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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To my conscious knowledge, two major forces brought me into parapsychology.  The earliest was my childhood religion, Lutheranism.  My parents weren’t religious but my maternal grandmother, who lived in the apartment downstairs from us, was very much so.  Grandmothers, as so many of you personally know, are sources of unconditional love, so she took me to Sunday School and church, and what was good enough for her was good enough for me!  I was quite devout as a child and early teenager.

The second major force was science.  As early as I can remember I loved everything connected with science, and by the time I was a teenager I was very widely read, including a lot of “adult” books.  I had my basement chemical and electrical laboratory, became a radio ham and built my own equipment, and wanted to be a scientist or engineer.  Studying electronics and radio on my own, I was able to pass government tests and get a First Class Radiotelephone license, empowering me to operate commercial radio stations.

The teenage years are a time of starting to question what you’ve been taught and to think for yourself.  I became aware, as most idealistic teens do, of the seeming hypocrisy of adults, those church people were not living what they preached!  Worse yet, I now enough science to realize that most, if not all, religious ideas and beliefs were quite nonsensical from the point of view of science, just old superstitions.  How could I reconcile this with the deep religious feelings that had began in my childhood?

From an adult perspective, I know many teenagers go through similar conflicts between science and religion.  A common “resolution” is to go to one extreme or the other: religion is all nonsense and materialistic science is right, or religion is the ultimate truth and science can be ignored when it’s inconvenient.  I put “resolution” in quotes, for as a psychologist I see this extremism as usually an incomplete and often psychologically costly way of dealing with the conflict, too much suppression of parts of our nature are involved.

Luckily my extensive reading – the Trenton city library was my second “home” – had included many older books on psychical research and parapsychology.  I realized that many intelligent people had gone through conflicts similar to mine, and the founders of the Society for Psychical Research had come up with a brilliant idea.  Instead of a wholesale rejection of all religion and spirituality and adoption of Materialism in whatever form was then scientifically fashionable, why not apply the methods of science,  the insistence on accurate data collection, logical theorizing, testing of theories, and full and honest sharing of data and theory, to the phenomena of religion and spirituality?  Why not examine and refine the data and devise more adequate theories?  I was inspired by this idea, and it has been the central theme of my professional work and personal life ever since.  Look at the data of spirituality (my preference is for individual spirituality rather than the group psychology of religion), see how to observe it more accurately, create and test theories about it, share these with colleagues, and slowly work our way toward a spirituality based on observable facts.

My first formal parapsychological experiment was a study of hypnotic suggestion as a (hoped for) way of producing out-of-body experiences (OBEs) while I was a sophomore at MIT, studying electrical engineering.  Looking back it wasn’t bad for a teenager, although I didn’t have an objective way of evaluating the data (nor did the field as a whole).  I didn’t formally write the results up until many years later Tart, C., 1998, Six studies of out-of-the-body experiences. Journal of Near-Death Studies, 17, No. 2, 73-99), by which time I had carried out five others studies of OBEs.

While at MIT I met other students interested in parapsychology and we formed a student club to talk about it and ask speakers to lecture us.  One of those speaker was Andrija Puharich, whom Eileen Garrett, world-famous medium and head of the Parapsychology Foundation, had told me about.  Here was a physician researcher who not only claimed to have a way of making telepathy work better or to shield it, he was doing it with electrical devices, Faraday Cages.  What could be more intriguing to students of electrical engineering and physics?

Some of us visited Puharich’s laboratory in Maine and thought his work seemed basically sound.  He gave a lecture on his findings at MIT for our club, and I was intrigued enough – and needed the money! – to ask him for a summer job.  So I saw some of his research up close for three months in 1957.

I was young and naïve, so didn’t fully realize that, in spite of being rejected by mainstream science, the few parapsychologists around did not all band together in a friendly way to present a united front. There was a parapsychological establishment, centered in J. B. Rhine’s laboratory at Duke, and Puharich was definitely not part of that establishment: he was a “bad boy.”  I had already met Rhine when he came to lecture in Boston several times and corresponded with him.  I wanted to switch from electrical engineering to psychology, to prepare for a career in parapsychology.  MIT had no psychology programs, but Rhine helped me transfer to Duke as a psychology major, and he had indicated he would find a part-time job for me in his laboratory.  Once I spent the summer working for Puharich, though, Rhine decided I did not have sufficient discrimination to make a scientific parapsychologist.  The promised job disappeared: indeed, I was, a friend told me, put on the list of people to be discouraged from visiting Rhine’s lab.  I was a “bad boy” now myself, in a very minor way.

