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

Lecture 4, Part 7 of 19 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

Student: I just want to tell you to go back to the broader conversation about thought and thinking. In the Buddhist context, as well as in the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction version of Jon Kabat-Zinn's work, the concept of nonjudgment about what we’re thinking, or that we are thinking, is very important. And I just think that’s important, especially as a clinician, because not everyone’s going to necessarily have that goal of becoming enlightened. A lot of times people are just struggling to work with a particular issue and you get them to understand how to work with the mind as a tool instead of having it control them.

CTT: You could think about that in terms of disidentification too. That normally every thought that comes along, it’s ME!, and how could I go against me? But if you create the larger container in which thought is one activity among a number of activities, then it’s not such automatic identification. Then thoughts don’t have quite so much power.

You’ve probably read about it at this point in Living the Mindful Life, but did you read about the exercise I gave people with the milk carton to see identification at work?

(A chorus of “Yes” “The cup.”)

CTT: OK. I’ve done it with a milk carton too, but milk cartons are messy. You tend to get old milk splashed all over the place. (Laughter) But it really is amazing how just by a simple request of telling people to identify with something for a minute, and then stomping on it, it literally hurts some people. That identification process can be so powerful.

Student: If we know how to do that so well, do we know how to disidentify well too?

CTT: I don’t think so. For most people the identification process is automatic. It’s not like, “Here’s a skill. I want you to use it now.” Identification just keeps happening as a result of your particular life history and conditioning. If you tell them to disidentify with something, most people would probably be skilled, able to do it, if it’s an unimportant thing you tell them to disidentify with. But if I tell you, “John, did you see that kid with the sledge hammer working over your motorcycle?”

(Laughter) (John rides a motorcycle to ITP)

That’s a little harder to disidentify with, isn’t it?

(Laughter)

Student: Yeah. I think that’s the problem with disidentification. The problem that people have with it is it’s a spiritual practice in some sense. You know, “That is not me. That’s not me.” But the problem is people get to a point where if you try to keep disidentifying yourself from all these things that you think of as parts of yourself, you get to a feeling of, “Then, what is it?” You know, “What is the self?” or “What is me?” And that’s scary, and difficult to figure out.

Student: Well, I think there’s no description once you get to that point, which is the problem. Because what you are is going to unfold next, and it hasn’t happened yet.

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"Are you suggesting that even someone with anomalous perceptions can contribute to a scientific study of such experiences as a scientist and not simply as a “lab rat” to be studied?"

I think you're worried about the problem of bias here, and it's reasonable to think about it.  One of the great strengths of science is the commitment to be as objective as possible and to report the facts, the data, and keep your interpretations of the data logically close to the facts, rather than distorted by personal preferences and beliefs.

But how far do we want to take this?  Should we say that only blind people can study vision because sighted people may be biased?  That only deaf people can study hearing since hearing people may be biased?

You could argue that sighted and deaf people will have insights into the stuff being studied that are great advantages.

They still have to watch out for their personal biases.  For example, I have a dear friend of many years who has made her living as a psychic, but I have never formally studied her, interesting as that might be, because I know I might well be too biased and unable to compensate for that bias.

Questioning your own experiences?  Sounds like exactly what I would expect of a scientist.  A "believer" would say "My experiences are sacred and prove Doctrine X, it would be heresy to question them!"  A scientist would think, "Here's my data, what I saw/experienced, it's interesting to interpret it by theory A, also interesting to see if from the point of view of theory B, maybe there's another theory that will work even better, I'll tentatively say theory D works best for now, let's go on and see what happens…."

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"But," I told her, "I won't be at home."

Then I realized that under "Home Number" on the paperwork they wanted, of course, my cell phone number, not my old-fashioned wired telephone number at home!

Silly me…..

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Essence of Science, Essence of Common Sense

or

Science in a Nutshell

Funny how everybody tends to automatically equate science with physical data and physical theories.  Partly a function of the enormous success of the physical sciences, of course.

This is a reminder I circulated to some parapsychologist colleagues who seemed to be falling into that common trap.

