I was fascinated by the various drums, and repeatedly had an urge to pick one up and tap out a brief rhythm on one of them, as a gesture of respect to the shamanic world view, as a gesture of respect to the almost miraculous thing Harner has accomplished in reviving shamanism in the modern world, and to respect the feeling I have occasionally had that if my life had taken a very different course, probably in a quite different cultural setting, I might have become a “shaman,” rather than a scientist.  I wanted to do that, but at the same time felt it was probably quite inappropriate.  If I was going to make a gesture of respect to the shamanic worldview, I should do it in a proper state of mind and in the proper ceremonial way, not semi-publicly and casually in a store.  In the end I didn’t do it, my wife finished buying her gifts, and we continued on our way south.

This occasional feeling that I could’ve been a shaman is something I almost never talk about to people, as it is, to put it mildly, not part of the image we scientists cultivate!  Scientists are cool, detached, rational people, usually operating within a completely materialistic worldview.  Shamans represent what is seen as a more “primitive” worldview, one where higher and lower spirits and spirit realms are an important part of life, and the shaman is “gifted” to sometimes journey into those spirit worlds and be able to affect things that then have effects in our world, such as healing the sick, finding lost objects, etc.  As a scientist I have  been quite successful in my scientific career.  Now, largely retired, I might be able to get away with expressing an intellectual interest in shamanism, or even of having dabbled in it slightly by attending some of Harner’s workshops, but if I had admitted anything like that earlier in my career I would’ve faced even more rejection and irrational opposition than I did for daring to be interested in the paranormal – and there was quite enough of that as it was!

We returned to our home in the Bay Area a few days later, and what was waiting for me in the accumulated mail?  Michael Harner’s new book, “Cave and Cosmos: Shamanic Encounters with Another Reality.”  Looking at the postmark, it had been mailed the day before my experience of thinking about shamanism and wanting to do a little drum work, so it was on the way while I was looking at the drums…

Coincidence?

Coincidence is a major category in orthodox science work.  It’s certainly true that some things coincide for no particular reason and we are mistaken to think there’s a connection when there really is none, and it’s also a convenient intellectual excuse for being able to ignore events or experiences that don’t make sense to you and don’t fit into your ordinary worldview.  I don’t think the word coincidence is used much by shamans, who see the world as much more connected, particularly in ways that are real but invisible to those of us limited to ordinary conscious perception.

So maybe it was just a coincidence that I got thinking and feeling strongly about shamanism the day after Harner’s new book was mailed to me, and perhaps it was a Coincidence… A reminder of sorts.

Indeed I just remembered that three nights after that I was talking to a new acquaintance about psychic experiences, and mentioning that while sometimes I can imagine why a particular psychic experience was meaningful to a particular person, given who they were, their needs, interests, etc., sometimes I could imagine no clear meaning of that sort, and I suspected some psychic experiences were simply the universe’s way of “rattling our cage,” deliberately grabbing our attention and puzzling us as a way of reminding us that we get too settled into too narrow a worldview, we should remember to widen our view.  So perhaps this was specifically meaningful because Michael Harner had been thinking of me just the day before mailing the book, which “telepathically” got me thinking about shamanism – he wrote a very nice personal dedication in the book to me – and/or maybe the universe was indeed reminding me that my worldview was getting a little too narrow.

Among scientist colleagues who I think are pretty stuck in a materialistic worldview I would stress the ordinary coincidence approach in talking about this, but in terms of my personal growth and satisfaction, it’s more interesting to think about the possible shamanic aspects and hints here.  (I noticed, as I watched my own psychological state that the word “possible” popped up in the previous sentence  because the scientist in me likes to be cautious about how I interpret things.  Not a bad characteristic all in all, but dangerous when it becomes automatic.)

Now I’m looking forward to reading a very interesting book!

Will I move more toward shaman than scientist?  I doubt it.  In this lifetime, the scientist route has worked out too well for me and I feel satisfied in what I’ve been able to contribute to building some bridges between genuine science and genuine spirituality, but who knows what the next lifetime might bring?

And then there’s a whole other level where some scientists are already filling aspects of a traditional shaman role.  I don’t have time to discuss that here, but I think I played it strongly in 1993 when I was asked to give a lecture on science and religion at the Second World Parliament of Religion in Chicago (Tart, 1993).  My wife had mentioned to me that it would probably be a very colorful event, with representatives from all the world’s religions there in their traditional costumes.  That set me thinking, what was the archetypal scientist “costume” I should wear?  What “holy icons” and symbols?  It was very interesting to note the audience reactions when I stepped on to the stage to lecture wearing a white lab coat, carrying a clipboard, with an identification badge clipped to the lapel of my lab coat and a calculator in my other hand…

Reference:  Tart, C. World Parliament of superstition?  Scientific evidence for a basic reality to the spiritual.  Second World Parliament of Religion, Chicago, September 3, 1993.

I thought my colleague did an admirable job in bringing up this issue in as rational a form as possible, but I think we should remember that rationality is only part of the picture when discussing things like spirituality, atheism and parapsychology, and our human emotions often push and twist behind the scenes.  To call someone an “atheist” is, for a lot of people, not simply a description of their theological beliefs, but a very negative characterization of atheists (irregardless of its truth value) and, insofar as people being called atheists pick up on this negative emotion, is taken as an attack and an insult.  I can recall when I was a child that the general assumption was that people who were atheists were quite rare, and probably evil people, Communists, or the like.  I don’t know that this assumption had much to do with reality, but that’s the way people thought then, and I think a lot of people still think that way.

So intellectually we can regard the use of “atheist” in discussions as simply descriptive, meaning the person so designated doesn’t think there’s enough evidence supporting the existence of God or gods to make the concept of God or gods a useful working hypothesis for scientists, and/or that there is plenty of evidence arguing against the existence of God or gods.  But I suggest we use the atheist/atheism term very carefully and think about possible emotional forces we’re letting loose.

Let’s take the Old Testament God, Jehovah, e.g.  I can give you rational sounding reasons why I’m an “atheist” with regard to Jehovah, but, having studied my own psychology for a long time, I know that, for me, they are mainly rationalizations of deeper emotions and thoughts.  What it comes down to is that if I’m going to accept any being as god-like, he or she should be a considerably better person (by my standards) than I am, and Jehovah, judging from what I learned in Sunday School and the behavior of a lot of Right Wing “Christians” since then, too often doesn’t make the cut.  He insists on constant praise from everyone – chronic insecurities? – punishes those who don’t please him, often excessively – is overly harsh in judging, etc.  Heck, I don’t mind being complimented on something I’ve done occasionally, but constant praise?  It would drive me nuts and bore me to death!  As to harshness, I remember being taught in Sunday School 60+ years ago that Jehovah not only punished those he considered sinners, but their children and their children’s children down to the seventh (or maybe it was the fourth) generation.  I was shocked!  Talk about a bully and a meanie!  Wow!  I could almost never hold a grudge overnight before I softened, but punishing the children’s children’s children?  Real anger management issues here….

So when I say I’m an “atheist” with respect to Jehovah, what my emotions are actually doing is saying “You (if you even exist) are such a jerk and so unworthy of being a god that I won’t believe in you!  So there!”  Not the highest manifestation of my maturity, I’m sure, but I can go on thinking more clearly about issues of God or gods versus atheism, spiritualism versus materialism, etc. once I own up to my irrational sides.  And while it could be that I’m the only one on a list of scientists and scholars who are otherwise completely rationale, I doubt it….      ;-)

Note that I’m not saying that the reasons I’m denying the existence of Jehovah are exactly the reasons that anybody else in particular has for denying the existence of Jehovah.  Given the variety in human beings I’m sure there are many routes to this conclusion, or reaching different conclusions.

