Notes on an event in a 50+ year attempt to learn and benefit from spiritual practices….

For some years now, I have been trying various meditation techniques from many world traditions, particularly techniques which meditation teacher Shinzen Young has modified in various ways to make more sense to and be more doable by modern people.  A month ago, I was participating in one of Shinzen's monthly telephone retreats.  For these, 20 to 50 people telephone  into a conference call number and Shinzen leads us in some guided meditation for 2 to 4 hours.  There's time for reports and questions at the end, and often individual phone consultation with him during a break in the middle of the period.  These "mini-retreats" are a very useful way to stay connected to intensive meditation practice, and much more convenient, inexpensive and practical than flying off to some residential retreat site.

On this particular day, I was participating in a two-hour guided meditation session on a technique Shinzen calls "Do Nothing" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZ6cdIaUZCA).  The basic instruction here is that you don't attempt to do anything in particular, to have any kind of particular meditation experience, or to "correct" or guide what happens in your mind during the meditation.  Indeed, the instruction is that if you sense that you intend to change something, relax that intention.  You're not actively looking for such intentions – that would be doing – but, if intentions are noticed, you drop them, relax them.

This is a technique I have not tried much and which I find rather difficult.  But I also find it quite interesting, as I think becoming aware of intentions, especially subtle intentions, as they first well up my mind, is an important factor for my spiritual growth.

Fairly far along in meditation, after a little period of quiet, Shinzen instructed us that the search was over, we didn't have to do anything, we didn't have to try to make anything happen or not happen.  As he said that, a deep feeling of sadness suddenly welled up in me and tears came to my eyes.  I realized that I have never stopped trying! My entire life, from childhood on, has been spent trying to do the "right thing" at practically every moment!  Even though I appear to be a relaxed and easy-going person, even though I think I'm actually quite relaxed compared to people in general, in the background I'm always trying to figure out what the right thing to do is and to do it.  Not that this was and is a "bad" thing to do, but I just suddenly realized how very, very tired of trying I was!  I hoped that someday I would be able to stop for a while and get some rest.  But it was a very faint hope, I was always, always trying, why would anything change?

After a few moments the feeling passed, the tears dried, and I went back to the do nothing practice.  At the end of this telephone meditation retreat I didn't think anything special about it, other than that this insight about how tired I was of always trying, had happened.

Rancho Palos Verdes Retreat – Flow

Two weeks later, my wife Judy and I are at a Catholic nunnery and retreat Center in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, for a 12 day retreat with Shinzen.  While I know he will present a variety of techniques for people to try, with the aim of finding what works well for you or simply making your mind more flexible, I've already decided that I'm going to concentrate on meditation procedures for sensing "flow."  That is, whatever sensory channel I'm paying attention to, input from the five classical senses or the actions of my mind (visual imagery or internal talk), I'm going to try to be aware, with concentration, clarity, and equanimity, not only of the particulars of the content at any moment, but of the way it changes from moment to moment, its flow.  Flow is Shinzen's modern term, which he thinks covers most, if not all, understandings of the crucial concept of "impermanence" in Buddhism.

If I happen to be meditating with my eyes closed, for example, observing visual imagery on my inner mental screen, I might notice that it's relatively restful at this moment, mainly black-and-white or faintly colored dots flickering on and off, like looking at static, "snow" on a TV set tuned to a channel which has no broadcast on it.  But the flickering on and off of these dots can actually be seen as flow, one momentary pattern changing into another.  Indeed, more specific imagery will almost certainly appear as I continue to pay attention, and one image will morph, will flow into another and another and other.  A brief image of a car driving along a highway, e.g., morphs into a forest, which morphs into clouds in the sky, which morphs into a wall, etc., etc.  Keeping aware of these changes, with equanimity, concentration, and clarity, is what Shinzen describes as meditating on flow or impermanence.

Peace – Resting in the "Nature of Mind?"  Or?

To my surprise – except I didn't really feel surprised at the time – I had five or six experiences, each 5 to 20 min. or so long, that were, from their own internal perspective, nothing special, but, from the perspective of my ordinary mind activity, were extraordinary!  I didn't do anything that had the intention of bringing these specific experience or states on, or to maintain them, or to prolong them.

While there is much formal meditating in the zendo (meditation hall) during Shinzen's retreats, one can attend these or not, as one wishes, and I often skip a number of these formal sessions in order to meditate outside in nature.  The retreat center is very pleasant that way, located in the hills above Los Angeles, and having a relatively undeveloped area off the parking lot with bushes, pine trees, etc. as well as more formal gardens and lawns.  In these "extraordinary but nothing special experiences," I would be sitting in a chair, looking off into the distance or at nearby pine trees or bushes, and practicing the previously described observation of flow meditation.  With my eyes open there was always flow in the sensory world: the movement of tree branches in the wind, occasional people walking at a distance, changing automobile noises from cars passing on a nearby road, etc.  With my eyes closed there was always plenty of flow in terms of morphing body sensations, morphing internal visual imagery and morphing internal talking.

Then I would notice, usually when my eyes were open, that I was "at peace."  That phrase doesn't quite describe it accurately, but I'm at something of a loss for words here – which is unusual for me, a champion talker.  I would be just sitting there, looking at the pine trees, for example, and find I was just contentedly sitting there looking at the pine trees.  I was awake and alert, but no longer doing any kind of technique, I was not wishing for anything in particular to happen or not happen.  I wouldn't say I was practicing the "Do-Nothing" technique, rather I wasn't striving to do or not do anything at all, I was just here, and now.  There was no effort, no striving involved in maintaining this feeling of peace, of calm presence.

I'm tempted to describe this as an experience of Peace, capital P, but from the inside it simply wasn't any big deal.  It's only from my ordinary perspective of knowing how incredibly rare an experience like this is in my life, especially one lasting more than a few seconds, that I realize how extra-ordinary it was.

I think I have experienced something like this only once before in my life.  Several summers ago my wife and I were on a Dzogchen retreat with lama  Tsoknyi  Rinpoche at his country center, Rangjung Yeshe Gomde, in northern  California.  After one of the teaching sessions one afternoon, we found ourselves just sitting on the hillside, watching the clouds move, feeling the wind blow, and the touch of the sun on our skins.  It was just so very peaceful and natural.  Again I make that statement as if this were very special, a retrospective judgment, but at the time it was just natural to simply be there for a few minutes, enjoying the sun, the wind, and the sights.

