanence you develop compassion for other beings.  I have no idea why this is logical or necessarily follows from seeing impermanence.  So am I dumb, or are teachers eliding over something?

Now I can understand a statement that people who develop good insight into impermanence (usually) develop more compassion for others too, because that's simply the way it happens, without implying that there's an obvious logic to it.

I can also see that compassion is one of our innate characteristics, regardless of our insights into anything else, and maybe developing more feeling for impermanence gives your natural compassion more things to perceive and think about – but again I don't follow the apparent "logic" implied.

I can certainly hypothesize that I'm really dense on this issue and maybe other people understand the logic just fine – in which case I'd like to get less dense…

???

Warmly,

Charley

PS: I think I'll put this puzzlement on my blog for the amusement?  Edification?  Stimulation? Whatever of my readers…..

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

Lecture 4, Part 10 of 19 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

CTT: The mindfulness traditions claim they’ll take you all the way to enlightenment. And we certainly have historical examples of people who are considered Buddhas or saints or something like that, who supposedly went all the way and became remarkable human beings. What we don’t have, from a Western perspective, is sort of a percent of graduates who succeed figure.

We hear about the outstanding successes, but what percentage of people who follow those paths actually get somewhere significant? 90 percent? 10 percent? We don’t know.

Student: Why don’t they have some kind of way of tracking it?

CTT: That’s a very good question. I was having a variation of this conversation with Shinzen Young, my meditation teacher friend, some years ago, about how well does this meditation work for people. He shocked me because he said, “When I teach people meditation, just about everybody will say this is good and I’m going to make it part of my life”. You know, if they’ve had a weekend, a retreat, or a class or something like that, they really feel like they’ve picked up an important psychological tool.

If he comes back a year later and 5 percent of them are still actually doing meditation, he feels he’s been very successful. I was shocked, because my comparison was from a Western educational point of view. If I ran a graduate school and I had a 95 percent flunk out rate after the first year…. I mean, come on. You know? A few percent, you can understand. Some people came and they really shouldn’t have been here and all that, but 95 percent?

I’d feel like there was something badly wrong with the educational system.

And I thought, this is really odd, because I think Shinzen is a really good meditation teacher. He told me no, this is not 5 percent for him, this is 5 percent for all meditation teachers he knows, including the traditional, lineage-holder meditation teachers in Eastern settings. About 5 percent.

And not only that, it’s not worried about in the East at any rate.

The view there is that it’s karma. If it’s your karma to come around for instruction, you’ll come around. If it’s your karma to stay, you’ll stick around, but if it’s not your karma to stay, you won’t stick around. Maybe 10 lifetimes down the road you’ll come around again. Well maybe it is indeed karma, but I found this a very convenient excuse to not look into the efficiency of your teaching.

This is my bias as a Westerner? If 95% of my students fail, there’s something very badly wrong with the way I’m teaching. The moral I take from that is not that various meditation teachers are “bad,” but that we don’t understand how to effectively teach meditation very well, and/or that lots of people get attracted to meditation who really aren’t suitable for it. But I’m more interested in how do you teach more effectively.

You were next.

Student: Yeah. I think one of the problems with those systems is that they don’t have any… When you come here, to ITP, you know in five or six years, you’ll have a Ph.D.; whereas if you go and you learn some meditation practice, you don’t know how long it’s going to take. There are no guarantees and there’s no time line and there’s no sort of measurement of how far you’ve come. I think if there was a way of saying it’s going to take you three years – If you do this, it will be three years – then people would do it and you’d have a lot of graduates.

(Laughter)

CTT: And if they graduated, they wouldn’t be paying tuition anymore….

Student: I’m sure Shinzen Young is not motivated by getting more tuition, right? He would prefer to have a lot of his students really progress with meditation, become enlightened or something?

CTT: That’s right. And he has devoted enormous effort to try to figure out ways to make the whole teaching process more effective. When we look at these spiritual systems, we have these romantic pictures of the guru, right? It’s a he, usually. He’s got a white beard. He sits on a little throne or wears a turban or something, and he looks so saintly because it’s very important that gurus fit our pictures of what saints look like.

And the devotees surround the guru and that just lets you know that, “Wow, man, this is really something to have all these devotees.” It’s such a privilege to serve him tea. If somebody really is a fantastic teacher, teaching you spiritual things that you need to know, serving him or her tea nicely is a tiny price to pay for that.

