Progress in Meditation?

Dear Shinzen,                              Date Composed: August 22, 2010

Some thoughts on the Path that are running around in my brain lately….Let me set the background and then describe the problem.

A basic premise of spiritual systems, to put it in a very general form, is that ordinary life involves a lot of suffering that does not have to be, and that there is a hugely more satisfying mode of existence that is possible – call it “enlightenment.”  Further, methods exist for reaching enlightenment.  But for most of us, reaching enlightenment or even getting close involves a lot of work, and the motivation to engage in that work while giving up other life things that could be relatively satisfying.

Buddhism, e.g., calls for work on three lines.  Ordinary morality and decent living.  Learning concentration skills.  Insight, using those concentration skills to investigate the nature of the ordinary mind, which can (not must, can) bring about a breakthrough, perhaps just occasional glimpses at first but getting more and more frequent, that breakthrough being enlightenment.

I have no inherent problem with the first line, morality training, I’m a decent person to begin with and want to live a life of increasing kindness, sensitivity, honesty, effectiveness, etc.  There’s been noticeable progression along this line in my life.

Concentration skill.  I’m spite of having a very active intellectual mind that constantly generates ideas under ordinary conditions (generally good ideas, I have little complaint there), my ability to focus reasonably well on one thing has certainly increased with meditation and self-remembering practice.  By “reasonably well” I mean if asked to focus on X, I will not have awareness of nothing but X for minutes at a time or more, but I can keep some varying awareness of X, with only small total losses, even while other thoughts and images come and go, i.e., I can keep X reasonably well in the foreground even if the background continues manifesting.  This is enormously better than, say, 20 years ago, where I would be lucky if I thought of X for 3 seconds and then my mind would go off completely for seconds to minutes at a time before I remembered that I intended to focus on X.

Insight.  To some degree I can, for short periods, experience flow, an occasional gone, mildly restful states in imagery or talk, and body relaxation.  I can not automatically identify with the varying content that flows on, i.e. “I” am aware of content flowing through without being exactly the same as that content…this is difficult to express…..it’s not a strong sense of a Watcher watching, but I don’t know how else to describe it….  It’s not a Big Deal experience, but certainly gives me the intellectual conviction that whatever “I” am, it’s not the content, which changes all the time, but a more basic ability to experience per se….

The problem.  A feeling of having reached a plateau, where my meditation and mindfulness practice is OK, I’m glad I can be more mindful and will continue to practice it intermittently, but it’s not a Big Deal, it doesn’t directly motivate me to want to put in a lot of time on it – half an hour a day seems plenty – so I can reach enlightenment or whatever.

I sit for designated vipassana practice, e.g.  My time then varies between, at best, feeling calmly present and aware, and, at worst, simply dozing through most of the session*.  In between there’s daydreaming, thinking about things, berating myself for not doing better, etc., all the stuff I imagine you hear about all the time.  At the end of a session I’m usually glad I did it, it’s mildly satisfying – but so is a good cup of coffee, a nice walk, writing a paper, etc.  That is, I’m not getting direct feelings that there’s some special satisfaction from meditating, so I’m not motivated to meditate much more.

I feel like the Buddhist deal offered is that I can see some slow progress in my technique of meditating, nice but not a Big Deal, and then there’s the promise that if I keep this up long enough (months?  years?  the rest of my life, but still not getting there?) the Big Deal of enlightenment might (or might not) happen.

You used to compare learning meditation to learning to play the piano, and the analogy may be very direct and accurate for some people.  Nothing but boring scales at first, then simple tunes, more complex tunes, eventually you’re enjoying the music you play, maybe you get good enough that people ask you to play, maybe Carnegie Hall….  In learning to play the piano you get tangible rewards as you see your skill increasing, it’s not like once you can play basic tunes you plateau and then nothing happens by way of improvement or satisfaction year after year, but maybe, for some people but not others, suddenly they are concert pianists.

