Dr. Charles Tart

Mindfulness

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

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

CTT: This third method, doing Vipassana meditation on unpleasant sensations and going into them, is a very interesting method. I strongly recommend Shinzen Young’s book, Break Through Pain, I think it’s called. He specifically tailors the instructions for Vipassana for dealing with pain, especially chronic pain that you can’t do anything about. You’re not going to get a medicine for it, or get better; you’re going to have to live with it.

And he thinks this meditative approach is a pretty universal cure. I don’t know if it’s a universal cure. I personally do not want to find out if it’s a universal cure! I don’t want to ever get some pain that can’t be fixed in any other way so I have to develop meditative skill to deal with it.! I’d prefer that to remain in the realm of theory for me rather than practice.

But it’s certainly true that bringing mindfulness and openness to sensations that are painful can change the way you experience them enormously. At least in some cases, judging from my own experience, that’s a very effective way to deal with pain.

But it’s a tricky attitude. It’s not like, “Well, here’s this pain. I’m going to pay attention to it in order to make it go away,” because that’s not really being equanimous about it, or really open-minded about it. That’s saying I think I know a way to sneak up on this thing and get rid of it, which is back into a forceful approach.

Forcefulness is appropriate sometimes, but really being open to the pain can change things enormously. Again, that equation we've talked about earlier – suffering equals pain multiplied by resistance. Now that can be expanded out to cover so many dimensions, and even the attitude of “I want to get rid of this” can be seen as a form of resistance that creates more suffering than is really necessary for the pain. And the equanimity part of it, I guess, also involves the fact that sometimes we just have to accept the fact that we’re in pain. That’s how it is.

I remember I was in horrible pain once. My wife ended up calling an ambulance, and they took me to a hospital up in Northern California. I didn’t know what was wrong with me, and I wanted them to give me something. To take away the pain! But they couldn’t give me something until they knew what it was, because otherwise giving me something might be bad for it. So whether I wanted to be accepting or not, I had to be accepting. It turned out to be a kidney stone that was passing, and they’re pretty awful. But when they finally diagnosed it and gave me a double shot of Demerol, I really liked that!

While I was in this horrible pain and trying to be cooperative and a good patient, the doctor from the next cubicle in the ER comes over and says, “You may not remember me, but I was in one of your altered states classes at UC Davis ten years ago, and I thought you’d enjoy knowing at least one of your students turned out to get into an honest profession.”

(Laughter)

And I’m thinking, “Is this social time here? What the hell?”

(Laughter)

So sometimes – what’s the saying? – if you use force and it doesn’t work, you need a bigger hammer. That’s what’s necessary sometimes. But if that’s the only way you can deal with things, by forcing it – you’re limited.

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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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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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I realized at the time I read it that it was an ingenious psychological technique to try to get paranormal manifestations, but almost nothing has been done with it and variations since then, unfortunately.  There are way, way too few scientific parapsychologists!  I think the rationale at the time was partly to simply test whether the fun atmosphere of a typical séance could produce psi effects without necessarily have a "real spirit" around, and partly to use the psychological setting of a séance, where you are not responsible, it's a spirit doing things, to allow people's psychic abilities to manifest.  After all, it's pretty heavy psychologically speaking for you to claim special powers, but if the spirits are just using you…..it's much easier and safer.  Especially at the time Spiritualism developed, women were not supposed to express themselves, so they didn't, the spirits did it, and bossed a lot of men around…..Fascinating sociology there, it's been written about lately.  It's can also be risky, even in these so-called modern times, to claim psychic powers.  In the long history of the human race, it’s only been a moment since we burned people we thought had psychic powers (we didn't approve of or were afraid of) at the stake….

The one psychologist who really developed this technique further, Kenneth Batcheldor, started doing table-tipping and rapping sessions, but before the lights were dimmed or extinguished and the hymn singing started, sitters drew cards and one drew the "mischief" card, without telling anyone who it was.  That person was to subtly cheat near the beginning, manually lift a corner of the table or something like that, without revealing him or herself, and this created a mysterious atmosphere that maybe a spirit was manifesting.  Then the cheater would stop doing anything, but manifestations – raps, table liftings – often continued.  The psychological "ice" was broken, and nobody had to take responsibility, the spirits were doing it.  Overcoming this "ownership resistance" (Batcheldor's term) was important, and, if my memory is correct, I think it worked well in a number of sitter circles.

One of the most interesting things nowadays has to do with "spirit raps" obtained in modern séances.  A number have now been electronically recorded, and an analysis of waveforms does not show what you would expect from mechanical raps, namely an immediate jump to maximum amplitude followed by steady falloff (what any tap does), but rather a gradual rise to maximum amplitude and then a gradual fall off.  This kind of rap sounds pretty much like an ordinary rapping sound made by tapping one object on another to the ear, but an oscilloscope detects how different it is……So far the few who have investigated this cannot find any reasonable mechanical way of reproducing this kind of rap under the usual séance room conditions……Interesting!

So claiming the spirits did it makes you safer in one way, you were just used, but we can start shading over to the excuse that a bad spirit, the Devil made me do it…..not a direction we like to think about.

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Mindfulness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another Student: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

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

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

Student: Yeah. I know what you mean.

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

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

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

CTT: She was angry because you…?

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

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

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

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

(Laughter)

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

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

Student: Yeah. You’re dangerous!

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

(Laughter)

Good!

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

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

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

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

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

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Mindfulness

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

Lecture 4, Part 13 of 18 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

Student: So would it be hurtful, though, or pathological to do what Bob was talking about and really glean from that experience what seemed to be a significant portion of truth there, and to sort of work back towards that in the future and in the present. Constantly, I guess. Or would I constantly be setting myself up for disappointment and having expectations that are maybe unmeetable or maybe just undesirable?

CTT: You’re asking good, tricky questions tonight.

Student: I really am a little bit shaken up and I don’t know what to do about it. I mean, I don’t know how to re-frame my experiences.

Another Student: I’d like to respond to that.

CTT: Okay.

