Ouspensky weighs in on the 5%

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

Lecture 4, Part 12 of 19 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

Student: Before you said that I was thinking about this 5 percent and the Ouspensky book. In that book, doesn’t he talk about there only being a certain amount of knowledge?

CTT: Ah. Yes.

Student: And so that’s a little bit, not confusing, but sometimes uncomfortable. Sometimes it feels good, like, “Oh yeah, some privileged people,” but then sometimes it’s like “Oh, that’s not so nice.” Like it kind of reminds me a little bit of Christianity and that Jesus is the only Son.

Student: Is that where he says I need somebody who can be enlightened and those things like that?

Student: Same time.

CTT: Ouspensky uses the analogy of gold, there’s only so much gold in the world and if you gave everybody an equal share, then we’d each have a tiny grain that did nobody any good. I always hate that part of the book, and I refuse to believe it.

Student: Okay.

CTT: And I hope it’s not true.

Student: Okay.

CTT: But suppose it is. I mean suppose there’s a literal food of impressions to really take you into a higher level of consciousness, but its amount is very limited, then it could indeed be the case that you could have a few people who’d move to a whole new level by getting nourished enough. But if you spread it all around, it wouldn’t make any difference with anybody.

I’ll bet we could use an ordinary analogy: medical care. Fancy medical care can extend people’s life. If you do that for people say who are very productive people contributing to society, you’re going to think that’s wonderful, but it costs you a lot. If you take that same amount of money and spread it around equally to every single person on the planet, then what? Everybody will have one less cold, but we’ll all die at the same age.

Now see I really don’t like that part of Gurdjieff. I refuse to believe it, but I recognize my resistance. I rationalize that he said this to deliberately motivate people more. This is a variation of the guy lying in ambush with the stick to find out when you’re not practicing enhanced awareness. I hope this limited amount stuff is not true.

Student: But it’s like the lack of intelligence thing where, when you want to sell something, you say “Oh yeah, limited time offer.” Tomorrow the price is going up, so if you want it at this low, hot price you need to buy it today. And time’s running out, and we’ve got masses of orders coming in, and we might run out of stock. And when you call up a place and you say “Have you got that book?” and they go, “Let me see.”

If you want a room at a hotel and they go, “Oh, let me check. Oh yeah, there’s one room left,” and then you have a conversation and it turns out there were 8 or 10 rooms available. And anyway. (Laughter) I already went out of the mix. (Laughter)

CTT: Let’s just note this as another factor to keep in mind as you study various spiritual traditions. You know? There are realities here that are vitally important, and there are human distortions of the whole process, and there are styles of teaching. Okay?

For a lot of people, Gurdjieff’s methods were harsh, and he was obviously abusing people. There was no question about it. For others, he was the greatest spiritual master ever to come along. For others, he was a real pain in the ass who got them moving. And he would go out of his way to egg people on.

His philosophy was not, “Oh, oh you poor precious souls, we have to make you happy.” His philosophy was that most people were going to die like dogs. They’re not going to make any effort. It’s not worth wasting your time on them. So you’ve got to screen people very rapidly for the ones with potential for actually waking up and then you can treat those people in any way that will actually get them to wake up. If that means being nasty to them at times, no problem.

Waking up is so precious that you wouldn’t give a damn whether you felt like you’d been abused in the process. It’s like when they do CPR on you when you’ve had a heart attack and you’re going to die, right? If you survived, you don’t waste your time sitting around afterwards thinking “Oh, they were pounding on my chest in a very undignified way.”

(Laughter)

“You know they should have respected me more,” or something like that. You can all see the sense of that approach in a way.

At the same time, what abuse potential that idea has! What a rationalization for charlatans who are not genuine spiritual teachers, but who like to push people around and abuse and exploit them and then claim that it’s for their own good. Don’t we have a preference for the saintly ones who sit up there and beam smiles at us and give us blessings?

(Laughter)

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Motivation and the Five Percent

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

Lecture 4, Part 11 of 19 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

Student: What comes to mind is motivation: what brings people to meditation, and the extent to which someone understands the suffering that they’re experiencing, whether it be psychological or physical. I think that plays a lot into how successful they are and how much they keep up with the practice.

One thing popped out to me when you said that 5% figure. Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction has really crazy high numbers of people who are still doing it a year and two years later, but they’re also motivated by being in excruciating pain or having their life falling around their feet if they don’t keep up the practice.

