>> So, it's an honor to be the
Chogyam Trungpa lecturer for 2016.
Now, I never met Trungpa Rinpoche
and my knowledge of him is limited
to reading a few books and knowing
scores of his students over the years.
But even if only seen through a glass
darkly in the ways he is reflected in print,
both by his own hand and those of others,
and then the life of others that I have met,
he is always seemed to me a unique
and compelling figure in the history
of Tibetan Buddhism, and its
encounter with American culture,
and in a way that is centrally
connected to my subject for the night.
My interest in Trungpa Rinpoche is in how he was
rooted in a Tibetan past and yet he spent much
of his adult life designing
for an American future.
Someone who was passionate about the world
in all its unique context and specificity,
and who in his activities was engaged
in fashioning community and worlds and
yet did so with a very conscious
sense of difference,
of the difference between his own
Tibetan world, of his upbringing
and the uncertain American
worlds that he tried to inhabit.
This impetus to built worlds is ritually
articulated in Indian Buddhist literature,
in the elaborate, wide-ranging cosmological
interest of the Abhidharma literature
or the fantastic worlds and communities
represented in the Tantric mandalas
of later centuries of Indian Buddhism.
It was perhaps the central
concern of Tibetans in the 11th
and 12th Century during its famed
renaissance of Buddhist culture.
And during which Tibetan groups all across the
plateau fashioned richly-elaborated narrative
and artistic programs of alternative
past and presents and futures
for their communities and their lineages.
And when I think about it,
it particularly brings
to mind the 11th Century initiatory rituals of
a tradition that I've spent my life studying,
they called it Dzogchen Nyingthig
or the Great Perfection.
And in this, they talked about initiation not
in a traditional vocabulary of empowerments
but rather, in the language of introductions.
And in these introductions, one is
told, place a crystal over your eye.
And as you have that crystal in front
of your eye, you look at various things,
statutes of Buddhas, companions
dressed in ruffled bone ornaments,
items evocative of different visual
phenomena that you experience in mediation.
And I thought for a long time,
what's with the crystals?
Why do you put a crystal in your eye?
Why don't you just look at the statute?
You see it a lot more clearly.
And I came to wonder, if
the necessity of looking
through the crystal was perhaps the necessity
for Tibetans in this time of looking through in
at Buddhism, through the warping and
clarifying crystalline perspective
of glacial Tibet herself.
And placing the ultimate value on what visions
emerge in that translucent interior far removed
from the steamy plains of India
where Buddhism first emerged.
As Buddhist step in and out of the
space of these crystals, perhaps,
they enter the alchemical process of cultural
transformation, both seen and altered.
And they reemerge in a distinctly
Tibetan fashion.
Cultural assimilation is not only a corrosive
force that wears away at the sole of Buddhism,
but can reflect a wisdom of difference and
embrace of the changing context of our lives,
individually and collectively, and the
need to constantly fashion a lived world
out of those contexts and
all their profundities.
And so to me, Trungpa Rinpoche appears to have
been someone who was committed to this kind
of wisdom of difference and thus drawn to
the project of building an American world
in all its messy and potentially
enlightening details.
Now, my own context for many years in
addition to living in Tibet is that in 1992,
I took a professorship at
the University of Virginia.
And here, you see our founding father Thomas
Jefferson, the original grounds that he built,
and the Dome Room, the center of enlightenment,
French Enlightenment at the
University of Virginia.
And he designed the University of
Virginia as a contemplative university.
He stated his hopes and aspirations for this
community of knowledge on December of 1820,
thus, "This institution of my native
state, the Hobby of my old age,
will be based on the illimitable
freedom of the human mind, to explore
and to expose every subject
susceptible of its contemplation."
In almost two centuries later after that
moment and after two decades of myself living
in Virginia, in Tibet, in 2012,
because of the generosity of a donor,
we founded a wide-range initiative on
the so-called Contemplative Sciences
which I've directed from its start.
And which is quickly expanded to range
over engineering to medicine, to business,
to humanities, to nursing, to architecture, and
has launched ambitious initiatives and new forms
of classroom learning, innovation and
residential life, and major research programs
in K through 12 education, higher
education, and participatory medical care.
Now, as part of this, I found myself
returning to my old hunts in Tibetan culture
and Buddhist contemplation with
a whole host of new questions.
How does one identify the true
character of a contemplative practice?
What is the significance of context
for understanding contemplation?
How does culture relate to contemplation?
How does one learn contemplation?
What's the relationship between procedural
instructions, oral guidance, art narrative,
emulation, context and all of the other
ways that contemplation is disseminated?
How does contemplation relate to the academy?
And finally, and especially for this
talk, what's the utility in relationship
between the humanities and the
sciences in understanding contemplation
and perhaps, in adapting and transform in it.
Now-- Sorry, that was the wrong slides switch
so that's the Contemplative Science Center.
And as I puzzled over these questions,
I began working on a definitional
project towards thinking
about Tibetan Buddhist contemplation and all
its variety such as these 12-fold typology
that I've been working out of
Tibetan Buddhist meditation.
And as I trace the contours of the dizzyingly
varied forms of Tibetan Buddhist contemplation,
I kept returning back to
this challenge of context.
The context in ancient Buddhist literature and
lived practices and contemporary hermitages,
and the present and future context
relevant to its possible adaptation in new
and unexpected settings in a university,
in elementary school, a clinic,
an entrepreneurship incubation,
designs of the built environment
or biophilic initiatives thinking about the
natural environment and our exposure to it.
Now, people often think that
Buddhism is about simplicity.
The simplicity of an ascetic life, the
simplicity of being mindful in the moment,
of mediation on emptiness, of pure awareness,
and certainly, there's a truth to that.
And the Tibetan Tantric literature is
littered with references to simplicity,
the non-elaborate, the non-discursive,
the singular and the like.
But there is also an equally strong
concern in the literature for complexity.
I don't think anybody would
accuse these of being simple.
And I think at times, scientists and Buddhist
practitioners alike, suspect that humanists
like myself have an irrational
post-modern obsession with wallowing
in complexity beyond all limits and all
sense especially the kinds of complexities
that are inflected within and through language.
And that certainly may be the case.
But if we do, it's an obsession that
Buddhism shared in its very origins.
It is an Ancient Buddhist truth
and commitment to complexity
which ultimately manifests in
the avocation of two sides.
There's a Buddhist diagnosis of what's wrong
with the world in complex interwoven processes
of causality which get called interdependent
origination reflected here in the will of life.
And there's a Buddhist vision of what
might be right about the world in our being
which in later sources gets expressed
as an equally complex magical web
of emanation shown in the image to my left.
The teaching of emptiness in Buddhism sits
at the intersection of these two visions
of complexity, as a way of talking about
the impossible complexity of our own being,
individually and collectively,
and the worlds of complexity
in which we are inextricably embedded.
Each stain in the world, a person, a discourse,
a table, a thing, has constitutive threads
that trail off into this impossible complexity,
and contemplation is absolutely no exception.
With endless numbers of constitutive threads
for each practice, in each experience,
that escape the scope of
our human understanding,
scientific, humanistic, or religious.
Now, of course, humanists and scientists both
share this Buddhist concern for complexity,
but the respective pathways
diverge dramatically.
Scientists are most typically drawn,
driven, by the normative imperative
to analytically understand how a phenomenon
varies systematically at the quantified level.
And in this context, complexity
becomes exponentially burdensome.
Humanists, freed, from the experimental
constraints of a scientific lavatory
and motivated by very different concerns, are
driven by the rage for elaborating complexity,
hermeneutically, historically, ethnographically.
There's a wisdom in both of these approaches
to complexity, but diverging assumptions
and needs creates an epistemological
gap that can be fraught
with emotions, irritation, and impatience.
But this also belies the internal diversity
within sciences and within the humanities.
In the sciences, we can look to
a debate that has raged for years
between the nomothetic and
the ideographic approaches.
The nomothetic approach dominates in the
sciences particularly psychology with its focus
on averaging away individual difference
to delineate generally applicable
norms about human processes.
Individual differences and context are
even explicitly labeled often as error,
just so much chaotic noise from
which we seek to extract our signal.
And yet, there are scientists and experiments
that instead take an ideographic approach
that sees variation, individual difference,
context, as being the alchemical stone
that will yield insight in the
human processes and practices.
