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

Lecture 4, Part 3 of 17 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

CTT: What else did people experience this week?

Student: I thought it was easy to verbalize my sensations during the meditation, versus having my eyes closed. So verbalizing for me was easier to track the sensations in my body.

CTT: Okay. Yes. If you are ever having difficulty doing an exercise like this and you’re doing this at home, and your mind is really totally jazzed up and spaced out or whatever, you might try just verbalizing aloud. That can help you focus sometimes.

In formal Vipassana systems, this is a technique known as noting. Rather than just be aware of what the moving focus is – let’s say body sensations in this case – you specifically note each one, mentally look it over for a few seconds. You can either note just internally and/or you can put a verbal label on it – foot, knee, foot, right hand, foot, something like that if your focusing on location of sensations – or you can actually say the label out loud.

If you’re really flummoxed and distracted, saying it out loud will help you focus in much better. Then as your concentration improves and you follow it better, you can just drop it to just mental noting. And if you’re doing pretty well on that, you can actually stop the internal, verbal words and just follow the pure sensation itself.

The goal of this kind of controlled attention practice (CAP) – Vipassana – is to have a really clear and even-handed, equanimous perception of the whole flow of your experience. One of the reasons we don’t normally have that is that we’re caught up in talking to ourselves and imagining things to ourselves, and that makes us lose a lot of sensory input, a lot of bodily feelings, and so forth.

So you can just try to brute force stop it and say, “I won’t think. I won’t have any images. I’m just going to experience touch sensations.” Sometimes you can do it, but most of the time that’s pretty hard. So this way, as long as that verbal process is going to happen anyway, you put it to use in a way that helps you. Some part of your mind is just desperate to make words. Good. It can make labels that can fit with whatever the strongest body sensation of the moment is.

But you don’t want to stick with that forever. You want to come back closer and closer to the pure experience. Not that it’s bad to use words, but you don’t want to confuse the words with the realities that they are about. You want to keep those things distinct.

[Note added later – Shinzen Young's websites (www.shinzen.org, e.g.) have excellent and detailed info on this]

What else happened?

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

Lecture 4, Part 1 of 17 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

CTT: A couple classes ago, I talked about an aspect of meditation practice, or spiritual practice in general, that I don’t usually talk about because it felt more personal; and yet it feels like it’s time to say more things about it.

Before you actually begin spiritual practice, you remember the context you’re doing it in. You remember that this is not just, “Oh, 6:34, time to do my ten minutes of concentrative meditation,” but you remember you have a larger life purpose or larger context or a spiritual context in which you’re doing that practice; that in some sense it’s not just me and it’s not just you, that you’re undertaking your spiritual practice as part of a larger movement of humanity, as part of a compassionate movement. I’m not quite sure how to express this.

At any rate, I’m going to start us with an experiential exercise tonight. To precede that I’m going to share with you something I listened to in the car on the way down, a little musical selection by a guy named John Astin , a song he created that I think is a good reminder of why a lot of us actually practice this sort of thing. It’s just a couple minutes long, but I really dig it.

(Plays song “Love, Serve and Remember” from John Astin CD, Remembrance. This deals with whether we remember our purpose in incarnating on Earth. Words not reproduced here because of copyright restrictions.)

Now the exercise I’d like us to do this evening to start things off is done in pairs, and it both deepens your ability to do Vipassana and, at a teaching level, serves to demonstrate something about the power of collective consciousness in influencing what we’re doing, usually for the better.

So without talking, quietly pick a partner – preferably somebody you don’t know that well – and sit facing them. You can move chairs around if necessary.

(Students select partners)

Okay. Good. We’ve got a nice, even number.

Now you know that when you do Vipassana meditation with body sensation as your primary focus, you try to experience with clarity –you just look at what happens with openness, curiosity, wonder – and with equanimity. You don’t try to grab the good stuff or push away the bad stuff, but just to look clearly at whatever occurs, without getting caught up in accepting or rejecting, grasping or pushing away; and you follow the strongest sensation within the body, as we’ve talked about and practiced a little for Vipassana.

What I’m going to have you do this time is first pick who’s going to go first. We’ll call that the A partner. And having made that big decision, what’s going to happen is the A partner is going to close her or his eyes and then do Vipassana. But they’re going to do it aloud, so that your listening partner can hear you. Loud enough so that they can hear you, not so loud you dominate the whole room. And be as straightforwardly descriptive as possible. That is, it’s fine to say something like “There’s a burning sensation in my right foot,” but then don’t go into “and that reminds me of a foot injury I had on the ski slopes back in 1983,” and blah blah blah blah. Keep coming back to simply describing the most prominent sensation you’re experiencing at this moment.

When it changes, describe the next one. If it gets larger or smaller, changes shape or size, say something about that.

If it’s a totally socially unacceptable sensation, “I really feel like I need to fart and…”

(Laughter)

You can cheat and not say anything about that particular sensation.

Your listening partner is also doing Vipassana. But as listening partner, your primary focus is to look at and listen to your partner’s words so that you, in a sense, are adding your concentration, your focus, your awareness to what your verbalizing partner is doing. You listen with equanimity, with openness, with clarity as much as possible. And of course, you don’t say anything. You just listen. So this expands the observing part of your mind in that very elastic sense.

