Outstanding Results Using Ozonized Water to Irrigate the Gums
Jewel was kind enough to allow me to post her experience using the ozonized water protocol (to help prevent gum disease):
Hello Dr Vinograd,
I was introduced to you via the Gerson March webinar, thank you for your presentation and thank you for your service.
Feedback: Using the ozonator nightly for 4mo the 7mm pockets around my molars decreased to 3mm. I am thrilled for the turnaround!
I am grateful to review your full-length presentation and I want you to continue posting it in its entirety. In the interest of time I suggest posting a shortened version that zeros in on the portions concerned with anaerobic bacteria and the ozonizer so newcomers can get at the info faster. The full-length video is a lot to sort thru to get to the benefits of the ozonizer.
Thank you for your much-needed advice on communicating the benefits of ozonizing. You get the credit for improving my gums. :^)
All the best,
Jewelle
Ozonizer Product Page: http://www.bodypure.com/product-p/ozonizer.htm
The Healing Power of Mindfulness P6
So I go in there, and I knew them all because it was a small community and everybody likes each other. But I was, of course, terrified. It’s like a lot hangs in the balance. Somebody says, “What’s this ‘he who dies before he dies does not die when he dies’?” This is the first question on my thesis. I’ve worked five years on this research, and they want to know… “he who dies before he dies.” Of course, they were pushing 50. I was 27 or something like that; they were in their 50s and thinking ahead. (laughter) That obviously piqued some interest. “You die before you die, you don’t die when you die. I want that.”
I said, “Do you really want to know?” They all said yeah. I said, “It might take some time.” “We’ve got time.” So actually, I would say half of my thesis defense was actually unpacking what mindfulness is about to these guys. This was in 1971, by the way. I wrote it up; it’s a chapter called “Dying Before You Die Deux” because the first “Dying Before You Die” was the other story that I told about first encountering meditation at MIT.
That’s just to say that I didn’t want to continue a career in molecular biology; I wanted to bring my training as a scientist together with my training in meditation, because it seemed like everybody’s doing the science, but nobody’s paying attention to the balance between thought and this other function of our brains and nervous system that no one’s paying attention to called awareness, that is painfully obviously bigger than thought because whatever thought you have or whatever emotion you have, you could embrace it in awareness. And not have to do anything with it, but it would change by virtue of simply holding it in awareness, if you were patient enough to do it. Especially if it didn’t feel good.
That’s what we teach now, and it’s come into the mainstream of medicine in ways that are really astonishing. The National Institute of Health is funding hundreds of studies on mindfulness to the tunes of hundreds of millions of dollars. The idea that that would have been the case in 1979, I like to say, more improbable than that the Big Bang would just all of a sudden stop and implode back on itself. And yet it’s happening. Mindfulness is now in the mainstream of medicine.
I’ll just show you some pictures before we go to questions. Would that be all right with you? Are you still awake? (laughter) Good. Because you don’t ever have to stop, even when you go to sleep. It’s being present. That’s all. Being fully present. Is anybody good at this? No. So don’t make, “Ugh, I’m no good at this.” Nobody’s any good at it. But all you need to do is be a little bit better than automatic pilot, and your life will rotate. It will be very, very different.
Every time anger comes up, the default mode comes up – whether it’s anger or anything else – Thich Nhat Hanh likes to say the reason we have to practice mindfulness, the reason we have to cultivate it intentionally, is that we’re busy cultivating the opposite all day long. Cultivating anger, cultivating jealousy, cultivating low self-esteem, cultivating all sorts of negativity in the emotional domain or in the thought domain.
The people who are doing the telomere research are saying that their research is showing that the real stress comes from thinking. This is a biological and molecular biological consequence that accelerates aging and accelerates heart disease. You can’t interview people who die of sudden cardiac death, but if you could, you’d find out probably it was a thought that did it. The wrong thought at the wrong time – dead. (laughter)
I’m actually not joking. It’s so serious that we need to laugh, and I want to say that about meditation too: it may have seemed like I’m not taking this stuff seriously. This stuff is so serious that it’s too serious to take too seriously. And I’m serious. (laughter)
If any of you were alive back then, this is the cover of Time Magazine back in 1983, four years after I’d started this stress reduction clinic. I look back on that time and I say, “Stress? What stress?” Compared to now. There was no internet, there was no email, there was no instant messaging. There were no computers, except mainframes. I used to say in the early ’80s, once I had my first PC, which was gigantic, that I could get more work done in a day than I used to be able to get done in a month. Well, that was in the mid-80s. Now, it’s like I can get more work done in a day than I can get done in a year. That’s not so good. We’re always “on.” Not so good. We’re not computer servers; we’re human beings.
Here is the evidence from Liz Blackburn’s lab and Alyssa Epple, who is the mindfulness researcher in her lab, proceedings in National Academy of Sciences showing telomere length as a function of years of chronicity of care giving of children – this is parents with children with severe medical disabilities. It’s an unavoidable stress; you can’t just walk out on your kids, “I don’t do stress. Sorry, goodbye children.” No, you can’t do that.
But look at this, also, in that study: this is a perceived stress scale. It’s the perception of stress that makes the difference. If you are just dealing with it because it’s the way it is, then you can be more transparent to the stress; your telomeres are longer. If you take everything personally, your telomeres degrade. So if you want one take-home message from this – this turns out to be harder to enact than it is to say – don’t take things personally when they’re not personal.
Then you might ask, “When are they not personal?” That’s a good question to keep asking yourself. It may be they’re never personal. It may be that the you that you think you are is not the real you. That you’re much bigger. Now the neuroscience is actually showing that. You want to be your narrative self? Fine. Then you’re using certain regions of the brain. You want to be your direct moment-by-moment experiential self, grounded in the body? You’re using lateral networks in the brain, a whole different brain profile. So you choose.
One is related more to happiness. The left activation in the prefrontal cortex, if you put monks in the scanners, and I’ll show you some pictures of that, they have tremendous activation in the left prefrontal cortex, and particular regions that have to do with approach and that have to do with emotional balance.
When we train people in MBSR, they shift from right activation to left activation in eight weeks. Their brains actually change structure in eight weeks. Work out of Sara Lazar’s lab, a German postdoctoral fellow who’s training with us in MBSR, and who has been our student, Britta Hertzel [sp], for years from Germany, young neuroscientist, has demonstrated that major regions of the brain change with eight weeks of mindfulness training and MBSR, including the hippocampus, including the cerebellum, including the posterior singular cortex.
All of these are involved in making meaning in self-regulation, in perception, decoding, memory, and learning. Not bad for eight weeks of what looks a lot, if you were looking in from the outside on our patients, looks a lot like nothing. They do nothing lying down; then they do nothing sitting; then they do nothing walking. Like this, like the Night of the Living Dead, really slow, meditative walking. (laughter) They’re doing nothing. And healthcare is paying for it. Amazing. How did they pull that off?
It turns out that brains are changing not just in terms of activity; in terms of structure. Significant thickening in those regions I mentioned, significant thinning in the amygdala, which is the emotional reactivity center, the threat center that triggers, fires off all the time whenever we feel threatened or accosted in one way or another.
God, I’ve got a whole talk here that I’m not going to give. How many of you see a triangle? Raise your hand if you see a triangle in this picture. Okay. Keep your hands up there. Look around so that you know you’re not alone if you see a triangle in that picture. It’s interesting, because there’s no triangle in that picture. The triangle’s defined by a three-sided figure, and what your mind does is it puts in the sides. If we shifted that little Pac-Man the tiniest little bit… so the mind can actually see things that are not there. The brain actually does that. It’s so good at that.
If I had time, I would show you this movie, which – how many of you have seen this image? Yeah, you can’t use it anymore. But I’ll just play it anyway. Anyway, it’s a movie, and they’re passing around basketballs, and you ask the room to count the number of times the people in the white shirts pass the basketballs. I could get it to work, but it would take too long. So you’re counting the number of times the people in the white shirts are passing the basketballs, one basketball per each, the whites and the blacks, and then in the middle this gorilla comes out. (laughter) And then goes off to the other side. But when you ask people to count the number of times the people in the white shirts pass the basketball, they don’t actually see the gorilla.
If we did it and none of you had seen it – 95% of people would have counted the number of times the people passed – usually you get a Poisson distribution, so you can’t even count correctly. (laughter) But then you don’t see the gorilla. Why? Because the brain has told itself, “The white shirts are what’s important. Tune out everything that’s not white.” Well, the brain, it turns out, is fantastic at – I just showed you. It sees things that aren’t there, and it doesn’t see things that are there. Not very reliable. (laughter)
Now, does that apply to you? I’ll leave that for you to decide. Just ask your spouse or your mother or your father. (laughter) Because that is part of the default mode. We are out of touch, seriously out of touch, with a lot of different elements of this.
This is just a quote from William James, basically saying if we could learn how to bring the mind back when it was wandering, that would be a good thing. It turns out the Buddhists have been doing that for thousands of years.
