Loch Kelly - Shift into Freedom: The Science and Practice of Open-Hearted Awareness

Below is a promo from Sounds True for the new book from Loch Kelly - Shift into Freedom: The Science and Practice of Open-Hearted Awareness (links to Sounds True page for the book - here is an Amazon link). There is also a CD available with 20 of the meditations from the book (There are CEUs available as well - 3.5).

Join this innovative teacher to explore more than 20 meditations including:

• Awareness Yoga—a foundational practice in moving awareness

• Embodied Presence—a practice for deeply feeling unity and acceptance

• Unhook, Drop, Open, See, Include, Know, Let Be—a way to shift levels of mind that culminates in living from open-hearted awareness  

“The goal of these meditations is not to transcend the human condition,” explains Loch Kelly, “but to discover how to live a fully intimate human life.” Shift into Freedom gives you the tools to navigate your life with clarity and unconditional love.

Interestingly, I spoke with Loch when he was beginning work on this book. More than a year later he contacted me again about doing some editing, but by then I was very busy with my editing work at the University of Arizona Cancer Center.

Recently, I heard from Loch again - the book was done and hitting the market. He had Sounds True send me a review copy, which I am reading right now. I will be posting my review in the coming weeks. I must that, so far, I am finding this an excellent book, and one I will be using with some therapy clients.

This is the email Sounds True sent out (with a brief bio from the Sounds True website):

Loch Kelly, MDiv, LCSW, is a teacher, consultant, and leader in the field of meditation and psychotherapy who was asked to teach by Mingyur Rinpoche and Adyashanti. The founder of the Open-Hearted Awareness Institute, he is an emerging voice in modernizing meditation, social engagement, and collaborating with neuroscientists to study how awareness training can enhance compassion and well-being.

Dear Sounds True friends,

I am delighted to share my new book and audio meditation program with you, Shift Into Freedom: The Science and Practice of Open-Hearted Awareness. I’m grateful to all of my teachers, students, and friends for their support in helping me bring this book and audio into form, and to Adyashanti for his inspiring foreword.

I was fortunate to stumble upon meditation early in my life after a series of losses. Meditation was a great help to me because it revealed the inner foundation of a naturally spacious and loving awareness. My heart’s curiosity then led me to graduate school and to India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, where I met many renowned meditation teachers who generously shared their lives and practices with me. The particular approach I was drawn to is one where we discover the solution to suffering by directly shifting into our awake nature that is already here. Then through the practice of “small glimpses, many times,” we can experience freedom from fear, shame, and worry, and live an embodied, open-hearted life. My life’s work and love has been to discover the essence of these advanced practices and bring them to you in contemporary and accessible form.

The book and audio provide a how-to guide for awakening. I have been refining these unique teachings and practices for many years, and have had wonderful results in sharing them with students.

This book presents a distinct and clear definition of awakening. My goal is to bring the process of awakening into the mainstream of our culture in the same way that mindfulness meditation is now embraced, studied, and valued by Western medicine and psychology. Shift Into Freedom offers unique and helpful pointers from developmental psychology, neuroscience, psychotherapy, and comparative contemplative traditions.

The audio program is a powerful series of short guided meditations, pointers, and “glimpses” designed to help you recognize and live from open-hearted awareness. While these practices are written in the book, I highly recommend that you listen to the audio. The audio meditations will make it easier to experience what is being pointed to within you. Experiencing the glimpses is what will transform you.

Awakening can be understood and learned—often through much unlearning and letting go. I am convinced that awakening is the next stage of our human development. You are more capable of discovering this potential than you may believe. Our mutual awakening is essential for our planet today.

I hope you enjoy this heartfelt offering!

With Love and Gratitude,

Open-Hearted Awareness Institute
New York City

This nondual way of “small glimpses, many times” takes basic mindfulness to the next level by introducing us to effortless mindfulness and heart mindfulness.
September 2015

Listen to my Insights at the Edge Podcast »

Dr. Jeffrey B. Rubin - The McMindfulness Craze: The Shadow Side of the Mindfulness Revolution

Dr. Jeffrey B. Rubin emailed me and suggested I might like to share his recent article, "The McMindfulness Craze: The Shadow Side of the Mindfulness Revolution" (which originally appeared at Truthout).

While I tend to agree with Dr. Rubin, in part, I also have some issues about the generalizations in this article. A quote:

Meditation can lessen distractedness, quiet the inner pandemonium, reduce self-criticism and cultivate the capacity to tolerate a greater range of feelings. But emotions such as greed and hatred are viewed in some meditative traditions, such as classical Buddhism, as "defilements" and obstacles that interfere with experiencing a deeper reality. Meditators often try to quiet their minds so as to transcend or get rid of upsetting thoughts and feelings, rather than learn what they might teach us. [italics mine]

If ANY teacher, therapist, doctor, or whoever, is teaching mindfulness as a way to "get rid of upsetting thoughts and feelings" s/he have totally missed the point. The REAL point of meditation and mindfulness (thank you Pema Chödrön) is to learn how to sit with our suffering, to turn toward it and not away from it. That is how I learned it and how I teach it to my clients.

This is from Pema Chödrön's essay, "How to Tap into the Natural Warmth of Your Heart," which is included in A Pema Chödrön Primer, from The Shambhala Sun magazine.

The natural warmth that emerges when we experience pain includes all the heart qualities: love, compassion, gratitude, tenderness in any form. It also includes loneliness, sorrow, and the shakiness of fear. Before these vulnerable feelings harden, before the storylines kick in, these generally unwanted feelings are pregnant with kindness, with openness and caring. These feelings that we’ve become so accomplished at avoiding can soften us, can transform us. The openheartedness of natural warmth is sometimes pleasant, sometimes unpleasant—as “I want, I like,” and as the opposite. The practice is to train in not automatically fleeing from uncomfortable tenderness when it arises. With time we can embrace it just as we would the comfortable tenderness of loving-kindness and genuine appreciation. [italics mine]

Anyone who is teaching mindfulness and meditation as anything other than a way to turn toward and embrace our most difficult feelings and thoughts is not teaching a Buddhist practice. This is the essential difference between Buddhist meditation and meditation as a tool for stress reduction - confusing the two is a serious mistake.

It's also a mistake to assume (as many Buddhists have) that meditation and mindfulness is all we need to heal our psychological wounds. This is nothing but a form of spiritual bypassing.

Buddhism offers some valuable insights and tools that can be a powerful adjunct to psychotherapeutic interventions, but they cannot replace the healing power of the intersubjective relationship with a good therapist. And, quite often, it can do nothing to heal the preverbal, somatic-level traumas of attachment failures.

That said, here is the article from Dr. Rubin.

The McMindfulness Craze: The Shadow Side of the Mindfulness Revolution

Sunday, 04 January 2015 | By Jeffrey B. Rubin, Truthout | Op-Ed 

(Image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout) 

In case we had any doubt after watching Anderson Cooper on "60 Minutes," mindfulness is the new yoga - and we are in the midst of a mindfulness revolution. It's been embraced by celebrities, business leaders, politicians and athletes; and recommended by doctors, clergy, psychotherapists and prison wardens. Apps and bestselling books touting the benefits of meditation proliferate. Google "mindfulness" and you'll get over 24 million hits.

It's not surprising that with unbridled enthusiasm about mindfulness come exaggerated claims and problems that are eclipsed. Jon Kabat-Zinn, one of the architects of the mindfulness revolution, claims mindfulness "has the potential to ignite a universal or global renaissance that . . . would put even the European and Italian Renaissance into the shade . . . [and] that may actually be the only promise the species and the planet have for making it through the next couple hundred years."

Backlash was inevitable. Critics are beginning to highlight the shaky foundations of the scientific claims of meditation's seemingly miraculous efficacy. After reviewing 18,000 scientific articles on meditation, the Association for Health and Research Quality at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a governmental organization that manages standards of research, declared in 2007 that future studies must be "more rigorous." In other words, the scientific evidence for the efficacy of meditation has been overstated and does not support the claims from evangelists of mindfulness about its benefits.

Buddhists have also pushed back, arguing that the mindfulness vogue has divorced meditation from its grounding in traditional Buddhist teachings.

But focusing on these problems with the McMindfulness craze obscures a more profound one - meditation neglects meaning. This not only opens the door to grave dangers, but also compromises meditation's radical potential.

I'm both a psychoanalyst and a long-time student - and now a teacher - of meditation. Over the years, I've witnessed the capacity of meditation to increase awareness, deepen compassion and cultivate wisdom. This is an immense gift for Western culture in general and psychotherapy in particular. But I've also seen how students and teachers of meditation alike grapple with unresolved emotional and interpersonal conflicts that meditation by itself sometimes doesn't touch, and in some cases hides.

The research of Jack Kornfield, a psychologist and one of the United States' most beloved Buddhist teachers, who interviewed nearly a hundred Buddhist teachers from a variety of traditions, supports this. He discovered that a significant number used psychotherapy to deal with psychological issues that meditation could not resolve. "Even the best meditators have old wounds to heal," Kornfield wrote in Bringing the Dharma Home: Awakening Right Where You Are. What he noticed in other Buddhist teachers, himself and his students, in over 40 years of teaching and practice, was that "meditation practice doesn't 'do it all.'" While wonderful, it often left untouched childhood wounds, unconscious fears, loneliness, poor self-care, troubles at work, and difficulties handling feelings and intimate relationships.

Meditation can transform our lives in powerful ways. But even after years of meditating, we may still be saddled with many of the same conflicts and inhibitions that plagued us before we began meditating. We may still be attracted to what is not good for us. We may still not have compassion for ourselves. We may still fear intimacy.

