It strikes me you're getting a lot of advanced tutoring in real science.  Ideal science is done by completely rational people, nobly searching for the truth, with no biases of any sort, and certainly no "lower emotional processes" affecting the quality of their reasoning.  This makes being a scientist an extremely high prestige position, so naturally, since we are attached to our high prestige social positions, no one would want to admit that their practice of science is anything but that.

Then we come to real science, which is done by actual human beings.  Real human beings have emotional brains that operate faster than their rational brains, have needs to succeed and be accepted, fears that they won't succeed or be accepted, etc.  To varying degrees real scientists work to overcome their emotional problems (with various degrees of success) and biases, and, in the long run, the need for replication and reproducibility in science tends to filter out results which really are due to the bias of particular individual investigators.  But the "long run" can sometimes be generations or longer, not one journal issue to the next.

So yes, doing something parapsychological like ESP or PK involves using very delicate psychological faculties, and we don't know anywhere near enough to control all the angles.  Recognizing this is a step in maturity, knowing your own human qualities.

To give you an example of the human factor in science, one of my friends about 30 years ago was a graduate student in geology in a leading department.  Now you don't get a much "harder" science than geology, do you, all those hard, solid rocks?  But he and I had some discussions about the psychological phenomenon of projection, the very powerful human ability to see what you believe, with no idea that you're actually projecting your beliefs into something.  So I mentioned that my wife, who loves geology, would often, on our hikes, say that we were looking at such and such a formation – and I couldn't see it.  What was apparently clear to her was a lot of lines running every which-a-way to me.  She would regard me as ignorant, and I would tease her that maybe geologists were making all these things up.  So my friend mentioned to his geology professors that perhaps they should do some studies to see just how objective and reliable geological classifications were — and they practically threw him out of the department!  He learned to keep his mouth shut after that.

So, we tend to talk about the "hard" and "soft" sciences, physics versus sociology, e.g., but I prefer to talk about the hard and the easy sciences.  Things like physics, chemistry, etc. are the easy sciences.  It doesn't matter what you had for breakfast the morning before you come into the lab, your relationship with your partner, etc., the same old things reliably happen in your experiments.  Sciences like psychology or parapsychology are the really hard, difficult sciences because all these subtle things do matter, and, not only do we not know much about the specifics of that, we don't want to know because we still cling to our feeling that we are superior, objective beings, scientists!

Welcome to reality.  Tread carefully, especially around other human beings who are too invested in their objectivity.

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Mindfulness

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

Lecture 5, Part 9 of 18 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

CTT: How are people doing in your attempts to practice self-remembering when you’re out in the world? And we’ll allow the world to include ITP outside this particular classroom at this moment too, even though some would question that.

Student: I’ve been hearing that bell. I’m always a little nervous because I thought that maybe it was hearing loss. Just now, when you rang the bell, I thought oh – that’s the same. That’s what I’m hearing.

CTT: Through the walls, you mean. [CTT has used unexpected bell sounds to remind students to self-remember.]

Student: When I’m at home. When I’m nowhere near the bell.

CTT: Uh huh. Ah. Well, I hope it brings you happiness.

Now there is a medical condition called tinnitus, or maybe tinnitus – I’ve never been sure of the proper pronunciation – where you start to hear sounds.

Student: Right.

CTT: And –

(Laughter)

Student: Or you’re just crazy.

(Laughter)

CTT: For a lot of people, I think it’s another excellent example of Shinzen Young’s equation, that suffering equals pain multiplied by resistance, because for a lot of people, tinnitus is a small amount of funny little noises that happen once in a while, but they worry themselves sick about it. And so make what is really a very minor annoyance into an enormous amount of suffering. There can be very serious levels where it actually interferes with hearing, but I don’t know how widespread that is.

Student: It’s pretty pleasant (unpleasant?).

CTT: If you can hear it once in a while, take it as a reminder. There is a whole esoteric branch of yoga devoted to hearing the “astral sounds.” It might mean that there was a bunch of old yogis who all had tinnitus back in ancient India, but they took a positive slant on it, as though they were starting to hear the secret sounds of the cosmos, and let it spur them in their practice. Why not? What the hell?

