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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Mindfulness

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

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

CTT: Now once in a while, the transpersonal does get through to us. So one way to grow is to hope to have an overwhelming transpersonal experience that will force a new way of looking at reality on you, that’s going to be such a revelation that – wham! – it’s got your attention, and you feel a need to try to center your life around it, to live in accordance with that.

Probably the most certain way to induce that – more certain than all the usual mystical paths – is to have a near-death experience (NDE). Most people who have a near-death experience find their life tremendously changed. They’ve been talking with God for a while. Even the atheists. They have an especially hard time when they’ve been talking with God in terms of reconciling what they are experiencing with their belief system…..

The trouble is, the near- part is very tricky! So it’s not a method I recommend at all.

(Laughter)

Most people who get that close to death don’t tell you about a fantastic transpersonal experience. They get buried. So you don’t want to go that way. If life pushes you that way – okay. C’est la vie. But the more gradual spiritual paths are attempts to induce transpersonal experiences that can break through. That’s one of the routes.

The other route is what you might call the noise reduction route. The quieting down of the cocktail party so there’s going on in your head to give you chance to “hear” those higher kinds of things, and that’s what the mindfulness techniques do. That’s what certain kinds of psychotherapy do. They try to produce space between your thoughts and feelings and images, so that you can hear more subtle kinds of things

That’s the thing we’ve been focusing on. None of the stuff I teach in the mindfulness course really has anything to do with directly trying to induce transpersonal experiences, per se. It has an indirect effect of making it more likely that such an experience might happen because it cuts that noise level way down. That’s where we’re focusing. But if the higher experiences come, learn from them.

Student: I was wondering if your concept of noise here is analogous to Gurdjieff’s concept of the number of forces that are acting in a particular plane, or realm. He advocates cutting the number of forces by half, making the material world less dense. I’m looking for the connection to that thought.

CTT: You can make that connection if you want. It's interesting, but I didn’t make it.

Student: Okay.

CTT: Gurdjieff’s idea of the number of laws acting at various levels and all that – that always struck me as intellectually interesting, but something I would have no idea of how to find out whether it was true or false.

I mean, it’s true in a general, psychological sense. The more neurotic you are, the more restrictions there are on your experience and behavior. The more laws you’re limited by, in a sense. But whether these are specific laws – you know, whether there’s a book somewhere that states what these particular laws are and that they divide strictly by halves or – I don’t know, and I don’t know how to figure it out.

So if you find that sort of stuff useful to help you move along, great. But I don’t know what to make of it. Sometimes I think Gurdjieff made it all up to get Ouspensky, who was so compulsively intellectual, off his back!

(Laughter)

You know, Ouspensky was such an intellectual. Oh, he wanted everything explained in precise intellectual terms, and sometimes I think this laws and forces stuff was a sop Gurdjieff threw to Ouspensky…..but probably not. Probably he thought this was the real stuff……. and maybe it is.

Student: My impression in reading it is that he was creating a symbolic representation of an individual, just like you alluded to in answering my question.

CTT: Yeah. It’s certainly true psychologically, that the more neurotic and conditioned you are, the more laws restrict your behavior, even if they’re nonspecific. Well, they’re specific for you. You may be conditioned in a certain, specific way that, say, closed doors make you nervous. That puts a restriction on your ability to use rooms in an efficient, comfortable kind of fashion. When you have some therapeutic insight into what’s behind that, and kind of let go of that mechanism, it’s like you gained another degree of freedom, because now closed doors don’t bother you.

Student: Whew. Thank God he opened that!

(Laughter)

So that’s the little review I wanted to give you. Okay? We’ve been working with the three boxes in the left and upper part. The fourth one is there. We hear more about the fourth one in other kinds of courses. If any of you take the altered states course next quarter, we’ll be talking some about altered states that have some things to do with these higher sorts of things, but I’m functioning as a “noise reducer teacher” in this particular class.

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Mindfulness

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

Lecture 5, Part 3 of 18 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

That takes us over to the upper right hand corner diagram of what can happen with Vipassana meditation, and two big things are happening in the way I draw that. Most of the squiggly things have been straightened out, and there’s a lot fewer of them. You can experience much more mental quiet; not necessarily an absolute, “I’m not having any experience,” but rather an awareness of being conscious. But it doesn’t have all those contents in it all the time, there’s more space between different aspects of experience, and things don’t automatically hook up. Things don’t automatically just trigger off more and more processes themselves. And I’ve also shown more input from those primary, simple perceptions by drawing a bigger arrow there.



