Lately though I've commented a number of times on comments – and when I check later, they don't appear.  I've got some sort of software problem in WordPress, it makes me think I've done something when nothing is done.  My webmaster is working on it.  Meanwhile, sorry to be too absent.  Hope my regular posts are stimulating….

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Lecture 4, Part 12 of 17 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

CTT: You’re getting at the balance between an experience that is being relatively directly created by what’s actually happening at the moment, and starting to superimpose concepts of what should be happening over it. Those concepts can be very intriguing, but they’re never quite the same as the actual experience. So you can go through life, in a sense, ruining your actually experience.

…..Okay, how do I want to say this…..?

One of my qualities that I’ve had to work with all my life is gluttony, to use an old-fashioned word for it. And for my particular personality type, gluttony manifests as, “Whatever experience is happening to me, it could be better!” Which means it’s never quite enough for what it is. For me to learn to simply accept experience as it is – which mindfulness practice is very good for – makes experience much more rewarding than constantly thinking, “This could be better!”

Knowing that you’ve turned your attention away from sensing what’s actually going on and are now investing in words about it or images about it – those are the main ways that concepts are done – allows you to not get so carried away by these things. But it’s so easy to get carried away.

An example came to mind while we were talking about it. There was a world religious leaders’ conference in Switzerland some years ago. One of the delegates there was a famous Zen teacher, who was quite old at the time. He looked so relaxed that everyone figured the old guy is dozing…

The person who was writing about it was describing an afternoon session. The delegates were all gathered around a long conference table in this beautiful room. The windows were open and someone was giving the most elegant lecture about the nature of spirituality and all that when a gust of wind blew in the window, took the speaker’s papers, and blew them down the table real fast.

While all these people caught up in their words did nothing at all, the Zen master simply reached out and caught the papers as they went by, because he hadn’t been caught up in the words.

Concepts, beliefs, ideas about reality vs reality….

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Progress in Meditation?

Dear Shinzen,                              Date Composed: August 22, 2010

Some thoughts on the Path that are running around in my brain lately….Let me set the background and then describe the problem.

A basic premise of spiritual systems, to put it in a very general form, is that ordinary life involves a lot of suffering that does not have to be, and that there is a hugely more satisfying mode of existence that is possible – call it “enlightenment.”  Further, methods exist for reaching enlightenment.  But for most of us, reaching enlightenment or even getting close involves a lot of work, and the motivation to engage in that work while giving up other life things that could be relatively satisfying.

Buddhism, e.g., calls for work on three lines.  Ordinary morality and decent living.  Learning concentration skills.  Insight, using those concentration skills to investigate the nature of the ordinary mind, which can (not must, can) bring about a breakthrough, perhaps just occasional glimpses at first but getting more and more frequent, that breakthrough being enlightenment.

I have no inherent problem with the first line, morality training, I’m a decent person to begin with and want to live a life of increasing kindness, sensitivity, honesty, effectiveness, etc.  There’s been noticeable progression along this line in my life.

Concentration skill.  I’m spite of having a very active intellectual mind that constantly generates ideas under ordinary conditions (generally good ideas, I have little complaint there), my ability to focus reasonably well on one thing has certainly increased with meditation and self-remembering practice.  By “reasonably well” I mean if asked to focus on X, I will not have awareness of nothing but X for minutes at a time or more, but I can keep some varying awareness of X, with only small total losses, even while other thoughts and images come and go, i.e., I can keep X reasonably well in the foreground even if the background continues manifesting.  This is enormously better than, say, 20 years ago, where I would be lucky if I thought of X for 3 seconds and then my mind would go off completely for seconds to minutes at a time before I remembered that I intended to focus on X.

Insight.  To some degree I can, for short periods, experience flow, an occasional gone, mildly restful states in imagery or talk, and body relaxation.  I can not automatically identify with the varying content that flows on, i.e. “I” am aware of content flowing through without being exactly the same as that content…this is difficult to express…..it’s not a strong sense of a Watcher watching, but I don’t know how else to describe it….  It’s not a Big Deal experience, but certainly gives me the intellectual conviction that whatever “I” am, it’s not the content, which changes all the time, but a more basic ability to experience per se….

The problem.  A feeling of having reached a plateau, where my meditation and mindfulness practice is OK, I’m glad I can be more mindful and will continue to practice it intermittently, but it’s not a Big Deal, it doesn’t directly motivate me to want to put in a lot of time on it – half an hour a day seems plenty – so I can reach enlightenment or whatever.

I sit for designated vipassana practice, e.g.  My time then varies between, at best, feeling calmly present and aware, and, at worst, simply dozing through most of the session*.  In between there’s daydreaming, thinking about things, berating myself for not doing better, etc., all the stuff I imagine you hear about all the time.  At the end of a session I’m usually glad I did it, it’s mildly satisfying – but so is a good cup of coffee, a nice walk, writing a paper, etc.  That is, I’m not getting direct feelings that there’s some special satisfaction from meditating, so I’m not motivated to meditate much more.