Thinking about my rejection of Jehovah for a while, I’ve also realized there’s nothing particularly original in the way I did this.  In my childhood family, when you were angry at someone, you cut them off, stopped speaking to them, acted as if they didn’t exist.  So at some level I’m pretty childish about the whole thing.  Well, better to know when I’m being childish than to rationalize such behavior as mature adult behavior.      :-)

One other distinction.  I think some people mistakenly believe because of my  Western Creed exercise, published in my The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together  book (now available in all major ebook formats, see www.fearlessbooks.com/TartE-Books.htm) and available to work with in video at (http://www.alternativedesignsolutions.com/itp/Tart_ITP.html that I think all atheists, of whatever, stripe, are terrible, selfish, immoral people.  But if they had read the book or listened to the video more carefully, they would see that the argument that goes with that psychological exercise is that if you think there’s no inherent meaning in the universe and everything is just accidental, it’s easier to exploit other people irregardless of their feelings  Not that you are forced to, it’s just easier.  If I’m trying to build something and it keeps coming out wrong I may get pissed off enough to whack it with a hammer!  But I’m not likely to whack you with a hammer when you frustrate me, I think there’s something special about you as a conscious being and a spiritual being.  And of course there are people who declare themselves atheists who are wonderful human beings, and people who declare themselves very spiritual who are awful human beings.  There’s no single cause for hardly anything.

So when someone on my scientific discussion list provides evidence or a theoretical argument that psi, parapsychological effects, is like so-and-so, I don’t care if they are a theist, an atheist, a polytheist, a Satanist, a Wiccan, a Buddhist, a Hindu, a Druid, a Sufi (to just list the religions near my  home in California) or whatever if they are being scientific and scholarly in their presentation.  If it feels like a background set of beliefs might be slanting or distorting their argument, I will probably – gently,  no point needlessly insulting people – ask about it to try to get them clearer about their point.  I also try to be polite – “Could there be an implication of such-and-such in what you say because of a certain background belief?  Can you clarify that?” – rather than “You are wrong!”

And oh yes, I’m an “atheist” about Jehovah (take that, you bully!), but as to other possible gods?  [Insofar as there is a real God who is way better than me behind that primitive Jehovah image, I’m sure He/She/It won’t mind my childishness]  Well it’s psychological data that people sometimes have experiences that, at first approximation, are easily described as meeting “gods.”  That’s data, it shows certain kinds of human experiences are possible.  Knowing what kinds of experiences are possible or not possible for human beings is important in advancing our knowledge of ourselves.

Does it mean those “gods” really exist independently of the nature of human consciousness?  Interesting question…..If someone can make that specific enough to turn into testable hypotheses, that will be scientifically interesting indeed….

And meanwhile back in the ordinary world what are they up to?       ;-)

Although most people in the scientific community seem to have developed a total belief in the monastic, materialist view that consciousness is nothing but an epiphenomenon produced by the brain (and perhaps in conjunction with some other aspects of the nervous system), I and a few other people who have worked in parapsychology believe there is empirical, scientific evidence for the competing theory is that the mind per se is of some different nature altogether than the brain, although consciousness, as we ordinary experience it, is the product, the systems emergent of both whatever mind is and brains nature is, working together.  I’ve written about this elsewhere in a formal dualistic theory of consciousness.  (Tart, 1993)

The reason to postulate that brain may be something more that is not equivalent to mind is the data of psychical research and parapsychology, where sometimes humans show effects like telepathy or clairvoyance that we have no explanation at all for in terms of the material properties of material objects.  My last book (Tart, 2009), The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together,  marshaled this evidence, and overall it  showed that it is a reasonable position to accept the reality of the material universe and its laws but also allow for something else, something we vaguely call “spiritual” or “non-material.”

I’ve just attended a five-day retreat with Tibetan lama Tsoknyi Rinpoche on aging and Buddhism.  Besides traditional teachings, this included a small group session for everyone where they talked about what most concerned them about getting older.  In my group, and in most groups, judging from conversations after the retreat, one of the main concerns among this older group of people is that their minds would go.  Alzheimer’s, senile dementia, etc.  For some the idea of their mind deteriorating is far more frightening than that of their body deteriorating.

There are deep philosophical and difficult scientific questions connected with this issue.  If consciousness as manifested, as we experience it, is nothing but the electrochemical functioning of the brain, then certainly if the brain is damaged or deteriorates we expect to see the consciousness/mind deteriorate.  On the “positive” side, as far as gaining more knowledge, insofar as specific mental functions, pathologies and deteriorations are correlated with specific areas of the brain, we would actually learn something about how those aspects of consciousness are produced in normal brain functioning.

So let’s say you meet someone who is having difficulty communicating, or saying things that don’t make sense:  certainly from a materialistic point of view to see this as a result of ongoing brain damage is a sensible thing to do.  But from a dualistic point of view that I use as a working hypothesis for understanding the mind and altered states of consciousness (ASCs), might there be cases in which the mind remains relatively intact in aging or injury, but the way it interacts with the brain changes drastically?  It would be like watching a car speeding up and slowing down, veering right and left, suddenly stopping, suddenly accelerating.  It could be that the driver is seriously impaired, or it could be that the driver is relatively unimpaired, but there are some major problems with the car’s mechanical functioning itself.

I was deeply touched by peoples expressed worries on the retreat, and while I certainly don’t have any overall solutions to the problems of aging, I remembered something that I observed recently which can serve as a convenient illustration of how impaired mind-brain communication might manifest.  This might be useful to some others.

My wife Judy had a lot of handwritten notes from a teaching retreat that she wanted to transcribe, but it was going to take so very long to type them up.  I suggested she use the tool I’ve found so useful recently, Dragon Dictate Professional 11.5, and then she would only have to correct occasional mistakes rather than do an enormous amount of typing.

For those who haven’t used it, Dragon Dictate is a computer program that listens to what you say via a microphone connected to your computer and then makes guesses as to what each word is as it types it out on the screen.  I’m using it right now, and it’s doing a very accurate job.  Sometimes it makes mistakes, of course, so it’s a good idea to train it to recognize the peculiarities of your voice, and the manufacturer provides material to read aloud so the program learns what your voice sounds like saying particular words.

My wife spent over an hour training, and then tried to dictate her notes.  Dragon Dictate made so many mistakes and wrote stuff which was almost totally nonsensical, that she quickly gave up!  But, I thought, connecting it with this retreat on Buddhism and aging, that’s an excellent kind of example for picturing a changing relationship between  mind (one kind of existence) and brain (another kind of existence).  There was nothing wrong with Judy’s mind nor her verbal expression of it, but someone looking only at the transcribed output could readily think the person who had typed it was demented or insane.  To illustrate this, I’m going to ask her to read this particular paragraph into Dragon Dictate, and we’ll see how it comes out.

Well that’s what I thought I was going to do, have her read the above paragraph.  But as she attempted it the program turned some of her words into commands, like bolding part of a sentence, instead of transcribing her words and didn’t bother to transcribe most of it!  That confuses me, she has a pleasant, normal voice.  So let me try reading the above paragraph myself in a funny accent and see if that can illustrate how distortions creep in.

“My wife spent over an hour trying as I tried to pick tight her notes Dragon dictate made so many mistakes, wrote stuff which was almost totally nonsensical, and she quickly guy.  But all I thought it knowing this brief Buddhist retreat.  That’s an excellent kind of example are picturing a challenging relationship between morning dead growing.  There was not the rule with Judy’s mind nor expression of elite call bull so bored looking all in at the transcribed mapped out red leaf be exempt person will keep.  One guy monitored or in sign.”

Okay, there are undoubtedly many different kinds of problems that affect how we can express ourselves, some must probably express an actual deterioration in the quality of our consciousness, but some, as this example shows, and golf interaction between mind and brain.

Would that be wonderful if we had absolutely real reliable telepathy, so our expert mindreader could tell what was going on “inside” person?  I can remember years ago, with said the still, that I had to make the decision as to whether to pull the plug on my mother after she had never recovered any consciousness from emergency surgery.  I know I made the best decision possible, but how I wish I could’ve really know whether there was still somebody” inside” her body or not…

And if we did develop some kind of telepathic way of seeing if a person’s consciousness was still functional in spite of communication difficulties, we would be so concerned that this was really a valid telepathy, and not some distorted version of it or just a projection of somebody’s irrational beliefs that they were telepathic…

I hope this analogy is useful to some people.

So, as I asked at the beginning of this little essay,

“Morning dead growing?  Has Professor Tart finally lost his marbles?”

I don’t think so, but as I actually age I become more and more aware of the real possibilities of these kinds of things.  Frankly I would prefer to have only an excellent theoretical knowledge of what aging is about, rather than direct experience!       :-)

I would also like to end this essay by saying research has now figured out how to use telepathy reliably so we can communicate with the mind behind an impaired brain/body, but, alas, that’s probably a project for your and my next lifetime….