But I think we also have to look at the larger social situation in which it’s embedded. For some people, being a guru is making a living. And when you start making a living, you usually might like to make a nice living. Well, if your students graduate too fast and are not necessarily replaced, that’s not so good. So sometimes I feel as if there’s a deliberate attempt to hold the student back.

Now I should reveal my personal experience bias here. A few years ago I started taking a Tai Chi course, my wife and I did, because I felt it was time for me to learn some Tai Chi. The instructor was very good at his verbal explanation as to what to do, as well as personally correcting moves. But he went kind of fast.

By the third class, I was still trying to work out my mistakes on the first three steps and he was into teaching the fifteenth step. So I asked him, “Would you mind if I make a tape recording of you giving the instructions and then I’ll have that to practice with at home and I won’t be practicing my mistakes?” He wouldn’t allow me to do that. Well, it’s not like I was going to sell the tape or set myself up as a Tai Chi teacher or something like that. I wanted to learn and he was preventing me from effective learning. So I stopped taking the class, because there was no point learning my mistakes more and more thoroughly while I got more and more behind.

But sometimes I wonder about that dynamic, you know? You do have this whole social situation, and it’s complex, and there’s a real spiritual element in there most of the time, and then there are actual human being playing social games, making a living, etc.. Things to be aware of.

Yes. Remember your arms and legs. I lost mine for a minute there.

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This is a stimulating and interesting venture to me.  I prefer to think of myself as an old-school exponent of the well-crafted written word, that readers take in slowly and mindfully….but I have noticed that video is big nowadays!     

The first of these videos, now up on the web, is about what we mean by “subtle energies.” ISSSEEM expects to post a new video about every two weeks up to, and possibly beyond our late June conference.

The second video will discuss the confusion between genuine science (friendly to subtle energies and spirituality) versus the too prevalent scientism (automatically dismisses subtle energies and spirituality as nonsense, without actually examining them).  This is the theme of my recent book, The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together, which shows that it is actually reasonable and healthy, based on scientific evidence, to be both scientifically oriented and spiritually oriented.

My third video discusses evidence for psychic or subtle energies induced healing, and how we can begin building an evidence-based spirituality for the 21^st century, the theme of ISSSEEM’s June conference.  Suggesting one direction we could go in, the fourth video is an emotionally moving author’s reading from my The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together on the experience of Cosmic Consciousness, a description by the originator of the term, Canadian physician Richard M. Bucke.

More videos are in preparation, and ISSSEEM will send out an announcement to its members (and I to this list) as each goes on line, approximately every second week.  As these videos are of wide interest, feel free to pass this announcement or subsequent ones on to friends and colleagues.  As I argue in my book, multitudes of people are psychologically and spiritually damaged – in a useless way – because Scientism, Scientistic Materialism, Dismissive Materialism, arrogantly dismisses their spiritual urges and experiences as nonsense.  As people realize that, while of course you need to be discriminating, genuine science and genuine spirituality are very compatible and can aid each other, this suffering can be reduced and the world can benefit.

[In case anyone doesn’t know me, here’s the description sent to ISSSEEM.

Professor Tart is an internationally known researcher, writer, lecturer and educator.  His classic Altered States of Consciousness book in 1969 was largely responsible for legitimatizing the study of altered states in psychology and psychiatry, and his Transpersonal Psychologies book in 1975 helped found the field of that name.  He has contributed more than 200 research and scholarly articles in refereed journals, but is known for his friendly, understandable, relaxed-but-stimulating style of lecturing.]

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Recently I received an email from a scholar who will be reviewing my The End of Materialism book for a journal. He noted that:

In the book you say: "….genuine science [shows] that a wide variety of traditional religious views about reality are factually wrong; they just don't stand up to empirical tests." Can you give me at least one example?

I think my response to him is interesting to many….