(Laughter)

Student: And it only happened after they achieved great wisdom because it took so many years.

CTT: There you go. There you go. False correlation.

However, if it ever gets so bad you have trouble hearing ordinary sounds, see your doctor.

Student: Okay.

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One of the first ways this became clear to me was when I began training in the Japanese martial art of Aikido back in the 1970s.  I had been impressed with a demonstration of the art, and invited a black belt instructor, Alan Grow, to come to UC Davis twice a week to give instructions.  I started a student club, of which I was faculty adviser, to justify getting space on the mats in the gymnasium for this.

To my surprise and consternation, I could immediately "explain" Aikido far better than my black belt instructor.  As I would later put it, I had a "Black Belt in Talking" by the time I was twelve!  That's an amusing way of saying I was very glib.  But while I could verbally explain Aikido better than my instructor, I couldn't do anything, whereas he could toss me across the mat with what seemed a flick of his wrist.  It took me several years to learn how to learn in a different way.  What was required for Aikido was body-instinctive intelligence, not intellectual, verbal intelligence.  Eventually I learn to pay attention from my body, as it were, and actually begin to really grasp what Aikido is about.

Emotions were even more difficult, as, like most people, when an emotion arose it tended to hijack all of my consciousness, and then make all my perceptions and thoughts centered around and reinforcing that emotion.  If something had aroused a fear response in me, for example, I saw things as more threatening than they probably were, I had thoughts about other times I was afraid, and, of course, my body sensations reinforced the fear.  A fearful stimulus that may have lasted only a few seconds produced a self-reinforcing reaction that could go on for minutes or hours.

I engaged in many personal growth activities in the 70s, 80s and 90s, aspects of the Humanistic Psychology movement as well as a spiritual quest, and gradually learn more about what my emotions were and to be accepting of them.

I would not claim to have become particularly emotionally intelligent, but at least I was no longer really dumb and neurotic about emotions, and, similarly, because of Aikido training and meditation training later, I became more aware of what my body-instinctive intelligence was telling me at a particular time.

This morning I had a particularly clear example of how emotions ought to work when they are reasonably intelligent, rather than undeveloped or neurotic.  My wife Judy and I were having a silly quarrel on a topic we've had silly quarrels about many times over the years, and she mentioned that if she died before I did, I wouldn't have to do the things she expected me to do.  I responded, from an intellectual stance, that this was indeed true, but, on balance, the gains from this would be nothing compared to the loss of her.  To my astonishment, before I could finish that sentence I was all choked up and crying!  And a few seconds later, it was all over!  My emotional intelligence had risen and taken over my consciousness, reminded me of what was really important in my life, and, having perceived that I got the message, had then become quiet again.

This is my understanding of what Gurdjieff had to say about the intelligent way for emotions to function.  Emotions give you a different perspective on situations than intellect or body-instinctual intelligence, they come on powerfully to make sure you notice that perspective, and then, if you've got it, they quickly cease.  On the other hand, undeveloped emotions not only force a message on you, they kick off associations to all sorts of things that have ever felt like this, and you could easily have what I've called in the title of this note, "emotional seizures."  That is, instead of you getting the message right away, so you can act more appropriately, you go on and on with the emotion kicking off thoughts which reinforce the emotion which generate appropriate body sensations which kickoff more related thoughts which reinforce the emotion, on and on and on.  Your mind is seized!  Modern neurological research about emotions talk about how the emotional part of the brain "hijacks" the thinking part.

This is not to say that there are no long-lasting emotions which are useful, necessary and realistic.  Some aspects of life require long consideration, emotionally as well as intellectually and bodily-instinctively.  But most ordinary emotions, when they become intelligent, can indeed, from Gurdjieff's perspective, only last a few seconds, just long enough for you to get that message clearly.