References:

Tart, C. T. (1993)  Mind embodied: Computer-generated virtual reality as a new, dual­istic-interactive model for transpersonal psychology.  In K. Rao (Editor), Cultivating Consciousness: Enhancing Human Potential, Wellness and Healing.  Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1993.  Pp. 123-137.

Tart, C. T. (2009)  The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together.  Oakland, California: New Harbinger, 2009.

They say that life moves faster as you get older, and I’m discovering that it’s true, suddenly realizing that the beginning of my three-week online workshop on Foundations of Mindfulness is beginning this Saturday!

I had hoped to make a new introductory video about mindfulness, but life wasn’t very cooperative about providing the time.  Nevertheless, there already are two short videos you can watch to learn something about the workshop.  If you go to http://www.glidewing.com, you’ll be on the introductory page for GlideWing, and my workshop is currently the first one featured there.  You can read the description and/or click on the video.  Then if you want to sample a short video on a way to feel more comfortable doing concentrative types of meditation, go back to that first page and click on the picture of me at the top of the page.

I’ve had a happy career as a scientist working to understand more about our minds, particularly unusual, altered states of consciousness and parapsychological aspects of spirituality, and I never really thought about teaching any aspects of spirituality.  But after 50 years of learning and teaching, while I’m not at all sure what “enlightenment” is and how one gets there (I think it’s an ongoing process, not a final destination), I do know how basic meditation skills help you settle and clarify your mind, and how they can be applied in the way G. I. Gurdjieff taught them to bring more mindfulness to your everyday life.  Formal meditation is, in a way, safe.  You can’t get in much trouble sitting by yourself on a little black question if your mind goes off in weird directions, but we do that kind of thing all the time in everyday life — and reap the consequences later.  Thus any increase in mindfulness that can be applied in life, which is my main interest, can be very useful indeed.

This will be the second time I’m teaching this GlideWing online workshop, and I hope to see some of you there.  I’ll probably teach it about twice a year, so if this is all too sudden, there will be another chance later on – assuming life doesn’t deny me the time as I plan!

Charles T. Tart

In the atmosphere of gratitude and bodhicitta,

May I be blessed into usefulness!

Now from my experience

Not from my word mind…

Practice, practice, practice!

In the varieties of meditation

Shamatha, insight, devotion, presence

Years and years and years

Moments/Times of

Concentration,

Clarity,

Equipoise

In the atmosphere of bodhicitta,

May I be blessed into usefulness!

Now  – - – Just switch on.

“Switch,” “do,” “create,” “enter,” “relax into,”

Too easily become fabrication,

Forcing, attaching, averting

Something more gentle and subtle,

No good word here,

“Active,” but not fabricating

So getting there,

Just switch on.

What could be more natural?

Staying there, returning there.

Hopes, fears – - –  relax, let them go

Expand

Nowness, the reality of the senses

Tune in to the lama

Tune in to those around you who also seek the nature of mind

Take it Moment by Moment, moment by moment

When I lose it, no need to fuss

Just switch on

It need not be good, it need not be bad, it need not be anything in particular

It is —- here, now

If HERE, NOW

Nice, but no big deal

Move slightly slower – gently

Speak slightly slower – gently

Pause when I’ve lost it – then just switch on

Beware the Hurry Up! vibes

Trust

Don’t grasp, don’t reject

Confidence, patience

Full stop when lost

Looking, listening, openly, yet lightly

When on, no ego, nobody special

When on, no not ego

When on, no big deal

From “ordinary,” samsaric mind, big deal…..

All of these —

Don’t confuse thinking about

With actually doing/being…

Some colleagues and I have recently been discussing the problem of how experimenters’ attitudes, both conscious and unconscious, may affect whether any psi actually manifests in their parapsychological experiments.  This is a complex subject I won’t go further into here, but one suggestion was that a concept of eight stages of consciousness taught in some branches of Buddhism might be helpful in understanding this issue.  As I have been struggling to fully understand that concept for some years, I thought it might be useful to share some thoughts about it here.

Figure 1 outlines a basic Buddhist conception of eight stages of consciousness.  “Stages” tends to imply a serial progression, but that’s not fully the case here.  Consciousnesses One through Five are the five classical senses, sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste.  Those are what we would call in modern terms parallel inputs to consciousness, rather than separate stages of action.  (There are other minor senses, such as balance, that I have not included here, but the five classical senses are sufficient for our discussion.)

Insert Figure 1 about here

The outputs of all of these senses feed into what’s been called the Sixth Consciousness.  After an initial sense feed, we begin further sequential processing, for the output of the Sixth Consciousness feeds into the Seventh Consciousness, from which action may arise, and or output goes into the Eighth Consciousness.  What we normally refer to as experiencing our own mind, experiencing our own consciousness, is almost wholly activity within the Seventh Consciousness, thus I have put an oval around it to indicate this in Figure 1.

What are these stages of consciousness?  In Figure 2, I’ve listed some classical Buddhist names and comments on the functions of these various consciousnesses, conveniently taken from a Wikipedia article, as modulated by my understanding of various teachings I’ve received from Sogyal Rinpoche or Tsoknyi Rinpoche or that a colleague (especially Dr. Serena Roney-Dougal) has communicated.

Insert Figure 2 to about here.

In Figure 2 I’ve bolded the term for particular stages of consciousness that I think is most useful for getting a quick idea of what it’s theorized as doing.  I say “theorized,” incidentally, from my perspective as a Western scientist, but I should note that among Buddhists who are highly skilled in meditation, I’m sure these descriptions/names are more an expression of direct experience, direct observation of these processes, although undoubtedly tinged with theory to some extent.  I have always been very impressed and admiring of the discipline and training needed to develop the observational skills to make such observations!

The Sixth Consciousness is called Ideation Consciousness.  Its primary function is an instant recognition of what one or more of the senses is registering at a given moment.

The Seventh Consciousness, Obscuration Consciousness, is usually treated in Buddhism, as I’ve encountered it (see http://blog.paradigm-sys.com/740/ ), as if it’s the major source of all our suffering.  As a psychologist, I tend to see Seventh Consciousness as an elaboration stage, connecting incoming sense impressions with previous knowledge and to our desires, etc., but Buddhism focuses on the way we create a false sense of self, which then gets constantly driven by the “poisons” of the mind, attachments, aversions, and ignorant, mindless habits.

As I mentioned briefly above, the activity of the Seventh Consciousness is primarily what we are conscious of.  Thinking, remembering, feeling emotions, planning, etc.  That can mean, at its worst, a constant “stewing in our own juices,” the constant play and replay and replay and replay of our neurotic fixations, etc.

The Eighth Consciousness, Storehouse Consciousness, is considered a deeper consciousness than the others, and apparently seldom directly experienced although it’s usually active in the background.  It is the “seed,” the basis from which we have the ability to be conscious in other ways, and it constitutes very long-term memory, including the seeds of actions carried along from previous lives that may affect our current lifetime if the situation is appropriate for particular karma to ripen.

In Figure 3 I tried to put this in a simplified, modern perspective.

Insert Figure 3 about here

We begin with the inputs of the five senses, and I’ve indicated that they are, to use what is now a common computer term, hardwired.  That is, our senses are physically built in ways that affect the quality of the information they detect, process, and send on to the Sixth Consciousness.  By and large, there’s nothing you can do about their hardwired characteristics, that’s part of being human, the “karma” of the human condition.  There are some exceptions, such as wearing corrective glasses if you have poor eyesight, or using a hearing aid if you’re partially deaf, but unless you’re a synesthete, you’re going to get visual sensations from your eyes, if and only if electromagnetic radiation within the certain wavelength range reaches them, etc.

The outputs of these five classical senses reach the Sixth Consciousness whose job is immediate recognition and identification of what we’re perceiving.  Identification apparently includes the proper name of the object being perceived in teachings I’ve received.  I look up and glance out my window now and see a tall green thing that I instantly know is a “tree,” I move my glance down and see what I instantly know is a “printer,” I look to the right and instantly recognize several objects along the wall that I know are “bookcases.” I’m aware of no effort in doing this, it just seems to happen automatically.