[note drawing not reproducing just right, lower right says “Infuse with mindfulness and equanimity”]

How do you get there? In Vipassana, you basically infuse your perception of your ongoing experiences with mindfulness and equanimity. This is the big general picture now, rather than a specific technique. You basically infuse all of your experience with mindfulness. You’re looking. You’re listening. “What is it?” You’re curious. You’re open to it, and stay open to it with equanimity. You’re much more accepting of – you know, that hurts and I don’t need to freak out about it. It just hurts in a certain, particular kind of way, and things keep right on flowing. It’s that infusion of your experiential flow with mindfulness, curiosity, openness, equanimity that starts straightening out all those things so they don’t always jam up, that starts creating more space between things.

Judging from what some of you have said in class or written in your papers, I know some of you have had moments of a more spacious, clearer kind of flow of experience, even if it’s temporary.

I’ve crossed out all those defense mechanisms that were in the first panel of attraction, aversion, ignorance – defense mechanisms, conditioning, etc. They get reduced, ideally eventually eliminated.

If you jump to the lower left panel, I’ve also added, for the sake of completeness, that there are more ways to straighten out this flow than with just Vipassana meditation.

Vipassana meditation is a nice kind of technique. It’s very general. It’s been around for at least a couple of thousand years and whatnot, but we have learned some things since then. Things like psychotherapy can help straighten out those particular kinds of problems. Or learning particular kind of skills, or behavior modification techniques, or something like that – there’s a variety of growth methods now that essentially can straighten out many of the kinks in your own experience and let things flow better.

That doesn’t mean you end up in a state of no experiences at all; it simply means there’s less grasping, there’s less repulsion and attraction. Your experiences are experienced more cleanly. They don’t build up as an automatic reactive mass.

This has been where our work has been so far this quarter, to introduce you to controlled attention practices – CAPs – specifically concentrative meditation, Vipassana meditation, and self-remembering – that start to give you some training in exercising mindfulness and equanimity in a variety of ways to begin to “smooth out” experience.

Not that with the amount of training practice we can do in this course, that you’re going to come out of here “enlightened,” or something like that. But hopefully, you’re all going to come out of here with an ability to, at least at times, have a little more space between aspects of your experience, and do something about it.

(Student cell phone rings)

To be able to have your cell phone ring in an embarrassing manner in class and not have it be the end of the world, but perhaps to have it be just a minor annoyance!

Of course you have to know who it is.

Student: Mom!

(Laughter)

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Mindfulness

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

Lecture 4, Part 16 of 18 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

CTT: It’s a very unusual environment here at ITP, going back to William’s concerns for a minute or so. We don’t have a doctrine. We’re not a particular spiritual system with tight parameters of what you should and shouldn't experience, and what’s good and bad and all that.

But while we’re open in a lot of directions, there is a general receptivity and respect that makes things a lot safer and more productive. Nobody’s going to tell William, “Oh – you must be psychotic if you’re having funny experiences. You better go see a psychiatrist.” They’re more likely to say, “Oh. What happened? What was it like? What can I learn from that?” Something like that. Or make suggestions for particular things. This receptivity, I think, makes an enormous difference.

In the past, to find receptivity to unusual experiences, you generally had to belong to some particular religious or spiritual group. So you got people who respected you, but you got a very narrow container to try to fit things into. I think there are a lot of tragedy stories in traditional spiritual disciplines of people who were having deep and genuine experiences that could have been growthful, but they wouldn’t fit in a particular system that well, so they were looked upon as failures, or the work of the devil, or something like that. People suffered from them instead of growing from them.

I’ll tell you the story of the Spiritual Emergence Network.

For years, since I got a little reputation as someone who was interested in unusual kinds of things, I would hear from people. This was in the old days, so it was generally by telephone or letters. You guys remember letters? Pieces of paper?

