Mindfulness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Student: Right.

CTT: And –

(Laughter)

Student: Or you’re just crazy.

(Laughter)

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

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

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

(Laughter)

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

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

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

Student: Okay.

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Mindfulness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Student: Oh, is that right?

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

Student: I can only imagine.

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

Student: Yeah. Yeah. Okay –

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

(Laughter)

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

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

CTT: Yes.

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

(Laughter)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Mindfulness

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

Lecture 5, Part 7 of 18 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

CTT: I think at this point we can open it for discussion about the review, your current experience, the readings – what have you. But do try to stay focused in the present. It’ll make it more fun.

Student: My experience right now is in something that I’ve been thinking about recently. Right after meditation like we just did, I’m much more aware of my bodily movements. For example, sitting in class, I adjust all the time. I think I wasn’t aware when I was adjusting, yet it happens all the time. You just move a part of your body, don’t even think about it. But right after we did that, I moved my arms up to my legs and felt like I knew it was happening the whole time.

CTT: Mm hmm.

Student: That’s it.

CTT: If you look at other people, or if you begin to see yourself, we fidget all the time! Constant movement. You begin to think it must be really uncomfortable to be a human being in a body, judging by how we’re constantly adjusting ourselves to get more comfortable.

And yet when you sit still for a few minutes, it’s not that bad. I mean, there’s the occasional itch that you know you’ll die from, but by and large, it’s not that bad.

I heard that given as an example of the Buddhist emphasis on suffering the other day, that this is one of the subtle signs of how pervasive suffering is in our life – constantly fidgeting and adjusting, trying to make things better. Or maybe we’re desperately seeking the optimal pleasant position.

But if you’re here, in the vipassana sense, it’s not so bad.

Student: During my experience just now, I had an itch that I chose not to go into. However, I have a pretty strong body reaction to itches. There was a time in Marine Corps boot camp when itching was not allowed, and sometimes we’d be standing at attention for –

CTT: Itching was not allowed?

Student: Well, if you’re standing at attention, you –

Another Student: Scratching.

Student: – don’t do anything. So –

CTT: I would think scratching was not allowed. They can’t give you an order not to itch.

(Laughter)

Soldier! Don’t itch!

(Laughter)

Student: So I developed the ability to legislate that I would not itch, and used my will to do that. I can see a difference between just accepting that feeling and seeing where it goes. So I can see the difference between those two, and yet I still have this intense body reaction that surrounds itching – that seems to be experiential and historical – and I was curious of how –

CTT: Is it like you were traumatized in some way by having to ignore prolonged itches?

Student: Yes.

CTT: Yeah. Maybe you can sue the government on it.

(Laughter)

Probably not.

Once you see the many – I want to say the suffering in human life, but let’s make it milder – the many sources of “discomfort,” you can see the usual way of dealing with discomfort is to try to actively fix it. When you have an itch, you scratch it. When you get cramped, you stretch. When you’re tired, you sleep. When you can do things, and they’re effective, that’s pretty good. Most itches go away when you scratch them.

But there are a lot of circumstances in life where we can’t do anything about something that’s bothering us. You know, like we’re all going to get old and sick and die at some point, and not much we can do about it. Not to mention many other discomforts along the way.

So how do you deal with those things? You can deal with them as Bob illustrated in his story, by developing a kind of willpower. “I’m going to power my way through this and not show any reaction!” And that’s a skill, and it develops willpower, and it’s something we all need. Because there will be emergencies where it’s the only thing you can do and it may save your life. You know? Don’t move, because that will attract the attention of the sniper.

You can say, “Oh, but I itch. I’ve got to scratch.” Not unless you want to get killed.

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Mindfulness

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

Lecture 5, Part 6 of 18 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

CTT: Now having said that by way of review, let’s try a little Vipassana for a few minutes.

I’m going to suggest relaxed Vipassana. You’ve just heard some specifics and details of creating spaciousness and ironing out the kinks in your flow and all that. I don’t want you to now sit and think “I’m going to create the perfect space and no kinks!” Just be curious as to what actually happens in your experience. Use the flow of the dominant sensation in your body as a convenient point to focus around so you don’t just drift away down Association Lane. But don’t try to do it perfectly. Don't do it tensely! That way lies madness!