In our culture most people would immediately think of the battle between those who interpret the Bible to mean the world was created some 5,000 years ago vs the scientific theory of evolution. Given the incredible levels of animus and politicization around that one, I'll pass. It also saddens me that profound teachings about doing unto others as you would have them do unto you can be demeaned down to such levels.
I'm a human, which means I have many, often contradictory aspects, but one of the roles I try to fill is that of scientist. To me that means I value truth, without claiming (to myself or others) that I have some sort of exclusive and final understanding of it. Rather I look at areas that interest me, see what happens (the data) and try to make sense of it – the theories. Sometimes my (and colleagues') theories make good apparent sense of the data and have strong predictive power, so will be useful for some time – until new data comes along that requires revision. Sometimes things don't make very good sense, so we keep collecting data, thinking about it, and hoping.
To me spiritual experience is data. Something happens to someone. Being human, we try to make sense of it. For some people, if it's apparently spiritual or religious in nature they say it's a Revelation, The Truth. It's very satisfying to feel you have The Truth about anything, of course, so this is an emotionally very appealing course. In my most rational moments, the theory I come up with about any spiritual data is simply the best sense I can make of it at the time, and it's subject to possible later revision. All religions, to my knowledge, say humility is a good thing, attachment to The Truth (except the particular ones espoused by ones particular religion….) is dangerous and blinding. I sometimes feel that, as a scientist, I have a great advantage over those known as spiritual or religious leaders: I can honestly say "I don't know" about a lot of things, instead of faking more knowledge than I actually have because religious leaders are supposed to know The Truth….
Now a particular example, which I will probably use in my Presidential address at ISSSEEM (International Society for the Study of Subtle Energy and Energy Medicine) this June – our conference theme, incidentally, is "Evidence-Based Spirituality for the 21st Century," and was inspired by my book.
In Buddhism, especially Tibetan Buddhism which I have some moderate knowledge of, the human realm is considered the most advantageous place to seek enlightenment from, it has the right balances of suffering, freedom, and intelligence. So, since it usually takes many reincarnations to progress, getting reincarnated as a human is highly desirable.
Unfortunately, the doctrine, as I have heard it, says it's extremely rare to be reincarnated directly as a human rather than in less favorable realms for many lifetimes. The analogy given is the probability of the world covered by one vast ocean, one 6 foot diameter hoop floating on it, and a turtle who surfaces for air once every thousand years. What are the odds it will come up in the hoop? Vanishingly small…..
The big exception is realized beings, saints and holy people, who have a much better chance of coming back human next time around, Tibetan tulkus, e.g.,
As a moral tale to motivate one to make good use of opportunities for spiritual growth while alive, I like it. But it's presented as truth, as the actual case of things.
OK, we can roughly (our first attempt) make that a testable scientific theory. If people could remember their previous incarnations, the immediately previous one would almost never be that of an ordinary human being.
Now the data. The great majority have no previous incarnation memories (because we discourage them?), but there are exceptions, and the laboratory at the University of Virginia, founded by the late psychiatrist Ian Stevenson, has about 4,000 cases of children remembering previous incarnations while still young. About 2,000 of these have been rated and coded into a data base to date.
Prediction from Tibetan theory: most of these folks would have been monks, nuns, yogis, dervishes, etc. in their immediately previous life, obviously holy persons, sincere seekers, to have made it back so soon.
Result: the folks who run the database have not examined it in detail for this, but in response to my query tell me that there were maybe half a dozen holy people in previous lives in their 2,000 cases. The rest all remember being ordinary people, the butchers, the bakers, the candlestick makers. Some were not nice people.
This is an initial and crude attempt, but the best we can do at the moment. Yet it illustrates how we can get some empirical, scientific handles on pretty esoteric concepts like karma and reincarnation. And in this case, the traditional theory is quite lacking, it needs drastic revision or replacement by something better.
So I'm quite excited to be helping to launch the idea of evidence-based spirituality. Not that I think everything of importance in the spiritual can be handled with rational, scientific inquiry, but the more various kinds of knowledge fits together, the better. My big attempt in proposing that, incidentally, but which I think was way ahead of its time, was my proposal for the creation of state-specific sciences back in 1972 in Science (article is on my www.paradigm-sys.com/cttart/ site).
Have I addressed your question well enough?
Sincerely,
Charles T. Tart

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I've just come back from a 10-day retreat in the Sierra with Sogyal Rinpoche, very deep.

One of the things Rinpoche frequently mentions is how the Buddha summed up all his teaching in just three lines. My memory is not the best, but it's something like to end our suffering

Do absolutely no harmful or evil actions.

Build up plenty of good karma through virtuous actions.

Tame this mind of ours.

When asked to sum up his teachings even more, the Buddha would just use the third line, “Tame this mind of ours,” as a deluded, out-of-control mind was the most basic cause of our suffering.

In my teaching and writing, I always mention all three, but put about 99% of my teaching into the last one, understanding and controlling our minds. That's because I have always felt funny about “preaching.” If you tell people to not be nasty and to be good, that's preaching, and college professors and scientists are not supposed to do that, are they? Only people identified as preachers and moralists are allowed to do that? Who are so good themselves that it would not be at all false for them to exhort others to be good?