(Laughter)

People who had had some unusual experience and were worried about it, and they had heard that I knew something about it. A few of these communications would be from people who I thought really were psychologically disturbed. They needed psychological help and, I’m not a therapist, I couldn’t give it to them. Often, they were crazy enough, to use a “technical term,” that if I suggested psychological help, they’d just put me into their delusional system.

So that part was sad. But a lot of these people were ordinary people – you know, sane like us, they’re allowed to walk around the street loose without a keeper – who’d had an unusual psychic or spiritual experiences, and they simply needed someone to be receptive to that.

So I often functioned in a therapeutic way simply by being a professor who said “This is not necessarily a sign of craziness. It’s a phenomenon. Here’s a name for it. We know a little bit about it.”

And that was sufficient in an awful lot of cases. “Oh, I experienced 'telepathy.' Oh, okay. Professor says I’m not crazy.”

Student: So it’s validation that’s making the big differences.

CTT: Yes. They got a glimpse of a bigger container that would allow them their experiences. And a lot of times, I might have to tell them, “You know, you might be crazy. I don’t know you.”

(Laughter)

“But on the basis of this one experience, you don’t sound crazy to me. You sound like an ordinary person who’s had a strange experience.”

Eventually (1978) Stan Grof and his wife Christina founded the Spiritual Emergency Network, which was an international network of people who were tolerant of this sort of thing. They would have liked to have a network right away of experienced psychotherapists who were quite knowledgeable about spiritual and psychic experiences and could actually work with people. They couldn’t get all that, but they got people who were friendly, who weren’t freaked by them.

And so as people would contact this network – and I referred a lot of people to them – they weren’t promised anything spectacular. They’d say, “Oh, okay. You’re in Neosho, Missouri? We have a member in the next town who’d be happy to sit down and have coffee with you and listen to your story without acting like you’re weird or crazy.”

And again, for a lot of people, that was all they needed. A bigger container, another human being who would accept them, instead of somebody who wants to send them to a psychiatrist or to a priest to get exorcised, or something like that.

I don’t know what the current status of the Spiritual Emergency Network is now. They’ve changed to Emergence instead of Emergency to give it a more positive spin, and they’ve gone in and out of business several times, and I don’t know whether they’re in business at the moment. I believe they've always been dependent on the generosity of private donors. They have trained a lot of psychotherapists who now know something about transpersonal and spiritual kinds of experiences, so they’ve helped things that way. I don’t know if they still just do their basic networking of – for example – “Here’s somebody you can have coffee with who will be friendly.” I hope they get back in business, but I think they’re out of business at the moment for lack of money.

Student: And what was that again? Spiritual Emergence –?

CTT: Spiritual Emergence Network. It was headquartered at CIIS in its last incarnation. I’m not quite sure exactly where it is now.

Student: Sounds like a much needed service.

CTT: Yes. It was very needed.

Student: Yeah. Why don’t we start it here?

Student: Yeah.

CTT: I don’t know how many people have suffered uselessly because they’ve had an unusual experience and the only way they can interpret it – and the only social interpretation they get of it – is this is pathology, or the work of the devil. We don’t need that! I mean, some people are crazy and need help with pathology, but, really….

Okay, so we’ve done our mid-quarter review. I’m happy. You guys seem happy.

You’ve stayed very grounded tonight. I guess we’ve reached the point where I will collect papers and you will exchange papers and we’ll get to go home.

Thank you for being present.

Student: Thank you.

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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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Systems that teach mindfulness are ones that let you become at least partially aware of the fuller range of yourself, and so decrease suffering because you stop doing things that you can now see are obviously maladaptive.  An example I like to use, e.g., is hunching up your shoulders, or other unnecessary muscle  tensions.  People can do this all day long without being particularly aware of it.  If you do something like this consciously, though, you immediately relax.  “This hurts and is on no use, why do it?”  Similarly with mental and emotional habits.
On the way to learning to be more mindful yourself, having a therapist who tells you about what it looks like you're doing, thinking and feeling, is like being more mindful yourself.  That "auxiliary mindfulness" function is, I believe, one of the reasons psychotherapy can help us.  You still need to learn to become more mindful from your own efforts and skills, but meanwhile having this outside help makes things much better.  “You seem to have an attitude, a chip on your shoulder, about such-and-such.”  Oh?  Let me look – yes, you’re right, let me relax…..When a therapist or counselor further helps you uncover reasons behind such behaviors that’s even better, but you start by becoming more mindful of what you’re actually doing – which may be quite different from what you think you’re doing. One of the ways I teach mindfulness to students at ITP is to have them work in pairs, with one person being the observer while the other actively does some specified exercise.  The observer is enjoined to give no responses at all, but pay attention, hopefully while being mindful themselves.  The active person can do something as simple as describe ongoing body sensations or as complex as talking about something of great value to them.  Students routinely report they are much more mindful than usual when there is an observer, an “auxiliary mind,” as it were.Having the observer give no responses at all is crucial to this method of training, as it keeps the observer in an auxiliary mindfulness role, rather than having the active person get involved in interpersonal games with the observer.  And yes, it’s very difficult for the observer not to nod, smile, laugh, or otherwise respond, but that’s good training too…..