Although Shinzen's was a silent retreat, I did have my little pocket voice recorder with me, and since I was far enough away from others to not disturb their silence, I dictated occasional notes, trying to capture something of the essence of the experience.  Here's one dictated after several previous occurrences of this sort.

A moment outside that I think of as a Dzogchen moment.  I'm relaxed and enjoying the touch of the sun on my skin, the warm temperature.  The sound of a chain saw being used nearby is just the sound of a chainsaw, I'm not taking it as annoying, "What a horrible noise spoiling this peaceful place!"  My mind is spacious.  I'm not particularly trying to improve things.  I wouldn't say I'm Here and Now in any profound sense, I'm just here and now, quietly enjoying sitting or walking around.  I didn't do anything in particular to bring it on, except perhaps expected it, as it's happened several times already on this retreat.  I was doing a meditation, mainly on flow, a few minutes ago.

Rigpa, or Resting in the Nature of Mind?

Although I've been a student of lama Sogyal Rinpoche for many years, primarily trying to understand and practice his Dzogchen teachings about rigpa, the ultimate nature of mind, I've always had trouble, though, understanding what "rigpa" means, what "resting in the nature of mind" means.  Sometimes I think I basically understand it, sometimes I'm not at all sure that I understand any aspect of it.  The last few years I've felt that any intellectual attempt of mine to evaluate whether a particular experience is indeed "rigpa" or "resting in the nature of mind" always has the answer, "No."  If I'm trying to intellectually pin it down, I am in an ordinary intellectual state, not in rigpa.

As Sogyal Rinpoche's translation of a Tibetan prayer, Dudjom Rinpoche's Calling the Lama from Afar puts it,

Buddhahood is not attained by fabricated Dharmas;

Meditation made by the mind, fabricated by the intellect, is the deceiving enemy.

During these periods of peace, I felt that this was it, or at least a small manifestation of resting in the nature of mind…..

Because I hadn't done anything specifically aimed at bringing these episodes on, one of my notes concluded:

So an important part of "resting in the nature of mind" is not wanting it to be anything in particular.

Thoughts

As I understand it at this time, one of the clearest understandings Buddhism has is that our thoughts often run wild and both delude us and create all sorts of unnecessary suffering.  In my experience, though, this insight is linked to other teachings in many sources about thoughts that make it sound like a state with no thoughts at all is the ideal one.  I know intellectually this is an extreme I think is wrong, for as Sogyal Rinpoche has often taught it's not the arising of thoughts that's a problem, it's the "running after them," getting identified with them and tangled up in them in maladaptive and crazy ways that's the problem.

As I noted during one of these episodes at the retreat,

It's not like I don't have any thoughts.  Thoughts come occasionally, but not steadily, not all the time.  They're not terribly "loud," they don't automatically dominate my mind.  I still maintain some touch with the world around me, and can easily let the thoughts go.

Physical Pain

One of the reasons I had decided to focus on meditation on flow on this retreat was that I thought developing more skill at it would be helpful in dealing with my chronic, daily headaches.  If I could focus on various aspects of pain with concentration, clarity, and equanimity, and then see how these characteristics continually changed, either slowly or rapidly, I think the physical pain would create less suffering.  And indeed, I have found this to be true to some extent, although I'm not that good yet at meditating on flow.  The suffering is definitely reduced during a headache while I concentrate on observing flow.  Unfortunately, as soon as I stop doing the formal meditation technique, the headache comes back with its previous intensity, but Shinzen agrees with me that there will probably eventually be carryover from developing skill in meditating on flow that will reduce headache pain.  Here's a note I made on this during one of these peace episodes.

As I sit here, mainly just being present, looking out at the trees and grounds, I feel a headache coming on.  I can feel that the pain that kind of "squeezes," contracts my head is also kind of "squeezing," contracting my consciousness, reducing its clarity and scope.  I don't know whether it's "squeezing" it directly, or just triggering worries that the pain will get worse, so I worry that I should hurry to take some medication.  But it will be interesting to see if I can stay in this nature of mind – dare I use that phrase?  …..   Wow, the pain still builds some…

It's a few seconds later and I'd say yes, I can stay in this "nature of mind," at least temporarily.  I say that because it's easier to just relax, to just let go of a train of thought and come back to the present moment.

Comparison of Peace and Self-Remembering

This is not like Gurdjieffian self-remembering, sensing looking and listening (SLL) usually is for me.  SLL involves a deliberate distribution of attention, a small part of my attention keeping track of body sensations (usually those of the arms and legs), more devoted to listening to the qualities of whatever sounds occur, and, since vision is our dominant sense, most devoted to attentive looking at sight qualities.  For SLL, there is a small effortful quality to it, you have to do it, and when you stop doing it, it's effects (usually but not always aliveness and sensory clarity) stop.  These peace experiences, though, were spontaneous.  I didn't "start" them, I didn't "end" them.

What's amazing to me now is how it (this state) just goes on relatively continuously, rather than being (when I make deliberate attempts to rest in the nature of mind at other times) just sort of a second or so long, being rather undefined, being hard to see whether I've made any change as a result of my making an effort to turn my mind inward.  I guess I'm blest!

Dzogchen teachings, as I understand them, typically say that when you are resting in the nature of mind, there's no need to do anything else, no need to apply some specific meditative technique, but that if you do engage in such a technique, it is more effective than if you are in your ordinary state of consciousness.  I recalled this during one of these peace states, and decided to try a specific technique.

I just did the hundred syllable mantra, intending it as a blessing on the world, while I was resting in this nature of mind.  It's different than when I do it normally, it just flows more naturally, without being such a big deal.  Yet it takes away from the resting in the nature of mind to some degree to try to do it deliberately, to do a directed practice like this.  Perhaps it would get easier with practice, with "getting used to."  There's that wonderful phrase that Sogyal Rinpoche uses all the time, "getting used to."

Cessation of the Experience of Peace

Anything that starts also ends, and so

I'm now feeling, maybe half an hour after this clarity began, that it's starting to fade.  It doesn't particularly matter to me, it's just change….

But given how satisfying these experiences were, wouldn't I very much want them to continue?

