In the case of science, the reality in question, up to now, has been primarily outer directed: concern for the nature of nature and our place in it, for the essence of reality and the laws governing phenomena, and more oriented toward understanding the observed than the observer. (Location 206)
In the case of the contemplative traditions, the vector of inquiry and investigation up to now has been primarily inward directed, probing the domain of the mind. Yet until recently, interior experience was dismissed in some academic circles as merely “subjective,” as opposed to “objective.” Now it is getting a second look as an essential and valid phenomenological dimension of human experience and knowing. This more balanced view, reconfigured as first-person experience, is thanks in large measure to Francisco Varela. (Location 211)
meditación fenomenología francisco varela cita
in the early Mind and Life meetings, it rapidly became clear that His Holiness’s grasp of the concepts and experiments being described to him was that of a natural-born scientist. He was often out ahead of the explanations, asking cogent questions and anticipating the next experiments. Moreover, it quickly became evident that the scientists involved were at least as profoundly affected by this modest Buddhist monk as he was by them. (Location 240)
The increase in meditation research in recent decades is perhaps only one manifestation of a broadly distributive, collaborative, and highly intentional investigation, through multiple complementary lenses, of the nature of our own minds, bodies, and brains and how they interact to influence health and disease, well-being and suffering, happiness and depression, and, ultimately, our basic humanity. Its promise and import seem to lie in examining and understanding our potential for ongoing development as conscious and compassionate beings—our capacity to grow into what is deepest and best in ourselves both as individuals and as a species—perhaps in time to avert some of the present and potentially impending disasters we face as a result of being a precocious species on a limited and fragile planet. (Location 293)
The topic for this meeting comes from the recognition that our work at the Mind and Life Institute is no longer limited to dialogue and understanding. More important is the need to translate these understandings into programs, interventions, and tools that will bring tangible benefit into peoples’ lives. Hence, we have begun to ask very practical questions: How do we nurture and maintain healthy minds? How can we cultivate more emotional balance in our lives and in our societies? And how can we teach these self-management skills earlier in life? (Location 436)
Furthermore, there is a tradition in Buddhism that if we find something that contradicts our scripture, we have the liberty to reject that scripture. That gives us a kind of freedom to investigate, regardless of what the literature says. (Location 518)
El énfasis empírico del budismo.
We don’t know what the outcome of this gathering will be, but in a sense, what is happening is that a community of practice—what Buddhists call a sangha—is expressing itself, and its members are getting a chance to look at and experience each other. (Location 555)
One of the first questions we ask ourselves is why bother to meditate, and if we do, on what, and how? The very nature of meditation is mental training, a tool of transformation over the long term of our life. (Location 561)
becoming a better human being for one’s own well-being and that of others as well. These two go together. (Location 568)
From the start, the Buddhist path has a therapeutic goal: to free ourselves and others from suffering. Obviously this is not a mere hobby, something nice to add to our lives. Rather, inner transformation is something that determines the quality of every instant we live. (Location 575)
The hope of this dialogue is to increase and deepen our knowledge of both what mental training really is and how it affects the brain, the body, and our relation to the world and to others in the short term and the long term. How will that eventually be a contribution to humanity? That is truly our common goal. Can we contribute something to education through cultivating emotional balance? As His Holiness often says, we cannot have outer peace without inner peace. We cannot have an outer disarmament without inner disarmament. If we want to have a harmonious society, it has to begin with and within each of us. That is what meditation is about, and that’s what we are going to hear about this morning. (Location 586)
Distinctions between pain and suffering are critical and relevant within the context of Buddhist thought and practice. (Location 595)
Before beginning I should underscore the fact that Buddhist teachings and ideas are traditionally always presented in the spirit of being offered for consideration and reflection rather than being held up as dogma that the listener is expected to believe. They are themes that one is invited to listen to; to take in, as His Holiness was encouraging; to contemplate; and to reflect on. That which is useful, one is encouraged to take and retain; that which we feel is wrong or doesn’t match our experience, we can leave aside; and that of which we are uncertain can be left on the “maybe” shelf. (Location 600)
“Oh dear, it’s 2:15 in the morning. I haven’t had enough rest! I’ve got to give a presentation today!” (Location 609)
So there I was in ideal conditions, yet my mind could get caught up, worried, anxious, distressed. This is what we mean by the quality of dukkha, or dissatisfaction: the capacity of the mind to lose its balance, to become emotionally stressed. (Location 611)
The Buddha’s teaching is somewhat unusual among world religions insofar as it is not centered around any kind of metaphysical statements. Essentially, the Buddha was a pragmatist, and so he aimed his attention primarily at this experience of dissatisfaction and suffering, or dukkha in the scriptural language. (Location 613)
