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

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

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

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

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

(A chorus of “Yes” “The cup.”)

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

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

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

(Laughter) (John rides a motorcycle to ITP)

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

(Laughter)

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

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

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

Lecture 4, Part 5 of 19 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CTT: Arms and legs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CTT: This goes back to an idea of Gurdjieff’s that I think is worth talking about, and that’s the idea of the food of impressions. Have you come across that in Ouspensky yet? Yes?

Student: Say it again.

CTT: The food of impressions. We all know that in terms of physical diet there are certain vitamins and minerals we need, and if we don’t get them we get sick. If you don’t get enough Vitamin C, you get scurvy for instance. Deficiency diseases. Gurdjieff said that in the same way that our body needs various elements and enough of them with sufficient purity and quality of them to keep our bodies healthy, a mind needs the food of impressions. Our mind needs to take in information that actually nourishes parts of our mind, in order to maintain it and grow it. And if you don’t get that food of impressions, you get mental deficiency diseases just as you get bodily deficiency diseases.

Now most people, from Gurdjieff’s point of view, since they’re asleep most of the time, are basically eating mental junk food. They’re not getting very high quality impressions because they’re not present, not here-and-now, for all these incredible sensory impressions coming in.

So when you get nothing but junk food, you need a lot of it and it has to be real spicy to try to convince you that you’re getting something. If you’re not bringing awareness like you are now to your sensory impressions, and so affecting them in a way that turns them into high quality nourishment, then you don’t get enough nourishment and you get these mental and emotional deficiency diseases, which produces a feeling of experiential hunger at some level. Then you’re liable to do funny or dangerous or pathological things to try to get more impressions.

So, for example, some of the Sufis say — and Gurdjieff would go along with this — we need a certain amount of attention paid to us. We need it from other people. We’ve got to be recognized. We’ve got to be paid attention to. Normally we get that from our parents when we’re very little, but some parents don’t give their kids enough attention.

So what’s one way of getting attention? Be bad! It’s much better to be shouted at or spanked, and get some attention, even if it’s not the best quality attention, than to starve for attention. Very weird.

Psychotherapy has all these theories about what you do and all these techniques and whatnot. Maybe the main effective thing is the fact that the client is getting a good steady input of quality attention from a therapist, and that attention will do a lot, just as attention per se, quite aside from any specifics of its content.

Where did we start on this? I remembered my arms and legs but I lost the beginning point.

Student: Food of impressions.

CTT: Food of impressions. Right! I’ve never seen this idea developed in standard psychological texts and probably not even in the transpersonal texts, per se. I’ve mainly seen it in Gurdjieff, but I think there’s a lot of truth to it.

It came in as part of the basis of transpersonal through humanistic psychology, mainly in all the body based therapies that came along. They give you a certain kind of food of impressions with body based massage therapies, physical releases, and things of that sort. Again, they also just give you a lot of attention. So sometime when you’re seeing a client some day and you’re listening to the problem and you don’t have any idea exactly what to do, at least pay good attention to them. They can usually sense at some level when they’re getting good attention.

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Lecture 4, Part 3 of 19 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

Student: I have a question about when you were talking about when your mind is running, or your imagination is running away or running rampant.

CTT: Who was talking about that?

Student: I think you were.

CTT: I was? Oh. Okay.

Student: I guess this was a dialogue between you and one of the students, or maybe that was something else I was thinking about. Trying to do the sensing to be present, so that your mind will be filled up with focusing on the hearing this, the seeing or the sensing that. Then it won’t have enough room for the mind to wander or to keep on going.

So when my imagination was running I tried doing that, and then at that moment I was okay with it. Then it seemed like it would kind of start up again when I was finished, so I tried to do that again, you know? And it took a long time for my imagination to shut up. Do you have any advice on that?

CTT: Has it started up again?

Student: Yeah. Sure.

CTT: Yeah. One of the places I trained in Aikido many years ago, I don’t recall which one, had a little exercise where we each had a plastic golf tube. Do you know what those things are? They’re long plastic tubes that golf clubs are normally stored in to protect them from being dinged. I don't know how I ever got one in the first place, but they make great toys for whacking each other because you can’t really hurt anybody with them.

There was an Aikido exercise where you each held one of those like it was a sword. We were facing each other and your job was to strike the other person when you thought you’d get away with it, before they could move to block it. So what you had to do was pay very close attention and stay in the present yourself, while watching your partner to see when her or his attention flickered away for a moment. If you struck then, you could usually hit them. It was a very revealing exercise.