Here’s a photo of me at Puharich’s Maine laboratory, the Round Table Foundation.

Still an idealistic young man, I was naturally miffed over this treatment, although, as I matured, I realized I would have acted the same way as Rhine in a similar situation.  If I had devoted my life to making a case for my field based on very careful, methodologically sophisticated research, I would discourage wild young people from getting involved and undermining my work with questionable work of their own.

On the other hand, J. B. Rhine had given a talk to the entering Freshman women and invited any of them who were interested in parapsychology to visit his lab.  So there I was looking at books in the Parapsychology Laboratory’s library (I did not accept Rhine’s ban) when this beautiful young woman came in and asked if I believed in ESP.  More than 50 years of marriage later, Judy tells me I still use the same response I did with her way back then, that’s it’s not a matter of belief, it’s a matter of evidence…  So Rhine was the proximate cause of far more happiness than unhappiness for me, and he did decide after another 20 years or so that I had enough discrimination to make a parapsychologist….and the next 50 years were quite interesting….

And just to put a cap on these beginning threads, Puharich became even more of a “bad boy” to the parapsychological establishment by getting involved with things like UFO studies, while I became a part of that establishment.  Puharich eventually got too far out for me, but it’s a shame that his basic findings that Faraday cages may amplify or shield psi have been ignored, as they may be a key to a major advance in getting reliable psi in our work.  As far as I know, I’m the only one who did even a partial replication study of his work (Tart, C., 1988, Effects of electrical shielding on GESP performance. Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research,  82, 129-146).

Just a beginning . … lots more since then on psychology, altered states, etc., to be written about some day….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Student: What was the price?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My response:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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 6 of 17 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

Student: In the New Age-y interpretation they talk about, “Oh yeah, you need to stop rushing around doing and start being.” And then, well, what does that mean? Sitting still? And it doesn’t really mean sitting still.

CTT: Well, you see, it’s the human dilemma. We have a language, and we think we know what we mean, and then something really interesting and rewarding happens to you and you want to tell people about it, and you seize on the words that you know, and they may convey a very special meaning for you, and other people don’t know them or understand them at all.

I’m thinking of a very funny instance. It’s probably not politically correct, but it’s so damn funny. In a group I was in once, we had a Chinese Tai Chi teacher come in who was very, very good. He gave us a lot of lectures, as well as showing us his Tai Chi exercises. He really confused me at one point, though, when he talked about the importance of “keeping the tongue on the parrot.”

Now I really tried to figure that out. I figured the dragon is a very important mythological animal in Chinese. What did the parrot represent, right? What’s the deep symbolic meaning of keeping your tongue on the parrot?

Well, of course he meant palate.

(Laughter)

It took me months before I finally realized, oh – what a stupid mistake! But I’m sure he thought he was explaining it very clearly, and I thought I knew what he was talking about.

Student: All that time you didn’t know?

CTT: Some of you are still just getting it, right?

Student: You like, show up with this parrot.

(Laughter)

Student: I got it, guys. So whatever.

CTT: Yeah. It seemed a very powerful symbol. You know? A very dramatic bird.

Student: It is powerful, because a parrot just regurgitates what it’s learned to express, and doesn’t necessarily add anything of the tongue.

CTT: And so by keeping your tongue on there, you were –

(Laughter)

Student: Yeah, you can’t talk when you got your tongue on a parrot

Note added in 2010: I should have explained to my students at the time that keeping the tip of one's tongue on the upper palate, just behind the teeth, is to aid the microcosmic circulation of ki or chi energy postulated/experienced in Taoism.  To this day I still do that most of the time and can feel a subtle shift in the quality of my consciousness toward more clarity when my tongue is on my palate…..

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

Lecture 4, Part 5 of 17 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

Student: I don’t want to be too much in my head, but what came up for me while you were talking was the difference between knowledge and being. For me, the words are kind of with knowledge, and then being is sort of the essence of the experience. I don’t know if that resonates with anyone.

CTT: Yes. I can say I’m experiencing a terrible pain in my foot, but I don’t feel the pain. That’s just words. But if the pain was actually there, it would be a lot deeper.

Student: I wanted to talk about being. I thought that was really interesting. I wanted to know what everyone thought about the reading at some point.

CTT: Yeah. I think it’s natural to move to the assigned readings for today, so sure. Just remember we’re going to be sensing, looking, and listening as much as possible, keeping track of those arms and legs and the sounds and the sights while we talk. So what would you like us to think about – ask about – being?