So maybe it’s just me, and/or maybe I’m a fairly common type of person, but it’s hard to keep up or increase the motivation to practice more when I seem to have plateaued, and maybe I’d be better off putting my time into something else because the meditation isn’t going to go anywhere for me?

This is certainly reflected in my practical decisions over the years.  Like since I’ve been officially retired from UC, I could spend hours every day meditating, go to a zillion retreats, etc., but my expectation of getting somewhere if I do that is pretty low.  Whereas I know I’m doing something useful for other people in my writing and teaching, so I choose to put most of my time into that…. and get rewarded for that when people tell me my writings and lectures help them understand things better.

Anyway, that’s what I wanted to express.  If you feel like talking about it, give me a call when you get a chance – it will always be satisfying to talk with you anyway, my friend!  We’ll be here the rest of this week, then off camping for 10 days.

Charley

* Oh, the sleepiness when meditating I’ve complained about for years?  It turns out from sleep lab studies that I have both obstructive and central apnea, they will probably put me on breathing assist apparatus, maybe I’ve been sleep deprived for years without that being clear.  It will be interesting to see what happens if my night sleep gets deeper….

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Date Filed: August 23, 2010

Hi Charley,

I think part of the problem is from Buddhism itself. Most Buddhist literature gives one the impression that the path is supposed to involve some big spiritual orgasm that happens suddenly and changes one forever. The reason that Buddhist teachers (including myself ) talk about the path in this way is that occasionally something like that does actually happen. When it does, it's quite dramatic. However, it's been my experience that for most people who practice meditation, it doesn't happen that way. Rather the changes are gradual, so gradual that people acclimatize to them and don't really realize how much they've changed.

The other problem is that the changes are not necessarily best measured by insights that occur, but rather in most cases best measured by the amount of suffering that a person would have gone through but didn't go through because of the path. But since that measure is both hypothetical and a measure of absence, it's difficult for most people to realize how HUGE it really is.

So I would say don't worry if you're not getting epiphanies. Your practice as you describe it is just fine.
All the best,
Shinzen

———————
Shinzen Young
Shinzen@MeditationTraining.com
www.BasicMindfulness.org (Phone-based retreats and classes)
www.Shinzen.org (Articles, CDs, onsite retreats)
www.YouTube.com/user/expandcontract (Video talks)
www.YouTube.com/user/ShinzenInterviews (Interviews with Shinzen)

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Thanks, Shinzen.  Your understanding fits.  In many ways, I've had a lot of changes over the years of the "quietly dropping away" of negative stuff sort, often not even noticed for a long time.  My superego has high standards, though, so that isn't good enough for it!

> The other problem is that the changes are not necessarily best measured by insights that occur, but rather in most cases best measured by the amount of suffering that a person would have gone through but didn't go through because of the path. But since that measure is both hypothetical and a measure of absence, it's difficult for most people to realize how HUGE it really is. <

Now there's a challenge for the experimental psychologist in me!  How do I quantify what hasn't happened?       

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Observation reveals…

My mind has scenario generators and there’s practically always one running, either as thoughts (verbal talk/words to myself) or imagery.

The imagery is easy to see as I drift toward sleep, but, while less intense in terms of perceptibility, seem to be there all the time I’m awake.

There’s internally generated imagery, i.e., I don’t know why the particular image/dreamlet should come up at that time, there’s imagery generated by previous imagery or talk of body feelings, and there’s constant imagery in response to sensory input.  I hear a sound, e.g., and even if I don’t consciously want it, a faint visual image of what the object making that sound probably is occurs, and it’s accurately, spatially located in a usually implicit visual map of the space around me.  Like my perceptual processes are getting an image ready if I need it, perhaps to speed other info retrieval in connection with it.

If I’m not exerting some intention to organize my talk and image so they have a goal in mind, they wander all over the place.