So we’ll sit for five minutes.

[Begin exercise][Put a minute or two of practice between each of the following instructions]

Just be relaxed and curious about whatever body sensation is strong. Look at it to see what it is. Let it do what it wants to.

[Continue exercise]

If you find you’ve drifted way off from body sensation, just gently come back.

[Continue exercise]

If you find yourself talking to yourself in your head about what a sensation is like, it’s all right. Just gently bring your attention back to the sensation itself. Focus on sensing the actual feelings rather than secondary things like talking about them, thinking about them

[Continue exercise]

We’ll end now, so come back to sensing, looking, and listening. You’re in this room, attentive, curious, keeping a little bit of attention in the body, that grounds you here, mainly having an attitude of curiosity about what’s happening.

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When I become the Czar of Worldwide Words, I'm going to abolish the word "meditation."

Isn't that an odd way to start a blog on meditation?  Gets your attention, though.

I will write mainly from my role as a scientist, as a psychologist, as one of the founders of a relatively new branch of psychology, Transpersonal Psychology, although as a student of meditation and spiritual paths all my life, my perspective is "inside" and well as "outside."

As a field, mainstream psychology pretty much accepts the materialistic assumptions that dominate in most fields of science today, that only what is material is real, matter and physical energy.  The physical matter and electrical and chemical processes of your brain are real, consciousness is nothing but a secondary derivative of those physical processes.  From this perspective, all those things called "meditation" are indirect ways of controlling your physical brain's functioning, and so someday you won't have to spend all those (too often boring) hours sitting, because science will develop a pill that directly puts the brain in the best "meditative" state.  "Spirit" or "spirituality," from the materialistic perspective, is simply old fashioned nonsense, superstition, and best dispensed with, as it interferes with our rational functioning.

There certainly is a lot of nonsense associated with the spiritual, as there is with all fields of life, but in Transpersonal Psychology we think, to use that powerful old image, the baby has been thrown out with the bath water.  We believe that there is something real to the spiritual, and that its recognition and development are vital to individual and societal welfare.  Denying this hurts people.  If we totally accept materialism, there is no inherent meaning to life, and the only "sensible" thing to do is get as much of riches and resources for yourself as you can to maximize your pleasure and minimize your pain.  Then we all die anyway, and it means nothing.  (See my recent The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together for elaboration and evidence about this, and why genuine science actually shows the spiritual has reality to it.)  Where is culture going, when greed is a primary motive and nothing really means anything?  If we are really some sort of spiritual beings, though, and mystical experiences of, say, our inherent unity, the power of love, etc. are about realities, our relations to our fellow beings are quite different.  As just one example, what hurts you hurts me in some real sense, and cooperation and kindness are natural things to do, not some "should" imposed from outside.

Transpersonal Psychology is not a religion which thinks it knows the answers to all of this, but believes that applying the tools of (a more enlightened) science and scholarship to the spiritual can result not only in a better understanding of what's real and what's not, and how we can evolve, but in more effective ways to help people have genuine spiritual experiences and integrate them into their lives in a healthy way.  Yes, this is a noble goal, and yes, my life has been and is dedicated to promoting it.  Too, in contrast to a common belief in some spiritual systems that we were once much more spiritually evolved, I believe in and try to promote progress: we can evolve forward, not just hope to go back to what it was like in some more enlightened past time.  Who knows, perhaps there are even more spiritually evolved states than "old-time enlightenment?"

So what does all this have to do with my opening statement that I'd like to abolish the word "meditation?"

One of the questions I like to ask my friends and colleagues in various religions and spiritual traditions – and I must admit there's a certain impish quality behind it – is "Has there been any progress in spirituality in the last couple of centuries?"  There's been enormous progress in the various sciences.  In areas like physics, chemistry, medicine, we know enormously more, and can do enormously more than we could a couple of centuries ago.  So, are more people who enter a particular spiritual path today getting "enlightened," "saved," or whatever?  There is usually an embarrassed silence in reaction to my question.