Student: I would suggest holding the experience as an inference, meaning that it can have many, many possible meanings. Usually, we really only need to come to a judgment when some action is required specific to that judgment. So within your experience, there’s probably numerable aspects of it that are more inferential and could mean something years later. And so, as much as possible, just hold it as an inference.

CTT: That means the next time you go down some path, you’re not actually expecting to experience something because of the judgments you’ve made. The inferences you hold might open up a whole new avenue that wasn’t even present in how you can process the information now.

Student: Have you written about it too?

CTT: You’re taking yourself some notes on it?

Student: Sort of. I wrote a paper about it for another faculty member's Ethics class, and now I’m just… yeah, taking notes.

CTT: The point Jospeh made about seeing some of it as inference is a good one too. Because we have experiences sometimes which you might say are sort of “pure experiences.” We’re not talking to ourselves about it at the time – the experience is so strong, it does it.

But boy, give us a microsecond afterwards and the old inference machine will start up and try to fit it into a framework! But that’s all right. That’s one of the things we human beings do. We come up with theories about what things mean. But distinguish between that and the actual experience, and be careful about getting carried away with the inference, the theory, the belief.

Student: Yep.

CTT: Because you might see it in a different way at some later time.

Again, it’s going back to this Tibetan thing of learn from these experiences, but hold them lightly somehow. Don’t throw them away. Don’t disrespect them, but don’t get overly attached to them.

Now this goes against what a lot of people want to do. Because a lot of times, you’ll have a certain kind of experience and it’ll seem like the best thing that ever happened in your life, and you want to get back to it and go that way. And that might be a legitimate opening on certain spiritual paths. It might mean that yes, you’re making progress, and this is a manifestation of it, and maybe having that experience again would open up even more of it.

I don’t know how to advise people on that kind of direction. I don’t feel very knowledgeable there. But I do know that, in general, getting too attached to anything can create all sorts of troubles.

And take good notes!

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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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One afternoon Rinpoche invited a few of us to meet with him privately and discuss what we saw as important obstacles to the introduction and growth of Vajrayana Buddhism in our Western culture.  Since he had touched, in passing, on the fact that Western science equates consciousness with brain functioning in an earlier teaching session, I focused on that, as building bridges between genuine science and genuine spirituality has been the focus of my half-century of scientific and personal work.

I have long been concerned that the prejudicial rejection of any reality to spirituality in orthodox science not only distorts the scientific understanding of our nature, it also seriously injures many people who have spiritual yearnings or who have been touched by personal spiritual experiences,  because They, The Authorities, those scientists who know what reality is, have "proven" that the spiritual is all illusion.  I and some of us know this attitude – I call it Dismissive Materialism, as it dismisses and invalidates the spiritual without going through the necessity in proper science to examine actual evidence – has hurt these people, for instead of feeling touched by Spirit and starting to grow, they think they must be stupid or a little crazy, and so squelch their budding spirituality.

Vajrayana Buddhism, like all the world's major spiritual systems, is heavily based on giving reality, as much reality as the material world has, if not more, to a "spiritual" realm.  The idea of the Siddhartha Gautama, the  historical Buddha, or various Buddhas since that time, or bodhisattvas continuing after their physical death as real beings, real "mind streams" that can help us and bless us in our own spiritual search, is central to Vajrayana, as are acceptance of various god-like, non-material beings, dakas, dakinis, yidams, protectors, karma, reincarnation, etc.  In Christianity, comparably, we have God, Jesus, the Holy Ghost, various angels, saints, all existing in a non-material way and able to help us.

Dismissive Materialism says all this is superstitious nonsense, of course.  Mind is nothing but a product of the physical functioning of the brain.  When the brain is badly injured or dies, that's the end of consciousness.  So  Siddhartha  Buddha was a smart fellow who lived 2500 years ago and figured out some psychological techniques to reduce human suffering by altering attitudes and beliefs about who you are and the nature of reality.  But the Buddha's “mind stream” ceased with the death of his brain.  The psychological techniques he created, like meditation, are still useful for reducing personal suffering.  Indeed they are especially useful to scientists studying brain functioning, as trained meditators can keep their minds still and focused much better than ordinary folks, which makes tracing brain circuits easier.  The result of such brain research, from the perspective of Dismissive Materialism, will be that eventually we will know exactly what brain circuits reduce suffering and produce feelings of happiness, enlightenment, etc., and then we will go on and discover more effective ways to activate those circuits, such as designer drugs, and we will no longer have to spend years and years meditating and doing other superstitious processes like Vajrayana rituals which are not guaranteed to work anyway, even within Buddhism.  We will have the Materialist version of Buddhism, drug X, Nirvanathene © which reduces your suffering.

If Buddhism or other imported spiritual systems follow the same historical path as Christianity and Judaism have followed in Western culture, what will probably happen is that spiritual systems will cede more and more territory to material science while claiming a certain mystery and exclusive territory, the territory of ethics, meaning, values, etc., that cannot be directly approached by materialistic science.  Christianity and Judaism have thus been marginalized in many ways as to contributing to our understanding of the world, although many social scientists will admit that research shows that belonging to a religion is good for your health.  It doesn't matter that your core beliefs are false and nonsensical – God, heaven, hell, salvation, Buddhas, enlightenment, all that sort of stuff – belonging to any tight-knit social group gives you support mechanisms that are good for your ordinary health.

I believe that if Buddhism does not directly confront this invalidation from Dismissive Materialism, it will become like our home-grown religions.  There will be a few small groups of people who manage to have a lot of faith and get along largely ignoring this invalidation, and many, many people who have half-hearted religious and spiritual lives.

In the few minutes I had to mention this point with Tsoknyi Rinpoche, I gave a quick version of the above and added, again much too briefly, that when science is done properly – an emphasis of dealing rationally with all the data, not just that which fits what you want to believe – we find that there is actually plenty of high-quality scientific evidence that people sometimes manifest the kinds of qualities which we would expect genuinely spiritual beings to have. Telepathy may be a mechanism of prayer, e.g., or clairvoyance and remote viewing examples of psychic/spiritual interconnectedness of being.