I'm calling it “common sense” as well as science since so many people have an aversion to “science” as something that denigrates their spiritual aspirations….

Long, long ago (well 1972 actually) I got a feature article published in Science in which I proposed the creation of state-specific sciences, i.e., complementary views of reality by practicing the basic procedures of science in various (altered) states of consciousness, ASCs.
There was then enormous fuss over whether anyone could do anything scientific and rational in ASCs.  The young folks thought so, the old folks yelled that only ordinary consciousness was suitable for science, all other states were inferior and crazy.  Funny thing, looking back almost 40 years, though, with that huge readership of high-class scientists, nobody has ever written that I didn't understand the basic process of science.  Makes me think I got it down pretty well.
Real short.
-    Distinguish the corpus, the body, the particular popular data and theories of science at any given time, from the method of doing science.
-    Start with Observation, of whatever you're interested in – which includes human experience, not just external meter readings.  (And meter readings are, of course, experiences of people… Keep striving to improve the scope and accuracy of your observations.
-    Make sense of your observations, Theorize.  Be rational about the outcome, the theory (even if you got it by "intuition" or whatever.  Feel smart!
-    Remember that we humans are really fantastic rationalizers, so we can come up with plausible sounding explanations of anything in retrospect, so make Predictions from the logic of your theory.
-    Go out and test the Predictions.  If they work, fine.  If they almost work, maybe adjust your theory a little.  If they don't work, reject your theory, no matter how "intuitively obvious," sensible, elegant, mathematical, used all the currently fashionable concepts, etc. it is.  Back to the drawing board.
-    Keep cycling the above process, so you go from crude observations and ideas to theories that give better and better, wider and wider accounts of what you can observe.
-    Remember you may be weird, biased in certain ways, so openly and honestly Share, Communicate all the above steps with peers.  If they say they can't replicate something, you have to specify conditions better.  Or they contribute observations that extend your theory.  They may find reasoning flaws in your theory and/or extend it in useful ways.  They think of Predictions and test them, etc.  The single-person cyclical knowledge refinement process gets better and better as it becomes a cooperative social activity.
Notice I haven't said a single thing about the observations must only be of the nature X. Meter readings, inner images, whatever.  If you can observe them better and better and come up with Theories, conceptual frameworks that make more and more sense of them and extend them through validated predictions, you're doing science.

Oh, the reference.  Tart, C. (1972). States of consciousness and state-specific sciences. Science, 176, 1203-1210. It's available on my web archive, www.paradigm-sys.com/cttart/

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

Lecture 4, Part 6 of 19 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

CTT: Now I say that with a little trepidation, because I’m thinking of some of the spiritual literature that seems to say that thinking is bad. Period. That thinking is always an illusory state separating you from the oneness of everything. I have a hard time with that point of view, especially when I hear it from prominent foreign teachers who put down all sorts of thinking, but who all got here on jet planes, which were created by disciplined thinking to the nth degree. It seems a little unrealistic.

There is an implication in some of the spiritual literature that if you really could live completely in the present, be enlightened, that some form of extra sensory perception (ESP) would take over and you’d always know the right thing no matter what. I’m open to the possibility — but I wouldn’t advise anybody to depend on it. I think it would be a good idea to make sure you have enough gas in the tank of your car before you start driving out across the desert, even though that’s thinking and it’s not quite in the here and now. So there’s a balance here, okay?

For we who have been so caught up in thinking so much of the time, with so little control over the compulsivity of the thinking, we have to work to become mindful of the present. We have to learn that kind of skill, but it doesn’t mean that is the only way to live life. Unless some of those spiritual teachers are right and I just don’t get it — which is a possibility, but who knows?

Student: I would support some of those other teachers by maintaining that thinking is an activity that takes one away from the presence and, to use your example, thinking –

CTT: The presence or the present?

Student: The present. Sorry.

CTT: Okay. Makes a difference.

Student: Yes. There are presents in the present (presence?), I think, but that’s another discussion. Your discussion about thinking, that one might get involved in the fabrics; that to me is the mind taking over a present state, where judgments have taken precedence to the validity of the conversation taking place.

