Dr. Charles T. Tart, Mindfulness, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology,
Lecture 2, Part 9 of 15 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.
Student: I just had a question on where creative expression falls in the spectrum? Because I think –
CTT: Where creative expression falls?
Student: In the past I feel like my mindfulness practices have been drawing. I find that that clears my head more than anything else. Is that a valid way of practicing this, or is this some form that isn’t as fruitful?
CTT: I can’t answer that very specifically because I’ve never been able to draw anything worth a damn! But I suspect that if meditation practices were really individualized to draw on an individual’s strengths and avoid their weaknesses, that you could discover in everybody some kind of thing that really helps them focus and turn that into a kind of meditation. The one thing you’d want to be careful of is can they generalize it into something that doesn’t depend on having the external props. Because if a crisis comes along, you can’t say “Wait a minute, Mr. Attacker, I have to get into the lotus posture here or get out my drawing materials in order to get my mind composed to deal with this in a more mindful sort of way.” 
You want to start generalizing that skill to focus out to life, but probably every one of us has something that really involves us. Look up the work of the psychologist Csíkszentmihályi on flow. Flow activity, I don't know whether that is the same as meditation practice or not…
Student: It requires focus.
CTT: Or something like that. But what Csíkszentmihályi basically found is that people are very happy when they’re given a task that is demanding enough that they really have to concentrate to do it, but not so demanding that they can’t do it. We like to be pushed toward our limits, and function up at the high end, and we feel that things really flow. That’s clearly a desirable state. Whether it’s the same thing as what’s produced in meditation, I don’t think we know enough to make the comparison yet.
Tags: attention, awareness, Charles T. Tart, Charles Tart, creativity, drawing, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, intention, ITP, meditation, Transpersonal
Dr. Charles T. Tart, Mindfulness, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology,
Lecture 2, Part 8 of 15 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.
Student: Any suggestions or counsel on the state change of my leg falling asleep constantly?
CTT: Well you can worry about how you’re probably going to die from it. (Laughter) But I think you already know how far that gets you. You might try a better position.
Student: But I need pain to stay awake.
CTT: You could hire somebody with a stick to beat you once in awhile. (Laughter)
Student: I can do that for you. (Laughter)
CTT: In classical Zen they have this . . . . What do they call the guy with the stick who will come around and give you a good whack when you get too sleepy?
Student: The guy with the stick.
CTT: Somebody must do Zen. What do they . . . ?
Student: Your guilty conscience?
CTT: No. This guy is external. He’s got a big stick and he’s trained to know how to whack you across the shoulders in a way that causes a maximum amount of pain without any actual physical injury. You might want a somewhat more gentle way.
Try keeping your eyes open and sit up straight and let’s see what else I forgot…. Some traditional ways are to meditate sitting up straight with a pot of ice water balanced on your head so that (Laughter) if you start to fall asleep the ice water will drench you and wake you up.
Or the really desperate ones recommend that you meditate while sitting on the edge of a cliff. (Laughter) So if you fall asleep, you’re going to die. (Laughter) I don’t go for those kinds of extremes.
Student: Okay.
CTT: More sleep at night.
Student: Yeah.
CTT: If you’re a typical student, you’re sleep deprived.
Student: Yeah. A little. I’m the typical . . . .
CTT: It’s much harder to stay awake when you’re sleep deprived. If the pain helps you keep awake and you can regulate the pain to a level that helps you stay awake but doesn’t distract you too much from what you’re trying to do, that’s fine. Yes.
Student: Where’s the acceptance that maybe this is what I need right now, and I’ve come to this place to be open, and what has come up is I need sleep, so go into the sleep and maybe there’s something new there. I mean, if you sleep then when you wake up, do you feel refreshed and then you can sit?
Student: Well, yeah and I’ve looked at that precise . . . I mean I’ve looked at it from the somatic sense, what is my body trying to tell me? What is my relationship to pain? Why do I have trouble staying still in this part of life? So yeah, there are all these tangents I can go on, but bottom line is my foot keeps falling asleep.
Student: If your foot falls asleep in 10 minutes, try sitting on a chair.
Student: I’m sitting up straight in a chair.
CTT: Okay. For you there’s another technique which may work, and that’s walking meditation. This is more of a Vipassana technique than a concentrative technique, but these things are actually on a continuum anyway. It is definitely harder to fall asleep when you’re walking! It could be done. But it’s harder.