I have heard teachings that seem to characterize the activity of the Sixth Consciousness as “pure perception,” but I am not happy with the adequacy of that term.  Insofar as “pure” implies that we have an absolutely accurate perception of whatever is in front of us, this is simply not factually true.  (This is a fact that we have been able to discover through modern science, and which was far less available to the otherwise marvelous introspective observations of meditators.)  Our sense organs have various kinds of information processing built into to their intrinsic operation, so even at the level of the Sixth Consciousness we have a selective, biased perception of what is actually out there, hardly “pure.”  Our eyes, for example, have a built in neural process called lateral inhibition which increases the contrast, sharpens the edges of things that we see, instead of seeing the fuzziness that is actually there.  Practically, this kind of edge sharpening can be very useful, it makes it much easier to see the tiger lurking in the bushes than would otherwise be the case!  On the other hand, compared to the incredible changes that the Seventh Consciousness can create, reception in the Sixth Consciousness is indeed rather pure.

As mentioned above, the vast majority of what we experience as our consciousness, the activity of our mind, is the activity of the Seventh Consciousness.  This could be very useful if you have the relevant knowledge and disciplined skills to, say, design a better airplane.  But, as Buddhism recognizes so very well, much of the time we’re involved in telling ourselves our personal stories, our personal myths, so making ourselves relatively insensitive to what’s actually out there in our world.  It also creates, among other things, lots of unnecessary and useless suffering.

If you’re a guest at a dinner party and are given strawberry ice cream for dessert, for example, but you really wanted vanilla ice cream, and sit there not enjoying what you actually have, remembering other times you’ve been disappointed, that’s useless and unnecessary suffering.  If, when I was glancing about as above to illustrate the workings of the sixth consciousness, when I reached the sight of the bookcase I got involved in ongoing worries about what’s going to happen to my collection of technical books after I die, will the institution I hope to give it to actually be able to accept it, will instead the collection be broken up, making it relatively worthless, etc., etc., etc., I have wandered off into a relatively moderate instance of the Seventh Consciousness activity creating useless suffering.

I’m not going to say anything more about the Eighth Consciousness at this point, as that opens up such vast psychological territories that I would probably confuse the points I’m trying to make here….     :-)

The Eight Consciousnesses Map and Suffering

Given that life is often difficult and stressful, and there’s lots of unhappiness caused by real events as well as unnecessary psychological suffering, what can we do about it?  When the Buddha was asked what it was that he taught, he told his interlocutor that he taught the end of suffering.  How does this map of the eight consciousnesses help us escape suffering?

Our own personal experience, as well as various psychological studies, shows over and over again that there is only so much “mental real estate” available at any given time, only so much capacity to experience.  If you fill that capacity up, there is no room for new experience, it’s hard for new processes to begin.  If your mental real estate is already filled up with your Seventh Consciousness activity that creates constant suffering, it can be hard to simply stop those thoughts and feelings, become more rational, and stop suffering .  In Figure 4 I’ve given a perspective on using concentrative meditation in Buddhist practice to diminish and perhaps eventually eliminate suffering.

Insert Figure 4 about here

The main way Figure 4 differs from Figure 3 is that I’ve taken the oval which designates where experience is focused, and moved it so it’s primarily in the Sixth Consciousness, hardly touching the Seventh or Eighth Consciousnesses.  The basic instruction for concentrative meditation is to pick some discernible object, usually some emotionally neutral object like the sensation of breathing, and keep your attention gently turned toward it.  You have to gently monitor the process also, so that when your mind does stray away to your worries, plans for what to do tomorrow, Seventh Consciousness stuff, etc., you relax these new contents and bring your attention back to the chosen object of concentration.  The Tibetan Buddhist term for this kind of meditation is shamatha with support, the support being the sensation of breathing in this case, but any tangible object could be used.

To the degree that you keep your attention focused in the Sixth Consciousness, on the immediate perception or designated range of perceptions coming in through some sense gate, you simply don’t have much awareness or energy left over for the Seventh Consciousness to use in telling your story, running your worries over and over again, etc.  It may be hard to learn to do this at first, but as you eventually get better at gently returning your attention to the support object, you spend more and more time there.  The Seventh Consciousness process is starved of energy and attention, and you experience increasing degrees of peace.  Meditators who get very good at this kind of concentrative meditation eventually experience a series of jhana states, which involve sensory withdrawal from the world and increasingly subtle states of peace and happiness.  (I don’t really understand the jhanas from personal experience, though, so won’t say anything more about them here.)

Note that I am not saying, and neither does Buddhism as I’m familiar with it, that learning to remain in the jhana states, not having any thinking and feeling in the Seventh Consciousness, is all that there is to enlightenment.  As noted elsewhere (**fill in ref********), I have been troubled by a strong anti-thought trend in Buddhism, but that’s not of concern to us here.

[Note to myself: look at the relationships between the idea of "pure" consciousness, as experienced in the Sixth Consciousness, and the vivid and brilliant description of perception associated with psychedelic experiences.]

Psychological/Neurological View of the Eight Consciousnesses

Now let’s look at the scheme of the eight consciousnesses from the perspective of modern neurological and Western psychological knowledge.  Figure 5 schematizes that.

Insert Figure 5 about here

As indicated earlier, there is a high degree of hardwired processing built into our senses, and almost nothing we can do about that.  In terms of initial neurological processes that receive the data from the senses, though, there is also considerable hardwired processing.  The fact that our vision is extremely sensitive to movement, even in the periphery of our visual field, for example, illustrates that.  So I’ve shown hardwired processing as an oval that includes both the classical senses per se and the Buddhist Sixth Consciousness.

The large circle indicates what we might call programed processing, further neural and psychological activity which selects certain perceptions for enhanced attention, rejects other perceptions as unimportant, and transforms these already chosen perceptions into forms that meet with the needs and standards of our personality, our sense of self, our hopes, our fears, social propriety, etc.  By “programmed,” I mean processes which were explicitly or implicitly created in us or taught to us, voluntarily or involuntarily, in the course of growing up.  In contrast to hardwired neural processing, programmed processing can be changed.  The current excitement about neuroplasticity is an expression of our happiness at the freedom we realize we now have that some psychological processes which have been incorporated into the very operation of our nervous system can be reprogrammed, are plastic.  I have added an arrow labeled Feedback into the diagram to represent this neuronal plasticity, perhaps extending even a little into lower level sensory processes that we currently think of as hardwired.

As in an earlier figure, the large circle shows the sphere of activity of which we’re normally conscious.

We humans like dichotomies.  Something is yes or no, useful or useless, good or bad, and the Buddhist characterizations of the Eight Consciousnesses and my own earlier diagrams fit in nicely with the desire to dichotomize.  But the reality, illustrated below in Figure 6, is more of a continuum with varying, increasing degrees of processing.

Insert figure 6 about here

At the left-hand side of Figure 6 we have the inputs from our classical senses, and there is little processing, other than the hardwired processing which is part of the structure of the sense organs themselves.  As we move more toward ordinary consciousness, though, I show a large arrow labeled as Processing/Construction, to indicate that the things we experience are more and more constructs, built up compounds, rather than “pure” perceptions or simple perceptions of sensory experience.  The Buddhist division into discrete stages, then, is generally seen from this Western perspective as a simplification.  That’s not to decrease its value in any way, though.  It’s a roadmap to help you identify different aspects of your mental activity, and by identifying them have more conscious choice over what you want to happen to you, to move more toward enlightenment and away from living in samsara, Endarkenment.

Biological Psychological Virtual Reality (BPVR)

Another way to express this increasingly construction of consciousness, this movement away from simple perceptions to more complex and interrelated concepts that are mistakenly perceived as if they’re simple perceptions, is to turn to my systems approach to altered states of consciousness (*****ref-link***), and to note that the end results of psychological and neurological processes is the creation of a Biological Psychological Virtual Reality, as illustrated in Figure 7, below.  As mentioned briefly above,  everyone has experienced a basic BPVR in the course of having a nighttime dream.  There you find yourself in a world, events happen, characters enter and interact with you, time passes, and, except in the relatively rare case of lucid dreams, you do not question that this is reality.  From our outside perspective you are in a virtual reality, a world that seems real, but is not real from our perspective.  This BPVR of nocturnal dreaming differs in two very important ways from the BP VR of waking.

Insert Figure 7 about here

First, the quality of your consciousness is more passive, dumber, and duller than it is in the waking state.  You don’t have a true apprehension of your actual state, namely that you are dreaming.  You don’t have access to your accumulated life knowledge that would quickly show you that many of the events happening in the dream are markedly different from what customarily happens in waking life, which would alert you to the fact that it’s a dream.  Indeed, in Buddhism and other spiritual systems, the lack of realization of our true state in nocturnal dreaming is often used as an analogy for our lack of realization of our true spiritual nature in the ordinary waking state.  Thus what we call “waking” is a form of dreaming from a higher spiritual perspective.