I feel like the Buddhist deal offered is that I can see some slow progress in my technique of meditating, nice but not a Big Deal, and then there’s the promise that if I keep this up long enough (months?  years?  the rest of my life, but still not getting there?) the Big Deal of enlightenment might (or might not) happen.

You used to compare learning meditation to learning to play the piano, and the analogy may be very direct and accurate for some people.  Nothing but boring scales at first, then simple tunes, more complex tunes, eventually you’re enjoying the music you play, maybe you get good enough that people ask you to play, maybe Carnegie Hall….  In learning to play the piano you get tangible rewards as you see your skill increasing, it’s not like once you can play basic tunes you plateau and then nothing happens by way of improvement or satisfaction year after year, but maybe, for some people but not others, suddenly they are concert pianists.

So maybe it’s just me, and/or maybe I’m a fairly common type of person, but it’s hard to keep up or increase the motivation to practice more when I seem to have plateaued, and maybe I’d be better off putting my time into something else because the meditation isn’t going to go anywhere for me?

This is certainly reflected in my practical decisions over the years.  Like since I’ve been officially retired from UC, I could spend hours every day meditating, go to a zillion retreats, etc., but my expectation of getting somewhere if I do that is pretty low.  Whereas I know I’m doing something useful for other people in my writing and teaching, so I choose to put most of my time into that…. and get rewarded for that when people tell me my writings and lectures help them understand things better.

Anyway, that’s what I wanted to express.  If you feel like talking about it, give me a call when you get a chance – it will always be satisfying to talk with you anyway, my friend!  We’ll be here the rest of this week, then off camping for 10 days.

Charley

* Oh, the sleepiness when meditating I’ve complained about for years?  It turns out from sleep lab studies that I have both obstructive and central apnea, they will probably put me on breathing assist apparatus, maybe I’ve been sleep deprived for years without that being clear.  It will be interesting to see what happens if my night sleep gets deeper….

———–

Date Filed: August 23, 2010

Hi Charley,

I think part of the problem is from Buddhism itself. Most Buddhist literature gives one the impression that the path is supposed to involve some big spiritual orgasm that happens suddenly and changes one forever. The reason that Buddhist teachers (including myself ) talk about the path in this way is that occasionally something like that does actually happen. When it does, it's quite dramatic. However, it's been my experience that for most people who practice meditation, it doesn't happen that way. Rather the changes are gradual, so gradual that people acclimatize to them and don't really realize how much they've changed.

The other problem is that the changes are not necessarily best measured by insights that occur, but rather in most cases best measured by the amount of suffering that a person would have gone through but didn't go through because of the path. But since that measure is both hypothetical and a measure of absence, it's difficult for most people to realize how HUGE it really is.

So I would say don't worry if you're not getting epiphanies. Your practice as you describe it is just fine.
All the best,
Shinzen

———————
Shinzen Young
Shinzen@MeditationTraining.com
www.BasicMindfulness.org (Phone-based retreats and classes)
www.Shinzen.org (Articles, CDs, onsite retreats)
www.YouTube.com/user/expandcontract (Video talks)
www.YouTube.com/user/ShinzenInterviews (Interviews with Shinzen)

———-

Thanks, Shinzen.  Your understanding fits.  In many ways, I've had a lot of changes over the years of the "quietly dropping away" of negative stuff sort, often not even noticed for a long time.  My superego has high standards, though, so that isn't good enough for it!

> The other problem is that the changes are not necessarily best measured by insights that occur, but rather in most cases best measured by the amount of suffering that a person would have gone through but didn't go through because of the path. But since that measure is both hypothetical and a measure of absence, it's difficult for most people to realize how HUGE it really is. <

Now there's a challenge for the experimental psychologist in me!  How do I quantify what hasn't happened?       

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Lecture 4, Part 11 of 17 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

Student: Recently I’ve been feeling like I can be in that sort of peaceful place, but when I’m there, I can’t get out of it. Like I miss the state of being mindful, but when I’m there, I can’t get out of it. Does that make sense?

CTT: I’m not sure yet.

Student: I’m not always in a state of peace, but I’ve found that doing this mindfulness practice has gotten me more aware of my body and more aware of my emotions all the time. But it’s been increasingly more difficult to come back and start reading for school and doing papers.

CTT: Is that because you like the state you’re in?

Student: I do like it.

CTT: And then all this school stuff is work.

Student: But I like school too. I love learning.

CTT: Mindfulness does not mean guaranteed happiness.

Student: Right.

CTT: Or always knowing the best thing to do in each and every situation. Sometimes you still have to make yourself do something that one part of your mind knows is what you should do, and the other parts of your mind aren’t interested.

Student: Right. So I guess my question is I know that last week you talked about getting into your body when you’re doing a paper, but how do I get to the paper when I’m paying attention to my body?

CTT: That’s an interesting way of thinking about it. She’s succeeding too much at not writing her papers, but she’s happy.

