| Mind Life 2005 |
This is very much a first person account of my experience at the XIII Mind and Life Conference in Washington, DC. 1. The notes that I took sometimes omit the speaker, and I have added my own questions and comments to them- and the difference is not always completely clear. 11.07 7:10 PM The cast is assembled. We four stand in front of the stage as the lights dim. The sound system powers up with a click and a buzz, we rally for the ride, and just before the words --- 11.7 His Holiness the Dalai Lama (HHDL): “It is especially a great source of joy to have the Christian faith represented “. He speaks a few words and my eyes fill with tears. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a presence like this. “Science and Buddhism; I think they are both trying to find reality.” There are two levels of experience: sensory, from your organs and brain, and mental. “I have nothing to offer. I am here to listen” He slips between Tibetan and English and his translator Thupten Jinpa looks at him so intently, and translates several minutes of his speech without any apparent difficulty. Happiness is not indelible and neither are neurons. Much of what will happen here will occur between members of the audience. Let your expectations slip, let the veil drop, and let the ripples run out. Mental health is not the absence of mental illness! However, it is a widely spread pandemic, affecting 10% of the US population at any given time. Meditation as a “cure” is not merely sitting underneath a mangrove tree and blessing out in order to have a better day. It’s CULTIVATION, of desirable qualities which lead toward real happiness. What is behind the stream of thought? Playing an instrument changes your brain. It’s not the ultimate drama if you don’t play the piano… but mindfulness and inner peace are different. It is the ultimate drama (depression, unhappiness) if you don’t have these. So unlike learning to play a musical instrument, which also changes your mind for the better, this is very essential. Why? There can be no outer peace without inner peace. You have the choice not to accept any of what you hear here this week, because we are discussing the nature of facts and reality. The mind can lose its balance. The Buddha focused on dissatisfaction, and how to eliminate it. He was almost a clinician. The Buddha said that he knew much much more than what he actually taught his subjects. Supposedly this is because he didn’t think it would be useful to them. What could he have known that he didn’t consider an addition to wisdom? Even if a fact is completely irrelevant to you, it helps you understand somebody/something else better. He was the Doctor of the World. He looked at it in the following manner: DISEASE: unhappiness Pain is endemic in our lives, physical and emotional. How do you avoid this? You don’t. You get rid of the fretfulness, the 2nd order pain. As humans we are truly incredible: we can create suffering even out of beautiful experiences. Meditation is the refinement of our natural abilities to control this reflexive 2nd order pain. Break the habit of being dragged around by compulsion. We think relaxation is dozing on a La-Z-Boy. We think excitement is being on a roller coaster, and we love this. But what we don’t know: relaxation and excitement are not mutually exclusive! You are not completely sane until you are enlightened. Your mind swarms to pain like flies to meat. Be aware. Live for 5 minutes more without dying. HHDL: “It’s probably not lethal.” It’s only lethal once in your entire life. Learn to be at ease with deep grief, which is part of being alive. Meditation and Medicine come from the same root = to measure. (They all struggle to speak clear English to HHDL without being condescending!) Hospitals are Dukkha magnets. Dukkha is the translation of either “stress” or “suffereing”, depending on how you look at it. STOP AND WATCH. Be intimate with the present moment. This is not easy. This is a radical act of self-compassion. Also: recognize the beauty of other people. A beginner’s mind sees things from the start up. It’s best to try and cultivate this attitude. Personal experience is the final arbiter of truth. I agree! Psoriasis healed faster in patients who received the control treatment and also participated in an 8 week meditation class. This has implications for the treatment of skin cancer. Questions: 1. Have Tibetan practices worked, in the realm of healing?