So go ahead and start doing that. We’ll do that for five or ten minutes, and then I’ll have us switch roles, and I’ll wander around, so my focus comes into your peripheral field every once in a while, just to do God knows what.

Questions?

Student: Person B has their eyes open?

CTT: Yes. Person B has their eyes open. Unless you really want to try it with your eyes closed, just really listening to the tone of your partner’s voice. And you don’t have to try to reproduce their sensations in yourself. You listen to the tone of their voice. You obviously grasp the basic meaning of it and listen.

Okay. We have the big A-B decisions worked out now? Okay.

CTT: Ready?

[Bell rings, exercise begins]

[Random pickup of what students are reporting to partners....]

Student: My throat is expanding. My forearms – feel like there’s a pressure on the insides of my thumbs.

[Exercise continues]

Student: …feel my head. Also warm sensations throughout my whole head.

[Exercise continues]

Student: Still have a warmth in my hands. An itch right in the lower right hand side of ….

[Exercise continues]

Student: Now my left toe is – or my left foot – it’s telling, all the five toes are. Now a vibration moved to the right side. I feel a little perspiration coming from my forehead. I feel the flickering of my right eyelid.

[Exercise continues]

Student: My feet feel tingly. I feel a buzzing in my head, in the front of my head, like my brain’s being massaged. My hands feel tingly. Right under my nose feels like it itches a little bit.

[Exercise continues]

CTT: Remember to be open and equanimous.

[Exercise continues]

Student: I can feel additional cognizance in my aura, and I feel my hands – a bit more sweat, putting a presence on my legs. I feel the position of my body as I’m sitting, like I’m folded, on a chair, and a sense that I’m not standing straight.

[Exercise continues]

Student: Feel it’s cold. It is – it hurts. Pressure in my feelings. Throbbing under my left sole.

[Exercise continues]

CTT: Switch roles now.

[Exercise continues]

You don’t need to explain yourself to each other. Just stay aware and switch roles.

[Exercise continues]

Student: The itch in my head is still pretty permanent, and there’s still the pressure on my forehead.

[Exercise continues]

Student: I’m feeling itchiness in my hands and itchiness in my nose. I feel full, heavy, and my limbs are heavy.

[Exercise continues]

Student: I’m aware of kind of a numb, kind of still, like, vacuum of air just outside of my ears, under my ears now. It’s kind of weird. As if there’s this caught in a dead space, and I’m standing right next to my ears. My forehead feels kind of warm right now.

[Exercise continues]

CTT: Just continue with your eyes closed and everybody silently doing Vipassana now, noticing whatever the most prominent sensation in your body is from moment to moment.

Bring your chairs back to their original position now, and try to maintain this attitude of openness and equanimity so that, in a way, we’ll be doing self-remembering, sensing, looking, and listening now for the rest of the class, even though we didn’t go through the formal morning exercise to get started. We moved into Vipassana.

And you can mindfully sign in when the pad goes around.

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

Lecture 4, Part 10 of 19 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

CTT: The mindfulness traditions claim they’ll take you all the way to enlightenment. And we certainly have historical examples of people who are considered Buddhas or saints or something like that, who supposedly went all the way and became remarkable human beings. What we don’t have, from a Western perspective, is sort of a percent of graduates who succeed figure.

We hear about the outstanding successes, but what percentage of people who follow those paths actually get somewhere significant? 90 percent? 10 percent? We don’t know.

Student: Why don’t they have some kind of way of tracking it?

CTT: That’s a very good question. I was having a variation of this conversation with Shinzen Young, my meditation teacher friend, some years ago, about how well does this meditation work for people. He shocked me because he said, “When I teach people meditation, just about everybody will say this is good and I’m going to make it part of my life”. You know, if they’ve had a weekend, a retreat, or a class or something like that, they really feel like they’ve picked up an important psychological tool.

If he comes back a year later and 5 percent of them are still actually doing meditation, he feels he’s been very successful. I was shocked, because my comparison was from a Western educational point of view. If I ran a graduate school and I had a 95 percent flunk out rate after the first year…. I mean, come on. You know? A few percent, you can understand. Some people came and they really shouldn’t have been here and all that, but 95 percent?

I’d feel like there was something badly wrong with the educational system.

And I thought, this is really odd, because I think Shinzen is a really good meditation teacher. He told me no, this is not 5 percent for him, this is 5 percent for all meditation teachers he knows, including the traditional, lineage-holder meditation teachers in Eastern settings. About 5 percent.

And not only that, it’s not worried about in the East at any rate.

The view there is that it’s karma. If it’s your karma to come around for instruction, you’ll come around. If it’s your karma to stay, you’ll stick around, but if it’s not your karma to stay, you won’t stick around. Maybe 10 lifetimes down the road you’ll come around again. Well maybe it is indeed karma, but I found this a very convenient excuse to not look into the efficiency of your teaching.