One explanation for this is that we are to blame. If only we would increase our dedication to meditation, learn to focus, and overcome our personal inadequacies, then perhaps we could change those things about ourselves that disturb us. Could this self-blaming explanation have reinforced the sense of inferiority that may have brought us to meditate in the first place - a troubling irony that perhaps too few Buddhists may contemplate?

A more accurate explanation for why meditators remain trapped within the same psychological conflicts after years of dedicated practice is that Buddhist meditation, like all techniques, is a tool that arose in particular contexts designed to handle specific challenges and not other ones. "I teach one thing and one thing only: suffering and the end of suffering," the Buddha is reputed to have said. Buddhist meditation was the technique the Buddha developed to handle the existential suffering he encountered when he escaped from his sheltered life within the palace compound in his mid-20s and witnessed, for the first time, old age, suffering and death. Profoundly distressed, even haunted, by the reality and inevitability of aging, misery and mortality, he abandoned his wife and child and initiated a spiritual quest that produced a set of teachings and practices whose central focus was eliminating the agonizing suffering that traumatized him.

We like to believe that the Buddha's teachings are timeless truths. Suffering seems like a universal aspect of the human condition, rather than a relic of a particular cultural or historical age. But anthropologists and cross-cultural psychologists teach us that there are fundamental differences as well as similarities in individuals and cultures. His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama was shocked to hear that Americans suffered from "self-directed contempt," as Daniel Goleman wrote in Healing Emotions: Conversations with the Dalai Lama on Mindfulness, Emotions, and Health. The Dalai Lama told a group of US scientists and mental health professionals that this experience was absent from Tibetan culture.

We believe, without sufficient evidence, that mindfulness is good for everything from stress to sleep. And we ignore that it originated in a particular sociocultural context very different than our own - 5th century BCE India - with purposes often at odds with the way most people in the contemporary world use it. No one seems to ask whether meditation techniques designed to eliminate the misery of monks in ancient India would be wholly sufficient for cognitively oversaturated lay people in the West in the 21st century who want to raise self-esteem, heal emotional traumas or be more productive in a frenzied world.

Meditation can lessen distractedness, quiet the inner pandemonium, reduce self-criticism and cultivate the capacity to tolerate a greater range of feelings. But emotions such as greed and hatred are viewed in some meditative traditions, such as classical Buddhism, as "defilements" and obstacles that interfere with experiencing a deeper reality. Meditators often try to quiet their minds so as to transcend or get rid of upsetting thoughts and feelings, rather than learn what they might teach us. Peter, a long-term practitioner of Buddhist meditation, was raised by highly critical, perfectionist parents, who pushed him to be the sort of person they needed him to be. He felt essentially unloved for who he actually was, yet highly critical of himself. When he first discovered Buddhist teachings on "purifying" the mind of "defilements," he felt right at home. Some years later in psychoanalysis, he realized that the whole project of purification created an unconscious judgment and aversion toward parts of himself that needed to be embraced, explored and understood - not eliminated.

At the first meditation retreat that I ever attended, in the late 1970s, I asked one of the teachers in an interview what to do with the wealth of unconscious perceptions and insights that arose during my meditations. "Don't do anything," he advised me, "just let go of it." I later learned this was a central dimension of the Buddhist method.

This can be tremendously useful advice. Most people spend an inordinate amount of time obsessing about the past and fearfully anticipating the future. Letting go has value when someone is hyper-vigilant and over controlled, or caught in obsessive thinking or excessive worrying. But there can be negative consequences when we "let go" of experience.

A well-known writer on meditation told me some years ago that after his divorce, meditation helped him anesthetize his pain and grief. Concentrating his mind during meditation kept his loss and sadness at bay, which he recognized unnecessarily prolonged the mourning process; because he never grieved his loss, it took longer to get over it.

If the way meditation is ordinarily practiced can lead to numbing detachment and self-avoidance, what would a meditation that valued self-engagement and self-discovery look like?

Emancipatory meditation - which involves intimacy with oneself - is an extraordinarily vital and alive activity in which one attends to whatever one is experiencing without any preconceived conclusions about it and without trying to get rid of it. To return to the example of the meditator who was undergoing a painful divorce: In emancipatory meditation, he would be more interested in truly experiencing and learning from his sadness, loneliness and fear, rather than anesthetizing himself or getting rid of his feelings by prematurely detaching from them.

We need to investigate the content and meaning of what we become aware of in meditation instead of attempting to transcend it or reduce it to what we already believe based on Buddhism, psychotherapy or any doctrine. Practicing meditation in an emancipatory way could be a powerful ally in our efforts in the 21st century to live with greater awareness and sanity, intimacy and passion.

Posted with permission of the author.

John Crowley - Time After Time (via Lapham's Quarterly)

From Lapham's Quarterly, a fascinating and thought-provoking (and erudite) meditation on the nature of time.

Time After Time

It’s possible to live in more than one time, more than one history of the world, without feeling a pressing need to reconcile them.

By John Crowley

February (detail) from Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry,c. 1412.

Then what is time?” St. Augustine asked himself in his Confessions. “I know what it is if no one asks; but if anyone does, then I cannot explain it.”

Augustine saw the present as a vanishing knife edge between the past, which exists no longer, and the future, which doesn’t yet. All that exists is the present; but if the present is always present and never becomes the past, it’s not time, but eternity. Augustine’s view is what the metaphysicians call “presentism,” which holds that a comprehensive description of what exists (an ontology) can and should include only what exists right now. But among the things that do exist now are surely such things as the memory of former present moments and what existed in them, and the archives and old calendars that denote or describe them. Like the dropped mitten in the Ukrainian tale that is able to accommodate animals of all sizes seeking refuge in it from the cold, the ever-vanishing present is weirdly capacious—“There’s always room for one more!”

Time is continuous, but calendars are repetitive. They end by beginning again, adding units to ongoing time just by turning in place, like a stationary bicycle. Most calendars these days are largely empty, a frame for our personal events and commitments to be entered in; but historically calendars have existed in order to control time’s passage with recurring feasts, memorials, sacred duties, public duties, and sacred duties done publicly—what the church I grew up in calls holy days of obligation. Such a calendar can model in miniature the whole of time, its first day commemorating the first day of Creation, its red-letter days the great moments of world time coming up in the same order they occurred in history, the last date the last day, when all of time begins again. The recent fascination with the Mayan “long count” calendar reflects this: the world cycle was to end when the calendar did.

It’s possible to live in more than one time, more than one history of the world, without feeling a pressing need to reconcile them. Many people live in a sacred time—what the religious historian Mircea Eliade called “a primordial mythical time made present”—and a secular time, “secular” from the Latin saeculum, an age or a generation. Sacred time, “indefinitely recoverable, indefinitely repeatable,” according to Eliade, “neither changes nor is exhausted.” In secular time, on the other hand, each year, month, second, is a unique and unrepeatable unit that disappears even as it appears in the infinitesimal present.

To live at once in a time recoverable by a particular sacred calendar and also by a time without qualities, counted as it passes, involves a sort of mental doubling that is perhaps comparable, in the richness it grants to thought and feeling, to growing up bilingual: two systems, each complete, funny when they collide, each supplying something the other lacks, bearing no command to choose between them. Like a hamster in a Run-About Ball, we can explore an endlessly generated world freely by turning inside the vehicle of our closed and demarcated calendars.

Toward the middle of the thirteenth century, a Dominican friar in Genoa, Jacobus de Voragine, set out to chronicle all that he knew about the history of the world, and to express that knowledge through the sacred events of the Christian year and the exemplary stories of the saints whose feast days filled it. There were many collections of saints’ lives and works extant in his day, called “legendaries”; Jacobus de Voragine’s very long work had larger ambitions than most. His Readings on the Saints became the medieval equivalent of a bestseller, its popularity reflected in the nickname bestowed upon it by fans and printers, The Golden Legend.

In the first sentence of his book, Jacobus divides history, “the whole time span of this present life,” into four periods. Beginning with Adam’s fall out of timeless Eden into temporality and extending up to Moses, who called mankind back to God, is the period of Deviation. The succeeding period of Renewal reaches from Moses to the birth of Jesus, the center point of history for Jacobus. That event begins the era of Reconciliation (“God and sinners reconciled” as the herald angels sing), which culminates in Jesus’ resurrection from the tomb. The last period Jacobus calls the Pilgrimage, which starts with Jesus’ departure from earth back to heaven and continues to the end of the world.

In a new study of Jacobus’ work, In Search of Sacred Time, the great medievalist Jacques Le Goff, who died in April of this year, calls The Golden Legend a “summa on time.” Jacobus, says Le Goff, intended to integrate three sorts of understandings of how time moves in order to “structure and sacralize the time of human life in such a way as will lead humanity to salvation.” The first of these time frames is the sanctorale, the history of the saints and prophets as they appear one after another through historical time. Next is the temporale, the calendar of the church and its annual feasts, offices, and celebrations, which is cyclical and begins again where it ends. Third is the eschatological time of our progress toward Judgment Day, when time stops and eternity begins. Jacobus sets a sort of temporal algorithm, three modes of time working through four periods of history yielding a yearly calendar of feasts, celebrations, and saints’ days which in turn sanctifies the life of Christians in time.

Calendars of the thirteenth century didn’t have uniform start/end dates for the year—there were a few choices—and Jacobus begins his summa not with the first day of the Roman year but with a study of the four weeks of Advent that lead up to the key event of the Nativity. Among the saints whose story Jacobus includes here is Nicholas (December 6), famed for resurrecting dismembered or drowned children, which recalls the death and resurrection of Jesus long before in history and also foreshadows their reenactment at Eastertide. The effect aimed at was to give memory the power of event, to cause a part of the past to occur in the present.