If their content were analyzed, I’m sure they would be only partially random or of unknown provenance.  Generally they would reflect my usual personality and concerns, a kind of statistical distribution of “me.”  So I’m not just a random generator, but the lawfulness is hard to see sometimes – why in the world am I thinking about X?

So what is the “I,” the “me” behind this?  I automatically label all this stuff “my” experience, but that’s not just a post hoc intellectual thought, it “feels” like “me” in some hard-to-define sense.

So what might survive death?  A variegated collection of memories held together by intention?  In my alive state, my body must hold a lot of “me” together, as well as habitual and transient intentions?  The body as concretized intentions?

Funny, will, intention are the big things missing from modern psychology.

If intention can hold my current body, thoughts and feelings together, could sufficient intention “possess” a complex computer and organize it into a living, conscious being?

I’m going to go to sleep soon, that means I stop exerting specific intent to be “me,” to be organized, to be anything in particular, and the images will increase, the dreamlets start, and I’m gone….

To be continued 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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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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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 17 of 19 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

CTT: But let’s throw in one more factor here that’s important, especially since so many of us are going to become clinicians, and that’s projection and transference reactions. Every one of us has had the experience of relating to God-like teachers, and that was our parents. When we were infants and little children, our parents, by comparison, were so incredibly knowledgeable and powerful, and could give love or take it away. Freud was quite right in pointing out that this creates very deep, very primitive kinds of attitudes toward powerful figures like that and, without buying all of psychoanalysis, these things happen in later life, so you get transference reactions. Okay?

So these primitive feelings that you had toward your father or mother get transferred to some other living human being who, of course, isn’t your father or mother, and isn’t magical. But some parts of you regard them that way. And I’ve seen a lot of this happen in various spiritual teaching situations. When it first begins to happen, it’s wonderful for the person who experiences it.

You fall in love with your guru. They are so wonderful and what they do works. You have experiences. When you were a little kid and you hurt yourself you ran to mommy and she kissed the boo-boo and made it better. It works! The guru kisses the (psychological) boo-boo and makes it better, and that draws from and stimulates this deep transference kind of reaction in you.

The trouble is that this devotion and appreciation and energy toward following the guru is based on a fundamental error. This person is not your father or mother. You are not a little child. Whether they have any magic abilities or not is a wide open question, but you deep down feel that way. And of course, you rationalize it all as this is their spiritual ability coming through.

The problem with building on this foundation is that transferences can flip from positive to negative if the right circumstances come along. And all of a sudden, this wonderful emissary from God, who loved you and taught you everything you know, is a God damn fucking charlatan who’s been exploiting you the whole time, and you lose everything! All the effort you put in, all the skills you learned, you don’t want to have anything to do with it because it’s gone to a negative transference! All the things you hated about your parents suddenly become projected on to the relationship, smothering the positive projections.

As far as I can tell, most spiritual teachers have very little awareness of the phenomena of transference (or counter-transference, which swells up the ego of the spiritual teacher). And so they have a lot of problems with these sorts of things. They don’t know how to handle them.

One of the early groups I was in was led by Claudio Naranjo, when he was on a very spiritual “high.” And no, I don’t think he was “enlightened,” but he was in touch with something really important. He was also a psychiatrist, and he made his students write essays on their transference relationships with him every once in awhile.

Student: Wow.

CTT: Very unusual kind of approach, which some people, who I think had big transferences, said “This is our opportunity to tell him how much we know he really is God.”

(Laughter)

Scary. Scary.

Let me just finish one other item in this story. Maybe you’ve read about it in the book already; maybe you haven’t. When I ran a mindfulness training group along Gurdjieff lines for about a year and a half, two years, I tried to keep people aware of this transference dimension because I didn’t want that kind of psychological distortion confusing the skills people were learning to be more present.

But it started happening, and I could see it happening. Somebody would ask me a question and I’d say “I don't know the answer to that.” And they’d get this look in their eye that this was a very profound answer on my part.

(Laughter)

And it wasn’t a profound answer. I just didn’t know! So I tried to explain that to them, you know? “Don’t act like that’s profound. I just don’t know.”