I have written about the findings of scientific parapsychology (not New Age, unscientific beliefs calling themselves parapsychology) constituting a scientific basis for taking Transpersonal Psychology as the study of a real spiritual nature of humans.  My recent book The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together is an overview of the scientific evidence and conclusions I have come to about this from my own and others' research.  I will be sending a copy to Tsoknyi Rinpoche, although I tend to doubt he will have much time to read in it, given the enormous amount of responsibilities he and other lamas have in preserving and spreading Tibetan Buddhism since the Chinese conquest of Tibet.

This is part of a general problem I see.  Western religious and spiritual leaders have taken quite a beating from materialistic science for a long time.  Often this was deserved – a lot of factually false or psychologically harmful ideas have been presented as religious truths.  But now the tendency is for spiritual leaders to pretty much ignore science, unless a particular, isolated finding happens to agree with their belief system, thus apparently lessening conflict.  But this does not solve the fundamental problem: Dismissive Materialism is one of the most powerful psychological, social and economic forces in the world and steadily undermines many genuinely spiritual aspirations and attempts at development.

Will Buddhism, or any other imported spiritual system, do any better than Christianity and Judaism have done in confronting Dismissive Materialism head on, instead of trying to pretend there is no problem?  I don't know.

What I think would be very helpful will be for progressive spiritual leaders to be aware of the kind of high quality scientific evidence I talk about in The End of Materialism, and when attacked by Dismissive Materialists presenting themselves as "scientists," be able to ask them if they are speaking as scientists, if they have actually studied this evidence?  Almost none of them have!  If they will honestly admit they haven't, then they should logically admit that their dismissal of the spiritual is a personal conviction, but does not carry the prestige of Science.  Better yet, religious and spiritual systems should explore positive ways to join with open-minded sciences like parapsychology and Transpersonal Psychology to begin discriminating different qualities of knowledge in these areas, exploring how to more effectively encourage and aid healthy spiritual lives, etc.

I fear, though, that once spiritual leaders have fallen back on the "just have faith" defense, they themselves don't want to associate with genuine science, as genuine science can question anything as part of refining knowledge, and that may mean some parts of spiritual systems will be found to be factually or theoretically inadequate and need to be replaced with better understandings and practices……This opens a whole area of how open minded science and the practice of humility can create progress in spirituality which I can’t go into here…..

And so these thoughts taper off in a quite unsatisfactory manner, no certain answers, lots of possibilities, and the human spirit being the most important thing in the world…..

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One of the things I am doing with this blog is putting in early drafts and beginnings of material which will be in one of my next books.  One of those book will be about looking for the Spirit in modern times, as seen through my eyes, with me probably being somewhat typical of a large class of people, a sincere but scientifically trained intellectual.  My training as a scientist and scholar has been to be as objective as possible, a very useful goal if not overdone, but which often means writing in as impersonal style as possible.  After all, “It happened” seems so much more objective than “I did,” doesn’t it?  But I’m slowly learning that people like some personal aspects of issues and it can be an advantage in sharing ideas if done right, so….this small contribution.

Forty-five Years Ago I Woke Up

Charles T. Tart

This is a partial transcript of an “online” (via telephone link) conversation between CTT and Shinzen Young on the evening of January 8, 2011, during Shinzen’s annual winter retreat at the Mary and Joseph Retreat Center in Rancho Palos Verdes, CA.  It’s “partial” in that CTT recorded his own words, but only did quick, dictated summaries occasionally of what Shinzen said, so Shinzen’s reconstructed remarks are [bracketed] and sometimes missing.  Shinzen has been too busy to check this for accuracy, so anything attributed to Shinzen is my memory/interpretation of what he said, don’t’ take it as a literal quote of his words or ideas.  This transcript is lightly edited for clarity.

(Note also that my dictated notes were sometimes unclear or the recording unclear, so a number of interesting directions are not quite spelled out – and I have left them in as mysteries to intrigue myself and the reader.)

CTT:  There’s a particular direction I want to take us in, and since it’s going to be an interesting story, if you don’t mind, I’ll record my side of the conversation.  And when you say something I especially want to remember, I will record a few words capturing it for myself.  If you don’t want to hear that, I’ll click my telephone mike off or I’ll let you hear me dictating….

[Fine with me, and I don’t care if I hear you dictating your notes]

Okay, good.  That simplifies things.

Okay, I’m going to manifest in a very different way tonight.  Usually, you know, when we play, I manifest as your friend, and when we’re on retreat, I manifest as a student of Buddhism who really wants to know and who, I think, is genuinely humble in the sense that I know I don’t know much.  But I try to learn.  Now, I’m going to do something different.  I’m going to manifest as a moderately attained student of another tradition in order to get your feedback as a very advanced student of another tradition on that, because I can’t get the feedback I’d like from that tradition.  Sound interesting?  Okay.

[Assents]

Yeah, OK.   Forty-five years ago I woke up.

Now, what do I mean by that?  I was reading Ouspensky’s book In Search of the Miraculous and came to a part where he wrote that what was essential to waking up was to have the arrow of attention simultaneously go inward and outward.

[Shinzen expresses great interest in this]

Yes, mm-hmm, double-headed arrow.

This is in his book In Search of the Miraculous which is… – I’ll send you the quote later.

[Shinzen wants to take some notes on this]

Okay.  You take notes.  (pause)

Right.  Okay.  I had read that two-way arrow of attention stuff intellectually before, and it was just an interesting concept, but somehow, this time, I actually did it, and I woke up.  Now, technically I’d say “relatively woke up,” because I don’t know what absolute waking up is.  But compared to the usual constant, ongoing stream of thoughts and hopes and fears and plans and memories and all that crap, I was present.  I was there.  I was alive.  And, by contrast, I hadn’t been alive up until that point.  Some “robot” must have been running the machine, making noises.

A few seconds later I went back to my comfortable sleep and forgot all about the fact that I’d woken up for a few seconds for, oh, months.  And after I remembered it, months later, I could talk about it to other people, but I never actually did it again for a long, long time.

Well, skipping over many years and many explorations, I eventually came in contact with a formal Gurdjieff training group out in California.  I was introduced to a specific technique for awakening.  You will love this technique because I can now put it in your system (of classifications of meditation techniques, introduced at this retreat) quite precisely.