The Buddha goes on this long extrapolation until we get the point: By the time the surgeon has answered all the questions, the soldier will surely be dead. The point, he said, is to pull out the arrow and dress the wound. That’s what the emphasis is in the Buddhist tradition, to try to address the central element of dissatisfaction, this quality of dukkha. (Location 629)
One of the epithets the Buddha acquired over the years was “the Doctor of the World.” A reason for this is that the central insight and framework that he taught, known as the Four Noble Truths, is cast in the formulation of a classical Indian medical diagnosis. The format begins with the nature of the symptom. In this particular kind of psychological or spiritual disease, the symptom is dukkha, the experience of dissatisfaction; this is the First Noble Truth. The second element in this diagnostic format is the cause of that symptom, which the Buddha outlined as being self-centered craving, greed, hatred, and delusion. These are the toxins that Matthieu referred to, the negative afflictive emotions, habits, and qualities that the mind gets caught up in and that poison the heart; this is the Second Noble Truth. The third element is the prognosis, and the good news is that it is curable. This is the Third Noble Truth, that the experience of dissatisfaction can end; we can be free from it. The fourth element—and the Fourth Noble Truth—is the methodology of treatment: what the Buddha laid out as the way to heal this wound. It’s known in some expressions as the Eightfold Path, but it can be outlined in three fundamental elements: first, responsible behavior or virtue, living a moral and ethical life; second, mental collectedness, meditation, and mind training; and third, the development of insightful understanding in accordance with reality, or wisdom. These three elements are the fundamental treatment for this psychological, spiritual ailment of dissatisfaction. (Location 632)
the Buddhist tradition makes no claim to exclusive knowledge of the true way, but instead celebrates whatever pathways we find, whether we call them religions or psychotherapies or something else, that help bring to our lives a quality of happiness, to enable ourselves and others to live more peacefully and fully. (Location 650)
In using the word “dissatisfaction” or “dukkha,” a theme that will probably inform the discussion throughout this gathering is that there are two dimensions to this experience. The Buddha outlines these very clearly. The first is that the experience of physical and emotional pain is inescapable, endemic in our very lives as human beings and intrinsic to the fact that we have a body and a mind. We can call this natural suffering or, more simply, pain. The main focus of the Buddha’s teaching was on a second element, which we call adventitious suffering: what the mind adds to a negative experience. When we feel physical pain or have some kind of difficulty, the fretfulness, resistance, resentment, and anxiety we create around the experience is this second kind of suffering. (Location 652)
If we’re unwise, then most often the only way we know how to deal with pain is to escape from it through absorbing the mind into something pleasurable, which leads to the blind pursuit of sensory pleasure. (Location 660)
Even pleasurable experiences contain within them the seed of dissatisfaction if we relate to them unwisely. (Location 668)
meditation isn’t an attempt to have any particularly special experience or strange vision or acquire special abilities. It’s more like working with a couple of innate capacities that the mind possesses: the ability to focus the attention and the capacity to investigate, explore, and contemplate the nature of experience itself. These two capacities are natural to us, and meditation develops them, like cultivating a seed and giving it the conditions to grow and flourish. That is the purpose and the nature of meditation. (Location 677)
The more the attention is trained on the present, the more we are able to break the habit of being dragged around by compulsions and distractions—the mind constantly creating scenarios for the future, rewriting the past, being lost in distracted thought, or subjected to incessant reams of thinking. (Location 685)
Most of us here have had those times where it seems like nothing can make the mind stop. It just goes on and on and on and on and on. The capacity to focus in meditation has a lot to do with learning how to think when we choose to think, and learning how not to think when we choose not to. (Location 687)
cita meditación pensamiento control favorite
One of the characteristics of Buddhist meditation that we can discover for ourselves is that, perhaps surprisingly, relaxation and arousal are not mutually exclusive. When the mind is truly alert, fully attentive to the present moment with a clear, unwavering focus, whether one is attending to the breath or not, it can be completely peaceful and highly energetic at the same time. The two are not mutually exclusive. (Location 700)
In the Buddhist tradition, you’re not completely sane until you’re fully enlightened. (Location 707)
The body tenses up and feelings of aversion, fear, and anxiety cluster around that painful feeling like a swarm of flies around a piece of meat. (Location 716)
A crucial element is recognizing that one can experience pain on a physical basis and still be completely at peace with it. The most useful element is when we transfer that recognition to emotional pain, as well. (Location 728)
If there was some way to translate the Buddhadharma so that it did not lose its essential dimensions, but became available to be heard and enacted or embodied by regular people who are not particularly interested in either Buddhism or meditation, it might potentially be beneficial. That was the challenge, if you will, the experiment. (Location 750)