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I’m not good at math, but sometimes I think some psychological truths can be expressed nicely as simple equations.  A prime example that inspired me this way was Shinzen Young’s equation

S = P * R

Suffering, S, what you experience, is a product of P, the actual physical intensity of a pain multiplied by R, your psychological resistance to this kind of experience.  It shows how with a highly resistant attitude, even a little physical (or emotional) pain can produce enormous suffering, whereas with an open, equanimous meditative attitude (which can be learned), pain can not only be no greater than it’s actual physical value, if R is less than one it can even be reduced.  At the extreme, meditative equanimity can be such that even though you’re in great physical pain, your suffering is tiny or non-existent.  I know this works for me, at least for low to moderate levels of physical pain – I don’t really want to test the relationship with high levels of physical pain if I can avoid it, thank you….   

I’ve written more about this in an earlier blog post (“Pain versus Suffering,” July 27, 2009) and Shinzen’s recent book discusses the theory and practice in detail (Young, Shinzen, 2009, Break Through Pain: A Step-by-Step Mindfulness Meditation Program for Transforming Chronic and Acute Pain. Boulder, CO: Sounds True).

On a recent Dzogchen retreat with Tsoknyi Rinpoche, I came up with the following.  This clarifies some things about the Buddhist idea that we live in “illusion,” samsara for me, perhaps it will for some others.   So, starting with the assumptions I make:

Assumption # 1:  Western psychotherapy tends to deal mainly with maladaptive, complex psychological structures.  Some are successfully dealt with in therapy, others are hard to deal with because the component parts from which they are built are hard to discern and so deal with effectively.  A particular flavor of emotion, e.g., may actually hide several sub-flavors, depression hiding covert anger, as one example.

Assumption # 2:  Classical Buddhist meditation tends to deal mainly with very basic, more “micro” processes that complex, psychological processes are built from, and, by progressively freeing one from attachment, aversion and ignorance (“purification”), tends to reduce or dissolve the suffering caused by complex psychological processes.

Assumption # 3: It is useful at times to talk about specific items/processes of ongoing experience, even though flow and morphing can also connect in causal ways what might be separated out as relatively discrete events.

So, my math-like formulation:

Let T = Tangledness, the degree to which specific items/processes of experience combine with, interact with other items/processes of experience.  Rough synonyms would be viscosity, density, charge, stickiness.

For a relatively discrete event at time 1, then,

T₁ = R₁ / f(S₁, C₁, Q₁)

where

T₁ = degree of Tangledness at time₁

R = real properties of event at time₁

C = mental clarity at time₁

S = mental Spaciousness at time₁

Q = Equanimity at time₁

Verbally, Tangledness is a function of the real properties of a particular event/process.  Strong physical or emotional pain, e.g., is more likely to cause that event to entangle with others than, say, a mild feeling of warmth, or thoughts of what kind of bread to buy at the grocery store.  There are probably important differences among individuals as to the R properties of what might appear to be identical events to an outsider.

The Tangledness of an event/process is reduced/divided to varying degrees by three variables (which I separate conceptually here, but which may be interrelated in reality), the mental/emotional/physical Spaciousness of the experiencer during the event/process, the Clarity of mental/emotional/perceptual functioning, and the experiencer’s Equanimity (Q) at that time.