One of the curious things about my experiences of peace is that I'm not particularly attached to them.  I sort of hope they will occur once in a while again, but it's no big deal!  It's nice to know I can be like that.  I don't think I'd want to be like that all the time, though, I don't think it would be very good for doing my primary work on bridging science and spirituality, writing, and so forth.  Curious that I'm not feeling attached.

Knowing With Words and Intellect, Deeper Knowing

Finally I should note how intellectual knowledge can long precede direct knowledge.  That's not bad, but it's not the same thing at all.  

Many years ago, intellectually I had the understanding that it was good to develop an "observer" separate from the ongoing content of experience, as it increased your freedom, but that this observer could indeed ossify and turn into something rigid itself, which prevented freedom, so you later had to break loose from this.  Perhaps I'm now ready to see it on a deeper level than just intellectually

And So……

All this reminds me of Gurdjieff's admonition to work as if everything depends on work, pray as if everything depends on prayer.  Do what I can and do it well, and be open to "gifts."  My intellectual mind that likes to understand things (on its own terms!) can't see a clear reason why these peace experiences happened.  Oh a vague one, yes, all these years of a variety of psychological clearing and spiritual development practices laid the groundwork, but that's not at all specific.  So perhaps I should just relax and accept that, in some deep sense, this was a gift?  And while I want to continue my work of bringing science and spirituality closer, knowing that it's possible to be at peace like this sometimes is indeed a great gift…..

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Mindfulness

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

Lecture 5, Part 8 of 18 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

CTT: And that’s the problem with concentrative meditation. With concentrative meditation, some people can develop an enormous amount of concentration power, and they can get rid of pain because basically they’re focused here, and the pain’s there, so it’s gone. They’re all here.

But what else are they missing if they’re all focused here? That’s why the Buddha, who had mastered concentrative meditation, realized this was not a real end to suffering. When you were in these concentrative states – these jhana states – you got away from all ordinary pains, but eventually you had to pee, to come back from your abstracted, concentrated state to the ordinary, bodily world, and the same chronic problems were still there waiting for you. That’s what spurred him to develop Vipassana, the insight kind of meditation.

Student: I got food poisoning a few years ago, and I actually tried to go into it briefly. Instead I ended up whining like a baby for several hours. So with something really intense like that, I’m just curious. What if the pain is driving you to delirium; is that still handle-able?

CTT: I’d say head to the ER instantly so somebody can be checking you from the medical side, and meanwhile you can be doing your internal practicing. In the case of chronic pains, where you know it’s not a medical problem that needs external attention, then sure, the internal approach is fine. But I mean, common sense would suggest that when you get some sudden, strong pain, that says something is wrong! Maybe something is badly wrong. So, again, we’ve got a lot of experts around here in modern life, doctors, who can check that for us.

Student: This discussion has made me think about – I haven’t been through this experience, but I can imagine childbirth is incredibly intense, and there’s a –

CTT: My women friends told me my kidney stone was like childbirth.

Student: Oh, is that right?

CTT: It’s a much smaller baby, but it’s a much smaller “birth canal!”

Student: I can only imagine.

CTT: And they routinely give twice the analgesic Demerol for kidney stones that they do for childbirth.

Student: Yeah. Yeah. Okay –

CTT: But I’d just as soon leave these woman’s mysteries to you ladies!

(Laughter)

Student: I can only imagine. But there’s a whole movement now around the mindfulness technique. Obviously a lot of women opt for natural childbirth, but now there’s this newer component of the mindfulness training – mindful birthing.

Apparently, if you are really present with it, the oxytocin rush after the contraction is just, like, really blissful. That is, you can actually feel how good it is after the contraction. Because if you’re resisting the pain the whole time – this is apparently the premise, and the people who have gone through it have said that it’s true – there’s resisting, resisting, and that’s your posture through the whole thing.

CTT: Yes.

Student: Whereas if you’re really mindful and get through the contraction, then you actually enjoy the – you know, your little gift after each one.

(Laughter)

Apparently it’s the chemical part, which it’s really interesting how so many people go through it and the whole thing – three, four, or six hours, however long – is really painful and difficult. Whereas just the shift of being present with it allows your body to actually experience what the chemicals are trying to help your body experience.

CTT: Oh. Yes. In Buddhist cosmology – and don’t ask me to check this against Gurdjieff’s various levels in all this, because I don’t know if this is true; it’s just interesting – they talk about different realms of existence, which some Buddhists take them as literally existing: the god realm, the demigod realm, the hungry ghost, the hell realm, things like that. Other Buddhists talk about them as if these are really psychological analogies. You know, you can find the warring “demigods” on Wall Street, struggling desperately against each other to make more money and all that.

But Buddhism does teach that the human realm, here, where we are, has the right balance of happiness and pain to be the optimal place to seek enlightenment. There’s enough suffering here to motivate you to want to do something, but there’s enough opportunity here to be able to do something effectively about it.

Pain is one of those inevitable things, you know. You’ve got a body. You’re going to get some pains occasionally. We can’t really forget about it – not that we have any choice, since we’re all here in the human realm – so let’s make the most of it.

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One of these paths, centered around the vipassana-type meditations I've learned from Shinzen Young, is about exploring the deeper nature of my mind.  On it, typically I'm sitting still with my eyes closed, observing some set of internal reactions.  If I'm paying attention to external sensations, like sound, still, my primary interest is in the internal reactions that are created, and in learning how to observe them with concentration, clarity and equanimity.  On this path, I learned a lot about how my mind works, either in response to sensory stimuli, or how it functions when it's not being driven by external stimuli, not being engaged in coping with the external world, but running on its own.  For example, I've learned how difficult it is for me to follow the simple instruction to simply pay equanimous attention to the qualities of sensation X, without getting lost in acceptance or rejection, or trying to change X, or trying to prolong or shorten it.  One of the most insightful things I see, even after years of practice, is that there are usually subtle biases to try to make my experience be of such-and-such quality, rather than simply observing it as it is.

I feel like this exploration of the inner workings of my mind gives me a deeper understanding of myself, and I have some faith that, as Shinzen says, paying equanimous and clear attention to these internal processes eventually clears out a lot of junk in the way the mind functions.  It also trains the skills of concentration and clarity.