(Laughter)

Well, you can think about all the money you’re spending to come here to graduate school!

Let’s let that one float for a minute. I don’t have a good answer for your question.

Student: I think that peace is a by-product of other activities and not something that should or can be pursued directly, and that mindfulness results in a feeling of peace. I’ve been working hard this year to test it out on the racetrack with my motorcycle, and it is possible to feel peace and comfort and waiting for what’s happened next, even if you’re in a slide at over 100 miles an hour.

So they don’t seem to go well together, but then it fits into what you were saying about slowing down. The very fastest people are moving the slowest. Things are happening without expectation, only adjustment to what’s happening. So you talk to somebody that’s really fast, and they’re not doing very much in the controls. They’re there for the experience and looking forward to what’s happening next, so everything slows down. And yet they’re faster than everybody else, so I don’t think that slowing down…. It means doing less than what you were explaining, but it doesn’t mean accomplishing less. That actually there’s a way to accomplish more.

CTT: Yeah. Seeing peace as a side effect is a good way to look at it.

Student: That reminds me of orgasms.

(Laughter)

Student: It’s weird, because what you’re describing sounds like having really good orgasms. One of the things I realized a while ago, after looking at tantric stuff, is that when you relax instead of turning sex into having a goal at the end of it, or the climax, the more you relax into the experience, the more amazing the experience is.

Another Student: Yes.

Student: In fact, the first time I got on the racetrack with my bike, years ago, I actually said, “This is the next best thing to sex, except that it lasts all day long.”

(Laughter)

There is a real sense of just waiting for what’s coming next and not trying to orchestrate an experience.

Another Student: Right!

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I got an email this morning about being interviewed as an expert on air ions and their physiological effects for a Discovery program.  My response was "Good topic, but I know way too little to be an expert.  I was interested in effects of atmospheric ions on biological and psychological reactions, and read the literature, such as it was, 40 years ago!  I imagine there's been an immensely greater amount of research since then, and I know nothing about it nor do I know who the current experts are to refer you to….Sorry.”

And then I remembered that later this afternoon I had planned to write a little report to send out to my lists and friends and correspondents about a, to me, amazing event.

For the last year and more I have had bad tension headaches every day, requiring large amounts of both Tylenol and codeine to control. For the three and a half weeks since starting an unusual electrical treatment, which probably affects how my body deals with air ions, I have had almost no headaches! I can still hardly believe it, it even feels odd to not have my head hurting, I’ve gotten so used to it.

If this works for me it may work for other headache sufferers, so I’m sharing this info!

What did I do?

Last year I was asked to be the President of ISSSEEM (International Society for the Study of Subtle Energy and Energy Medicine), as their Board felt I was an outstanding example of openness to unusual ideas and discoveries while still remaining scientifically rigorous and creative.  At our meeting in June, the former President, Jim Oschman (thank you Jim!) handed me a recent book he had written a preface for, “Earthing,”  by Clinton Ober, M.D., F.A.C.C., Stephen Sinatra, and Martin Zucker.   It’s about health effects of electrically grounding ourselves.  The subtitle is pretentious, “The Most Important Health Discovery Ever?” but you get used to that kind of puffery as publishers try hard to grab our attention.  The book claimed that all sorts of diseases involving tissue inflammation, which have been more and more prevalent since the Second World War, may be partly due to the fact that we no longer walk barefoot on the earth, or wear shoes with leather soles, which are fairly electrically conductive.  Our shoes since the war usually have soles of synthetic materials which are strong electrical insulators, so we walk and live ungrounded in the earth-ionosphere static potential field (about 200 to 300 volts per meter – a generally  accepted scientific measurement).  The authors of the book claimed to have at first accidentally, and then more systematically, discovered that if they ground people, all sorts of disease problems lessen or cure.

I've always been interested in and pretty knowledgeable about electricity, and this didn't sound too pseudo-scientific to me, although I am generally skeptical that most alternative medicine stuff is psychological healing effects.  But I could see it wouldn't be dangerous to try having my bare feet on a grounding mat while working at my computer during the day*, and if there was any chance that it worked – boy, was I tired of constant headaches…..

(*The mat is grounded thru a one megohm resistor, so even if you touch a defective piece of electrical equipment you won’t get a dangerous shock.)

Incidentally I am not a placebo reactor, and I’m not hypnotizable, although I was an expert in hypnosis research in the early part of my career.

Bottom line: nothing happened for a few days, just the usual heavy headaches, and then I suddenly dropped to hardly any headaches, have had many headache-free days, and it's held up! I've been plotting my level of headache pain, based on how much medication I have to take, for years, and I attach a chart of the 24 days since the headaches stopped and 24 days earlier as a control.  A too typical bad day for me before could mean I needed to take something like 90 mg of codeine and 6 Tylenols throughout the day….