This is my bias as a Westerner? If 95% of my students fail, there’s something very badly wrong with the way I’m teaching. The moral I take from that is not that various meditation teachers are “bad,” but that we don’t understand how to effectively teach meditation very well, and/or that lots of people get attracted to meditation who really aren’t suitable for it. But I’m more interested in how do you teach more effectively.

You were next.

Student: Yeah. I think one of the problems with those systems is that they don’t have any… When you come here, to ITP, you know in five or six years, you’ll have a Ph.D.; whereas if you go and you learn some meditation practice, you don’t know how long it’s going to take. There are no guarantees and there’s no time line and there’s no sort of measurement of how far you’ve come. I think if there was a way of saying it’s going to take you three years – If you do this, it will be three years – then people would do it and you’d have a lot of graduates.

(Laughter)

CTT: And if they graduated, they wouldn’t be paying tuition anymore….

Student: I’m sure Shinzen Young is not motivated by getting more tuition, right? He would prefer to have a lot of his students really progress with meditation, become enlightened or something?

CTT: That’s right. And he has devoted enormous effort to try to figure out ways to make the whole teaching process more effective. When we look at these spiritual systems, we have these romantic pictures of the guru, right? It’s a he, usually. He’s got a white beard. He sits on a little throne or wears a turban or something, and he looks so saintly because it’s very important that gurus fit our pictures of what saints look like.

And the devotees surround the guru and that just lets you know that, “Wow, man, this is really something to have all these devotees.” It’s such a privilege to serve him tea. If somebody really is a fantastic teacher, teaching you spiritual things that you need to know, serving him or her tea nicely is a tiny price to pay for that.

But I think we also have to look at the larger social situation in which it’s embedded. For some people, being a guru is making a living. And when you start making a living, you usually might like to make a nice living. Well, if your students graduate too fast and are not necessarily replaced, that’s not so good. So sometimes I feel as if there’s a deliberate attempt to hold the student back.

Now I should reveal my personal experience bias here. A few years ago I started taking a Tai Chi course, my wife and I did, because I felt it was time for me to learn some Tai Chi. The instructor was very good at his verbal explanation as to what to do, as well as personally correcting moves. But he went kind of fast.

By the third class, I was still trying to work out my mistakes on the first three steps and he was into teaching the fifteenth step. So I asked him, “Would you mind if I make a tape recording of you giving the instructions and then I’ll have that to practice with at home and I won’t be practicing my mistakes?” He wouldn’t allow me to do that. Well, it’s not like I was going to sell the tape or set myself up as a Tai Chi teacher or something like that. I wanted to learn and he was preventing me from effective learning. So I stopped taking the class, because there was no point learning my mistakes more and more thoroughly while I got more and more behind.

But sometimes I wonder about that dynamic, you know? You do have this whole social situation, and it’s complex, and there’s a real spiritual element in there most of the time, and then there are actual human being playing social games, making a living, etc.. Things to be aware of.

Yes. Remember your arms and legs. I lost mine for a minute there.

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Identity, Self, Karma, Buddhism, Survival of Death, Etc….

Buddhism, as I understand it (and I’m not a scholar, just a beginning but serious student and on-again, off-again practitioner/experimenter and “fooler-arounder”) is a body of knowledge, concepts, and practices about human experience.  Direct experience is the fundamental data of Buddhism, although a lot of Buddhism seems to say, in a way that’s debatable to me, that what is true about experience is true for all of reality.  An interesting idea, but….  As a general expectation (subject to checking and future experience, of course) I suspect most of what Buddhism says about experience is likely to be some of the best “truth” we have about it.  When it comes to the external, physical world, though, I generally expect modern physical science to be more accurate.  “Accurate” or “true” in the sense of a good fit between concept and observable data.  If I need to cross a bridge over a deep chasm, I hope it was designed by a mechanical engineer rather than a (advanced or not) Buddhist meditator…

Gautama Buddha was concerned, like Indian yogis before him, with human suffering and escaping from it.  Traditional yoga taught its adepts how to enter into very deep altered states of consciousness (ASCs), jhanas, in which, among other things, all ordinary suffering (pain, thirst, hunger, worry, etc.) disappeared for the duration of the ASC.  The Buddha mastered these absorptive states but felt they were not enough, because when you came out of them, the troubles you had left behind were still there.  So, as Shinzen Young has pointed out, the Buddha made a great discovery.  If you used the greatly enhanced concentrative and focusing abilities developed to study and examine the basic nature of all mental phenomena, all experience, vipassana meditation, you could see the roots of suffering, and then “tear out” these roots and so end suffering permanently, rather than just having temporary “vacations” in jhana states.  (Although we should note that achievement of any of the jhana states is an amazing accomplishment in itself!)

Buddha insisted things had to be personally discovered, using meditative investigation and examination, not simply believed as some kind of doctrine.

Three of the most basic and necessary (to end suffering) discoveries to be made were anicca, anatta, and dukkha.

The Pali word anicca literally means "inconstant", and refers to the absence of permanence and continuity.  Everything (except perhaps the ultimate nature of awareness- this is a tricky and subtle idea) is in a state of flux, changing as a result of multitudinous causes.  Some things may change rapidly, like our thoughts and feelings, some usually slowly, like a rock, but there are no eternal, unchanging things, totally solid stuffs, everything is actually ongoing process.