The other main line is centered around my Dzogchen practice with Sogyal Rinpoche.  Now I should qualify what I'm going to say by noting that I consider myself a "poor" student in terms of what I think is the standard model of a "good" Vajrayana student.  I don't do the various sadhana, mantra-type practices, simply because I have no real faith that they will somehow make me acquire a lot of merit which will automatically up the quality of my spiritual life.  It would take a lot of time and energy to do 100,000 of this, that, or the other practice, and I think that, for me, that time is better spent in my work advancing knowledge as a transpersonal psychologist.  These kind of practices undoubtedly work for other people, but they just don't appeal to or resonate with me.  At times I worry that this means that I'm never going to make much spiritual progress because I am a "bad" student and I'm not following the basic instructions.  At other times I remember, because of course I'm motivated to remember this, that Sogyal Rinpoche says he offers a lot of practices, and while he recommends them all, he also strongly recommends that you find the practices that inspire you and work for you, and concentrate on them.

I should also add my usual qualification that my feeling of whether I understand the basic Dzogchen approach varies wildly, ranging from "I think I basically understand the main practice" to "I have no idea what they are talking about!"  So I need to occasionally evaluate what I think I do or don't know, but not get too attached to such evaluations…..

The Dzogchen practice which is of most concern to me is that of suddenly turning the mind inward, instead of being lost in the ongoing contents of mind, lost in one's "story."  This is based on the traditional teaching that samsara is mind turned outward, lost in its projections, nirvana is mind turned inward, directly seeing its own true nature.  When I take a moment to turn the mind inward, there is usually a brief moment to a few seconds in which the ongoing stories and reactions I was having to various content before, my "story," dies back down, and I'm simply here, now.  The vast majority of the time, my experience is that it's nothing "special."  I'm just here, now.

This is, in one way, a great disappointment to me in terms of my expectation that Dzogchen, touted as a fast path to enlightenment, would produce all sorts of wonderful spiritual experiences that would reassure me that I was on The Path and doing the right thing.  But I've decided that, in general, I'm not the kind of person who has extraordinary experiences, but I am a sensible, grounded person, able to be somewhat helpful to others.  Whether this is a rationalization for my inability to practice in a way that produces "spiritual" experiences, or whether it's the truth, I don't know.  Again a concept that is useful in some ways, but which I had better not got too attached to…..

On the other hand, since my usual state is to be lost in my thoughts and reactions to external situations, samsara, these occasional moments of simply being calmly here and now are rather extraordinary, extra-ordinary, outside or beyond the ordinary.

I'm seeing my current spiritual practice, then, as following these two main paths.  Usually I sit for 20 minutes or so each day to do eyes closed, vipassana-type meditation, and sometimes when doing this I learn something new about the nature of my mind.  Usually it's just a calming, restful period of time.  As to its long-term "purification" effects, I'm not sure, I hope that's what's happening, as Shinzen believes.  The Dzogchen practice of turning the mind inward, on the other hand, I find useful primarily in the midst of ordinary life.

Although it would probably be a mistake to totally equate them, I find this Dzogchen turning inward practice ("resting in the nature of mind" or "rigpa") to be like Gurdjieffian self-remembering practice.  In both cases I deliberately use my attention and intention to stop being caught up in the ongoing, unceasing story of reactions of my mind and come to the present.  As I've written elsewhere, when I first began doing this Gurdjieffian practice, for many years the immediate effect was a feeling of not only being here-and-now but of being much more alive, much more in contact with my environment and with myself.  Now it seldom seems that special, it's just here-and-now, but that's still quite good!

Okay, this is all very nice, but I must remember that the primary point is learning to be in the present, here-and-now, accurately perceiving what's happening outside and inside, rather than coming up with more and more clever sets of words and concepts about what's going on!

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I knew this to be true from modern psychological studies.  Our common sense model is that perception is accurate, seeing, e.g., is like taking a picture with a camera, whatever is actually in front of your eyes registers on the film, and we think a picture never lies.  "Seeing is believing."  Of course with modern digital cameras and software to edit photos, we now know a finished photo may be very different from what was actually in front of the camera.  Similarly psychological research in the last century has shown over and over that perception is seldom a simple registration of what's actually there, it's much more a form of high-speed (you think it's instant), automatized thinking, a construction that's a guess as to what's there.  But presented as an obviously real perception, with no "best guess" label attached.  For us digital types, it's better to see the eyes, e.g., as a digital camera and there's Photoshop type processing automatically going on before we perceive the picture.  How this biological Photoshop alters the picture has a lot to do with our emotions, our personality, and our cultural conditioning.  Believing is seeing, or at least has a lot to do with what you perceive.

I notice this once in a while in myself.  Sometimes I look out my bedroom window at night, e.g., and notice a tree in a neighbor's yard is underlit by a floodlight, it's very pretty.  Except as I look more closely I realize I'm seeing a patch of partly lit night sky through the trees, not an underlit tree.  I've seen this many times, but still often at first see the illusion, then suddenly it switches – my biological Photoshop changes its functioning – and it's a patch of dim night sky.  I can almost never switch it back, but next time it may happen again.

In spite of intellectual knowledge about "Believing is seeing," though, I seldom think that this is something that applies to me.  After all, I'm a scientist, I strive to perceive accurately and like to believe I'm good at that!

So I was somewhat startled, then pleasantly surprised when I had a strong personal demonstration that "believing is seeing" this morning.

Our neighbors are having their kitchen remodeled, and I looked out our living room window and noticed that a couple of workers were rolling a very heavy looking machine across the street toward the kitchen.  I wasn't quite sure what the machine was for, but I thought it was a tile cutting machine, something I know is heavy and massive.  A few minutes later I looked out our kitchen window, and could see their truck parked across the street, which I figured would give me a clue as to what kind of machine it was.  The distance was sufficient that it was somewhat difficult for me to see clearly, but I could make out a company name and, by squinting a little, underneath the company name it said "tile floors."  The figure below gives you an idea of the level of clarity I could see with from a distance.

I went and told my wife that it was now clear that our neighbors were installing a tile floor on their kitchen, and we would probably hear a fair amount of noise during the day as they cut tiles.

Imagine my surprise a few minutes later when my wife told me that our neighbors had had a hardwood floor put down yesterday, and the machine I had seen was a large floor sander!  I now went and looked at their truck from closer window and, as the figure below shows, the words below their company name clearly says "hardwood floors!"