I hope this  keeps working for me.  If you have a lot of headaches, I hope it will work for you!  The grI hope thisounding mat you can buy on the web at (http://stores.homestead.com/HughesLtd/-strse-3/Earthing-Connection-Un iversal-Mat/Detail.bok) for sixty bucks isn’t much of investment for years free of headaches….  I have  no financial interest in the book or the mat, incidentally.

Is this a “pure” experiment in the sense that the only thing of possible significance that changed in my life was the grounding?  No, on July 30^th I had a visit to the Kaiser Oakland pain clinic because of sleeping poorly due to a combination of pains waking me up, viz. night-time headaches, bursitis in my hip, and an old shoulder injury aching.  Since I’ve been taking 60 mg codeine at bedtime, maybe another 15 to 30 mg during the night if the hip or shoulder gets bad, but haven’t had but one nocturnal headache in all that time.  The pain ratings in the above chart are strictly for Tylenol and codeine taken during the day for headache.  I doubt if this increased codeine at bedtime is related to the enormous drop in daytime headaches, though, as that started a few days before I started the higher codeine dose at bedtime, and any codeine taken early in the night should have been pretty much metabolized out by morning waking. anyway…  But I mention it to be thorough.

Am I enthusiastic?  You bet?  Could my headaches come back?  Maybe, but I hope not.  Heck, I’m going to get a second ground mat that you can put under the sheet in your bed so I’m grounded at night….

Charley

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Observation reveals…

My mind has scenario generators and there’s practically always one running, either as thoughts (verbal talk/words to myself) or imagery.

The imagery is easy to see as I drift toward sleep, but, while less intense in terms of perceptibility, seem to be there all the time I’m awake.

There’s internally generated imagery, i.e., I don’t know why the particular image/dreamlet should come up at that time, there’s imagery generated by previous imagery or talk of body feelings, and there’s constant imagery in response to sensory input.  I hear a sound, e.g., and even if I don’t consciously want it, a faint visual image of what the object making that sound probably is occurs, and it’s accurately, spatially located in a usually implicit visual map of the space around me.  Like my perceptual processes are getting an image ready if I need it, perhaps to speed other info retrieval in connection with it.

If I’m not exerting some intention to organize my talk and image so they have a goal in mind, they wander all over the place.

If their content were analyzed, I’m sure they would be only partially random or of unknown provenance.  Generally they would reflect my usual personality and concerns, a kind of statistical distribution of “me.”  So I’m not just a random generator, but the lawfulness is hard to see sometimes – why in the world am I thinking about X?

So what is the “I,” the “me” behind this?  I automatically label all this stuff “my” experience, but that’s not just a post hoc intellectual thought, it “feels” like “me” in some hard-to-define sense.

So what might survive death?  A variegated collection of memories held together by intention?  In my alive state, my body must hold a lot of “me” together, as well as habitual and transient intentions?  The body as concretized intentions?

Funny, will, intention are the big things missing from modern psychology.

If intention can hold my current body, thoughts and feelings together, could sufficient intention “possess” a complex computer and organize it into a living, conscious being?

I’m going to go to sleep soon, that means I stop exerting specific intent to be “me,” to be organized, to be anything in particular, and the images will increase, the dreamlets start, and I’m gone….

To be continued some day….

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

Lecture 4, Part 10 of 17 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

Student: I wanted to say something about peace, because I did this experiment. Tom was talking about, “If you’re in a state of peace, then doesn’t life get boring?” You’re not pissed – peace.

(Laughter)

You can go and have a piss if you want.

(Laughter)

So I did this experiment where I tried doing really slow, deep breathing all day, from when I woke up till I went to bed, and I realized from the effect of that that what it does is – it’s like your emotions affect your breathing and your breathing affects your emotions. So if you breathe with that particular breath, you feel that emotion.

I found that that breath is the breath of peace. It’s very, very slow, and very smooth, and very consistent. And it’s the breath of peace, so I moved into the state of being in peace. No matter what happened, no matter what I was doing, I felt peace. And it was amazing. It was like everything happens like a gift, and I just felt very content and very peaceful.

And then I thought, why not do this every day? And one of the thoughts that came was, well, if I do that, then I won’t really be alive, because I will just be feeling peace all the time.

But then I realized that peace is like an emotion that contains all the other emotions. So when I’m stuck in anger, I’m in anger. And when there is anger, or when I’m in sadness, I’m in sadness, and really know sadness. But peace contains anger and sadness and all the other emotions, because the effortless way to peace is acceptance of everything, including all these other emotions.

And so even though you don’t get lost in anger, or lost in sadness, or lost in jealousy, instead of peace, I can understand and fully empathize with those states, and so I can kind of act angry in an authentic way. I can be angry without being lost in anger, when I’m in a state of peace.

CTT: I think one of the things you’re illustrating also is that the word “peace” is kind of broad gauge and probably contains several different things within it, some of which are desirable and some of which are not.