Second, the world created in your nocturnal dream state is almost totally isolated from getting input from any sensory perceptions.  It’s as if a roadblock was put up across the nerves that come from your sense organs (this is a function of the subsystem I’ve called Input Processing in my systems approach(***give link/reference***).  While things may happen in the real world around you, they are not going to control the creation of the virtual world you experience yourself in an adaptive way.  Sounds and sights are almost always totally ignored unless they are loud enough to wake you up, bring you out of the dream BPVR.  On the relatively rare occasions when sounds do make it into the dream world, they are frequently distorted (the subsystem Input Processing again) so that they fit into the context of the ongoing dream in a smooth way that doesn’t disturb the basic creation of the dream world.  The ringing sound of an old-fashioned alarm clock, for example, if it doesn’t wake you, may become a dream telephone ringing in the room you were standing in in your dream world.

And so…..

I’ll close with just one example of how adding in knowledge from another spiritual system and from modern neurology might substantially improve the usefulness of this basic map.  One of my main personal sources of psychological and spiritual inspiration has been the teachings of G. I. Gurdjieff.  Among his teachings was the concept that we have three basic kinds of intelligence, three “”brains” as he called them.  One of these is the intellectual part of the mind/brain.  The second was an emotional brain, and third a body/instinctive brain.  Gurdjieff talked about how each of these brains had to be developed and educated in terms of its unique abilities, otherwise we end up, as is all too common (I speak, unfortunately, from personal experience), with one kind of intelligence highly or overly developed and the others undeveloped and probably neurotic.  Thus much suffering in life comes when one kind of brain does the work that should really be handled by another kind of brain, for example the intellectual brain handling something that really requirs emotional intelligence.  As part of these ideas, Gurdjieff taught that the emotional brain is faster than the intellectual brain: you may find yourself emotionally reacting to something before you intellectually understand what’s going on.

This faster speed of the emotional aspect of intelligence processes has been confirmed by modern neurological studies.  This is illustrated diagrammatically in Figure 8, below.

Insert figure 8 about here

Something happens so your senses are presented with an event that has both intellectual and emotional qualities.  If we now see the Sixth Consciousness is divided into specialized processes, one for handling emotionally neutral, primarily cognitive information, and the other for information that might be emotionally significant, there’s an interesting result.  The intellectual processing, what I have labeled 6-cognitive in Figure 8 has a number of neurological steps, each one of which takes time, to get the information to the higher parts of the brain, the part of the brain/mind that’s going to assess the overall situation and decide what, if anything, needs to be done.  The emotional processing part, however, while not as smart as discriminating as the intellectual part, can get its conclusions to the higher parts of brain much faster, there are fewer steps.

This makes sense.  It’s much better to be afraid and run away instantly if something is moving in the trees toward you and it could be a predator, and then feel foolish when it turns out to be the wind, than to stand there doing a more detailed intellectual analysis when that time delay might let you get eaten by an actual predator!

To illustrate this with an analogy, you’re sitting in your study having an interesting conversation with a friend, and suddenly you feel very anxious, your body gets jumpy, you feel afraid and/or angry, you look out the window and see that your assistants have alerted the troops!  They are arming and getting into battle formation, your escape pod is being readied, and loud alarm bells are going off and red warning lights blinking!  QUICK, QUICK, DANGER, DANGER, ACT, NOW, NOW, NOW!  You may try to think about this and realize it’s a tremendous overreaction to something of no real significance, but it’s very hard to think when your body is jumping, you’re full of emotion, and those damn bells are ringing!

I’ve informed many students about this difference in speed of the emotional processes, using this information drawn from both Gurdjieff’s teachings and neurology, and they’ve found that it’s helpful in dealing with their emotions.  We so often take the blame for what we feel.  “I’m a stupid person, afraid, angry, weak willed, etc., etc.!”  This kind of reaction doesn’t help you cope well with actual situations.  But with even a small intellectual voice remembering this knowledge, saying “Your feelings have probably been hijacked by the emotional brain, it’s probably not really that bad,” you have a more spacious mental state to calm down in.

To put it another way, the map of the eight consciousnesses is very helpful in giving you a wider perspective on your own mind.  In this case, just remembering that there’s a specialized part of you which is designed to emotionally hijack you, that prefers to make mistakes rather than take a chance, helps you remember there is a bigger “you,” instead of just the part being drowned in the emotions.  A big “you” observing one part of itself having emotions has many more possibilities than a small “you” which is drowning in the flood….

Who is

Who unfollowed me

Who is honey boo boo

Who vs whom?

When I type in “what,” I find

What is my IP

What to do in San Francisco

What is gangnam style

What does yolo mean?

When I type in “when,” I find

When to work

When is Labor Day

When is Thanksgiving

When is Easter 2013?

When I type in “where,” I get

Where is Chuck Norris

Where am I

Where to buy nexus 7

Where the wild things are?

And finally for the big why question,

Why is the sky blue

Why do cats purr

Why am I so tired

Why are manhole covers round?

And, inspired by what I read, I type in that deepest of all questions, “is?”  I find the planetary consciousness is concerned with

Is shingles contagious

Is it down

Is Frank ocean gay

Is Jackie Chan dead

Okay, there’s the world report for today, I won’t even begin to speculate on what it means, and don’t know if I will ever assess the planetary mind again.  But it’s amusing, so happy Thanksgiving to all!

While participating in a meditation intensive practice led by Jeff Warren recently, I noticed he introduced it with a word that I have seldom heard used by many meditation teachers, or at least not given much importance, namely the word curiosity.   I have been thinking about this for the few years, as one of the main reasons I have always been interested in meditative (and similar) practices is curiosity.  Curiosity about my mind, about other people’s minds, about how minds work, about how they can work better, etc.  Of course that is just one motivation among many: I certainly would like to reduce my suffering and reach “enlightenment” (whatever that is).  Hearing Jeff Warren use the word, though, stimulated me to write about curiosity, Buddhism, and modern psychology.

(I put in my usual qualification that I am not a Buddhist scholar, that Buddhism has many, many branches, and anything I say about it can undoubtedly be contradicted by the teachings and practices of some branches of Buddhism, but, as a longtime student of various branches of Buddhism, I hope to stimulate useful thought.  A more complete form of this qualification can be found at http://blog.paradigm-sys.com/740/ )

Figure 1, below, shows what Shinzen Young has characterized as the essentials that constitute Vipassana meditation practice, namely the development of concentration, clarity, and equanimity.  I show them as interacting and reinforcing each other.

Figure 1:

By developing greater concentration in observing some selected aspects of ongoing experience, for example, you experience greater clarity as to what is actually happening, and so you have less chance of being overwhelmed by various experiences through their ordinarily compounded complexity.  Such greater clarity makes it easier to develop equanimity about the experiences, to have less grasping on to them if you like them and less rejection of them if you don’t like them.  Further, by experiencing greater clarity, your implicit identity as a successful meditator is enhanced, which makes it easier to be equanimous about experience: you know you’re doing well.  In turn, greater equanimity allows you to concentrate more effectively, as you’re not constantly being thrown off-track by attractions and aversions, and so this virtuous circle goes round and round.

Shinzen sees these three basic factors as constituting the essence of Vipassana meditation practice, an analysis that makes excellent sense to me.  But, in my more than 50 years of experience as a psychologist studying not only ordinary consciousness but various altered states of consciousness (ASCs), I’ve come to be more and more sensitive to the fact that while we may isolate particular mental or behavioral factors for cognitive usefulness in understanding, they always operate within a larger context that affects how they operate.  For example, Figure 2, below, from my States of Consciousness book, shows the major types of factors that can affect the outcome of ingesting the drug marijuana.

Figure 2:

The chemical nature of the drug itself, its dosage and method of ingestion, are only one part of a larger set of factors, which can determine whether any ASC develops at all, or, if ASCs develop, what the nature of these states is.  I won’t take time to talk about these individual factors here, but just use this diagram as a reminder that any procedure designed to affect consciousness, including meditation, is carried out within some kind of complex context which may have major effects on it.