 

A Dance to the Music of Time, by Nicolas Poussin, c. 1635. Wallace Collection, London.

It wasn’t only the sacred calendar that could be made to govern temporality. The four seasons themselves and even the parts of the day are subjected to arithmetical sanctification in The Golden Legend. The Mass, said at least once every day of the year, could also be interpreted as world-shaped and -sanctifying. When I was an acolyte, the Mass began, as it had for centuries, in the uncertainty and doubt of deviation: Quare me repulisti, I’d ask God, age twelve, kneeling at the altar in my cassock, et quare tristis incedo, dum affligit me inimicus? Why do you reject me, and why must I go on in sorrow, while my enemy afflicts me? Renewal and reconciliation are figured in the miraculous changing of bread and wine into the body of Jesus Christ, the center point of the Mass, as the birth of Jesus in a living body is the center of human time. And at the end, the Pilgrimage must continue—Ite, missa est. In those days I could have served at Mass in any Roman Catholic church in the world: it was everywhere the same.

The sacraments that, one by one, I partook of as I grew also had each a temporal aspect. Baptism began life anew after the mess and pain of birth and original sin; first communion began a cycle of subsequent communions, but confirmation occurred just once, marking (like the bar mitzvah) the leaving of childhood and the beginning of adult life. On ahead lay marriage and the anointing of the sick, or extreme unction, as it was alternatively named, pronounced by youth in my part of the Catholic world as “X-tree Munction” and as mysterious as it sounded. If the Christian sacraments are, as critic Terry Eagleton has lately written, “signs which accomplish what they signify,” then for me what they accomplished was the inscription of sacred time in my soul.

But even as my family and I lived by the temporale of the Catholic calendar, we measured time by an unsacred sanctorale, one just as rich with incident as Jacobus’ but that reached far further back and extended forward without limit. One that accounted for my existence but asked nothing of me; one whose truth to time was established by instances of refutation as much as by confirmation.

In November 1953, when I was eleven, Time magazine reported on the exposure of a long-ago scientific hoax; the title of the article was “End as a Man”:

For more than a generation, a shambling creature with a human skull and an apelike jaw was known to schoolchildren, Sunday-supplement readers, and serious anthropologists as “the first Englishman.” He was “Piltdown Man,” and he was supposed to have lived anywhere from 750,000 to 950,000 years ago. Last week three British scientists, armed with modern chemistry, demolished Piltdown man.

My family had a subscription to Time—its general pro-Catholic, “American Century” disposition aligned with my father’s, and it had a middlebrow aura of intelligent probity. I may have read this article—probably would have, if I saw it. I was fascinated by fossils and archaeological finds. I looked for fossils in Kentucky slate, and faked one myself when I grew restive at finding none: a nice little trilobite, etched into stone by knifepoint and pretty convincing (to me). Piltdown Man’s relics were made from a human cranium and the jaw of an ape—an orangutan, actually—and a single canine, ground down to resemble an early human’s tooth. The oddity never fit with other early humans in that ascension shown in old textbooks (and still seen in cartoons) from remotest knuckle-dragging ancestor to modern man. The fake ancestor, Time said, may not have been planted by his original discoverer: “More likely, the difficult hoax was perpetrated by an erudite joker who enjoyed in silent satisfaction his success in fooling the experts.”

One of those jokers, it would later appear, may well have been a young paleontologist and Jesuit priest who went on to formulate his own highly original theory of the descent of man from nonhuman ancestors and man’s future ascent through millennia of evolution to a posthuman omega point. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a hero to a certain class of educated Catholics of the 1950s: a priest and a scientist, a thinker who seemed able to reconcile two kinds of time: the immensity of unfigurable pastness and futurity, and Jacobus’ box of time shaped by God from the fiat lux to the Apocalypse.

Born in 1881 and enrolled in a Jesuit boarding school at ten years old, Teilhard in one sense exemplified the old Jesuit belief that if they have the boy they will ever after retain the man, but orthodoxy never quite retained Teilhard. He entered the novitiate at eighteen, studied the standard subjects as well as physics and geology, and later did a course in theology at Ore Place, a seminary in Sussex, England, founded by French Jesuits. It was there, he said, that he became convinced of the truth of Darwinian evolution, which “haunted my thoughts like a tune.” Ore Place was located very near to Piltdown, and Teilhard became close friends with the amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson; they often went fossil hunting together, and Teilhard found the canine tooth that appeared to match the Piltdown jaw. Dawson announced the finding of the Piltdown fossils in 1912, the year after Teilhard was ordained.

Three years before the debunking of Pilt­down Man was described in Time, Pope Pius XII in the encyclical Humani generis declared that certain aspects of Darwinian evolution weren’t intrinsically in conflict with church teachings, though (Pius said) Catholics certainly didn’t have to believe in evolution if they didn’t want to. A family like mine—observant, loyal to church tradition and doctrine, but also open-minded and disputatious, certainly did. We knew that the seven days of Creation could be taken as seven eons of vast duration, time enough for bacteria and algae to produce dinosaurs and mammoths through the workings of chance and possibility. Though for several years he worked for the church—as the medical director of a small Catholic hospital in Kentucky and then as the infirmary doctor at Notre Dame—my father leaned toward the idea of two churches, one for the smart and learned who could handle ambiguities and don’t need miracle stories or blessed crucifixes, and another for everyone else, who loved and cared for such things. A family friend, a priest who taught in the history and philosophy of science program at Notre Dame, once told us about a conference he’d attended at which he had a dispute about time with another scholar, an unbeliever; while the unbeliever’s theory of time allowed for the (theoretical) existence of angels, the priest’s did not. He thought that was amusing, and so did we. We sometimes attended his masses; he married two of my sisters. If and when Catholics like my family felt the need for a system to account for how they thought, there was Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

 

Summer, from the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, 1412–1489. Musée Condé, Chantilly, France.

 

Teilhard was a believer in deep time, the long processes of geological and biological evolution that stretched out over the billions of years of earth’s existence. He hunted fossils with Roy Chapman Andrews of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, a hero of mine in boyhood, and in the 1920s participated in the excavation of Homo erectus in China, then dubbed “Peking Man.” No one’s time scheme was longer than Teilhard’s: none began further back, or went further on. In his best-known book, The Phenomenon of Man—the one we owned—Teilhard built his universe carefully from primal atoms and molecules through living matter to consciousness and the human world, evolving without cease until transitioning finally into eternity.

For Jacobus, time begins with Adam’s fall; for Teilhard, it is the coming into being of a biosphere—the life layer of earth, as opposed to the underlying inorganic geosphere. From the Russian scientist and metaphysician Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky, Teilhard adopted a tripartite hierarchy of geosphere, biosphere, and noosphere, from the Greek nous, mind: the realm of thought and self-reflection, the vast and growing network of mental connections belonging only to humans. The noosphere was Teilhard’s sanctorale, that by which time makes sense in consciousness; in Julian Huxley’s formulation, which Teilhard embraced, humankind is how evolution becomes conscious of itself. As science and communication technology stretches a membrane of human connection over the whole earth, and any person can be in all places at once, then sooner or later—a very long time from now in either case, but helped on by human striving—an omega point is approached, where the universe reassembles all consciousness in itself, yet in which every individual consciousness remains separate. The last step depends on God and Christ: “a prodigious biological operation,” Teilhard wrote, “that of the redeeming incarnation.” Not so much a Second Coming as the final instantiation of an evolving divine person born in Bethlehem, Jesus is both beginning and end for Teilhard, as central to his immense loom of time as he was to Jacobus’ brief span from Adam and Eve to the end of the world.

Whether or not Teilhard as a youth at seminary was really involved in the faking of the Piltdown relics—Stephen Jay Gould thought he was, and made a circumstantial case for it in Natural History magazine in 1980—I wonder if those mismatched bones might stand metonymically for the temptation to reconcile the irreconcilable, mix the immiscible. Early in his career Teilhard was censored for unacceptable writings about original sin; in 1925—and in the very week the Scopes trial began—he signed a statement repudiating his opinions. As in the case of Galileo, it was less the threat of new knowledge that alarmed the church than the threat to doctrine. When he submitted the manuscript of The Phenomenon of Man to church censors for scrutiny in 1941—surely a year of backward progress in human evolution—it was rejected for publication, and after the war he was forbidden to teach or write on philosophical subjects. Not until after his death in 1955 did the book appear in French, and in the wake of its worldwide popularity the Holy Office—the same body that condemned Galileo—issued a warning (monitum) stating that Teilhard’s writings “abound in such ambiguities, and indeed even serious errors, as to offend Catholic doctrine,” and Catholic institutions were instructed “to protect the minds, particularly of the youth, against the dangers” they presented. Whatever Teilhard himself imagined, his thought couldn’t be easily reconciled with standard catechisms.

Then came John XXIII (recently canonized) and aggiornamento, or modernization, and the hierarchy began to perceive in Teilhard’s grand synthesis a path to resolving the tension between faith and science, which at that time seemed so urgent and so hurtful to the church. Instead of standing pat, faith had to ante up, lay a very big bet, if it was to recoup its losses. Teilhard’s thought held out the possibility that nothing needed to be given up or painstakingly reconciled; no matter how big the universe got, how long the time frame, deep time was sacred time, and the story that could be told about it could be seen to be the simple Christian story after all.

Of course the bet was hedged: “It must be regarded as an important service of Teilhard de Chardin’s that he rethought these ideas from the angle of the modern view of the world and, in spite of a not entirely unobjectionable tendency toward the biological approach, nevertheless on the whole grasped them correctly and in any case made them accessible once again”—so wrote a German theologian named Joseph Ratzinger in 1968. Such delicate reservations. Long before then I had vacated the premises.