In Buddhist terms, we might
characterize these as the wisdom
of sameness and the wisdom of difference.
Such that the ideal is an impossible union of
the two which seems to always retreat from view
on the personal horizons of limited
time, tolerance, and imagination.
I would suggest that the nomothetic
has partial resonance with the model
of interdependent origination and
it's desired to mitigate the impact
of complexity on the experimental process.
While the ideographic relates impart to
the model of the magical web of emanations
and its willingness to celebrate
the complexity in its own right.
Now, as I consider the nature of these
often abyssal distances between the sciences
and the humanities and looking at contemplation,
and the question of what
common grounds there might be,
I gravitate again to this question of context.
Practitioners, secular adapters,
scientists, and some humanists often seem
to share a dismissive attitude
towards culture and context,
when it comes to the religiously
charged question of contemplation.
Assuming that meditative
experience is largely or primarily
about the procedural instructions whether
we read them in a book or hear them
from someone's speech, an
extraordinary individual states.
So extraordinary that we might identify
and extract a specific practice from all
of its cultural context and
expect that it comes out clean.
And that reminds me of a traditional
Tibetan proverb about death.
Butter figures prominently in
traditional Tibetan nomadic culture
but it's not the type we find
in the Boulder grocery stores.
Tibetan butter was prepared and kept in
animal skin bags so there were strands
of coarse yak hair that wound
through them as a consequence.
And so you always find yourself pulling these
yak hairs out of your butter because who wants
to eat your butter with yak hairs.
And the yak hair pulls out
really nicely, very clean.
And so, the Tibetan proverbs says that at
death, whether we like it or not, we are alone,
extracted from the complex context of our
lives like a yak hair pulled out of butter.
And likewise, people, Modernists, Buddhists,
scientists, people looking to adapt
to Buddhist practice for secular and
reform-minded Tibetan teachers themselves want
to pull these meditative
practices out from all the messy
and often poorly understood lived context
like so many yak hairs out of nomadic butter.
All right, I wondered where
I was going with that.
Unfortunately, it just isn't that simple,
because all of those messy contexts potentially
participate in as yet poorly understood ways
and degrees in the constitution
of the fundamental significance
and dynamics of the practices in question.
These practices historically were
bundled in complex ways with each other.
With thought systems and different
bodies of knowledge, with social
and institutional patterns, with images and
rhetoric, while also inextricably constituted
in their full dimensionality
by these astonishingly interdependent
threads of everything.
Perceptual practices in Tibet, the
human-- understandings of the human body,
linguistic grammar, and just about
anything else that you might imagine.
Now, we can tease those threads
out but the process is endless.
And when we unbundle these practices
for study or for application, obviously,
we also change them, again, in
ways we scarcely understand.
There's a common tendency among scientists,
philosophers, and contemplatives alike
to often be dismissive of these issues.
Dismissing cultural context is so much
cultural baggage, which I once heard
from a very famous contemplative scientist.
And I had the thought, well, I
must be a well-paid bellhop then
because I've carried a lot of
cultural baggage through the years.
And somehow, I thought it mattered.
Ultimately, I would argue that what is at stake
in these questions and in these dialogues,
in these differences of opinion is no
less than the worlds in which we live.
If we think first and foremost of contemplative
practices as grounded in and grounding forms
of life and reflect on the individual and
collective character of those forms of life,
we will understand that these contexts
are different strands of the worlds
in which we are always already
embedded and yet, ultimately shaped.
Of course, we can make analytical and
statistical claims about specific strands
as being central or peripheral, and their role
in the causal chain based upon
the object or subject of study.
But these can be deeply influenced
also by the values, experiences,
and proclivities that we bring,
whether termed bias or passion.
But have we really so easily
differentiated the kernel from the shell,
the reality from the rhetoric,
contemplation from its context?
And so, I've been pondering these
questions of contemplation, context,
and consilience between the sciences and
the humanities the last few years all
against my own personal background of memories
and scholarship and plans about worlds,
Tibetan worlds, of profoundly religious
commitments in increasingly secular realities,
American worlds of secular needs and hopes but
with often barely hidden religious aspirations,
and the many variants that lay in between.
And so I began to look back at traditional
literature on Tibetan contemplation
to ask the question, what are these contexts
that are cited in the procedural instructions
in surrounding discussions or in the narrative
literature or in ethnographic observation
of my own experience, the ones that are tacitly
assumed and applicable on the lived ground
but never spoken of in text or in speech.
Why? Because everybody knows already.
And while surely provisional and artificial,
I came up with this working
list of 12 such contexts.
Some are classic moderators, they
influence the dynamics of what we're looking
at while others seemed to be classic mediators.
And others, we simply don't know whether
they're constitutive of the primary dynamics
of the meditation or simply influencing the
strength of whatever impact we're observing.
And so, the full list is dependencies,
conceptual systems, aesthetic factors,
boundary conditions, the fact that the practices
are tremendously variable across space and time
and figure and setting, social settings,
environmental factors, intention, motivation,
expectation, emotional dimensions, physical
embodied dimensions, individual difference,
cultural beliefs, and temporal context.
And much of is this has spoken of explicitly
in the meditative literature and yet,
we pay so little attention to
it in the research that we do.
And so the question is, are these kind
of contexts or are they constituents?
Are they mediators which constitute the
fundamental mechanism of the practice,
or are they moderators that influence
the strength of the associations?
Are they center or periphery?
Are they essential or incidental?
Are they the active ingredient of
a practice or existentially inert?
These are questions we do
not know the answer to.
And yet, we typically start with so many
assumptions, which conceptually tend to assume
that whatever is outlined in the procedure
that we received are the central
mediators, usually cognitive processes.
And everything else is incidental to the
degree to which we even discuss them.
So, what I'd like to offer today
depending upon my time is a couple
of examples of that listed 12.
I can't go through all 12.
That would be impossibly long-winded.
But I want to go through two or three.
And I'm going to use a particular practice or
particular tradition from Tibetan Buddhism.
One that in part because I know it really well
which is the Dzogchen or the Great Perfection.
And in part, because it would
seem like a tradition,
that is perhaps particularly
resistant to culture and the context
because of its infamous language
of pure awareness and the primacy
of the mind, and rejection of conditionality.
As it turns out in my own opinion,
that's completely misleading.
So, the first one we're going to talk
about is dependencies, integrated pathways.
And this is what in the Tibetan Buddhist world
is most frequently called stages of the path,
though the issue goes well beyond
that formal body of literature.
This concerns the relational identity of a
practice to other practices mainly the fact
that we might isolate out a given practice
but it's embedded within a complex set
of relationships with other
practices to constitute a path.
Now, ubiquitous in Tibet, whether
formally specified or tacitly assumed,
these integrated path structures
involve a dizzying array of ways
in which various contemplative practices are
combined with each other, breathing techniques,
physical yogas, prayer, ritual, pilgrimage,
dietary practices, ethical norms, sexuality,
medical treatments, emulation of
death, para-personal mediations.
And these are combined to form both
normative and highly individual sequences
that can vary tremendously in context.
And the literature is rife with lengthy
presentations of such sequences of practices.
Although without ethnographic
or biographical attestation,
we never quite know whether these were on
the ground realties or literary fabrications
that no one actually practiced in reality.
Regardless of any particular case
however, we certainly know beyond doubt
that individual contemplative practices in
Tibet were constantly on the ground integrated
with each other in specific sequences.
And the order and mix of the ingredients
of those sequences were the subjects
of intense debate and contestation.
Now, given this reality, the tenability
of readily defining what constitutes one
individual practice is far from clear
and as slippery as delineating
a wave within an ocean.
It's thus vital that if you're a
researcher and you want to understand this,
you have to understand the
broader typology of practices
in which a single practice is embedded.
And the typical way in which that practice
was preceded by, accompanied or followed
by other practices in complex and sophisticated
arrangements technically called a path
in traditional Buddhist nomenclature.
Now, for example, there's a complex
array of so called preliminary practices,
classified as ordinary or
extraordinary in Tibetan Buddhism,
which are usually insisted upon as a
preparatory phase necessary to engage
in other contemplative practices.