If one is spacious at the time of an event, experiencing “oneself” as very large and open, “empty” in Buddhist terms, the disturbance possibilities, entanglement possibilities of an event/process are only a small part of “you,” so of less importance, and may be swept away by the continuing flow of events/processes.  This is, I believe, what Dzogchen refers to as “aimless self-liberation” when one is “resting in” “rigpa.”  Clarity and Equanimity (Q) have a similar effects, but I’m distinguishing them from Spaciousness in that there may be a more forceful, willed quality to clarity and equanimity, a deliberate focusing, calming and non-reacting rather than just resting in Spaciousness.  The distinction can be illustrated by willfully relaxing one’s muscles as you feel them beginning to tighten up in reaction to an event, e.g., or using a little “willpower” to keep perception clear, as compared to just being spacious, “empty” and open, so events/processes just flow through freely without effort on your part to make that happen.

Assumption # 4:  Now relax Assumption # 3 above and assume that most events at particular times are not fully independent on one another, but interact in ways that entangle them and produce higher and higher degrees of Tangledness in consciousness overall.  This interaction may be linear and/or non-linear and/or non-linearly emergent.  Thus the overall Tangledness (“samsaricness”) (lost in one’s internal “story”), (ΣT) of consciousness over time may be represented as a function of addition and interactiveness of individual event/process entanglements:

ΣT = f(T₁, T₂,  …   T_n)

Analogy: Picture hair balls clogging water pipes, producing turbulence, reducing flow.  The more tangled the hair balls, the less likely one can take them apart, distinguish individual hairs and pull them free, or straighten them so they don’t hook other hairs….  The more and the bigger the hair balls (karmic lumps?) the more they interact and make bigger tangles…..Bigger tangles are more likely to ensnare and tangle new experiences as they come along, etc.

Specifics needed.  For particular Ts, we need to find if the function is, e.g.,

ΣT = T_{1 +} T_{2 +} …   T_n

or, analogously with your pain and suffering equation,

ΣT = T_{1 *} T_{2 *} …   T_n

Or, a third possibility, emergents may occur.  I don’t know how to symbolize in standard math form that idea that some of the effects of the various T_ns may result in higher level emergents, qualitatively different outcomes.

Anyway, for me this is a useful and fun way of thinking about how vipassana (as Shinzen Young teaches it) and/or the spaciousness cultivated in Dzogchen (insofar as I understand it, from the teachings of lamas Sogyal Rinpoche or Tsoknyi Rinpoche and their teachers) leads to purification…..

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Lecture 4, Part 18 of 19 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Student: Wow.

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

(Laughter)

Scary. Scary.

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

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

(Laughter)

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

(Laughter)

And the look would get deeper.

(Laughter)

He’s very humble, as well as profound!

(Laughter)

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

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

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Lecture 4, Part 9 of 19 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

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

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

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

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

Student: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Laughter)

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

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

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

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

S = P x R

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

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

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

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

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

Remembering our arms and legs now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(A chorus of “Yes” “The cup.”)

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

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

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

(Laughter)

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

(Laughter)

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

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

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

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

Student: Say it again.

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

Now most people, from Gurdjieff’s point of view, since they’re asleep most of the time, are basically eating mental junk food. They’re not getting very high quality impressions because they’re not present, not here-and-now, for all these incredible sensory impressions coming in. So when you get nothing but junk food, you need a lot of it and it has to be real spicy to try to convince you that you’re getting something. If you’re not bringing awareness like you are now to your sensory impressions, and so affecting them in a way that turns them into high quality nourishment, then you don’t get enough nourishment and you get these mental and emotional deficiency diseases, which produces a feeling of experiential hunger at some level. Then you’re liable to do funny or dangerous or pathological things to try to get more impressions.

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

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

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

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

Student: Food of impressions.

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

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

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

CTT: It’s a very unusual environment here at ITP, going back to William’s concerns for a minute or so. We don’t have a doctrine. We’re not a religion, not a particular spiritual system with tight parameters of what you should and shouldn’t experience, and what’s good and bad and all that.

But while we’re open in a lot of directions, there is a general receptivity and respect that makes things a lot safer and more productive. Nobody’s going to tell William, “Oh – you must be psychotic if you’re having funny experiences. You better go see a psychiatrist.” They’re more likely to say, “Oh. What happened? What was it like? What can I learn from that?” Something like that. Or make suggestions for particular things. This receptivity, I think, makes an enormous difference.