It amazed me that in less the second I became so deeply emotional and was crying, and that it was all over a few seconds later.  But I'm glad to have had this very clear example to share some of my understanding about the nature of personal and spiritual growth, and hope this might be useful to others someday.

These ideas will seem quite sensible and have practical implications when you are in a calm state, and probably be forgotten when a strong emotion takes over: it happens to me that way a lot.  A strong emotion screams "This is the Truth, you feel it, it's Real!!!"  When that happens I try to note what the actual message of the emotion is and also remember about emotional hijack.  It's like a very loud alarm siren is shrieking and it's hard to think, but don't feel too bad about yourself during that alarm….

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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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Small Song of Small Realization?

Ordinary samsara.

A moments stimulus, sixth consciousness

Fast reaction, seventh consciousness

I like, I dislike, which reminds me, which I like or dislike which reminds me….

On and on and on.

My endless story of ME, MY FEELINGS

New stimulus

Not noticed much or clearly

I'm busy with my story…..

New stimulus: added into my Story, twisted to fit,

Seventh rules sixth, believing is seeing…..

I think I'm aware, but

Just deeper into samsara, moment after moment, hour after hour.

Many brief moments through the day

A few seconds of just being here, noticing what's happening

Nothing special, just here, now

My story is interrupted, I'm calm, present

Stimulus comes along, sixth consciousness

I notice it

Perhaps think no further about it

Perhaps think just a few helpful thoughts, don’t get carried away

Radiance of rigpa?

Stopping once in a while, turning mind in

No big deal

Yet I don't add my crazies to my ongoing crazies for Big Crazies….

Less samsara in my day…..

Elaborating….

Samsara:  Buddhist term for ordinary consciousness, which is seen as a badly distorted form of consciousness.  Our perception of world and self is badly distorted by the three main driving forces of greed/attraction, aversion/rejection and ignorance (of reality and of one's true Buddha nature).

Sixth Consciousness:  Traditionally each of the main five senses is considered a kind of consciousness, and (ordinary) mind is considered the sixth kind of consciousness, a consciousness which takes the input of the senses at any one time and simply and objectively names their object and perhaps brings up some immediately relevant, objective information about them.  Right now, my sixth consciousness says "computer screen" as I look straight ahead, "coffee cup" as I look to my left, "bookcase" as I look to my right.

Seventh Consciousness: This is an almost completely conditioned, automatic elaboration of the simple perceptions of sixth consciousness into our personal "stories," our hopes, fears, etc.  So there is a feeling as I notice the computer screen in front of me of satisfaction, of pride, I'm a writer, I'm good at it, and an undercurrent of anxiety – this monitor has been acting a little flaky lately, suppose it breaks, it will be expensive to replace it…..That coffee cup, I need to take it to the kitchen and wash it, I'm so tired of washing out coffee cups, maybe it I just leave it out my wife will wash it for me, oh damn, how can I think that, I'm a lazy person, why can't I be more responsible?  Ah, the bookcase, look at all those books!  I'm so smart to read so many books, I'm happier thinking about how smart I am rather than how lazy I am…..

According to Buddhism, greatly supported by the discoveries of modern psychology, we almost never stay with simple sixth consciousness perception, automatic seventh consciousness reactions take over almost instantly and can be strong enough to effectively blot out or distort simple, objective perceptions.  I've used mild illustrations of this here, but the emotional dynamics and psychological defenses of our individual selves can have us dwelling in our "stories," our dramas, most of the time.

I like, I dislike, which reminds me, which I like or dislike which reminds me….

On and on and on.

A perception, my like or dislike, which triggers associated likes and dislikes, which triggers more, on and on and on, the original sixth consciousness perception lost in the drama.  New events, new stimuli which are strong enough to get our attention are often almost instantly distorted by the seventh consciousness to fit right into our ongoing story…..And our illusory existence, samsara, continues and builds…..

Many brief moments: In Dzogchen turning the mind inward to notice what's there, in Gurdjieffian terms self-observation or self-remembering.  Succinctly expressed in Buddhism as samsara is the mind turned outward, lost in its projections.  Enlightenment is mind turned inward, directly seeing its own true nature.  Rigpa is one of the names for the true nature of our minds, our Buddha nature.