So for instance, suppose you are a reckless driver. You know, you move over between lanes too fast, speed too fast, and so forth. I could make you a better driver by tinkering with your engine so most of the cylinders didn’t fire and you could only creep along at five miles an hour. You wouldn’t be very reckless at five miles an hour. Or let the air out of your tires, or something like that. That’s a kind of peace you can get by forcing your whole system into a slow mode or a defective mode, and I think some of the tranquilizing drugs do that in a way, too. Just turn the whole system down.

But in the long run, I’d rather teach you to be a better driver than have to disable your car that way. This is a hint – the spirituality of the future will be couched in analogies about cars, for that’s where our real souls are! None of these chariots like in the Hindu scriptures!

(Laughter)

Maybe motorcycles for some people!

Student: I’m not sure if you’re implying that the practice was like taking a drug. To me, it seemed like the result was the same as if I’d done a lot of Vipassana, basically. But the thing is, it was ethical in that I had to effortly concentrate on doing that breath in order to obtain that state, whereas I would imagine after a lot of Vipassana, then I would both breathe in that way and I would experience that state without having to actually do it consciously.

CTT: You wouldn’t do Vipassana that way.

Student: No, no. I mean the result of having done Vipassana. Because I would have no – because Vipassana would result in me having more automatic peace, because I would have integrated more of Vipassana.

CTT: This is tricky here. Okay? The goal of Vipassana is not peace. Or at least if it is a goal, it’s a way-long-term, “let it happen by itself” kind of thing. You can do meditative exercises to induce the peace directly, such as long slow breathing, or something like that. That’s a very powerful procedure, actually.

But you don’t want the peace with a price of ignorance. You could wear blinders when you drove, and that way you wouldn’t feel threatened by those people who zoom up on the side of you. But you really better know when those people are zooming up in case you need to take evasive sort of action.

You don’t want to cut out your capacity to respond with feelings like fear or anxiety and the like. You want to keep from being irrationally carried away by them.

Let’s say somebody would say something to you that could be taken as insulting. Gurdjieff would say that a person who was really normal would have a flash of anger or fear. You got the message – maybe this person is being aggressive toward me – and you could now act intelligently on that message, but you didn’t have to keep dwelling on the message.

But what happens in most people is that when an emotion like that is induced, it triggers off related memories. It starts distorting your perception, and you start seeing this person doing other things that are obviously aggressive signs, when in fact they’re not, and it reminds you of all those people who ever picked on you anyway, and it wasn’t fair, and someday you’ll blow up the whole world, and blah blah blah.

We get into these emotional loops as a result of something that only lasts a fraction of a second, a lot of times. That’s the emotional system, or the bodily system, or the intellectual system running away with itself instead of giving a mindful response to what’s actually there. Stay in touch with what actually is. And then if you need to make a decision about it, you need to make a decision.

So you don’t want to cut that sensitivity out, but the peace comes as a side effect of not “going away,” of not cocooning yourself in dullness or ignorance.

Student: And it’s because you have these negative emotions very briefly, and then you go back to peace, and so then you don’t spend a long time in this stuck emotion.

CTT: I think most spiritual systems would say our actual, natural, resting state is peaceful. They might not want to say peace with a big capital P and an ecstatic connotation, but a kind of calm, open – peaceful is the word that keeps coming to mind – state.

It’s when these other things start…. I mean, an indication now might be how often is it that somebody said something hurtful to you in the morning and it ruined your whole day? You just spend the whole day going over it and over it. Not that it got you anywhere except to make you more agitated.

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

Lecture 4, Part 8 of 17 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

Student: You can only handle as much pleasure as you can pain.

CTT: Sounds like a cool idea. I have no idea whether it’s true.

Student: But I mean, it seems like if you start trying to approach every situation with equanimity, do you eventually just dull your emotions so that you can’t experience pleasure?

Another Student: Yes.

CTT: Now you’re really focusing on an important part of the pathology. You can give yourself a sort of forced equanimity. If you basically just hold the lid down on your feelings, then you’re going to start losing things.

Now this is where Gurdjieff made the unique contribution with his concept of emotional intelligence. We’re just getting the idea of emotional intelligence in modern psychology, but Gurdjieff was talking about it 50, 75 years ago.

Gurdjieff’s basic idea is that we have three brains, he called them. I think “brains” was, you know, a good scientific-sounding word to pass muster in those times, but we can call it three processes if we don’t want to physiologize it and run down the physiological correlates of it.

So let’s say you’ve got three distinctive processes. The analogy I like is that each one of us is a ruler, and we have three advisers who give us advice about what’s happening in the kingdom and how to do something about it.

But, according to Gurdjieff, practically all human beings’ development was warped such that they basically only really listen to one adviser, and they didn’t pay much attention to the other two advisers. The one adviser might be very smart, very glib, but this was a person who saw things through their particular biases. The other two advisers, because they’d been neglected and ignored, and often actively suppressed, tended not to be heard or had gotten kind of neurotic about their views.