In the past, to find receptivity to unusual experiences, you generally had to belong to some particular spiritual group. So you got people who respected you, but you got a very narrow container to try to fit things into. I think there are a lot of tragedy stories in traditional spiritual disciplines of people who were having deep and genuine experiences that could have been growthful, but they wouldn’t fit in a particular system that well, so they were looked upon as failures, or the work of the devil, or something like that. People suffered from them instead of growing from them.

I’ll tell you the story of the Spiritual Emergence Network. For years, since I got a little reputation as someone who was interested in unusual kinds of things, I would hear from all sorts of people. This was in the old days, so it was generally by telephone or letters. You guys remember letters? Pieces of paper?

(Laughter)

People who had some unusual experience and were worried about it, and they had heard that I knew something about it. A few of these communications would be from people who I thought really were psychologically disturbed. They needed psychological help and, I’m not a therapist, I couldn’t give it to them. Often, they were “crazy” enough, to use a technical term (humor), that if I suggested psychological help, they’d just put me into their delusional system.

So that part was sad. But a lot of these people were ordinary people – you know, sane like us, they’re allowed to walk around the street loose without a keeper – who’d had an unusual psychic or spiritual experiences, and they simply needed someone to be receptive to that.

So I often functioned in a therapeutic way simply by being a professor who said “This is not a sign of craziness. It’s a phenomenon. Here’s a name for it. We know a little bit about it.”

And that was sufficient in an awful lot of cases. “Oh, I experienced telepathy. Oh, okay! The Professor says I’m not crazy.”

Student: So it’s validation that’s making the big differences.

CTT: Yes. They got a glimpse of a bigger container that would allow them their experiences. And a lot of times, I might have to tell them, “You know, you might be crazy. I don’t know you.”

(Laughter)

“But on the basis of this one experience, you don’t sound crazy to me. You sound like an ordinary person who’s had a strange experience.”

Back in 1978, Stan Grof and his wife Christina, founded the Spiritual Emergency Network, which was an international network of people who were tolerant of this sort of thing. They would have liked to have a network right away of experienced psychotherapists who were quite knowledgeable about spiritual and psychic experiences and could actually work with people. They couldn’t get all that, but they got people who were friendly, who weren’t freaked by them.

And so as people would contact this network – and I referred a lot of people to them – they weren’t promised anything spectacular. They’d say, “Oh, okay. You’re in Neosho, Missouri? We have a member in the next town who’d be happy to sit down and have coffee with you and listen to your story without acting like you’re weird or crazy.”

And again, for a lot of people, that was all they needed. A bigger container, another human being who would accept them, instead of somebody who wants to send them to a psychiatrist or to a priest to get exorcised, or something like that.

I don’t know what the current status of the Spiritual Emergency Network is now. They’ve changed to Emergence instead of Emergency to give it a more positive spin, and they’ve gone in and out of business several times, and I don’t know whether they’re in business at the moment. They have trained a lot of psychotherapists who now know something about transpersonal and spiritual kinds of experiences, so they’ve helped things that way. I don’t know if they still just do their basic networking of – for example – “Here’s somebody you can have coffee with who will be friendly.” I hope they get back in business, but I think they’re out of business at the moment for lack of money.

Student: And what was that again? Spiritual Emergence –?

CTT: Spiritual Emergence Network. It was headquartered at CIIS in its last incarnation. I’m not quite sure exactly where it is now.

Student: Sounds like a much needed service.

CTT: Yes. It was very needed.

Student: Yeah. Why don’t we start it here?

Student: Yeah.

CTT: I don’t know how many people have suffered uselessly because they’ve had an unusual experience and the only way they can interpret it – and the only social interpretation they get of it – is this is pathology, or the work of the devil. We don’t need that! I mean, some people are crazy and need help with pathology, but, really….

Okay, so we’ve done our mid-quarter review (see last posting). I’m happy. You guys seem happy.

You’ve stayed very grounded tonight. I guess we’ve reached the point where I will collect papers and you will exchange papers and we’ll get to go home.

Thank you for being present. [“Present” being deliberately used to mean psychologically staying in the here-and-now, not just physically present.]

Student: Thank you.

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