So I'm in samsara, then I turn mind inward for a moment.  A sensory event, a stimulus comes along then and it's just sixth consciousness perception, it's just a bookcase, no activation of my personal "story" about how wonderful I am, how much I know.  I glance at the bookcase again, notice a book sticking out, close to falling off the shelf, I'll push it in next time I go over that way, back to the moment.  Here's my mind, here, now, nothing "special" about it, just calmly here – but that's pretty special compared to the usual ongoing, self-stimulating drama of ME!

Radiance of rigpa:  It's not that the goal of Buddhism is to stay forever in a state of mind that's absolutely calm, where nothing ever happens.  That's not our nature.  Our nature of mind, our rigpa, moves, thinks, creates, like the sun radiating light and heat.  But to have it stay close to sixth consciousness perception, not get twisted into my story…..that's something!

I called this a small song of small realization, question mark.  No big deal, yet very fundamental.  Coming back to the moment every once in a while during my day, I don't get so carried away, I don't have fantasy building on fantasy, amplifying samsara.  Perhaps not a big deal insight, but I like it….

So once again:

Small Song of Small Realization?

Ordinary samsara.

A moments stimulus, sixth consciousness

Fast reaction, seventh consciousness

I like, I dislike, which reminds me, which I like or dislike which reminds me….

On and on and on.

My endless story of ME, MY FEELINGS

New stimulus

Not noticed much or clearly

I'm busy with my story…..

New stimulus: added into my Story, twisted to fit,

Seventh rules sixth, believing is seeing…..

I think I'm aware, but

Just deeper into samsara, moment after moment, hour after hour.

Many brief moments through the day

A few seconds of just being here, noticing what's happening

Nothing special, just here, now

My story is interrupted, I'm calm, present

Stimulus comes along, sixth consciousness

I notice it

Perhaps think no further about it

Perhaps think just a few helpful thoughts, don’t get carried away

Radiance of rigpa?

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Mindfulness

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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I was reminded this morning of an amusing incident at this conference.   One of the speakers, a local and, I guess, probably politically influential Rancher, talked about his friends in the UFOs, the rides they took him on, the sights they showed him, etc…..I'm not a trained clinician, but to me he was obviously schizophrenic.  Now I'm not making that judgment because of his unusual experiences per se, I've always been open to the idea that UFOs may stem from the activities of intelligent aliens, even though UFO-related delusions are common among the mentally ill.  The stubborn conviction that we are the only intelligent life forms around, and that if we can't think of a useful way to travel from one star system to another it must be impossible has always struck me as simple arrogance.  But from the way this man talked, he was clearly, to use a delightful old phrase I haven't heard anyone use in years, marching to the beat of a different drummer.

I talked to one of the conference organizers about him afterwards, how could they have such an obviously crazy person talk at a public conference like this?  I was concerned that putting respectable scientific research on parapsychology on the same stage with such a crazy presentation would reflect badly on parapsychology, a "guilt-by-association" method much used by the pseudo-skeptics.

Well, I was told, all his friends and neighbors of course knew he was crazy – but it's extremely difficult to find any decent water in those Northwestern states.  His UFO alien friends had led him to some fantastically good places to drill wells, producing hundreds of gallons of good water per hour…..they wished had more crazy neighbors like him around……

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I found this fascinating, as I see "personality" – we'll define it in a minute – as a primary user of our psychological and spiritual energies, and a shaper of our perceptions, thoughts and feelings.  My own special area in graduate school half a century ago was called Personality.  What is this "personality?"  There are many definitions, but I think we can stay with the common sense idea, namely "The assemblage of qualities or characteristics which makes a person a distinctive individual; the (esp. notable or appealing) distinctive character of a person." (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary)  Clearly one could have personality characteristics that make life generally easier for you and others, such as being friendly, helpful, courteous (my old Boy Scout oath is coming back to me!) or habitual personality characteristics that create suffering for you and others, such as being temperamental, moody, unpredictable, aggressive, etc.  I would call the suffering that results from these kinds of personality characteristics as "unnecessary" or "useless," since if you didn't exhibit them life would flow more smoothly.  We all know people whose personality, whose habits of perceiving, thinking, feeling and expression create a lot of trouble in their lives.