So he talked about the intellectual brain, which you all have developed quite well, or you wouldn’t have made it this far in the educational system. The intellectual brain’s got words – boy, has it got words! – words, concepts and theories, and puts things together, and talks really, really good.

But he also talked about the emotional brain, or the emotional center, whose job was to look at the world and have an emotional reaction that represented an assessment of what that part of the world was about. It was an information-gathering and decision-making process, and the decision – the evaluation – was presented to us in the form of an emotion.

Same thing with the body as the third kind of advising process. The body also takes in information about the reality around us and presents it to us in a pattern of feelings.

Now ideally, all three of these processes are well developed. They’ve been nourished. They’ve been educated. They’ve been experimented with to know how to use them best. So we’re all great rulers, because we have three smart advisers giving us three different perspectives on every situation, from which we then make some kind of final decision.

But the problem that Gurdjieff said is, again, that one of these advisers has risen to prominence, and that’s the only one we listen to. Some people live life through their emotions. What they feel is 99% of what matters in a situation, and they don’t give it much verbal thought, and they don’t pay much attention to their body.

Some other people live life primarily through their bodies. You meet resistance, you push it aside. Something like that, you know what I mean? Emotions and thinking don’t matter very much. Other people – especially in the academic world – think verbally about it.

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To my conscious knowledge, two major forces brought me into parapsychology.  The earliest was my childhood religion, Lutheranism.  My parents weren’t religious but my maternal grandmother, who lived in the apartment downstairs from us, was very much so.  Grandmothers, as so many of you personally know, are sources of unconditional love, so she took me to Sunday School and church, and what was good enough for her was good enough for me!  I was quite devout as a child and early teenager.

The second major force was science.  As early as I can remember I loved everything connected with science, and by the time I was a teenager I was very widely read, including a lot of “adult” books.  I had my basement chemical and electrical laboratory, became a radio ham and built my own equipment, and wanted to be a scientist or engineer.  Studying electronics and radio on my own, I was able to pass government tests and get a First Class Radiotelephone license, empowering me to operate commercial radio stations.

The teenage years are a time of starting to question what you’ve been taught and to think for yourself.  I became aware, as most idealistic teens do, of the seeming hypocrisy of adults, those church people were not living what they preached!  Worse yet, I now enough science to realize that most, if not all, religious ideas and beliefs were quite nonsensical from the point of view of science, just old superstitions.  How could I reconcile this with the deep religious feelings that had began in my childhood?

From an adult perspective, I know many teenagers go through similar conflicts between science and religion.  A common “resolution” is to go to one extreme or the other: religion is all nonsense and materialistic science is right, or religion is the ultimate truth and science can be ignored when it’s inconvenient.  I put “resolution” in quotes, for as a psychologist I see this extremism as usually an incomplete and often psychologically costly way of dealing with the conflict, too much suppression of parts of our nature are involved.

Luckily my extensive reading – the Trenton city library was my second “home” – had included many older books on psychical research and parapsychology.  I realized that many intelligent people had gone through conflicts similar to mine, and the founders of the Society for Psychical Research had come up with a brilliant idea.  Instead of a wholesale rejection of all religion and spirituality and adoption of Materialism in whatever form was then scientifically fashionable, why not apply the methods of science,  the insistence on accurate data collection, logical theorizing, testing of theories, and full and honest sharing of data and theory, to the phenomena of religion and spirituality?  Why not examine and refine the data and devise more adequate theories?  I was inspired by this idea, and it has been the central theme of my professional work and personal life ever since.  Look at the data of spirituality (my preference is for individual spirituality rather than the group psychology of religion), see how to observe it more accurately, create and test theories about it, share these with colleagues, and slowly work our way toward a spirituality based on observable facts.

My first formal parapsychological experiment was a study of hypnotic suggestion as a (hoped for) way of producing out-of-body experiences (OBEs) while I was a sophomore at MIT, studying electrical engineering.  Looking back it wasn’t bad for a teenager, although I didn’t have an objective way of evaluating the data (nor did the field as a whole).  I didn’t formally write the results up until many years later Tart, C., 1998, Six studies of out-of-the-body experiences. Journal of Near-Death Studies, 17, No. 2, 73-99), by which time I had carried out five others studies of OBEs.

While at MIT I met other students interested in parapsychology and we formed a student club to talk about it and ask speakers to lecture us.  One of those speaker was Andrija Puharich, whom Eileen Garrett, world-famous medium and head of the Parapsychology Foundation, had told me about.  Here was a physician researcher who not only claimed to have a way of making telepathy work better or to shield it, he was doing it with electrical devices, Faraday Cages.  What could be more intriguing to students of electrical engineering and physics?

Some of us visited Puharich’s laboratory in Maine and thought his work seemed basically sound.  He gave a lecture on his findings at MIT for our club, and I was intrigued enough – and needed the money! – to ask him for a summer job.  So I saw some of his research up close for three months in 1957.