What I did is a figure “J.”  You could start out imagining it as a fat exclamation point with a top very thick and it’s tapering down and coming to a point, and it’s all in the focus-out column.  It’s fat at the top because the recognition is that visual is most of the incoming information most of the time, so that’s where most of your attention is to be directed.  And hearing is next, and then you deliberately keep a little bit of attention in your body, specifically in the form of attending to the feelings in your arms and legs.

[Q from Shinzen on why arms and legs]  Yes.  Technically, I think the arms and legs were chosen because of the feeling that a lot of people had undergone emotional traumas which “resided” in the body, and if you got people attending to their body sensations too soon, you might activate those, and, because of the reactivation of suffering, they might quit practicing.  That’s true in my own practice with my students.  Some people can’t stand to spread attention this wide into their bodies, they activate pains and tensions.  They gotta stay in the –

[Shinzen interrupts with note about similar restriction in vipassana practice]

Ah.  So in Goenka retreats they cut the focus down when people get too agitated?  Good.

[Another Q from Shinzen, content not remembered]

Yeah.  I still present it to people with arms and legs getting about ten percent of your attention, and tell them the main purpose of this is not that those sensations are so important per se, but they provide an anchor in the hear-and-now instead of letting you drift off totally.

That’s right.  And it’s –

[Focus out]

Yes.

And I also teach this self-remembering technique with an admonition to actually look, actually listen.  Don’t just sort of mechanically move your eyes around and let your ears pick up sounds.  When you look at something, look to see what it actually is.  It’s like that extra attention, that intention – it’s like a moment of noting (vipassana technical term for paying open, concentrated, equanimous attention to ongoing stimuli), I realize now, after a new sensation comes in.

[Inclusive noting and focus out was (unclear)____ all.  Excellent.]

Yes.  Now, for me, the arms and legs thing long ago spread to a generalized sensitivity to my whole body, and I found that, even though the conscious focus is on external sensations, sight and sound, this practice made me much more aware of emotional feelings as they came up.  And it also kept emotional feelings or fantasies from running away with me because I was consciously controlling my attention and using a lot of it for being deliberately present, in the here and now, so that extra mental and emotional energy wasn’t there for my craziness to automatically take up.  Okay?

So years later, after I relearned this technique again, once again I started having the experience where. when I did this, I was suddenly present, and it was clear that before that I’d been relatively “unconscious;” the “machine” of my mind and senses was just operating.  And when I’d stop doing it, stop “sensing, looking and listening” as the technique is called, I’d fall back into that ordinary consciousness.

Another formal technique name for this in the Gurdjieff work is self-remembering, but I should note that people within the Gurdjieff tradition would probably think I’m being too casual with terminology.  But that’s not important for our discussion tonight.

Although I’ve always thought of the re-membering as a pun on sensing your arms and legs, your members.  [Laughs] Who really knows?

But the big thing is that you’re adding conscious intention to all sorts of stuff that’s normally just unconscious habit that you do.  And so sometimes there are sorts of specific increased sensitivity to specific aspects of sensations, perceptions, and the like, but it’s that increased feeling of consciousness that, to my mind, makes a difference.

************(not understandable)

This kind of self-remembering is the primary technique that I know of, but here’s my story/question gets complicated.  After Gurdjieff died, a lot of people said in effect “He didn’t name a successor, but of course I was the one who was going to be named his successor.”  So, there are many fragmented, little Gurdjieff groups.  They often tend to be rather secretive, so some of them may have developed some other techniques, but it would be very hard to know in general.  It’d be much easier to know what the range of techniques is in Buddhism, by comparison.

[lost remark from Shinzen]

Yeah, right.  Yeah, it couldn’t be that jerk over there when I was obviously the one of the elect.  This situation creates problems.  That’s also the reason there isn’t really anybody within the Gurdjieff tradition I know of that I can talk to about what I’m going to bring up next.  The one person I know very well in the tradition is a wonderful guy, he has a brilliant intellect, but when I ask him any kind or question, or invite some speculation – I feel like he can’t deviate from orthodoxy.  When I bring up any kind of topic that asks a question about something, it’s like an iron curtain of orthodoxy slips down over a brilliant mind and…..

I can’t get him to speculate, to play with alternate hypotheses like I’m used to doing as a scientist.  He won’t compare the Gurdjieff work with other things.  And I’ve noticed that in – I would probably notice this in other groups if I thought about it, too -  but I’ve noticed in Gurdjieff groups I’ve visited that there’s a lot of questions and answer with the instructors, and some of it is indeed increasing the student’s knowledge, but some of it is shaping, it’s socializing, it’s conveying to the student what it’s proper to think about and what it’s not proper to think about.  I’m sure you’ve seen that in a lot of places too.

Anyway, this kind of relative awakening from practicing self-remembering is and was really important to me because I’m not a kind of person who has mystical experiences and things like that.  I’m very practical, and this kind of experience of relative awakening was and is my main connection with feeling that, “Gee, there really is a higher level of consciousness available,” and I could see how repeated practice and experience gradually made changes in me over the years.  So this self-remembering was my central practice for many years.  It’s still my central practice in life, because I find it works much better for being mindful in life than formal meditative techniques.  It’s funny, too when I study dzogchen, it’s like when they talk about how someday they’ll talk about integration, I think, “I started backwards.  I began with integration.  What’s all this sitting still, not moving, not looking around stuff they want you to do?”

Anyway, this led on in many interesting ways, okay?  I’ve been thrown out of various Gurdjieff groups for daring to ask questions.  I ran my own Gurdjieff-style group at one of my teacher’s requests  for a year and a half, and deliberately and pleasantly dissolved it when I saw that people were getting transference reactions on me that I couldn’t get rid of.  So self-remembering was quite central for me for a long time, especially before I learned to be somewhat successful at vipassana as a result of your teaching.

But now, here’s the interesting question that I finally get to.  I can still do the technique, but it doesn’t feel special. Okay?