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The Healing Power of Mindfulness P5
So learning, and out of that learning, growing; and out of that growing, healing, which in my vocabulary, the way I define healing is coming to terms with things as they are. Coming to terms with things as they are. Very different from curing. There are very few cures in medicine, but the opportunity for healing – as long as there’s breath – it’s in some sense already here. All we need to do is see it, feel it, live it. It’s not about denying pain and suffering; it’s about in some sense befriending even that.
Resting for a final few moments in stillness, in silence, in wakefulness and full awareness. Outside of time, as if you had nothing to do, no place to go, nothing to do. And nothing to attain, because you’re already whole – the meaning, by the way, of the words “health” and “healing” and even the word “holy.”
By the same token, the word “medicine” and the word “meditation,” they grow out of the same tree, the same root, Indo-European root. Medicine and meditation are joined at the hip. It was not so radical to actually bring them together in mainstream clinical care. In fact, it’s essential for caring.
So silent wakefulness. Attending to what is. (rings bell five times)
Now the real meditation practice never stops. Just because some bells got rung, just because we’re going to shift gears a little bit, the real meditation practice is how you live your life from moment to moment. It’s not how good you are at sitting without moving, or what great yoga poses you’re doing. Because yoga is itself a meditation, a beautiful form of meditation that we use enormously, and it’s a good purpose in MBSR, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction.
I’d like to just say a few things about stress and medicine, and then open it up and give you a little bit more of an expanse of how we work. But I wanted you to have at least this taste of it, and I want to share a couple of poems with you. It’s not like all of a sudden I’m going a little weird on you. How many of you, when you heard the word “poetry” or “poems,” you go, “Oh no, not a poem. I don’t understand those things”? (laughter) That’s not uncommon.
But one of my colleagues, John Teasdale, with whom I wrote that book, The Mindful Way Through Depression – who is one of the world’s great cognitive scientists – is coming out with several papers in which he is arguing that the root cause of suffering in human beings is not knowing how to deal with our emotions because we don’t know how to inhabit and then shift our relationship to what he calls implicational meaning. Implicational meaning is what moves, say, in poetry. It’s different from the propositional meaning, which is just the bare facts.
I’ll recite a poem for you. This is a poem by Antonio Machado, who’s a great Spanish poet of the turn of the 19th, 20th century and won the Nobel prize. It’s very short, but see if you can feel it:
The wind, one brilliant day, called
to my soul with an odor of jasmine.
In exchange for the odor of my jasmine,
I would like the odor of your roses.
I have no roses; all the flowers
in my garden are dead.
Can you feel that? How many times have we had that feeling, or similar feeling? “I have no roses.” There’s nothing beautiful about me. “All the flowers in my garden are dead.”
Well then, I’ll take the withered petals
and the yellow leaves and the waters in the fountain.
And the wind left. And I wept. And I said to myself:
“What have you done to the garden that was entrusted to you?”
Can you feel that? This is a poem about great sadness. Could easily go into depression. Just because it’s a Nobel laureate, doesn’t mean – I like to actually change the last line. (laughter) I would suggest that for our purposes, rather than “What have you done to the garden that was entrusted to you?”, which is a kind of blaming, wouldn’t you say? It’s like stick the knife in and then, “Oh, right, as long as I’m feeling down, why not just go right over the edge?” A lot of cultures actually perpetrate that kind of perspective.
But instead, why don’t we say “What are we doing with the gardens that are entrusted to us?” Gardens, plural. Okay? Because right now, we have a lot of gardens entrusted to us, I would say. The closest to us is, I would say, the garden of the body. Better than an American Express credit card; you can’t leave home without it. (laughter) A lot of the time, we’re not even in the body, and a lot of the time, our feelings about the body are so negative that the less said, the better. Just don’t bother me about the body. I don’t even want to know it exists. If it’s not driving me crazy, I feel lucky.
James Joyce is famous for starting out a short story in Dubliners with the following sentence. This is an approximation, but it’s “Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.” (laughter) If you start to pay attention in the way that I’m suggesting, in the present moment, you’ll discover that that’s your address as well, a lot of the time. We’re in our heads, lost in thought. Someplace else, not in the body.
That has biological consequences, by the way. Everything I’ve said tonight, when I started the stress reduction clinic in 1979, there was almost no science of the effects of stress and the biology of stress on the body and on the mind and on the brain and on the heart. Now, the data is just overwhelming. Including, as I’ll show you in a minute, aging. That it’s turning out that stress – they used to say stress is not a real risk factor for morbidity or mortality because it’s not like a high-fat diet, it’s not like cigarette smoking, it’s not like hypertension, high blood pressure.
But now it turns out, there’s incontrovertible evidence that stress actually increases the rate of degradation of the ends of all of our chromosomes, which are called telomeres. You’re going to hear a lot more about that word. The woman, Liz Blackburn, at UCSF who actually discovered telomerase, which is the enzyme that builds them back up, won the Nobel Prize in 2008. Her lab is studying the effects of mindfulness on telomeres and telomerase. The evidence is moving in the direction of meditation can actually enhance telomerase.
Not just that; it’s more than meditation or mindfulness, it’s your attitude towards what’s happening. It’s not like these people aren’t under a huge amount of stress, but it’s never the stress; it’s how you choose to be in relationship to it. If you have really exhausted your resources for handling stress, then of course, yeah, all bets are off. But if you know how to draw resources to yourself, then even under very, very high levels of stress, you can dance with the energy. Sometimes it’s unbelievably painful, but nevertheless, you’re much bigger even than the pain and suffering, and liberate yourself from that. And guess what? The telomeres get longer.
Every aspect of our biology is what’s now called plastic. That’s a new terminology. It’s not like Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate. This is for the older people. (laughter) But it means that our biology is miraculous in another way: it’s constantly reorganizing itself. It’s not just “it’s all downhill from here.” Yes, there is aging; yes, we are all going to die, unless somebody makes a very important discovery very quickly. But the question is not “is there life after death?” or “is there some way to escape death?”, but actually, “can we live while we have a chance?” “Is there life before death?” That’s the most interesting question. And right up to the moment of death.
A lot of times, I think that really, when we talk about fear of death, we’re really more afraid of life than we are of death. There are two chapters – I was going to actually tel you some stories, but I don’t think I will, about my early days at MIT, one of which was how I got into meditation. I got into meditation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a graduate student in molecular biology with a Nobel laureate, believe it or not. Go figure. Not in some monastery in Asia. Because the Zen master came and gave a talk, actually, at MIT, and I was one of five people in all of MIT that went to the talk. (laughter)
It took the top off my head at the age of 22. It was like, “Oh my God, there’s an entirely different way of knowing. Why didn’t they tell us this in kindergarten?” (laughter) An entirely different way of knowing, and no less beautiful, no less profound, no less transformative than thought. Just different. This should be part of the repertoire, so to speak, and part of the science and investigation.
The other thing was the story of my thesis defense. Because I wrote a thesis on some arcane topic in molecular biology, and it was all these MIT Nobel laureate types, real hotshot molecular biologists. A few from Harvard who came over because you always have to have someone from another institution. My thesis, it was an existential challenge for me. How many of you are graduate students here? Anybody a graduate student? It’s like, hard. (laughter) Hard to be a graduate student. Because nobody cares, and most of the time you don’t either, but it can be really humiliating. Then of course, if you’re a scientist, science is 99% failure. Which doesn’t do that much for your self-esteem, so to speak. Then you’re looking for the 1%.
So I finally got my thesis together, and I wrote in the front page, on a page by itself – they let you have a little dedication, a little saying or something like that – I wrote “He who dies before he dies does not die when he dies.” I don’t even know where I got it. (laughter) It was some Greek. Very old Greek. So I put that line in the first page by itself before getting into the thesis. I go into the room with all these scientists who are going to decide whether I get my doctorate or not, after what’s called – I forgot what they even call it, but a thesis review – defense. Right, defense. It’s a war term. (laughter) They’re going to attack and I’m going to defend, and if I do it well enough, then…
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The Healing Power of Mindfulness P4
Even if there’s something going on, even if you’re in pain from your lower back and you’ve had it for a long time, or even if you have cancer at the moment, or you’re a cancer survivor, or you have heart issues of one kind or another, whatever it is… the sum total of this universe of between 10 and 100 trillion cells – the whole body now, we’re talking about – is good enough to have gotten you here today. It’s good enough for now.
And the more energy you pour into it, the more that robustness, whatever it is, sometimes called homeostasis, but it’s a very dynamical process that we call ELF, as opposed to disease, or dis-ease. When we start to pour energy in the form of attention into what’s already right with us, it turns out that the body has its ear to the rail, the brain has its ear to the rail, the brain is part of the rail, the heart… every aspect of our being is one integrated whole. It’s not like different systems. The immune system talks to the nervous system; the nervous system talks right back, and everybody else is listening in on the conversation. And it’s all cells.