And these involve a diverse array of
contemplative practices or techniques as well
as a variety of subjects and orientations,
guided reveries on the nature of human identity
and agency, dramatic visualizations
of confession and purification,
prefatory prayers aimed at
engendering compassion and empathy,
relationship incubation rituals, and much more.
How does the presence and absence
of those practices impact upon the
other practices that they precede?
Does the deeply cultivated
motivation to alleviate the suffering
of others impact the meditations that follow it?
What are the consequences
for example of eliminating
such ethical context in spiritual goals?
Now, in terms of the Great Perfection
tradition, perhaps the most well-known movement
in Tibet focused on contemplation of
pure awareness that began historically
with an infamous exclusive
focus on pure awareness.
Even to the extent that formal
practice seemed absent or suspect.
We read in the text about non-duality naked
experiences beyond words and thoughts,
pure and vivid self-awareness, and
the ontological primacy of awareness.
And we wonder and historical
Tibetans wondered whether
such traditions were beyond practice altogether.
And yet in the 11th century--
And if you've noticed,
I love the 11th Century so
I always talk about it.
In the 11th Century, everything changed.
And there was an explosion of new contemplative
methodologies under that same rubric
of the Great Perfection, drawing upon
yogic physical movements, visualization,
semantic mindfulness, visionary imagination,
dreaming, alchemy, diet, dreaming and so forth.
And from simplicity, we suddenly had complexity.
These came to be packaged into these
literary orderings of multiple sequences
of preliminaries, main practices, concluding
practices, which themselves were executed
on the ground in retreat environments, though
the bridges between such literary presentations
and actual practice on the ground
is always fraught with uncertainty.
Technique-free practices of pure
awareness combined and evoked
with powerful poetic reflections continued to be
central to the tradition but were now packaged
under a single rubric called
the breakthrough contemplation.
And the traditional also now
include another contemplation
of equal status called the direct transcendence
that involve visionary experiences,
stimulated by the sun, candles, or
complete darkness and using postures,
gazes and other techniques to
cultivate a series of visual experiences
that became ever more complex, symmetric and
iconic in character thus spontaneous in nature.
In addition, there was suddenly a dizzying array
of new practices subordinated as preliminaries,
backups, enhancements, supports
of those two main practices.
Dream yogas overnight, alchemy and diet,
diverse practices of focused attention,
contemplation of naturally occurring sounds
like fire, water, earth, the sound of a cuckoo,
sexuality, practices of behavior, visualizations
of syllables, crazily acting out every impulse
that bubbled up to your body,
speech and mind and much else.
And like so many other moments in the
history of Tibetan Buddhist contemplation,
there was a lot of argument, do we really need
those practices, do they have to be sequenced
in that way, can I just skip
to the main practice.
People didn't agree.
But what I want to ask here is what happens to a
simple cultivation of a state of pure awareness
which continues to be a practice
in this new and expanded repertoire
when suddenly it is preceded, accompanied,
and followed by a plethora of other practices
that just a few decades were
dismissed in the same context.
These kinds of debates raged throughout
the history of Tibetan Buddhism.
Must esoteric practices of
dramatic visualizations
and intensely somatic internal yogas be framed
by earlier practices of calming the mind,
generating analytical insight,
emptiness and compassion?
Must somatic yogas be preceded be the
symbolic encoding, intensely mental
and visualization-based practices
of performative self-evocation
of one's identity as a Buddha?
Does calm need to be cultivated as a practice?
Or can we accomplish that in
the course of other things
such as deep visualization skill cultivation?
So, a fuller consideration of context in this
case would be to work together with humanists
and practitioners, and ethnographers to ensure
that the full array of types of practices
and their interrelationships are understood.
As well as the various normative ways in which
these practices are interwoven into programs,
whether a short retreat schedule, a multi-year
retreat program, or a life-time of practice.
We should then combine this
understanding with first person retreats,
scientifically gathered data,
neural or otherwise,
to try to begin to understand
the actual significance
of the shifting constituent
relationships that are bundled, unbundled,
and rebundled that determine the
identity of each one of these practices
that never ever existed in isolation.
So that's one context.
So you can see why you're
not going to get 12 contexts.
Second context, conceptual
and aesthetic factors.
The second issue of context and contemplation
is what is often dismissed as intellectual,
mere aesthetics, mere metaphysics, namely our
practice is framed and embedded and disseminated
and encountered with regards to
conceptual and aesthetic contexts.
This involves the way that a given
contemplative practice is either determined
or strongly influenced by the broader
conceptual and aesthetic frameworks
in which traditionally, they
were contextualized.
You may have a seemingly identical
process when you look at the procedures.
And yet, it can be extremely different
in relationship to the aesthetics
and intellectual frameworks
in which it's embedded.
For example, you have a simple practice of
concentrating the mind or focusing attention.
And it might be prefaced by a strongly
analytical set of deliberations
or by reciting an aphoristic poem.
It might take place within two profoundly
different philosophical traditions in Tibet
that diverge radically on the
issues of the nature of the self,
the significance of structure and
process, human agency, and more.
Or there may be very different metaphorical
configurations that are deployed around
and within the teaching of the
practice and even its execution.
So when we focus on a practice with
insufficient attention to the immediate
and broader conceptual and aesthetic contexts
which constitute their character and impact
in unknown ways often dismissing them as
cultural baggage, intellectual trivia,
so much useless beauty, our
assessment will be I think misguided.
So to return back to my favorite
tradition, the Great Perfection,
in its original so called pure practice,
a version of what today is sometimes called
open monitoring or open awareness meditation,
is it really any different-- this is very
heretical question for the tradition--
is it really any different than earlier
Buddhist practices of Samatha and Vipassana,
calming the mind, cultivating insight
of the mind and so forth or later,
Mahayana traditions of emptiness and compassion.
Now, if you ask the tradition like all
traditions, they'll claim a stark difference
between such Great Perfection, cultivation of
pure awareness and this earlier antecedence.
But how do we as scholars and researchers
who don't have a vested interest
in the tradition assess these claims of
difference to what can sometimes formally
and procedurally look like
very similar practices?
We can bring instruments for example
to measure the neural activity
or physiological processes
to bear upon this problem.
But that will only yield
more data with which to work.
And we'd be foolish to assume that constituent--
consistency on these reports entails
that there is no significant difference
in the practices' overall
impact and significance.
That said, surely, it's useful to have
such data for example neuro markers
across these particular variations.
But, I think we need to look at
each one of these practices not just
at the procedural instructions but at the
distinct conceptual, metaphorical, rhetorical,
symbolic, narrative, and aesthetic frameworks
in which these practices were transmitted,
practiced, and embedded with,
and from start to finish.
You sit down on a mat in an isolated place.
You do a basic exercise of open monitoring
or open awareness or for that matter,
focused attention on a specific subject,
a candle, a statue or your breath.
How does what you do before
and after shape that event?
What about the weeks and months
and years of a world view
in which the practitioner is positioned?
What does the neurological monitoring
of a meditator really tell us?
And what does it not tell us?
For example, when we focus on these
questions, there can be no question
that there is an immense difference
between calming and insight meditation
in pre-BCE Northern Indian Buddhist circles
and the Great Perfection
contemplations of 11th Century Tibet.
Dzogchen on the one hand is a
resolutely post-Tantric tradition.
It comes after all of esoteric
Buddhism which it severely critiques and
yet is in profound dialogue with esoteric
Buddhism's agenda of transformation,
complex ritualism, forceful
contemplative techniques
and interior mastery of physiological processes.
In addition, the Great Perfection's
symbolic space
and its conceptual framework
is focused on naturalism.
External spaces, vast stretching spaces, nomadic
imagery with little link lambs with are herded
into visionary pens across the immense
stretches of the Tibetan sky, and anti-agrarian
and anti-constructionism rhetoric.
And all this is against the
background of a broad familiarity,
with the most normative esoteric practice in
Tibet, deity yoga, with its central dictate
of semantic mindfulness, that yokes the
perceptual details of these divine images
with specific Buddhist philosophical,
ethical, and cosmological principles.
There's also the issue of the primacy of
consciousness of the ontological priority
of pure awareness for which the
Great Perfection is so famous.
The literature foregrounds mind such an
awareness and makes a sustained argument
for its generative function in all
aspects of human existence and beyond.