One of the primary ways that has allowed scientific pursuits to progress so much has been clear communication.  In chemistry, biology or physics, for example, whenever the word "water" is used, it is quite clear that what is specifically meant is a molecular compound made up of two atoms of hydrogen to one of oxygen, which is liquid in a certain temperature range, vaporous in another temperature range, turns to ice in  another temperature range etc.  Nobody confuses coffee, tea, battery fluid, brandy, or anything else with water simply because they are liquids.  But, when somebody uses the word "meditation," what do they mean?

Within the particular teachings of the Sogyal Rinpoche's Tibetan Buddhist Rigpa organization, for example, there will be a relatively specific meaning attached to words like "meditation," "consciousness," "attention," "mindfulness," "awareness," etc.  But as soon as you go outside that particular teaching, all these words may carry different explicit and implicit meanings.  Now if we knew that all the time, it would not be too much of a problem – "Ah, we are talking about type 3 attention now as a basis for type 5 meditation" – but most of the time people are not too sensitive to the different meanings of the same word within different traditions.  But we think we know what is meant because the words are familiar.

Thus when someone tells me, for example, "I meditate each day," I really have almost no idea of what they actually do or mean.  At a minimum, it probably means that it is something they consider different from their ordinary life activities, but that's about it.

As a transpersonal psychologist and scientist, looking at how "meditation" is taught and practiced across many traditions, there are many, many definitions of what it means, and often no clear definition at all of what it means.  Further, the actual techniques for particular forms of meditation may be described in certain words, but any practice is learned within a context, and the subtle hints and cues and expectations in that context may greatly change the meaning of the particular words for a learner.  So the same set of instructions in terms of words, in different contexts, may mean people do entirely different things.

Another of the main reasons science progresses is that it looks at data about things from a wide variety of perspectives, then looks for essential commonalities to get at the essence of things.  But if you look at "meditation" to try to find such commonalities, you may find a few – sitting still, e.g. is quite common – but probably almost none that are universal -some "meditations" involve standing and movement – and many that have concepts and practices that are contradictory to other traditions.  You can't, to go back to our example, make a lot of progress in understanding the chemistry of water if some people who report the results of their study of "water" are using battery fluid, others are using coffee, and others are using brandy.

Now, fortunately for the world, I will never be appointed as czar of anything!  That's good, giving me too much authority tends to go to my ego, and I use authority badly.  Practically, I have gone on what I call "semantic crusades" several times in my career, trying to introduce more precise terms in psychology and parapsychology, and only occasionally been successful.  So I know that, realistically, nobody's going to stop using the word "meditation."  And usually using it to mean what they want it to mean!  So what I'm advocating, is that if you want to learn something about meditation in a particular tradition, try to get clear what's meant by the terms within that particular tradition, and try to put that meaning aside when you study in a different tradition.

The situation is further complicated because meditation is often defined in terms of words like "attention," "mindfulness," "concentration," etc., yet while these words are in common use, they often mean different things to different people.

If this is starting to make your head hurt to think about how complex this gets, I'm with you!  The important thing is not the words per se but learning how to direct your attention in specific ways, and what you see as a result of that, but, as in so many areas of life, words can help us begin to use our attention in the desired way.

The things these words refer to are important and vital realities, and it helps us if we can have clear definitions of what we're doing or trying to do, but I suspect with some of these very basic things like "mindfulness," are never going to be able to totally defined in logical and grammatical terms.  The old Zen saying, "The finger pointing at the moon is not the Moon," is so true!  But the finger pointing at the moon may be helpful.  If the moon is in the west and we're looking toward the east, the finger pointing toward the west may get us turn around, and that certainly increases our chances of seeing the moon.  Or we may stare at the finger……

Here's an example where I have particular problems with words.  This problem may be more acute with me because, as a transpersonal psychologist, I have to look at a lot of different spiritual traditions and techniques, but many people may have a similar problem.

Sogyal Rinpoche teaches about three components of meditation.  The terms he uses are "mindfulness," "awareness," and "remaining spaciously."  He's talking about three aspects of your mental functioning in trying to do the Rigpa system of meditation.  He is giving them specific definitions in terms of the Rigpa process of meditation, which is very good.  But I get "mindfulness" and "awareness" confused all the time unless I make a special effort to get them straight, because I hear these same words used with different meanings in other contexts.  Indeed, unless I go back to my notes, I may make a mistake in the next sentence about what he means by "mindfulness" or "awareness."  But one of them means "What is the meditation object that is focused on?"  That might be an external object, such as a picture of a spiritual master, or an internal visualization, but it's the focus point you try to keep in mind.  In my own mind I translate it as the "focus point."  Another part of your mental process, which may be what he calls "awareness," is a monitoring of the process:  "How am I doing?  Am I actually paying attention to the focus point, or has my mind wandered off on something else?  Am I successful in bringing it back to the focus point, or do I have to do it again?"  Rinpoche speaks of about 25% of your attention being on process monitoring, about 25% on the focus point, and the balance restfully remaining open.