Yet I have the nagging feeling that by not emphasizing the need to be good, by emphasizing the “technical,” the psychology of understanding and controlling the mind I'm abetting people in bypassing issues of whether they are indeed living a good life.

I don't have any particular answers about this, but it's a nagging question….

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Anonymous comments:

> In Buddhism, waking up might be described as the cessation of suffering because of the cessation of desire (ie ceasing of attachments and aversions). Do your experiences fit that description, ceasing to suffer, letting go of attachments and aversions?<

I am not comfortable with the word “cessation,” it’s so absolute. As long as I’m alive in this body, e.g., I have no doubt that my body will crave air, food, warmth, etc., those sorts of things are built into the “hardware” of being human. Now I will note that in my ordinary state, where I spend 99% of my waking existence, there is a constant interplay and flow of attachments and aversions, I want to do this, I really should do that, I don’t want to do this other thing, I don’t want to feel like there’s always something to do, etc. A good deal of the time I am doing one thing and pretty absorbed in it, but these desires and aversions are always ready to pop in. Relaxing? What about that paper you’re supposed to write? Feeling too busy? Why don’t you relax. I think this is a description of “normal” consciousness for most people, most of the time.

When I’m more mindful and “awake” – remember, “awake” only in a relative sense compared to my ordinary mushy consciousness, not Awake in some grand and glorious spiritual sense – there’s an implicit feeling of contentment. A desire will come along, and sometimes if I’m staying mindful and present I’ll just note it but not be carried away by it, but often it will interrupt my mindfulness and I’ll be back in my ordinary, desire-and-aversion-drive state.

I suppose there might be some higher state of awakeness where you have worked through all those ordinary desires and aversions that are not necessary for biological survival and comfort, so they don’t even arise, but that’s just theory for me. Less drivenness, yes, “cessation,” no.

Anonymous again notes:

> Especially in modern times, because of our scientific outlook, people have a hard time accepting something unless they can understand it and I don't think there is a very clear explanation about what waking up is.<

Yes, it’s easy to imagine fantastic things about “waking.” And there are probably various degrees of “waking.” What I’m attempting to describe may be moments of one of the lowest levels of it, but if it’s helpful to people to have a clearer understanding or goal, great! I’ve been told that one of my talents is to say and write things that are “perfectly obvious:” it’s just that nobody has ever said it before. I doubt the historical truth of that, it probably just means that the way I’m saying something now is useful for the listener, but who knows how many times it’s already been said before?

> Most people who hear about the end of suffering or letting go of attachments and aversions think waking up means being happy all the time, but I think the analogy to pain is more appropriate. Waking up doesn't make pain go away it changes your attitude about pain. According to how I understand it, waking up doesn't eliminate emotions it changes your attitude to them.<

That fits my own experience to date. Sometimes mindfulness, being present, being more “awake” feels great, sometimes it makes you much more precisely aware of just what a screwed up state you’re in! But that’s good, if you know you’re really confused, angry, etc. you may be smart enough not to act on your present state and feelings and so not create consequence you’ll later regret. Every once in a while I remind the students in my ITP mindfulness class to be careful not to change the sensing-looking-listening technique described in an earlier post into some other technique aimed at making you feel happy rather than mindful. Confusing imagination that’s pleasant with ongoing reality is the quickest way to feel happy, but then you do stupid things with later negative consequences.

> Is it just as apt to say "Before enlightenment worry, joy, anger, and love. After enlightenment worry, joy, anger, and love?"<

Sounds good to me. Same old emotions, but seen more clearly, less likely to start hours-long loops of compulsive feelings and thoughts. You come back to ongoing reality much quicker.

Anonymous commenting on Tor:

> I think everyone has to find their own balance of letting out (observing and understanding emotions) and letting go (displacing negative thoughts with neutral or positive thoughts, or just focusing attention on something else).<

We too easily fall into believing there is One Goal, reached by One Way. One of the jobs of transpersonal psychology as a field will be to investigate what sorts of ways work or don’t work for what sorts of people and directing those who want to grow appropriately. I’m sure there are times, e.g., when a little psychotherapy would be much more effective than spiritual practice, and visa-versa.

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[I'm putting quotes around “spiritual” to remind us it's a tricky word, we'll have to try to make clearer one of these days]

So let me stir the pot a little as we think about some aspects of this.