I mean right now, e.g., I can look more consciously at what I’m looking at, while simultaneously keeping some feeling in my body to center me in the present, and it seems like, yeah, that’s just something I do sometimes.  The world around me is more real, I’m more real, none of that seems particularly special.  And I don’t know – is it just that I’ve done it so much over the years that there isn’t this huge contrast any more that made it seem very special?  Or have I really screwed up whatever the hell the technique is and I just don’t do it right any more?  Or what?  Now, that’s what I’m wondering what you might have some reflections on.

[Shinzen asks whether earlier and continued practice has had long term effects on me]

Oh, yeah.  No, in terms of immediate special feelings, but if you ask about long-term growth, I’d say yes.  Long-term growth continues.  I’m a more aware, compassionate, present, practical kind of person than I used to be.

[Shinzen notes I’ve been into many kinds of growth practices, what have they done?]                     ]

That’s true.  Your kind of meditation has probably been my main practice for the past few years.  The Tibetan dzogchen stuff, that’s a whole other conversation because I vary considerably between thinking, “Of course, dzogchen is basically waking up like this,” versus “What the hell are they talking about?  Pure perception?  I have no idea at all.”  But this trying to be present in life by anchoring in the body and consciously looking around at my perceptions is my main technique in life.

[Shinzen remarks that he does mostly focus out into the world, for his practice in life.  He is pleased I think there’s been growth over time]

Yeah, there is definitely growth over time, so I’m glad you think I’m doing fine.

[Shinzen would call self-remembering an “even coverage on focus out,” within his current terminology for describing meditation practices.  He thinks that  what I’m doing with it and vipassana, and what I’m doing on dzogchen with Sogyal Rinpoche seems to be fine.]

[In terms of it not seeming that different, it’s true that we acclimatize.  In some ways it doesn’t seem that different for me, the way I am now, to where I was 40 years ago, as I’m just boppin’ in the world.  But I know that I’m like totally and completely different, but I’m just acclimatized.]

[So it’s not like you’ve done something wrong with it; you’ve acclimatized]

Yes, it’s abiding.  That’s probably the main factor.  That’s very helpful to hear from you, Shinzen.

Well, see, there’s a likely psychological projection problem here, too, because I think, “Shinzen – oh, my god, he’s done all this meditation.  I know he’s had some very deep experiences.  He must go around having really deep experiences all the time, even though he acts like a normal guy.”

[It’s true I go around having deep experiences all the time, but I’m not particularly aware of it as being special in any way at all.]

[Right now, there’s no separation between me and this room.  They’re a wave that’s absolutely connected, and I didn’t have to do anything to make that happen.  It’s just as soon as I pay attention to it, it’s there, but it takes 40 years to get to that point.  As I’m talking to you, I’m not on an acid trip behind it.  I’m acclimatized.  I’m just like ordinary.]

That’s very interesting.  Okay, yeah.  Of course I’m biased to think it’s acclimatization because I certainly know I’m a better person than I was 40 years ago, and I’m – for instance, there’s an interesting distinction in Gurdjieff’s teachings.  They talk about seven levels of man, and the first three levels are just descriptive.  They’re not really numbers that add up, just nominal.  Man Number 1 is a person who’s mainly centered in his body and instincts; the second in his emotions; the third in his intellect.  And they’re all sort of equally deluded, equally asleep, because they’re just living in parts of themselves.  So the first level of real development in the Gurdjieff work is what he called Man Number 4, where there’s a relatively balanced development of emotions, body instincts, and intellect.  I’m still an intellectual, but I feel like I’ve got a reasonably functioning emotional intelligence now, and I’m in good relation with my body and pick up a fair number of those instincts now.  So that’s one of the main ways I describe the change there.  There are higher levels in  his system, Gurdjieff gets into funny cosmological stuff that I have no idea whether it’s real or not, so I don’t think much about it.

{noise on phone connection}

You still there?

[Yeah].

So I just finished talking about Gurdjieffian higher levels which are very cosmological, and I have no idea if they’re true.  So, okay.

[Anything else you want to go over?]

That was the main thing – well, I wanted to get you to explain to me what dzogchen is, but that may be too much for tonight.

[Doing nothing, and expansion and contraction, and spaciousness – this would map onto dzogchen.]

This may just be me, but I have the feeling sometimes that in Tibetan Buddhism they’re very good at withholding information because it keeps paying students around longer.  And it’s a funny way for me to feel, because, for instance, Sogyal Rinpoche – I like the man.  One of the main reasons I stopped doing formal Gurdjieff work was that, while I was continuing to get ahead in it, there was a cold, unheartful quality to it that I didn’t really care for.  I was already too cool, too intellectual.  Sogyal Rinpoche came along and was clearly a very compassionate person, as well as such a competent teacher of Tibetan Buddhism.  That really appealed to me.

Now, I don’t know, incidentally, if Gurdjieff would have wanted it that way, emotionally very cool, but that’s the way a lot of his followers went, because if you look at Ouspensky’s book in particular, Ouspensky was a hyper-intellectual.  He was like us, dude!  And I don’t know if he ever got out of being just an intellectual, but…  I think you and I are more than just intellectuals, though…

[Shinzen remark lost]

Oh, but I thought it was the same thing rather than Ouspensky’s technique being different, because in sensing, looking, and listening, you have a two-headed arrow of attention.  Most of it’s deliberately directed out; 10, 15 percent or so is directed in; and the exact percentage varies.  I make a big point of telling students the percentage distribution of attention will change with circumstances though.

[Shinzen says if you hold subjective and objective space in awareness simultaneously, it breaks down the boundary between in and out.  I’d have to think about that.  I don’t know if it breaks down the boundary for me.  It’s –]

Ah, boundary.  I guess –

Yeah, you can’t stop me from thinking for a minute, man.  I’m an intellectual.  I don’t think there is a boundary when I do the self-remembering technique, okay?  I mean, in retrospective description, I say the outside world did such-and-such, and I was more clearly aware that I was in this location, and maybe I felt so-and-so.  But I don’t feel a heavy inside-outside kind of split.  But…

[What would happen if you were sitting in a swarm of black flies and doing that technique?  Would you still be able to say there’s no boundary on those black flies?]