CTT: Remember arms and legs.

Student: So that, to me, is a subtle way that the mind gets in and actually processes thoughts about an experience which is happening more through a bodily interaction with the world, or a sensory or sensuous interaction with the world, rather than a cognitive or thoughtful interaction with the world. And so, to me, that’s where the thinking is. The thinking is about the past. It’s something that’s happened or been experienced, even if it’s very recent. And that’s why I think that thinking is deemphasized and that the actual present experience is more one of sensing.

CTT: Well, yeah. When you’re learning how to be in the present, you have to deemphasize the thinking. I’m just talking about when it seems to be elevated to an absolute category of “Come to the present and never think again and you’ll be enlightened,” that’s what I have my doubts about. Of course I’ve never been there, so who knows…

Student: I think maybe it would work, assuming that everybody else is doing it too.

CTT: I don’t want the people who design the next airplane I’m on to not think!

(Laughter)

CTT: Now how many of you have read any of the Carlos Castaneda books? (Few hands go up) Hardly anybody?

Student: Talked about them a lot.

Student: Yeah.

Student: Haven’t read them.

CTT: What an amazing world I’ve grown up in. (Laughter) Well back when don Juan, Castaneda’s teacher, was the hottest thing on the spiritual circuit, he shocked some people, given what Castaneda had written in his books. Because he’d done so much work on Castaneda, trying to get him to not think in specific situations but to experience something. Then at one point don Juan came out and talked about how wonderful the ability to think rationally is, and how rare it is! That actually makes a great deal of psychological sense, because we do think.

I have to tell you a wonderful joke I heard today. “I used to think the brain was the most important organ in the body and then I realized who was thinking that.”

(Laughter)

We think we spend a lot of our time logically thinking about things, but actually much of that apparent rationality is rationalization. We’ve had emotional reactions to things if we like or dislike them and our mind conveniently makes up reasons to justify the particular emotion.

To actually be able to indulge in purely logical thinking about something is probably one of the highest gifts human beings have — and rarely use. And to know when that rationality has actually turned into rationalization is another gift that’s really important, because then you can treat it differently.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so…..

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This is a stimulating and interesting venture to me.  I prefer to think of myself as an old-school exponent of the well-crafted written word, that readers take in slowly and mindfully….but I have noticed that video is big nowadays!     

The first of these videos, now up on the web, is about what we mean by “subtle energies.” ISSSEEM expects to post a new video about every two weeks up to, and possibly beyond our late June conference.

The second video will discuss the confusion between genuine science (friendly to subtle energies and spirituality) versus the too prevalent scientism (automatically dismisses subtle energies and spirituality as nonsense, without actually examining them).  This is the theme of my recent book, The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together, which shows that it is actually reasonable and healthy, based on scientific evidence, to be both scientifically oriented and spiritually oriented.

My third video discusses evidence for psychic or subtle energies induced healing, and how we can begin building an evidence-based spirituality for the 21^st century, the theme of ISSSEEM’s June conference.  Suggesting one direction we could go in, the fourth video is an emotionally moving author’s reading from my The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together on the experience of Cosmic Consciousness, a description by the originator of the term, Canadian physician Richard M. Bucke.

More videos are in preparation, and ISSSEEM will send out an announcement to its members (and I to this list) as each goes on line, approximately every second week.  As these videos are of wide interest, feel free to pass this announcement or subsequent ones on to friends and colleagues.  As I argue in my book, multitudes of people are psychologically and spiritually damaged – in a useless way – because Scientism, Scientistic Materialism, Dismissive Materialism, arrogantly dismisses their spiritual urges and experiences as nonsense.  As people realize that, while of course you need to be discriminating, genuine science and genuine spirituality are very compatible and can aid each other, this suffering can be reduced and the world can benefit.

[In case anyone doesn’t know me, here’s the description sent to ISSSEEM.