Even a spiritual teacher like His Holiness the Dalai Lama (HHDL) often advises people that if you want to be selfish, be wisely selfish. Being nice to others builds up good will, which will have an overall positive effect on how others treat you. That's a straightforward statement of what, if we want to be fancier, we could call the operation of the law of karma in everyday life. HHDL believes karma goes on from lifetime to lifetime, of course, but let's stay focused on this life for now.

I like to think of this level of niceness as “business karma” or “investment karma,” or “wise self-interest karma.” As far as it goes, it business. You can't keep all the people happy about you all the time, but if you keep your customer base generally happy, your business is likely to thrive. This is a generally sensible strategy for living life.

So let's say I'm a Dismissive Materialist, as discussed in The End of Materialism. That is, I think everything in the universe is material stuff and forces, it all just happened, there's no purpose or plan, no Creator, no goal. Let those atoms bang against each other for a few zillion years and you get us, but it doesn't mean anything other than what we care to imagine about it. Then we die and consciousness is done, poof! Gone. Any idea of a possible reality to the spiritual is dismissed a priori. It can't be true, so don't even bother to look at any evidence there might be for it.

So I look at you and see you have something I very much want and you're not likely to give or sell it to me, given my limited resources. Ah, but I see there's a way I can force you to give it to me, even though you won't like me. That might be worth the fight if my gain is big enough… Ah, better yet, here's a way I can trick you out of it, and neither you nor anybody else will realize I've done anything reprehensible. Way to go! I'm richer and happier! My customer base is still fine.

So you hurt from your loss.

What's hurt?

Just chemical reactions in a complex biological system with no inherent meaning….. As long as my biochemical reactions don't make me feel hurt, what's the problem? Your biochemical reactions are in your body, not mine. They are all gone when death comes anyway.

Now suppose I have a religious or spiritual belief that I shouldn't hurt others to advance myself?

From the logic of Dismissive Materialism, all that means is that my social feelings, based on my (inherently meaningless) biology, have been conditioned through evolution or personal enculturation conditioning to make inhibit my ability to put myself first if it involves hurting other. This may involve intellectual/emotional beliefs about what we might term retributive karma, that either the lawful nature of the universe or some divine being will know what I've been up to and punish me, either in this life or a future one. Business decision again, from the Dismissive Materialism point of view. Is the cost of suppressing the unhappiness caused by this feeling less than what I'll gain from taking advantage of you? If yes, go for it!

Lots of people who've had what we call deep mystical experiences, though, tell us that the separation between one person and another is only a part of the story, that we really are all intimately connected at a deep spiritual level, and so there really is no true happiness for any one person without the happiness of all others. They tell us this is not an intellectual idea, it's the deepest kind of realization they've ever had. They usually try to live in accordance with this understanding, although they admit it's not easy to do.

If they are right, then intelligent self-interest is fine as far as it goes, but the reason for, the need for, being nice to others is way, way deeper, it goes down to the very core of existence. If I think I can be happy while others suffer, especially if they are suffering as a result of my actions, I'm deeply deluded.

Note that lots of people think this, so, if it's delusion, it's “normal” delusion… ;-(

Are the mystics right, or are they deluded, a malfunctioning of the matter and material energies in their brains?

So when a mystic feels deeply at one with all other life, is it just a failure of the boundary defining mechanisms in her brain, or, knowing, as discussed in The End of Materialism , that clairvoyance and telepathy work sometimes and there are no known limits to what we might become in contact with, is the experience of deep connection with all life a clairvoyant contact?

Things to think about….

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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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I have had a lot of trouble with sleepiness when I try to meditate for more than a decade now.  That old hypnagogic imagery starts up behind my closed eyes, faint at first, but quickly gets stronger and more interesting.  My conscious mind, "I," goes away as the imagery gets stronger, and eventually it's no longer a case of a "me" observing that I'm having hypnagogic imagery, I'm gone, my head falls (the famous "Zen lurch") and I snap back awake, but I've been asleep for a moment.  Not only is the imagery interesting and absorbing, but my body and all sensory input fades away as I slide into the hypnagogic state.  That body fading is especially nice if I'm tired or uncomfortable, my body just disappears.