I can’t say how or by what gradual steps the sacred calendar was erased within me, but I remember a time and place when I knew it had vanished away. It was a feast day, a holy day of obligation, in fact, August 15, the assumption of the Virgin Mary into heaven in her sanctified body. As I see it in memory I am returning from church alone along the dirt road to my house, in the Indiana August heat and dust, and—at the advancing tip of a chain of thought that I can’t recall—I said aloud I give it up; I just don’t care. I had (I thought then) no argument against it all, no case for its general untruth or absurdity; for all I knew the world was just as the church claimed it to be. I simply had no soul investment any longer in it, I was outside it then and always would be. It didn’t feel like loss, nor like liberation; it was more like the moment when you understand without surprise that you are not actually walking the streets of a strange city with odd companions but awake in your own bed. I had lost my faith, as the church would say it, though I think the reverse is just as true. In fact I’m not sure that faith was ever what I had. I think I was not capax Dei, in Augustine’s phrase: I had, and have, no capacity for God. Living in the sacred time you didn’t really need it; you didn’t even need belief. All you needed were five senses, a sacerdotal language, and the solemnities of repetition.

One by one all my family “fell away,” as the phrase used to be. My father assumed that Vatican II would be more thoroughgoing in scrubbing away indefensible doctrines than it was; what instead were removed were rituals and observances as cherished as they were peculiar, whose force in practice lay deeper than reason. My mother, for whom evolution meant mostly the advancement of the human species from exasperating stupidity and cravenness to strength and beauty, loved Teilhard, but maybe for just the reasons the church was wary of. Her other two daughters were not married by a priest, and nor was I.

It was a net loss, counted one way at least. Sacred time is also human time, linking generations to one another, binding those who do this in this way at these times with all those who in the past did likewise. My Jewish wife, from a large extended family which now includes me and our children, never had difficulty retaining many of the practices and prayers she grew up with, which connect her to past generations and to a timeless realm as well. I have never succeeded wholly in convincing her that continuing with my own traditions (those that remain) would require sincerely committing to certain metaphysical propositions, as hers—in her estimation—do not. She disputes the distinction I make between sacred and secular time. What about Halloween? A commercial holiday that the whole nation participates in, as it does in Memorial Day (both days of the dead, it occurs to me); a public community festival with roots in immemorial folk practice, that was at a particular time turned to the uses of the church. Jacobus de Voragine extols it, the feast of all the saints that ever were or ever will be, whose feast days mostly can’t be known but which fill the calendar beyond repletion. It’s among the last of the feasts he celebrates before Advent comes around again.

Presentism—the notion that everything that exists is only what can and does exist right now—is countered in metaphysics by eternalism: the idea that time is not a process but a dimension, and in that dimension all reference points have equal validity, and thus all time, past, present, and future, exists at once, extending (like space) in all directions. Augustine believed that while we live along the vanishing knife edge of the present, God has the eternalist view: God perceives time as a block, everything existing simultaneously, all complete to his sight. Teilhard might say: time is Christ’s body, and once in it we too will know all of time at once, and share that eternalist perspective.
You could say that a calendar, which seems to mark time moving from future to past, is actually an eternalist device: all possible pages, all possible dates, are already present in it, endless marchers around a Möbius strip of here-and-nowness. Most calendars measure only a year, but they also measure any year; they keep our old appointments and anniversaries forever, Christmas an eternal December 25, only the moveable feasts sliding within their fixed round of possibilities as the moon comes and goes.

I’ve never been good at keeping calendars, and my family says that I am lax on anniversaries and insufficiently moved by feast days (though I do love fireworks and Thanksgiving dinner). I keep one calendar, though: one so singular and private I can’t know if everyone, or even anyone else, has one like it—though I suspect some must. It’s without dates; the occasions that fill it have no fixed number and don’t recur in any sort of chronological order. Each is a return of some long-ago circumstance in a kind of momentary entirety: the flavor, the taste, the total sensation of it; a past moment in the present. Marcel Proust [Paris, page 132] tasting his teacake was led to remember in detail an earlier, a first instance; and (I suppose) other bites of similar cakes produced that moment for him again ever after, though perhaps with diminishing intensity. For almost all of mine I can’t discover an original, though I believe an original is what I am visited by. I can’t keep them; the calendar is self-erasing.

These instants give me nothing to ponder or to celebrate; they aren’t joyful or somber, express nothing but the intensity of felt existence. Some return many times, some never again. Sometimes they have a catalyst: lately I have felt them brought on by the deeply saturated colors of certain new cars passing me on the highway, chrome yellow, cherry red, teal. What am I reminded of? What in the chaos of my interior is being drawn out, like W. C. Fields plucking just the desired document from the apparently hopeless disorder of his rolltop desk in Man on the Flying Trapeze? Maybe nothing; maybe after all these aren’t memories—discrete moments of the past drawn into the present—but rather glimpses into a timeless time in which all moments have equal standing, are therefore not moments but the signs that Terry Eagleton says accomplish what they signify. If all that can exist in past, present, or future exists now, then the time that has passed through our consciousness, flowing continuously without marks or stops in parallel with the tick of clocks, resides there still when it is gone: choosing, in effect all by itself, what we are to know of it.

Contributor

 
John Crowley
John Crowley is the author of eleven novels, including Little, Big, the Ægypt cycle, and, most recently, Four Freedoms. He teaches creative writing at Yale University.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin, working in Richard Davidson's lab, have found that Sudarshan Kriya Yoga can help reduce the symptoms of PTSD and allow them to better manage the condition.

The original article is paywalled at the Journal of Traumatic Stress, so here is a summary from the British Psychological Society, followed the abstract of the research article.

Breathing, Meditation, and Helping PTSD

BPS News | 18/09/2014

Servicemen and women with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) could benefit from trying breathing-based meditation, a new study suggests.

Research by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, published in the Journal of Traumatic Stress, found that a practice known as Sudarshan Kriya Yoga can help sufferers better manage the condition.

This, it stated, is because this form of breathing directly affects the autonomic nervous system, which means it can have an effect on symptoms of PTSD such as hyperarousal - when a person constantly feels on guard and jumpy.

Richard Davidson, one of the authors of the study, is keen for additional research to be carried out, so physicians could eventually be able to prescribe treatment based on an individual's "cognitive and emotional style".

"Right now, a large fraction of individuals who are given any one type of therapy are not improving on that therapy," he observed.

Mr Davidson said this means the only way to improve the situation is to determine "which kinds of people will benefit most from different types of treatments"

Our breathing is radically affected by how we are feeling, e.g. short breaths with anger, long sighs with sadness etc, obviously affecting our oxygen supplies to the body and so maybe exacerbating our feelings even more. I would have thought that any regular deep breathing technique would be useful in such situations. However, the breathing technique in this study has previously been found to help with different physical ailments as well as mental health, even DNA and gene expression. It is therefore no surprise that it was found to benefit symptoms of PTSD. As the authors suggest, however, different approaches or even breathing techniques may be more helpful for different individuals. (The sudarshan kriya technique is widely used in India and worldwide through the endeavours of Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and his organisation, The Art of Living).

Chartered Psychologist Dr Kate Sparks comments:

"Our breathing is radically affected by how we are feeling - for example, short breaths with anger, long sighs with sadness - obviously affecting our oxygen supplies to the body and so maybe exacerbating our feelings even more.

"I would have thought that any regular deep breathing technique would be useful in such situations. However, the breathing technique in this study has previously been found to help with different physical ailments as well as mental health, even DNA and gene expression. It is therefore no surprise that it was found to benefit symptoms of PTSD.

"As the authors suggest, however, different approaches or even breathing techniques may be more helpful for different individuals. The sudarshan kriya technique is widely used in India and worldwide through the endeavours of Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and his organisation, The Art of Living."

* * * * *

Full Citation:
Emma M. Seppälä, EM, Nitschke, JB, Tudorascu, DL, Hayes, A, Goldstein, MR, Nguyen, DTH, Perlman, D, and Davidson, RJ. (2014, Aug 26). Breathing-Based Meditation Decreases Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Symptoms in U.S. Military Veterans: A Randomized Controlled Longitudinal Study. Journal of Traumatic Stress; 27(4): 397–405. DOI: 10.1002/jts.21936

Breathing-Based Meditation Decreases Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Symptoms in U.S. Military Veterans: A Randomized Controlled Longitudinal Study

Emma M. Seppälä1, Jack B. Nitschke, Dana L. Tudorascu, Andrea Hayes, Michael R. Goldstein, Dong T. H. Nguyen, David Perlman, and Richard J. Davidson

Abstract

Given the limited success of conventional treatments for veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), investigations of alternative approaches are warranted. We examined the effects of a breathing-based meditation intervention, Sudarshan Kriya yoga, on PTSD outcome variables in U.S. male veterans of the Iraq or Afghanistan war. We randomly assigned 21 veterans to an active (n = 11) or waitlist control (n = 10) group. Laboratory measures of eye-blink startle and respiration rate were obtained before and after the intervention, as were self-report symptom measures; the latter were also obtained 1 month and 1 year later. The active group showed reductions in PTSD scores, d = 1.16, 95% CI [0.20, 2.04], anxiety symptoms, and respiration rate, but the control group did not. Reductions in startle correlated with reductions in hyperarousal symptoms immediately postintervention (r = .93, p < .001) and at 1-year follow-up (r = .77, p = .025). This longitudinal intervention study suggests there may be clinical utility for Sudarshan Kriya yoga for PTSD.

In this new mini review from Frontiers in Cognition, Lippelt, Hommel, and Colzato compare three meditation types (focused attention, open monitoring and loving kindness) in terms of their effects on attention, conflict monitoring, and creativity.