Pure awareness is the driving force in
embryology, surprise, thanatology, cosmology,
cosmogony, eschatology, psychology,
physiology and epistemology.
This pronounced reorientation is
toward a model of divine creativity,
a gnostic philosophical position that
infuses every aspect of its contemplation.
So you can't just look at the procedural
instructions and think you've understood.
So, how are we to understand
such language and such rhetoric,
and the realities it evokes
and tries to articulate?
The slightest exploration of the literature
and the oral teachings should leave one
with no doubt that it is far from self-evident
what it means, that it has multiple meanings.
And that the rhetoric of the
tradition and the reality
of our experience are inescapably bridged
by the human science of interpretation
and the human logic of aesthetics.
So, how do these shifting registers
impact upon the actual practice,
the experiences it engenders, and the personal
and collective transformations
that may issue from it?
Do neurological indicators
at all record these shifts?
Skeptical.
This is at least as true for
Tantric contemplation overall,
which is inherently dramatic and
theatrical in so much of its extent,
that extricating some naked experience from
the practice is intrinsically problematic.
Or if we turn to the more intimate
experiences of somatic internal yogas, here,
we have the para-personal space of our bodies
imaged in wildly diverse ways, a hydraulic body,
a photic body, a phonemic
body, an aerodynamic body,
a sexual body, a dying body, a grotesque body.
How do these embodied images and metaphors and
concepts and rhetoric impact upon the practice?
And how does neuroscience
help us asses those impacts?
Interpretation and experience, hermeneutics
and phenomenology are not as easy to extricate
from each other as we might think.
This applies whether we are looking
at the practice in its own right,
the grand imaginative performances of deity
yoga, the nomadic visionary wanderings
of the Great Perfection, or the rush and
roar of internal pilgrimages in somatic yoga,
or what precedes and follows those
contemplations and their experiences.
After all, even if we have a
simple contemplative session
of what we might understand to be
a non-conceptual peer awareness,
we live in the dynamic human complexity
of the spaces that precede and follow it.
And the significance of those
experiences surely is profoundly shaped
by that complexity and that specificity.
We still err repeatedly in our age old desire
to separate the secular and the profane,
the trivial and the profound, the cultural from
the universal, the samsaric from the nirvanic.
Though it is far from clear that
we are not cheapening both sides
and the calculus upon which we rely to do so.
In addition, I would raise a warning flag at the
embrace of the dichotomy of critical analysis
and contemplation, the traditional and
modern pairing, because I think much
of this brings us to face
to face with aesthetics.
Analogical thought, the impact of a work
of art, music, or performance upon us,
the type of inquiry performed
in a powerful poem.
So, we have to resist the instinct to
separate experience from conceptual
and aesthetic considerations and realize
that only a full spectrum integrated approach is
going to help us mature as a collective trying
to use modern methodologies, scientific,
historical, phenomenological, hermeneutical,
ethnographic, to better understand
these practices and their import.
Third context, third and final, don't worry.
Social and environmental context.
Social and environmental contexts points
to the communal and institutional settings
in which these practices where
and are transmitted and conducted.
This ranges over many variables.
Is the practice done individually?
Is it done in groups?
Small groups?
Large groups?
One sex? Both sexes?
Et cetera.
Is the practice done in public?
In private?
Or in secluded areas?
What about the environment of the practice?
Altitude, proximity to water, nature,
degree of light, surrounding vegetation.
What about the structure in nature of
the broader community and institutions
in which you're doing the
practice and which are shaped
and in turn shape these contemplative
practices, and so many other variables
in the social and environmental setting?
When we take these practices out of
context, context that are often prescribed
in considerable detail in the traditional
literature and assess them independently
of all those contexts, it is far from clear
that we are even examining the same practices
thus throwing all of our conclusions into doubt.
For example, a yoga, perhaps a yoga practice
studied as individual practitioners do it and
yet traditionally, it was
always done in groups of 10.
And specific and significant
neurological shifts happen when people do
such synchronized movements together but do
not happen when they're done individually.
In addition, we often talk about the social
context for example in terms of Asanga
or a small group of practitioners.
But really, it goes well beyond of
limited range of norms and values shaped
and reinforced within those contexts.
It ranges more broadly into the distinctively
cultural worlds that are constituted
at the micro and macro level by the
communities in which we live, ideas--
sorry, too many words-- by the communities in
which we live, ideas and practices and values
that are temporal, spatial,
emotional, cognitive,
linguistic, semantic, ethical and more.
Now, I could give a lot of
examples but I'm going to limit them
to two very personal reflections
and then, conclusion.
All these relates to transmission from the
past to the present, from religious communities
to secular societies, from Tibet to
America, from the present to the future.
Lineage is an age old concern for Tibetans.
We see deep concerns about the fragility
of continuity, about the entropy of time,
about the ravages of distance for such a
small number of people across such an immense,
treacherous terrain on the
Tibetan plateau with so many forces
of disruption, human and inhuman alike.
And thus, we hear throughout the history of
Tibetan Buddhism of adulteration, corruption,
breaking, vanishing of lineage
and transmissions.
Is transience or impermanence only a
danger or is it also an opportunity?
Is temporality a force we must guard
against for fragile transmissions
or is it an empowering force
enabling innovation and adaptation?
At times, it seems the choice is between decay
and preservation but there is also the vitality
of a transmission and transformation.
We often think of traditions at stake in
these lineages in terms of discrete things,
there's a text, there's a ritual, there's a
meditative practice, there's an ethical system.
But they are grounded in and grounding ways of
life which are incarnated in all of these forms
and beyond the narratives and arts
and lived lives on the ground.
What if we think first and foremost of
worlds as being what is transmitted?
If our topic is really the problem of multiple
worlds, this world, my world, your world,
their world, and all their complexities, and all
their simplicities then the question becomes,
how do we translate a life and
how do we transmit a world.
An example is one of my own teachers, the
life and times of Khenpo Jigme Phuntsok,
a famous 20th Century Tibetan contemplative
visionary and organizer whose activities
in post-cultural revolution in Tibet give rise
to the largest monastery
in the history of Tibet.
And I remember when I first heard
of him in Southern India in 1980s.
He was this mysterious figure that
was revealing treasures out of the sky
with contemplative content and
working miracles up in Eastern Tibet.
And when I came to know him, when I came to
live in his community, read his literature,
talk to his followers, write his life
story, I began to see that what was most--
the most transformative value in his revelations
was how he contributed to the reanimation
of lived Tibetan world, how he bound together
profoundly unsettled generations back
to a uniquely Tibetan matrix of
space and time and agency and values.
The cultural revolution in Tibet had
devastated the transmission of that world.
It had left Tibetans unmoored
and adrift in an amorphous world
where places lack Tibetan names
and practices and associations.
Time no longer resonated with Tibetan figures,
and memories and festivals and meeting.
The pantheon of agents were full of new
threatening unknown figures divested
of the intimacy of shared values and relations.
And Khenpo Jigme Phuntsok's visionary
revelations and transmissions all
across the plateau were keyed
to specific times and places.
As well as ancient narratives and they
function to reanimate the sacred landscape
in these particular places, pilgrimage sites,
the remembered past, future possibilities
of agency, all with deeply Tibetan resonances.
His new transmissions, contemplative,
philosophical,
narrative were profoundly oriented not just
to a personal ahistorical transformation
but to the collective renewal and
re-articulation of this Tibetan world.
That was the real miracle.
And then, there is here and now
in the United States where I
and I think most of you live and work.
And as I've worked with others over the last
couple of years on the secular adaptation
or transformation of contemplative transmissions
for use in elementary schools in Louisville,
Kentucky or entrepreneurship training
in the business school or patient care
in the nursing school, or the
undergraduate student experience,
our attention is often absorbed
by the technical details
of how do you make a practice that's
religious secular and what's the consequences
of divesting them from those religious aspects?
And how do you alter them to suit these
new contexts and the contextual needs
and developmental realities of the people
that you're trying to bring them with to?
And this is by no means a trivial process.
That's why it absorbs our attention.
And it seems to me, it's a clear possible
good to bring practices of concentration
and attention monitoring and empathy and
performance visualizations, somatic awareness,
and so forth into a fourth grade classroom
or the self-care of a terminally-ill patient.