If we all took our livers and put them out on the stage here – that would be an interesting exercise – and then we shuffled them around, and then you were all encouraged to just pick yours up on the way out, you wouldn’t know which was yours. You can look at all 100 trillion of these cells in your body, and your name isn’t on any of it. It’s like “Oh, here’s my liver. Here’s my gallbladder.”
The punctuation from the cell phones is actually really – if that was a cell phone – is really interesting.
But do you hear what I’m saying? Even the question of who we are, when you start to actually ask it with tremendous authenticity, it might not be so facile to just say your name, or even describe what you do, or even send in your CV. If you’ve ever hired people, you know the CV is not the person, and you hire the CV a lot of the time. Big mistake. Because you can’t work with the person a lot of the time. What you want is congruence. You want integration. So when we take our seat, so to speak, what we’re actually engaging in is a recognition of how integrated we already are. We don’t need to “Oh, I’m such a wreck; I’ve got to get integrated.” No. From this perspective, you’re already as integrated as you can be in this moment. Is it enough? Is it good enough?
Let’s actually take a moment. I’ve even brought another prop; I brought some bells. We don’t need the bells, but I’ll ring them. When I ring them – and just for fun, you don’t have to shift your posture, but just for fun, why don’t you shift your posture and sit in the posture that for now embodies dignity, whatever that means for you? Look, the entire room is moving. (laughter) Not that dignified, I guess.
But actually, it doesn’t matter. The posture is secondary. What’s most important is the inner orientation, the willingness to open to the present moment, to put out the welcome mat and to let the idea that “Now we’re going to do something special” drop. Because as soon as you plant that seed, “now we’re going to do something special and we’re going to experience something special,” then you’ll be on the lookout for something special. But you see, nothing special.
There’s a wonderful cartoon in the New Yorker that I actually mentioned a long time ago in Wherever You Go, There You Are. Two Zen monks, one obviously elder, the other young. The young one’s looking up quizzically at the older one, and the caption underneath – the older one is speaking – he’s saying, “Nothing happens next. This is it. I just said that to you earlier.” But the “this is it” is really important.
Otherwise you could spend 20 or 30 years or more – and people do this – meditating, trying to get someplace else. Trying to have some special experience and say “That’s what it’s all about. Now I’m enlightened.” The problem is, you’re already enlightened; but the personal pronoun that wants to grab it and say “I’m enlightened” – it’s the personal pronoun that’s the problem, not the enlightenment.
Your eyes are already enlightened, your ears are already enlightened, your belly is already enlightened, your feet actually do what they’re supposed to do, for the most part. Your brain is actually doing what it’s supposed to do, your liver is doing what it’s supposed to do. A very famous scientist and physician named Louis Thomas once said he’d rather be at the controls of a 747 trying to land with no pilot training whatsoever than at the controls of his own liver for 30 seconds. So you don’t need to find special. This is good enough.
Let’s actually sit for a moment, if you’re sitting, or stand if you’re standing, in a position that for you, at this moment, embodies wakefulness and dignity. You don’t even have to close your eyes, but you can if you like, or let them fall unfocused on the chair in front of you or whatever. As I ring the bells, seeing if you can just follow the sound of the bells into the space of the air. (rings bell three times)
Allowing the space of the air to be coextensive with the space, you could call it, of awareness, so that there’s simply awareness. Hearing what’s here to be heard. The sound of the bells are past, and now there’s just sound. Whatever is arising.
You could feature hearing as a way of anchoring our attention. You can focus on some object or field of objects like hearing, and just rest in being aware of sounds and the stillness and the silence, in between, inside, and underneath any and all sounds. Including, of course, my voice.
Alternatively, because there’s more than one thing going on – there’s not just hearing going on; there’s also seeing and smelling and all the senses are actually operating – seeing if you can actually instead of hearing, feature for now feeling a sense of the breath moving in and out of your body. Wherever it’s most vivid in the body. Allowing awareness to inhabit the whole of the body and be most vivid in the region whether the breath sensations are arising and passing away. In breath… out breath.
Seeing if you can ride on the waves of the breath with full awareness, moment by moment. Noticing any time the mind goes off and gets involved in anything else, including judging how stupid this is. “We came for a talk, and all of a sudden we’re doing this stupid exercise.” Or whatever is flitting through the mind at the moment. Just making it so spacious that you can see whatever’s unfolding, hear my guidance as I’m speaking, and at the same time ride on the wave of the breath going in and the breath going out.
With full awareness and a kind of interest, a kind of in some sense affection at attention. Even if the breath isn’t all that interesting to you, or all that boring, or your mind says “Okay, I get that concept. What else?” Just staying with the breath.
Then playing with the possibility of expanding the field of awareness around the breath, wherever you’re experiencing it most in the body, until it includes a sense of the body as a whole, sitting here or standing here breathing. Noticing you can do that just easy as pie. It’s not really a doing, but when I say it, easily the awareness can hold the whole body, to one degree or another. Whatever degree you can hold it, that’s fine. It’s not like, “Oh, if I practiced, I’d get better at this.” That’s just the thought. Never mind. Just letting your thoughts come and go, and staying with the awareness of the body as a whole, sitting and breathing.
If possible, remembering that this isn’t some simple little exercise that were doing in the middle of a talk. That this is your life unfolding in this very moment, and this breath is important to you. You wouldn’t want to do without it. With that kind of quality of attending – it’s like tuning a guitar string – too loose, no true tone; too tight, no true tone; but if you can just bring the lightest of touches of awareness to the sense of the body as a whole, breathing, as if it mattered. And of course, it does. Because it’s your body in this moment, it’s your life, and the breath is vital.
One more, before we end. Noticing any thoughts that may be moving through your mind, and noticing how easy it is to self-distract, that the mind does wander, and it wanders away from the breath. If we did this for any period of time, sooner or later your mind would be someplace else. Probably not even in the room. Maybe not even in the present moment. You could be having dinner in Paris or Bangkok, or in an argument three years ago in the shower with yourself.
When you notice the mind has self-distracted, no problem, no judging; or if you judge it, don’t judge the judging, and just see if you can come back to this moment in awareness. Featuring whatever object of attention you care to. It could be anything that’s in the field of awareness.
But the last little piece is to just underscore that none of this is about the sound of the bells; none of this is about the feeling of the breath in the body; none of this is about the thoughts moving through the mind. Those are all important and they’re secondary, but what it’s really about is the awareness that knows the sound when it comes to the ears, that knows – and I mean non-conceptually knows, not just conceptually – knows the feeling of the breath moving in the body. Non-conceptually, it inhabits the body as a whole in awareness, sitting and breathing.
Non-conceptually knows when the mind self-distracts or when we get into an emotional whirlpool or turbulence of some kind or another. The awareness can just allow it to just be here. Feature it, center stage, let it come, let it go. Meanwhile, we just continue to rest. To rest in awareness, outside of time, because the present moment is time-less in some profound way.
Awareness and silence and stillness are all different ways of saying the same thing. They’re pointing to something that’s already yours, that you don’t have to get, but has tremendous healing potential. Tremendous potential for learning, for seeing things in new ways, for that rotation in consciousness that I was speaking of. Everything’s the same, only nothing’s the same. Why? Because you showed up in your fullness.
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The Healing Power of Mindfulness P3
There are now wonderful studies that are showing that that actually impedes or reduces any objective measure of performance. That doing two things at once detracts from the quality of either of the one. Doing five things at once, or being that scattered in your mind – you don’t even have to be doing anything, but when you’re at the mercy of this kind of mind wandering all the time and you’re trying to get things done, it’s very, very challenging. Very challenging.
So the question is, is there a way to actually live that will allow us to deal with what Zorba the Greek in Kazantzakis’ novel and movie called “the full catastrophe of the human condition.” The good, the bad, the ugly, the unwanted, the feared, the traumatic, the awful. To be able to hold each moment in its fullness and allow our attention faculty and our awareness faculty to actually hold it in such a way that we can then inhabit the next moment with authenticity, and maybe even respond appropriately to this vast range of demands that we are faced with all the time.
When I started the stress reduction clinic back at the University of Massachusetts back in 1979 – I did bring some slides, which I don’t know if I’ll show you, but I’ll just take that moment by moment. Maybe I’ll show them to you, maybe I won’t. (laughter) Because I’m trying to actually create more of an impression. I don’t want to leave you just with things in your head, just facts, because you’ll lose them immediately because other facts will come in and whatever.
If you’ve spent time and energy getting here, and I’ve spent time and energy getting here, then what would make me feel most satisfied is if one, you had some kind of inkling why you came in today. I’m sure you all do. It’s a mystery, though, I’m sure. Hoping, maybe, to be entertained, or maybe to connect on some deeper level, or maybe you’ve practiced mindfulness, or maybe you’ve been to an MBSR program. But if you peel back all those layers, there’s some really, really, really, really, really interesting reason why you’re here, and I bet you don’t know what it is. I’m not joking.