The three research areas the authors covered in this review (attentional control, performance monitoring, and creativity or thinking style) seem to imply the operation of extended neural networks, which might suggest that meditation operates on neural communication, perhaps by impacting neurotransmitter systems. They speculate:

Finally, it may be interesting to consider individual differences more systematically. If meditation really affects interactions between functional and neural networks, it makes sense to assume that the net effect of meditation of performance depends on the pre-experimental performance level of the individual—be it in terms of compensation (so that worse performers benefit more) or predisposition (so that some are more sensitive to meditation interventions).

Full Citation: 
Lippelt DP, Hommel B and Colzato LS. (2014, Sep 23). Focused attention, open monitoring and loving kindness meditation: effects on attention, conflict monitoring, and creativity – A review. Frontiers in Psychology: Cognition. 5:1083. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01083

Focused attention, open monitoring and loving kindness meditation: effects on attention, conflict monitoring, and creativity – A review

Dominique P. Lippelt, Bernhard Hommel and Lorenza S. Colzato

• Cognitive Psychology Unit, Institute for Psychological Research and Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition, Leiden University, Leiden, Netherlands

Meditation is becoming increasingly popular as a topic for scientific research and theories on meditation are becoming ever more specific. We distinguish between what is called focused Attention meditation, open Monitoring meditation, and loving kindness (or compassion) meditation. Research suggests that these meditations have differential, dissociable effects on a wide range of cognitive (control) processes, such as attentional selection, conflict monitoring, divergent, and convergent thinking. Although research on exactly how the various meditations operate on these processes is still missing, different kinds of meditations are associated with different neural structures and different patterns of electroencephalographic activity. In this review we discuss recent findings on meditation and suggest how the different meditations may affect cognitive processes, and we give suggestions for directions of future research.

Introduction

Even though numerous studies have shown meditation to have significant effects on various affective and cognitive processes, many still view meditation as a technique primarily intended for relaxation and stress reduction. While meditation does seem to reduce stress and to induce a relaxing state of mind, it can also have significant effects on how people perceive and process the world around them and alter the way they regulate attention and emotion. Lutz et al. (2008) proposed that the kind of effect meditation has is likely to differ according to the kind of meditation that is practiced. Currently the most researched types of meditation include focused attention meditation (FAM), open monitoring meditation (OMM), and loving-kindness meditation (LKM). Unfortunately, however, the methodological diversity across the available studies with regard to sample characteristics, tasks used, and experimental design (within vs. between group; with vs. without control condition) renders the comparison between them difficult. This review is primarily focused on FAM and OMM studies¹ and on how these two (proto-)types of meditation are associated with different neural underpinnings and differential effects on attentional control, conflict monitoring, and creativity.

Meditation Types

Usually, FAM is the starting point for any novice meditator (Lutz et al., 2008; Vago and Silbersweig, 2012). During FAM the practitioner is required to focus attention on a chosen object or event, such as breathing or a candle flame. To maintain this focus, the practitioner has to constantly monitor the concentration on the chosen event so to avoid mind wandering (Tops et al., 2014). Once practitioners become familiar with the FAM technique and can easily sustain their attentional focus on an object for a considerable amount of time, they often progress to OMM. During OMM the focus of the meditation becomes the monitoring of awareness itself (Lutz et al., 2008; Vago and Silbersweig, 2012). In contrast to FAM, there is no object or event in the internal or external environment that the meditator has to focus on. The aim is rather to stay in the monitoring state, remaining attentive to any experience that might arise, without selecting, judging, or focusing on any particular object. To start, however, the meditator will focus on a chosen object, as in FAM, but will subsequently gradually reduce this focus, while emphasizing the activity of monitoring of awareness.

Loving-kindness meditation incorporates elements of both FAM and OMM (Vago and Silbersweig, 2012). Meditators focus on developing love and compassion first for themselves and then gradually extend this love to ever more “unlikeable” others (e.g., from self to a friend, to someone one does not know, to all living beings one dislikes). Any negative associations that might arise are supposed to be replaced by positive ones such as pro-social or empathic concern.

Meditation Types, Attentional Scope, and Endogenous Attention

Whereas some meditation techniques require the practitioners to focus their attention on only a certain object or event, other techniques allow any internal or external experiences or sensations to enter awareness. Different meditation techniques might therefore bias the practitioner to either a narrow or broad spotlight of attention. This distinction is thought to be most evident with regard to FAM and OMM. FAM induces a narrow attentional focus due to the highly concentrative nature of the meditation, whereas OMM induces a broader attentional focus by allowing and acknowledging any experiences that might arise during meditation.

In a seminal study, Slagter et al. (2007) investigated the effects of 3 months of intensive Vipassana meditation (an OMM-like meditation) training on the allocation of attention over time as indexed by the “attentional-blink” (AB) deficit, thought to result from competition between two target stimuli (T1 and T2) for limited attentional resources. After the training, because of the acquisition of a broader attentional scope, participants showed a smaller AB deficit as an indication of being able to distribute their brain-resource allocation to both T1 and T2. The reduced AB size was accompanied by a smaller T1-elicited P3b, a brain-potential thought to index attentional resource allocation.

A more recent study comparing meditators (trained in mindfulness-based stress-reduction) to non-meditators found that meditators show evidence of more accurate and efficient visual attention (Hodgins and Adair, 2010). Meditators monitored events more accurately in a concentration task and showed less interference from invalid cues in a visual selective attention task. Furthermore, meditators showed improved flexible visual attention by identifying a greater number of alternative perspectives in multiple perspectives images. Another study compared OMM and FAM meditators on a sustained attention task (Valentine and Sweet, 1999): OMM meditators outperformed FAM meditators when the target stimulus was unexpected. This might indicate that the OMM meditators had a wider attentional scope, even though the two meditator groups did not differ in performance when the stimulus was expected.

Electrophysiological evidence for meditation-induced improvements in attention comes from a recent study in which Vipassana meditators performed an auditory oddball task before and after meditation (in one session) and random thinking (in another session; Delgado-Pastor et al., 2013). The meditation session was composed by three parts. First, an initial part of self-regulation of attention focused on sensations from air entering and leaving the body at the nostrils. Second, a central part of focusing attention on sensations from all parts of the body while maintaining the non-reactivity and acceptance attitude. Last, a final brief part aimed on generating feelings of compassion and unconditional love to all living beings. Meditators showed greater P3b amplitudes to target tones after meditation than either before meditation or after the no-meditation session, an effect that is thought to reflect enhanced attentional engagement during the task.

Support for the assumption that FAM induces a narrow attentional focus comes from several studies that show that FAM increases sustained attention (Carter et al., 2005; Brefczynski-Lewis et al., 2007). Neuroimaging evidence by Hasenkamp et al. (2012) suggests that FAM is associated with increased activity in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), which has been associated with “the repetitive selection of relevant representations or recurrent direction of attention to those items” (D’Esposito, 2007, p. 765 ). Thus, in the context of meditation experience, dlPFC might be involved in repeatedly redirecting or sustaining attention to the object of focus. It would be interesting to investigate whether this pattern of activation is unique to FAM or whether other kinds of meditation lead to similar increases in activity in the dlPFC. If the dlPFC is indeed involved in the repetitive redirection of attention to the same object of focus, then it should not be as active during OMM during which attention is more flexible and continuously shifted to different objects. Alternatively, however, if during OMM the meditator achieves a state of awareness where (only) awareness itself is the object of focus, the dlPFC might again play a role in maintaining this focus. Similarly, it would be interesting to examine how LKM modulates attentional processes and the activation of the dlPFC.

In a follow-up study, Hasenkamp and Barsalou (2012) found that, during rest, the right dlPFC connectivity to the right insula was improved in experienced meditators compared to novices. The authors suggest that improved connectivity with the right insula might reflect enhanced interoceptive attention to internal bodily states. In a support of this idea, a recent study reports that mindfulness training predicted greater activity in posterior insula regions during interoceptive attention to respiratory sensation (Farb et al., 2013). Various studies have shown theta activity to be increased during meditation, primarily OMM-like meditations (e.g., Baijal and Srinivasan, 2010; Cahn et al., 2010; Tsai et al., 2013; for review see Travis and Shear, 2010). This increase in theta activity, usually mid-frontal, has been suggested to be involved in sustaining internalized attention. As such, similar increases in theta activity would be expected for LKM during which attention is also internalized, but not during FAM where attention is explicitly focused on an external object, even though typically the object of meditation in FAM, at least for beginners, is the breath, which is internal.

Additionally, active mindfulness meditation (versus rest) was associated with increased functional connectivity between the dorsal attention network, the Default Mode Network and the right prefrontal cortex (Froeliger et al., 2012). Thus, meditation practice seems to enhance connectivity within and between attentional networks and a number of broadly distributed other brain regions subserving attention, self-referential, and emotional processes.

Meditation Types and Conflict Monitoring

A fundamental skill acquired through meditation is the ability to monitor the attentional focus in order to “redirect it” in the case of conflicting thoughts or external events. Not surprisingly, several studies have already shown improvements in conflict monitoring after meditation. Tang et al. (2007) investigated whether a training technique based on meditational practices called integrative body-mind training (IBMT; most similar to OMM) could improve performance on an attentional network task (ANT; Fan et al., 2002). The ANT was developed to keep track of three different measures, namely orientation, alerting, and conflict resolution. While IBMT had no effect on orienting and alerting scores, it did improve conflict resolution. In a similar study FAM and OMM were compared on an emotional variant of the ANT. Both types of meditation improved conflict resolution compared to a relaxation control group (Ainsworth et al., 2013). Surprisingly, there was no difference between the two meditation types, even though, mindfulness disposition at baseline (i.e., trait mindfulness) was also associated with improved conflict resolution.