 So let’s situate our basic practices and outcomes of concentration, clarity and equanimity within the usual Buddhist background that they are practiced in and manifest in.  This is shown in Figure 3, below.

Figure 3:

When a student approaches a Buddhist meditation teacher (or, nowadays, many teachers who may not formally say that they are teaching Buddhism but have been strongly influenced by Buddhism), they bring pre-existing beliefs about Buddhism, the nature of mind, what meditation is, what it can do, what their own capacities are, what they expect from the teacher, etc. to the situation.  No student walks in with a mind totally free of preconceptions and expectations and is then told to practice observing their experience with concentration, clarity, and equanimity and nothing else.  Rather the situation is quite comparable to Figure 2 which showed the various factors that affect a person’s reaction to a psychoactive drug like marijuana.

What happens is that the student is taught the essence of a Buddhist worldview, including ideas like the reality of suffering, and that Buddhism offers a way to reduce and, indeed, to totally eliminate suffering.  Elimination of suffering comes about by reaching enlightenment, and thus while the practices of concentration, clarity, and equanimity may be taught in a relatively straightforward fashion, they are taught with the implicit or explicit background context that we are suffering and that the purpose of these practices is to lead to a reduction and eventual cessation of suffering through attaining enlightenment.

A comparable example that often occurred in my early research on ASCs was in my research with hypnosis.  To hypnotize a person in our culture, you probably tell them to go to “sleep.”  But the person being hypnotized knows you don’t really mean sleep in the usual sense of the term.  If they went into actual sleep, they wouldn’t be able to be hypnotized, so they automatically reinterpret the word “sleep” in terms of general cultural information about hypnosis, such as expectation that a hypnotized person is passive and active only when action is suggested.  Just as no one walks into meditation instruction without pre-existing beliefs and feelings about what meditation is and will do, no one in our culture goes into a hypnosis session without pre-existing beliefs and feelings.  Indeed, a study of college students found that they generally had a quite accurate knowledge of what it is like to be hypnotized.  Which, of course, raises interesting questions about what hypnosis really is in some universal sense, versus the degree to which it is a semi-arbitrary construction of a particular culture.  We’ll raise that same type of question about meditation practices later.

I started this essay by noting my impression that the word “curiosity” is seldom mentioned by Buddhist teachers, or not given any particular importance if it’s mentioned in passing.  My feeling is that the implicit and explicit background of the Buddhist worldview, in common with any detailed worldview, basically inhibits curiosity.  It’s as if Gautama Buddha figured out everything of importance, pointed out the one important goal in life, the cessation of suffering, and mapped out the way to get there, so there are no other important questions.  There may be technical questions on using the methods most effectively, or adapting them to an individual’s strengths and weaknesses, but there are no basic questions.

This is the reason why I have long characterized Buddhism and other spiritual systems not as spiritual sciences, but as spiritual technologies.  A scientist, in principle, can be curious about anything and everything.

A scientist may be initially taught certain basic principles fundamental to her field, but may well go on to question these basic principles and find them erroneous or in need of revision.  A technician, on the other hand, is trained in the application of basic principles, in applying them in an effective technical manner, not in questioning these basic principles.

Of course a lot of people socially designated as scientists actually behave as if they were technicians, never really asking any fundamental questions but just creating small, technical improvements within the worldview they were already given.  This is essential and important to the progress of any field of science.  The historian of science Thomas Kuhn called this normal, paradigmatic science.  But this scientist/technician distinction is useful.  If you’re working in a spiritual tradition that already knows all the important answers, no basic curiosity is needed.

Figure 4 takes the Vipassana method, the basic methods/outcomes of concentration, clarity and equanimity, and situates them within an overall context of general curiosity.  The Vipassana meditation method, the development of concentration on particular aspects of experience, leading to greater clarity/insight, leading to equanimity/objectivity which also allows greater concentration, then greater clarity, etc., is seen here by me as a general purpose “instrument” which can be used in a wide variety of ways, not only within a traditional Buddhist worldview leading only to classical Buddhist enlightenment.

Figure 4:

That a powerful belief system can stifle curiosity has been applied to Buddhist, Vipassana meditation here, but it obviously has more general applications.  One of most concern to me is my own field of psychology.

Lack of Curiosity in Modern Psychology:

In the late 1800s, when psychology began differentiating itself from philosophy, one of its primary methods was introspection.  This was basically a method of examining inner experience, and some of the early psychologists wrote on having “trained observers” examine and report on their experience.  Unfortunately, psychology failed to establish itself as a useful discipline with this approach.  There was simply too much disagreement among the results of various laboratories as to what was observed in the mind and why these things were observed.  Introspection became discredited as a method and replaced by behaviorism.  Behaviorism produced much more objectivity – did a person do external, behavioral act A or not? – but left out the whole interior side of human experience.

As I have written about elsewhere,(Tart, C., 2005, Future psychology as a science of mind and spirit: Reflections on receiving the Abraham Maslow award.  Humanistic Psychologist, 33, No. 2, 131-143), with the wisdom of hindsight we can see many reasons why this introspective approach didn’t work.  There was no understanding of the importance of individual differences, for example, but rather a naïve belief that each of us possessed what we might call a “standard mind,” so anyone’s experiences could give basic insight into the way a standard mind worked.  There was also no understanding of the vital importance of experimenter bias, an issue still largely avoided even in modern psychology as we cling to the idea of being “objective observers.”  Most importantly, when “trained observers” were talked about, this usually meant people who might have had 10 to 20 hours of training on how to report a particular aspect of experience.  With our current familiarity with meditation systems from Buddhism and other spiritual disciplines, however, I’ve heard Buddhist teachers estimate that it generally takes at least 5,000, if not 10,000 hours of disciplined practice to become a really good observer of one’s own experiences.  This 10,000 hour figure has been applied now in many fields as a foundation for real mastery.  Thus the fact that untrained, introspecting observers did not produce reports which agreed with one another is hardly surprising.

In the last couple of decades psychology, particularly clinical psychology, has discovered that aspects of meditative practices can be therapeutically helpful in relieving a variety of conditions.  But note that we have a close parallel to what I said about Buddhism above, namely we have an overall belief system, our culture’s beliefs, about what is normal and how a normal mind should operate.  Meditative methods are now seen as an adjunct to other forms of therapy which are designed to help patients’ minds operate in accordance with our views of normal.  It’s wonderful that aspects of traditional meditation systems have been adapted in ways that reduce human suffering, but the general curiosity emphasized in Figure 4 is not there.

The exciting question, for me, is what would happen if we developed a lot of people trained in these basic Vipassana methods (while figuring out better ways of training), and then applied them in the sense of real science to investigating all aspects of experience, all aspects of reality?  Not simply those that help people be “normal” and get rid of their specific kind of suffering?  Could we develop a new introspective psychology that actually worked?

This idea is very exciting to me!

And as for meditation practice, Figure 5, a modified version of Figure 2, reminds us of the many blanks that need to be filled in if we are to fully understand and utilize Vipassana practice….

Figure 5:

I’ve always been pleased with the outcome.  I don’t expect anyone to “master” mindfulness in this brief time, but everyone has at least had a taste of what greater mindfulness can be like, and some tools for producing it.  As I usually teach this in the Fall (although I now doing a shorter version as an online workshop a few times a year through GlideWing.com), I tell me students the big test of what they’ve learned will likely come at Thanksgiving if they go home to their families: all the subtle and not-so-subtle stressors will be there!

So I was delighted and reminded of how effective mindfulness practice can be for some, even after only four weeks of training, with the following student paper, reproduced here by permission.

Paper 5

PRES (PhD Residential program) 3079 – MINDFULNESS

The classroom discussion regarding emotional intelligence last week inspired me to be conscious of the topic during an upcoming family event.  This past weekend, my sister was married in Boston and I knew there would be many chances for me to practice staying calm and centered during emotionally challenging situations surrounding various family dynamics.  A couple of my family members have very strong personalities and often lash out or become easily agitated.  They often emit negative and nervous energies, creating stressful situations.  Due to the stress often surrounding wedding details, I anticipated there being some difficult moments.  Practicing “Self Remembering” and Vipassana over the past few weeks provided me with access to a place of calm, peace, and tranquility.  With the ability to remain centered and aware of my body, I could easily identify emotions that surfaced.  Since I knew I was going to experience potentially difficult moments this past weekend, I had a strong intention to remain present and mindful.