As a general model, not as the absolute truth – I don't know what the absolute truth is about anything – but as a general model, it’s useful to say we have a certain fixed maximum quantity of attention; let's arbitrarily say seven units, or something like that. It’s only under extraordinary circumstances you might have more, like eight or nine units. So normally it’s always seven.

What do you do with that seven? Normally processes come along like imagination, daydreaming, worrying – automatic reactions to events that happen to us, that grab a lot of that attention and use it up, which reactions trigger other automatic processes on and on and on.

When you are forced to pay attention by the threat of somebody hitting you in that little golf tube sword game, for instance, there isn’t much energy left over for your imagination to work with. Some English literary figure, I forget who, and it’s been said in various forms by a lot of other people too, said something like there’s nothing like knowing you’re going to be hanged in the morning to focus your mind! And there’s something very satisfying about being focused, compared to our usual drifting, with attention moving all over the place.

That’s one of the reasons that Gurdjieff said something that nobody ever likes. I don't know if you’ve come across it in the Ouspensky book yet or not, but he said we’ll probably never get rid of wars because wars force you to concentrate on the present. When somebody’s trying to kill you, those who survive get really focused in the present, and there’s something very satisfying about that! And so some perverse part of our mind is going to keep right on creating wars because we like the thrill of that focus when it comes. I don’t like the idea at all but I think there’s a fair amount of psychological truth to it. That real danger gives a focus of intensity in the now.

Similarly, there’s a lot of other stuff we do that are imitations of that but not quite so serious, like go to horror movies. I think, “Why would any sane creature go to a horror movie?” Yet they’re very popular. But it gets us focused on what’s going to happen when the cellar door creaks open.

(Laughter)

But if you learn to focus your attention more directly, you don’t have to depend on indirect things to get that focus. You don’t have to start a war or do something stupid that will put you in a dangerous situation that will force you to pay attention. You can get that satisfaction of being in the present moment in a direct sort of way, and…

Are we still in the present moment? Got some arms or legs or other body parts in there as well as ears and eyes? Good. I’ll keep reminding you once in awhile.

Student: I guess that’s why people like extreme sports like rock climbing.

CTT: Yep. A sport where you must pay precise attention to exactly what’s happening moment by moment, because if you drift away, you get killed. It’s high motivation!

Student: I have a race bike that I ride on a road race track, motorcycle and that. Before I knew anything about this, several years ago I had said that when you’re going into a corner at 100 miles an hour there’s nothing more important than what’s going to happen in the next few seconds. You’re more mindful there because you also have to stay relaxed to be successful, so there’s a lot of conflict.

CTT: Not the time to think about your relationships and what you should have said when she said after he said…. Yeah! Focuses you in! So this class and practice is not an extreme sport, what we’re doing in here, but it can produce similar effects of bringing you into the present.

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

Lecture 4, Part 2 of 19 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

CTT: So take a minute to look at the comments on your paper. You might not have a response to them. You might. It might also remind you of something that you wanted to bring up from the readings or the last class.

But remember to always try to keep some part of your awareness in your body in the here and now.

Now when somebody does ask a question or brings up a point, listen to what they say. Your thinking mind is obviously going to be engaged, but keep some of your awareness in body sensation: in the sound of their voice, in the sight of what you’re seeing, rather than just trip off on the concepts the way we so often do. We’ll see what that does.

Student: I notice when I’m trying or when I am more present that my contacts bother me, because I have a harder time seeing with lenses. If I’m doing Aikido, it’s better if I don’t have my contacts in. I can see much better when I’m being more present. So right now you told us to focus, and I notice them kind of start pulling out, like as a filter.

CTT: You think it’s literally a change in the muscular structure of your eye that’s forcing them, rather than just more awareness of a sensation that was there all the time?

Student: I wonder if my eyes are just more relaxed.

CTT: That could be.

Student: They’re not trying to see detail. It’s like the soft focus of the person, you know?

CTT: They do teach soft focus vision here as part of Aikido, yes?

Student: Yeah. And I have a wider perception, like trying to see everything in the room versus trying to read just that.

CTT: That’s interesting. I’d still raise the question of whether it’s an actual change in your eyes, it might be, or whether it’s a sensation that’s always there but normally you’re too involved in other kinds of things to notice it.

One of the frequent reports I get when I teach mindfulness and have people start sensing their arms and legs, or the more formal Vipassana sensing your whole body, is that some people say this is really uncomfortable or painful. Because some people discover that the ordinary, “normal” state of their body is tense painfulness. But normally they’re going too fast to notice it. They’re distracted from that. If they start bringing some awareness back to the present, to the body, they notice it. So the tendency, of course, is to not want to do it, to just continue to rush along, but that doesn’t really solve the problem of the body being uncomfortable and tense.