Further evidence for improvements in conflict monitoring come from a study investigating the effect of 6-week long FAM trainig (versus relaxation training and a waiting-list group) on a discrimination task intended to investigate the relationship between attentional load and emotional processing (Menezes et al., 2013). Participants had to respond to whether or not the orientation of two lines presented to either side of an emotionally distracting picture was the same. Importantly, those who underwent a meditation or relaxation training commited fewer errors than the waiting list control group. Furthermore, error rates were lowest in the meditation group, higest in the waiting list group, while the relaxation group scored in between. With regard to emotional regulation meditators showed less emotional interference than the other two groups when attentional load was low, and only meditators showed a relationship between the amount of weekly practice and reductions in emotional interference.

In a study of Xue et al. (2011), meditation-naïve participants were randomly assigned to either an 11 h IBMT course or a relaxation training. Compared to the relaxation training, the IBMT group showed higher network efficiency and degree of connectivity of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). As the ACC is involved in processes such as self-regulation, detecting interference and errors, and overcoming impasses (e.g., Botvinick et al., 2004), improvements in ACC functioning might well be the neural mechanism by which IBMT improves conflict resolution. In an interesting study of Hasenkamp et al. (2012), experienced meditators engaged in FAM inside an fMRI scanner and pushed a button whenever they started to mind-wander. The moment of awareness of mind-wandering was associated with increased activity in the dorsal ACC. Thus, as the mind starts to wander during meditation, the ACC might detect this “error” and feed it back to executive control networks (Botvinick et al., 1999; Carter and van Veen, 2007), so that attention can be refocused. Various other studies have also shown improvements in ACC functioning after meditation (Lazar et al., 2000; Baerentsen et al., 2001; Tang et al., 2009, 2010). Hölzel et al. (2007) compared experienced and novice meditators during a concentrative meditation (akin to FAM) and found that the experienced meditators showed greater activity in the rostral ACC during meditation than the novices, even though the two groups did not differ on an arithmetic control task. Similar results were obtained in another study comparing novices and experienced meditators (Baron Short et al., 2007) by showing more activity in the ACC during FAM compared to a control task. The activity in the ACC was more consistent and sustained for experienced meditators. Related to that, Buddhist monks exhibited more activity in the ACC during FAM than during OMM (Manna et al., 2010). This suggests that the effects of meditation on the ACC and conflict monitoring do not seem to be limited to temporary state effects but carry over into daily life as a more stable “trait.” Future large scale longitudinal studies should to be conducted to address this issue and to disentangle short-term and long-term effects on conflict monitoring.

Improved conflict monitoring does not necessarily entail increased brain activity. Kozasa et al. (2012) compared meditators and non-meditators on a Stroop task in which semantic associations of words have to be suppressed to retrieve the color of the word. While behavioral performance was not significantly different for the two groups, compared to meditators, the non-meditators showed more activity in brain regions related to attention and motor control during incongruent trials. Given that the aim of many meditation techniques is to monitor the automatic arise of distractible sensations, such skill may become effortless by repeated meditation, therefore leading to less brain activity during the Stroop task. LKM has been shown to improve conflict resolution, as well, when LKM and a control group were compared on a Stroop task. The LKM group was faster in responding to both congruent and incongruent trials, and the difference between congruent and incongruent trials (the congruency effect) was smaller as well (Hunsinger et al., 2013). As LKM incorporates elements of both FAM and OMM, it would be interesting to investigate how the effect size associated with LKM may be positioned in between FAM and OMM.

Recently, meditators and non-meditators were compared with regard to measures of cortical silent period and short intra cortical inhibition over the motor cortex before and after a 60 min long meditation (for the meditators) or cartoon (for the non-meditators), respectively, measuring GABA_B receptor-mediated inhibitory neurotransmission and GABA_A receptor-mediated inhibitory neurotransmission (Guglietti et al., 2013). Given that deficits related to cortical silent periods in the motor cortex had been previously associated with psychiatric illness and emotional deregulation, the activity over the motor cortex was measured. No differences were found between meditators and non-meditators before the meditation/cartoon. However, after meditation there was a significant increase in GABA_B activity in the meditator group. The authors suggest that “improved cortical inhibition of the motor cortex, through meditation, helps reduce perceptions of environmental threat and negative affect through top down modulation of excitatory neural activity” (Guglietti et al., 2013, p. 400). Future research might investigate whether similar GABA related mechanisms underlie the suppression of distracting stimuli during meditation and how different types of meditation might have distinguishable effects on these processes.

Meditation Types and Creativity

The scientific evidence regarding the connection between meditation and creativity is inconsistent. While some studies support a strong positive impact of meditation practice on creativity (Orme-Johnson and Granieri, 1977; Orme-Johnson et al., 1977), others found only a weak association or no effect at all (Cowger, 1974; Domino, 1977). Recently, Zabelina et al. (2011) found that a short-term effect of mindfulness manipulation (basically OMM) facilitated creative elaboration at high levels of neuroticism. As pointed out by Colzato et al. (2012), these inconsistencies might reflect a failure to distinguish between different and dissociable processes underlying creativity, such as convergent and divergent thinking (Guilford, 1950). Accordingly, Colzato et al. (2012) compared the impact of FAM and OMM on convergent thinking (a process of identifying one “correct” answer to a well-defined problem) and divergent thinking (a process aiming at generating many new ideas) in meditation practitioners. Indeed, the two types of meditation affected the two types of thinking in opposite ways: while convergent thinking tended to improve after FAM, divergent thinking was significantly enhanced after OMM. Colzato et al. (2012) suggest that FAM and OMM induce two different, to some degree opposite cognitive-control states that support state-compatible thinking styles, such as convergent and divergent thinking, respectively. In contrast to convergent thinking, divergent thinking benefits from a control state that promotes quick “jumps” from one thought to another by reducing the top-down control of cognitive processing—as achieved by OMM.

Conclusion

Research on meditation is still in its infancy but our understanding of the underlying functional and neural mechanisms is steadily increasing. However, a serious shortcoming in the current literature is the lack of studies that systematically distinguish between and compare different kinds of meditation on various cognitive, affective or executive control tasks—a criticism that applies to neuroscientific studies in particular. Further progress will require a better understanding of the functional aims of particular meditation techniques and their strategies to achieve them. It will also be important to more systematically assess short- and long-term effects of meditation, as well as the (not yet understood) impact of meditation experience (as present in practitioners but not novices). For instance, several approaches (like Buddhism) favor a particular sequence of acquiring meditation skills (from FAM to OMM) but evidence that this sequence actually matters is lacking. Moreover, the neural mechanisms underlying meditation effects are not well understood. It might be interesting that the three main research topics we have covered in the present review (attentional control, performance monitoring, and creativity or thinking style) imply the operation of extended neural networks, which might suggest that meditation operates on neural communication, perhaps by impacting neurotransmitter systems. Finally, it may be interesting to consider individual differences more systematically. If meditation really affects interactions between functional and neural networks, it makes sense to assume that the net effect of meditation of performance depends on the pre-experimental performance level of the individual—be it in terms of compensation (so that worse performers benefit more) or predisposition (so that some are more sensitive to meditation interventions).

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Footnotes

1. ^ It is important to note that even though this mini review is based on the theoretical framework of distinguishing FAM and OMM, another one includes the distinction between concentrative meditations, practices that regulate or control attention/awareness, and meditation practices which instead do not explicitly target attentional/effortful control (Chiesa and Malinowski, 2011; see also Chiesa, 2012 for a recent review on the difficulty of defining Mindfulness). Moreover, Travis and Shear (2010) have pointed out a third meditation category besides FAM and OMM: the automatic self-transcending which trascends FAM and OMM through the absence of both (a) focus and (b) individual control or effort.

References at the Frontiers site

The Embodied Mind - The Tricycle Interview with Philosopher Evan Thompson

Via Tricycle Magazine, this is a cool interview with philosopher Evan Thompson (best known as a co-author of The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, with Francisco Varela and Eleanor Rosch). Thompson's eagerly awaited new book is Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy, scheduled to be released on November 11, 2014.

The Embodied Mind

An interview with philosopher Evan Thompson

To be fruitful, the encounter between Buddhism and science demands intellectual boundary crossers—rare scholars who are expert in both realms, who can translate ideas across the divide and identify and critically appraise assumptions each side brings to the table. The philosopher and cognitive scientist Evan Thompson is one of these. Thoroughly grounded in Western and Buddhist philosophy and learned in science, Thompson has been dedicated to cross-cultural and interdisciplinary dialogue between Buddhism and cognitive science for over two decades.

Bringing clashing points of view into conversation is a calling Thompson was born into. He is the son of the social philosopher and cultural critic William Irwin Thompson, who founded the Lindisfarne Association—an Esalen-like think tank and retreat devoted to “the study and realization of new planetary culture.” Thompson grew up and was homeschooled at Lindisfarne, so from the time he was young—“a little kid gripped by philosophical questions”—he was surrounded by what he describes as the “passionate and sophisticated debate” of diverse thinkers from very different spiritual and academic backgrounds.