As Tart discussed in class, by staying present, our emotional center won’t be as reactive and cause emotional hijacking.  I definitely had many opportunities to put this to test. Throughout the days, especially when I was around certain family members who had triggered emotional reactions within me in the past, I made sure I was splitting my attention between my inner and outer environments.  When a family member snapped or lashed out at me, for example, I noticed that I was much more calm.  If I responded, it would be a clear-minded statement without an emotionally charged element.  I noticed that my response surprised the family members and immediately changed the dynamic.  Either they seemed to stop emitting the negativity and walked away, or it increased the anger or whatever negative emotion they were feeling.  The increase in emotion, however, would not last long and it seemed to stem from confusion or frustration since their energy was not being fed. It was quite remarkable.

To further test my new mindfulness skills, I experienced being stranded in Boston due to the hurricane.  During the peak of my Maid of Honor duties that were mostly attempting to calm a very stressed bride, I received news such as my flight being canceled, not being able to leave for several days, and realizing I would miss a week of classes.  Looking back, my response to that situation was shocking.  I was able to receive all of that information in a calm manner, although I did have my moments of stress.  My overall reaction was much improved compared to how I would have reacted in the past.  To even further my test, I then rode in a car for 20 hours with my parents back to Ohio where they live.  Twenty hours in a car with anyone could bring up emotional reactions, especially with my parents.  I realized I need much more practice in meditation and mindfulness techniques and that I have not mastered them by any means since I was unable to stay centered during the whole trip.  In addition to the difficult dynamics, the stress of bad weather, rain, snow, wind and waves crashing onto the expressway at points did not help.  I am however quite impressed regarding the overall change I’ve seen in my emotional intelligence.  If I were to have experienced this past weekend a year ago, I know it would not have been pretty.

An Essay/Review Stimulated by Eben Alexander’s

Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife.

 Charles T. Tart

 [This essay started off with an intention to be a brief review of and highly positive recommendation for Eben Alexander’s just published book Proof of Heaven, but broadened rapidly into reflections on near-death experiences and related aspects of our minds in general.  I’m not going to post it as a book review per se, I’ll write that elsewhere, but it should be of interest to readers of this blog.]

It’s been more than half a century since I began studying the deeper reaches of human nature, both professionally as a psychologist and personally as someone seeking more meaning and value in life than just the acquisition of social and material rewards.  Altered states of consciousness (ASCs), sleep, dreams, hypnosis, meditation, biofeedback, out-of-body experiences (OBEs), near death experiences (NDEs): I’ve investigated them all and written about them extensively in various scientific journals and books (see my brief bio at http://blog.paradigm-sys.com/brief-bio/).  I’ve also been involved in those 50+ years in scientific parapsychology, which led me to the conclusion, focused on in my last book, The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together , that the popular idea that science has somehow proven that all spirituality is nonsense, just imagination and hallucinations, is an invalid scientific idea.  That dismissal is scientism, not science, prejudice masquerading as science.  Yes, of course, there’s lots of nonsense and craziness mixed in with religion and spirituality, as there are in all areas of human life, but, in point of fact, we have extensive, high-quality scientific evidence to show that the human mind possesses qualities which are the sort of things we would think a genuinely spiritual being would have, and that we would not expect a physical brain to have.

Applying this to our personal lives, no one should be embarrassed or ashamed of having spiritual or  psychic experiences.  Rather it is perfectly sensible to be both spiritual and scientific in your approach to life.

The conclusion is fine as a basis for having more sensible and spiritually rewarding lives, but where do we go from there?  It certainly doesn’t mean that we should believe everything and anything labeled “spiritual” or “psychic,” for, as I said above, all areas of human life have lots of errors and nonsense mixed in with them, not to mention distortions and glosses put on to accounts of spiritual beliefs and experiences for political purposes by those who gain power that way..

Practically speaking, one of the main problems with conventional religion and spirituality in modern culture is that it doesn’t work very well for far too many people.  By not working well, I mean it doesn’t effectively lead to strong feelings of understanding and help them become wiser and more compassionate people in practice, so conventional religion tends to become something either rejected wholesale and indiscriminately out of disappointment, or grasped onto with fanatical devotion and blindness, a kind of “blind faith” that goes against intelligence.  Given that religion and spirituality are major sources motivating us to care about other people, and thus a key to creating a better world, we need religions and spiritualities that work, and that give people insights that are consonant with our scientific understanding (which is constantly evolving), as well as inspiring.  To me, as one of the founders of the field of Transpersonal Psychology, this

means that while we can look at existing religions and spiritual systems as sources of inspiration and ideas, we can’t take them as the final word, the Ultimate Truth about anything.  Rather I regard them as attempts by human beings, usually well-intentioned but fallible human beings, to share their insights and understandings, but those insights and understandings may be valid only in cultures that have changed enormously or that no longer apply to the complexities of the modern world.

So one of the goals of transpersonal psychology is to not simply respect and spiritual traditions, much less to uncritically accept them, but to take all their teachings as simply working hypotheses, things to be tested, empirically and experientially, to see how they work or don’t work, and to be modified and improved as a result of actual scholarly and scientific investigation.  The field is very young, so there’s not much to say yet about accomplishments, but someday we may have solid evidence for recommendations  like ”If you do meditation type nine, for people of a certain type, it will stir up their unconscious minds and amplify confusion and suffering rather than growth in wisdom and compassion, so it’s better to discourage them from doing that kind of meditation but suggest some other, specific kind of spiritual practices.”

One of the ways we get new knowledge and refine knowledge about the spiritual is by listening closely to and working with the accounts of people who have what we will loosely call “spiritual experiences.”  In recent decades our culture, e.g., has been strongly affected by previously unheard of familiarity with NDEs.  When I was first in psychology 50 years ago, I knew about NDEs because I had read a lot of very esoteric psychical research literature, but aside from knowing that NDEs happened and a few of their characteristics, very little was known by anyone, and the average person had never heard of them.  When Raymond Moody published his Life After Life book on NDEs in 1976 and it hit the bestseller lists (more than 13 million copies sold to 2012!), it resonated with people’s spiritual needs, and now there is widespread knowledge about qualities of NDEs.

One of the things that most impressed me about people’s accounts of their NDEs back then was that people with very different backgrounds and religious beliefs, including people with no religious beliefs to speak of, described the qualities of NDEs in a very similar way.  But if NDEs were nothing but the distorted functioning of a distressed brain, you would think that, like most hallucinations resulting from brain malfunctions, the content of those hallucinations would be very much affected by a person’s life experiences, cultural background, and individual beliefs.  That there was so much commonality immediately made a case that people were telling you about something that might be real in some sense.  By analogy, I have never been to Rome, but accounts I have heard of what Rome looks like by people who claim to have been there show so much commonality that I have high confidence that there really is a place called Rome.

From my perspective as a researcher, however, there is a major drawback to collecting more accounts of NDEs today that didn’t apply when they were first collected.  Back then, almost everyone who finally came forth with an account noted that they had never heard of such things before they had their own NDE.  Indeed they usually had never talked to anyone about what they had experienced, or had tried to talk to others and been so severely rejected (you must have been hallucinating, that’s crazy, the work of the devil, etc., etc.) that they remained silent about it, and so there was very little obvious influence from cultural background or others’ opinions creating the similarity in their accounts.  Now there have been so many articles, books, TV specials, etc., about NDEs that when you hear about someone’s recent NDE, you have to wonder how much is this an accurate report of something that is “real” and how much their experience has been molded by all their previous knowledge about what NDEs are supposed to be about.

I am particularly concerned with the potentially biasing effects of previous knowledge because a lot of my early research was on hypnosis, and I had it constantly demonstrated in my  research that about a quarter or so of the population could have profoundly real-seeming experiences of any arbitrary nature whatsoever suggested to them by a hypnotist.  I doubt that most NDEs are in this category of the purely arbitrary, all a product of suggestion, even the ones occurring today, but even if a major part of what a person experiences is “real” in the sense of belonging to some reality external to their belief system, still the way they perceive it may be influenced to some unknown degree by the now widespread cultural knowledge of what NDEs are supposed to be about.  This doesn’t mean there’s no point in studying most people’s NDEs, just that we have to be more careful about this possible biasing factor.  And there’s nothing particularly novel about this, people’s descriptions of ordinary reality are often biased by what they believe, emotions of the moment, etc.