I can't say there were any powerful emotions driving this, but what a clear example that "seeing is believing!"  I had decided a tile floor was going down, and under somewhat difficult seeing conditions, I saw my proof in the words on the side of the truck.  I think this is especially amazing, as the word "hardwood" is twice as long as the word "tile" would be.

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The first level, what we might call the level of not particularly dealing with an emotion, is the ordinary level of simply and automatically identifying with the emotion as it occurs.  This is the automatization of ordinary consciousness.  The emotion then mobilizes most or all of your consciousness to fit in with it, brings up related material like memories and similar emotions, and creates a "story" centered around the emotion that can take you far from reality, and that can goad you into doing things which will create a lot of karma, which you will later regret.  An emotional "storm" may go on for minutes or hours after the original stimulus arousing it has ended.

The next level of dealing with emotions would be trying to detect them as they happen but then keep them from rising to a strong level, where they take you over.  This could be done by concentrating on something else, by deliberately pushing the emotion down, by getting involved in some other activity to take your awareness energy away from the emotions.  This is useful if it keeps you from acting on emotions in a way which would get you into trouble or create bad karma, and/or reinforcing particular emotional triggers and reactions.

The next level of dealing with emotions, which I have heard Sogyal Rinpoche  stress the last couple of years, is when you realize that emotions are rising, direct your attention to the qualities, the nature of the emotion itself, rather than to the object the emotion has been aroused by.  If a person makes you angry, for example, stop focusing on that person, and try to note the qualities of anger itself.  From my own experience with Gurdjieff type work, I would say that means paying a lot of attention to body sensations, and, from Shinzen Young's vipassana work, paying attention to the internal talk or internal imagery that's associated with the emotion.  The big emphasis is on the ongoing, moment-by-moment qualities of the emotion, not the object of the emotion.  If Bob Smith, e.g., says something that gets me angry and I let the anger take me over, I will be focused on my negative perceptions and on that bastard Bob Smith, the anger will continue to run in an automatic way, etc.  Focusing on the qualities of the emotion itself will keep the story from developing and take the wind out of the sails of the emotion.

The highest level, what I think of as the Dzogchen level, will involve looking inward to try to perceive "who" is feeling the emotion.  This strikes me as the ultimate way of transcending the emotion, and I have some experiential feel what it is like, although it's difficult to describe.

All of these ways of dealing with emotion strike me as useful, at a minimal level as tending to inhibit the expression of negative emotions which will probably generate negative karma, reactive consequences, and, at a deeper level, of cutting down identification with emotions and stories that are associated with various emotions.

What I find missing from Buddhist approaches, as I have been exposed to them to date, is Gurdjieff's idea of emotional intelligence.  Gurdjieff taught that emotions, properly trained, are forms of intelligence.  They alert you to possible realities in your ongoing situation that may require your attention and action.  An intelligent, well functioning emotion then would grab your attention with its quality and power, you would then look more closely at various aspects of reality to see if there is something you need to do.  What you need to do might be take some external action or investigate some specific aspect of the workings of your mind.  Having alerted you, the emotion quickly dies away.  That is intelligent emotions, according to Gurdjieff, are very brief, rather than starting stories which go on for minutes or hours after the event that stimulated them.

I don't think I've been exposed to teachings in a Buddhist framework which talk about making emotions more intelligent.  Rather the general attitude that I think has been there is that emotions are a source of suffering, they drive our samsaric existence, and so we want to disempower these motions.   Compassion is the big exception, as the development of it is an essential part of enlightenment.

As usual, I qualify the above thoughts my noting that I'm not a Buddhist scholar, so I'm sure there are some forms of Buddhism that are different from what I've said above.

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I saw the show and it was fascinating, although I think the great graphics tended to be wonderful visual entertainment rather than really explaining any of the science.  But much better for me, at least, than empty abstraction.  This is a series – try to catch the rest.

But what is "dark" energy and matter?  Does it really convey some sort of spiritual quality?  Or that certain truths are part of the mystery of God and forever veiled from us?  The necessary faith and confidence for doing science – or for living life, for that matter – is that we are smart and will be able to figure most things, if not all things, out.  When one's arrogance is high, we'll be able to figure it all out.  When we get stuck and frustrated we may admit that perhaps the human brain maybe can't work it all out, but can still do great things…..  This is necessary "faith," for if you start thinking "I and we aren't very bright, we probably can't learn anything," that is likely to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.  To quote, as I'm sure I have before, Henry Ford, "Those who think they can and those who think they can't are both right…..

"My colleague seemed to think that the postulating of dark matter and energy was a refutation of what I've described in The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together as scientism, the materialistic philosophy overwhelmingly dominant in most areas of science that says everything can and will eventually be explained in terms of physical matter and physical energy.  Because "dark" energy and matter are not matter as we know it?

But that's not the case.  Scientism is a philosophy of materialism, everything is made of matter and energy.  If we can't explain something now in terms of known forms of matter and energy, then it's an item of faith that, as we discover new forms of material matter and material energy, we will then be able to explain things in expanded materialistic terms.

As I'm sure I've said many times before, scientism is not science, although most people, including most scientists, think it is.  An essential part of a genuinely scientific theory is that it is capable of disproof, of making observations which are quite incompatible with the theory.  When scientism encounters something inexplicable in terms of current materialistic theories, though, it keeps the faith by saying someday we will explain it in physical terms, including a wider understanding of what "physical" means.  This is what philosophers long ago named promissory materialism, as you can't ever disprove that someday they won't explain it in terms of material entities and forces (or little green men or angels or devils or aliens or whatever you prefer). I try not to fall into scientism, even though it's a prestigious thing to do as it leads to more social acceptance.  If I had wanted to be very successful in conventional terms I would never have followed a career that kept looking into things that were taboo, that were heresy in materialistic terms.

Essential science – see again my The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together book – always puts data, observations, experience first and foremost, and if your theories to explain them, materialistic, mathematical, socialistic, religious, whatever don't actually work, too bad for the theories and beliefs.  Study the data more closely, see what you can learn.