Hospitals obviously are refuges for people who are suffering. Because of this, we sometimes refer to them as “dukkha magnets.” What better place to develop and offer a universal dharma approach for the relief of suffering and to investigate its clinical effectiveness? (Location 768)
Certain kinds of suffering have been shown to increase the rate at which telomeres are shortened. Telomeres are the repeat DNA subunits at the ends of our chromosomes. They are involved in cell division, and how rapidly they are degraded appears to be tied to the rate at which we age biologically. So stress reduction becomes a potentially important vehicle for helping people reestablish balance and well-being in their lives, as a complement to whatever the doctors are able to do for them. (Location 779)
Our operational definition of mindfulness is “moment-to-moment non-judgmental awareness, cultivated by purposely paying attention in the present moment.” Kindness and self-compassion are an intimate part of the attending. (Location 786)
In Western societies, stopping can be a radical act in and of itself. I believe that just stopping and opening one’s field of awareness is, ultimately, a radical act of self-compassion and wisdom. (Location 792)
meditación cita occidente radical
when we teach little children to ride a bicycle, it’s not so easy for them to learn. But once you know how, you know for life. Sometimes children start with training wheels, which are gradually raised higher and then removed as they get the hang of it. In a sense, the guided meditations are like training wheels that you use until you learn how to cultivate mindfulness and mindful attention yourself. (Location 802)
In MBSR, we start by eating one raisin very, very mindfully. We may take ten minutes, first smelling it, examining it visually, and feeling it in the hand, then tasting it and feeling the saliva in the mouth, and in this way cultivating awareness of an object that is very familiar to us, but that we are not usually very intimate with. (Location 810)
After the raisin meditation, we then proceed to direct that same quality of attention to other aspects of our moment-to-moment experience —breathing, body sensations, hearing sounds, all sorts of perceptions of the eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and body—and then to the whole domain of thoughts and emotions. Thus we cultivate intimacy with the spaciousness of awareness, an awareness that can hold any or all objects of attention, and then bring that awareness into everyday life. Thus the true meditation practice becomes how you live your life, not how well you sit on a cushion. What we are really talking about is awareness. The various objects that we can pay attention to and be aware of are important, but most important is the attending itself, awareness itself, or mindfulness. (Location 813)
Learning meditation requires not trying to get someplace else so much as being where you already are, thus non-striving. It requires patience and being non-judgmental, being willing to have a beginner’s mind that sees things freshly. (Location 828)
“Yes, but has that worked in the past? Just as an experiment, can you perhaps put a single toe in the water? Can you feel just the sensory element of the sensations you’re calling pain, even for one moment?” Often, one discovers that there is also a whole universe of thinking around the sensations: “I hate this. This is killing me. How long is it going to last? My whole life is destroyed.” All of those statements are merely thoughts, but people relate to them as if they are the truth about themselves and their immediate condition. (Location 834)
When you hold these emotions in awareness without judging them so much, it pulls out the second arrow. It also releases you from shooting more arrows into yourself. You learn to cultivate a certain kind of equanimity in the face of discomfort. (Location 838)
Out of this practice, over time, moments can emerge where you actually experience freedom and peace, right here in your own body, in your own mind, in your own life. (Location 844)
meditation is not merely a relaxation technique. It is not a technique at all, but a way of being and of seeing, resting on a foundation of deep inquiry into the nature of self, and offering the potential for liberation from the small-mindedness of self-preoccupation. (Location 872)
The implication is that something going on in the mind is strongly influencing the healing process at the level of the skin. It must be working all the way down to the level of the gene expression that controls cell replication. It could be influencing it through the nervous system, the endocrine system, the immune system, inflammatory responses, or a combination of these—we don’t know the mechanism. (Location 908)
I emphasize the importance of mental training, which involves thinking about happiness and compassion not just as traits but as skills. If they are skills, that implies that the mind and the brain can be transformed in ways that will also affect the body. This will be the substance of my comments today. (Location 949)
These circuits of emotion have bidirectional communication with the body, including the autonomic nervous system, the endocrine system, and the immune system. This indicates that when we change the brain, we inevitably influence the body. Correspondingly, when the body changes, it in turn influences the brain. (Location 976)
People differ in how skilled they are at voluntarily regulating their emotions. Those who are better able to regulate their negative emotions show less activation in the amygdala and more activation in an area called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is involved in emotion regulation and decision making. (Location 989)