Student: [ Comment hard to transcribe...] I just wanted to know how that sap effect won. Like what the reading talked about, the difference knowledge is it’s one component, and how ___ ____ ___ ____. I think in my process, that’s really important right now to me. You know? So ___ ___ ____ ____ ______.

CTT: Have you ever known any college professors who talked a fantastic game, but were total jerks in real life? Not that there are any at ITP, you understand, but in other institutions?

We don’t have to limit that to college professors, but that’s an example of people who are highly selected and have all the right words and concepts, but if you look at how they actually react to life, they can be total jerks. They don’t know nothin’, even though they have good words for it. That’s one meaning of the difference between knowledge and being, or at least verbal knowledge and being.

Anyone else contribute to that?

Student: Yeah. I remember something I read years ago – I think it was by the Dalai Lama – and I think it was in that book that he spoke about the difference between knowledge and wisdom. Somebody could have all the knowledge in the world, but wisdom is when you begin to apply it in your life. So it’s kind of like you need a six-year-old kid to be wise, most likely because they’ve figured out how to apply what they’ve learned. A lot of adults aren’t very congruent. They know things, but they’re not being those things. I saw it as kind of the same thing with knowledge and wisdom.

CTT: Did I give the example from Living the Mindful Life of the woman who spoke about ending war at the Dalai Lama’s talk? I’ve written too much. I’m losing track.

Student: It was a feminist.

CTT: Yes. Right. Four people spoke after the Dalai Lama had talked about how if you want peace outside, you need it inside. Then this distinguished woman scholar ranted on and on about how terrible men were, war was all their fault, etc., etc. And you know, it really amazed me, because intellectually I agreed with everything she said, yet I kept getting more and more pissed at her! I thought it was me until my wife turned to me and said, “Boy, she pisses me off.”

(Laughter)

And I began to realize, “Oh – it’s not my weird internal processes. There’s something going on here.” She’s illustrating the Dalai Lama’s concern that if we don’t have peace inside, our efforts to create peace outside will be sabotaged. We don’t usually make this distinction between being and stuff, but it’s important.

Student: So a lot of the time, people talk about being as kind of an opposite of doing, and I’ve a perspective that often people do because they want to become something. They’re focusing on what they want to be, so they’re really wanting. So doing is a process of wanting in order to become; whereas if you instead focus on already having what you want, then you will perhaps, by being, have an impact that blows out doing.

CTT: That’s a useful way of thinking about it, yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now back to the God of the Gaps.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lecture 4, Part 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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At one level, I took this as a compliment.  At least one person found it valuable enough to go to a lot of work to scan that big book in so others could read it!

At the more important level, I was quite upset, not so much for myself as for authors in general.  Publishers depend on selling at least several thousand copies of books to break even, much less make a profit, and if a book is pirated like this shortly after publication it is much less likely to sell enough copies to justify publishing it in the first place.  I wrote to the pirate site, reminding them this was stolen property they were distributing and asking them to take it down, and I wrote to my publisher and the Authors Guild asking what could be done.  Apparently nothing can be done.  The Harry Potter books have been pirated the same way.  My book is a drop in the ocean compared to that, and if they can’t stop it for Harry Potter…..

We may be moving quickly toward the end of publishing as we know it, with fewer and fewer people being able to make a living as an author, and so fewer and fewer books being published, no matter how valuable their content might be to some people.  Book pirating is rapidly becoming widespread with no clear way to stop it.  The same thing happened a few years ago with music, with the rational of the pirates that it gave new bands exposure they would not otherwise get thru the big record companies and they would earn a living thru people thus coming to their concerts.  I don’t see that model as applicable to book publishing: when was the last time you spent money to hear a book author speak?

Well I don’t want to go glooming and dooming, the world is changing and it’s going to be ….. interesting?  Better?  Worse?  We’ll see.

The interesting development is I just got an email today.  My publisher has found that The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together is not actually available at the pirate web site – but you can catch a virus by going there!  A strange manifestation of the end of materialism, you try to save some money by stealing and you catch a virus that trashes your computer?

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> I am on a Quixotic quest for a definition of the non-material. Seems like consciousness itself, everyone seems to recognize it when they see it but have no clue what it is?<

I think some folks would find my response interesting…..

That makes consciousness just like pornography, yes?  What famous Supreme Court justice said he couldn't really define pornography but he knew it when he saw it?  

So for some fun off the top of my head, without going to any authorities like the Oxford English Dictionary….

I like to look at what is implicit or assumed in questions and ideas, so let's start with the assumption that we ought to be able to "define" the "non-material."

