Buddhify

Right speech does involve some degree of being truthful, not truthiness.  I'd have appreciated it if Rev. Fisher had picked up a couple of the points I make below, but I guess that's my perspective.

I hope this isn't seen as picking on Danny Fisher or Rohan Gunatillake  in particular, but this interview with Rohan Gunatillake is problematic for me.  More particularly, I've issues with this bit:

You're very clear in the FAQs on the website that buddhify is not meant to be a comprehensive meditation system. Can you say something about your understanding of the limitations of format--like a mobile app? Also, are there things you think are not fully appreciated yet about what a format like an app can do?
As you say, buddhify is not a complete system since that is not what it has been designed to be. It is an accessible and different approach to teaching meditation to new audiences.

While some of the more tech-wary members of the practitioner community see digital as a threat to dharma practice, I think this fear is misplaced.  I'm a firm believer that technology can only augment, and not entirely replace, other forms of teaching and delivery.  Nothing beats face-to-face teaching from a qualified instructor, nor indeed the support of a local community you connect with. But the fact is that for many people, even if they do have a local community, it's not for them - that's certainly why I myself have found the community around Buddhist Geeks so valuable since even in London there wasn't really a scene I felt was speaking my language.  Digital tools can, of course, take meditation and so on to a scale never possible before and for many people.  This is especially true, I think, for Gen Y: to have an online community or a digital training tool can feel better and more relevant than a local one if it is designed well and the content is strong.  It might even feel worth the trade-off of it not being local or physical.

And when it comes to buddhify, I'm very clear: all it tries to do is introduce people to meditation, and says that if people want to explore more they should do that through deeper more personal modes of delivery such as more advanced courses, the great meditation literature we have, and also local teachers.  As meditation providers, we all need to know where we sit in the system and what our limits are - that's really important to me.

Something I'd also just like to add is that people underestimate the power of a mobile phone.  It is a very intimate device - with us pretty much all of the time - and very personal and tactile.  Therefore it is in a way much more suitable as a vehicle for teaching meditation as things like laptops.  How we relate to our mobile phones was part of the design thinking behind buddhify for sure.

"Urban" is an important adjective for you in much of the work that you do. Can you say something about what you mean "urban," and the importance of that distinction for you?

Yes, urban is perhaps the most important word when it comes to buddhify.  So much of the meditation tradition - especially in the Theravada/insight/vipassana school that I know the best - is designed for forest or remote or retreat environments. As such, many of the meditation delivery models we see are just taking systems designed for a rural or stylized environment and placing them in an urban one and expecting them to work perfectly.  They don’t...

 First, let me say right off: if Rohan's making money from this (or even if he's doing "the socially responsible" thing) and pointing people in a general direction towards a practice that keeps them from going into murderous psychotic rages against those with whom they dwell, great!

But...as a guy who's been practicing for a while, who's practiced in urban settings as well as rather far from the madding crowd, as a guy who's certifiably tech savvy, I've got a perspective. 

Augment? 

I've a colleague who's Gen X, who's been doing some new popular video game.  It's apparently "very real;" in his description of the game he said, "I've gotten really good at shooting arrows." I replied, "I don't think so."

Augment? It's not the same thing.  It's like "augmenting" real strawberries with artificial strawberry flavor on some level.

Buddhify is no more a threat to Dharma practice than shooting an arrow in a video game is a threat to archery.

Maybe it's useful in a bompu Zen kind of way, but a Buddhist  Dharma practice it ain't.

Rohan's idea that "urban" must be an impossible venue for mindful practice is also pretty wide off the mark. I used to practice at both the Zen Studies Society and the MRO Zen center when the latter was in downtown Manhattan. Both were pretty noisy due to the urban environment.  With both practice would extend after the sitting quite well - it's possible to be very mindful on the subway.

Last night in 詠春 the training place was quite cold.  In quite a few martial arts the training is done under rather non-ideal conditions, for obvious reasons if you think about it - real life is a non-ideal condition.  It's also where we are.

So it is with many traditions of practice. 