I was young and naïve, so didn’t fully realize that, in spite of being rejected by mainstream science, the few parapsychologists around did not all band together in a friendly way to present a united front. There was a parapsychological establishment, centered in J. B. Rhine’s laboratory at Duke, and Puharich was definitely not part of that establishment: he was a “bad boy.”  I had already met Rhine when he came to lecture in Boston several times and corresponded with him.  I wanted to switch from electrical engineering to psychology, to prepare for a career in parapsychology.  MIT had no psychology programs, but Rhine helped me transfer to Duke as a psychology major, and he had indicated he would find a part-time job for me in his laboratory.  Once I spent the summer working for Puharich, though, Rhine decided I did not have sufficient discrimination to make a scientific parapsychologist.  The promised job disappeared: indeed, I was, a friend told me, put on the list of people to be discouraged from visiting Rhine’s lab.  I was a “bad boy” now myself, in a very minor way.

Here’s a photo of me at Puharich’s Maine laboratory, the Round Table Foundation.

Still an idealistic young man, I was naturally miffed over this treatment, although, as I matured, I realized I would have acted the same way as Rhine in a similar situation.  If I had devoted my life to making a case for my field based on very careful, methodologically sophisticated research, I would discourage wild young people from getting involved and undermining my work with questionable work of their own.

On the other hand, J. B. Rhine had given a talk to the entering Freshman women and invited any of them who were interested in parapsychology to visit his lab.  So there I was looking at books in the Parapsychology Laboratory’s library (I did not accept Rhine’s ban) when this beautiful young woman came in and asked if I believed in ESP.  More than 50 years of marriage later, Judy tells me I still use the same response I did with her way back then, that’s it’s not a matter of belief, it’s a matter of evidence…  So Rhine was the proximate cause of far more happiness than unhappiness for me, and he did decide after another 20 years or so that I had enough discrimination to make a parapsychologist….and the next 50 years were quite interesting….

And just to put a cap on these beginning threads, Puharich became even more of a “bad boy” to the parapsychological establishment by getting involved with things like UFO studies, while I became a part of that establishment.  Puharich eventually got too far out for me, but it’s a shame that his basic findings that Faraday cages may amplify or shield psi have been ignored, as they may be a key to a major advance in getting reliable psi in our work.  As far as I know, I’m the only one who did even a partial replication study of his work (Tart, C., 1988, Effects of electrical shielding on GESP performance. Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research,  82, 129-146).

Just a beginning . … lots more since then on psychology, altered states, etc., to be written about some day….

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

Lecture 4, Part 7 of 17 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

CTT: Now this point you bring up about state of being is really a very important one, and it’s very hard to talk about adequately. We can talk about, say, personality. We can say this person has an aggressive personality, or that person has a generous personality, and we mean that there is an overall pattern to the way they live their life, and it’s a unique enough pattern – or distinct enough pattern – that it’s useful to know that kind of thing.

And you can talk about states of consciousness, where the mind can operate in a particular way, and so we talk about an altered state like dreaming, we mean the mind is operating in a different kind of fashion. But then consciousness goes back to its usual baseline. Altered states are transitory things.

But a state of being – well, first off, the abbreviation is not good, right? Because you start talking about SOBs and it’s going to be hard to get research grants to work it out.

But there’s very little formal recognition that people might be at different qualities of being, but – well, I’m just adding to the confusion, so I’ll shut up.

Student: I think that what happens is that there is a default state of being for most people, which is their preconditioned, cultural, hypnotized beliefs about themselves and what they deserve, and who they are. That’s certainly my default state of being. So in practicing being there, what happens is that my life unfolds in a way in which that perpetuates.

But then when I become more aware of the deeper truth about myself, then I have more choice in what I am being. And so what I choose to be in this moment, in terms of how I feel or how I perceive the world, then manifests – then becomes real – as I move through the world, and my actions flow from that state of being.

CTT: I mean, suppose your state of being is indeed a peaceful one. Then you can be in situations where people are agitated and aggressive and angry and in a lot of conflict with each other and not overreact to it, and sometimes have a calming influence just by being there. Whereas if you don’t have a peaceful state of being – if your normal state of being is kind of excitable – then you go into a paranoid situation, you get paranoid too, and you get into an aggressive situation, you get aggressive too.

Developing a peaceful state of being is an important aspect of a lot of spiritual paths. Partly it’s a practical one. If you’re highly agitated, you’re not going to learn many spiritual skills. Your mind’s too jumpy and caught up in things. You’re not going to learn meditation or prayer, or any kind of practices that require focus. Partly it’s simply because most of the time we like to feel peaceful rather than agitated, although once in a while, feeling agitated is really neat! There are some built-in pleasures to that kind of thing.

So you can work on spiritual development techniques to develop peace, but there’s a tricky part here. You can overdo it. You can develop peacefulness when you really should get agitated by a situation. You can develop a kind of forced suppression of your feelings so that you feel calm and peaceful, but it’s really not appropriate to feel that way in a situation.