Yeah, I might be able to do that, although it seems like a horrible experiment to indulge in.

[So the only way to get a merging then is to affirm the in-and-out simultaneously, and they become a single swirl.]

[What I’m describing works if the “in” is not too stimulated.  What I’m describing is a proactive thing to not have a boundary.  But if “out” is impacting and causing huge “in” reactions, it won’t work.]

Yeah, I think you may be right there.

[If I simultaneously go in and out, they become one flow.]

Yeah, it may be like that.  I’m not sure.  If I’m thrown into a stress situation, I think I will automatically start doing this self-remembering.

And yes, I’m not saying I can’t be thrown off if the situation gets really bad.

[Want to try something like that now?]

Yeah, okay.  All right.  Maybe you can give me a little experience of that because I had that problem the other night when I cancelled our online session.  I think it was a combination of the cold and the fever and a reaction to the Sudafed that I’d taken.  My imagery went mad and I couldn’t do anything about it.

Well, actually, it’s gotten pretty late, and I’m quite satisfied with our conversation, so why don’t you just work with the other two folks on other lines for now, and thank you for a great retreat!

And I’ll even try to get over my fantasy of the next retreat.  I’m gonna stand at the food service table and stare balefully at people who don’t sterilize their hands[1].  Bastards!  [Laughs] Okay, bye-bye.

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Where Do Spontaneous Images Come From, And Why?

I’m wondering where the huge number of images and dreamlets, whose form and content almost never have anything to do with my life, come from when I meditate.  I say “where,” as the origin of these images and dreamlets does not feel at all like it comes from “me,” from my conscious thoughts and intentions.

Observational Method:

For years I have tried to practice some vipassana (“insight”) meditation most days as part of my ongoing study of consciousness.  I wouldn’t call myself an accomplished meditator by any means, but I’ve certainly learned a lot about how my mind, and thus probably mind in general, works.  Now I want to ask about one of the mysterious aspects of it.

I often get sleepy while attempting to do vipassana with my eyes closed, and rather than just complain to myself about not being able to stay fully awake, I’ve learned, thanks to advice from Shinzen Young, to take the visual imagery that arises as the object of my meditation, to try to observe whatever imagery spontaneously comes with as much concentration, clarity and equanimity as I can.  That is I don’t try to influence it, don’t try to make certain kinds of images arise and others not arise, but stay with whatever comes along and observe them as clearly and  “objectively” as possible.

I can classify my observed imagery roughly in three categories.

First is what I might call the background screen, the faint, moving, morphing, vague patterns, probably caused partly by what light does come through my closed eyelids plus internal processes.

Second is more definite images, brighter, still moving and morphing to some degree, but largely impersonal, more like poorly defined geometrical designs than identifiable, everyday objects.

Third is what I call “dreamlets,” brief (a few seconds) dreams with definite, moving imagery and accompanying, appropriate thoughts (internal talk).  Dreamlets come as I slip more deeply into a hypnagogic state.  I get absorbed quickly into the dreamlet story and lose some of my ability to observe, but often retain some sense that I am observing throughout, and usually come back to more awake, less imagistic consciousness after a few seconds.  Rarely, I can keep observing ongoing dreamlets in this hypnagogic state for longer periods, but it is tricky to maintain enough intention and activation to not actually fall asleep, but not so much as to wake me up so much that the dreamlet fades away.

My question, phrased in the heading as where the images (and dreamlets) come from, is a set of why questions.  Why do the images appear, why do they have the particular forms that they do, and what function, if any, do they have?  I’ve thought about several crude theories, described below, none of which is very satisfying in terms of fitting the data, and wonder if JCS online participants may have some better ideas.

Random Image Creation Process Theory:

One line of theorizing is that some parts of the mind are basically random generators, there is no “Why?” answer or “What function?” answer.  It would be like a program running in your computer that randomly accessed sections of randomly selected files on the hard disk and displayed them for a few seconds before making another random selection, with some blending/morphing of images as one selection is replaced by another.  This kind of theory is a partial fit to my thousands of observations of my imagery and dreamlets, as for almost all of them, there is no obvious connection to my recent activities, my ongoing concerns, or my personal history.  As to continuity, while at the form level alone one image frequently morphs into another in a second or two, there is seldom any obvious cognitive reason for A turning into B into C, etc.

A major shortcoming of the purely random theory is that whatever generates my images works with constraints to generate recognizable objects and dreamlets: they all make rough or complete sense.  I do not see weird things you would never see in reality, the characters in my dreamlets do not speak in gibberish or do impossible things, etc.  So if there is a random process behind things, it is a constrained process, limited as to what kinds of forms and happenings it can pick.

Deeper Processing Byproduct Theory:

Another line of theorizing, applied by some to nocturnal dreams also, is that the images are a byproduct of some deeper activity of sorting through recent sensory impressions and thoughts.  The deeper activity is theorized to be of importance in organizing the brain or something like that, the experienced imagery is a kind of fluff, an epiphenomenon of no direct or relevant meaning.

The main problem with this theory is that these “deeper processes” are so vague at present that this kind of theory could not be disproven or distinguished from a constrained random process theory until such time as the characteristics of the hypothesized deeper processes are specified.

Another problem with this theory is the observation, mentioned above, that what I see is not truly random, it is constrained to “sensible” objects and happenings.  Why would something that is just fluff or static be constrained instead of totally random?

The older version of this deeper processing line of theorizing is, of course, Freud’s ideas on the meaning of dreams as disguised expressions of deeper desires.  Perhaps….but as it’s not feasible to have a psychoanalyst on standby whenever I have an image while meditating, I won’t go there now.  In general, I’m sure that if I started a process of association to many of these images, subtly guided/biased by a therapist, I would eventually get back to things of significance to me, but whether this would be more effective than, say, starting associating to words picked from the dictionary at random, is a good question.