Happiness and compassion are skills that you can learn. People can’t always predict what will make them happy at first. The ability to regulate emotion is a tricky skill. “Happiness in this country is an unalienable right!” HHDL: “Not ONLY in this country!” Beauty is before me Is this Navajo? I am surrounded by my friends, backed by thousands of curious minds, facing the Dalai Lama. Fact: The more the hormone cortisol decreases in your body during the day, the better your health. Cortisol is naturally there in the morning to facilitate readying for the new day, and it should be nearly gone by the end of the day. Stressed people have lots left. These people do not show any increase in prefrontal cortex activity when they are regulating negative emotions (such as responding to a disturbing picture). People whose prefrontal cortexes show activity in this situation are healthier. Their brains put out a gamma frequency. They have less cortisol by the end of the day. People who learn to meditate can become like this. Experienced meditators can even tell you when they feel the most “focused” and “centered” – and their self-reported markers scale almost exactly with the reported intensity of gamma waves in their brains. This is rockin’ self awareness! However, unpracticed meditators can’t do this. They just seem to be guessing. Another cool thing happening in the brain of practiced meditators: their motor neurons actually activate, and their “self” region of the brain turns off!!! This brings up an EXTREMELY IMPORTANT point: meditation isn’t necessarily thinking about yourself in an relaxed way: it’s actually readying your body (through compassion) to be mobile and help, as seen very clearly in the brain. As you meditate, you’re literally readying yourself to spring up, zoom away, and save the world. So does pure awareness cause healing? HHDL: In the exact moment, yes. Afterwards it may work like a pain killer, a tranquilizer, to turn off the parts of your brain which make you suffer from your pain. You release your grasp on your own pain. Father Keating: Scientists are on a spiritual journey! My Brothers and Sisters! (Let’s go down, let’s go down, let’s go down to the water and pray.) “The more we understand ourselves, the more accountable we are for our actions.” “The underlying silence [during meditation] is never not thunderous.” So, is there a distinction between pain and suffering? Yes. Pain is unavoidable and is “essential due to the limited universe”. Suffering, the resistance and “pain of pain”. We are not stuck in the mud!! We can change. Brain = soul? What do you think? The first morning ended there. The four of us walked through DC (surrounded by Important Places, right next to the Washington Monument, for one thing) and ended up at a sandwich shop. It seemed that everybody there was from the conference – discussions of universal compassion and neurobiotic response to pain coming from the pizza section – and we sat down at a table outside, from which one man was just leaving. We exchanged min-biographies and our interests in the subject, and he left us with this advice: The more you dedicate yourself to your spiritual base the better you can move through your life journey. Second session begins. Wolf Singer is speaking on the biological substrates of meditation. So during meditation there are high frequency oscillations in the cerebral cortex in the gamma range, 40 Hz. His work says: precise neural coordination can be a sign of learning. SYNCHRONY. I want to ask the Dalai Lama: Your Holiness, Pepsi or Coke? What’s your favorite song? Nick says: what’s your favorite TV show? Where do dreams occur in the brain? The previous hypothesis of neuroscience: Western thought said there existed an “interpretation center” o the brain where it all came together, and self had its throne. But now we see a vastly interconnected cerebral cortex with no distinct seat: consciousness seems to be a product of coordination. Because of this, we need a neural code which defines relationships, not single neurons. This code would also require temporal precision, because the order of neural events is as important as what they actually are. His work says: you see a synchronization of neural discharge: the sender and receiver of a signal at the same resonant frequency. This makes it easy for two neurons to be selective over long distances. Experiment with a cat: if you have a cat get ready to touch a button when it sees a certain object, the neurons will fire synchronously until the event occurs, after which it will disappear – even if the same number of neurons are firing, they do not fire together. So attention is not equal to amount of brain activity, it’s equal to the coherence of said activity. In an attentive brainstate, you see high frequency, small amplitude brainwaves. When inattentive, the brain shows low frequency, large amplitude waves. In schizophrenic patients, there is very little synchrony – they can’t make their neurons “ramp up” – ie fire at the same time – to deal with tasks involving higher cognition. Robert Sapolsky: a captivating speaker with a bear-like visage. Humans have invented, more than anything, adventitious suffering. This is the suffering we create in response to pain. What does this make our bodies do? We react to suffering with the fight or flight response. This is bad over a long period of time! RATS. If you take a rat, and you stress him, he gets an ulcer. In this experiment, stressing involved putting a rat alone for a whole night in an “isolation” area, without his rat-buddies. How to prevent the ulcer:
Responses to stress:
Dopamine is released in your brain when you are *about* to get a reward from completing a task, not when you actually do it. Anticipation is fun! Conclusion from this fact: we love a little loss of control – it’s exciting. But if you lose control completely, your body really shows it. You want to lose control in a benign setting. The evening of the 8th we went to the “VIP” reception in a very fancy hotel. Many of the speakers were there, milling around the “lake” in the middle of the enormous hotel atrium, a big wishing pool that reminded me of “canned Venice”. There were fancy gourmet snakes toted by graceful waiters, drinks for all. I spent the beginning of it cowering at a table, kind of overwhelmed by how important an influential and well-dressed everybody was in relation to me, but towards the end I found some really interesting people to talk to, including one man who lives in Japan but has much experience in Tibet, who talked to the four of us about being a healer, and said that we could do it if we gave it a chance. After getting a toasted PBJ sandwich somewhere near the hotel, we took a slightly sleepy Metro/car ride back home. Once there we worked on the “hands thing”, for which we have no name. As usual it worked nearly instantly for Anna and I. Nick tried it for the first time, and it worked, but something very unusual happened. I was sitting facing him as we both tried it, and our hands were at about the same level off the floor, fairly close. The field he was creating seemed to interact quite strongly with mine, which we tested by shutting our eyes and moving our own individual fields, and seeing if that was easily detectable by the other. Although this was by no means an exhaustive test, it seemed fairly clear that we could detect the movement. I went to watch the tree outside the back window. The leaves are bright red and one helicoptered down in the rain. The shadows are crisp. Aron is laughing, glowingly, at an email, and Anna is curled up watching, perched precariously like a cat. Nick looks serene. Serenity. The room is lit by candles and laptop screens. I love these people. November 9 HHDL enters, saying Tashi Delek to everybody and making the whole room smile a beaming smile. He puts *back on* the orange visor somebody gave him yesterday. Whoever gave him that must be having the best day ever. Despite anger, most species do not commit murder. What is suffering? The two-arrow explanation: if you’re a warrior, and you get shot with a poison-tipped arrow, you don’t find out who shot the arrow, and his parents’ names, and his grandparents’ names, and his village and favorite type of cereal… you take it out!!! But in humans, we often let this 2nd level, adventitious suffering continue without taking the arrow out. Depression is the “common cold” of mental diseases. Somewhere around 10% of the USA – that’s 30 million people – is depressed. Clinical depression: sad every single day for 2 weeks, no interests in former interests, responsibility for self and others completely lacking. Treatment: psychotherapy and drugs are equally effective in clinical trials. However, immediate treatment is not enough. Most people relapse, and you have to do maintenance therapy even when they feel healthy in order to prevent this. How do you do this? You try to understand sad moods in a way that they don’t trigger depressive episodes. People who have previously depression experience, or who are depressed, tend to ruminate a lot: “what does this say about me as a person? How can I change myself?”