I don’t normally teach it and I very seldom do it myself but it’s a good thing to do if you want to meditate but you’re going to fall asleep otherwise. The basic technique is to walk very slowly. For those who are really into it, it’s really sensing the lifting of your heel, and your foot slowly pivoting forward, your foot lifting from the ground, swinging forward, and beginning to come down, and doing this all in a very slow motion. It’s really weird to see it from the outside. You would think it was a bunch of zombies in there. (Laughter)
You do that with your eyes open. It helps to see where you’re walking, but your eyes are cast down, not looking out. You can do variations on this. If real heavy sleepiness is a real problem, there are ways to stay awake. Because, remember, you’re trying to learn to focus and calm your mind. So you can experiment around that in ways that are going to be helpful to you. Or, as one of my meditation teachers once suggested, sometimes a lot of sleepiness is nature’s way of saying you need a nap.
Student: Some dynamic forms of meditation can still…. I run and that’s a great form of meditation, and I like to climb and that’s a beautiful form of meditation.
CTT: Yes. Because if you put your foot or hand in the wrong place you die.! (Laughter) Good motivation to keep you awake. Now you’re probably on a rope when climbing, but you’ll be embarrassed anyway if you fall.
Student: Yeah. So in terms of orthodoxy, Vipassana is this… I mean, I’m obviously not doing Vipassana.
CTT: I’m not a great teacher of orthodoxy. (Laughter)
Student: I didn’t know that.
CTT: If you want to be orthodox you better sit in the full lotus posture.
Student: Yeah.
CTT: And the pain from that will definitely keep you awake. Now I remember one study years ago using EEGs with transcendental meditators. The transcendental meditators showed a lot of sleep periods during their meditation. Now was that a success or was that a failure? Depends how you think about things. Had they learned the skill of sleeping while sitting up? Was this is a great accomplishment? Or was this just one more way to cop out of staying awake and meditating? I don't know the answers to any of those questions.
And there are a lot of things we don’t know, but keep in mind again the overall goal. We’re trying to learn to focus our minds better, in a gentle sort of way, that still leaves us open to other things but doesn’t leave us in the usual state of our minds running away like mad, distracting us with this, that, and the other thing. We all already know how to daydream.
I’m sure everyone one of you is at Olympic levels of daydreaming skill. You know you can go on and on and on and you don’t need special instruction on that. But to be able to just come back to the present and be here, that’s a real skill.
Tags: attention, awareness, Buddhism, Charles T. Tart, Charles Tart, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, ITP, meditation, Transpersonal, waking up
Recently the ITP faculty attended a workshop that emphasized that students feel more comfortable and work more effectively in courses where they understand the instructor’s philosophy of teaching from the beginning, so here, in a nutshell, is mine.
I always thought I was very lucky and blessed to be able to go to college and graduate school and to make a living doing stuff which, except for some necessary administrative work, was really interesting to me. I sit at my desk occasionally and think “I like to read, to talk, to think, to write, to do research, and to teach – and they pay me to do it! Wow!” By contrast, so many people must work at jobs they dislike or are bored at or make the world a worse place…
I teach this course, even though I’m old enough to retire, because I think its subject matter is interesting and important in making at least a small contribution to our individual and collective psychological and spiritual growth. That you are here at ITP, of your own volition, that you’re taking this course which is an elective, rather than required, allows me to assume that you too are really interested in its subject matter. Thus I don’t have to motivate you to keep up with the readings, to read relevant material beyond what’s required, to contribute both your enthusiasm and doubts and questions in class, and to find it a privilege to write small papers each week to share your own enthusiasm and thinking with me and your fellow students. I bring to class my interest and enthusiasm to share with you, and I’m rewarded by your interest and enthusiasm. Yes, I bing expertise in content too, but that interest and enthusiasm is more important. When I see you grappling with our material, intellectually and experientially, in class or in your papers, I feel I’m a success as a teacher!
If, God forbid, it ever reaches a point where nobody says anything interesting in class and the papers are all nothing but book reports, then it will be time to stop teaching…. I know this may happen someday if I get too old or sick, but I doubt it will happen for lack of student interest and enthusiasm.