(Laughter)

And the look would get deeper.

(Laughter)

He’s very humble, as well as profound!

(Laughter)

I saw this starting to go out of control, so I ended the group, because I didn’t want that kind of crap happening. I didn’t know how to take people through that in a sensible sort of way. But it’s something to always watch out for in any spiritual path that somebody’s on. Transference and a countertransference.

You know I don't know how popular Freud is among clinicians nowadays, but that part of it you should be familiar with, because it’s a very real thing in spiritual circles. And especially because it’s not understood at all, by and large. That makes it all the more powerful. And it’s one of these things that, if you understand it, you have a chance to do something about it.

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Ouspensky weighs in on the 5%

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

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

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

CTT: Ah. Yes.

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

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

Student: Same time.

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

Student: Okay.

CTT: And I hope it’s not true.

Student: Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Laughter)

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

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

(Laughter)

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Motivation and the Five Percent

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Laughter)

Student: That sounds like a great business plan.

(Laughter)

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

(Laughter)

We were thinking of introducing that here at ITP.

(Laughter)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Student: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Laughter)

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

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

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

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

S = PxR

You can do something to reduce the suffering

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(A chorus of “Yes” “The cup.”)

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

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

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

(Laughter) (John rides a motorcycle to ITP)

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

(Laughter)

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

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

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Identity, Self, Karma, Buddhism, Survival of Death, Etc….

Buddhism, as I understand it (and I’m not a scholar, just a beginning but serious student and on-again, off-again practitioner/experimenter and “fooler-arounder”) is a body of knowledge, concepts, and practices about human experience.  Direct experience is the fundamental data of Buddhism, although a lot of Buddhism seems to say, in a way that’s debatable to me, that what is true about experience is true for all of reality.  An interesting idea, but….  As a general expectation (subject to checking and future experience, of course) I suspect most of what Buddhism says about experience is likely to be some of the best “truth” we have about it.  When it comes to the external, physical world, though, I generally expect modern physical science to be more accurate.  “Accurate” or “true” in the sense of a good fit between concept and observable data.  If I need to cross a bridge over a deep chasm, I hope it was designed by a mechanical engineer rather than a (advanced or not) Buddhist meditator…

Gautama Buddha was concerned, like Indian yogis before him, with human suffering and escaping from it.  Traditional yoga taught its adepts how to enter into very deep altered states of consciousness (ASCs), jhanas, in which, among other things, all ordinary suffering (pain, thirst, hunger, worry, etc.) disappeared for the duration of the ASC.  The Buddha mastered these absorptive states but felt they were not enough, because when you came out of them, the troubles you had left behind were still there.  So, as Shinzen Young has pointed out, the Buddha made a great discovery.  If you used the greatly enhanced concentrative and focusing abilities developed to study and examine the basic nature of all mental phenomena, all experience, vipassana meditation, you could see the roots of suffering, and then “tear out” these roots and so end suffering permanently, rather than just having temporary “vacations” in jhana states.  (Although we should note that achievement of any of the jhana states is an amazing accomplishment in itself!)

Buddha insisted things had to be personally discovered, using meditative investigation and examination, not simply believed as some kind of doctrine.

Three of the most basic and necessary (to end suffering) discoveries to be made were anicca, anatta, and dukkha.

The Pali word anicca literally means "inconstant", and refers to the absence of permanence and continuity.  Everything (except perhaps the ultimate nature of awareness- this is a tricky and subtle idea) is in a state of flux, changing as a result of multitudinous causes.  Some things may change rapidly, like our thoughts and feelings, some usually slowly, like a rock, but there are no eternal, unchanging things, totally solid stuffs, everything is actually ongoing process.

The Pali word anatta (or anatman) refers to the absence of any permanent self.  What we usually take to be the self is, like everything else, a series of changing, ongoing processes, causally affected by many other things.  It’s opposed to the Hindu idea of the atman, a permanent, immortal core or soul of a person.