There are intelligences at work that are just deeper than the thought function, and the thought function is so smart that it sometimes outsmarts us completely. Have you noticed that? Then it’s like we’re stupid. We’re so smart, we’re stupid. It’s very hard to see that in yourself, but you can see it in other people just really easy. (laughter) Maybe you’ve noticed that.
I’m going to try to weave together a whole bunch of things that probably none of it is going to make complete sense, but what I’m doing here is I’m trying to in some sense plant seeds. I’m trying to plant seeds in the fertile ground or garden of whatever it was that brought you here, so that when you leave here, something has been touched that will keep those seeds – that actually I’m not planting; they are already in you – keep them being watered, nurtured, protected, privileged in a certain way, so that it nurtures, in some profound sense, some aspect of you that wants to be as alive as you can be while you have a chance.
We say to people coming to our stress reduction clinic – and they come with every conceivable kind of human ailment, referred by every conceivable subspecialty and specialty and generalist in medicine – and it’s an eight-week long course, designed to teach you how to take better care of yourself as a complement to whatever the healthcare system – I should call that a “disease care” system, by the way – can do for you. We say, from our perspective, as long as you’re breathing, there’s more right with you than wrong with you. No matter what’s wrong with you. We see people you would not want to be in their body or in their mind or in their life. They probably wouldn’t want to be in yours, either, but you probably wouldn’t want to hear that. Because after all, you’re the star of this movie, aren’t you? (laughter) There’s more right with you than wrong with you, no matter what’s wrong with you.
That’s radical perspective, and very, very important, because I started this stress reduction clinic in 1979. In 1979, a Surgeon General’s report came out called “Healthy People,” and what it was forecasting into the future, which is here now – we are in this future – that no matter how much money America spends throwing money at health and healthcare, it will never be enough to have health. Because there’s a missing ingredient, and that’s the humans that the healthcare is supposed to care for. And that there’s not enough money on the planet to do all the various things that would have to be done to us when we don’t take care of ourselves, when we don’t know how to handle stress, when we do not know how to be in wise relationship with our lives and our lifestyle and our diet and exercise and our bodies and aging and everything else.
That if we leave that all to the auto mechanics model of medicine – you drive your car around until it breaks down, then you get the carburetor replaced, or the engine, or whatever, or the tires – but this is not a machine. I know a lot of people, even in biology, love to use machine analogies, and even nano-machine analogies, about the body. To a degree, they’re correct; but there’s another piece of it, like no one understands the construction of the machine that’s you.
Let me give you one example. How many of you see that slide up there, and what’s the color of the background? Blue. Does everybody agree that it’s blue? No one knows how you do that. No one knows how you go from the wavelength of electromagnetic radiation, the blue region in the visible spectrum, no one knows how you go from this wavelength, which is colorless, it’s just energy, to a subjective feeling of blue. We also really don’t know – we have a consensus reality that agrees that the blue that you’re seeing and the blue that I’m seeing are the same blue, but it’s not always true, and it’s not true for colorblind people.
There’s a lot of consensus agreement here, but the brain weighs approximately three pounds, and it’s all cells and cables that are made up of cells, neurons, and then all these glial cells in there supporting the neurons. Incredibly specialized. It’s really the most complex assembly of matter in the known by us universe. Right inside your little old body. And no one knows how sentience, how consciousness, how knowing, how even thinking arises in this three pounds of what some neuroscientists call “meat.” It’s a little distasteful. (laughter) But to just kind of make it graphic.
So if you forget, every once in awhile, walking around on the Dartmouth campus or in Hanover or wherever you happen to live, that you’re a miraculous being… well, okay. It’s just one more mind wandering. One more default, not really being aware of how amazing it is that you can see, for instance. That you can hear, that you can taste. How many of us eat food and we don’t bother to taste it, we just devour it? Or we taste the idea of the food. “Yeah, that was really good.” But you didn’t actually taste it. Have you ever had a mindless hug from somebody who was really trying to be friendly? (laughter) It’s sort of an impulse to be friendly, but not in one’s body.
So all of these things we take for granted, but we can actually begin a process of re-minding – and I put a little hyphen in there – re-minding ourselves. Re-bodying ourselves. When? Now. Because why? There’s the only time you have. Coming back into a certain kind of vector or alignment with your entire life trajectory.
It doesn’t matter how old you are when you begin this process. The Native Americans actually started to measure your age from when you became a grandparent. Before that, it was like you were too busy to really be human. The Asian Indians measure your age from when you start practicing yoga. So if you’re 75 years old and you’ve been into yoga for three months, you’re three months old. I like that. Isn’t that nice? What about a new beginning? Every moment, a new beginning. That’s what mindfulness is about. Every moment fresh.
Now, this is not a philosophy; it’s not a good idea; it’s not a concept; it’s a way of being. It’s not a technique, and it’s not a special state. “Oh, I think I’ll trot over to the MBSR clinic, meditate…” (pause) Maybe you’re waiting for something else to happen, but nothing else happens. (laughter) Nothing else happens. This is it. Goodbye. (laughter) Maybe you’re hoping for something special to happen, some special meditative state, some kind of vision, some kind of alignment of the spheres, some special bolt of lightning out of the blue to wake you up. It’s a mis-take. A mis-take on meditation, on mindfulness, on reality.
Let’s just pretend, why don’t we just sit for a moment. Oh, you’re already sitting. You don’t even need to shift your posture, although I see some people getting ready, “Okay, now we’re going to get into it.” (laughter) “It’s going to be somewhat experiential, thank God. He could talk forever.” But you see, you don’t even have to shift your posture to be awake or to be aware. You can do it like this, and really be aware.
By the way, I can’t see my hands, but I know where they are. How do I know? A sense called proprioception. Maybe you’ve heard of it, maybe you haven’t, but there are a lot more than five senses; I just want to put that out. When we’re talking about miraculous being or genius, it’s got lots of different dimensions to it. Many.
If I ask you “How are you?” in the elevator and you say “Fine,” how do you know? Aside from the fact that you’re probably not fine, but you just don’t want to get into it in the elevator with somebody you don’t want to tell anyway. But when a friend asks you “How are you?” and you say, “Fine,” how do you know? That’s another sense. And you know very quickly, and you know when you’re not, too. What is that knowing called? It’s not, “Let me think, hmm. I don’t know, how am I?” No, you know instantly. That sense is called interoception.
There are ways that the organism has, using the brain and the nervous system – which has lots of maps, by the way; the brain is loaded with maps of the body, and not just the somatosensory cortices, but the insula and the cerebellum and the hippocampus. Lots and lots of – and again, I stress: we’re beginning to understand something about what lights up when, when you meditate and when you do this and do that, when you go into depression. All sorts of wonderful, wonderful things happening in brain research and neuroscience nowadays. But still, no one knows how it all comes together in you, in this moment, in a way that actually you don’t have to think about.
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The Healing Power of Mindfulness P2
Or another way to put it, sometimes, maybe – no offense meant, but “How did I get born into this family?” or “Who are all these crazy people? Why am I the only sane person?” You know, when you’re in a family, no one else can know the kind of genetic disease of that particular family, that everybody suffers from except you. (laughter)
So if we hope for the future to be different, the only place we have to stand is now. Because first of all, it’s the future of all the moments that have come before. If you want to be in the future, here you are. This is actually non-trivial. It’s not just “Oh, yeah, tell us something interesting.” Because what it invites is a kind of shift in perception and a shift in awareness, a shift in consciousness, that allows us to actually live our lives as if they really mattered and the only moment we ever have. Part of that means being embodied, because a lot of the time, we are lost in thought.
That’s another thing you’ll notice, if you start to pay attention to your mind, is that it’s all over the place. It’s all over the place. You don’t even have to meditate for that to happen. It’s default mode. (laughter) It’s default mode. You don’t even have to have a smart phone. You don’t even have to have email. You don’t even have to have a computer. It’s the default mode of the mind to be all over the place. It thinks this, then it thinks that. It likes this and it hates that. Wants to approach this, but really wants to stay away from that. It’s wired into our biology.
That’s called approach-avoidance, and it’s kind of – the hemispheres are actually somewhat divided in terms of left hemisphere and the frontal cortical region is more approach-related, and right activation, more… and that’s one of the fundamental biological features of living systems. Move towards food, move away from danger. Perfectly natural. But how we actually modulate those impulses and those reflexes and those kinds of unconscious urges that drive us and that cause us to be reactive a lot of the time is really an art form. It’s the art, if you will, of living our lives as if they really mattered.
When we begin to actually drop in on ourselves – and I brought a few props. Sometimes when we begin to drop in on ourselves, we can actually reclaim this moment, in this body, with this heart, with this mind, and begin to shift the default setting on how we live our lives. Begin to actually move in a direction of greater balance of mind, greater groundedness in the body, greater clarity of sight, greater, if you will, recognition of what’s actually unfolding moment by moment, that’s not so conditioned by whether we like it or not.