Looking at different people, we see a lot of variation in individual patterns of daily cortisol levels. Some people have less of a reduction of cortisol at the end of the day. It turns out that it’s a problem if cortisol levels aren’t reduced in the evening. The more they’re reduced in the evening, the better the health outcomes that appear to be associated. We found that people who are good at regulating their emotions, and specifically at transforming negative emotions, have a better profile of cortisol levels, with a steeper decline at the end of the day. (Location 998)
A very general hypothesis is that some forms of meditation strengthen the cortical regulatory circuitry in the brain that in turn modulates the dynamics of subcortical emotional reactivity. In our work with long-term Buddhist meditation practitioners,30 we found that meditation is associated with marked increases in the brain’s electrical signs of activation expressed in the fast-frequency oscillation known as gamma, particularly in the prefrontal cortex, which is important for aspects of regulating emotion. This is consistent with the idea that meditation is not simple relaxation. We also see an increased synchrony between the prefrontal cortex and other regions of the brain in long-term practitioners. (Location 1003)
We found that compassion meditation changes the brain’s response to the presentation of distressing sounds. When we present a recording of a woman screaming for just a couple of seconds, the practitioners show a remarkable increase in activation in the insula. The insula is a part of the brain critical for communicating with the body and provides information on the state of the body to the rest of the brain. Different visceral organs project information to the insula. The insula has been implicated in empathy. Another brain region, the medial prefrontal cortex, has been implicated in self-relevant processing. This area of the brain gets activated when people think about themselves. For example, if you suggest an adjective and ask people whether this adjective describes them, that area of the brain becomes very active. This area of the brain associated with the self is deactivated when people are generating compassion, which is very much a selfless state. (Location 1027)
The new physics, for instance, is saying things that are more mystical than you’ll ever hear in a Sunday sermon. I’ve heard one physicist quoted as saying that you can’t have a thought without influencing the rest of the universe—instantaneously! Maybe it’s a small influence, but the idea suggests an extraordinary interconnectedness or interdependence of everything in creation. This has enormous effects on religions and science, including how we see each other and the rest of the world. (Location 1103)
I see practices like mindfulness and loving-kindness coming into play right there, because we are capable of so much, and not only for ourselves, but in relationship to others as well. People often think of meditation as leading to passivity, just being complacent or easygoing. If we can address that superimposed suffering somewhat, we will have more energy to look at the direct experience of the pain or the circumstance and try to find a way to be in a new relationship with it, for ourselves and for others. (Location 1127)
Some studies also show that there are two basic patterns of altruism. One is centered on oneself: We feel distress when facing others’ suffering and we cannot stand that, so we want to do something to relieve that distress. Genuine altruism is not just about that. It’s a deep concern for others that may indeed be reflected in a reduction in activation of brain regions related to the self. (Location 1138)
Synchrony defines which neurons cooperate in order to convey their message jointly. (Location 1240)
cita cerebro sincronía definición neuronas
Modern brain research now describes a completely different picture of the organization of the human brain. Areas of the cerebral cortex are interconnected very intensively with one another, but there is no evidence for a convergence center or a pyramidal hierarchical organization. (Location 1245)
There is no single place in the brain where an observer could be located, a command structure could be implemented, or the self could have its seat. It is a highly distributed system in which many functions occur simultaneously and there is no coordinator. They self-organize. (Location 1249)
the intuition that a single center must exist is wrong. There is no coordinator, no observer, no seat of the self. (Location 1256)
A big problem is that messages need to be sent from one place in the brain to another with high selectivity. How is this done when the connections are so intermingled? There is evidence that nature has found a way very much like when we use a radio to tune in to a transmitter. The sender and the receiver are in the same frequency, so they can resonate with a handshake, and then transmission of information becomes very selective.38 (Location 1282)
The interesting finding is that synchronous activity occurs only when the brain is in a highly attentive state. It disappears completely when the brain gets drowsy and inattentive. Even though the nerve cells respond very actively, as before, they are not temporally coordinated in their activity. So, rather than modulating the amount of activity, attention involves the coherence and synchronization of activity. This is an important issue. When the meditators go into this attentive state, they probably increase the coordination of distributed neuronal activity. (Location 1299)
There is also evidence that a critical amount of synchronization among neurons occurs when one becomes consciously aware of something that one sees.40 (Location 1311)