Dukkha refers to the discovery, through deep meditation, as well as ordinary reflection, of the inherent unsatisfactoriness of all factors of ordinary existence.  Facets of dukkha can be expressed with words like suffering, pain, unsatisfactoriness, sorrow, affliction, anxiety, dissatisfaction, discomfort, anguish, stress, misery, and frustration.

So who/what am I, then?  And how can I end my suffering?

Meditative concentration practices teach me to focus and stabilize my mind, so I can then examine it.  Without concentration and stabilization, it’s like trying to examine a fine-detailed painting when all you have by way of light is a sputtering, weak-flamed candle.  As you develop concentration the light of your mental candle, following the analogy, gets bright and steady, so now you can make out details.  You can practice not just concentrative meditation (shamatha) but insight meditation, vipassana.

I have been doing vipassana in various ways for more than 20 years now.  I would never describe myself as an “advanced” or “accomplished” meditator, but I have gotten better at it and so seen some things about the nature of my experience (and presumably about experience in general, ignoring real possibilities of significant individual differences).

-        You can get better at concentration and insight with practice, although it’s taken me a lot of practice!  I started out with a really restless mind, my candle flame flickered wildly in thought gales, but I can steady it moderately well now some of the time.  At other times, the usual thought storms are raging away!

-        Anicca, impermanence, is a good description of my experience, the closer I look the more I see it constantly changing, morphing, flowing, things pop up, stay a bit, alter, disappear, etc., etc., etc.  Even with my conscious, deliberate talking mind being relatively calm, there’s a steady stream of thoughts and thoughtlets, sensations, emotions going on.

-        Anatta, absence of any permanent self, is also a good description of the fact that I can’t find a “watcher” of all these mental phenomena.  Yet “I” obviously “watch” on many occasions.  To believe I have some sort of permanent self is thus a belief with no data to support it in my experience.  Yet I’m obviously here, writing this, “I” exist, so it makes no sense to believe in some sort of nihilism or non-existence.  Practically, I tend to follow Sogyal Rinpoche’s advice here, accept that “I” obviously exist, but don’t take it too seriously or project all sorts of eternal concepts on to that ongoing, changing experience.

(Putting quotes around words like “I” and “watch” is my way of reminding myself and readers to be careful and not take these words literally, they are tricky.)

-        Of courses there is my physical body and brain.  I understand from what we know scientifically that they are processes rather than permanent things, and also know from experience that body sensations change all the time.  Even what appear to be steady ones, if you look closely, are constantly morphing in various ways.  I also understand from simple common sense and instinct that we need to take good care of our physical bodies.  We’ll regret it if we don’t, and even then, my body will ultimately die.

-        In spite of the insistence on anatta, the absence of any permanent self in Buddhism, there is an implicit implication that the ultimate nature of mind, rigpa, is a permanent “thing”/”process” that goes on from life to reincarnate life, as well as being behind all changing experience in this life.  Since I think there’s good (albeit not overwhelming) empirical evidence for the reality of reincarnation for at least some people, I’m willing to accept anatta as just one of the “mysteries,” something we can’t understand with ordinary logic.  It look’s like that’s just how it is, whether we understand it or not.  Buddhist attempts to insist on no permanent self but then have “your” karma go from life to your reincarnate  life always strike me as straining logic, so I don’t worry too much about them.  Twenty-five hundred years of scholars straining to make everything consistent… as a scholar myself, I understand how scholars can get somewhat distant from the actual data while fooling themselves with oh-so-elegant words….

-        My everyday experience of my mind functioning, ordinary or meditative, is obviously an emergent product of whatever the ultimate (life-spanning) core of myself (rigpa plus karma plus ???) is, intimately interacting with the physical and sensory-encoded qualities of my body-based psychology….  I mean “emergent” here in the sense of systems theory, that the whole is more than a simple addition of the parts.

And so…..

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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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