Because the world – maybe you haven’t noticed this yet – but it’s not actually organized around you being the center of the universe. (laughter) I know, that’s really disappointing. Because – I’m guessing now; don’t take offense, again – but I’m guessing that you are entirely organized around you being the center of the universe. Every single one of us is. It’s almost unavoidable. It’s almost unavoidable. And that actually has representations in the brain, it’s turning out. That there are medial networks in the frontal cortex that is actually called the default mode, and it’s what neuroscientists think is what’s happening when you’re not doing anything.
Well, it turns out, when you’re not doing anything, you’re very busy. You’re very, very, very busy, and one of the ways that’s described is that your mind is wandering. Now there’s an entire field in neuroscience focused on mind wandering. How many of you have noticed that your mind sometimes just has a life of its own? It goes here, it goes there. It loves to be entertained; it’s very entertaining. So yeah, that’s what’s called the default mode now, and another name for it is the narrative network. It’s like we’re continually constructing narratives about ourselves. I mean, after all, it’s the favorite topic, right? Me. What could be more interesting than me? The story of me, starring me. (laughter)
If you start to pay attention – because what we’re talking about, what mindfulness is, it’s actually awareness. And it’s cultivated by paying attention. So just to get clear about this, that doesn’t sound very Buddhist, does it, so far? Or very Asian, or very mystical, or very anything? It’s just paying attention. How many teachers are there in the audience, whatever level you’re teaching at? Raise your hands, so I can feel – okay. Don’t you want your students to pay attention? It’s non-trivial to get them to pay attention.
First, you might have to be interesting. That itself is a challenge. (laughter) Second, you might have to make the subject matter interesting. That’s also a challenge. But third, I remember, as a product of the New York public schools, having teachers actually yell at us to pay attention. But that’s not a very effective way to get people to pay attention, because it turns out that attending is something that you need to learn. It’s a learnable skill.
But instead of being taught to pay attention, you’re just told to pay attention. “Get with the program; pay attention.” A lot of people pay attention very differently. Some pay attention auditorily; they’re really predominantly auditory. Other people can’t do auditory so well; they’ve got to see it visually. Other people, it’s more intuitive; they feel it with their bodies in a certain way.
So this is incredibly important in education at all levels, because as they say about orchestras, even the greatest of orchestras, with the greatest musicians, with the greatest instruments, playing the greatest music, before they perform, they get together and they tune their instruments. First to themselves, then with each other, until there’s a kind of dropping, if you don’t mind my putting it that way, into resonance. Call it an “A,” call it what you like, but a kind of interconnected feeling that we are in some space together.
You could call it relationality. So mindfulness is the awareness that arises by paying attention on purpose in the present moment. Paying attention on purpose in the present moment, and non-judgmentally. Non-judgmentally, that’s the kicker, because as I said, the default network is operating constantly, and the default network’s got ideas and opinions about everything. It’s judging constantly. Non-judgmentally doesn’t mean that you won’t be judging when you actually start to pay attention to what’s on your mind or what’s going on in your life, but that you’ll notice how much you are judging, how much you want to approach this and push away that, and you’ll just allow that whole thing to be there, as if you just put out the welcome mat for it. I’m not going to have an opinion about my opinions. I’m going to just let it all rain down for a moment.
Can you feel how radical a shift that would be in your life, to just take one moment and allow everything to be as it is, instead of wishing it was one way or another? The Buddhists would call that liberation. It’s a kind of freedom that no one else can give you, but that allows us to in some sense rotate in consciousness so that for one moment, we’re stepping outside of time. Because if you live in the now – well, maybe you’ve had this experience. Just check your watch and take a look, right now. What time is it? I’ll tell you what time it is: it’s now. (laughter) Every time you check your watch or your phone, it’s now again. Why am I even talking about this? Why did I even come here? It’s always good to ask those questions. (laughter) I don’t know, actually. Because it’s usually bigger than whatever you think your reasons for it are.
But it has a lot to do with the medical school and with what Ira is doing there, and with what Helen is doing in the undergraduate school. It has to do with the fact that the society has reached a point where we’re beginning to understand that the exponentially increasing levels of stress in medicine, in our professional lives, in our personal lives, at every age, really require some kind of shift that is not in the form of taking some pill to numb yourself out to it or “get it together,” but that actually we need to cultivate what’s often spoken of as the domain of being in order to not be so overwhelmed by all the doing and the performing.
While it’s true that with the Olympic team, we were using mindfulness to actually improve their performance, it was a kind of Zen operation in the sense that you can’t improve performance by trying to improve performance, especially with the mind. Because the kind of mind that’s grasping for an outcome is exactly the kind of mind that gets in the way of any desirable outcome. Have you got that? Did you catch that as it flew by? This means we’re in new territory.
One example, common example: you can’t get to sleep by forcing yourself to get to sleep. By telling yourself how important the meeting is you have tomorrow – in fact, that’s probably a very bad idea, because that thought will actually secrete one more thought about the meeting or the stakes of it, and then that will lead to something else in this default network of mind wandering, and pretty soon you are wide awake, desperately wanting to be asleep, and not knowing how to get there.
It’s non-trivial to actually befriend our own minds and our own lives in such a way that we can actually work in these paradoxical ways where striving won’t do it. That doesn’t mean that I’m advocating that all of us abandon ambition, or don’t care about anything; meditation is not about becoming stupid. Even being non-judgmental is not about becoming stupid. It sounds like, “Well, don’t judge anything. Then maybe I’ll just walk off the stage and break my leg.” No. I’m aware that the edge of the stage is here, and if I do fall off the stage and break my leg, it will have been a moment of mindlessness, or out-of-touchness, if you will. Or walk across the street without looking because we have this sense that we’re not going to judge that truck coming at me. (laughter)
There’s a big difference between judgment and discernment. Mindfulness is all about discerning, with clarity, what’s actually going on. Most of the time now – how many of you would say that you are engaged in some kind of way that doesn’t feel all that good? A lot of the time in multi-tasking – anybody find yourself multi-tasking? Confess that when you’re on the phone, you’re actually sending an email to somebody else. Anybody ever do that? Raise your hands, I want to see. Confession time. Okay. We actually do it a lot. Why? Part of it is really because we’re so stressed. We don’t have enough moments in our day to get it all done, so we start to discombobulate a little bit and juggle and cut corners.
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The Healing Power of Mindfulness
MOORE: My name is Helen Damon-Moore, and I am the Director of Service and Education at the Tucker Foundation here at Dartmouth College. I am honored to welcome you all and to introduce Jon Kabat-Zinn on behalf of the Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center Palliative Care Service, the Tucker Foundation, the Ruben Committee of Dartmouth College, Alice Peck Day Hospital, Dartmouth Medical School, the Norris Cotton Cancer Center, and the Valley Insight Meditation Society.
Special thanks to Ira Byock and Ivan Corbet [sp] and the Palliative Care Service for partnering on this project, and to those at Tucker who have worked so hard and who are this week celebrating the 60th anniversary year of the Tucker Foundation Dartmouth Center for Service, Spirituality, and Social Justice.
We are pleased to welcome Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn to Dartmouth College today for the second time. Kabat-Zinn first visited Dartmouth in the summer of 1984, when the college and the Connecticut River served as the training camp for the men’s Olympic rowing team. He was the meditation trainer for the team, helping them to optimize their mental performance. Today, he is here to help optimize our performance.
Jon Kabat-Zinn holds a PhD in molecular biology from MIT. He is Professor of Medicine Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and founder of the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Healthcare, and Society and its mindfulness-based stress reduction clinic. He is the author of numerous bestselling books, including Full Catastrophe Living, Wherever You Go, There You Are, Coming to Our Senses, and The Mindful Way Through Depression, co-authored with Williams, Teasdale, and Segal.
Dr. Kabat-Zinn’s research focuses on mind-body interactions for healing and on the clinical applications and cost-effectiveness of mindfulness training for people with chronic pain and stress-related disorders, including the effects of mindfulness-based stress reduction on the brain. His current projects include editing The Mind’s Own Physician with Richard Davidson, and guest co-editing with Mark Williams a special issue of the journal Contemporary Buddhism.
Dr. Kabat-Zinn’s work has contributed hugely to a growing movement of mindfulness in mainstream institutions such as medicine, psychology, healthcare, schools and colleges, corporations, prisons, and professional sports. Courtesy of Kari Jo Grant here in our Student Health Promotion Department, Dr. Kabat-Zinn and his work have even made their way to the inside of our bathroom doors, featured as they are in the current edition of the Dartmouth College Stall Street Journal.
Please join me in welcoming Jon Kabat-Zinn back to Dartmouth College.
KABAT-ZINN: Thank you. It’s a delight to be here. Do I have to have the light this bright in my eyes? Maybe you could tone it down a little bit, so that people can still see me, but I’d like to be able to see you, too.
It’s a delight to be here. It’s nice to walk into a theater where mindfulness is on the marquee. You know you’ve really made it when it’s on the marquee along with Frankenstein. (laughter) It’s like you’re part of the mainstream, so to speak, however that goes, from moment to moment and from day to day. But it’s really a delight to be here.