The Pali word anatta (or anatman) refers to the absence of any permanent self.  What we usually take to be the self is, like everything else, a series of changing, ongoing processes, causally affected by many other things.  It’s opposed to the Hindu idea of the atman, a permanent, immortal core or soul of a person.

Dukkha refers to the discovery, through deep meditation, as well as ordinary reflection, of the inherent unsatisfactoriness of all factors of ordinary existence.  Facets of dukkha can be expressed with words like suffering, pain, unsatisfactoriness, sorrow, affliction, anxiety, dissatisfaction, discomfort, anguish, stress, misery, and frustration.

So who/what am I, then?  And how can I end my suffering?

Meditative concentration practices teach me to focus and stabilize my mind, so I can then examine it.  Without concentration and stabilization, it’s like trying to examine a fine-detailed painting when all you have by way of light is a sputtering, weak-flamed candle.  As you develop concentration the light of your mental candle, following the analogy, gets bright and steady, so now you can make out details.  You can practice not just concentrative meditation (shamatha) but insight meditation, vipassana.

I have been doing vipassana in various ways for more than 20 years now.  I would never describe myself as an “advanced” or “accomplished” meditator, but I have gotten better at it and so seen some things about the nature of my experience (and presumably about experience in general, ignoring real possibilities of significant individual differences).

-        You can get better at concentration and insight with practice, although it’s taken me a lot of practice!  I started out with a really restless mind, my candle flame flickered wildly in thought gales, but I can steady it moderately well now some of the time.  At other times, the usual thought storms are raging away!

-        Anicca, impermanence, is a good description of my experience, the closer I look the more I see it constantly changing, morphing, flowing, things pop up, stay a bit, alter, disappear, etc., etc., etc.  Even with my conscious, deliberate talking mind being relatively calm, there’s a steady stream of thoughts and thoughtlets, sensations, emotions going on.

-        Anatta, absence of any permanent self, is also a good description of the fact that I can’t find a “watcher” of all these mental phenomena.  Yet “I” obviously “watch” on many occasions.  To believe I have some sort of permanent self is thus a belief with no data to support it in my experience.  Yet I’m obviously here, writing this, “I” exist, so it makes no sense to believe in some sort of nihilism or non-existence.  Practically, I tend to follow Sogyal Rinpoche’s advice here, accept that “I” obviously exist, but don’t take it too seriously or project all sorts of eternal concepts on to that ongoing, changing experience.

(Putting quotes around words like “I” and “watch” is my way of reminding myself and readers to be careful and not take these words literally, they are tricky.)

-        Of courses there is my physical body and brain.  I understand from what we know scientifically that they are processes rather than permanent things, and also know from experience that body sensations change all the time.  Even what appear to be steady ones, if you look closely, are constantly morphing in various ways.  I also understand from simple common sense and instinct that we need to take good care of our physical bodies.  We’ll regret it if we don’t, and even then, my body will ultimately die.

-        In spite of the insistence on anatta, the absence of any permanent self in Buddhism, there is an implicit implication that the ultimate nature of mind, rigpa, is a permanent “thing”/”process” that goes on from life to reincarnate life, as well as being behind all changing experience in this life.  Since I think there’s good (albeit not overwhelming) empirical evidence for the reality of reincarnation for at least some people, I’m willing to accept anatta as just one of the “mysteries,” something we can’t understand with ordinary logic.  It look’s like that’s just how it is, whether we understand it or not.  Buddhist attempts to insist on no permanent self but then have “your” karma go from life to your reincarnate  life always strike me as straining logic, so I don’t worry too much about them.  Twenty-five hundred years of scholars straining to make everything consistent… as a scholar myself, I understand how scholars can get somewhat distant from the actual data while fooling themselves with oh-so-elegant words….

-        My everyday experience of my mind functioning, ordinary or meditative, is obviously an emergent product of whatever the ultimate (life-spanning) core of myself (rigpa plus karma plus ???) is, intimately interacting with the physical and sensory-encoded qualities of my body-based psychology….  I mean “emergent” here in the sense of systems theory, that the whole is more than a simple addition of the parts.

And so…..

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I am sitting here and contemplating

My special cloud

The one that’s always hanging there

Between me and the sun.

You say the sky is clear,

The sun is warm.

But I’m not through admiring

My fascinating cloud.

It is unique; it’s mine alone.

Full of sorrows and fears,

Angers and desires – each deserving

An eon of introspection.

Someday I’ll see the sky, bask in the sun –

When I am ready; when things go right.

But for now, I think I’ll just keep watching

My special cloud.

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(I'll be on retreat for the next 10 days, but wanted to share something to support the excellent discussion you folks keep having here)

I was talking with my meditation teacher friend Shinzen Young earlier today, and one of the topics we touched on was what was a bottom line on mindfulness and meditation practice, what good could it do for a person?

Yes, you learned to stay calm and clear and focus in formal practice in quiet places like meditation halls, but how about in real life, when the proverbial shit hit the fan?