In our times, though, we spiritual beings – I think that's what we all essentially are – have our spirituality badly repressed and rejected because of scientism.  But we try to find some means to justify being more spiritual, justifying, rationalizing by trying to find scientific reasons to be more spiritual.  So we can take developments like dark energy and matter as pointing toward a mystery beyond human understanding, as pointing toward God or Spirit.  It's commonly done all the time in New Age, as well as other spiritual movements.  Quantum physics has been used this way for decades now.You can certainly take new scientific data and theory that way, and I sometimes do, but I don't think a "proof" of the existence of God because of our ignorance is very powerful.  "This is beyond our understanding, so there must be a God who understands."  I'm much more impressed by people's mystical experiences, not to mention all the scientific investigations surveyed in my book that show we humans sometimes do things we think spiritual beings would be able to.  By "spiritual" here I mean of a nature very different than contemporary physics and reasonable extensions of it allow to happen.  Telepathy as a possible "mechanism" for transmitting information and requests in prayer, as just one example.

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Mindfulness

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

Lecture 5, Part 4 of 18 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

CTT: Now one of the reasons that I’m reviewing this, is that it takes us to the fourth diagram in the lower right-hand corner of the handout, and that’s another way of looking at our topics, particularly from a mostly Gurdjieffian viewpoint, but I have the nerve to call it a “Tartian” viewpoint too, so this is what I think about things, it’s not straight Gurdjieff.

We ordinarily have input from the world, just like in these other diagrams. We have this, all this input processing that shapes these various kinds of perception, and Gurdjieff divides it into these three primary centers or “brains” – intellectual, emotional, and bodily/instinctual. I just labeled them as the dominant center and two secondary centers, and which center is dominant depends on the particular person. For most ITP people, I’d say it would probably be the intellectual center, or it could be the emotional center for a lot of people. Probably not too many body instinctive types; they don’t usually show up that often in institutions of higher education.

Each of those kinds of centers have their effect on the kind of automated processing of input that comes in. That’s why the information flow arrows go two ways; each takes in information to a particular center, which affects the way these automated processes vary and modulate what you think is actually out there in the world. And the final creation of all these things is your internal experiential processes – your story, your inner life, and things like that.

Now the interesting thing is that Gurdjieff said we actually have five centers, or “brains” or processes, not just three. I think he mainly called them brains. I think centers and processes is a better word for it than brains. There’s a higher intellectual center and a higher emotional center, and the interesting thing Gurdjieff taught about it was that while among our ordinary three centers, one of them is overdeveloped and the other two are generally greatly underdeveloped, the higher emotional and higher intellectual centers are already fully developed and fully functioning. There’s a higher intellectual center that already has enormous understanding of reality, and a higher emotional center that already has a higher, enormous understanding of value, and I’m deliberately stressing the word value in there.

But for all practical purposes, most of the time these two centers might as well not exist. That’s why I’ve put “noise” there in the figure blocking the inputs from these two higher centers. These centers send their judgments and evaluations about reality to us and they kind of bounce right off. Our constant internal chatter creates a screen of noise that these higher centers can almost never get through.

Once in a while they get through, and people often talk about a “mystical experience” or a “revelatory” experience at that point. Those higher centers are up in what we might call the transpersonal level. The ordinary centers – the stuff we’ve been focusing on, are just down in the more ordinary, physical, material kind of realm.

But the two are related in the sense that as long as the noise level is very high, it’s very hard for the transpersonal realm to manifest. The analogy I often use is the transpersonal realm is like a couple of very wise people at a cocktail party trying to give you important messages, but it’s a cocktail party. You can’t hear them! The noise is going on. You want to dance and gossip, and these two funny-looking folks are whispering over in the corner.

(Laughter)

What have they got to say?

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Mindfulness

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

Lecture 5, Part 2 of 18 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

CTT: The processing and abstraction and elaboration in the box right below that [see previous blog entry] is very much affected by your needs – your hopes, your fears, your habits. By your particular personal history that has taught you to see the world in certain kinds of ways; by the particular skills you have for coping with various kinds of things. All that is constantly affecting how you process your perceptions of the world around you, and your perceptions of yourself. Again, it’s easier to represent stuff coming in from outside in the figure, but this is about your perceptions of yourself also.

With all those needs and hopes and fears and so forth affecting perceptual processing, we reach some kind of final conscious perception – the big arrow up the top there, moving over from processing to final conscious perception. Our final conscious perception, then, is not a simple, straightforward grasping of what’s there; it’s a manufactured product. It has had all sorts of things taken away from it compared to the actual input at any moment, and it’s had all sorts of things added to it.

Now you see a circular flow of big arrows there, attention flow. For the primary simple perception, I’ve shown a very small arrow on the left, indicating we don’t really pay much attention to that kind of raw input in the now, but we have a constant circulating flow of attention – those big arrows around and around and around – that have to do with our “story,” our life, our world, our experience, and all those little squiggly things represent particular contents of that. The attention flow is the general sort of thing, and the squigglies are particular needs and fears, particular thoughts, particular images, particular desires, and things like that that are constantly in there.

What Shinzen explains so nicely is that this is not a clean, simple, efficient kind of flow, but rather – just drawing these things squiggly – if you actually would picture this as a series of pipes, with fluid flowing around through it, and all these odd shaped objects floating in it, you can see how they tend to bump and hook onto each other because they have hooks and curls and angles and bumpy things on them, and that’s what happens to so much of our ongoing experience. You think of something which automatically reminds you – which automatically brings up a memory that triggers off an emotion – which automatically reminds you – which triggers off another emotion – which distorts the next perception coming in to support the emotion – which triggers off …– and around and around. There’s a lot of turbulence. It’s a highly viscous, a highly sticky, chaotic, troubled kind of flow of our experience.

So we largely ignore the outside world around us, and a lot of our direct body sensations as far as that goes, and we’re constantly immersed in this flow of stuff going around and around and around, our sticky story.

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

Lecture 5, Part 1 of 18 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

CTT: Any kind of habit you can set up at the early learning stages of becoming more mindful is a good habit. Do watch for the point where it starts to become just a stimulus to trigger off the fantasy of being mindful, though, instead of actually doing it.

I don’t know how many times I remembered that I wanted to come to the present and be mindful, and so I thought about it, and fantasized about it, but I didn’t make the shift of attention to notice what was actually happening now. I got caught up in my thoughts about the now instead.