It was at Lindisfarne that Thompson met the renowned scholar of Tibetan Buddhism Robert Thurman. Thompson was so inspired by Thurman’s vision of philosophy (as “a transformative path of rational liberation with a global heritage,” Thompson wrote in a tribute to Thurman) that he entered Amherst College at the age of 16 to study with him. It was also at Lindisfarne that Thompson met the Chilean biologist, philosopher, and neuroscientist Francisco Varela, now recognized as the founding father of the dialogue between Buddhism and cognitive science. Varela lived for several months at Lindisfarne as a Scholar-in-Residence and became a Lindisfarne Fellow and a family friend. Later, when Thompson was a graduate student, he studied with Varela at the École Polytechnique in Paris and in 1991 coauthored with Varela and the psychologist Eleanor Rosch The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. This was the first academic book to explore what Buddhist philosophy and meditation practices could offer cognitive science and to promote an “embodied” or “enactive” view of cognition; in tandem with Varela’s Mind and Life meetings with the Dalai Lama, which had begun in 1987, their book launched the Buddhism-cognitive science dialogue. The Embodied Mind has since been translated into seven languages and will be published in a second edition in 2015.

Thompson is now a professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia. His other books include Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind and the forthcoming Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy.

Tricycle spoke with Thompson at a conference that he co-organized at the University of California at Berkeley, where 15 top scholars from the field of Buddhism and science gathered to tackle the question “Given the current critiques of the Buddhism and cognitive science encounter, how might we proceed?” Thompson is among those who are steering the conversation toward not only compatibilities but also differences, even contradictions, because that is where the partners in dialogue have most to learn from each other—and where, if given the chance, they may even find surprising complementarity.

—Linda Heuman, Contributing Editor

Almost two and a half decades ago, in The Embodied Mind, you critiqued a notion of mind that was already prevalent then and that continues to frame much of the current neuroscience research on meditation. What is that view, and what is wrong with it? 

We criticized the view that the mind is made up of representations inside the head. The cognitive science version says that the mind is a computer—the representations are the software, and the brain is the hardware. Although cognitive scientists today don’t think the brain works the way a digital computer does, many of them, especially if they’re neuroscientists, still think the mind is something in the head or the brain. And this idea shows up in the neuroscience of meditation. But this idea is confused. It’s like saying that flight is inside the wings of a bird. The mind is relational. It’s a way of being in relation to the world. You need a brain, just as the bird needs wings, but the mind exists at a different level—the level of embodied being in the world.

What’s your alternative view of the mind? 

The alternative view we put forward is that cognition is a form of embodied action. “Embodied” means that the rest of the body, not just the brain, is crucial; “action” means that agency—the capacity to act in the world—is central. Cognition is an expression of our bodily agency. We inhabit a meaningful world because we bring forth or enact meaning. We called this view “enaction” or the “enactive approach.”

In the enactive approach, being human is a matter of inhabiting the human world of culture and shared bodily practices. Of course we need our brain to do this, but we also need that world to be in place in order for the human brain to develop properly. The brain is what philosophers call a necessary “enabling condition” for mind and meaning, while enculturation is a necessary enabling condition for the brain. What’s important is not just what is inside the brain but what the brain is inside of—the larger space of the body and culture. That is where we find mind and meaning.

It was early in your career—you were a doctoral student—when you cowrote The Embodied Mind. Looking back, do you have any regrets—things you would have changed, knowing now what you didn’t know then?
There was a certain way we talked about mindfulness that I now think is wrong. Sometimes we described it as a special kind of inner observation that lets you see the way your mind really is apart from being mindful—as if your mind were a box and your looking into it revealed what was there all along.

Do you mean the notion that in meditation you see “what really is there”?
Yes, where “see” means looking inside to see how your mind really is apart from such looking. For example, we said that Buddhist meditation lets you see that your experience is really discontinuous and momentary, rather than a continuous flow. But one could just as well argue that certain kinds of meditation make experience gappy and then reinforce that gappiness by giving you a theoretical system that says that’s how things really are, as the Buddhist Abhidharma philosophical systems do.

If we go back to the neuroscience of meditation, the idea that mindfulness is a kind of inner observation reinforces the mistaken idea that the mind is in the head. It leads to thinking of mindfulness as a special kind of inner monitoring that scientists using brain imaging tools can identify with the activity of neural networks. This is a mistake. Mindfulness depends on the brain but isn’t inside the brain. Certain neural networks may be necessary for mindfulness, but mindfulness itself consists in a whole host of integrated mind-body skills in ethically directed action in the world. It’s not a neural network but how you live your life in the world.

Is the problem you are getting at the widespread assumption that mindfulness meditation is not mediated by concepts?
Experience and concepts are interdependent. Whether there are nonconceptual modes of experience is a complicated matter that both Buddhist and Western philosophers have argued about a lot. But in most cases of human experience you can’t have one without the other. Take science. Here you observe things, of course, but you can’t see them properly unless you have the right concepts. If you just look through a microscope with no guidance on how to look at what you see, you have no clue what you’re looking at. Even if you’re doing high school biology, you need to have concepts like “cell wall” or “organelle”—to say nothing of what’s happening at the edge of scientific discovery, where you’re using new imaging technologies and learning to see things. So observation is happening there, of course. But also a lot of conceptualizing.

Similarly, if you go on a Vipassana retreat, you may spend the first day or so watching your breath, but then you’re given a system of concepts for practicing mindfulness—concepts like “moment-to-moment arising,” “pleasant versus unpleasant,” “sensation,” “intention,” “attention,” and maybe some categories from the list of elements, or dhammas, in Theravada Buddhist philosophy. It’s a silent retreat, so this is the only thing you hear, and everyone else around you is doing the same thing, so this shapes how and what you experience. You get a powerful and socially reinforced conceptual system for making sense of what you experience. That system in that context may help to bring about certain nonconceptual experiences, but the minute you start thinking about them—which there’s no way to avoid doing—you’re back in the land of concepts.



Practitioners might hear something like this and wonder, “If I’m not turning inward and seeing things as they are in and of themselves independently of my observing them, then what is my practice about?” 
I’d say it’s about commitment to a certain way of life and participation in a community (sangha) that supports that way of life. It’s about cultivating what we think are beneficial qualities of mind and body, and beneficial ways of acting or being in the world, as in the eightfold path. I’d say that practice in this full sense of the term, which goes well beyond sitting meditation, is its own purpose or goal and is itself the expression of a noble way of life. It’s what philosophers and psychologists call autotelic, an end in itself, not a tool or instrument for something else.

I object when people reduce practice in this rich sense to a tool or instrument. Some people use the analogy that meditation is like an inner telescope: Outer science uses physical telescopes for looking at the stars, and inner science uses meditation for looking at the mind. I don’t like that analogy. It makes you think of your relationship to your own mind in an instrumental way. Your relationship to yourself is precisely not an instrumental one. A telescope is a tool for looking at something separate and distant. Meditation isn’t like that. If you think that awareness is an instrument that enables you to look within, on that analogy you’re thinking of the inner realm as one of objectivity—except it’s not, because it’s subjectivity. If you think of meditation that way, you can’t help turning your mind into an object, which is precisely what the mind is not. So here I think there is an important difference between meditation and scientific observation, despite the importance of concepts for making sense of both. Meditation can be very powerful and transformative: it can be very generative of insight, deep understanding, and connectedness. But not because it’s an instrument or tool that enables you to see a hidden inner realm.

You mentioned that the appropriation of mindfulness as an object of scientific scrutiny and research has created new forms of self-understanding for Western meditators, so that meditators start to identify themselves in terms of their inner life and their subjectivity in terms of mindfulness. How does that happen?
The ideas I’m working with here come from the Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking. He calls them “looping effects” and “making up people.” When we categorize people—as poor, homeless, obese, gifted, and so on—we also change them as a result of how we interact with them based on these categories and how they come to think of themselves in terms of those categories. This is the “looping effect.” Sometimes we even create new kinds of people who didn’t exist before. This is “making up people.” Take the category “citizen.” We categorize ourselves as citizens, but there weren’t any citizens before there were legal criteria and government procedures for applying this category. Hacking argues that this happens especially with medical and clinical categories.

I wonder whether this is happening with “mindfulness.” An originally Buddhist notion is adapted for secular clinical programs like MBSR (Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction) and MBCT (Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy). To assess the efficacy of such programs, specifically the idea that there’s a distinct “mindfulness” component, we need a way to scientifically define and delimit that concept. This leads to various scales for measuring mindfulness—based on what people report about themselves in response to questionnaires—and efforts to assess mindfulness behaviorally. Also, some scientists think there may be biological markers of mindfulness, such as the activation of certain brain networks. I’ve even heard some scientists and Buddhist teachers say that if we knew what these biomarkers were, we could use them to help people become more mindful. So we already have looping effects: We interact with people differently and they think of themselves differently because of this new version of mindfulness that our culture—which is to say, we—is creating. We seem to be making up a new kind of “mindful person.” Think of the mindful education movement and mindful parenting, or mindful eating and mindful sex, or mindfulness-based mind fitness training in the military—the list goes on.

Why is it important to recognize that this process is occurring in the popularization of mindfulness?
It sets up a dichotomy between “mindful” and “unmindful,” where we fixate on mindfulness so that it becomes a kind of fetish, and that blinds us to how the concept or category gets used, especially socially and politically. One of Hacking’s points—and here he’s really taking his lead from Michel Foucault—is that there are always social and political interests and power dynamics at work in looping effects and in making up people. People always get organized in certain ways for certain ends. Why should we think that it’s any different in the case of the modern mindfulness movement? The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek has argued that the current fetishizing of mindfulness fits perfectly into a consumerist corporate culture that needs to pacify itself from the endless stress of modern capitalism. My way of doing philosophy is very different from Zizek’s, but I have to agree with him on this point. Those of us who work in this area have a responsibility to keep these looping effects and their social and political ramifications in critical focus. We need to know what we’re gaining—and for the record, I do think that MBSR and MBCT are very beneficial—and what we’re losing, or what we’re creating that isn’t beneficial. Buddhist scholars are contributing to this critical project by tracing the historical and philosophical evolution of the concept of mindfulness so that we can see how the Buddhist modernist and secular versions get generated. I try to contribute from the perspectives of cognitive science and philosophy by showing why it’s not right to think of mindfulness as being in the head or brain, so we can see that it’s social, relational, and ethical.