So it appears that one correlate of conscious perception is a transitory synchronization of neuronal responses that establishes a highly coherent pattern of oscillatory activity across the cerebral cortex. (Location 1328)
The content of consciousness apparently is distributed over many areas, is temporarily assembled through coherence, and cannot be further reduced to a location. It is a distributed dynamic pattern. It’s difficult to imagine, but that is what it seems to be. (Location 1330)
But more than anything else, humans have invented adventitious suffering: the ability to feel pain and suffering for what once was, what will be, what could be, or what someone else experiences. (Location 1369)
Another rat got the same shocks—its reality was exactly the same—but every time the second rat got a shock, it could go over to another rat on the other side of the cage and bite it. The second rat didn’t get an ulcer. Thus we see that rats are close relatives of humans. HH Dalai Lama: Is it because the rat has a chance to express the pain? Robert Sapolsky: Exactly. What we say in my business is that it avoids getting an ulcer by giving an ulcer. A third rat got the shocks but had a bar of wood that it could chew on with its teeth. It did not get an ulcer. Again, this was a way for it to express the pain. (Location 1382)
These, then, are the building blocks of psychological stress. If you have no way to release your frustration, if you feel like you have no control and no way to predict what will happen, if you interpret an event as meaning that life is getting worse, and if you have no one’s shoulder to cry on, this is what makes adventitious suffering stressful. (Location 1393)
All of this is wonderful for a zebra running for its life, because it is a way for its body to deal with fear and pain. But your body does the same exact thing for days and months and years because of psychological suffering. If you are always mobilizing energy, your body never gets to store it. Your muscles become weak, and you are more likely to get diabetes, which has now become a disaster globally. If your blood pressure increases while you’re running away from a lion, that’s a good thing. If a traffic jam causes your blood pressure to increase and that happens often enough, you will have heart disease and your blood vessels will be damaged by atherosclerosis. If your digestive system constantly shuts down, you are more at risk for an ulcer or colitis. There is a terrible, strange disease called stress dwarfism, or psychogenic dwarfism, where children are under so much psychological stress that their bodies stop growing. If you are a female mammal under lots of stress, your reproductive cycles become longer or stop all together. If you are a male, your testosterone levels go down, and you may have problems with erections. I should add that never in my life would I have thought that I’d be discussing erections here with you. But I digress … If you are always under stress, your immune system is suppressed, so you are more vulnerable to infectious disease. (Location 1402)
For a short time, one or two hours, stress does wonderful things for the brain. More oxygen and glucose are delivered to the brain. The hippocampus, which is involved in memory, works better when you are stressed for a little while. Your brain releases more dopamine, which plays a role in the experience of pleasure, early on during stress; it feels wonderful, and your brain works better. Unfortunately, the opposite happens when stress has gone on for too long—for four hours, or for four years. (Location 1415)
It would be easy to say, “Aha! We must have no stress in our life!” But that is nonsense. For a short period, stress does wonderful things for the brain, and we love it. It makes us feel good. We will pay money to be terrified on a roller coaster. So the question becomes, When is stress a good thing? Good stress is what we call stimulation, when there is a challenge to overcome. What is it that makes stress stimulatory? (Location 1429)
dopamine is not released in the brain when you get a reward, but rather when you think you are soon going to get a reward. It is about anticipation, and thus anticipation itself becomes pleasure for the brain. (Location 1440)
Part of the path of cultural influences comes from the impact of religious thinking in the past on philosophy. The notion of soul is prevalent in many cultures. Also, we all experience a sense of selfhood in day-to-day life: “I’m doing this … I’m doing this for myself … I see you,” and so on. We all possess this very instinctual sense of selfhood. When we try to identify what that sense of self really refers to, we tend to assume that this is the core of our being, no matter how difficult it may be to pinpoint what it is or where it is. We feel that this is the central organizing principle, the very essence of one’s existence. In Buddhism, however, there is a lot discussion of how this mode of conceiving of oneself is unfounded. There is no such eternal, abiding principle that is truly “me,” a true self. The idea that there is a soul or self, over and above the physical and mental elements that constitute our experience, is misguided. This is what Buddhism means when it talks about the negation of selfhood, or absence of selfhood. So for Buddhists, the neuroscientific explanation of how, despite all your effort, you cannot find any identifiable convergence point for self or soul within the complex network of neurons in the brain is a compelling reconfirmation of selflessness. (Location 1485)
From everything that I’ve heard this morning, and after reading your most recent, very thought-provoking book, The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality,49 it doesn’t seem that meditation puts you into that relaxed state. It seems that it increases your focused attention and moves you to the top of the U-shaped curve. Maybe what it’s really doing is modulating your stress response, bringing it to an optimal point so that the nerve cells in the locus coeruleus, the part of the brain that is important for vigilance and focused attention, that gets you to peak performance, start firing optimally—not too much, not too little. I wonder if that might be part of what is happening with meditation? (Location 1501)