Ouspensky recommends changing “alarm clocks” when an alarm clock gets like that. Find something different that will trigger you off. So, for instance, you could set up a kind of conditioned response that every time you touch a doorknob, you’ll come to the present; and that might work for hours, days, maybe even weeks. But when you find yourself having fantasies about being mindful when you take a doorknob in your hand, it’s time to drop it because we don’t need to learn how to condition ourselves further. We’re already very good at that!

Now since I feel like you’re all being very mindful, I’m going to do a little review here at a conceptual level, but I ask that you try to keep some touch with the present while I get intellectual this way. You can do it by keeping some attention in your arms and legs; by looking around some, rather than staring fixedly at any one thing for too long a time; by noticing the quality of sounds as well as understanding the content of the particular words I’m saying; and in each of your individual cases, there may be some other particular kinds of sensations or actions which will help you be mindful, too. Experiment. What works for you?

The little sheet I’ve passed out – everybody got one? – has four drawings on it. If we were going to look at these, we’d say the order is upper left, upper right, lower left, lower right. I’m just going to review these. You’ve seen the first three before, and then I’ve added a new one that I created a couple of days ago when I sat down to do a formal meditation session.

My meditation went “poorly.” Instead of having any luck at all coming to the present, the goal of my meditation, I kept having the idea for this diagram that would help you guys understand something. So I decided that maybe my higher self is telling me the good outcome of this meditation will be a diagram. Or maybe it was just an excuse for not being able to concentrate….

The upper left corner diagram [figures presented separately here] – I told you this is my representation of one of the ways Shinzen Young talks about ordinary consciousness, or living in samsara, living in a state of illusion. You’ll remember I said that while some spiritual schools take an extreme position that the world really is an illusion, what the emphasis really is in most spiritual schools, as far as I can tell, is not that the world is illusory, unreal – that’s a metaphysical position, you can believe what you’d like to on that, but be careful about stepping out in front of cars! – but that the point is that we distort our perceptions of the world and ourselves so much that we effectively live in an illusion.

So on the left hand side here, you’ve got primary simple perception. Right now, for example, it’s bright. It’s warm. It’s quiet. You feel the chair pressing up against your butt and your back – very simple, primary sorts of things. Maybe the movement of your clothes against your skin as you move, the sensation of breathing – simple, primary sorts of things. What the Tibetans call Sixth Consciousness.

But we almost never spend much time in focusing on those simple, primary perceptions. When we do Vipassana meditation, we do something like that. But that’s not our ordinary way at all. Instead, we get into all sorts of processing of the perceptions that involves, on the one hand, elaboration of them into various thoughts and feelings and memories and hopes and fears and plans; and on the other hand, abstraction – that, insofar as you maintain some kind of contact with the world around you, it’s with higher level abstractions about the world where you “perceive” – quote, unquote around perceive – that we’re sitting here in a classroom. Classroom is an abstraction. It doesn’t begin to take in the details of this actual particular classroom at this particular point in time.

So we have an enormous amount of automatic processing. Generally, we have no control over whether it’s going to happen or not. We’ve been conditioned to have it happen. It happens. It runs automatically. And this automated process is working over your primary simple perceptions in both abstracting them and elaborating them.

One analogy we might use is that you’re the CEO of a major manufacturing company. You get some reports passed up to you, but you don’t keep track of every little widget, and where it is on the production line, and whether shipping has got so many boxed up and all that. You look at more abstract kinds of things like profits over the past month, or something like that. You have hopes and fears about growing the company, or avoiding a downturn. You don’t stay very much with the manifold actual details. That’s not a terribly good example, but it will do.

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While I hope that the field of Transpersonal Psychology will advance so much that in a few decades I'll be able to give great advice to these folks, Transpersonal Psychology is still a tiny, under-supported field and progress is way too slow…..

This is to share an example of the kinds of questions I get and my responses.  I have disguised the identity of this questioner to protect her or his privacy and paraphrased the communication for brevity.

Hello Dr. Tart.

My name is ********* .  I really enjoyed Waking Up and am on my second round with it.  In between I read Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous as it was recommended in Waking Up for people interested in pursuing further Gurdjieff's ideas.

As a Zen practitioner and having had interest in psychology since I was young, you have my attention!  I feel I have well above average perceptive abilities, that is to say, aware of my thoughts, beliefs, distortions, reactions and such. I can see it all very clearly.

The reason I am writing is that, as mentioned in Waking Up, I perhaps have some emotional issues (listed) that I am not sure whether they need to be addressed before seriously going further on this path.

I have been living in Japan for 5 years and although I really enjoy living here (despite the earthquakes), I feel there might not be enough resources for someone like me who wants to find a group and/or therapist to aid in my waking up. There is one Fourth Way (Gurdjieff) group in Tokyo but it's in Japanese (not so much a problem, but I wouldn't want to miss the subtleties as well as specific cultural issues might not apply to me).

I guess there are 2 things I wanted to ask and get your opinion on.

(1) Do you think there are/know of any resources someone in my position overseas could find in terms of a Fourth Way group, or is it best to go back to the States for that?

(2) Being that I have a good degree of self-awareness and self observation, are the emotional issues I have enough to warrant NOT going further down the road of serious work with Gurdjieffian methods?  I know it might be hard to access that not knowing me, but…I guess that disclaimer in the book just gave me pause. [I had noted in Waking Up that serious emotional issues could easily derail what one thinks of as a spiritual search into neurotic activity]  I really feel like between 2 stools as these emotional issues keep pulling me back into patterns that are hard to break on my own.

Well, I am sorry for writing so much as I am sure you are a busy guy. Thanks for your work and insights.. I am really enjoying discovering this work.

Here's how I responded.

———–

Dear ********,

It has taken me a while to answer you, as I cannot give you the answers I would really like to give.

> First, let me say I really enjoyed Waking Up and am on my second round with it.<

You might find my other two books on mindfulness useful.  Same basic subject, different ways of expressing myself.  One is Living the Mindful Life, the other is Mind Science.  It often takes me several different presentations of things, in different styles, to learn them. The latter book may be hard to find though….And remember, my books are introductions, far, far from the final word…..