As I think we talked a little bit about last time, if you become more clearly aware of your body, even working on being equanimous toward it rather than trying to make it better or something, there’s a tendency for the body to relax and drop the unnecessary tensions just by being more aware.

The analogy often used is that the unconscious is psychological processes that go on in the dark, that we don’t have conscious awareness of, and when you start shining the light on them, they can be dissolved. Not all of them. Some of them take much more intense, therapeutic kinds of work, but there are a fair number of things which if you simply become clearly, consciously aware of them — habits, attitudes, stances, things like that — they dissolve away.

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

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

Do absolutely no harmful or evil actions.

Build up plenty of good karma through virtuous actions.

Tame this mind of ours.

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

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

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

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

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

Lecture 4, Part 2 of 19 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

Sorry this one is a little late in going up, I've been on a 10-day meditation retreat, pretty heavy…..

CTT: So we’re trying to be bodily present in the here and now. I’ll give reminders once in a while, but otherwise we'll have a more general discussion. What I’m going to do is something I normally never do until the end of class, and that is to pass your last two papers back with my comments on them. I’ll give you a few minutes to look at those because I often make notes on them that you should bring such and such a topic up in class. You often raise issues of general interest and importance, and then it tends to be forgotten a week or two later when the opportunity might arise to bring it up in class, so I thought I’d spark the discussion in this particular fashion.

Start some of them going this way and, like passing the pad around, remain aware of your body, what’s happening in the here and now. You may find it helpful to slow down ever so slightly while you do it because that often aids mindfulness, to just do ordinary actions at a slightly different speed from usual. I should warn you that if you make that slight slowing a practice in everyday life, though, you will be subject to more scrutiny.

(Laughter)

Student: Really?

CTT: It’s quite amazing. I used to teach a humanistic and transpersonal psychology class at U.C. Davis, which was a long class. We’d have a coffee break in the middle and often walk over to the coffee shop across the quadrangle. As a mindfulness exercise, I would tell people to just do everything normally, but walk maybe 5 percent slower than usual.

Now in the grand cosmic scheme of things, and with natural variability, walking 5 percent slower than normal shouldn’t mean a thing. It has no significance whatsoever. But my students were always conscious of how other people who weren’t in the class would look at them. They sensed something funny was happening.

I may have gotten the idea from a colleague who told me about a trip he’d taken to Istanbul. He was being shown around the city by a friend and the markets especially were very crowded. It was hard to get anywhere. So the friend told him “Oh, we’ll walk slightly slower than normal, because that’s what wise men do, and we won’t have any trouble getting around.” And sure enough, by a very slight drop in speed, crowds just automatically parted and they could go wherever they wanted. So now you know how to fake being wise.

(Laughter)

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

Lecture 4, Part 2 of 19 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

CTT: So we’re trying to be bodily present in the here and now. I’ll give reminders once in a while, but otherwise we'll have a more general discussion. What I’m going to do is something I normally never do until the end of class, and that is to pass your last two papers back with my comments on them. I’ll give you a few minutes to look at those because I often make notes on them that you should bring such and such a topic up in class. You often raise issues of general interest and importance, and then it tends to be forgotten a week or two later when the opportunity might arise to bring it up in class, so I thought I’d spark the discussion in this particular fashion.

Start some of them going this way and, like passing the pad around, remain aware of your body, what’s happening in the here and now. You may find it helpful to slow down ever so slightly while you do it because that often aids mindfulness, to just do ordinary actions at a slightly different speed from usual. I should warn you that if you make that slight slowing a practice in everyday life, though, you will be subject to more scrutiny.

(Laughter)

Student: Really?

CTT: It’s quite amazing. I used to teach a humanistic and transpersonal psychology class at U.C. Davis, which was a long class. We’d have a coffee break in the middle and often walk over to the coffee shop across the quadrangle. As a mindfulness exercise, I would tell people to just do everything normally, but walk maybe 5 percent slower than usual.

Now in the grand cosmic scheme of things, and with natural variability, walking 5 percent slower than normal shouldn’t mean a thing. It has no significance whatsoever. But my students were always conscious of how other people who weren’t in the class would look at them. They sensed something funny was happening.

I may have gotten the idea from a colleague who told me about a trip he’d taken to Istanbul. He was being shown around the city by a friend and the markets especially were very crowded. It was hard to get anywhere. So the friend told him “Oh, we’ll walk slightly slower than normal, because that’s what wise men do, and we won’t have any trouble getting around.” And sure enough, by a very slight drop in speed, crowds just automatically parted and they could go wherever they wanted. So now you know how to fake being wise.

(Laughter)

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