I realized that I had a real life example from a couple of nights ago. I couldn't get to sleep because of a bad headache – I've gotten a lot of headaches all thru my life – and got up to take some medication. While waiting for it to take effect, I thought I'd do a crossword puzzle. My cat Elliot had a different plan though – why waste a good human lap with a book in it when it could be occupied by a purring cat? I agreed, and we were sitting there in the dark when we both heard a funny, thumping sound from out in front of the house. When it repeated, I unceremoniously dumped poor Elliot from my lap and got up to investigate. Turning on the porch light, I saw a man in dark clothes pushing on one of my garbage cans. Very odd, as he was reaching over one garbage can to push on the lid of another, finally he pushed it over so it fell into the yard. I couldn't get a good look at him, his head was hanging down. I live in a quiet neighborhood, vandalism is very rare. He could have been someone really strung out on drugs, or very drunk, or just crazy, but my feeling was this was someone who was in bad shape. I went out on to the porch and tried to talk with him, cautiously standing right by the door and ready to jump back inside if he turned dangerous. He didn't respond to my queries about what he was doing or who he was, just stood there with his head hanging down, long, dark hair concealing his face.

I went back inside and called 911. As I continued to watch, waiting for a police response, the person slumped down to the ground and just lay there. This was bad – it was in the 40s outside, the ground was quite wet from recent rain, this was the road to hypothermia. I called 911 a couple of more times, telling them this person probably needed medical help, while he lay on the ground.

It seemed like forever, but a cop was there within 10 minutes. Turns out it was a very drunk teenage boy. More cops came, they got his name and home phone and called his parents to come pick him up. I'm glad the cops responded quickly: if he'd lain there on the cold wet ground all night I might have found a dead body in the morning. I'd thought he had on a black coat when I first saw him, but it was actually just a T-shirt.

In retrospect, what amazed me, I told Shinzen, is that even while I intellectually knew it could be dangerous to go outside to try to talk with this stranger, I was perfectly calm and focused the whole time.

So after 50+ years of spiritual seeking and practice, while God hasn't dropped by to say “Good job, Charley!” I'm very pleased to have been able to stay so calm and focused in a difficult situation.

Happy Holidays to All!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CTT: That could be.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lecture 3, Part 11 of 13 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

CTT: Nobody’s asking the question people always ask of how come only your arms and legs? So I’ll give you the answer anyway. Do some people at least wonder?

Student: Yeah.

CTT: Point one, it’s traditional. That’s the way it was taught to me and you know I’m a great respecter of tradition and don’t believe in any change.

(Laughter)

Point two, I have heard a rationale for it which makes a fair amount of sense for me, but I don't know if it’s an absolute truth, namely that arms and legs are neutral territory for most people. That is, there are psychologies that think that somehow our problems and traumas in our life get stored up in particular kinds of body locations, and those are mostly all in the torso, rather than your arms and legs. So you’re not going to reactivate any old traumas by keeping some attention in your arms and legs, because that’s kind of neutral territory.

Student: Okay.

CTT: It makes sense. Reason three, there are generally good quality sensations in your arms and legs from being moved around a lot in the course of daily life. It’s easy to find them. You know, if I said concentrate on the seventh vertebrae, duh, where’s that, and I’m not sure it’s got any feeling there. The arms and legs always have something.

The more practical way I personally apply it is I always sense my whole body, for instance, but that’s because I’ve been doing that sort of thing for years and I’m comfortable with my whole body. I don’t think I have any trauma bombs hidden in there ready to go off. So what I advise people is if you find you’re actually kind of sensing your whole body naturally, that’s fine, but don’t force yourself to sense your whole body if you’re not sure about that. And again, a more limited area like your arms and legs, is easier.

Do the priming exercise first thing in the morning, especially before you read the news. Do you want to prime your mind with the idea that you could be more conscious? Or that the world’s going to hell in a hand-basket? That’s what happens if you turn on the news, or that the traffic’s worse, or something like that. Do this sensing, looking, and listening (SLL) as much as you can during the day.

Now I would suggest you do it mainly in short bursts. That is, if you say I will do this process continuously for the next 16 hours, you’ll probably forget about it in 5 minutes and then start feeling guilty. It’s much better to say I’ll do this for a couple of minutes now while I walk to the other side of the building, or while I fix myself a cup of tea, or something like that, and have some success with it in a kind of limited process. And then think ah, I can go back to sleep for a minute, a vacation from larger consciousness….

Of course you might get to like this and want to do it all the time and that’s all right. But do it in a natural way. Don’t force. Ideally, you should have had at least a year’s practice in concentrative meditation before I even introduced this practice, and who has time for that in modern life? Even the Tibetan monks complain there isn’t proper time for concentrative meditation. They get more time at it than most people.

But by doing the sensing, looking, and listening process, you’re also practicing developing concentration. You’re also practicing Vipassana. You’re practicing staying in touch with body sensations. You’re not making them the main focus, but you’re keeping some attention in there and learning more sensitivity to your body that way.

If you would like to do some formal concentrative meditation or Vipassana meditation sessions in addition to sensing, looking and listening, that’s fine. All three of these things will reinforce each other. I’m going to make the sensing, looking, and listening (SLL) the main focus for the rest of the quarter, but that doesn’t mean you couldn’t profit by more time spent sitting in more formal meditation periods.

