more thoughts on The Visit
Oct. 24th, 2010 02:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
joculumListening to the cognitive-science researchers report to the Dalai Lama on the results of compassion meditation in their laboratory experiments and field tests, I found myself remembering Robert Ornstein’s sarcastic put-down in The Psychology of Consciousness of the experiments on the purported benefits of Transcendental Meditation (a.k.a. TM™) by imagining similar charts on the physiological benefits of an activity called “reading.” His point was that reading produces the effects it does, both permanent and transient, through a complex of forces and inner and outer activities, and to reduce the phenomenon to the simple act of letting one’s eyes scan words on a page would be as silly as trying to separate out “meditation” from all the other things that go into an efficacious spiritual (for want of a better word) or religious (for even greater want of a better word) activity.
The de-Tibetanized act of compassion meditation, however, is a visualization exercise that I’m sure will get some specific types of folks exercised once they learn that it is actually being used to make people more sensitive to the needs and feelings of others. (What one is to do about the problems of others, and how one is to learn how best to address them, is a separate topic. As with the Georgia mule whacked upside the head by the two-by-four, first you have to get their attention.)
I was brought up short by a fact that I presume every physician knows, but I did not, and one which seemed to interest the cognitive psychologists only because it provides a means of measurement: namely, that normal breathing involves what I believe was referred to as “a subtle arrhythmia”: and of course I don’t remember whether the heart speeds up slightly during inhalation and slows down slightly during exhalation, or the other way round. But this fact alone would explain the cautionary notes in the spiritual traditions about undertaking breathing exercises without being cognizant of all the other things one is supposed to be doing, all of which would serve to modify blood pressure, levels of oxytocin in the bloodstream, serotonin levels, what have you. What you do to the lungs affects the amygdala. What you do via the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex affects the whole organism. (“What you mean, ‘you’?”—if I may burlesque the Lone-Ranger-and-Tonto joke. Or to quote Douglas Coupland on the subject, “What is the you of ‘you’?”)
And as I listened to these findings and reflected that this was really just the elementary first step towards making a human being more human (though Frans de Waal would contest that phraseology…perhaps I should say “towards making a human being a more fully functioning empathy-possessing animal”), I began to realize that the visualization techniques of compassion meditation were already encoded in the recommendations of Charles Williams and Metropolitan Anthony Bloom…that techniques known in Tibet also found their way into certain corners of English Anglicanism and Russian Orthodox Christianity. And it wasn’t woolly-minded woo-woo; it was technique offered in place of the moral admonitions to pull yourself up by your bootstraps more generally presented under the name of religion.
As with any technique, you actually have to practice it in order to be any good at it, and given the amount of inner repair required in our disordered psyches and the natural disinclination to do the work, it is scarcely surprising that there are few virtuosos to be found. The ones who can be found tend to know what they know, and no other topics. The ones who have had the inclination to relate such knowledge to other disciplines generally haven’t gotten very far in their own practice. Given the extent to which we are, all of us, messed-up creatures by the age of four if not from the very moment of the trauma of the birth canal, perhaps even the advanced practitioners aren’t as advanced as we like to think (we project perfection upon them, to use the old-fashioned psychoanalytic terminology).
The problem of knowing is complicated by the fact that whatever techniques exist are embedded in a cultural matrix and distorted thereby, as everything human is distorted by the matrix in which it exists. (We leave to one side, therefore, the question of whether this is a binary opposition of which one term might not exist except in language, as with “perfect / imperfect” or “ideal / actual” or “imaginary / real” and so on.) The problem is made worse by the combination of our tendency as social animals to engage in psychic contagions, plus the tendency towards psychic inflation caused by first encounters with the phenomena that the traditions warn you not to take seriously, because otherwise you will come back “gusty with a graph or a gospel across seven heavens,” as I believe C. W. put it. We are inclined for evolutionary reasons to jump to conclusions; it seems to be hard-wired into us, and the traditions have had to work very hard to correct the inclination, not very successfully.
So sitting in the media section of the morning session of the Conference on Compassion Meditation, I jumped to some conclusions of my own that may well be as silly as the offhand speculations about lizards and butterflies that sent the evolutionary biologist in the audience into paroxysms of frustration.
The question that intrigues me is what will happen as advanced practitioners in the several disciplines combine their information—hopefully more astutely than the oft-cited journalist in Charles Lamb’s essay who approached Chinese metaphysics by reading an article on China and an article on metaphysics and combining his information.
Most of us hold the deficiencies of the human condition at bay by one technique or subterfuge or another while we pursue our intellectual and material goals. We seldom master more than one or two academic disciplines relevant to those goals. But the maximally beneficial attainment of the goals require the benefits conferred by all of them, even if we are writing novels or putting together real estate deals. Anyone who doubts this has only to look at the condition of the best-seller list, the global economy, or the global environment. Short-sighted short-term accomplishment almost always leads to long-term misery, just like the Buddha told us. (This post may turn out to be a present example.)
The problem is that most folks find it impossible to express this perennial insight without falling into treacly lyricism or obfuscatory jargon. We got plenty of both from various individuals during the course of The Visit 2010 of the Presidential Distinguished Professor. (The professor occasionally upbraided them.)
Are we at a point where we can stop saying either “Stuff and nonsense!” or “Oh, wowwwww….” and get down to business with deciding what it is that human beings already know but do not know that they know?