. They are also much more likely to say that this rumination is helpful to them, as opposed to healthy people who do not think it is very useful. What does cognitive therapy do? You learn to be curious about a depressed state of mind. You learn to consider thoughts as mental events, which you have the power to change through training. What kind of training? Mindfullness training, of course! Interesting outcome: this gives the greatest benefit to people who have had multiple depressions. The main idea: remove yourself from the vicious cycle. A graph of performance versus hormone expression in the body looks like an upside down U. With none, you’re asleep. With the right amount, you’re at peak performance. With too much, you have no performance: you fail, you freeze, you’re sick. THIS GUY IS SHARP AS A TACK. The idea of synchronicity gels with the Buddhist idea of lack of central authority (no central wisdom, Creator, Ultimate God, single self). Something like “ we are all soup, not croutons” from Robert Thurman’s speech last year. So why, given these similarities, have Tibetan and Western views on the origin of consciousness evolved so differently? What exactly is the negation of self, anyway? “Non stress is really an incubation, a readying, for maximal stress.” “The greatest way for mammals to reduce stress is taking it out on other people.” Depressingly. Big challenge: how to be a balanced person even given this. It’s possible! We can learn new behavior which trumps our limbic system. We even know this intuitively. When you hurt somebody, you say later, incredulously: “I wasn’t myself”. When you are kind, you feel it’s your intuitive nature showing through, and you feel “whole”. HHDL speaks about a monk (from Namgyal monastery! Go Ithaca!) he knows who spent quite a bit of time in a Chinese prison. His greatest unhappiness afterward: that he would lose compassion for the Chinese. ********It’s so hard to be compassionate towards people who hurt somebody you love very much, but if you stop being compassionate, you lose so much. It pays to keep this alive. ******** HHDL speaks in such a gentle way. He never sounds like if you disagreed with him, he’d be the slightest bit upset. Let’s make His Holiness a present. I’ve always wanted to. Suggestion: pretty tissue box. (He was sick at the time with quite a cold.) How can we help Americans wake up to violence?
Examine the state of extreme well-being, not just the state of extreme sickness! Helen Mayberg: on treating depression. Depression is imbalance. It is suffering. It can actually be mapped (so where do different treatments act in the brain?) Depression is a numb, active anguish (says William James). When ordinary people think of sadness and loss, their cognitive processes turn off, and their LIMBIC SYSTEM TURNS ON. Knowing to what degree this effect occurs can help us predict what kinds of treatment will be best for each person. Why is depression an illness? Because it can’t self-correct. There are 2 ways to treat, and they both help, but through different pathways. Meditation helps by turning back on the cognition centers of the brain and bringing your empathy response way up. Medication helps by effectively suppressing the limbic system. “Depression is an enslavement of the body when the mind is gone.” Helen Mayberg’s truly remarkable experiment: implanting an electrode on the region of the brain associated with depression (she said which it was, but I missed it) and sending a pulse in to effectively “turn off” this region of the brain. It works. The pain is turned off. She described, very movingly, how in the operating room the patients who received this treatment instantly woke up and became themselves again, looking up, suddenly caring about the other people in the room again and becoming curious. Teasdale’s questions: How do you give cognitive therapy to 30 million people and still maintain integrity of treatment? Tidbits from the discussion: People need to be able to empathize without becoming overwhelmed. Self-doubt is the destroyer of spiritual life. Self doubt in several religions: “You might be a sinner” – Catholocism. “You’re lazy” – Protestantism. “Your mother isn’t happy with you” – Judaism. “That thought wasn’t compassionate or enlightened and this one isn’t either!” –Buddhism. Depressed people are much better at predicting games of chance, from pure logic. I guess they lack the hope that they’ll “win”. This pessimism can be refined to realism, which is a good thing. Transform what you already have. Intention and motivation are extremely important in the outcome of depression treatment. In fact, you can actually detect when people are about to have a thought – you can read the intention in their brain like a “pre-thought burp”. I don’t think we are “built” to deal with only a few people’s suffering – just because we’ve worked that way in the past doesn’t make it true. I think I feel the way I did in the Himalayas where the whole world is available, rumbling slowly under your toes, warming you with the possibility of lava, but the air is so thin, you feel a little dizzy. “This is the beauty of our species, that we are so different and yet at the same instant so similar.” – Allan Wallace William James went in to a deep depression because he believed, from his studies, that he was only an actor, a puppet, completely predetermined and not responsible for his actions. The only way he could extricate himself from this depression was to choose to do so, proving his ability for action. Depression may need to be subclassified, because it turns out that many depressions are different in brain chemistry, symptoms, or both. Our brains