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Oct. 20th, 2010 10:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
joculumI am still trying to process three days of the visit of the Dalai Lama to Emory University.
Having to show up at my job at least occasionally, I skipped the creative journey with Richard Gere and Alice Walker. (I heard at second hand that since Tibetan has no word that means "creativity," the Dalai Lama never quite understood what Gere and Walker were talking about.) I also missed the second half of the day-long conference with research psychologists and primatologists.
I was there for the presentation of the next four Emory-developed textbooks intended to teach Tibetan monks and nuns the rudiments of evolutionary biology, genetics, brain physiology, and the other complex of investigational insights that compose contemporary science. The Dalai Lama has requested that all 20,000 contemplatives in the Tibetan meditational tradition be made scientifically literate, and an immense translation enterprise is producing textbooks to accomplish this goal.
The Dalai Lama is also seeing to it that the most promising candidates pursue advanced scientific study at Emory University under the auspices of the Emory-Tibet Partnership in general and the Emory-Tibet Science Initiative in particular.
They follow in the footsteps of Geshe Lobsang Tenzin Negi, who twenty years ago arrived in Atlanta to pursue a Ph.D. in psychology to match his comparably advanced degree in Tibet’s comparable academic disciplines. (Tibet’s study programs are rather more interdisciplinary in nature, recognizing that the analytical disciplines overlap.)
Geshe Lobsang has developed a—I’ll quote the literature so as not to distort—“secularized meditation protocol” based on the basic techniques of loyong (mind training) found in Tibetan meditational practice. Researchers at Stanford, Wisconsin, and elsewhere have been conducting experiments to determine whether the techniques of visualization it employs can produce lasting changes in brain physiology and changes in the personal behavior that follow from those physical changes.
The researchers are often singularly tin-eared, except for Geshe Lobsang, whose Cognitive-Based Compassion Training is nomenclature that grates less on the sensibilities than some of the misleadingly simple terminology developed by other researchers. As I remarked in the parallel essay I have posted on my Blogspot weblog Counterforces, an audience member suggested that the panel discussion could have used an evolutionary biologist when it came to exploring the incidence of empathy in non-mammalian species. They could also have used an anthropologist specializing in contemporary language and literature to point out the automatic negative reactions that terms such as Compassion Cultivation Theory arouse in typical readers of the TLS or the New York Review of Books—the sorts of persons who could do with some compassion cultivation, snark being their stock in trade.
So anything I summarize here about the conference will most likely meet with negativity on the part of my longsuffering readership. I’ll just say that the research on the doings of the amygdala and the vagus nerve go far towards providing tentative answers to the question posed by Frans de Waal from the perspective of primatology and the psychologists from their separate perspectives: “Is empathy a biological given, or can it be cultivated, or both?” The answer, clearly, is both, and one of the more interesting exchanges between the Dalai Lama and Frans de Waal is worth reporting:
His Holiness asked, “Is this different response [of empathic capacities across species] because in their brains the systems are lacking?” To which de Waal explained some of the relationships between the development of the prefrontal cortex and self-recognition in a mirror, which forms “a perfect correlate” to the higher forms of empathy; the capacity to recognize a representation of the self seems to be an obvious precondition for the capacity to recognize and respond to the suffering of others. (Elephants, dolphins, apes, and humans are the only ones to have reached this level of, uh, reflectivity. The so-called mirror neurons that lead to imitative behavior are present across species, however, and basic precursors of empathy occur simply through the presence of nurturing behavior towards offspring. And yes, I am doing a wretched job of condensing already fragmentary notes. You could look it up.)
His Holiness (a translation which the scholarly trickster Glenn Mullin finds annoying; if, as the Dalai Lama has said, he is not a Living Buddha but only someone who is worthy of respect—the Chinese badly mistranslated “lama”—neither is he a Pope) was at his technical best in trying to bridge the language gap with the scientists. As one would expect, things went best when his translator conveyed Tibetan terms in the closest English equivalents; the Dalai Lama is capable of fairly sophisticated English, but the nuances sometimes escape him, just as they escape some of the scientists for whom English is a native tongue.