When I complained about this to Shinzen some years ago, during a retreat in Santa Fe, one alternative he gave me was that if I was going to spend so much time in the hypnagogic state – the "bhavanga" is the Sanskrit term for it- than I could try to develop clarity within it and explore it, use it as a vehicle for meditation, rather than simply see it as an obstacle.  I definitely got better at doing that (add story about reprogramming head lurches), but it's still really tricky.  It's like climbing part way down a slippery slope to observe things.  A little ways down I don't see much, the imagery is pretty dim and undeveloped and overwhelmed by sensory world info, but I still know who I am and what I'm doing, and can climb back to the surface easily.  As I let myself slide further down the seeing gets better, the imagery brighter and more extensive, but the slope gets steeper and slipperier, there's little or no more input from my body or other external senses to help anchor me to the waking world, so it's easy to lose my footing and slip all the way down into full sleep.

At the beginning of this retreat (Santa Barbara, 2008-9) I got curious about the hypnagogic state as "visual thinking," just what was the style and rules?  During one of our long sits I found myself much better able than before to get pretty far down and still make relatively conscious observations in words to myself, things like "The new visual thinking theme starts where the last sensory stimulus/loud noise occurred in image space," or "Barring outside sounds, new topics usually start in the lower left corner of image space and work upward."

Encouraged, two days ago I decided to try anchoring myself to the waking world more firmly to see if that would help me keep a stable footing far down in the "hypnagogic valley," instead of slipping off into sleep.  How?  I reasoned that if I could keep better, steadier sensory contact with body sensation, that would do it.

I've done a lot of meditation following body sensation, including the "flow" part, the way one body sensation will morph, usually over the course of a few seconds, into a different kind of sensation and/or shift its locale or intensity, for example.  So I thought I would start one of our long sits following the flow of body sensation, and then make an effort to keep some contact with that body sensation flow as the hypnagogic state came on.

Having decided this I was surprised when a new type, for me, of flow experience started, which I'm calling FLIPS.  Instead of a relatively gentle morphing of one sensation into another in an adjoining body area, it was like the gain was turned way up on my body sensation receptors, so I was aware of a huge, undifferentiated mass of all sorts of varied body sensations all over my body, and my attention started flipping rapidly from one to another.  It could be something like a striated sensation across the back of my right hand for a second, flipping to a pulsing ache in my right foot for a second, flipping to a tenseness in the left part of my stomach, flipping to a lump in my throat, etc., etc.

I was a little started and wondered if somehow I was "faking it."  But these felt like genuine body sensations, as if I were observing body flow at my normal slow transition times, and except for a general background desire to keep my attention scanning, flipping, I was not consciously controlling the flipping of my attention in any discernible way.   It was like my initial intention sent two commands to myself, (1) turn up the gain all over so lots of or all body sensations are strong, and (2) ping them about once per second at random.

So I let the process continue, paying attention to this rapid flipping at first, following the "flow," and quickly the hypnagogic state developed.  Then indeed I did go quite deep in terms of vividness of imagery, with a "ping" of a body sensation every second or two in the background anchoring my consciousness.  This went on almost continuously for about an hour or more, and there were only a few occasions when I lost the body sensation but still stayed in the hypnagogic, although I never slipped all the way down into sleep.
The experiment was successful, and I'll try it again today….didn't get very sleepy and didn't get much experienced FLIPS, too much coffee I guess…

Note that in the long sit yesterday, I tried starting with a more usual, "slow flow" following of body sensation flow, and it was nowhere near as effective as FLIPS in letting me stabilize in the hypnagogic state.

My theory of the moment is that it gets harder and harder to keep some contact with the sensory surface as you climb or slide down the walls of the hypnagogic "valley," it's inherent nature is that it gets steeper as you go further down, but that by having a more intense and often repeated, every second or so, body signal, it could reach me and remind me of my conscious aims while I was further down.  The stronger signal of the FLIPS – intense, rapidly changing – could be seen "further down."

Shinzen commented that he had used a similar technique fighting sleepiness in long Zen sits…..

As a final note, in a long sit after I had this initial success in penetrating deeper into the hypnagogic state my wife, who sits beside me, elbowed me occasionally during the sit, as I have apparently acquired a new "talent," the ability to start snoring without my head dropping first…..   Progress?

I remember reading 30 years or so ago that researchers had found that Transcendental Meditators were showing sleep EEG patterns while meditating, and I remember feeling somewhat scornful, why learn to sleep sitting up when it's so much more comfortable to sleep lying down?  Karmic payback for my scorn?     

Oh, FLIPS?  For those who like scientific sounding acronyms, FLIPS obviously stands for Fast Lateral Intermittent Punctuate Stimuli….    

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