respond differently to triggers of depression. Maybe trigger-response should be a determinant of subclasses of depression. Maybe you need to be relatively healthy to even start recovering – you need a certain amount of brain health available to think yourself out of the hole. With the heart, you’d do surgery to jumpstart healing from a heart attack before you’d move along to lifestyle changes as treatment. Same with brains – but you need to examine the brain to find which treatment is best. You don’t give everybody with a heart attack the same treatment. Jan Bays is in favor of media fasting as a treatment. I do this – I barely watch any TV at all – but this hasn’t made me react more calmly to suffering, this makes me react very viscerally and horribly to suffering. Why? How is this supposed to help? “When we teach our young men to kill, we are doing a great wrong to the human organism.” IS the spiritual path the ultimate relief of suffering? I think that’s a big leap. Not sure I agree. What is a wise individual? 11.9.05 2:38:45 PM We’ve just finished a group meditation, all several thousand people in the conference. It was a “compassion meditation”, so we spent a lot of time thinking of nice wishes to bestow on people we care about. About halfway through, I felt a very strong “wave”, much like the magnetic wave between hands, pass through the audience from my right to my left. I was sitting next to Nick – he later told me he had felt it also. Allan Wallace: “There was a rich contemplative tradition before the Buddha came along.” 8th-13th century Nalanda: a university, a magnet for students of all kinds. There are 2 kinds of happiness:
A symptom of a balanced heart-mind might be inner flourishing. Can you even flourish in the face of death? Framework of Buddhism
A problem: Many people see truth, happiness and virtue as being unrelated entities. You can’t have all 3 at once, they say. This is a bad attitude. You need to not feel alone. You need to feel connected. Truest thing ever! You can’t love others if you hate yourself. To what degree does our common experience bring us together? How do our differences keep us at a distance and can that field ever be crossed? HHDL: “I believe the very purpose of our life is to seek happiness.” I don’t know how he does it, but when the HHDL speaks, the whole room smiles. Sometimes the whole room laughs – just because he does. FACT: The blood flow to the heart is significantly reduced in some patients due to mental stresses as simple as subtracting 7 from 100 repeatedly. This is ischemia. Out of the people in a particular study, 20% of the controls who responded to stress like this were dead after 5 years. Only 6% of those who received meditation training died. New topic: psychoneuroimmunology. There is very definitely bidirectional communication between the immune system and the brain. How does this happen? It has to do with cytokine release, which should happen lots when your immune system is healthy. Molecules called glucocorticoids block the expression and secretion of cytokines. People who are caregivers for a person with Alzheimer’s disease have very compromised immune systems. When they are given a vaccine, they produce 50% less antibodies than non-caregivers. This is a pretty important result!! However, not all stress situations produce such vastly reduced immune responses. Some of them actually provoke a better immune response. Thoughts from discussion: Hmm. I think we are all on the same side here. HHDL, on what one *really* needs: “Just universal compassion. That is all.” We feel very vulnerable to our outward projection of self. The word of the day: Ultimate Compassion. Does just plain compassion actually improve your health? HHDL, on affection: Your entire life once depended on another’s care. By nature, we must have affection because we are intelligent enough to realize it is necessary. We can even make our affection greater than what it already is. ….DYING…. [notes have disappeared] Joan says that if you think of yourself as empty, you can let bad things that come at you pass through you. But I very much prefer to think of myself as full. Of good things. Does this mean I misunderstand selflessness? It seems like a flame to me. One goes to two, with no loss whatsoever. Is it naïve to think being appreciated is so important? I wonder: if you are enlightened, do you still fear that nobody loves you? If I was enlightened, how would I feel about myself? Would I have enough self-confidence to believe that the people who I th ink love me actually do? How can you completely trust yourself without being a little self centered? HHDL: “If something can be done, no need to worry. If nothing can be done, no use in worry.” The night of the 9th we had dinner at a restaurant called Citronelle in Georgetown. There is really no appropriate way to describe the evening. Here are the facts:
I’ve probably never had a more remarkable evening.