I am here, basically, because of Helen Damon-Moore and her work, which I got to actually see at the University of Iowa, when she was at Iowa before coming here. Also Dr. Ira Byock, who I met in Ireland about two years ago – almost exactly two years ago – and I was just incredibly impressed by what he’s doing with integrative medicine and palliative care. I don’t live that far from this place, and I got in the car this morning and drove up. I’m really happy to be here for the next three days.
To have this many people come out at 4:30 on a sunny afternoon, after the kind of winter that we’ve had, to a talk about mindfulness is really some kind of indicator that something has shifted in the society. You all have better things to do, I’m sure, this afternoon, than to come here. Unless you have some kind of real intuition about what the healing power of mindfulness might be, and then it might actually be incredibly valuable to spend the end of a nice sunny Thursday afternoon here together.
This talk is really not about me or what I have to say; it’s about us. It’s about every single one of us, and in some sense, what the potential is, as the slide says, for living your moments as if they really mattered. I put a little asterisk in there, just kind of an aside, “and they actually do.” The reason they do is because we’re only alive when we’re alive. This seems a no-brainer, but you could say that a lot of our lives, we’re walking around with a no-brainer or just basically no brain, or the brain is on auto-pilot or something like that. What mindfulness really is about is bringing it back online, so to speak, in the present moment. Because that turns out to be the only moment any of us ever have.
But we’re so good at thinking, so incredibly good at thinking, that we can spend enormous amounts of our time and energy absorbed in the past. Have you noticed that? Just incredible preoccupations about who’s to blame for why it’s like this, or how great it was in the good old days, and why can’t it be that way now? There’s a tremendous attraction to the past, or a tremendous aversion. But whether it’s attraction or aversion, we spend a lot of time there. Would you agree? Have you noticed that a lot of the time, if you check on what your mind is up to, it’s up to memory. It’s up to thinking about things that are already over, to a large degree.
The other favorite preoccupation of the mind is in the opposite direction, the future. If, again, you check in every once in a while, just to – sometimes I like to say you can call yourself up. You may have to, because we are “on” 24/7. We’re infinitely connected. Probably every single person has one of these in their pocket. I hope there are some exceptions. And they’re called “smart” phones, but they’re not – but they can really dumb us down, because we can be infinitely connected everywhere except here. So we may need to call ourselves up every once in a while, “Hello, Jon? Are you actually here?” (laughter) And the answer is, “No, I’m off in the future, thinking.” By the way, of course you’ll get a bill from AT&T or Verizon.
But seriously, what are our favorite preoccupations in the future? Well, one is worrying. I don’t know about in the north country; maybe you’ve gone beyond worrying. But the rest of the world, a lot of worry about things that haven’t happened yet, and may never happen. In fact, Mark Twain is famous for having said – you probably heard this in a lot of different guises, but he’s famous for having said, “There’s been a huge amount of tragedy in my life, and some of it actually happened.” (laughter)
There is this saying that “he died 1,000 deaths.” We drive ourselves crazy over things that are not going to be happening, because we’re not smart enough to actually forecast the future, but that doesn’t prevent us from driving ourselves crazy and perseverating over and over and over again about what will happen, and then something else happens, because we’re not that smart. So something else happens, and we say we’re blindsided.
How many of you would like the future to be different from the way we think it’s going to turn out? Anybody ever find yourself wishing the future was going to be majorly different, that we’d make some kind of change in the world? Raise your hands. I want to just feel in the audience.
I heard social justice mentioned earlier, and this is, after all, a university or – I guess you call yourself a college, but a campus kind of situation – so it doesn’t surprise me. This kind of engagement really requires thinking about what it means to make the future different. How can we possibly apply any leverage? Could we find an Archimedes fulcrum with which to influence the future? There’s only one fulcrum that I know of for that, and that is the present. Because guess what? We’re living in the future of every single moment in all of our lives that came before this one.
Do you remember back – I see there’s kind of a range of ages, although most of you don’t look like you’re college students, I’ve got to say. (laughter) And I’m a little disappointed. Not that I’m disappointed that you came, but I’d like to see a lot more college students. They’re going to Frankenstein, probably, later. It’s an awkward time of day for the young people. How many of you are under 25? 25 or under? Oh, so I’m wrong. That’s really nice to be wrong. (applause)
I was going to say to the older people, maybe you did it when you were even younger; do you remember before you came to college here, and probably you got into planning what the courses were that you were going to take when you got a hold of the catalogue, or you went online and you began planning, “Oh, in the freshman year I’ll take this, and sophomore year, and the junior year…” And then maybe you planned even who you were going to meet and who you might marry and what your children will look like. Does that sound familiar? Sometimes we do that when we’re young. And then we think that it’s all going to turn out in the future.
No matter what your age is, I’ve got news for you: this is it. It already turned out. How did it turn out? It turned out just like this. In this moment, your life is just like this. Not happy with it, a little bit sad or depressed or wishing it was different? That’s not a problem. That’s not a problem, because we can always feel like okay, how are we going to be in relationship to this? Of course, life is not easy. A lot of times we’re faced with enormous challenges, sometimes with enormous pain, sometimes with enormous threat. That’s part of the human condition.
But the real interesting question when it concerns, say, the future, and concerns living as if life really mattered, is can we actually be in the present moment when things are not the way we thought they would be? Or sometimes the shorthand for it is “I didn’t sign up for this.”
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Revolution in the Mind Sciences P6
The final point here is suggest towards a first revolution in the mind sciences. if suggest that we haven’t had one blue there has been too much dogma suppressing the empirical study of mental phenomena themselves as oppose to real physical <>. Now there is a possibility as we have access to Buddhism, Hinduism, <> tradition, psychology, neuron science we no longer are isolated.
Here at Google you maybe know this better than anybody else. You are on the globe, physical plant happens to be in Mountain View but it could be on amazon. We’re now living in a globe where we can integrate like ever before. integrate these <> first person and third person methodology from the contempative, the psychological , the neuro scientist in collaboration with the cognitive scientist the whole broad range and contemplatives who has exceptional mental cu c insights resulting from rigorous sustain mental training and observing and experimenting with states of consciousness.
there will be a change to break down the barriers, to throw out dogma and uncorroborated assumption and open up a new renaissance of americium and the scientific study of the mind that would be confound contempt and experiential and diet rigorously scientific. that could revolutionize the <> , it could revolutionize science and it could bring this unfortunate rift between religion and science, creationism of the school district that makes most of us gag and start breaking those barriers and see about integrating west and west , ascent and modern and cats that fresh light on the nature of the mind and on human identity. It’s a possibility, that’s my hope.
Audience: going back to the rift that instead of looking through some criticism that <> within the Greek god is one of the original ways to be <> and then there’s always <>?
Second speaker: it’s just one away. If was using taste in a short presentation. If was saying here’s a good sampling. This was not promotion Buddhism vs. Hinduism roar the Muslim trading or the <>. If was saying this is a good example form the very rich, well developed, intellectually, very sophisticated contemplative trading but the Santa Barbara Institute, which if found is not a Buddhist institution. It is an inter contemplative tradition drawing from the wealth of east ND west competitive from all over the world interfacing these with a bust of science. It’s not plugging any one tradition and it’s certainly not trying to validate Buddhism or any particular school. It’s very much the contrary.
These great contemplative tradition have been after universal truce and not just trying to collaborate Buddhist ideas and I’m not <> in that at ll. if think going back to Greek though, back to Plato, back to <> themselves to the notion of <> which is the hyper mental perception by means of which we can directly observe non sensual meant kl phenomena, tests a Greek notion but we’ve forgotten it.
I don’t want to leave anybody out. That’s indigenous people, west and east bring it all together because the stakes Rae high now. We’re dealing with something that is central to everybody’s existence and that’s consciousness. let’s throw out dogma of all sorts and not leave anybody out , not leave out the contemplative , not leave out the burro scientist, not leave out anybody and really start fusing and taking advantage of the technology including transportation that we have now so that we can really droop in thus wealth of <> insights and multiple methodologies. This <> pluralism I think is actually the key.
Audience :<>
Second speaker: so the question is if this so going to be scientific and of course science gained its laws by studying objective stuff. You can even look at it from a third person perspective. Quantifiable but measure. If one lab dies <> another can cohobated it and its pretty clear. Mental phenomena are subjective. As john <> irreducibly, <> first person. U think a good analogy for this, the question deserves not a two minute sewer. It deserves conferences` and really detailed investigations so we don’t come up with cheap answers.
If we take of example mathematics. Mathematics is not scribbling thins on a board. That’s the outer display of it but anybody here who don’t know mathematics can memorize the equations and write with the best of them with no understanding at all. When study higher mathematic s in my training in physics its really subjective. It’s working thigh a proof. Its thinking you may do something out here on the board, you may not but the rule juice of mathematics is smoothing taking <> internally and say how can mathematicians ever speak with each other. How can they know who’s great.