Recall the example I gave you the other day of John Lilly, being deeply hurt as a kid and so deciding he wasn’t going to feel any emotions, and managing to pull it off for another 20-30 years of his life. It made him very calm and able to handle a lot of stress in a calm way, but eventually he realized what a terrible price he’d paid for basically not feeling anything.

Student: What was the price?

CTT: The price? Aliveness. Joy. If you’re starting to suppress all your feelings because you don’t trust the negative ones, it’s pretty hard to suppress just the negative ones and let the positive ones go. You tend to keep a damper on everything, and that means the positive ones don’t start either.

Student: Also you can’t really fully suppress them anyway. Because if I was always trying to be peaceful, and I was actually resentful or angry, then that would come out as passive aggression, and then that would manifest in my life.

CTT: That would be our particular Western psychological contribution to spiritual development, I think – that we know that when you suppress things like this, there’s going to be other kinds of prices paid for it, and things are going to come out in other ways.

It’s like in the early days of psychotherapy, when they discovered that hypnosis would cure hysteria. A hysteric would come in with a paralyzed arm or hysterical blindness or something like that, and with a hypnotic session or two, they get a complete cure. Then some new symptom would develop a week later. That was what led to the idea that if a person has a particular kind of symptom, that’s expressing a dynamic, a deeper process. They’re getting something out of that, and if you just cut it off, you may make this dynamic find some other kind of outlet.

Now I don’t think that turned out to be universally true, okay? I mean, the Freudians particularly carried this all the way. Every single thing you did carried tremendous psychodynamic meaning that needed to be ferreted out. But some things are relatively nothing when it comes to psychodynamics.

What was Freud’s famous saying? Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. It’s not a symbol for anything.

So are we focusing on being the way I'd like us to?

Student: Yeah. Thank you. I’m going to be in the bathroom.

CTT: Now that’s a state of being that requires a change!

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For several years I've been a member of an organization of “spiritual leaders” devoted to the question of developing a trans-traditional spirituality that would be more suitable to our time. Why me? I'm not a “spiritual leader,” but I think I'm their token scientist with a clear interest in spirituality.

A serious question was asked by another member about living in the here-and-now, especially as a way of dealing with our human suffering, and while it was directed to one of the Buddhists in the organization I felt like giving it a few minutes' reflection. You may find my answer of interest.

I'll paraphrase the question, since I wouldn't want to quote without permission…

"The challenge I have is to continue working on how to live in the Now! How much of the time can it actually be done? Can you, after years of practice, have only moments of living in the now, or can such nowness be extended to hours? It doesn't seem possible to me that a person could really live in the present for any length of time…."

My response:

You addressed your question to *****, ****, but I'll take a shot at it too.

Using the methods developed by G. I. Gurdjieff in his experiments with developing mindfulness techniques that worked for Westerners, I spent a lot of time living in the present years ago.  In a supportive environment, like other people working at it, I could spend much of my day very much anchored in the present.  Working on my own I could do it pretty well too, but it took more effort.  Nowadays I don't focus on it anywhere near as much, except when I teach this in my Basic Mindfulness class at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, where I try to stay anchored in the present for the whole 2 hours of class.  I often get intellectually excited by something we're talking about and lose touch with the present, of course – and I'm very pleased when my students start to catch me when I do this, and feel mindful enough and secure enough to tell me to come back to the present!    

While I don't formally try to be present and mindful all that much in everyday life anymore, I usually remember to do so when situations get sticky, and I feel there's been an overall shift in my level of consciousness/being from that earlier work, such that while I wouldn't describe myself as "awake" I could accurately say I'm not as deeply asleep, lost in consensus consciousness and my own story, as I used to be.

Oh, Gurdjieff's approach differs from classical mindfulness meditation techniques in that it's mainly about developing mindfulness in everyday life, rather than in special environments.  Few of us have every done anything really stupid while sitting quietly on a little black cushion, but our mindlessness in everyday life has sure gotten us in trouble!

You can get the flavor of Gurdjieff's methods from my blog, where I'm slowly posting a transcript of my mindfulness course (http://blog.paradigm-sys.com/), and or from my three books on mindfulness training ("Waking Up," or "Living the Mindful Life," or "Mind Science: Mindfulness Training for Practical People."

A final word.  We have to be very careful about using mindfulness techniques as a way of avoiding reality.  To be mindful is to be curious about what is actually happening, inside and outside at the moment, and to be courageous in looking at it.  Given our human condition, that means that while it's often satisfying and joyful to be more mindful, real mindfulness also makes us more acutely aware of our own and others' suffering.  If you try to turn mindfulness exercises into ways to feel good no matter what, that's exactly the kind of living in illusion, samsara, maya, that the Eastern spiritual systems say is at the root of suffering to being with.  I know mindfulness practice can be twisted this way – I've done it a lot of times!

Learning to become more mindful is a great way to go, and, I believe, fully compatible with the essence of real spirituality.

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