His much-respected efforts to communicate in kindergarten terms for a mass audience sometimes lead listeners to forget the rigorous intellectual repartee that is part of Tibetan monastic training. A question from the audience after the first day’s kindergarten-level public discourse brought forth the rhetorically honed dialectician in him: “Your Holiness, if you had been mute your whole life, and you could now say just one sentence to us, what would that sentence be?” “That is a silly question! Such a thing depends on circumstances. If I am very hungry, maybe all I want to say is ‘Please give me some food.’” Or, as we say hereabouts, ask a silly question, you get a silly answer.
He also gave his longstanding answer to yet another seeker inquiring after the one single thing we should all do to attain a transcendental goal: “I don’t know!!!!”
And there is no reason why he should know any one single way; for the several religions of the Silk Road were developed in response to a very complex and multi-layered set of cultural and psychological conditions among some of the orneriest, fussingest, fightingest, most short-tempered folks on the face of the planet. (So they rather proudly consider themselves, anyway.) Eastern Orthodox spiritual counseling, Central Asian styles of Sufi practice, and Tibetan Buddhist modes of behavioral and physiological modification all arose in zones of cultural conflict. Sometimes they managed the conflicts very well; other times, various lowlanders stormed in and simply slaughtered the whole population, and just as many times, the attempts to maximize inner self-awareness, outward compassion, and social cohesion failed because the tensions of the various enterprises were simply too monumental to handle even with the most sophisticated techniques.
We need to recognize how multi-layered those techniques and psychological and social enterprises were and are. Robert Paul, the Emory professor of anthropology most responsible for the Emory-Tibet Partnership, has said of the research into compassion meditation, “We are learning what the mind is capable of in terms of controlling emotions and preventing depression.” I would rather he had said: we are learning what the mind is capable of.
Whatever the mind is capable of (and it is a great deal more than we think), it is crucial to understand the capacity of these traditions to explore the outermost (or innermost, if you prefer) dimensions of consciousness as well as the most persistent sources of social conflict. It doesn’t mean they were perfect or even particularly good at resolving the conflicts; it means they developed modes of inner insight that were designed to allow the possessors of such insight to teach other folks how they could get along without whopping one another upside the head.
Compassion meditation is only the beginning. But it will take more than just understanding the physiological underpinnings to translate all this into terms suitable to the twenty-first century. It will also ultimately take more than Tibet—though the Emory-Tibet Project is the best locus for a simultaneous forward push in terms of developing methods for preserving a threatened culture under conditions of globalization while also investigating that culture’s cumulative insights into human psychology and physiology—for Tibetan medicine has its own biochemically based virtues just as Tibetan meditation does.
What is crucial is that the multidisciplinary effort not be muddled up with the woo-woo associated with past mystifications of Tibet and present-day mystifications of the modes of traditional cultures everywhere. The flood of whacked-out kitsch has immunized us to modes of inner investigation that have their own culturally specific style of rigor. We need to honor that rigor, and find ways of expressing it in terms that make sense to the rather primitive thought processes of contemporary skeptics.
The first hurdle, of course, will be to convince the skeptics that their thought processes are primitive. No one likes to think that their own way of doing things is not the highest and best ever developed by humanity, no matter how much they assert their belief in the relative inadequacy of all cultural categories.
Given the inclinations of our primate-derived behavior, it’s not surprising that we engage in intellectual discourse that is the abstract equivalent of whopping someone upside the head. Fortunately, there are traditions that have developed techniques that may modify our physiology, and now we are beginning to figure out how they work and why they work.