They get a similar training. They go through an undergraduate, the go through graduate, the go through post do and after a while they know who gets the field medal. It’s not that you write things on the board, it’s through dialogue and you say we speak a similar language. everybody else thinks they can’t understand what we’re talking but you I and I have gone through eight years of training in mathematics and we knot the elegant proofs, we know <> mathematics, we know the short stuff and so even though its largely internal they develop a language in common training do that they can communicate amounts themselves in ways that’s outsiders can understand.
let’s imagine, this is hypothetical in a ways that is slaps historical l in another and that is you spent a lot of time with Tibetans , laboring in Tibetan culture and we have <> there who would go for ten to thirty hours of training. with the common basis of ideas and training , contemplative technology and so forth and they develop a refined, professional language that they can speak amongst each other and they know what they’re talking about because like the mathematical they share training and development , they share their vocabulary and then amongst tem we know that this is true in the Tibetan tradition all the great contempative , the great scholars they know how the cream are. It was <>, those people the peers know. To an outsider it looks like a really sweet much, really nice guy. God charisma but the professional knows it’s more than that. This guy really has the Skippy, this man really know what’s going on.
I would not ask you to accept that7 because I’m saying it but I’m saying this issue has been grappled with. If we take a more <> example wine <>. when I drink I got my pallet ringed when I was eighteen because I got r drunk on red mountain wine, whiskey and beer at the same time and that tolled my tongue for like . So I can’t tell any good vintage from anther. I’ve hung out with people who has had that training. Its three years for training and then years of getting experience so two wine ><> come together and say “was it a 1948 or 1949 and what part of France was this raised in?” the state of swine is very subjective. You can’t pick up the taste offline with some external technology that will tell you that this is a $500 dollar bottle as oppose to a $5 bottle. No technology will tell you that.
They train a d then they use things like <>, they have a specialize vocabulary and they know who the brilliant wine <> are and who is just mediocre. That’s a specialized vocabulary and they know what they’re talking about and outsiders like me if I don’t have a clue. Wine testing is every imperial, the mathematical is very internal. If we try to inward inspiration on those only by analogy them perhaps we can get some idea but again the danger there’s all kinds of danger here, a mind field and that is they’re all being brainwashed in the same way. that was how introspection felled to its knees and died the different labs were simply collaborating their own assumptions and the trainees and observers their observations were so laden with the theories and assumptions of their Mentos that they were; ‘not getting this inter lab cohabitation , it fell apart but they gave up too soon and they didn’t go through a tenor twenty hours training , not <> , not James at Harvard. those requires training if its going to be professional, dint give them five hours of training or a week of trading , how about three years of training , ten tear if training.
Revolution in the Mind Sciences P5
Perhaps the imperial observation and mental phenomena nm may dispel this illusion of knowledge not from medical schools but from modern <>. happily are your American, Australian are now modern because in Singapore , it’s in Bangkok , it’s in Argentina , it’s in brazil. It’s not just the west now it’s the vision of <>.
Happily we’re not that only intelligent life in the universe. happily there have been other civilizations on this planet that has statistically the same scattering of geniuses of our euro American civilization but they weren’t us, they weren’t in the <> basin . They didn’t come out of the Abrahamic religion, of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. They didn’t come out of the Greek heritage Plato and Aristotle. Other civilization for five thousand years, India for who knows how many thousands of years might they have come up with anything we haven’t. It’s one of those questions you don’t normal ask. At least not at academia, it not one of the questions that comes up.
we’re just assuming that we trump everybody but India , classical India they unlike Galileo , unlike the founders of our scientific revolution they were not seeking a god’s eye view of object reality . They were not creating or assuming an absolute demarcation, a <> between subject and object a trying to object the world from an absolutely outside respective, God’s own perspective that just wasn’t on the agenda for Indians.
They were seeking to understand the world of experience not just some objective world independent of experience. In science we cloaca. if that’s your agenda to understand the world of e experience mot a god’s eyes view of something that transcends the experience, if that’s what your focus is, in German philosophy by the way its called <> veldt form the phenomena attribute of <>. if what you’re primarily wishing to understand the world of experience then the study of the mind has to be central to <> the natural world because the world of experience doesn’t even exist thigh consciousness.
There is no world of experience without someone experiencing it and so for the Indian the study of the mind was the first thing they tacked, in modern science it was the last thing they studied. Consciousness itself didn’t even come up for almost a hundred years. Only the last ten or fifteen years has consciousness become a legitimate object of enquiry for a <> near scientist of psychology.
When if studied <> psychology at Stanford, consciousness was not there, it wasn’t even in the index. Introspection was only mentioned in e preface when they said “we tried it and it don’t work” and they moved wright on. The Indian happily are not part of our <> basin box. They have their own areas and this is one of them. The <> and I’m reposing here that it’s a kind of telescope of the mind. These revolutionary truth seekers and they were revolutionary. they were kicking away from whole higher , dusty religious system cackled the <> tradition , heavily institutionalized , ritualistic, dogmatic , close minded and they said enough and these <> and these truth seekers roughly maybe three thousand years ago they set out to understand the world of experience with a primary emphasis in mind and the first thing they discovered is if you’re going to try and observe mental phenomena the observation of it has to be introspection but your attention is wobbling all over the place.
It was ADHD three thousand years ago. <> you’re either getting droopy or falling asleep at the wheel or your mind is scattered all over the place. How can you ace rigorously sane observation of mental phenomena if your attention is wobbling all over the place salting between <> and agitation. The first thing they did and they were very good at it by the time that Buddha came along twenty five years ago is that they developed extraordinary effective techniques or refining and causing attention. rather like a telescope firmly mounted on a tripod, polished lens, large aperture so you can make stable video observations not of stars because they were’ not that interested but they wearer fascinated to study the mind.
They develop a telescope of the mind the like of which we have beaver eloped and modern scientist since William James have not made any progress at all. that was the ground work laid like the Dutch lens makers who started off before Galileo and there was this historical individual Buddha <> and if would say he was to India what Galileo was to the west. He took a preexisting technology bite it was a contemplative technology of refining attention and he applied it in unprecedented easy. instead of simply going in a state of <>, experience bliss, equanimity , euphoria and so forth he stabilized the mind and then he used it to explore e states of consciousness , ordinary states but rigorously, empirical states of consciousness and made at least that ids the claim. Not for us to take as religion that would be boring but to take as hypotheses, they said they discovered this just like too NY good to scientist you hear somebody y over there in Beijing in their lab, can we replicate it? That’s the first thing that comes up. Somebody in Korea said they cloned a dog, let’s replicate it.
This is what scientist are doing all the time. If somebody makes a claim they replicate it and this is exactly what the Buddha encourages. He said these are my discoveries but don’t host take my word for it. See if you can replicate it and here’s the experimental procedures. first of all cultivate a way of life , aw whole way of behaving in the world that is conducive to social flourishing so that here at Google you can all get along together happy, harmoniously .you know how that happens , ethics. If there no ethics you’re ally going to be ripping each other hair out. with ought ethics no harmony , with ethic= you have a chance but also a relationship with the environment at large with mountain view, with the state of California the planet earth there’s a way that we can live in harmony in our natural environment without sucking it dry and leaving the husks to your children. Artists called environment ethics.
that was the foundation upon the basis of that , developing mental balance, refining the mound , refining attention , developing exceptional levels of mental health and well-being and with that basins then becoming a true contemplative scientists and using the redone attention out explore sub consciousness giving rise to a sense of spiritual authority or some will call liberation.
I’m suggesting something dramatic , something revolutionary here an denote I’ve said nothing original at ll. it was William harems , it was <> , it was Buddha . They’re saying this is the way to go to understand the nature of the mind. Don’t be satisfied by just studying the physical <>. You’re always going to get that which is around consciousness but nit the nature of consciousness. Should we be skeptics of that? The answer is yes said Richard Fine man the great Nobel <> in physical. He said one of the ways of stopping science would be only to do experiments in the region where you know the <>, play it safe. If you want to understand consciousness stick to the brain… you’ll get tenure. You’ll be published in <> review ` journals. Go introspection route and you’re on thin ice.
He said experimental search most diligently and with greatest effort in exactly those places where it seems most likely that we can prove our theories wrong. There’s a theory that the mind is just the brain, the mind ii just a <> of thwart brain, the mind Meta<> are physical. maybe its true but the good skeptic, not the one who is skeptical of other person’s views, the person woes is skeptical of his own assumption says ” lets out that ne to the test ” . In other words we’re trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible because only in that way can we find progress.
Science is known for skepticism, religion is known for dogmatic but what does Buddha say here, this great Galileo of India. He said in repose to a buck of skeptics, he as aid you should be skeptical about what you should be skeptical bout. Do not be led by report for tradition or hear say. Do not be led by authority of religious text or by mere logical inference all by itself not y considering appearance. just taking a causal look , taking all the races at face value nation by delight and ooespeculative popinion nor by sieing possibilirties not by the idea thsi is my teacher , ehat he said must be right but when you know for youerselves taht some things are un wholesome, destructive and detrimental then reject them and when you know for yourslef that certain things are wholeosme and good then accept them and foloow them . in otheres words be a skepitc. He encourages his own followers to be a sketic.