Tags: Charles T. Tart, Charles Tart, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, ITP, teaching
Yesterday was the graduation ceremony of the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology (ITP), where I teach part time in my semi-retirement. It was very inspiring to see dozen of students receiving their PhD degrees, ready to go out into the world and marry the best of psychology with a sincere appreciation of our spiritual potentials.
ITP also awarded honorary doctorates to Michael and Justine Toms, the founders of New Dimensions Radio. For more than 30 years, this radio program, carried all over the world, has featured thought provoking interviews with all the luminaries of transpersonal psychology plus many other outstanding spiritual and philosophical figures, such as His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
What amazed and somewhat saddened me was that when I introduced Michael and Justine, old friends of mine, I asked the audience how many had listened to any New Dimensions radio programs — and only a few hands went up. I had expected almost everybody. I told them they had really been missing something if they hadn't listened.
Afterwards my wife Judy reminded me that the audience was almost exclusively the parents of our ITP students, come to watch them graduate, and it's not surprising that the parents didn't know about this major source of information on the transpersonal. That's obvious in retrospect, but didn't occur to me at the time.
This is probably just common human psychology, but each generation does tend to think of its parents as pretty square. I remember reading that surveys showed that college students enormously underestimated the number of times their parents had engaged in sex. Had to be one for each child, of course, but certainly not much more than that. Same thing for spirituality, I suppose, what did our parents know?
If you have never listened to any New Dimensions programs, though, this is your heads up! Check out their website (www.newdimensions.org), where you can listen to current programs, download past programs, etc. They do charge for downloads of past programs, but don't resent that. They is entirely a private, charitable enterprise with no rich angels, so they need listener support!
New Dimensions is not your usual shallow talk radio kind of show. I've been interviewed on those kinds of shows, where the host hasn't really read the book but is just a glib talker who hopes to goad you into something controversial to spark up dull listeners in between the commercials. It's hard to get in useful thoughts in those kind of interviews. When Michael Toms interviews people on New Dimensions, though, there's something magic about the way he draws out the interviewee's deeper knowledge and wisdom. I've been interviewed several times over the years and after each interview go away thinking something like “Gosh! Did I say those things? They sound so wise! Where did they come from?”
New Dimensions, always a great listen, whether by download, satellite, or your local FM station.
Tags: Charles T. Tart, Charles Tart, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, ITP, Justine Toms, Justine Willis Toms, Michael Toms, New Dimensions radio, Transpersonal
I'm coining a word here. Pass it around if you like it.
Neuroglamorizing. Noun. The hyping of ordinary speech by the use of frequent but superfluous terms relating to the brain and brain functioning.
Instead of talking about becoming less fearful, for example, you make it sound like your understanding is much deeper and very scientific by talking about reducing activation in your amygdala.
Dogmatic materialism is so prevalent in scientific and academic circles that you find neuroglamorizing everywhere.
I love research on brain functioning and it's very useful. The more we understand about the brain the better. But when we slip into a habit of making ourselves seem smarter this way, we may well be thinking less deeply and accurately, charmed by our own glamor, being fashionable in in the scientific know….
Tags: brain functioning, Charles T. Tart, Charles Tart, hyping, neuroglamorizing, scientism
Dr. Charles T. Tart, Mindfulness, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology,
Lecture 2, Part 7 of 15 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.
Student: The second thing I wondered about was that I definitely have a state change happen. It does seem to be consistent that the more I focus my breath the more I change into this other state. Is that normal? Is that what’s supposed to happen or is that a standard thing? Do you go through standard states when you focus?
CTT: Oh, the power I have to tell you whether you’re normal or not! (Laughter)
Student: Is it healthy or -? (Laughter)
CTT: Or transpersonal. Some people relatively normally get an altered state of consciousness of some sort, possibly several altered states of consciousness, from doing this kind of practice. Yes. And for those who are really into it, there are 8 concentrative meditation states, 8 jhanas, J-H-A-N-A-S, if I recall this correctly.
Student: J-N-A –
CTT: J-H-A-N-A-S. Jhanas. I don't know. I’m probably terribly mispronouncing it, if anybody really knows Sanskrit. And they’re considered more and more profound but again they mean a better and better quality of focus. And they involve things that I find very difficult to understand because the descriptions say things like with the third jhana you have nothing but joy, equanimity, rapture and happiness.