As one trains incrementally in developing attention, a quality arises that is described as suppleness or malleability of the body and mind, and is often conjoined with a sense of well-being, perhaps even bliss. It happens very strongly when one achieves a high state of samadhi, but even incrementally along the path, there are many surges of this type of malleability together with a kind of bliss. (Location 1519)
How to combine a heightened state of vigilance with a very serene and relaxed state of mind? It can happen because when one rests in a limpid and vivid awareness of the present moment, hopes and fears, ruminations and expectations, vanish by themselves. This is a very lucid state of mind imbued with serenity. So you can understand how focused attention, for instance, could be a very alert and responsive state without having the negative aspect of what we usually call stress. (Location 1525)
You are tapping into one of our most depressing features as mammals—a feature that exists across all sorts of species. The greatest way to reduce the stress response is to take it out on someone smaller and weaker. We see this not only in rats, but also in studies of nonhuman primates. Among baboons, for example, 50 percent of aggression is displacement aggression onto a third party, an innocent bystander.50 A male who loses a fight chases a subadult male, who bites a juvenile, who chases an adult female, who slaps an infant. Almost everyone feels better afterward. (Location 1542)
Among humans, the equivalent is that during times of economic stress, the rates of child abuse and spousal abuse increase. (Location 1546)
Coming back to the issue of meditation, we learned this morning that it is far from relaxation, with electrographic responses associated with a state of high attention. It’s a strong internal activation of the brain. It is striking that this should always be associated with positive rather than negative connotations. (Location 1566)
the take-home message from what I’ve heard about meditation up until now is not so much that it’s a positive state; rather, it’s a very active state, and in some cases a very difficult state to achieve. (Location 1579)
Meditation seems to be a very active process that allows you to force your brain to pay attention to something other than these intrusive signals. (Location 1589)
When we talk about cultivating or refining the attention, we are really talking about the mental domain. Meditation operates more at the level of adventitious or psychological suffering, rather than physical, biological pain and suffering. (Location 1594)
I often tell the story of my close friend and colleague, a monk from Namgyal Monastery who spent many years in a Chinese prison in Tibet. One day he told me that during his years in prison, he sometimes had a great sense of fear. I inquired what that fear was about. He said it was the fear of losing compassion toward the Chinese. (Location 1610)
There’s an enormous emphasis in Buddhism on creating community. It is said that on one occasion the Buddha’s attendant Ananda, being very impressed by the importance of community for one’s own individual spiritual practice, said, “Lord, it seems like half the practice is sangha” (sangha being the community). And Buddha responded, “Say not so, Ananda. The sangha is the whole of the practice.” (Location 1631)
Let me give you an example that I find just amazing. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, you arbitrarily define a point in the brain. It could be the amygdala, a piece of cortex or thalamus—it doesn’t really matter. You measure the activity there, play it back to the subject, and tell the subject to try to increase this activity. Subjects lie there and try. They find out after a while that what they are doing is somehow related to what this meter does. After a couple of sessions, they become so good at it that they can deliberately increase blood flow, via neuronal activity, in specific, circumscribed regions of their brains, to the extent that they can control cursors or play Pong with somebody lying in another scanner.51 It is amazing. (Location 1665)
remembering a story of traveling somewhere and what happened on the trip. If the explosion occurs when your mind is completely engrossed in thoughts, that produces the maximum startle. In the open-presence state, when you are in the present moment very clearly and vividly and without tension, you don’t need to be brought back suddenly to the present moment, so you don’t jump. (Location 1680)
In terms of meditation, placebo is like a lollipop of optimism. You eat something that contains no active substance, but you suddenly become hopeful, confident even, that it will help cure your sickness. Studies have shown that placebos have a positive effect on health. But we don’t necessarily have to use such a trick. We can directly change our attitude and adopt a positive frame of mind, which has the same effect on the body without our having to swallow a blue or a yellow pill that has nothing in it. We understand that transforming one’s mind is one of the best things one can do to change one’s level of stress and reinforce one’s immune system. It is much more sensible to achieve this through training the mind, rather than by taking a placebo. (Location 1694)
Once you have a better understanding of these facts, which now have much greater scientific evidence, then your conviction in the value of these human qualities will increase and you will genuinely aspire to cultivate them. This aspiration will lead to a more joyful and happy life. (Location 1732)