I had been trying to meditate in various ways for many years before hearing this particular way of describing how to meditate, and I find it very helpful, and use it when I teach basic meditation.  But, as I said, given my background, I have to translate the terms he uses into "process awareness" and "focus point" in order for them to make sense for me, and to not get confused by the many other meanings of these words in both ordinary and psychological use.

So perhaps the moral of this post is as you begin to read any particular post or article or book about "meditation," figure out as soon as possible what the author means by key terms like "meditation," and it's probably a good idea to write those definitions down right away and keep them in front of you as you read on.  This won't guarantee that you become extremely good meditator, but will certainly avoid a lot of wasted time brought about simply through unnecessary confusion.

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

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

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

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

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

(Laughter)

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

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

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

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

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

Student: Okay.

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

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

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

(Laughter)

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

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

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

Student: Whew. Thank God he opened that!

(Laughter)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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My style of learning is generally to think about things, talk about them with others, get their feedback on what they think of my ideas, hear what their understanding is, etc.  It's probably a very Western way, as compared to that of many traditional cultures where you try to learn what the Masters have to say and put it into practice, with what often seems to me (I may be prejudiced here) an emphasis on rote learning rather than thinking about.

Recently some of us older students or Rinpoche have finally started having an email discussion about some aspects of what "enlightenment" or spiritual progress is from the Buddhist perspective and our own perspectives, and I thought it might be useful to share some of my comments on this here.  Perhaps this is an example of what a modern, Western, transpersonal psychologist thinks.

The discussion started around an idea in Buddhist teachings that our unenlightened, ordinary state involves being too much lost in infinite complexities of deluded, samsaric existence.  As a beautiful translation of a traditional Tibetan text by Sogyal Rinpoche puts it,

Ho!  Mesmerized by the sheer varieties of perception,

Which are like the reflections of the moon in water,

Beings wander endlessly astray in samsara's vicious cycle…..

My wife Judy noted that a reason for complexity is

>Why do we want to see what's beyond the "sheer variety"?  For me anyway, it's to answer those old questions – Where do we come from?  What's REALLY going on here?  How is it that I exist?<

I'm completely with her (makes for a good marriage).  Yes, I don't want me or other people to suffer, and clearly we can get distracted by all that complexity so we don't learn the Buddhist procedures that would reduce our suffering, but that's not enough for me.  I'm curious!  And I think my curiosity, my interest in knowing more, is one of my best features.

At my current level of (mis?)understanding, I know that many Buddhist practices will reduce my suffering, make me more effective at helping others, and also allow me much more innate contentment:  just happy being, not needing constant entertainment and distraction.  There's also, I think, a promise in the teachings that if I ever got really really enlightened I would, like the Buddha, know everything, like he supposedly did.  I know for sure the techniques and practices help a lot here-and-now, but I don't really know about this way-down-the-road promise.  I don't actively deny the possibility, but I put it on "hold," I know what results in ordinary life are, I don't know about this.

So I hope to keep up a sensible level – respect the relative, as ordinary existence is called – of interest in and curiosity about, and attempts to improve the ordinary, the relative, but hopefully my meditations and other practices keep me reminded that this isn't the absolute, the highest possible, stay open to the …. I was going to say "the More," but this sounds greedy, I don't know how to express the whatever is is/isn’t. But maybe some of you know what I mean.

Making this more concrete: the classic Buddhist teaching example of how our perception is distorted is about walking down a jungle path at twilight and mistaking a rope lying beside the path for a deadly snake.  It's a great illustration of how consciousness is constructed, biased, not just a high fidelity perception of what's really there.  The lesson, for me at least, being don't automatically take everything you see and experience as necessarily true, it may be a little or a lot illusory and distorted.  Learn to experience more of what's called the 6th consciousness, simple sensory perception, not be always stuck in 7th consciousness, the automatic, biased elaborations and story that substitute almost instantly for actual perceptions..