And I would certainly not want to suggest
that these practices are not often linked
in these new transformations to a
deep concern for broader values.
And yet, the more I work in those contexts,
I found myself or I find myself focused
on the dramatic and deeply
unconscious transformations that ensue
as these practices are migrated from one world
to another world and thoroughly transformed
in the process in the constitutive context
that ultimately are not incidental
to their meaning and function.
And so I went back and I go back to
the original traditions, their text
and the lived transmissions to look
more closely, what were those contexts
and to what degree were they
constituting the impact that I valued.
And this in turn has led me to an acute sense
that beyond the transformative transmission
of these practices in the new settings,
there is a more complex challenge,
and that is of one of the
worlds in which we live.
Our worlds are badly broken and their
restoration and alignment with values of insight
and care and well-being is a
deeper and more complex challenge.
And to address this, we need to
love those worlds and those contexts
and understand their complexity and
cultivate the skills needed to engage them.
But when we tell ourselves stories
of quintessential techniques,
essential experiences, unchanging
transmissions, and the triviality
of context, we go seriously astray.
And I don't think we'll ever meet those
challenges or realize those opportunities.
So, conclusion, oh I wasn't moving
my slides, sorry about that.
Conceptual and aesthetic context.
Social and environmental context,
that's a-- I think that's at Larung Gar,
the monastery that my teacher founded.
And over there is Thomas Jefferson's
grounds when we had a big meditation
on the historical lawn with Deepak
Chopra and Arianna Huffington so.
Now, Buddhism traditionally
narrates the diversity
of its contemplative systems
in quite different ways.
At times, it suggests that this diversity,
of the fact that we have so many kinds
of meditative practices, is emblematic
of the fact that people are diverse.
And we have to adapt to their
personalities and their proclivities.
And otherwise, it's all, you
know, streams to the ocean.
But just as persistently, there's a habit
of ranking practices, ranking philosophies,
which partially classifies them
by their divergent outcomes.
And in the long history of
Buddhist contemplation in Tibet,
it must be said that the greatest of masters
are often marked by profound disagreements.
And that these are not simply
sectarian, not simply egotistical
and not simply academic in character.
The contemplative traditions, I would argue,
are characterized by difference
as much as they are by sameness.
They do not represent a consistent, uniform, and
convergent body of singular wisdom but rather,
they reflect different visions of human
possibilities and destinations, human values
and inquiry, human self and community.
They reflect a complex range full of passion,
struggles, hopes, intellectual models,
experiences, inquiry, and experimentation.
Contemplation is not experiential
simplicity to thought's complexity.
In this process, we must not
lose sight of the human element.
Psychologically, some of us are
complexity-tolerant and others long
for the simplicity of normativity.
And it is not surprising that this also
manifest in our intellectual proclivities
and practices though we should not
confuse them for truth and righteousness.
Epistemologically, we individually
as people and collectively
as disciplines lack sufficient knowledge
to adequately understand these practices
in their constituents much less in
their complex context or moderators.
And these epistemological
lacunae most typically pass
into our intellectual efforts
without comment or awareness.
The traditional Tantric image of a
divine collective and world is a mandala
as you see six different variants
behind or to the side of me.
And yet, mandalas diverge considerably as we
can see in terms of being characterized by peace
or fury, the identity of their inhabitants,
the architecture of their residents,
the narratives of their lives, the ideologies
of their cultures, and the different visions
of the nature of center, periphery
and the relationships between them.
Contemplative traditions,
like all human traditions,
are ongoing processes of transformation.
They're not fragile products transmitted
with protections against entropy.
And translation into new context
is a perpetual responsibility,
not a special event happening once in an
epic transmission across distant borders.
Transmission is about tradition
which both constraints and enables,
and the transformations that
measure its vitality.
Traditions begin and end with the creation,
articulation, sustenance, transformation,
and decline of worlds namely messy, complex,
splendid, interwoven webs of so called contexts.
In this regards, I might suggest
that the traditional references
to wordless transmissions could also be
understood in relationship to embodied knowledge
and the tacit understanding of worlds that
comes for those who share the lives and worlds
of their teachers and their
brethren on an extended basis.
So I would suggest that the translation involved
in bringing contemplation from Tibet to America
from the past to the future will
never be a literal translation.
It will not be the type that textually involves
immense philological knowledge and mastery
of every little word and carrying it or
dragging it into the target language.
But rather, it will be an inspired translation.
One that is rooted as much in the future
it reaches out to and its specificity
as in the past from which it flows.
And this type of translation that is called
for when we encounter and imagine forms
of life not just transcendental
experiences and procedural instructions,
and hence might link back to what I
understood even if through a mirror,
darkly of Trungpa Rinpoche's life.
These differing worlds have overarching
norms that are broadly applicable
but they're also driven by
variability and individual difference.
So, we need the wisdom of sameness
and we need the wisdom of difference
to understand these constantly
evolving realities.
The traditional Buddhist notion of pure vision
then is that those worlds, these worlds,
are the real concern of Buddhism.
And that contemplation and study must
ultimately find the profundity we seek
in our daily experience and realities.
And understand and redeem the shared worlds in
which we live in all of their messy complexities
and all of their pristine simplicities.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
That was actually timely.
[ Laughter ]
So I can take questions, comments,
insults, suggestions, even praise is OK.
[ Praise ]
Poetry, music?
[ Inaudible Remark ]
>> I'm curious how you-- this research
in your presentation has affected your
individual practice and insight in Tibet.
>> My mind went back to the
foil of that research.
You know, I would say that my
understanding of the practices that I learned
in the tradition were profoundly impacted by the
lives of the teachers from who I learned them.
And that that really shaped my understanding
of those as much as the text that I studied.
And that has to do with like for example,
Khenpo Jikphun and kind of the life that he led
but also so many other teachers who--
I wasn't necessarily noticing it but
just tacitly, it flooded into me.
And more and more as I understood those
practices and why they were like this or--
And if you really study the literature,
there's so many ways you can do it all.
And so the pick and choose my pathways
through that was very affected by those lives.
In terms of the last four years or so, when I've
been involved much more heavily with this kind
of interdisciplinary research and so forth
and thinking about this design process
by which you have this-- can assemble this
team of people, practitioners and teachers
and ethnographers and scientists and humanists
and try to understand these traditions.
And then, try to think in a really
nuanced way, how am I going to design
for patients, you know, lupus patients.
Or how am I going to design something
for the context of an elementary school
or in undergraduates, in a dorm and so on.
That's like for other people's context.
It's not from my context.
And so, I think the last four
years, I've thought a lot more
about other peoples' contexts than my context.
And I think that the thing that I've learned is
actually not so much like, oh I should do this,
practice that way or this way for myself
but rather, a tremendous lesson in the need
to not objectify others and not be
insensitive to the profundity of their details
and their contexts and their experience.
And that for the last four years has
really been a gift to better understand
and recognize the way that
I was objectifying people
and still ignoring the very
divergent context of their lives.
And so I think by trying to figure
out how to adopt these practices,
it forced me to better imagine
and understand the messy realities
of others, people other than me.
And so, that's been kind of more what
I've learned the last four years or so.
>> Thank you.
>> Thanks for the talk.
My question is about practice as well
whether the research that you've been doing
and all in all stuff you brought to bear
here, is it different from the practices, say,
as going to shopping and cooking.
I mean, or, you know, is it a practice--
is it also part of the practice?
>> OK. So you're asking about the difference
between those practices and the kinds
of practices you're engaged
in throughout your day?
>> No, sorry.
>> Oh, sorry.
>> I mean, cooking was just a metaphor, I meant
the intellectual work which has [inaudible]
to do with, you know, your understanding
about worlds and the context of transmission
and all of that what you've
been presenting to us.
That still at the end of the day,
you're talking about the practices
which you might sit on a mat and meditate.
And I'm asking you about, you know, that
I suppose that indissoluble division
between the intellectual work and
the practice or were they actually--
>> Oh, I see.
OK, so I went with the cooking.
>> Yeah, sorry about that.
[ Laughter ]
No, no, that's OK.
It's all right.
>> That was--
>> -- something else.
>> So, I'm going to answer that but I'll just--
let me go back to your question for a moment
because it made me think of Khenpo
Tsultrin Lodro who's this very,
very famous Tibetan figure from Tibet who's
currently one of the heads of that monastery,
and a really brilliant and great
figure in Tibetan Buddhism.