<> was used to great effect coming out of the medial era into the renaissance. As <> said the principle is, it is vain to do with more assumptions what can be done with fewer assumption. What I’m suggesting here is we have too many assumptions if the scientific study of the mind. Let us use <> razor to shave off the assumption the mental phenomena or physics. It’s just an assumption. <> point out they don’t look physical why should they be. If we have off that assumption what have we lost? What less do we know? We still know the <>, we know just about as much about the brain a behavior as we did before. `We’ve just shaved off an assumption that has never been <> threw tat ne out and now apply a fresh method of inquiry of introspection to actually observe mental phenomena and what might we gain the answer is we don’t know unless we try it. as we draw this to a colors we come back to William James that suggested in terms of this interface science, religion and imparism, he said ” let imperssicism once become associated with religion as hither too through some strange misunderstanding. It has been associated with <> religion and if believe that a new era of religion as well as philosophy will be ready to begin if fully believe that such an empiricism is a more naturally than <> ever were and can be other religious life. In other words introduce it empiricism into religion as much as science through <> both sides of the fence and let’s see what the fireworks display.
Revolution in the Mind Sciences P4
It would be marvelous to have such technology the only problem is we don’t have it. That’s why there is such an enormous debate around abortion. No person wants to kill babies. These are not evil people on either sides of the fence but nobody has a clue that the thing in the womb is conscious. Is it twelve days, it is as the Muslim say a hundred and twenty days? As it as the Roman Catholic see at conception? Who has got a clue imperially we don’t have any objective means of detective the presence or absence or conscious of anything mineral, plants, human etc.
That makes it tough to have a science of consciousness. What’s are the neuron <> of consciousness what are the neuron <>, what’s invariably happening when you’re conscious? They’re called the NCC the Neuron <> consciousness haven’t been identified yet let alone consciousness. We don’t even know what the neuron <> of consciousness are.
What are the necessary and sufficient causes of consciousness? We don’t have to speak of it in the abstract. Let’s say visual perception. We know act about the visual cortex. It’s the area of the brain that is pretty well mapped out. We know that in human beings the visual cortex s necessary for us to see color, for visual perception to take place.
we know that visual cortex, the octave nerve ,, the retina are necessary for the generation of visual perception in human beings but do you need a visual cortex if you’re developing some artificial intelligence and you want it to be copious but you’re not going to give it a guys brain you want to wick it our with silicone chips.
Is a visual cortex necessary in an instrument of artificial intelligence? We don’t know. We don’t know what the defiant causes are. Whether it’s sufficient just to have a visual cortex and futons coming in. we don’t know what the necessary or sufficient causes are for visual perception let alone any other consciousness. Any assumptions about heat holes to consciousness at death are just assumptions. To speak with confidence and knowledge consciousness terminates at death, you would have had to identify the necessary sufficient cause athletes the sufficient causes are there but we don’t know whether they are so we don’t know what happens to consciousness at death.
We finally come to a data <> a philosophy mind called the hard problem and this is the chemical and electricity inside the skull they’re really ordinary… they’re just want chemist have been studying for decades. They’re no mystical neuron or chemical or electrons in there. It’s really ordinary stuff.
How is it that neuron generate subjective experience? What is it about those chemicals and electricity that enables them to generate subjective experience, nominal states or even influence mental states? All we know from <> effects we go to a doctor and we receive a tablet and we believe it night work, the <> effect is going to kick in big tome. Just your belief, your expectation, your desire and truss will have amours impact on your body, your brain, you immune system. the pharmaceutical industry knows this very well.
How is that possible that you can go from an idea, a faith, a belief and then it actually influences physical health? so when we add up all of that ignorance it comes hard to say that we actually have a science on consciousness it falls in the retina blind spot but never the less we cover over that retain blind so it with assumptions or what if would call illusions of knowledge and John <>, a very distinguished philosopher of mind expresses his illusion of knowl3edge although he’s expressing it as knowledge when he writes ” there’s a simple solution to the mind body problem”. Isn’t that good relief, it’s a simple problem.
The news gets better. This solution has been available to any educated person since work has begun on the brain nearly a century ago and in a sense we all know w it to be true. Here it is mental phenomena are caused by meant neuron psychological process in the brain. I f you knock out your virtual cortex you won’t see any longer, if f you knock out your hippy <> other things don’t happen, frontal cortex tether tings happen but there’s a catch. Mental phenomena are themselves features if the brain. Mental phenomena themselves are geophysical. When did ewe learn that? Where is the empirical evidence that showed equivalence between mental phenomena and Nero events rather than nurse that’s taking on the role of casual generating and resultant mental phenomena? Who demonstrated equivalence? The answer is nobody but he’s saying everybody knows it. How does everybody know something that nobody why knows and for which there is not empirical <> at all.
Happily one of the foremost people on the front lines of scientific and research of consciousness Christ off <. outstanding Nero scientist, he’s the one leading the charge of trying to find the neuron <> of consciousness. he unmasks this illusion when he states ” the character of brain states and the phenomenal states” by that he mean mental phenomena, designers , emotions and so forth , the character of brain states and mental states appeared too different to be completely reducible to each other.
Look at brain states, they don’t have any mental qualities at all. Observe mental states, phenomena process. They don’t have any physical properties at all bring out all your instruments of technology, they don’t detect a single mental of events. Why are on earth are we equating these when they don’t even have any overlapping qualities. Neural eve vents ebbing c aural takes a hundred millisecond to generate the salts and metal state. They don’t even exist in the same point in time.
He’s calling a spade to spade here, they’re so different. It now seems unlikely that they can be reusable to each other namely that mental phenomena are nothing other than brain states. He said if suspect that the relationship is more complex that traditionally envision. Traditionally envision are that mental phenomena is just physical. For now it’s best to keep an open mind on third s matter. If love it when scientist say that.
Let’s just acknowledge that we’re ignorant w. we don’t know the nature of mental events, we don’t know that they’re physical. Let’s keep an open mind nut practically speaking what should we do know and lets concentrate in identifying the <> of consciousness in the brain. its back to business as usual .it’s not picking up the gauntlet that William James threw down its going back to the safe, observing the quantifiable , the physical , the objective as if you’re rally going to fathom the nature of consciousness by singly studying the neuron <> that contributes to the vernation of consciousness.
He’s a really good Nero scientist so we can’t blame him for saying let’s focus on the brain but that doesn’t mean all of us should. William James aid ” ukase when are you going to listen to me?” Daniel <> a very distinctive historian wrote and excellent book called the Discoverers, the history of makings discovery for the last 5,000 years, in the preface of this book he makes a very imporant point. He said throughout human history the illusion of knowledge. Thinking knowing something that we don’t know at all but absolutely being convinced by it,
Illusion of knowledge and not ignorance have or oven to be the principle obstacles to discovering ignorance he <> know can find out, an illusion of knowledge if already know and we don’t need to ask mental phenomena as physical. That’s an illusion as Kristoff <> made clear.
What I’m reposing her is that if try to envision the first revolution in the mind science. X starting in `79 where was the revolution? At one point nothing was the same because Ou understand off the mind has radically shifted with Darwin with respect to life, Galileo with respect to its place in the universe.
What’s in suggestion here is that we need a renaissance of empiricism. The imperial examination of physical phenomena. If we look back to the time of Galileo the imperil examination of physical phenomena dispels the illusions of knowledge of <> with respect to our regrind physical phenomena. They thought in the 15th century that knowledge was complete. They had the bible which was s god’s own rowed, they hide Aristotle the philosopher. Thomas <> fuse these into one perfect system. Except that it was riddled with illusion of knowledge and Galileo started tipping over that cart and is never been operated science. It was Galileo then it ea. newton, one after another and they kept on showing that which you thought was incomplete is not only incomplete but is radically flawed because you’re mistaking illusions of knowledge for actual knowledge.
I’m suggesting here that the imperial observation of natural phenomena not just the behavior or neuron <> but the phenomena themselves. Picking up the challenge of William James may dispel the illusions of knowledge of modern physicalize regarding mental phenomena.
Physicalize assumes, it onsite emphatically that there is nothing in the universes apart from physical <> and their emerging properties. Who said why the whole of reality should fit into a human conceptual construct. after all we are the one that define physical, nature didn’t define it for us and the very nature of the physical have shifted from the time of Dick Hart through Newtown , Though Maxwell, Through Max Plank , through Einstein , Through Steven Hockings it’s a moving target . Everything is reduce able onto physics. Which physics? The physics of yesterday or a hundred years from now? Where fades the moving target spot? At ha pint can a physicist say “we’ve got it under wraps now” we know that the physical and mental phenomena have to fit into that box.
They day your state says that you should stop doing physics and you’ve become a medical scholastic. We now know what s physical and nature happily fit into out conceptual construct. Nature, the whole of nature fit into outer box and we call it physical. That’s not scientific that’s dogmatic.