World-Simulation Virtual Reality Processing Model:

For years I have found it useful to think of consciousness as a world-simulation process, as a Biological-Psychological-Virtual-Reality (BPVR) (Tart, C., 1991.  Multiple personality, altered states and virtual reality: The world simulation process approach.  Dissociation, 3, 222-233), where a mental model of self and world is constantly being created.  This model is compared against sensory stimuli from the world in order to update the model, although the simulation of the world created by whatever processes do it is not always an accurate simulation of external reality.  From this perspective, it is quite useful for the simulation process to generate scenarios of what one is liable to encounter in the world and try out various responses to see what is likely to happen, a series of “What if?” exercises so you won’t be surprised by novel events and may have a strategy for coping with them already worked out.

This modeling fits my conscious thinking well.  At best, much of my waking thinking is directed to modeling my goals and life situation and devising useful plans of action.  My more idling, less consciously directed, waking thoughts similarly frequently revolve around practicing the best ways to deal with my ordinary reality: how to phrase a certain idea in a lecture I will be giving, e.g.

The problem with applying this model to the imagery and dreamlets that arise during vipassana practice is that the content is so seldom recognizably about my life, or situations I might have to deal with in my ordinary life.  If there is a practice simulation process, you would think it would focus primarily on what might be useful given my history, and only rarely “play” with material of no likely practical usefulness.

The previous three theories are compatible with mainstream thinking that totally equates mind with brain functioning.  The next two lines of theorizing require more openness than the usual conventional mindset has, and may be dismissed without thinking about them by those who find the ideas disturbing.  But if you do dismiss them, I would still like your thoughts on the questions raised above and at the end of this note.

Semi-Random Recall of Past Lives:

Since I learned this vipassana technique in the context of Buddhism, and Buddhism accepts the reality of reincarnation – most everybody in India did in the Buddha’s time –  I wondered if these images and dreamlets, usually of no obvious connection to my current life, could be bits of memories from previous incarnations?  Certainly if I had been raised to believe in reincarnation and then learned vipassana meditation in a Buddhist context, it would be easy to interpret the imagery, so unconnected to my current life, as coming from previous lives.  Indeed, I could take it as a sign that I was making progress toward enlightenment, since Gautama Buddha is reputed to have remembered his past lives as part of his enlightenment experience.

While I do not have the standard mindless rejection of any possibility of reincarnation that is so common in Western intellectual communities, since I know there is some data supporting the theory, nevertheless my imagery doesn’t support this idea.  The images of people and things that arise are almost always what you would see in the contemporary world.  (I say “almost always” to be cautions and not over-generalize, I couldn’t swear that I have never had an image of someone dressed in an old-fashioned way, e.g., but I don’t think so.)

Random Telepathic Reception Theory:

Given the existence of thousands of peer-reviewed published experiments supporting the existence of several kinds of psi, extra-sensory perception – see my recent “The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together” book (Oakland, CA: New Harbinger, 2009) for a review of data and its implications – another line of theorizing might be that the process of vipassana meditation increases my receptivity to telepathically picking up the thoughts of others.  We could analogously picture various minds “broadcasting” like radio stations and the meditation process occasionally “turning on” the “telepathic receiver” and randomly twirling the dial to different frequencies.  I’m reminded of lying in bed at night, sleepy, randomly turning the tuning dial, there’s a little snatch of conversation (turn), some music (turn), a bit of drama (turn),, music (turn), conversation, etc.  This would fit the contemporary nature of the imagery and its lack of connection to my ongoing life and personal history, but introduce new mysteries of what is the hypothesized telepathic reception mechanism, how does it get switched on and tuned, and why?  I won’t speculate further here, but it’s interesting to think about….

Bottom Line Question:

So, “where” do all these images and dreamlets come from?  Why do they take the form they do?  What, if anything, does it mean?

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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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These are various lines of thought that deserve more thinking, not final answers to anything…..An internal "debate-in-progress" as it were…..

Many Buddhist teachings do not create conflicts for me.  By and large, I can think of the Buddha as an early psychologist, and the central core of his teachings about why we go through a great deal of unnecessary suffering and what to do about it make excellent sense to me, as both a person with extensive life experience and as a modern psychologist.  I can confirm the usefulness of various Buddhist ideas and practices in my own experience, as well as drawing on the psychological literature.

One of those Buddhist teachings I'm thinking a lot about is how many of our doubts are intellectually bankrupt.  That is, we automatically and habitually doubt many ideas not because we have thoroughly, logically and carefully thought about them and studied what evidence there is for and against them, and reached the most rational conclusion possible, but because our society doubts these ideas and we have been conditioned to doubt them too, without actually thinking about them.  By (automatically) going along with our social conditioning we gain social acceptance, and think of ourselves as smart or "normal."  I think of this as mechanical doubt: it has the same truth value or moral value as programming a computer to recognize, say, the word "Jesus," and play a recording that says "He has risen" or "He's a myth," reflecting what belief you were brought up in.  Mechanical and meaningless.

There is also what I call, as a psychologist, emotionally-invested, defensive doubt.  Besides elements of mechanical belief or doubt, we have emotional investments in believing or denying A or B, and this makes us irrational when A or B comes up.  We may pretend that we are rationally supporting or denying the truth of A or B, but actually we hope or fear strongly and this warps our reasoning.

Bringing this back to a lot of my thinking on this retreat, Sogyal Rinpoche published The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying in the 70s, and it has sold over a million copies in more than 30 languages.  As with most Buddhist ideas, I find most of the ideas in the book quite sensible, especially advice on how to live a good life, and can confirm their truth in my own experience.  But then there are many ideas – presented as truths rather than "ideas" – about the nature of the dying process, the after death state, and various ways of working toward liberation for oneself using the high-leverage process of dying, and/or helping those who have already died through prayer, phowa practice and the like that I cannot support or deny through my own experience.  Perhaps if I become a very accomplished meditative practitioner I will see the truth of these in my own dying process – but that possibility casts no light on things now, when I'm certainly not an accomplished meditator, and I'm not dead, surviving in some form and reflecting on how well these ideas were formulated.

At the same time, the Tibetan teachings on death maintain that it is of the utmost importance to practice meditation and related practices if I am to have any hope of getting a good (good conditions for spiritual progress) incarnation next time around or getting enlightened, so I'm not really offered the option that "These are interesting ideas, no need to think much about them or act on them."  Do these or else!