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Anonymous comments:

> In Buddhism, waking up might be described as the cessation of suffering because of the cessation of desire (ie ceasing of attachments and aversions). Do your experiences fit that description, ceasing to suffer, letting go of attachments and aversions?<

I am not comfortable with the word “cessation,” it’s so absolute. As long as I’m alive in this body, e.g., I have no doubt that my body will crave air, food, warmth, etc., those sorts of things are built into the “hardware” of being human. Now I will note that in my ordinary state, where I spend 99% of my waking existence, there is a constant interplay and flow of attachments and aversions, I want to do this, I really should do that, I don’t want to do this other thing, I don’t want to feel like there’s always something to do, etc. A good deal of the time I am doing one thing and pretty absorbed in it, but these desires and aversions are always ready to pop in. Relaxing? What about that paper you’re supposed to write? Feeling too busy? Why don’t you relax. I think this is a description of “normal” consciousness for most people, most of the time.

When I’m more mindful and “awake” – remember, “awake” only in a relative sense compared to my ordinary mushy consciousness, not Awake in some grand and glorious spiritual sense – there’s an implicit feeling of contentment. A desire will come along, and sometimes if I’m staying mindful and present I’ll just note it but not be carried away by it, but often it will interrupt my mindfulness and I’ll be back in my ordinary, desire-and-aversion-drive state.

I suppose there might be some higher state of awakeness where you have worked through all those ordinary desires and aversions that are not necessary for biological survival and comfort, so they don’t even arise, but that’s just theory for me. Less drivenness, yes, “cessation,” no.

Anonymous again notes:

> Especially in modern times, because of our scientific outlook, people have a hard time accepting something unless they can understand it and I don't think there is a very clear explanation about what waking up is.<

Yes, it’s easy to imagine fantastic things about “waking.” And there are probably various degrees of “waking.” What I’m attempting to describe may be moments of one of the lowest levels of it, but if it’s helpful to people to have a clearer understanding or goal, great! I’ve been told that one of my talents is to say and write things that are “perfectly obvious:” it’s just that nobody has ever said it before. I doubt the historical truth of that, it probably just means that the way I’m saying something now is useful for the listener, but who knows how many times it’s already been said before?

> Most people who hear about the end of suffering or letting go of attachments and aversions think waking up means being happy all the time, but I think the analogy to pain is more appropriate. Waking up doesn't make pain go away it changes your attitude about pain. According to how I understand it, waking up doesn't eliminate emotions it changes your attitude to them.<

That fits my own experience to date. Sometimes mindfulness, being present, being more “awake” feels great, sometimes it makes you much more precisely aware of just what a screwed up state you’re in! But that’s good, if you know you’re really confused, angry, etc. you may be smart enough not to act on your present state and feelings and so not create consequence you’ll later regret. Every once in a while I remind the students in my ITP mindfulness class to be careful not to change the sensing-looking-listening technique described in an earlier post into some other technique aimed at making you feel happy rather than mindful. Confusing imagination that’s pleasant with ongoing reality is the quickest way to feel happy, but then you do stupid things with later negative consequences.

> Is it just as apt to say "Before enlightenment worry, joy, anger, and love. After enlightenment worry, joy, anger, and love?"<

Sounds good to me. Same old emotions, but seen more clearly, less likely to start hours-long loops of compulsive feelings and thoughts. You come back to ongoing reality much quicker.

Anonymous commenting on Tor:

> I think everyone has to find their own balance of letting out (observing and understanding emotions) and letting go (displacing negative thoughts with neutral or positive thoughts, or just focusing attention on something else).<

We too easily fall into believing there is One Goal, reached by One Way. One of the jobs of transpersonal psychology as a field will be to investigate what sorts of ways work or don’t work for what sorts of people and directing those who want to grow appropriately. I’m sure there are times, e.g., when a little psychotherapy would be much more effective than spiritual practice, and visa-versa.

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Leading through a Gurdjieffian Priming Exercise

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

Lecture 3, Part 7 of 13 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

CTT: So if you want to do this, stop taking notes. Sit up comfortably in your chair and close your eyes. And just take a few seconds to relax.

Now you’re going to start by gently focusing your attention on your right foot, on just noticing any sensations in your right foot, from the tips of the toes to the back of the heel. And, like doing Vipassana, you just notice with openness and curiosity and equanimity what your right foot feels like.

You might move from one prominent sensation in the foot to another, or you might pick up a pattern of sensations through the whole foot, or one sensation through the whole foot.

Whatever. Just gently rest your mind following the sensation in your right foot.

There’s no right or wrong sensations. Whatever you sense is fine. If what you sense is numbness, that’s fine. Notice exactly what the numbness feels like from moment to moment.

Now if you were doing this on your own, you’d wait until you felt you had pretty good contact with the whole of your foot for at least 5 or 10 seconds, and then move onto the next step. We’ll move together, but you’ll adjust the timing when doing it on your own.

So now gently shift your attention upward into the lower half of your right leg, and let the foot go. Just sense whatever’s happening in the lower half of your right leg, from the ankle up into the knee. Whatever you feel is fine. Just be open to it.