what we’re really getting at when we talk about residing in a deeper understanding of the nature of mind and our natural capacity for empathy and compassion is sanity, pure and simple. (Location 1747)
Eudaimonic well-being is not something you go out and forage for. It’s not something you attain by finding the right person, the right setting, the great house, the great car. It’s something that is cultivated, (Location 2420)
The very word for meditation in Sanskrit, bhavana, means “to cultivate.” It doesn’t mean anything esoteric, mystical, or occult. To meditate is to cultivate your heart, your mind. The Sanskrit and Pali word citta, or sem in Tibetan, means both “heart” and “mind.” When you’re cultivating compassion, you’re cultivating your citta. It’s not a different part of your being. (Location 2423)
The Sanskrit term dharma means various things in various contexts, but when I asked one of my many Tibetan teachers long ago what dharma means, he said that dharma is the cultivation of a lasting state of well-being that arises from within, and the alleviation of suffering by overcoming the inner causes of suffering. It’s the pursuit of genuine, eudaimonic well-being. (Location 2432)
Maybe twenty-five hundred years of first-person inquiry have made some discoveries that seem metaphysical become purely empirical in the Buddhist tradition. They’re metaphysical only insofar as you can’t detect them with the instruments of technology. (Location 2470)
On the basis of ethics—the foundation, I think, of all spiritual practice and certainly all Buddhist practice—there’s a whole genre of practice that comes under the rubric of samadhi, which means “focused attention.” More broadly, it has to do with mental balance, with developing exceptional levels of mental health. This gives rise to psychological flourishing, to becoming exceptionally sane. And then, on that basis, one uses one’s exceptionally sane, balanced, focused attention for the cultivation of wisdom. It’s in the cultivation of wisdom that one finds the deeper level of eudaimonia, and in that realm of spiritual flourishing we find the liberation that His Holiness alluded to. (Location 2480)
The highly developed attention skills of samadhi are used as a telescope for the mind, becoming a very focused, stable, clear, vivid, malleable, and supple way of attending to a myriad of phenomena—potentially any type of phenomena, but specifically mental phenomena. So first we develop the tool, the telescope of refined attention. We then use that ability to explore the very nature of consciousness, the phenomenal experience of consciousness and its relationship to the universe at large. In so doing, we overcome the obscurations, afflictions, and imbalances of the mind, but we also cultivate the full potential of consciousness, tapping the deepest wellsprings of our own flourishing, knowing reality insofar as it can be known, by direct experience and the cultivation of virtue. (Location 2506)
As I view my own civilization, it strikes me that in our modern world, these three pursuits—the pursuit of happiness, the pursuit of truth in understanding reality, and the pursuit of virtue—are often seen as unrelated. The advertising industry is banking on that. They’ll sell you happiness—don’t worry about truth—and the clear implication is that happiness has nothing to do with virtue. Science has an enormous amount to do with truth, but it often doesn’t address the deeper issues of human flourishing or its relation to ethics. That could be a problem. When I try to envision a meaningful life, these are the three qualities that strike me as being essentially meaningful. (Location 2512)
People often hesitate to investigate their minds, and to investigate the inner mechanisms of happiness and suffering. What’s surprising is how little time or concern we have for understanding how our minds work, even though we deal with our minds from morning to evening. That’s what determines the quality of every instant of life. We spend so much effort and time on education, getting a job, beauty, fitness, and so on, and so little time taking care of that “spoiled brat” of a mind, you could say, that creates so much trouble all day long. (Location 2588)
I began my career, I could never have imagined that we would have the insights we have today about the nature of life and the interconnectedness of all living organisms. These insights have emerged from the deep analytic approach taken during the past half century or more, when the techniques and ideas of physics and chemistry were applied to biology. Mixing such powerful ideas and technologies has truly led to a revolution in our understanding of the nature of life and our ability to discover novel therapies to help relieve suffering. (Location 2991)
In addition to this wonderful opportunity, there also are great challenges. The first is an attitudinal challenge, the tendency of some physicians to reject a mechanistic link between the mind and physical illness. Although there is a legitimate and important journal today called Psychosomatic Medicine, when I was training as a doctor, a psychosomatic illness was seen by many doctors as not really illness at all, but some type of intellectual dishonesty on the part of the patient. That’s a very strange idea for a medical practitioner. (Location 3033)
When we do complex clinical trials, we use placebos that are exactly matched in shape, form, taste, and all visible properties to the drug that we’re testing. We do that because the placebo effect, which is a surrogate for the power of the mind, can be enormous in these clinical trials. On trials of pain medication, it could be very large. On trials of depression medication, it is often so large that the drug itself is no different than placebo. Even in trials on blood pressure, swelling of the joints in arthritis, or obstruction to urine flow, there is a substantial placebo effect. In many of these trials, if the total effect size is 50 percent, the placebo effect alone might be 20 or 30 percent. (Location 3043)