As I've written in many places, while I'm not idolatrous about essential science, thinking it's the only way to gain valid knowledge about things, it is very useful in so many ways, so I can't help but think about these Buddhist ideas in scientific terms.   Buddhist beliefs and teachings on the nature of life, consequences of living in various ways, reincarnation, the death and dying process, etc., are theories about the way the world is.  As a scientist (and psychologist) I know that theories can be intellectual intoxicants, we get carried away with ideas we like, so the discipline of being a scientist is that you must keep coming back to examining the evidence bearing on theories and treat all theories as tentative, perhaps the best explanation we can give at this time, but always subject to rejection, modification or expansion as new evidence comes in.

So what is the evidence for these Tibetan Buddhist theories on the nature of death and dying and how to use them to become enlightened?

Unfortunately there is little evidence from a Western view.  The primary authority for these teachings is just that, Authority.  "The Masters say that…."  But basic science wants observable, empirical evidence for theories: that people designated Authorities in some social system believe them is not enough.  Indeed the emergence of science with pioneers like Galileo was due to a recognition that we must be able to examine phenomena and test theories, not simply believe authorities, as authorities can be wrong.  As to empirical evidence for the Tibetan beliefs here, there are stories that some of the Masters who died while carrying out these practices had their deaths surrounded by "miraculous" events.  Because of my knowledge of scientific parapsychology, I do not automatically dismiss these stories and I give them some weight, but it's little weight by usual scientific standards.  And a general idea I apply to parapsychological events is that having a belief system that allows them makes them more likely to happen, regardless of the truth or falsity of the belief system.

So how do I and others prepare for death?  Western science offers no useful information or hope here at all.  Consciousness is nothing but the electrochemical action of your brain, your brain dies, life and mind are over, end of story.  Death is the final failure.  The best you can hope for is to die with good medical facilities available, so your personal death will be less painful than it might otherwise be.

The Tibetan Buddhist approach, on the other hand, offers a magnificent and appealing story of how we are inherently Buddhas, we survive physical death and reincarnate, albeit in different forms, that we can become enlightened through practices in life and/or during the dying process, and we can become bodhisattvas, enlightened beings who keep right on helping the rest of beings become enlightened themselves so they can stop suffering.  To say this is a more noble and appealing picture to me and to many people is to put it way too mildly!

But am I just kidding myself because believing this view lessens my fear of death and makes me feel better?

I certainly like to feel good, and I have observed innumerable instances in my life where wanting to feel good has warped my perceptions and judgments.  Is it happening here?

I also have a genuine desire to know more of the truth, whatever it is, and I have a genuine desire to help other people.  These desires can be warped or suppressed by hopes and fear and conditionings at times, but they are there, they are real.

I wish I had a perfectly clear answer to my questions.  Be a "normal" member of my materialistic Western culture and keep my medical insurance paid up to get the good drugs which will lessen my pain as I go into oblivion?  Take a chance on believing the Tibetan ideas and investing a lot of time in the recommended practices?

Doubt the Doubt!

Sogyal Rinpoche recognizes the existence of mechanical doubt and defensive doubt, and often admonishes students to "doubt the doubt," to examine just why you tend to automatically reject some ideas.  He particularly wants students to apply this to the fashionable, automatic modern materialist doubting of spiritual realities.  I couldn't agree more with this advice.  Whatever the ultimate nature of reality, being stuck in the automatic operation of beliefs you never examined or consciously chose in the first place will always be a hindrance to coming closer to truth.  To just mechanically accept what's been conditioned in you is to be asleep, in Gurdjieff's sense, to live in samsara in the Buddhist sense.

So I can readily see, after a long life, that many, if not most, if not practically all, of my beliefs and doubts have been mechanically or defensively conditioned in me in the course of socialization and in being a member of contemporary society.  And, perhaps even more importantly, I know that when science is properly applied we actually have lots of empirical evidence for a basic reality to the spiritual – that what my recent The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together book was all about.  But there's still a big gap between general support for the spiritual and the specific theories and practices of Tibetan Buddhism…..

Looking at this from a practical angle, I have no doubt that many Tibetans over the ages, practicing Tibetan Buddhism, became extraordinary people, spiritual people that I would like to emulate.  But how well are these practices, designed for a very different culture and time, going to work for me and my friends?

Ah, I suddenly realize one of the main things that has been bothering me is that the "doubt the doubt" injunction is not being applied evenly.  Yes, doubt the Western conditioning, the Western authorities.  How about doubt the Masters?

In his Sutta to the Kalamas, the Buddha takes a perfectly empirical and scientific approach to spiritual beliefs and practices, enjoining us to test everything, to take nothing on authority.  That attitude has been one of the major reasons I find Buddhism interesting and attractive, as opposed to the "Believe this completely or you will go to Hell!" attitude too often found in other religions.

Now I can understand that Tibetan lamas are under enormous pressure to preserve their ancient traditions: since the Chinese conquest, Tibetan culture and Tibetan Buddhism has slowly but steadily been being deliberately destroyed.  So it's all too human to doubt those who undermine what you think of precious, and not doubt those who support it much: I do this all the time, in spite of an intellectual commitment to examine all my beliefs….

So much of the Tibetan Buddhist (or any religion's) approach to dying has not been subjected to scientifically satisfactory examination and refinement by Western standards.  Perhaps some or much of it involves imaginary, unreal elements.  And yet compared to what the modern West offers – take your pills and get on with dying before your insurance coverage runs out – what a wonderful alternative!

I've done moderately serious, personal study of several spiritual paths now.  I've never found any that triggered a total belief and ecstatic embrace by me, although they've all offered me much of value, both personally and for my work.  I'm 73 now, I don't know how much time I have left, so I'm not going to be off hunting for some spiritual path that might be more satisfactory, especially in terms of preparing for death.  I'm not looking forward to death, but I do think the Tibetan approach will, at the very least, make it much more interesting as it nears, rather than just a "medical failure."  And if I get more enlightened and spiritual before I die, avoiding thinking just what that means for now, all the better…..

These lines of thought to be continued in the future…..

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