(A half minute of silence)

Now shift your attention upward again to the upper half of your right leg, from the knee on into your hip and sense whatever sensation or sensations are there. If you find you’ve wandered off into thinking about sensations instead of actually sensing them, or to thinking about other things, just gently bring your attention back to sensing whatever the actual sensations are.

(A half minute of silence)

And now shift your attention higher to your right hand, from the tips of the fingers right up into the wrists, and sense whatever sensations or flow of sensations there is there. Remember, there are no right or wrong sensations. Just sense whatever the flow is. Openly. Curiously.

(A half minute of silence)

And now shift your attention to your right forearm. Let the hand go and sense whatever’s in the forearm.

If your mind wanders, gently bring it back.

(A half minute of silence)

And now shift your attention to the upper half of your right arm, from the elbow up into the shoulder, and sense whatever’s there.

(A half minute of silence)

Now shift your attention across your body to the upper half of your left arm, from shoulder down into the elbow, and sense the sensations there. The mind tends to label the sensations and then not really pay attention anymore but keep bringing the mind back to the actual sensations.

(A half minute of silence)

And then shift your attention to your left forearm. Sense whatever’s there.

(A half minute of silence)

And now your left hand, right down through the fingertips. What’s it feel like? (pause) What’s it feel like now? (pause) And now?

(A half minute of silence)

Now shift your attention down to the upper half of your left leg, the hip down into the knee, and notice any sensations or patterns of sensations there.

(A half minute of silence)

And shift your attention to the lower half of your left leg, the knee down into the ankle. Whatever you feel, feel it in a relaxed and open minded manner. (pause) What’s it like?

(A half minute of silence)

And now sense your left foot right down through the toes.

(A half minute of silence)

Now broaden your focus so you sense the sensations from both feet. (pause) And then broaden it a little more, so while continuing to sense both feet, you also sense the lower half of both legs. (pause) And the upper half of both legs, so you’re sensing both feet and both legs altogether now.

Your sensing experience may be less detailed, but it’s broader.

(A half minute of silence)

Now while continuing to sense your feet and legs, broaden the focus to include your hands in there. (pause) And forearms. (pause) And your upper arms. (pause) So now you’re sensing your arms and legs, feet and hands all together. I’ll just call that sensing your arms and legs from now on. It’s not going to be the same all the time, and sometimes one part will be more prominent than another, but let sensing your arms and legs be the focus of your attention.

Now if we stopped at this point, you could take this as a form of body Vipassana. But we’re going to go on and include another element, and that is, while continuing to sense your arms and legs, I want you to openly and more actively listen to any sounds and what the qualities of those sounds are. So if you hear my voice, for instance, sense it, not just the meaning of the words but the tonal qualities of my voice. Any outside noises, any echoes and the quiet spaces between sounds – listen to them.

(A half minute of silence)

Now, while continuing to sense your arms and legs, and listening to the qualities of any sounds, I want you to slowly open your eyes and begin to actively look at things, while continuing to listen to the qualities of sounds and stay in touch with your arms and legs.

Now vision is a pretty dominant sense so it may take up most of your attention. But let’s say you’re going to leave 5 to 15 percent in sensing your arms and legs, 10 to 30 percent in listening to the quality of sounds. Most of the rest is looking, and something is left over to monitor the process.

(A half minute of silence)

I want you to look around in a special way. Don’t park your eyes on anything. Don’t just fix them somewhere and just stare at that spot for a long time. That tends to induce a sleepy, trance-like state. Rather, look at something gently but curiously, like you really want to see it, for a few seconds and then look at something else.

(A half minute of silence)

I like to kid people this is the “shifty eyed technique.”

If you haven’t got your eyes open yet, keep sensing your arms and legs and listening, but start looking now too…… Good.

We’ve moved from the priming exercise into Gurdjieff’s primary exercise for waking up, which we can call sensing, looking and listening, so that you’re now actively taking in your world through your two main senses, seeing and hearing. But you’re keeping some attention in your body, following the sensations in your arms and legs, which helps ground you in the present moment.

Now this takes a fair amount of effort. But you can learn to do it, and like any controlled attention practice (CAP), if you find you’ve drifted off from it, just gently come back to doing it. Don’t bother to try to figure out why you aren’t doing it, just do it. Just kind of sensing, looking, and listening is going to be the primary experiential type of practice we do the rest of the quarter.

It’s not going to be the same every time, as we’re all unique individuals in our unique worlds. But it’s going to be very interesting at times, very relaxing at times, and sometimes it’ll help you get a much clearly insight into what an automaton you’re being at a particular moment, so you’ll be a little wiser.

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Lecture 3, Part 6 of 13 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

CTT: So I’m going to introduce you to the primary technique that Gurdjieff taught people to develop mindfulness in every day life through a systematic practice. It is like Vipassana, but you don’t need to sit in a special position or keep your eyes shut or any of those sorts of things. You can apply this in any activity of life, which is what makes it really valuable.