But then when you get a little further along you didn’t have a crude feeling like happiness anymore. It’s just joy and rapture and equanimity and then you get beyond a crude feeling like equanimity. It experientially doesn’t connect with me. I can’t make any sense out of it. So yeah, some people get them regularly.
The Buddhist contribution was again in saying that increasing concentration per se doesn’t lead you to any ultimate kind of enlightenment, because you’re not understanding yourself better, you’re just deliberately holding yourself in a different kind of state of consciousness for a period - which isn’t bad. You know, if things are terrible and you can take a vacation for five hours, well you don’t have to suffer. That’s not bad! But the Buddha eventually ended up saying that for most people, they only have to develop a basic amount of concentrative meditation skill and then they can start applying insight meditation very effectively to produce the changes that lead to enlightenment.
Student: Okay.
CTT: So yes, you’re normal. (Laughter) I suppose. Maybe if you told me about the nature of the state, I’d say wow, you’re crazy man. But I doubt it. (Laughter)
Tags: Buddhism, Charles T. Tart, Charles Tart, ITP, meditation, ordinary mind, Transpersonal
For some years now there's been a stooped, gloomy looking old woman walking past my house once a day. She's always dressed the same in a way that's odd by most standards, and she never speaks to anyone.
Without having any real reason, I slowly developed an “instinctive” dislike of her. I say “instinctive” because there was no real conscious reason for it. This feeling puzzled me, as I like to know how and why my mind works.
Lately when I've seen her I've thought about how hysterical people in the old days – people certainly not like me! - would scapegoat old women, call them witches, persecute them, even kill them when times were bad. I thought that if things ever got really bad here, the neighbors (hopefully not me!) would attack this funny old lady.
Today she stopped as she was walking by, smiled, and asked me how my daughter Cindy was doing!
The instant she smiled and spoke, obviously knowing and caring about my daughter, my whole perception of her was transformed. She was just an old lady, probably tired from walking up the hill, with a funny sense of fashion, but certainly not ugly or an old witch!
It amazes me how quickly a perception can change. For the better, thank goodness!
Tags: belief, Charles T. Tart, Charles Tart, ordinary mind, witch
Dr. Charles T. Tart, Mindfulness, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology,
Lecture 2, Part 6 of 15 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.
Student: I had two things that I was wondering about. The first one is, when I was watching my breath at one time, it was like I could see inside my breath. I could see or experience emotions from that part; emotions, like stray emotions, which were like reminiscent emotions. So it was like a hallucination. There was something wrong with that because when I was looking at my breath, it was in the breath. So I was focused on my breath, but I was experiencing things that weren’t there.
CTT: Was the experience of these emotions a body experience, an image; a mental-visual imagined experience?
Student: [This paragraph seems to set up the discussion of emotions, but very difficult to understand, so just fragments presented here] It was like; it was like if; like a _____ being like; like it was like being _________ and have the feeling of because the air was cold and it reminded me of the ________. And so as I was feeling the coldness in my nose, it was as if; it reminded me of that feeling of being in the ________. And so I as focusing on; on the breath and it was taking me back to being in that state that I was in in the past.
CTT: Did you stay in touch with the breath?
Student: Yeah.
CTT: Then you were doing well. It’s not like if you focus on the breath, all of the rest of the stuff automatically stops.
Student: Okay.
CTT: You know we’ve all had 20, 30, 40, 50 years of that stuff going on and on and on. It’s not going to stop just like that. And in fact, while some meditators will talk about that kind of activity stopping, others will say it never really quite stops, it just becomes less important and doesn’t take you away all the time.
Student: Okay.
CTT: I saw it expressed somewhere recently as some people want to become spiritual because they don’t like their emotional life. So they think somehow, “I’m going to get so focused that I’ll never have an emotion again.”
(Laughter)
It’s very appealing if your emotions are really bad for you. You can do something like that.
Have any of you ever read John Lilly’s book, The Center of the Cyclone, his autobiographical book? Do you know who John Lilly was? Anybody who doesn’t know who John Lilly was? (Hardly any hands go up) Oh dear.