Professor Tart is an internationally known researcher, writer, lecturer and educator.  His classic Altered States of Consciousness book in 1969 was largely responsible for legitimatizing the study of altered states in psychology and psychiatry, and his Transpersonal Psychologies book in 1975 helped found the field of that name.  He has contributed more than 200 research and scholarly articles in refereed journals, but is known for his friendly, understandable, relaxed-but-stimulating style of lecturing.]

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

Lecture 4, Part 5 of 19 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

CTT: Comments on the comments on your papers, or things you want to bring up?

Student: I was going to say that last year I took some time off. When I came back here one of the things I really noticed was the satisfaction I feel because the interaction in this school feels very different from an intention point of view. Most times when one’s interacting here it really feels like there’s good intention going back and forth and that somebody’s listening. And I discovered that I have really missed that and that I wasn’t getting the same dose of it anywhere else.

CTT: Yes. I think that’s part of the ITP educational strategy. There’s a lot of attention floating around that you could nourish yourself with. To some extent you can get attention from other people, but the main thing you need to learn to do is to be more attentive yourself, and then the “ordinary” impressions that come in nourish you more. You don’t have to have a fancy car and expensive works of art on the walls and going to the symphony every other night or something like that if you really know how to pay attention.

One of the Gurdjieff groups I was in used to meet two or three nights a week in somebody’s commercial garage to work on rebuilding an old car. By ordinary social standards, what a grimy, unattractive place! But paying increased attention to it and what you were doing, it was a fascinating place! Being actually present, being there, was very nourishing. It didn’t have to be some fancy kind of place. Lots of ordinary places, lots of ordinary situations can be very nourishing when you’re present. And also that will tend to call out presentness in other people.

Student: I was working with an ADHD kid, it was more of a friend’s kid, and so I was trying to create a relationship with him, have a conversation. So I asked questions that people ask kids. How was school today? What are you playing now? And he had so much trouble with it and I realized he was already connected.

CTT: Remember not to look fixedly but to shift your gaze every once in awhile. Go ahead.

Student: But he seemed really connected. He was present. He was presently exploring this object, and he wanted me to shut up and join him, right? I was talking at him from a more removed place trying to establish connection and he was already connected. So I just stopped the conversation and got more present and it was great. It was like all of the sudden there was a connection.

CTT: Arms and legs.

Student: But it was interesting. I wonder if some people are misdiagnosed or misunderstood because of that. Because we walk around separated. They’re not behaving as society does because maybe they’re more connected.

CTT: They’re walking too slow or too fast.

Student: Yeah. They’re really in the present.

CTT: Yes. But think about the issue you raised there. You know we do have… I wanted to call them “classical” diagnostic categories but I guess they’re not old enough to be called classical yet… We have fashionable or currently popular diagnostic categories. But if you think about what people do with their attention and intention, you could come up with a lot of sets of categories applying to all people, not just people labeled odd in some sense, based on how they deploy their attention.

So, for example, it could be possible to be too much in the present. If you were always caught up in the fantastic qualities of stimulation and could never abstract yourself from the situation and plan ahead and learn something as a result of past experience, that would be very maladaptive. If, at the other extreme, you never noticed what’s in the present, you’re always caught up in your internal story and plans, that’s pathological too. It’s a different style of pathology. There’s a range in the middle where you tune in enough to present time, ongoing reality, to be adaptive.

You know what you need to know to function adaptively in that situation, and the adaptive range can vary. Sometimes it can go more toward the kind of, what should we call it, the sensory enjoyment, the sensory nourishment thing. You know? So if you’re stuck at a boring lecture and you’re not going to be tested on what the speaker is saying, maybe really noticing the fabrics of the clothes people are wearing would be a really cool thing to do. Much more amusing and nourishing than listening to somebody drone on and on about something boring.

When you are in a protected situation, a safe situation like formal meditation, it’s fine to go way toward that sensory awareness end of things. I mean there is no external situation you have to cope with. So you know you don’t have to worry about the intentions of the people around you. You can trip out on the sounds, the sights, the body sensations, what have you. When you’re in a normal life situation, you want to be sensorily mindful and bodily mindful, but not so caught up in just the sensory level of things that you don’t come up with any ideas about people’s intentions.