The insights of Gautama Buddha (insofar as I understand them) were at a more basic level than personality, though.  Liberation from unnecessary suffering comes from learning to observe three basic, fundamental forces controlling us, namely Attraction, Aversion, and Ignorance.  I agree.  From my personal observations, as well as scientific and scholarly knowledge, these are fundamental driving us.  "Personality," by contrast, is a more emergent level of these forces, it's a systems emergent.  (A systems emergent can sometimes be seen as an obvious result of combining more basic factors, but sometimes it's a complex emergent, what emerges has properties that don't obviously follow from the components – this gets complex and we won't follow this further here.)  By analogy, personality is like knowing how to use Word, the word processing program I'm using right now to express myself, but underneath is a more basic programming language running the computer, MS-DOS, and underneath that is a binary programming language actually running the computer.  These more basic languages are normally completely invisible to me.  Word is taking over my screen/consciousness.  Personality normally grabs up all our consciousness and makes it difficult to see more fundamental processes underneath…..

Now all my life I've been curious about how the way my mind and emotions work, and I had made a zillion miscellaneous observations and theories about it.  But, as I could see in retrospect, I was caught up practically all the time in the systems emergent, my personality, which in turn affected the kinds of observations I was likely to make and the way I would think about them.

Discovering back in the 70s that I was a type Seven on the Enneagram of Personality (you can find lots about this system on the web or in Helen Palmer's books) was an incredible shock and liberation.  A friend (another Seven) described psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo's psychologized enneagram system to me and when he got to type Seven it all resonated.  Of course!  This was the pattern that bound all those miscellaneous observations together!  And this pattern had a "taste" to it, it was something I could learn to sense in operation and, eventually, exercise some control over.  Years of self-observation and other work helped me work toward the particular virtue for type Sevens, the virtue of Sobriety, and I finally felt I had developed a fair amount of it.  I've reached a point in life where I know I'm still basically a Seven, but that's more a style now than an automated compulsion, and I can, when needed, put it aside.

Is it any coincidence that before discovering my personality type I was lousy at attempting "meditation?"  Just speculating here, I don't have enough data to push the idea, but it may well be that enough of my attention became liberated from compulsive Sevenish patterns that now I could observe myself at that more fundamental level of sensation and feeling, and more clearly see the basic Buddhist forces of Attraction, Aversion and Ignorance……

I'm cautious about sweeping generalizations, but there must be at least some other people like me who would really benefit from working at the personality level first, then be able to go on to the more fundamental forces level…..One of the jobs of the field of Transpersonal Psychology, as I envision it, is to learn to tell when, e.g., a person would be better off working at the personality level than at a classical meditation level.

In the bits of Buddhism I've been exposed to – Sogyal Rinpoche, Tsoknye Rinpoche, Shinzen Young primarily, and assorted vipassana teachers – I haven't seen any real grappling with this personality issue.  But then I'm learning in speaking and writing to always qualify anything I say about Buddhism as just my limited exposure and take on it,  as somewhere and somewhen there will be some "Buddhists" who do the opposite or something different….   

Incidentally I appreciate the wisdom of Buddhism in ignoring and subrating personality as a strategy for not being so caught up in our personality, our "story," but we shouldn't confuse learning strategies and realities…..

So an interesting direction to go in…..

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Mindfulness

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

Lecture 4, Part 12 of 18 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

CTT: You’re getting at the balance between an experience that is being relatively directly created by what’s actually happening at the moment, and starting to superimpose concepts of what should be happening over it. Those concepts can be very intriguing, but they’re never quite the same as the actual experience. So you can go through life, in a sense, ruining your actually experience.

Okay, how do I want to say this…..?