> There is one Fourth Way group in Tokyo but its in Japanese (not so much a problem, but I wouldn't want to miss the subtleties as well as specific cultural issues might not apply to me).<

That's a realistic concern.  You might learn some things and entirely miss others if the Japanese are as subtle as they are usually depicted.

Getting to the heart of the matter,

>(1) Do you think there are/know of any resources someone in my position overseas could find in terms of a fourth way group, or is it best to go back to the States for that? <

I have no idea about G groups in Japan.  I have written a friend about it who is in the G Foundation, but he's traveling now and I'm not sure he's going to be able to offer any useful advice for your situation.

>(2) Being that I have a good degree of self-awareness and self observation, are the emotional issues I have enough to warrant NOT going further down the road of serious work with Gurdjieffian methods?<

In my ideal world, which I fear has little connection yet with the actual one, although I hope it does someday, any spiritual development group would have both psychological and spiritual work, with enough sensitivity and competence on the teachers of each to know when you need more of the other.  A meditation teacher, e.g., who knows when to say "Don't sit so much, take that up with your therapist," and a psychotherapist who knows when to say "I think that issue is reduced enough that you can go on with the relevant spiritual work, see that teacher for more instruction," or, even more importantly, "I think you are using this spiritual practice as a way of avoiding this basic psychological issue."  (spiritual bypass)

There are many G groups, so there might be some that have more psychological savvy, but maybe there aren't…..So I can't recommend any in particular.  On the other hand, you say you have emotional issues, but so does everybody.  Are they strong enough to seriously hinder your ordinary living?  If not, you can probably profit to at least some degree from G work – although some of the G groups are, of course, cultish.  I rather wish we had the spiritual equivalent of Consumers' Reports magazine, "Group M has a cheerful tone but most people leave after a few months, undamaged but with little growth.  Group N is unpleasant in tone, but those who stick it out claim significant growth, although about 5% are psychologically damaged by the work……"

Sorry I can't be more helpful.  I am glad when I can get people interested in spiritual growth, and frustrated that after giving them a start I can no longer be of much help……

Charles T. Tart

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

Lecture 4, Part 14 of 18 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

Student: I think I agree with what everyone said, and there’s also a thing about worrying about losing something. That I’ve had this and I know if I don’t do something I’m going to lose it. I think that the intellect might not understand what happened yet, might not fully understand it, and may never fully understand it.

I know your intellect probably wants to understand it. And it may understand it more and more over time. But what you really needed to get out of the experience, you’ve probably already gotten out of the experience. Your intellect may not understand what it was and what you got out of it, but I’m sure that you’ve been changed and educated by that experience in a way which is irreversible and which you can never lose.

Student: You know, the irreversible nature, too, I think can actually introduce an idea of trauma into the experience too, because we can’t be the way we were before.

Another Student: Yeah, it’s a pretty significant thing. For example, I have a lot of stuff left over from my childhood that would be cool if it could be resolved quicker, but it takes quite a lot of effort. It’s taken quite a lot of effort to change the way that’s affected me.

This is a significant experience, so it’s not like over time it’s going to fade and it won’t affect you anymore. It will continue to affect you, because it’s like a trauma. It’s not really a trauma, but it’s a significant life experience.

Student: You say your intellect might not figure it out, or whatever. It seems like the intellect’s job is to incorporate the wisdom into the world view, or something like that.

Another Student: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Student: And it will do that without conscious effort anyway. It will seek to do that without so much energy.

Student: Well, I don’t know if that’s true. I think a lot of people will have an experience, like, see a ghost or something, and then just be like, “Oh, no. It didn’t happen. It doesn’t mean anything.” You know?

Student: Yeah. I know what you mean.

Student: You know. I’m just talkin’ here, but…

Student: I think William is scared to know yet. But it is harsh when you have an experience like that, and then you’re told to just experience it then forget about it, move on, you know? Because it’s massive, right? And it’s going to….

I’ve experienced it that way. I had an experience and I spoke to a spiritual director about it. She told me that I was… she basically had a go at me, and was really angry and aggressive.

CTT: She was angry because you…?

Student: She said I shouldn’t talk about those things. Basically what she did is she started saying, “You can’t have experienced that. You’d be a saint.”

And I said, “I’m not a saint, and I did experience it.”

And she said, “Well, you don’t walk like a saint.”

And I was, like, “Well, I’m not a saint.” And this conversation progressed with her telling me all the ways that I didn’t behave like a saint, and me saying well, I’m not a saint. And finally I wondered when she was going to just have a conversation with me about my experience.

(Laughter)

And now coming here (ITP), and seeing the way the people are here, and the way the professors are, and the whole training and spiritual guidance, I’m like, “Wow. She’s completely off the end of the scale from a well-trained spiritual adviser.”

CTT: Yes. See, if you’re in a particular spiritual system that’s got hundreds or thousands of years of tradition behind it, they may have pretty specific rules on how to handle particular kinds of experiences. Whereas here at ITP, we’re new. Thirty, thirty-five years old for the whole field of Transpersonal Psychology. We’ve got a little bit of this, a little bit of that; a dash of this, a dash of that. And we’re trying to create something new.

Student: Yeah. You’re dangerous!

CTT: And we’re dangerous? Yeah, I think we’re dangerous.

(Laughter)

Good!

Student: And I think that’s really awesome because, for me, when I’ve had experiences like that – when it’s still affecting me and I’m tryin’ to sort of latch onto what happened, I like to pull from different kinds of methods. I’ll run through a bunch of different creative methods, through writing, dancing, through art. Then I’ll just intellectualize everything, going through the theories, you know? And then talk to other people about it and see what they think.

So I think there is a benefit in working it through, working it through your system. So that once you’re actually tired of it, you can put it down and then put it away for now, until it comes up again.

Another Student: There’s also a benefit in not doing anything at all about it for a long time, or a little time. Just relax for a minute.

CTT: So you see we’re advocating a very big container to work with the experience in, and that’s an appropriate thing to do here at ITP. We don’t have some small traditional container that we’re going to force it into, some revealed religion that we think is The Truth, no matter what. And that’s good.

Now I want to make a process comment. I think we’ve been very good about staying pretty grounded in the present tonight, and I haven’t been giving any reminders to sense, look and listen. But I’ve been very impressed with the quality of the discussion. So I want to thank all you people for staying present and real. That’s kind of nice.

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