Right now, systematic ignorance seems to be winning across the board, as we invent reasons to keep doing what we would rather be doing and believing what we would prefer to be believing, whether the topic is personal behavior, religious practice, the relations of academic disciplines to one another, or global economics.
It’s been this way since the rise of the human species, of course, but this brings us back to the question of whether we can do anything to ameliorate this, once we have been whopped upside the head by the two-by-four.
The de-Tibetanized act of compassion meditation, however, is a visualization exercise that I’m sure will get some specific types of folks exercised once they learn that it is actually being used to make people more sensitive to the needs and feelings of others. (What one is to do about the problems of others, and how one is to learn how best to address them, is a separate topic. As with the Georgia mule whacked upside the head by the two-by-four, first you have to get their attention.)
I was brought up short by a fact that I presume every physician knows, but I did not, and one which seemed to interest the cognitive psychologists only because it provides a means of measurement: namely, that normal breathing involves what I believe was referred to as “a subtle arrhythmia”: and of course I don’t remember whether the heart speeds up slightly during inhalation and slows down slightly during exhalation, or the other way round. But this fact alone would explain the cautionary notes in the spiritual traditions about undertaking breathing exercises without being cognizant of all the other things one is supposed to be doing, all of which would serve to modify blood pressure, levels of oxytocin in the bloodstream, serotonin levels, what have you. What you do to the lungs affects the amygdala. What you do via the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex affects the whole organism. (“What you mean, ‘you’?”—if I may burlesque the Lone-Ranger-and-Tonto joke. Or to quote Douglas Coupland on the subject, “What is the you of ‘you’?”)
And as I listened to these findings and reflected that this was really just the elementary first step towards making a human being more human (though Frans de Waal would contest that phraseology…perhaps I should say “towards making a human being a more fully functioning empathy-possessing animal”), I began to realize that the visualization techniques of compassion meditation were already encoded in the recommendations of Charles Williams and Metropolitan Anthony Bloom…that techniques known in Tibet also found their way into certain corners of English Anglicanism and Russian Orthodox Christianity. And it wasn’t woolly-minded woo-woo; it was technique offered in place of the moral admonitions to pull yourself up by your bootstraps more generally presented under the name of religion.
As with any technique, you actually have to practice it in order to be any good at it, and given the amount of inner repair required in our disordered psyches and the natural disinclination to do the work, it is scarcely surprising that there are few virtuosos to be found. The ones who can be found tend to know what they know, and no other topics. The ones who have had the inclination to relate such knowledge to other disciplines generally haven’t gotten very far in their own practice. Given the extent to which we are, all of us, messed-up creatures by the age of four if not from the very moment of the trauma of the birth canal, perhaps even the advanced practitioners aren’t as advanced as we like to think (we project perfection upon them, to use the old-fashioned psychoanalytic terminology).
The problem of knowing is complicated by the fact that whatever techniques exist are embedded in a cultural matrix and distorted thereby, as everything human is distorted by the matrix in which it exists. (We leave to one side, therefore, the question of whether this is a binary opposition of which one term might not exist except in language, as with “perfect / imperfect” or “ideal / actual” or “imaginary / real” and so on.) The problem is made worse by the combination of our tendency as social animals to engage in psychic contagions, plus the tendency towards psychic inflation caused by first encounters with the phenomena that the traditions warn you not to take seriously, because otherwise you will come back “gusty with a graph or a gospel across seven heavens,” as I believe C. W. put it. We are inclined for evolutionary reasons to jump to conclusions; it seems to be hard-wired into us, and the traditions have had to work very hard to correct the inclination, not very successfully.
So sitting in the media section of the morning session of the Conference on Compassion Meditation, I jumped to some conclusions of my own that may well be as silly as the offhand speculations about lizards and butterflies that sent the evolutionary biologist in the audience into paroxysms of frustration.
The question that intrigues me is what will happen as advanced practitioners in the several disciplines combine their information—hopefully more astutely than the oft-cited journalist in Charles Lamb’s essay who approached Chinese metaphysics by reading an article on China and an article on metaphysics and combining his information.
Most of us hold the deficiencies of the human condition at bay by one technique or subterfuge or another while we pursue our intellectual and material goals. We seldom master more than one or two academic disciplines relevant to those goals. But the maximally beneficial attainment of the goals require the benefits conferred by all of them, even if we are writing novels or putting together real estate deals. Anyone who doubts this has only to look at the condition of the best-seller list, the global economy, or the global environment. Short-sighted short-term accomplishment almost always leads to long-term misery, just like the Buddha told us. (This post may turn out to be a present example.)
The problem is that most folks find it impossible to express this perennial insight without falling into treacly lyricism or obfuscatory jargon. We got plenty of both from various individuals during the course of The Visit 2010 of the Presidential Distinguished Professor. (The professor occasionally upbraided them.)
Are we at a point where we can stop saying either “Stuff and nonsense!” or “Oh, wowwwww….” and get down to business with deciding what it is that human beings already know but do not know that they know?
Right now, systematic ignorance seems to be winning across the board, as we invent reasons to keep doing what we would rather be doing and believing what we would prefer to be believing, whether the topic is personal behavior, religious practice, the relations of academic disciplines to one another, or global economics.
It’s been this way since the rise of the human species, of course, but this brings us back to the question of whether we can do anything to ameliorate this, once we have been whopped upside the head by the two-by-four.