Around HHDL the aura of respect is astounding. The men speaking to him, so eminent, seem so clearly in the role of the learner although they are doing the teaching. Medicine is focused on disease, the cause and symptoms of it, not life-long health. Americans tend to assume their health is the responsibility of their doctors. Back in the day: young men died of infection. Now: young men die of murder, suicide, drug abuse, and violent accidents. This is scary! We have to think of disease as a progression, not as a single effect of a single cause. Most develop over time from multiple causes and are not the same in everyone. A possible solution: preventative medicine, as the business of creating personal health and baseline analysis for everybody, which puts them in a position of responsibility for themselves. Learning to treat your body well is actually part of the core ethical values of Buddhism. We should respect this. Wolf Singer: “What we can know and imagine abou the world is limited.” We (our brains) have developed to live in this world – not to figure out the world – pragmatism, not questing, is inborn. Our world is measured in meters and centimeters. These are the units of classical physics, where measurements are invariant. So it’s hard to figure out cosmic and quantum dimensions, because understanding that was not necessary for survival. So we have poor intuition for non-linear dynamics and we sometimes make wrong assumptions about the simplicity of the world. This, perhaps is why we thought there was a “mover” – a central authority that shapes our brain. But importantly, we are not simple systems either. These systems we have can bring forth new qualities that cannot be deduced from the components. Position of Self in the World
How do you know when your brain has arrived at a correct assumption???? Good question. Thought experiment: If you ask a neuron what it’s doing, it will tell you it’s making some calculations and sending signals and sitting among other neurons. It has no responsibility! It has no idea it’s part of conciousness. The same might be said for human beings. You ask them what they’re doing, and they’ll tell you they “live, laugh, learn, love” and that they have a family, that they have a job… but maybe as a whole we don’t quite realize what we’re part of, something very great indeed. But we’re not neurons. We DO have the ability to question these things! “We can no longer understand the dynamic process we generate completely” and this can make us feel hopeless. But it’s not a bad thing – it’s only bad if we bite our neighbors for relief. What the panelists say they have learned:
HHDL: The concept of God and consciousness both come from the same desire – to know everything. You need to add a puzzle piece to the overall puzzle before you can evaluate it. You can’t divine the truth about anything if it’s not in relation to anything else. We are oceans – we can have depth, peace, storm all in the same fundamental body. This body can experience different kinds of happiness.
So GENUINE SELF-CONFIDENCE is not a triumph of ego, it’s the realization of inter-dependence on each other, the breaking of your self-bubble. Gold in the mud is still gold. When the sun is behind the clouds it’s not gone. Father Keating: Science and technology are also gifts of God to us today. “Nature and Science are God’s thoughts” – Einstein The truth of the Garden of Eden: Adam and Eve were tempted to become Gods on their own terms – not on God’s terms. But that got them kicked out of paradise. Sometimes today we have no idea where real happiness is, and sometimes we’re too weak to find it. So we have to accept our weakness and feel the need of others. Our most precious ability is to love. Love is going beyond “thinking” to the intuitive of knowing – deep knowing. God is our host, and he invites us to be hosts also, and keep on giving. “Most Christians need to be converted.” We can’t take ourselves to be a fixed reality – we have to expand our capacity to give and change. Allan Wallace: The greatest impediment to knowledge is not ignorance, it’s false assumption. How can you ever discover anything if you think you know the answer already? The convergence of multiple moments of awareness may be best checked against something radically different. It’s very hard to tell what we know and don’t know if you only associate with like people. Convergent truths of experience may be some of the most important truths humans can access!!!!!!!!!!! SUMMATION: Virtuous qualities of the human mind are cultivatable, and can impact one’s health hugely in a positive way. We can change. Our minds are plastic. We can be transformed; we are never stuck. “It is wonderful that you are here and that you exist on this planet.”
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