On the other hand, as a being incarnated in a vulnerable physical body, the world, especially hot places like India, is full of dangerous things like snakes.  I'm likely to survive much longer if my automatic processes (I think of this one as an ancient program hardwired into the human brain, human karma) scream "Snake, stop moving forward, jump back!!!," I stop, then I'll be happy to be embarrassed afterwards for being mistaken.  Embarrassment is much lighter suffering than snake bite and dead…..

Again, just my personal opinion, but Buddhist teachings in general often seem to put too much emphasis on getting on to the Absolute compared to practical teachings for getting along better in the Relative.  Not that there isn't a lot of practical advice in Buddhism as I know it, but the balance doesn't seem right to me.

Some of my friends, continuing our discussion, seemed to be a little embarrassed at wondering/speculating what more enlightenment would be like.  I understand the need for knowing what various teaching say if you're going to practice Buddhism, but I worry that too much humility, too much "Just quote what the Buddha or one of the enlightened Masters said" is not adaptive in our culture, so I wanted to encourage people to relax and think.  Thus:

Can I encourage you, my friends, to stop apologizing for thinking about the teachings and their application to life?  There is no problem with thinking, with "risings" per se, as I understand it (oh, oh, that's coming close to an apology….), it's the inappropriate and habitual attachments to thoughts that leads to problems.  I've heard Sogyal Rinpoche teach that, and it's certainly my own best understanding to date.  It's not thoughts (or feelings) that are a problem, it's the following after them, the way they automatically carry us away into our fantasies and stories.

When I/we discuss our understandings of the teachings, I try to remember that we are like first graders having a discussion about what you will learn in college or graduate school.  We probably have some little but correct  understandings, but may be way off on others.  So, in our Western intellectual culture at least, do we beat little kids when they think and talk about things they don't understand?

I know, there are some very repressive parents and sub-cultures that do, but I never did.  If I spoke up at all to kids I tried to encourage them to learn more things and think things through – and be prepared to learn more and think more as time went on, rather than think they had The Final Answer right now.

Gosh, as I write that I think I must have been an ideal parent—and I'm sure I was never that good, but that was my guiding ideal.  Same thing with students in my undergraduate and graduate classes nowadays – if they can repeat the "facts" I've taught them correctly, that's good, but if that's all they do, I'm sad.  I'm delighted when they think about and extend what they've been taught, when they don't childishly stay in a "They are children, I am the grown up who must be right" stance, but think about, explore things beyond my initial teaching and stimulation.

One of the things that really attracted me to the Buddha as a teacher is his Sutta to the Kalamas.  Here's a translation I have:

-Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it.

-Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations.

-Do not believe in anything because it is spoken and rumored by many.

-Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books.

-Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders.

-But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason, and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.

My personal understanding of this, fueled by ego and cultural conditioning, of course, as well as, hopefully, by common sense and genuine understanding, is don't freeze your ideas and ideals at any point, keep open to the moment, to learning.

But there are many strains of Buddhism, and while I'm not a Buddhist scholar, I've gotten the impression in looking at some teachings that this sutta has been interpreted (arising in much more authoritarian cultures than ours?) as think until you reach the same conclusion the Buddha is supposed to have reached about things, and then you can or should stop thinking…..Sadly this approach can reinforce the tribal mentality that is part of being human, so we feel threatened by people who don't fully conform to the approved interpretation and reject them (Me?  Now?  Sorry, I'm a thinker, even thought I try not to get too attached by my thoughts).

So in our culture, at least in my idealized understanding of it, we encourage our kids to think.  So keep thinking, kids, and don't apologize for it!  Share your thinking, and the thoughts you get from us other kids may help you correct misunderstandings or understand better.  And don't be mean to yourself or others because they are thinking!

And maybe some day when we're in graduate school and know so much much more, we'll look back fondly on our little kids selves….."They had some weird ideas, but they were good kids, had their hearts in the right places, and learned a lot…."

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Mindfulness

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Student cell phone rings)

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

Of course you have to know who it is.

Student: Mom!

(Laughter)

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