So that’s interesting because I think there’s a lot of people who, if they were to realize the impact of the psychological and spiritual suffering that’s going on in their lives, and how it’s rippling around them, would probably be just as motivated. Physical pain is empirically a greater motivator to stay focused.

CTT: They need to hire assistants who watch them and beat the shit out of them every darn day that they don’t sit for at least an hour.

(Laughter)

Student: That sounds like a great business plan.

(Laughter)

CTT: Actually there are advanced forms of martial arts training, kind of like Peter Sellers in his Inspector Clouseau movies and in Aikido, where at some point you do hire somebody to try to ambush you. It’s very good training.

(Laughter)

We were thinking of introducing that here at ITP.

(Laughter)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You were next.

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

(Laughter)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lecture 4, Part 9 of 19 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

Student: I think you can bypass the mundane with anything, really. Can people do it because they’re drunk on Jesus too? Too drunk to recognize their family problems? And they do it with theory, abstracting everything away.

CTT: My wife and I are reading a biography of Einstein. When things weren’t going well, he really got into his theoretical work. I know about intellectual drunks like that. It’s a wonderful way of getting away from the realities of the mundane world. But of course, they’re still there waiting for you, and the people you got away from by thinking yourself away from them are now pissed off at you because you didn’t pay any attention.

(Laughter)

Student: Can you do that mindfully sometimes though? Knowing that you’re not doing it all the time, but knowing that okay, right now I just really want to be intellectual, so I’m going to go…

CTT: Yes. I think the general rule in the mindfulness tradition is not that “At every moment I must be perfectly enlightened and deal with everything in the optimal way,” but to be mindful of what you’re doing. And sometimes that may involve recognizing “This situation drives me absolutely bonkers and bananas and I’m going to kill somebody if I don’t distract myself for a minute! So, damn it I’m going to concentrate on my breathing and not on what that son of a bitch over there is saying to me. Or go watch a movie!” Yep. It’s not as if there’s any one behavior or internal strategy that is the optimal thing for all situations. And, of course, one of the virtues of mindfulness is that you get to know yourself better. When you do have to use a less than mindful, but effective, distraction or happiness inducing technique, you could probably use it more effectively.

Student: Do you think they work in the long term if you don’t have any of those sort of work that you’re doing?

CTT: Do which work? The –

Student: Like psychological work, or like therapy. I mean, say that you get really angry when people disagree with you, so I have to distract myself every single time I get angry. But I do that knowing that I’m going to get angry if I don’t stop myself. But do you think that works in the long term if you don’t have some other sort of practice combined?

CTT: No. I don’t think it does. Well, I mean it might work in the sense that you don’t kill anybody, so you don’t go to jail, but you do get ulcers.

Student: Yeah.

CTT: Or at least that used to be the fashionable theory that anger gave you ulcers. I don't know if that’s true anymore, but there’s a level of behavioral suppression of stuff that will get you in trouble. Even if it may be psychologically stirred up and boiling inside, that’s much better than acting out in a way that gets you into really bad trouble. But then you want to go further and not just boil inside, but you want to get at the psychological source and begin to change it.

Now the mindfulness traditions would claim that the practice of mindfulness is all you need. No, no, I shouldn’t say all. It’s the main thing you need to eventually recognize those sources and change them. That eventually you’ll have insights into your personality that will let you change some of the more maladaptive psychological things, but eventually you’ll have the more important insights as to who you really are, which will make the big change. I don’t want to use the words “all you need” because they’ll always put this in context.

Buddhism is an eight-fold path. Meditation is one part of that, but you’ve got to have right livelihood, you know? If you make your living making land mines designed to blow up children, you’re not creating very good karma. And your actions toward other people have to be decent because they have consequences, which will again have psychological effects.

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

Lecture 4, Part 8 of 19 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.

Student: Is that where the subpersonalities come in? And do we maybe need to acknowledge it and then let it go? I wonder.

Student: So you have to be somebody before you can be nobody?

Student: Yeah. I remember you were talking about that.

CTT: Yeah. You have to be somebody before you can be nobody. Jack Engler, a Buddhist meditation teacher and psychotherapist, is famous for being the first one to say that, I think. Disidentification is a tricky process because it can be used in a very pathological way. You can use disidentification to basically distance yourself from your human feelings and attain a kind of peacefulness that way, but at the cost of impoverishing your life. Didn’t I talk about John Lilly a couple of classes ago?

Student: Yeah.