One of my qualities, that I’ve had to work with all my life is gluttony, to use an old-fashioned word for it. And for my particular personality type, gluttony manifests as, “Whatever experience is happening to me, it could be better!” Which means it’s never quite enough for what it is. For me to learn to simply accept experience as it is – which mindfulness practice is very good for – makes experience much more rewarding than constantly thinking, “This could be better!”

Knowing that you’ve turned your attention away from sensing what’s actually going on and are now investing in words about it or images about it – those are the main ways that concepts are done – allows you to not get so carried away by these things. But it’s so easy to get carried away by words and the reactions they generate.

An example came to mind while we were talking about it. There was a world religious leaders’ conference in Switzerland some years ago. One of the delegates there was a famous Zen teacher, who was quite old at the time. The person who was writing about it was describing an afternoon session. The delegates were all gathered around a long conference table in this beautiful room. The windows were open and someone was giving the most elegant lecture about the nature of spirituality and all that when a gust of wind blew in the window, took the speaker’s papers, and blew them down the table real fast.

While all these people caught up in the words did nothing at all, the Zen master simply reached out and caught the papers as they went by, because he hadn’t been caught up in the words.

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Mindfulness

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

Lecture 4, Part 11 of 18 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

[Sorry I haven't posted for a bit, life has been too too “full”....]

Student: Recently I’ve been feeling like I can be in that sort of peaceful place, but when I’m there, I can’t get out of it. Like I miss the state of being mindful, but when I’m there, I can’t get out of it. Does that make sense?

CTT: I’m not sure yet.

Student: I’m not always in a state of peace, but I’ve found that doing this mindfulness practice has gotten me more aware of my body and more aware of my emotions all the time. But it’s been increasingly more difficult to come back and start reading for school and doing papers.

CTT: Is that because you like the state you’re in?

Student: I do like it.

CTT: And then all this school stuff is work.

Student: But I like school too. I love learning.

CTT: Mindfulness does not mean guaranteed happiness.

Student: Right.

CTT: Or always knowing the best thing to do in each and every situation. Sometimes you still have to make yourself do something that one part of your mind knows is what you should do, and the other parts of your mind aren’t interested.

Student: Right. So I guess my question is I know that last week you talked about getting into your body when you’re doing a paper, but how do I get to the paper when I’m paying attention to my body?

CTT: That’s an interesting way of thinking about it. She’s succeeding too much at not writing her papers, but she’s happy!

(Laughter)

Well, you can think about all the money you’re spending to come here to graduate school!

Let’s let that one float for a minute. I don’t have a good answer for your question.

Student: I think that peace is a by-product of other activities and not something that should or can be pursued directly, and that mindfulness results in a feeling of peace. I’ve been working hard this year to test it out on the racetrack with my motorcycle, and it is possible to feel peace and comfort and waiting for what’s happened next, even if you’re in a slide at over 100 miles an hour.

So they don’t seem to go well together, but then it fits into what you were saying about slowing down. The very fastest people are moving the slowest. Things are happening without expectation, only adjustment to what’s happening. So you talk to somebody that’s really fast, and they’re not doing very much in the controls. They’re there for the experience and looking forward to what’s happening next, so everything slows down. And yet they’re faster than everybody else, so I don’t think that slowing down…. It means doing less than what you were explaining, but it doesn’t mean accomplishing less. That actually there’s a way to accomplish more.

CTT: Yeah. Seeing peace as a side effect is a good way to look at it.

Student: That reminds me of orgasms.

(Laughter)

Student: It’s weird, because what you’re describing sounds like having really good orgasms. One of the things I realized a while ago, after looking at tantric stuff, is that when you relax instead of turning sex into having a goal at the end of it, or the climax, the more you relax into the experience, the more amazing the experience is.

Another Student: Yes.

Student: In fact, the first time I got on the racetrack with my bike, years ago, I actually said, “This is the next best thing to sex, except that it lasts all day long.”

(Laughter)

There is a real sense of just waiting for what’s coming next and not trying to orchestrate an experience.

Another Student: Right!

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