(Laughter)
(Sigh)
This is like about 15, 20 years ago. I was lecturing in my altered states of consciousness class up at Davis and an older woman student asked me about Timothy Leary’s theories about the way the mind works and what I thought of such and such a theory of his. I responded to her and then this sweet young lady raised her hand and said, “Who’s Timothy Leary?” (Laughter) I felt so old. (Laughter) I’m not even going to ask if anybody knows who Timothy Leary was, okay? (Laughter)
John Lilly was a neuroscientist who got involved in the consciousness movement, especially heavily involved in flotation tanks. He’s the one who really pushed the floating in water thing, and started the flotation tank boom combined with psychedelic drugs, and he got way out there. He’s one of the few people who could kid me terribly and make me feel so square. Anyway, he’s dead now so I don’t have to worry about being kidded anymore… <g>
In his autobiography, he told of some very traumatic experiences as a kid when his brother got killed and he spent, I don't know, three days in a closet crying, or something like that. At the end of that time, he resolved that he was never going to feel anything again. That no way was that kind of suffering ever going to come into his life, and he was successful at that for the next 20, 30 years of his life.
You can learn to focus in a way to keep yourself under control, and you can really keep emotions pretty much out of consciousness. I think people who do that eventually realize that they pay a terrible price for that kind of suppression. That’s the same kind of reason that, in Buddhism for instance, they’ll say the concentrative meditation can take you a long, long way into very profound altered states of tremendous peace, absolutely no suffering, but they haven’t changed you fundamentally. And when something comes along that’s going to stir those things up again, you’re basically not much changed.
You can ignore a threat by keeping your eyes closed, but that often is not a terribly good way to deal with a threat. It requires your attention and some positive action on your part. That’s why the Buddha invented what we translate as Vipassana meditation or as insight meditation, to try to really understand yourself, not simply concentrate.
You could take concentrative meditation and really just push it as control, control, control and get very, very tight about it and there will certainly be some rewards for that. You know, your spouse dies, you stay aware of your breath. Don’t let things bug you. But somehow, something pretty profound hasn’t been dealt with. So maybe we should take this conversation into Vipassana meditation, unless there are other people who’ve been having trouble with the concentrative meditation that I can say something about.
Tags: attention, awareness, Charles T. Tart, Charles Tart, intention, meditation, ordinary mind, Transpersonal
I'm pleased with the way this blog is developing. You folks are contributing thoughtful ideas and comments, being open, being considerate of one another….who could ask for more?
I haven't really advertised the existence of this blog to my list yet, I've been too busy to get around to it, but I think I will wait a while – lots of other writing to do! - as I like the way we seem to be slowly, but organically growing….
Tags: Charles Tart
Dr. Charles T. Tart, Mindfulness, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology,
Lecture 2, Part 5 of 15 parts. To start class from beginning, click here.
CTT: How about other kinds of difficulties? Yes.
Student: Not a difficulty so much, but a question about what you’re saying. How might one discern the difference between a relatively quiet mind and being unaware of one’s mind-speak?
CTT: Unaware of one’s mind-speak? What would be “unaware of one’s mind-speak?”
Student: Not hearing the words the mind’s saying. When one relaxes a little deeper, then all of the sudden there’s a lot of talk going on, so to speak. And yet at some level it’s possible, in my opinion, to be unaware of the constant conversation.
CTT: That’s a good question, but a very complicated one. I think the way it works, until you get to specialized techniques, is that you try to do this controlled attention practice of keeping in contact with your breath and just being sensorily aware. Otherwise, you notice your mind going on and on and on.
In fact, did anybody have the experience that this practice seemed to make your mind race? (Many hands go up!) Yeah. The traditional answer to that is no, it didn’t make your mind race. You just became aware of how fast it goes all the time.
(Laughter)
That’s the condition of most people’s ordinary mind. It is going along lickety-split and we’re used to that. We identify with that cocktail party chatter that goes on all the time. Until we make a special effort to be quiet and pay attention, we don’t notice that anything’s there.
I think it’s quite normal to start becoming more and more aware of this, to get frustrated by it. It used to drive me nuts. I felt, “I’m going to just quiet my mind now,” and 10 minutes later realize I had been thinking like mad the entire time without an instant of quiet in there. But don’t get discouraged by that. You’re seeing the way your mind actually works, and seeing the way it works is the first step in being able to do anything about it.
There are eventually techniques to work more directly with that kind of mind chatter, but I think we’d be kind of jumping ahead of things to talk about them now. Maybe later in the quarter you might bring up that same kind of question.
Tags: attention, awareness, Charles T. Tart, Charles Tart, meditation, ordinary mind