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Recently I received an email from a scholar who will be reviewing my The End of Materialism book for a journal. He noted that:

In the book you say: "….genuine science [shows] that a wide variety of traditional religious views about reality are factually wrong; they just don't stand up to empirical tests." Can you give me at least one example?

I think my response to him is interesting to many….

In our culture most people would immediately think of the battle between those who interpret the Bible to mean the world was created some 5,000 years ago vs the scientific theory of evolution. Given the incredible levels of animus and politicization around that one, I'll pass. It also saddens me that profound teachings about doing unto others as you would have them do unto you can be demeaned down to such levels.
I'm a human, which means I have many, often contradictory aspects, but one of the roles I try to fill is that of scientist. To me that means I value truth, without claiming (to myself or others) that I have some sort of exclusive and final understanding of it. Rather I look at areas that interest me, see what happens (the data) and try to make sense of it – the theories. Sometimes my (and colleagues') theories make good apparent sense of the data and have strong predictive power, so will be useful for some time – until new data comes along that requires revision. Sometimes things don't make very good sense, so we keep collecting data, thinking about it, and hoping.
To me spiritual experience is data. Something happens to someone. Being human, we try to make sense of it. For some people, if it's apparently spiritual or religious in nature they say it's a Revelation, The Truth. It's very satisfying to feel you have The Truth about anything, of course, so this is an emotionally very appealing course. In my most rational moments, the theory I come up with about any spiritual data is simply the best sense I can make of it at the time, and it's subject to possible later revision. All religions, to my knowledge, say humility is a good thing, attachment to The Truth (except the particular ones espoused by ones particular religion….) is dangerous and blinding. I sometimes feel that, as a scientist, I have a great advantage over those known as spiritual or religious leaders: I can honestly say "I don't know" about a lot of things, instead of faking more knowledge than I actually have because religious leaders are supposed to know The Truth….
Now a particular example, which I will probably use in my Presidential address at ISSSEEM (International Society for the Study of Subtle Energy and Energy Medicine) this June – our conference theme, incidentally, is "Evidence-Based Spirituality for the 21st Century," and was inspired by my book.
In Buddhism, especially Tibetan Buddhism which I have some moderate knowledge of, the human realm is considered the most advantageous place to seek enlightenment from, it has the right balances of suffering, freedom, and intelligence. So, since it usually takes many reincarnations to progress, getting reincarnated as a human is highly desirable.
Unfortunately, the doctrine, as I have heard it, says it's extremely rare to be reincarnated directly as a human rather than in less favorable realms for many lifetimes. The analogy given is the probability of the world covered by one vast ocean, one 6 foot diameter hoop floating on it, and a turtle who surfaces for air once every thousand years. What are the odds it will come up in the hoop? Vanishingly small…..
The big exception is realized beings, saints and holy people, who have a much better chance of coming back human next time around, Tibetan tulkus, e.g.,
As a moral tale to motivate one to make good use of opportunities for spiritual growth while alive, I like it. But it's presented as truth, as the actual case of things.
OK, we can roughly (our first attempt) make that a testable scientific theory. If people could remember their previous incarnations, the immediately previous one would almost never be that of an ordinary human being.
Now the data. The great majority have no previous incarnation memories (because we discourage them?), but there are exceptions, and the laboratory at the University of Virginia, founded by the late psychiatrist Ian Stevenson, has about 4,000 cases of children remembering previous incarnations while still young. About 2,000 of these have been rated and coded into a data base to date.
Prediction from Tibetan theory: most of these folks would have been monks, nuns, yogis, dervishes, etc. in their immediately previous life, obviously holy persons, sincere seekers, to have made it back so soon.
Result: the folks who run the database have not examined it in detail for this, but in response to my query tell me that there were maybe half a dozen holy people in previous lives in their 2,000 cases. The rest all remember being ordinary people, the butchers, the bakers, the candlestick makers. Some were not nice people.
This is an initial and crude attempt, but the best we can do at the moment. Yet it illustrates how we can get some empirical, scientific handles on pretty esoteric concepts like karma and reincarnation. And in this case, the traditional theory is quite lacking, it needs drastic revision or replacement by something better.
So I'm quite excited to be helping to launch the idea of evidence-based spirituality. Not that I think everything of importance in the spiritual can be handled with rational, scientific inquiry, but the more various kinds of knowledge fits together, the better. My big attempt in proposing that, incidentally, but which I think was way ahead of its time, was my proposal for the creation of state-specific sciences back in 1972 in Science (article is on my www.paradigm-sys.com/cttart/ site).
Have I addressed your question well enough?
Sincerely,
Charles T. Tart

