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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American Veda

As a red-blooded American boy growing up in New Jersey in the 1940s, I had never heard of yoga.

By the time I reached my early teens and had heard the word, I thought it must have something to do with yogurt, health and health foods and all that – not that I’d ever eaten anything as exotic as yogurt back then.

By my mid-teens when I read Swami Vivekananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi, I had become aware of the enormous but quiet influence Indian ideas had exerted on the West for some time and which were increasing then.  Now, as Phil Goldberg points out in American Veda, in some cities it’s easier now to find a yoga studio than a Starbucks….

NOTE AN ALERT READER HAS ALREADY TOLD ME I'VE MIXED UP MY VIVEKANANDAS AND YOGANANDAS AS TO THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY.  WELL A GOOD EXAMPLE OF WHY WE NEED TO GET OUR HISTORY STRAIGHT.  I READ THEM BOTH WAY BACK THEN, BOTH GREAT BOOKS.

By my early 20s I probably knew much more about the theory of yoga, Vedic/Indian ideas than most people.  Today I am probably outclassed by hundreds of thousands of Americans in both theoretical and practical knowledge of yoga and Vedic ideas…..It’s been an interesting life!

If you are one of the millions of Westerners who are what sociologists call SBNRs, Spiritual But Not Religious, you’re probably already living from many Vedic ideas, and here’s your chance to see the history and sociology that’s affected you come together clearly.  As Goldberg begins the book,

In February 1968 the Beatles went to India for an extended stay with their new guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. It may have been the most momentous spiritual retreat since Jesus spent those forty days in the wilderness. The media frenzy over the Fab Four made known to the sleek, sophisticated West that meek, mysterious India had something of value. Our understanding and practice of spirituality would never be the same.

AMERICAN VEDA

From Emerson and the Beatles to Yoga and Meditation, How Indian Spirituality Changed the West

By Philip Goldberg

Foreword by Huston Smith

Published by Harmony Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group

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

Lecture 4, Part 13 of 19 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

[Note my postings may be irregular for the next few weeks as I'm going camping...]

Student: So what is the hallmark of a good spiritual teacher?

CTT: Wow!

Student: Sitting full lotus for three years!

Student: With a bottle of whiskey in one hand, you can do it in two!

(Laughter)

Student: “Drink, or you won’t be enlightened.”

(Laughter)

CTT: We would agree, I think, that places like Stanford or Harvard or something like that are first class universities. How do we make that judgment? Do we make it by the devotees who hang around the professors?

Student: By how often they are mentioned in U.S. News & World Report.

(Laughter)

CTT: Oh. Okay. No.

(Laughter)

That’s one way to do it, right? But I think the real criteria is that you judge them by their graduates. A lot of people who’ve accomplished a lot in the world have gone to universities like that, so we think they’re good universities. And yeah, there are things like how fancy the buildings and labs are, and scholarships. And that’s nice, but the ultimate test is the graduates.

I think that’s the ultimate test you need to apply to spiritual teachers. How many graduates do they produce and how much do their graduates give to the world?

Now at one extreme, you might have some spiritual teacher who never have any graduates. Everybody hangs around as a devotee and looks blissed out.

(Laughter)

I guess that’s all right, but they’re not going to get my ranking as a top teacher.

And on the other hand, you have some where the only people who ever leave a particular spiritual group are the ones who get thrown out. Does that make you think of a cult or something like that, or maybe because they genuinely weren’t suitable?

And on the third hand, there are teachers who’ve had students who’ve ended up being teachers or otherwise made contributions themselves and we think pretty highly of that. But we don’t do that in any systematic kind of way.

So you know Swami Yogananda gave rise to… I don't know if I have the succession right. Let’s say, famous Yogi No. 1 had a student, who was famous Yogi No. 2, to be more generic about it. But it’s not like there are clear records kept. Maybe this was 1 in 100,000 students. The only one who was worth anything. Maybe it was 1 out of every 10 who actually became a very effective teacher who helped people, or something like that.

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