At one extreme we can get into a rigid kind of arrogance, we humans are the smartest things in the universe and we can define everything!  We can make everything make sense in our human conceptual systems!  With the usually unvoiced corollary, that if we can't satisfactorily define it, it doesn't exist and/or isn't important, so lets ignore or suppress it….

I'm all for assuming we're that smart and giving things a good try – but also think it's a good idea to practice a little humility and remember that we may not be smart enough to figure everything out.  And/or maybe we're just temporarily stuck and a new approach will arise later, or a new tool be developed to work on the problem.  But I won't be surprised if we run into some things we never make any progress in explaining properly.

At the opposite extreme, I have no interest in the ideas of those who claim a priori that we cannot know about X and must not try.  That's an uninteresting recipe for failure.

So we may not be smart enough to ever "define" the "immaterial," or maybe just not smart enough to do it now – but we're pretty sure there's something there of interest and importance.

Now "define."  To me that means come up with a verbal (or special language, like math) formulation about a phenomenon X that makes "sense," that makes it fit "logically" into the rest of our (valued) knowledge base.  As with the implicit aspects above, there's an implicit assumption that we ought to be able to do this and that our current knowledge base is correct enough and expansible enough to handle X.  Same maybes as above.

I get a lot of headaches, e.g., and I'm also good at using language fairly precisely, but if you ask me to exactly define what or where my headaches are…..well, damn it, they move around, some qualities change, and lots of qualities I just can't find satisfactory words for!  Yet I know it when I have a headache, it's certainly real – and it's not like pornography!

So if I say something is "non-material,:

- I am not making any absolute or final statement, I'm making a pragmatic one given what we/I know now or reasonable extensions of that knowledge.  That statement is subject to change if the right new data comes along.

As an example, I would say that psi is "immaterial" with respect to our knowledge of electricity, it just doesn't show the kinds of qualities electricity does.  Translating that into pragmatic decisions, I would say, e.g., that if someone says they want to take all of what little money currently supports psi research and put it into buying more sensitive radio receivers to detect psi, "That's a waste of time, you can't have the money."

- When I say psi is "immaterial" in the larger sense of the term "material," I'm saying that what we currently know about the physical world and reasonable extensions of it does not offer any satisfactory explanations of psi.  My criteria of "satisfactory" would be both that the physical theory of psi make conceptual sense in terms of our physics data base AND allows someone to build a material gadget, working according to known physical principles, which would significantly amplify psi.  The old-fashioned prediction and control criteria for judging scientific theories.

At present we have some odd and occasional correlations of psi with physical variables (LST, e.g., geomagnetic weather, possible Faraday cage effect) but they don't really make "sense" of it as far as I can see.

Note that I don't buy into promissory materialism here either, I'm not much for untestable faith that someday they will explain psi in terms of physical principles.  Maybe, but that's faith, not science.

Note too that by saying psi is "non-material" by present knowledge standards, I'm not saying it does not obey any laws or that we can't figure out how it works or what it means someday.  That is I have no "supernatural" element of a non-understandable god meddling to change things sometimes – although I'm not arrogant enough to say that I'm so smart myself that I can declare there are no beings more intelligent or powerful than me….

The pragmatic bottom line for me is that I'm not saying don't look for physical correlates or explanations of psi – I love those attempts, I'm a nerd! – but I am saying don't sit back and fail to investigate what the actual characteristics of psi are because you assume "they" will explain it all someday in terms of physics.  To use my earlier example, investigate what electricity does and think about it, rather than assume Newtonian mechanics will eventually explain it.

This is exactly the same position I have about consciousness in general.  Yes, the brain is involved, but don't ignore those characteristics of consciousness that don't readily fit into a neurological model, get on with investigating them on their own terms.

So "immaterial" means real phenomena that do not follow known physical laws and which should be investigated in a variety of ways until we find some that make a new kind of sense out of them.

(Which might involve the development of state-specific sciences, but let's not go off on that track now!)

And of course it's more complicated than this, but enough!

See how you've overstimulated my brain/mind first thing in the morning?   

With best wishes,

Charley

Oh, and just to check in with Authority, the Shorter OED, the essence of each rather than the whole thing,

material:

► A adjective.

1 Of or pertaining to matter or substance; formed or consisting of matter; corporeal.

immaterial:

► A adjective.

1 Not material; not consisting of matter; spiritual. LME.

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

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

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

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

CTT: Good.

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

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

(Laughter)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CTT: Could you e-mail that around?

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

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

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