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

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

CTT: This goes back to an idea of Gurdjieff’s that I think is worth talking about, and that’s the idea of the food of impressions. Have you come across that in Ouspensky yet? Yes?

Student: Say it again.

CTT: The food of impressions. We all know that in terms of physical diet there are certain vitamins and minerals we need, and if we don’t get them we get sick. If you don’t get enough Vitamin C, you get scurvy for instance. Deficiency diseases. Gurdjieff said that in the same way that our body needs various elements and enough of them with sufficient purity and quality of them to keep our bodies healthy, a mind needs the food of impressions. Our mind needs to take in information that actually nourishes parts of our mind, in order to maintain it and grow it. And if you don’t get that food of impressions, you get mental deficiency diseases just as you get bodily deficiency diseases.

Now most people, from Gurdjieff’s point of view, since they’re asleep most of the time, are basically eating mental junk food. They’re not getting very high quality impressions because they’re not present, not here-and-now, for all these incredible sensory impressions coming in.

So when you get nothing but junk food, you need a lot of it and it has to be real spicy to try to convince you that you’re getting something. If you’re not bringing awareness like you are now to your sensory impressions, and so affecting them in a way that turns them into high quality nourishment, then you don’t get enough nourishment and you get these mental and emotional deficiency diseases, which produces a feeling of experiential hunger at some level. Then you’re liable to do funny or dangerous or pathological things to try to get more impressions.

So, for example, some of the Sufis say — and Gurdjieff would go along with this — we need a certain amount of attention paid to us. We need it from other people. We’ve got to be recognized. We’ve got to be paid attention to. Normally we get that from our parents when we’re very little, but some parents don’t give their kids enough attention.

So what’s one way of getting attention? Be bad! It’s much better to be shouted at or spanked, and get some attention, even if it’s not the best quality attention, than to starve for attention. Very weird.

Psychotherapy has all these theories about what you do and all these techniques and whatnot. Maybe the main effective thing is the fact that the client is getting a good steady input of quality attention from a therapist, and that attention will do a lot, just as attention per se, quite aside from any specifics of its content.

Where did we start on this? I remembered my arms and legs but I lost the beginning point.

Student: Food of impressions.

CTT: Food of impressions. Right! I’ve never seen this idea developed in standard psychological texts and probably not even in the transpersonal texts, per se. I’ve mainly seen it in Gurdjieff, but I think there’s a lot of truth to it.

It came in as part of the basis of transpersonal through humanistic psychology, mainly in all the body based therapies that came along. They give you a certain kind of food of impressions with body based massage therapies, physical releases, and things of that sort. Again, they also just give you a lot of attention. So sometime when you’re seeing a client some day and you’re listening to the problem and you don’t have any idea exactly what to do, at least pay good attention to them. They can usually sense at some level when they’re getting good attention.

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

Lecture 4, Part 3 of 19 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

Student: I have a question about when you were talking about when your mind is running, or your imagination is running away or running rampant.

CTT: Who was talking about that?

Student: I think you were.

CTT: I was? Oh. Okay.

Student: I guess this was a dialogue between you and one of the students, or maybe that was something else I was thinking about. Trying to do the sensing to be present, so that your mind will be filled up with focusing on the hearing this, the seeing or the sensing that. Then it won’t have enough room for the mind to wander or to keep on going.