And someone I've known for a long time.
And we had to meet Virginia a year and a
half ago and we did this kind of public talk.
And I knew he's very interested
in the sciences and so forth.
And I was trying to get into answer a
question that was a little bit like that
but we have phrase that I said, well,
listen, what if we do all these studies
and we just show beyond the shadow of
a doubt that if you take that deity
that you've been visualizing as black for,
you know, for 10 centuries but it changed
and you visualize it as blue, it's really going
to have a much greater impact
on your student's life.
And he was like, next question.
[ Laughter ]
Because it's a genuine question, right?
I mean, I think that as we-- if we
really pursue this in a profound way,
we should be open to taking that research
and actually thinking about the practices
that we're engaged in or we found persuasive
and consider adopting them in new ways.
And that was very hard for him to say especially
it was a public talk being recorded so,
you know, has to go back to Tibet and
say, I didn't really mean that, you know,
I'm trying to make him happy but.
So, to your question, I mean, that's kind
of precisely what I was trying to talk
about which is we get very focused on this is
the practice that I'm engaged in but the person
that we are is the person who was exposed to all
those things before we sat down in the cushion.
And so, like-- again, to go back to couple
of examples I gave, if I start a session
of just focusing my attention or
concentrating my mind and so on, and you do it.
And yet, I start the practice by reciting one
of the great works of philosophical poetry
in Tibet, the Drime Ozer of Longchenpa,
which is very commonly done in retreats.
You recite that and then you meditate.
And you recite it and you meditate.
And you, on the other hand, go to, let's
say the Lekshe Nyingpo of Tsongkapa,
a great work of analytical philosophy, totally
a different way of thinking about language
and really, everything under the sun.
And you kind of used that to frame your session.
Is the session going to be the same?
Will the impact on us be the same?
Will what we carry forward out of this session,
which is what really in the end matters,
is that going to be the same or altered?
Then, that differentiation of what in Tibet
you call the tun, the meditative session,
the formal session that's
bounded by a preliminary act
of declaring your intention or whatever.
And then, it has a set of
procedures in the middle.
And then at the end has a moment of reflection
on how do I want to bring this forward.
That bounded session, the
boundaries are artificial.
And the tradition itself
tells us this all the time.
It says, ultimately, it uses these metaphors
like dissolving the difference between day
and night, and so forth to say,
you got to carry it forward.
And so, carrying it forward also means that it's
carried forward before you start the practice.
It's not just that you carry it
forward, it's you're carried forward.
And so, all those things matter.
And the tradition talks about this all the time.
The inspiration, the blessings of the teacher,
the importance of the community, the--
if you look at the literature,
it talks, where should you go,
what kind of place should you go to,
what kind of person should you consult
with, or should you associate with.
There's these thousands of pages of
this, they cared about these issues.
It's not really a heterodox position
when you look into literature.
So, I think in the end, to go back to our
really famous Buddhist maxim, Samsara is Nirvana
and Nirvana is Samsara, not
a slightest difference.
And that means all of these things matter.
So maybe the contemplation, a big argument
in Tibet, you know, analytical contemplation.
One faction thinks this is the cat's meow and
the other faction is what are you talking about?
You know? Like that's like talking about
black-white or, you know, sour-sweet.
Well, we do sour-sweet soup but,
you know, they're making a sense.
So, it was a big argument.
But regardless of that argument, whether
you're employing intellectual processes
in the meditation itself, the point
is that you have a body, you're there.
You have a mind, you have emotions, you
have memories, it's all impacting on that.
And we just don't know without
a lot of research.
And traditionally, they did a lot of research.
They had a lot of care for these details.
But they had a lot of difference of opinion too.
So, to my request, it's just,
let's stop thinking
about extracting all the strands
of yak hair from the butter.
And let's worry about the butter
too, because we are butter.
We are people.
We have bodies and minds and relationships.
And so and I find it so much fascinating
like in psychology, I have a friend,
I mentioned the other night,
who's a neuroscientist.
And what he does is he loves shocking people.
So, he'll bring someone in then he'll threaten
them with shocks as well as actually shock them
because otherwise, the threats are not real.
And he puts the person in the presence
of loved ones or ones they don't know.
And he tries to see what's the differential
when you're in the presence of a loved one
or the presence of someone
you don't know in terms
of how you process this threat
and danger and so forth.
And what he came up with out of his own
studies was the idea that looking at the brain
and the way the brain was responding to these
things is that our viscerally expressed sense
of identity in the brain is
constantly changing in characters.
And loved ones are included in those parts
of the brain that are typically thought
of as involved with self-processing,
because they're part of our identity.
We have a distributed identity.
We have for 60,000 years as a species, since the
birth of language and it's constantly changing.
Others carry our memories and aspirations and
identity force we carry their identity force.
We are not separate.
And so, all these issues of the community,
of the thought system, of the metaphors,
of the feeling while you're
sitting in the session, on your air,
the humidity, all these things have an impact.
The field of biophilia, a love of nature and
architecture in else where that tries to look
at how when we make the built
environment does exposure
to natural elements have an impact upon our
bodies and minds and well-beings and so forth.
And study after study is
showing, surprise, it does matter.
Whether you're like just-- And think about
it, you're in one of a building like--
not a building like this but
this room, it's very monorhythmic
in character, all the sensory input.
You're outside, it's polyrhythmic.
There's all sorts of input that's
happening that's uncertain,
that's unstable, that's spontaneous
and so forth.
So anyways, that's just one example.
There's so many other fields of research
that are showing us how things have much more
profound impact than we thought they were so.
>> Given all this complexity and trying to
benefit the world and classrooms and schools
and so forth and trying to design approaches
that will work and also being mindful
of the tendency in this culture to abbreviate
everything and to try to fit in as many things
as we can in the shortest possible time.
When for example you bring a set of well-thought
out practices into an elementary school
in Louisville for example, how do you set up
a system so that there is a clear beginning,
middle and end so that you're creating some
kind of context for these practices that you
so carefully designed knowing full well that
there going to be myriad of other factors
that are going to interfere with that?
Are we setting ourselves up for a certain amount
of disappointment or failure when we enter
into these big projects like this?
I know you know what I'm talking about.
>> Yeah, well, I'm not going to dare to talk
about elementary school classrooms
in front of you so.
But--
[ Laughter ]
-- I'll shift to a topic on safer ground
which is it's the same issue, you know,
like in undergraduate education and so forth.
But here's a couple of thoughts about that.
In the beginning, the middle, end, this was
one of my great epiphanies the last four years.
You know, simple epiphanies,
which was when I started to look
up over Tibetan Buddhist practices and
asked the question, what is the grammar
that binds all these practices together?
There was this dangerous steering in my mind.
In Tibetan Buddhism, it's
beginning, middle and an end.
That's the grammar of Tibetan
Buddhist meditation.
You have a beginning, you have
a middle, you have an end.
It's formal in character.
It's bounded.
In retreat, the language
for a retreat is a boundary.
That's what retreat is in Tibet.
And they have boundary stones and all
these other boundary words about retreat.
But a meditative session is a mini-retreat.
It's a bounded zone.
And so, I began to ask myself the question,
what constitutes that bounded zone?
What's the grammar?
What's the lexicon?
What are the principles and so forth?
And I think it's easy to get fixated.
I think we all know people who
are contemplative teachers, very--
I'm not going to mention names but they're some
pretty well-known people who are really rigid
like they can't deal with change.
Like they come in the room
and it's like, whoa, you know.
Like this, I kind of come in here and say,
hey, I'm not going to stand like this.
You guys aren't going to sit like that.
That's not contemplative.
Or, you know, it has to be a circle.
Why does it have to be a circle?
Why can't we have a square?
I mean, we're all different, right?
There's nothing right about your contemplative
practice and your contemplative approach.
And I think that is a danger.
It goes the-- In Bhutan, the most famous example
of like they have meditation as implemented
in all the elementary school classrooms
but the people in the ministry
of education were telling us that often, you
know, the meditative moment that was ubiquitous
in Bhutanist's elementary schools or public
schools systems was like this, "Meditate!"
You know, "Oh."