The third issue that we have to consider is ethical. Today, I think all of us believe that mental training is an extremely powerful technology—I certainly do. You can see the damage that occurs when the mind goes in the wrong direction. There is no more powerful weapon than the human mind. And so we are really fortunate, and we should pause and think about the fact that these disciplines involving tens of thousands of hours of meditation practice were developed in the context of religious traditions grounded in moral motivation. That is not a problem; that is a blessing. One could imagine these technologies being inappropriately used. I should just remind you that the whole project of mindfulness-based stress reduction is grounded in this same ethical base, because the people developing it recognized how important that part of the process was. But it’s possible that one could develop similar technologies of mind training with no concern for ethics—an extremely unattractive possibility. (Location 3061)
The path I have taken as a physician has shown me that pure science and technology can lead in a direction that is to some degree a dead end. By itself, science doesn’t solve all clinical problems, and in some ways it can create even more problems. (Location 3117)
Over the last one hundred years, medical science has given rise to many wonderful things. However, it is now very heavily focused on disease. We spend almost no time on health. We make an assumption that for every disease, there is a defect that we need to find and fix. We don’t deal with people throughout their lives, but only when they’re sick. In the United States, we have become accustomed to assuming that one’s health is managed by one’s doctor, and that individuals have little responsibility or control over their health. (Location 3139)
We believe that stress reduction, a quiet mind, a forgiving mind, and a compassionate mind are essential to promoting health. As we think about meditation promoting ethical values, in my very naive way I wonder if how one treats one’s body, and how one might stop abusing one’s body, would be part of embodying ethical values. (Location 3172)
Are there aspects of meditative practices that enhance compassion, which could turn that compassion inward to ourselves and our own bodies? Can we use aspects of mental training to engage people in their own health during their lifetimes? (Location 3182)
We assume as well that the brain works like a linear machine, following the same material processes of classical physics as do clocks and simple machines. Yet we know that linear systems are not creative or intentional. They cannot take initiative, and they are not capable of producing surprises. However, we experience ourselves as creative, intentional, open toward the future, indeterminate, and free, and we observe others as being the same. Since we assume linearity, we think there must be something in the brain that makes all those wonderful things happen. This is probably why we postulate this mover to whom we attribute the mysterious properties of an immaterial self. (Location 3217)
We don’t know, but it could be that meditative states tend toward such solutions. What we do know is that the brain has systems for the evaluation of internal states, and when it reaches a result, these systems create pleasant feelings. The aha! or eureka! experience is always associated with a pleasant feeling. We like to find a solution. Meditation might be a strategy that the brain uses to strive toward such pleasant states, where controversies are resolved at the level of both conscious arguments and subconscious competition. There are always many states competing to win, and somehow they have to be reconciled. Maybe meditation is one way to get these many different agents that work in parallel to temporarily make peace. (Location 3256)
What is certain is that we cannot control the system within which we evolved. Even if we knew more, we would not be able to control its dynamics because it’s an evolutionary system. It’s nonlinear. Even if we turn screws, thinking we want the system to move in a particular direction, it will go somewhere else. We cannot deliberately steer systems like our economic systems and our social systems. It is impossible in principle. This is what modern science tells us, and I think we are already experiencing this now. All these linear strategies worked well when the world was still simple and our ancestors were jumping around between trees, but it is no longer so. (Location 3284)
We will have to develop what I call “long-distance compassion”: the ability to care for those who are remote. That is very difficult for us. (Location 3299)
India, almost three thousand years ago, intelligent people began to investigate where the “I” is located. They had the concept that an independent “I” must exist. Later the Buddha taught that there is no unchanging, permanent self. Rather, the self or “I” is something conceptually imputed on the combination of the body and mind. It is just designated, or conceptually projected, so we cannot find self as a thing with its own entity or its own reality. This relates (Location 3321)
the very eminent historian Daniel Boorstin, who wrote a history of humanity’s discoveries over the last five thousand years: The Discoverers.98 In the preface to that book, he commented that the greatest impediment to discovery throughout the whole of human history was not ignorance, but the illusion of knowledge—the belief that we already know something that, in fact, is merely an assumption. As long as we’re holding on to the illusion of knowledge, it impedes breaking through and gaining actual knowledge. (Location 3427)