Having to show up at my job at least occasionally, I skipped the creative journey with Richard Gere and Alice Walker. (I heard at second hand that since Tibetan has no word that means "creativity," the Dalai Lama never quite understood what Gere and Walker were talking about.) I also missed the second half of the day-long conference with research psychologists and primatologists.
I was there for the presentation of the next four Emory-developed textbooks intended to teach Tibetan monks and nuns the rudiments of evolutionary biology, genetics, brain physiology, and the other complex of investigational insights that compose contemporary science. The Dalai Lama has requested that all 20,000 contemplatives in the Tibetan meditational tradition be made scientifically literate, and an immense translation enterprise is producing textbooks to accomplish this goal.
The Dalai Lama is also seeing to it that the most promising candidates pursue advanced scientific study at Emory University under the auspices of the Emory-Tibet Partnership in general and the Emory-Tibet Science Initiative in particular.
They follow in the footsteps of Geshe Lobsang Tenzin Negi, who twenty years ago arrived in Atlanta to pursue a Ph.D. in psychology to match his comparably advanced degree in Tibet’s comparable academic disciplines. (Tibet’s study programs are rather more interdisciplinary in nature, recognizing that the analytical disciplines overlap.)
Geshe Lobsang has developed a—I’ll quote the literature so as not to distort—“secularized meditation protocol” based on the basic techniques of loyong (mind training) found in Tibetan meditational practice. Researchers at Stanford, Wisconsin, and elsewhere have been conducting experiments to determine whether the techniques of visualization it employs can produce lasting changes in brain physiology and changes in the personal behavior that follow from those physical changes.
The researchers are often singularly tin-eared, except for Geshe Lobsang, whose Cognitive-Based Compassion Training is nomenclature that grates less on the sensibilities than some of the misleadingly simple terminology developed by other researchers. As I remarked in the parallel essay I have posted on my Blogspot weblog Counterforces, an audience member suggested that the panel discussion could have used an evolutionary biologist when it came to exploring the incidence of empathy in non-mammalian species. They could also have used an anthropologist specializing in contemporary language and literature to point out the automatic negative reactions that terms such as Compassion Cultivation Theory arouse in typical readers of the TLS or the New York Review of Books—the sorts of persons who could do with some compassion cultivation, snark being their stock in trade.
So anything I summarize here about the conference will most likely meet with negativity on the part of my longsuffering readership. I’ll just say that the research on the doings of the amygdala and the vagus nerve go far towards providing tentative answers to the question posed by Frans de Waal from the perspective of primatology and the psychologists from their separate perspectives: “Is empathy a biological given, or can it be cultivated, or both?” The answer, clearly, is both, and one of the more interesting exchanges between the Dalai Lama and Frans de Waal is worth reporting:
His Holiness asked, “Is this different response [of empathic capacities across species] because in their brains the systems are lacking?” To which de Waal explained some of the relationships between the development of the prefrontal cortex and self-recognition in a mirror, which forms “a perfect correlate” to the higher forms of empathy; the capacity to recognize a representation of the self seems to be an obvious precondition for the capacity to recognize and respond to the suffering of others. (Elephants, dolphins, apes, and humans are the only ones to have reached this level of, uh, reflectivity. The so-called mirror neurons that lead to imitative behavior are present across species, however, and basic precursors of empathy occur simply through the presence of nurturing behavior towards offspring. And yes, I am doing a wretched job of condensing already fragmentary notes. You could look it up.)
His Holiness (a translation which the scholarly trickster Glenn Mullin finds annoying; if, as the Dalai Lama has said, he is not a Living Buddha but only someone who is worthy of respect—the Chinese badly mistranslated “lama”—neither is he a Pope) was at his technical best in trying to bridge the language gap with the scientists. As one would expect, things went best when his translator conveyed Tibetan terms in the closest English equivalents; the Dalai Lama is capable of fairly sophisticated English, but the nuances sometimes escape him, just as they escape some of the scientists for whom English is a native tongue.