And so, kids would meditate, you know.
And OK, that's-- that was
a contemplative moment but.
So, I think and this is something
that I learned from you.
And I think also Tish Jennings alike which
is the importance of teacher training.
That it's not just about here's your
procedural game plan, to march in Little,
Kentucky and implement, but you need
to cultivate a certain kind of person.
And if you don't take care of that, it's
probably not going to be that much use.
It will just be flexible--
It will be inflexible, it will be
rigid that will not be animated
by a living dynamic person who's
incarnated the sensibilities
that we might be called contemplative.
And so, they'll say, yes, there's
a beginning, there's a middle,
there's an end, and the students hate it, right?
So, that's the-- one of the things I
learned over the last five years from you
and from Tish is just that importance
of you have to train the people.
You can't just-- The curriculum
doesn't exist in isolation.
Just like, you know, I couldn't
have Dzogchen text by myself.
And sometimes, I remember one of my first great
Dzogchen teacher who I really loved and really,
I don't think he ever taught me a single
thing about-- we read like hundreds of pages.
And I'd ask him all these incredibly difficult
questions and he'd go, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I don't think I ever told a
single one of the problems and yet,
I learned so much from him, from the way
he talked, the way he-- like the book was--
he could not explain those
questions, those problems,
but the book was a-- it was
a lived reality for him.
It wasn't a technocratic process
of resolving this problem or that.
He would have like to solve those problems
but they were really hard problems.
And so, in the same way, whether it's a
teacher or it's an entrepreneur or it's someone
in a corporate context, we'd
have to take care for the people.
And so, that's definitely
something that I've learned as well.
I like to skip people, people are so messy, so.
And so, I had to, you know, I'd
lost my epiphanies about people so.
And that was one of the reasons
why so thank you for that.
>> One of the things that trumpeted that I
imagine that you're aware of many people here
in north is what called the-- what
are called the Shambhala teachings.
Like presented in the book, Shambhala is like a
path of the warrior and I'm thinking about this
in terms of what you talked
about pulling the yak hair
out of the butter, the importance of the butter.
There was a conversation that took place between
Thrangu Rinpoche and Trungpa Rinpoche years ago
about what he-- what Trungpa
Rinpoche was after in doing this.
And then Thrangu Rinpoche spoke to some of us
to sum up that conversation and said that--
there seemed to be two main
things that they talked about.
One was in our world, how the
land had been related to--
>> How the what?
>> The land.
>> Land.
>> The earth, the disturbance of our world.
And the other interestingly was that so--
what was so pervasive in our
culture was homelessness,
not in the sense that word is used, of people
dying out on the streets, but that people move
about so much and don't know where
they're from and where they are.
So I guess what I'm getting at there
is the importance of what we do
about our cultural situation, our butter
that the yak hairs are brought into.
And I just wonder what you think about that in
terms of how we pay attention to our behavior,
our environment, and so on, and the
important of that in this transmission.
>> Yeah, so I think that's precisely
what I was trying to get at.
I know nothing about Shambhala.
I'll just be totally honest.
But, you know, I've heard things
and so, probably all like, you know,
mixture of stuff in my brain
just floating around.
But I remember, he was talking to Phil probably
and Phil, you were telling me about just some
of the daily practices that were done
with regards to Shambhala in terms
of celebrating certain days and certain ritual
elements that accompanying meals and so forth.
And that was a long time ago when
Phil is Charlottesville, Virginia.
And, you know, that left an impression on
me because I thought, you know, that's--
I'm definitely not a ritual person.
You know, my father is Roman Catholic
and he was totally a ritual person.
And so, I was like the, you
know, anti-Christ or something.
No, no, I'm not going to say grace,
you know, and all these kinds of stuff.
But late in life, of course, I see the
incredible value and significance of these types
of elements in our individual and collective
lives, regardless of our personal sentiments.
And that left an impression on me because
I thought, well, that's a Buddhist world.
You know, whether you like it or not.
Like that was-- it's an attempt to articulate
an alternative time and space in relationship
to others, in relationship
to the food and so forth.
Like that's a genuine attempt that
building the Buddhist world in a way
that so many other Buddhist movements I see
in the US, they don't really seemed that way.
And so, in Tibet, when I first
spent those all years, you know,
looking for the next great master and so on,
I was very unobservant about things like that.
I was just so focused on my books
and my meditations and my teachers.
And-- But over time, it began to really
impinge upon me the Tibetan world
like to really experience it, to see how do they
experience time, and if you think about time,
there's values of time, there's
practices of time, there's ideas of time.
And the same with space, and the same with
our relationship to the places, you know,
the narratives we associate with
place, the values that we hold
for certain kinds of geographical features.
The practices we engage in with regards to
those places and how we transmit those to our,
you know, our children and others.
So, that sense of rootedness, of being
rooted in a place, in a community, in a time,
these are really essential things.
And I think contemplative practices can be
extraordinarily helpful in that process.
But if we bifurcate these and we think
contemplation is only about the amorphous space,
you know, I fear that we arrive at the
North American mall, a vacuous place,
a place of nothingness, of no
relationships and rootedness.
And we misunderstood the lesson.
We thought of emptiness as something
that only breaks the ties that bind,
but doesn't enable new forms
of commitment to take place.
So, yeah, that's very much kind of what
my intuition has led me to imagine.
>> Thank you.
>> You. Yeah?
>> So, I feel like the [inaudible] here
is that the context that a person lives in
or a tradition was developed in has a lot
to do with how that tradition is done.
So, I'm wondering if that means that since
each individual human being has lived different
experiences and different contexts,
that means there is an ideal path
for each specific person made up
of different practices inspired
by that person's specific background.
So, I'm guessing, I'm asking, A, is that
true and B, if it is, how does a person find
that for themselves, what practices or what path
is perfect for them because of their context?
>> You know, that's something
that I think about a lot.
And I don't-- I mean, I've been thinking about
it partially in terms of personalized learning
and customized learning, this movement towards
thinking that learning needs to be as much
as possible adaptive and, you know, customized
with regards to the person in question.
And we typically think of those as
facilitated by digital processes
so that a technology is keeping
track of what you're doing,
how are you responding, the
rate you're learning at.
And then, it's making choices and
adjustments for what's happening.
So, I think in terms of contemplative
practices in the same way.
How do we create an environment where
not everybody is being forced to regulate
to some norm that may or
may not make sense for them?
And yet, in a large institutional setting where
it has to scale, you can't just, you know,
go and have individual programs
for every single person.
How do you create a sense of tolerance and
even enthusiastic embrace of allowing people
to take these in their own direction, to
make that a matter of conscious awareness?
So, there's been studies done that have shown
that when you have a meditative instructor
and you've got like, you know, 50 people
out there, and they all hear the same thing,
they're all in the same context, they go
off and do the practice, that it turns out,
they do entirely different things.
So, whether you like it or not,
they are customizing the meditation.
But when we don't recognize that, when
we fool ourselves as teachers to think,
oh they're all doing exactly what I asked
them to do, you know, this is really great.
And instead, you thematized that,
you celebrate, you said, listen,
this is something that's
going to happen and that's OK.
But there's ways they can go wrong as well.
It doesn't mean that everything is fine and,
you know, do whatever you want to but you point
out to them that this is an inevitable and
valued process but there are still things
that can go wrong, and still
help that others can give you.
And we're never totally personalized, right?
It's a balance.
And so, just thematizing
that I think can help a lot.
And then thinking about the practices we have
people engaged in, some are more amenable
to that process and others are not.
And so, for example, embracing narration, the--
inviting people to, as part of a
contemplative set of practices to begin
to narrate their lives, and make
personal associations and so forth.
So, there's many practices like that.
One thing I mentioned last night to smaller
group of people that has bothered me is
that as I've gotten involved with these kinds of
things, that I felt there was a strong tendency
by myself and others to go into a very
regulated view of meditation or contemplation
where it was very deliberate, very
prefrontal cortex intensive, you know,
a lot of what are my values,
what are my intentions, you know,
and a kind of lot of activities like that.
And that's-- And then we have,
you know, more somatic practices.
But I've kind of just been trying to
struggle with how do we create context
in formal learning environments in public
school systems, in higher education
that also invite individuals to take
advantage of other forms of knowing,
of other forms of organizing their
experiences, more spontaneous.