So one way of getting a less biased picture of what NDEs are like might be to simply give more weight to experiences collected in the early days of research, when most accounts were from people who had never heard anything about what NDEs were supposed to be about.  Another way of trying to get beyond such a biasing factor is to study more extreme types of NDEs, NDEs with characteristics that are not all that common or known in our culture, and this is a major reason why I find Doctor Eben Alexander’s Proof of Heaven  book of great value.  One of the most common features of NDEs established in the early research, for example, was that at some point the person having the NDE, the NDEr, reaches some kind of “border,” or “barrier,” or “bridge” or “gateway,” and although they want to go on to what seem even more wonderful heavenly reaches of the experience, they are not allowed to go cross this border or go through this gateway, because if they did, there would be no chance of them returning to physical life.  Sometimes, knowing this, the NDEr chooses to come back to physical life, sometimes he or she is forced to come back to physical life even though they desperately want to go on.

What lies beyond this gateway?

Doctor Alexander is a neurosurgeon, and he describes a seven days long NDE caused by a usually fatal brain infection that, given our current medical knowledge, we would say totally knocks out all the higher functioning of the brain, everything that makes us conscious human beings.  From the outside medical perspective, he’s in a totally unresponsive coma.  Inside, at first he experiences his NDE almost like a vegetative state, with no real thoughts occurring in it, and going on “forever,” although no ordinary concept of time or duration meant anything to him in that condition.  And yet eventually he rose above this, with assistance that he perceived in a most interesting way  – –  I won’t give away this very thought-provoking aspect of the book  – –  and eventually went through a gateway, and reported  an exceptionally profound experience.

Because his experience was exceptionally “positive,” a word that hardly begin to convey its power, as a human being I want to believe that his was a true glimpse of the reality of the universe, that we’re all under the care of a loving, alive, intelligent universe, like physician Richard M. Bucke reported in his Cosmic Consciousness experience, described in my The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together.

That’s my personal reaction, but as a scientist, I have to bracket that reaction.  That is I don’t deny it or suppress it, but I recognize that this is something with strong emotions underlying it and it has a possibility of biasing an otherwise relatively objective attempt of mine to understand the experience.  So as a scholar and scientific investigator of NDEs, I look at the content of Doctor Alexander’s experience, in so far as he can convey it, note the similarities and differences between some other reports of profound experiences by different people in different times and places (like the Bucke Cosmic Consciousness experience mentioned above, or the Darkness of God experience reported by John Wren-Lewis reported on my TASTE (The Archives of Scientists’ Transcendent Experiences) site (go to www.issc-taste.org, Collected Archives, and select account number 0051, The Darkness of God), and  – - -  Here’s where I’d like to say I understand it’s clearly connected to such-and-such phenomena in ways that are very interesting – - –  but I can’t yet say much more than that this is really interesting, and I want us to learn a lot more about this kind of thing!  I know, this is the traditional scientific conclusion to almost all reports, “More research is needed,” but it’s true!  Indeed I would say the implications of NDEs are infinitely more important than 99 percent of what we study in science, so research on NDEs should have an enormous priority in life, but that’s not the political reality we live in.     ;-(

I also give some extra credence to Doctor Alexander’s account because he wasn’t a “believer,” he wasn’t heavily invested in some religious belief system that he had a desperate need to prove.  He had a certain, shallow, conventional religiosity from his family background: going to church on Christmas and Easter, otherwise not really giving religion and spirituality any thought.  He had heard of reports of NDEs, but, like too many physicians, who are closed minded rather than scientific about this area, he dismissed them as simple hallucinations of a malfunctioning brain.  He wouldn’t tell a patient they were crazy if they reported unusual experiences to him: in his role as a doctor, as a healer, he would always be nice to them.  But accounts of NDEs were just noise to him, damaged brain hallucinations.  When he had his own NDE, though, that was something else again!

So, moving into book review mode, am I recommending Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012)?  Absolutely!  Who am I recommending it to?  Anyone seriously interested in the meaning of life, and anyone willing to try to bracket their own previous beliefs and preconceptions and be very, very stimulated…

This issue of pain and suffering naturally becomes far more real and important to me when I’m ill and in pain myself.  While I tend to get absorbed in being unhappy with my own suffering and wishing I could do something about it, wishing my doctor could do something about it, etc., sometimes I remember that my level of suffering is usually trivial compared to the amount of painful suffering too many people go through, and I remember to pray for their healing and welfare.  No, I don’t know or have any guarantees that my prayer really makes a difference, but prayer expresses a deep desire in me.

Now that I’ve gotten older, pain is much more familiar to me.  I’ve had daily headaches for many years now, many of which can be controlled by medication, some of which keep right on hurting and distracting in spite of the medication I take.  Throw in some arthritis and bursitis that comes with getting older, and the prevalence and reality of pain is much more experientially real to me!

The last few years I’ve increasingly had the thought that if reincarnation is real (and I think there’s a good chance of it), one of the best things I could hope for in a future life would be to be born with the talent and motivation to become a researcher who helps develop more effective treatments for pain.

Now, the odd thing about this that struck me today.  Sometimes I am amazed at how long it takes me to grasp something that, in retrospect, is obvious.

I have actually devoted most of my working life to decreasing suffering in others! Not their physical pains, I’m not a physician or a chemist who can discover new drugs, but psychological suffering.  As I discussed in my last book, The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together, I have talked to and heard from innumerable people who have experienced a lot of suffering in life because they had spiritual experiences or spiritual desires, but believed that Science (I capitalize Science so we remember the Authority it can carry) has somehow proven that all spirituality is total nonsense, and therefore they were stupid, neurotic, or both to care anything about the spiritual.

Psychological pain can be just as real as physical pain.

The primary point of my last book though, was to say that when you look at what scientific evidence we actually have, it’s foolish to say that real science, essential science, has proven that there’s absolutely nothing to spirituality.  Sure, there’s lots of superstition, foolishness, neuroticism, politics, power plays, and the like mixed into various spiritual systems and religions – just as there are in all areas of human life.  But that doesn’t mean there is no reality to the spiritual.  I remember an old Sufi saying that counterfeit money can only exist because there is real money.

When you actually study the results of experiments in scientific parapsychology, you find that human beings occasionally manifest abilities which cannot be explained adequately in terms of contemporary physical science or straightforward extensions of it, and which are the sort of properties we would expect genuinely spiritual beings to have.  As just one example: telepathy.  From the point of view of materialism, physicalism, prayer, so central in spirituality and religion, is nothing but talking to yourself.  Even if you do it out loud, the message doesn’t get beyond a very limited range of who’s in earshot.  Perhaps it does us some psychological good to get our desires off our chests in the form of prayer, but that’s the end of the story.  Your mind is nothing but the workings of your physical brain, brains don’t emit or receive physical energies that can send prayers anywhere beyond earshot if you pray aloud and nowhere beyond your skull if you pray silently.

Once you look at the extensive evidence that human beings sometimes manifest telepathy, though, it’s clear that the idea of mental thoughts and desires sometimes transcending ordinary spatial barriers is not an inherently nonsensical idea.  It happens sometimes.  Well, what is prayer, but the hope that your wishes and desires will transcend the limits of physical space?  Hopefully with some sort of compassionate and powerful spiritual being on the receiving end of that prayer.  We don’t know much about the latter possibility from a scientific point of view — parapsychology is still such a tiny and  young science — and I don’t know how much we will ever know scientifically — but we certainly know that the message can be sent!

So, the point I constantly emphasize that The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together was about is that rather than thinking that Science has somehow shown all spirituality is nonsense, it is reasonable to be both scientific and spiritual in your orientation toward life.  Lots of intelligent discrimination and refinement of understanding is still required, of course, but it’s simply not all nonsense.  So when I can’t do anything else to help someone, or even when I can, I usually say a prayer hoping the best possible result will come from this situation.

It’s satisfying to realize that I have been able to do something which can reduce the suffering of at least a few others,  Many people have told me that when they realize what the results of scientific parapsychology are, they then are more open to their psychic and spiritual side, and feel like they haven’t been dismissed as stupid and neurotic.  And, of course, my own attitude toward life, which puts a high value on the spiritual, is personally reinforced by knowing that there is so much high quality scientific evidence pointing toward a reality to the spiritual.

I still wish I could help more with physical pain, though….