CTT: He was a famous psychiatrist whose brother or something died when he was a kid, and he was so upset for several days, and then he vowed he’d never feel an emotion again. And he managed to pull it off for the next 30 or 40 years of his life, without realizing how much he’d lost. The whole spiritual path can be used that way. The spiritual path can be a very effective psychological defensive mechanism.

It’s an attitude of “I’m not going to quarrel with you. I’m at a higher spiritual level. I don’t concern myself with mere Earthly disagreements like that.”

This is something you always have to watch out for in yourself as well as in the clients you’ll have. I was talking with somebody today about spiritual bypass as a defense mechanism. Everybody mentions it now, but apparently there’s not much actually written about it.

But it’s so easy to use spirituality as a way to not deal with your ordinary psychological problems. Now that doesn’t mean, at the extreme, that you must be an absolutely, perfectly psychologically functioning person before you dare to spend a moment on anything spiritual. But I think it does mean that if you’ve got significant psychological problems, you’ve got to be real careful about not using spirituality to bypass them. It’s commonly attempted, but it doesn’t work.

Student: How would somebody go about doing that? Using spirituality to bypass. I can’t even imagine having to do that.

CTT: One example that came up quite prominently during the hippie era – you folks are probably too young to remember hippies, but…

(Laughter)

CTT: Most of them, well I can’t say most, a lot of them lived by basically sponging off other people and didn’t feel in the least guilty about it because they were pursuing love and enlightenment. They weren’t going to get trapped in earning a living, which would support a corrupt society anyway. And hey, in one way that’s true, but it’s also a wonderful rationalization for just sponging off people instead of taking responsibility for yourself.

I can see Buddhism misapplied that way too. One way of looking at Buddhism is it’s the ultimate way of being cool, right? Nothing fazes me! Nobody can get to me! I don’t have any suffering! Well, that’s because you’ve stifled all the feelings that might arise within you. You’ve stifled them either by some kind of active suppression process or by a distraction process.

Let me elaborate that. I was thinking about that earlier today. If you’re in a situation that makes you unhappy and you want to be happy, what do you do? Well one thing you might do is to change the actual reality of the situation so it makes you happy. It’s too cold in the room. You turn the heater on. It gets warmer.

But a lot of times we’re in situations where we can’t really change the external situation. So the external situation is making us unhappy, it’s just going to go on for some long period of time. But we can do something about our reaction. Remember that equation, suffering equals pain multiplied by resistance? .

S = PxR

You can do something to reduce the suffering

One way is some sort of distraction technique. Here’s the pathological use of concentrative meditation. The situation bothers you. You concentrate so strongly on neutral sensations, like your breathing, you don’t notice the situation at all. So it doesn’t bother you.

Your life situation is poor, getting worse. You can’t get a job. You don’t have any friends. You don’t feel good about yourself. Concentrative meditation. Get into these abstracted states where you’re beyond any kind of suffering. Ahh!.

You come back out of a meditative state. All these things that make you suffer are still there. Damn! Pee quickly, have a bite to eat, and go back into meditation again. And maybe, if you’re lucky, you can spend your whole life meditating. Maybe you can join a monastery or a nunnery, or somebody else will take care of all the physical stuff and you get to spend all your time meditating; distracting yourself. So in that sense, meditation can be a distraction.

I think this is one of the reasons why the Buddha thought that concentrative meditation, for all that it was an incredible technique, wasn’t a complete technique for enlightenment. If you can distract yourself, you can simply take all your attention and put it somewhere else so there’s none left over to go into the suffering thing.

You need to have specific techniques for dealing with what bothers you, and this is where Western knowledge of psychopathology becomes valuable.

Remembering our arms and legs now. [for readers coming late to this series, the occasional reminder to students to remember their arms and legs is to remind them of the principle technique they have been taught to be more present, more here-and-now, and to practice that technique. Being more here and now helps keep these discussions more real, more concerned with reality, rather than just intellectual exercises]

All we know about classical defense mechanisms; repression, sublimation, rationalization, things like that; these are also ways of dealing with suffering. But again, they don’t solve the problems. They provide you with a temporary happiness, but they don’t solve the root problem, the core of the problem.

So this discussion started from pointing out that spiritual techniques like concentrative meditation can be an incredible accomplishment to get into these jhanas, concentrative states, to get into these incredibly abstracted states. But while you may rationalize that you’re working on your spiritual development, it may actually in fact be a kind of spiritual bypass, be a way of trying to not have to deal with the real life problems that you’re not very happy with.

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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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