And that's where aesthetics is something, I
think, really important for a contemplation,
drama, performance, music, art, poetry.
Because these are places that invite that kind
of sense that there's other capacities I have
to organize my experience
and to express my reality
than this heavy-mindfulness regulatory
environment where I watch what is happening,
I notice what is happening, I
analytically understand the consequences
of what is happening.
Now, I have taken inventory of my values,
I must realign these things with my values.
And now, I will deeply integrate them so I'd
be more adaptive and resilient in the future
with unexpected changes in my context.
[ Laughter ]
These are all good things but if that's
all we're doing like, my god, so.
>> Thank you.
>> OK. Questions are easy.
>> First of all, thank you for your great talk.
I'm an experimental psychologist and cognitive
neuroscientist by training so I'm a bit too far
on the simplicity side of
this question could be.
And it speaks to in some ways
what you were just talking about.
As you know, mindfulness is focused largely
on the cognitive functions
of attention and awareness.
And I'm wondering about the role of
intention in terms of being a vehicle for some
of these conceptual systems or contexts,
maybe directly interphases
with attention and awareness.
So, I'm just wondering if you could talk about,
yeah, your thoughts about intention in that way.
>> Yeah. So, when you look at that grammar
of beginning, middle and end, then usually,
the beginning part is explicitly a declaration
of intention or a practice of trying
to inculcate a certain kind of intention.
And so, I mean, I think of as intention is
really one of those very important context.
Whether the intention is something
that you tacitly bring to the practice,
it's not something that you have to necessarily
declare at the beginning of the practice
but rather, the whole community or
how are you been exposed to those
or how are you been taught this,
or other associations with it,
they suggest to you, this
should be the intention.
And there are some really obvious ones like,
you know, in traditional Buddhist practice,
not all practices are intended to
definitively transform yourself into,
you know, a Buddha or enlightened person.
I mean, there's a whole category of practices
that for example are called
eradicating obstacles.
And the intention of that practice is I want
to eradicate my obstacle, my
damn knee hurts, you know.
Or, I'm getting some problem here or there's
some cognitive problem with distraction.
Or there are enhancing practices.
So, there are a whole [inaudible] and so forth.
So, there a whole groups of practices
that are grouped by intention,
they're grouped by what your intention is.
And those intentions that you
bring to the practices, I think,
most likely have quite an influence
on what impact they actually have.
And then in addition, many of the
practices have a declarative moment
where you actually declare your intention.
Now, in the University of Virginia, we
tend to take that moment of intention
and make it much more variable and instead of
like a normative declaration of independence,
I will do this, I will become a Buddha for
the sake of all living beings and so forth.
And that's where it gets a little prefrontal
cortexy [phonetic] is we kind of invite them
to consider what is my intention.
We don't tell them what their intention is
but we'd say, we just want you to reflect
on what it is or bring an
intention to the practice.
And then at the end of the practice, to revisit
that intention, consider the experiences
that you are monitoring over
the course of the practice,
and consider what might be
your intention going forward,
how do you want to carry this into the practice.
And so, you know, I don't have
any idea how those actually relate
but I think that's what we should be looking at.
We should be looking at how those might be
affecting the quality of awareness or attention
that you're cultivating in those practices.
And so, I'll give you one project that I
was involved with which was museum tours.
And that was a project where
a famous museum in DC asked us
to help with contemplative museum tours.
And at first, I thought, you know,
I don't really know what
contemplative museum tours were like.
I mean, I hardly even know what
I was supposed to do in a museum.
And so, they have three particular arts of
work-- works of art they wanted us to focus on.
One was the Boating Party, very famous painting.
The other was a Roscoe room,
a classic Roscoe room.
And the third was a room of beeswax,
made of beeswax by a German artist.
And so, I thought a lot about it and I just--
I helped them come up with a kind of
game plan for how you might do this.
And I thought, well, when
I usually go to a museum,
it's a very transactional experience, you know.
OK, I walk in the door, I go get my ticket, I
wander through the next door, then I go tour.
And studies have shown what you do is you'd
walk up there, you spend 30 seconds there,
10 seconds here, et cetera, et cetera.
So, I thought, let's make it more
of a bounded deliberate practice.
And so, the idea is-- they're guided tours--
is you walk in and you consider your intention
as you walk through that last portal
before you enter the gallery space.
And as you approach the artwork, you also
think, now, I'm going to the Boating Party,
I'm going to encounter the Boating Party.
And I've got some thought in mind,
some reason that has brought me here.
And then when you're looking at the Boating
Party, you bring all your attention to it.
And you don't just bring your attention to it
but you also have that metacognitive capacity
and you focus on the fact
that my experiences matter.
If I feel a twinge in my abdomen or I-- my
mother who has, you know, long passed away.
Or whatever it is.
Or I experience some little moment
of ecstasy when I look at that guy
with the hat over there or something.
Whatever it is that you monitor those
and then at the end, before you pass away
from that painting, you consider, what did
just happen, what experiences did I just have,
and how might I, you know, carry those forward
or have some larger relevance, what's my hope,
what's my aspiration, what's my intention.
So, I think that's one of the most obvious
contexts that still we tend to be neglectful of.
And yet, the literature tells
us it matters dramatically.
And to me, just it makes sense that it might
matter dramatically but we don't really know.
And I think to go back to the
question about how research values
or how research might be valuable
for adjusting people's practices,
I think research of different kinds potentially
gives us information about two things.
First of all, it gives us partial information
about how these practices might work,
about how they might be having the
impact that they're having or not having.
Whether it's their impact on
or physiological processes
or neural activity or whatever it might be.
And the other thing they tell us some partial
information about is what impact they do have.
I mean, do they actually
improve students' performance,
do they actually change their health,
do they actually reduce bullying.
We should know that, right?
We shouldn't just go with antidotal evidence.
Antidotal evidence is inherently
useful and problematic.
So, I really have a great value
for research even if I get troubled
by the ways we go about it right now.
I think there's a lot of promise there
but everybody's got to be humble.
And I think that's where, if we
talk about contemplative sciences,
one way would be to really change how we
approach the sciences, how we actually do it.
Not just like now in the classroom, we do this.
And same way for university, how do you change
the culture, how do you change the organization?
And I thought a lot about that as well where
we have this dean of nursing at the University
of Virginia, Dorrie Fontaine,
who's this really amazing person.
And I watched her a lot in the first
couple of years and I thought, oh,
she's totally-- that's inspiring.
Because she would just say what she was thinking
and I was always regulating,
you know, always regulating.
And I thought, you know, I'm just going
to stop regulating in certain context
and just be very declarative of
why I'm here and why I care about.
And that was not something I was doing.
And I think that's a cultural
change that the more people do it,
the more the academy becomes a place where
people are approaching meetings and counters,
classes, research, and they're sharing
with each other why they are
here and what they hope to gain.
And I think, that potentially
has a transformative impact.
Or last thought I'll give you is we have
this things called Jeffersonian Dinners
which we do at the University of Virginia.
Theoretically, it's what Jeffersonian
did back in the day in Monticello.
But the idea is to just take a dining
experience and make it a contemplative practice.
And we've posted-- I've posted tons
of these over the last four years.
And usually, when we have people
come, we go to some restaurant and,
you know, it's like, [inaudible].
You can hardly hear the person next to you.
Much less have a larger encounter.
And so, these are usually done
in extremely quite places.
We often do them in the Jefferson's
original buildings, in the dining rooms.
And we start off by giving people a
question that asked them to reflect
on their personal experience about
some broader intellectual topic.
And then, we go around and they quickly
share those associations which tend
to reveal something about who they
are and where they are right now.
And then, we have a discussion where
you're forbidden to talk to your neighbor
and you have to talk to the table.
And then at the end, everybody's got to go
around again and kind of disclose something
that impacted them during that
discussion that they want to carry away.
Yeah, it may sound stupid.
It's the kind of stuff as a child I
would have run screaming from, you know.
No, not grace again.
I want to watch television.
So-- But, in my mind, they've often been
really transformative, taken in consequential,
transactional meals and turn them
into something where people were left
with a really deep sense
of each other's humanity.
So, that's a cultural change.
Anyways, thank you so much tonight.
It's fun.
[ Applause ]