His much-respected efforts to communicate in kindergarten terms for a mass audience sometimes lead listeners to forget the rigorous intellectual repartee that is part of Tibetan monastic training. A question from the audience after the first day’s kindergarten-level public discourse brought forth the rhetorically honed dialectician in him: “Your Holiness, if you had been mute your whole life, and you could now say just one sentence to us, what would that sentence be?” “That is a silly question! Such a thing depends on circumstances. If I am very hungry, maybe all I want to say is ‘Please give me some food.’” Or, as we say hereabouts, ask a silly question, you get a silly answer.
He also gave his longstanding answer to yet another seeker inquiring after the one single thing we should all do to attain a transcendental goal: “I don’t know!!!!”
And there is no reason why he should know any one single way; for the several religions of the Silk Road were developed in response to a very complex and multi-layered set of cultural and psychological conditions among some of the orneriest, fussingest, fightingest, most short-tempered folks on the face of the planet. (So they rather proudly consider themselves, anyway.) Eastern Orthodox spiritual counseling, Central Asian styles of Sufi practice, and Tibetan Buddhist modes of behavioral and physiological modification all arose in zones of cultural conflict. Sometimes they managed the conflicts very well; other times, various lowlanders stormed in and simply slaughtered the whole population, and just as many times, the attempts to maximize inner self-awareness, outward compassion, and social cohesion failed because the tensions of the various enterprises were simply too monumental to handle even with the most sophisticated techniques.
We need to recognize how multi-layered those techniques and psychological and social enterprises were and are. Robert Paul, the Emory professor of anthropology most responsible for the Emory-Tibet Partnership, has said of the research into compassion meditation, “We are learning what the mind is capable of in terms of controlling emotions and preventing depression.” I would rather he had said: we are learning what the mind is capable of.
Whatever the mind is capable of (and it is a great deal more than we think), it is crucial to understand the capacity of these traditions to explore the outermost (or innermost, if you prefer) dimensions of consciousness as well as the most persistent sources of social conflict. It doesn’t mean they were perfect or even particularly good at resolving the conflicts; it means they developed modes of inner insight that were designed to allow the possessors of such insight to teach other folks how they could get along without whopping one another upside the head.
Compassion meditation is only the beginning. But it will take more than just understanding the physiological underpinnings to translate all this into terms suitable to the twenty-first century. It will also ultimately take more than Tibet—though the Emory-Tibet Project is the best locus for a simultaneous forward push in terms of developing methods for preserving a threatened culture under conditions of globalization while also investigating that culture’s cumulative insights into human psychology and physiology—for Tibetan medicine has its own biochemically based virtues just as Tibetan meditation does.
What is crucial is that the multidisciplinary effort not be muddled up with the woo-woo associated with past mystifications of Tibet and present-day mystifications of the modes of traditional cultures everywhere. The flood of whacked-out kitsch has immunized us to modes of inner investigation that have their own culturally specific style of rigor. We need to honor that rigor, and find ways of expressing it in terms that make sense to the rather primitive thought processes of contemporary skeptics.
The first hurdle, of course, will be to convince the skeptics that their thought processes are primitive. No one likes to think that their own way of doing things is not the highest and best ever developed by humanity, no matter how much they assert their belief in the relative inadequacy of all cultural categories.
Given the inclinations of our primate-derived behavior, it’s not surprising that we engage in intellectual discourse that is the abstract equivalent of whopping someone upside the head. Fortunately, there are traditions that have developed techniques that may modify our physiology, and now we are beginning to figure out how they work and why they work.
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Date: 2010-10-21 07:00 am (UTC)Also, I saw a documentary about the corvidae family of birds a few years ago. In it they showed experiments that proved that some of those birds were not only capable of recognizing themselves in a mirror, but also of putting themselves in the position of other individuals.
Nice blog
Date: 2011-01-11 07:40 pm (UTC)Katty Swingfield
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