So when my imagination was running I tried doing that, and then at that moment I was okay with it. Then it seemed like it would kind of start up again when I was finished, so I tried to do that again, you know? And it took a long time for my imagination to shut up. Do you have any advice on that?

CTT: Has it started up again?

Student: Yeah. Sure.

CTT: Yeah. One of the places I trained in Aikido many years ago, I don’t recall which one, had a little exercise where we each had a plastic golf tube. Do you know what those things are? They’re long plastic tubes that golf clubs are normally stored in to protect them from being dinged. I don't know how I ever got one in the first place, but they make great toys for whacking each other because you can’t really hurt anybody with them.

There was an Aikido exercise where you each held one of those like it was a sword. We were facing each other and your job was to strike the other person when you thought you’d get away with it, before they could move to block it. So what you had to do was pay very close attention and stay in the present yourself, while watching your partner to see when her or his attention flickered away for a moment. If you struck then, you could usually hit them. It was a very revealing exercise.

As a general model, not as the absolute truth – I don't know what the absolute truth is about anything – but as a general model, it’s useful to say we have a certain fixed maximum quantity of attention; let's arbitrarily say seven units, or something like that. It’s only under extraordinary circumstances you might have more, like eight or nine units. So normally it’s always seven.

What do you do with that seven? Normally processes come along like imagination, daydreaming, worrying – automatic reactions to events that happen to us, that grab a lot of that attention and use it up, which reactions trigger other automatic processes on and on and on.

When you are forced to pay attention by the threat of somebody hitting you in that little golf tube sword game, for instance, there isn’t much energy left over for your imagination to work with. Some English literary figure, I forget who, and it’s been said in various forms by a lot of other people too, said something like there’s nothing like knowing you’re going to be hanged in the morning to focus your mind! And there’s something very satisfying about being focused, compared to our usual drifting, with attention moving all over the place.

That’s one of the reasons that Gurdjieff said something that nobody ever likes. I don't know if you’ve come across it in the Ouspensky book yet or not, but he said we’ll probably never get rid of wars because wars force you to concentrate on the present. When somebody’s trying to kill you, those who survive get really focused in the present, and there’s something very satisfying about that! And so some perverse part of our mind is going to keep right on creating wars because we like the thrill of that focus when it comes. I don’t like the idea at all but I think there’s a fair amount of psychological truth to it. That real danger gives a focus of intensity in the now.

Similarly, there’s a lot of other stuff we do that are imitations of that but not quite so serious, like go to horror movies. I think, “Why would any sane creature go to a horror movie?” Yet they’re very popular. But it gets us focused on what’s going to happen when the cellar door creaks open.

(Laughter)

But if you learn to focus your attention more directly, you don’t have to depend on indirect things to get that focus. You don’t have to start a war or do something stupid that will put you in a dangerous situation that will force you to pay attention. You can get that satisfaction of being in the present moment in a direct sort of way, and…

Are we still in the present moment? Got some arms or legs or other body parts in there as well as ears and eyes? Good. I’ll keep reminding you once in awhile.

Student: I guess that’s why people like extreme sports like rock climbing.

CTT: Yep. A sport where you must pay precise attention to exactly what’s happening moment by moment, because if you drift away, you get killed. It’s high motivation!

Student: I have a race bike that I ride on a road race track, motorcycle and that. Before I knew anything about this, several years ago I had said that when you’re going into a corner at 100 miles an hour there’s nothing more important than what’s going to happen in the next few seconds. You’re more mindful there because you also have to stay relaxed to be successful, so there’s a lot of conflict.

CTT: Not the time to think about your relationships and what you should have said when she said after he said…. Yeah! Focuses you in! So this class and practice is not an extreme sport, what we’re doing in here, but it can produce similar effects of bringing you into the present.

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I am sitting here and contemplating

My special cloud

The one that’s always hanging there

Between me and the sun.

You say the sky is clear,

The sun is warm.

But I’m not through admiring

My fascinating cloud.

It is unique; it’s mine alone.

Full of sorrows and fears,

Angers and desires – each deserving

An eon of introspection.

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

When I am ready; when things go right.

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

My special cloud.

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