I’ve already talked several times about the importance of the body, not just as a source of sensation, but as a source of sensation in the here and now, that the body keeps you anchored in the present. The kind of people that Gurdjieff attracted, for the most part, were people like you folks: intellectuals, intuitive, creative people, people with good imaginations, great thinking processes, tremendous talk power – but who, by and large, were not anchored in the sensory reality of the immediate here and now. So he taught them an exercise generally called the morning exercise, or sometimes I call it the priming exercise, to sort of “prime the pump” to get you ready> It is practiced first thing in the morning, before you engage your mind otherwise.

And the “before you engage your mind otherwise” is important. If you’re the kind of person who wakes up and can barely get out of bed to crawl to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee and don’t actually turn your mind on for a half an hour, you don’t try this before you have your coffee because you’ll just fall back to sleep. On the other hand, it’s really important to do this before you listen to the news or pick up the paper or begin remembering all your troubles and tasks, because you want to prime your mind with the values, the goals, of becoming more present, becoming more awake. That’s why I like calling it the priming exercise.

You can do this preferably sitting up, but it’s possible to do it in bed if you’re not going to fall back asleep. You can be propped up in bed or something like that. I generally do it while having a few sips of coffee propped up in bed, but I’m lazy. It would be better to actually get up and sit. If you’re going to sit, you sit in a comfortable posture like you were going to do meditation, so you don’t particularly have to twitch, and you systemically run your attention through your limbs in various ways. And we’re going to do it together now so you get a feeling for it. Okay? And understand, I’m giving you the traditional practice for doing this. It doesn’t mean it is the only way it can ever be done but it’s a generally applicable way.

(continued next week – enjoy sense of anticipation)

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Lecture 3, Part 3 of 13 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

Student: I’ve been having really lucid dreams as well. It’s really been helping my dream states. I mean, last night was sweet. I was playing bike polo the whole night.

(Laughter)

And I even got up, went to the bathroom, and jumped right back in the dream; like reentered a dream state really easily. So yeah, tight.

(Laughter)

CTT: Is there a real life sport of bike polo?

Student: It’s a small subculture, for sure.

CTT: Small subculture. It sort of sounds like fun, but I imagine there are some horrendous crashes sometimes.

Student: Yeah, definitely. But yeah, they’ve been very active dreams. I had a great skiing dream, and whatnot. I mean, it might just be the kind of person that I am, but I don’t dream that much. I don’t typically, or I don’t have recall of my dream. So that’s been nice.

CTT: Yeah. That’s good.

Student: A nice fruit of the practice.

CTT: Some people will find that as you practice various kinds of mind training during the day, it will start to slide over into the sleep state. You’re liable to recognize that you’re dreaming, or your dreams become more vivid, or various combinations of those.

And in fact in some branches of Buddhism, the Tibetan ones particularly, they have a whole bunch of dream yogas where you’re expected to become aware of your dreams as dreams and practice various meditative exercises in them. And then become aware of the state in between dreams. And no, it’s not easy for most people.

(Laughter)

Student: I recall reading somewhere, there was that National Geographic cover with the Buddhist monk with the EEG electrodes hooked up to his head, that alpha wave activity and deep states of meditation have, I think, been associated with REM sleep states. So that just strikes me as some kind of correlation between….

CTT: I wouldn’t take that too seriously.

Student: No?

CTT: But see, partly there’s politics here. Okay? When I was in graduate school, back in the 1960’s, I wanted to do my thesis and dissertation work on dreams, and my advisors really discouraged me from doing that. Dreams were subjective; they weren’t things that you could study scientifically. It would be a real waste of time.

And then along came a publication in Science that showed eye movement and brain wave correlates of dreaming and, given the materialistic values of the time, overnight dreams became “real.” I mean, if your brain changed, it must be real! So I was able to do my experiments. Politically, the discovery justified all sorts of studies of dreams that would have been hard to do otherwise, because of the ethos that this was a waste of time.

And then I saw the same thing happen about 12 years later. Before that time, meditation was something done by foreigners who were probably schizophrenic and sat cross-legged in the mud and did superstitious things. And all of a sudden they found some brain wave changes with meditation and meditation became real! Gosh! Gee whiz! But the brain waves… while there can be some brain wave changes in meditation, it’s just barely beginning to touch the surface of what meditation is all about. You know, if you like those justifications, that’s fine; but don’t take them too terribly seriously.

When I published my Altered States of Consciousness book in 1969, I had a section on scientific studies of meditation, and I bragged that I had reprinted two thirds of the world’s English language scientific literature on meditation. It sounded impressive until you realized it was two of the three studies! (Laughter) Now there are, last time I checked when somebody had counted, there were over 1,500 studies, and it’s probably up to at least 2,000 or more now. And most of them are “trivial” in the sense that meditation is prescribed like aspirin. It turns out to be good for anything related to tension. All right, not bad.

So doing almost any kind of meditation for 20 minutes a day will make you more relaxed, and that’s good for people in a stressed out, tensed up culture, like ours. But the size of the effects they find, well you could get the same by taking a nap or running around the block or something like that. There are still almost no studies that have looked at the deeper aspects of meditation, namely the ones concerned with beginning to have insight into the nature of your own mind, which is really where we want to go.

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