In 1996, Francis Crick stated that consciousness is now largely a scientific problem. As a philosopher, do you agree? If not, why not?
No, I don’t agree. There are important conceptual or philosophical issues that shape how we think about consciousness and how we investigate it. Crick’s viewpoint, which most neuroscientists share, is that consciousness is in the brain, so the problem comes down to finding the neural correlates of consciousness. That’s another expression of the mind-is-in-the-head idea. It’s like saying a cathedral is in the stones. You need stones, of course, and you need them to be connected in the right way. But what makes something a cathedral is also iconography, tradition, and its being a place of worship. In other words, the larger context in which the structure is embedded helps constitute it as a cathedral. In an analogous way, consciousness isn’t in the neurons or their connections. Here the larger context that constitutes consciousness—in the sense of sentience, or felt awareness—is biological: consciousness is a life-regulation process of the whole body in which the brain is embedded. In the case of human consciousness, the context is also psychological and social. So even if we suppose—as I think it’s reasonable to do, though some Buddhists will disagree—that the brain is necessary for consciousness, it doesn’t follow that consciousness is in the brain. There are many scientific questions about how the brain enables consciousness, but those questions are miscast if they’re made into the problem of how to locate consciousness in the brain in terms of its neural correlates.

It’s also worth pointing out that Crick thought we might have a solution to the scientific problem of consciousness by the year 2000! And we still don’t have one.

So you don’t think progress in understanding consciousness is necessarily about doing more experiments?
No. I mean, experiments are great, but we need conceptual work, theoretical work. We may need to radically change how we think about things in ways that are still not clear to us.

You have said that in seeking a way forward for the Buddhism and cognitive science dialogue, philosophy should take the lead. Why?
Buddhism has very sophisticated and technical traditions of philosophy, every bit as sophisticated and technical as Western philosophy. Here we enter the arena of concepts, analysis, abstraction, models, and arguments, all of which bring us closer to science. Buddhist philosophy is very concerned with analyzing cognition, concepts, and consciousness—the subject matter of cognitive science. So this is the arena where I see Buddhism and science as having a lot to say to each other.

I also want to foreground problems of meaning—how these different traditions conceptualize the mind and what’s at stake for them in doing so. It’s really the humanities that need to take the lead in this discussion now, not neuroscience. I think science is really important, so this is not an anti-science point; it’s an anti-scientistic point. When you’re concerned with meaning, you enter into a different space of discussion, where scientific methods are not sufficient.

I am particularly concerned to deploy that thought against the idea that the neuroscience of meditation should lead the way in this dialogue, because that’s very much what the Buddhism-science discussion has been about for the past five or ten years now.

Has there been too much focus on the neuroscience of meditation?
Yes, if we mistake this work to be a genuine Buddhism-cognitive science dialogue about the mind. Buddhism isn’t reducible to meditation—most Buddhists throughout history haven’t practiced sitting meditation. And cognitive science isn’t the same as neuroscience; it’s a broader endeavor concerned with a comprehensive scientific understanding of the mind and includes not just neuroscience but psychology, linguistics, computer science and AI, cognitive anthropology, and philosophy.

A cognitive science approach to meditation is concerned not with meditation per se but with using meditation to cast new light on basic cognitive phenomena like attention or consciousness. This means using meditation to generate new data and to test rival theories and models of the mind or to devise new ones. This can be especially valuable for the neuroscience of consciousness in conjunction with psychology and cognitive anthropology.

There is a widespread assumption that once certain metaphysical commitments are taken off the table—karma, rebirth, and the possibility of enlightenment on the side of Buddhism; physicalism, reductionism, and the causal closure principle on the side of science—Buddhism and science are well-matched enterprises because they are both empirical systems interested in investigating the nature of reality. University of Michigan professor Donald Lopez has argued that such bracketing doesn’t actually work to produce compatibility, because it takes out of play the most foundational topics on both sides, topics that are both regulative principles and the site of intractable differences. Do you think this strategy works?
I think it has worked sometimes. In some way, the Mind and Life dialogues have been a paradigm of that bracketing strategy. But the most interesting moments in those dialogues are when the brackets come off. For example, to my mind, the richest of those dialogues is one of the early ones that was about the states of sleeping, dreaming, and dying, seen both from the Tibetan Buddhist perspective and from the perspective of Western science, so you have the neuroscientific viewpoint about the nature of consciousness confronting the Buddhist viewpoint. There’s a moment when the Dalai Lama gives an explanation of his view of the dying process and of the subsequent bardos, a traditional Tibetan teaching, in the presence of the scientists. And the scientists push back against the idea that there is a consciousness that could somehow have a life apart from the brain. So the brackets are off and these views are confronting each other. Those are the moments I always look for.

Are there other strategies that might be more effective than bracketing for a meaningful Buddhism-science encounter?
A different strategy, the one I use, is to conduct the dialogue in the arena of cross-cultural philosophy. Here the dialogue partner on the Buddhist side is Buddhist philosophy. In philosophy, everything can be up for grabs, but any move you make needs argumentative justification. Philosophy is concerned with issues of meaning. Science must always presuppose a space of meaningfulness that it can’t fully account for, and philosophy is concerned with that. Philosophy can show the limitations of certain scientific viewpoints—as I was doing just now with Crick’s view of consciousness—so we can see more clearly the phenomena we’re trying to understand. The Buddhist philosophical tradition becomes very important here, because it has original insights and arguments to offer.

From this cross-cultural philosophical perspective, we can’t take science for granted; we have to remember that it operates within a human community of shared norms and values and practices—what phenomenologists call the “lifeworld.” Science itself is a social practice that has the force and meaning it has because of its place in our lifeworld. Science can change the lifeworld, but it can never step completely outside it and provide some absolutely neutral perspective. To put the point another way, philosophy is concerned with the meaning of science—something that science on its own can’t tell us. And Buddhist philosophy is as relevant as Western philosophy for thinking about the meaning of science.

This perspective can also help us to remember that there are different individuals and communities in the Buddhism-science encounter, and they have different things at stake. The Dalai Lama is a Tibetan refugee and a political figure, and so he’s going to speak from a particular perspective; he has certain interests—intellectual and political and personal—that are motivating his participation in the dialogue. Buddhists like B. Alan Wallace and Matthieu Ricard are scientifically educated Westerners who have become Buddhists, so they’re going to have a different stake in the dialogue. Tibetans like Thupten Jinpa, who was brought up in the refugee community and then was educated at a Western university, are going to have another perspective. Or take Francisco Varela, the founding scientist of the Mind and Life Institute, who was a brilliant neuroscientist and became a Buddhist through a charismatic Tibetan Buddhist modernist teacher. In my own case, I grew up in the 1970s at the Lindisfarne Association, an institute that brought together scientists (including Varela), philosophers, and contemplative teachers, and this made me want to study Asian and Western philosophy in college and graduate school. So we’re all participating in a shared discussion, but we have different backgrounds and histories. Our lifeworlds are shared, but we also have our particular emergence into them from our own places. Those kinds of things are not commented on very much, but they’re actually at the heart of the encounter. After all, it’s not really Buddhism and cognitive science that are encountering each other; it’s Buddhists and cognitive scientists.

What do you see as the way forward for Buddhism and cognitive science?
What I’d like to see is a collaborative effort to develop a much richer understanding of the human mind—a cognitive science of wisdom, for lack of a better term. For example, although self-knowledge is a topic of cognitive science research, it has yet to be informed by the kind of ethical and contemplative perspective that Buddhism upholds. We need to bring into cognitive science the recognition that the human mind can cultivate mature emotional and ethical capacities of benevolence along with cognitive capacities of deep insight and understanding. Right now cognitive science has a view of the mind that’s rather narrow, where the database for mental function is mostly college students. Also, informed by that kind of cognitive science endeavor, I’d like to see a much more critical perspective on what’s happening with the commodification of mindfulness and the social looping effects I was talking about before.

Do you feel that your community of researchers, who have developed and been engaged in this dialogue between Buddhism and cognitive science, have any responsibility for how that research has been appropriated?
Yes, definitely. I think it’s very important, as I was saying before, that we draw on Buddhist studies, philosophy, and cognitive science—and I would add the history of science—to keep critically in view the larger social and political context in which we’re working and how we may be contributing to deleterious kinds of looping effects. I’ve become very concerned about the growing fetishization of mindfulness I was talking about and how this is being appropriated by the corporate elite, including very right-wing elements. I was very dismayed to see the Mind and Life Institute co-sponsor an event with the American Enterprise Institute—a conservative think tank that helped give us the Iraq War—on “Happiness, Free Enterprise, and Human Flourishing.” “Free enterprise” is a contradiction in terms that has caused a huge amount of suffering in the world. It disturbs me to see what appear as dumbed-down versions of mindfulness and hyped-up science being advertised at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Some of my Buddhist and scientist friends will say that participating in such events is skillful means, but I think that’s naive. Social philosophy and policy aren’t my areas of expertise, so I don’t have readily available recommendations, but it’s become increasingly important for me to think about these matters. My hope is that Buddhist studies, cognitive science, and philosophy can work together to analyze what’s going on in ways that can be useful to activists and socially engaged Buddhists in their efforts to challenge consumerist appropriations of mindfulness and work for positive social, political, and environmental change.

Linda Heuman is a Tricycle contributing editor.

Photographs by Preston Schlebusch