Like I said, for what it is, it's probably OK for what it is (though I've a general reservation about "guided meditations" in general, as I've written before), but it doesn't even augment Buddhist practice.  It's more like it's like the Sil Lim Tao (小念頭)app on my iPhone - it's useful as a beginning tool, but it's no substitute for watching it done by Ip Man or Ip Chun on Youtube, let alone being instructed by a guy who's been doing it for over 40 years.

One more point I'll make, and it's on this sentence:

The history of meditation is one of evolution and change and this is just another chapter in that.

 That's a pretty grand statement, but I must point out the the "history of meditation" - like lots of other histories (economics, social ideologies, etc.) is also one of fads. Proof is in the pudding,  they say.  Hope the pudding's good, but doubt's part of the practice.

"Stop fighting! You're fighting!" or, "What's Chan got to do with it?

I'm thinking a bit more about the Shaolin/Buddhism/commercialism issue and Barbara's recent post here on this subject, and I think it might be a bit useful to expound a bit on the martial arts from my rank beginner point of view.  It might inform the discussion on why folks might flock to Shaolin and why folks at Shaolin might seek to protect their name.

I don't come naturally to martial arts, and I suspect most folks don't.  One has to seriously practice to get to a level of skill.  It seems part of the "fight or flight" response, triggered by the rush of adrenalin, is that "fight" tends to mean a tense hyper-vigilance.

One of the aspects of Wing Chun, which, I think is shared in other martial arts (it's too profoundly useful not to have been exploited by others), is the notion that force and tenseness are not usually used to the exclusion of relaxed action.  In fact, the vast majority of such moves are made in a relaxed, smooth, flowing manner.  This can be quite difficult when one has been conditioned from late toddler-hood to expect a "fight" simply because someone is facing you who is going to punch you.

In fact, it is so conditioned that folks, myself included don't even know how to punch effectively at first.  Even experienced students in my class will hear the sifu chiding them with a chuckle, "Stop fighting! You're fighting me now!"  All well know the guy is pretty much impenetrable when it comes to actually, uh, fighting. And it's not the point of the exercise anyway.

If you're "fighting" you're not going to be applying the iota of force in the right place and time that makes it all devastatingly effective.

All of the above is to say that martial arts can, and if practiced will teach aspects of ourselves that we didn't even know we needed to learn.

Of course it's the same with a Zen practice as well; thus in John Daido Loori's book The Eight Gates of Zen a chapter is devoted to "body practice," an application of Zen practice in the awareness of the body which might otherwise be called "body kung fu" (功夫) perhaps.

To me, it's an extremely important thing to learn because it has implications for pretty much near everything I do from day to day, most of which I'm not remotely aware of at this time.

And it goes beyond this: it calls into question (just like good Zen practice should) the most basic preconceptions and conditioning I have about myself and others.

If what they do at Shaolin is remotely related to the above, I could see why they would want to make sure it's not ripped off by cheap knock-offs. 

Sanity, 見性, responsibility

On travel I usually bring as many back issues of Harper's that I haven't yet read.  And so I was fascinated to read in the December issue an article on the possible prevention of psychosis (subscription required).  This article bears upon not only whatever responsibility we may have for the recent violence in Tuscon Arizona, and yet another reason why "he was insane, and there was nothing we could have done" was an inadequate response, but also the nature of mind and consciousness  and sanity, and its relation to kensho (見性 ), satori (悟り ) and other meditative states.

If you can get a copy of this article, I strongly suggest you read the whole thing, because I'm touching on only a tiny part of this article:

It is impossible to predict the precise moment when a person has embarked on a path toward madness, since there is no quantifiable point at which healthy thoughts become insane. It is only in retrospect that the prelude to psychosis can be diagnosed with certainty. Yet in the past decade, doctors have begun to trace the illness back to its earliest signs. [T]he First Episode Psychosis Clinic at the University of Illinois Medical Center ... is one of about sixty clinics in the United States that work to help people experiencing early psychotic symptoms maintain a grasp on reality. About a third of these programs focus exclusively on patients who appear to be in what is known as the prodrome, the aura that precedes a psychotic break by up to two or three years. During this phase, people often have mild hallucinations—they might spot a nonexistent cat out of the corner of their eye or hear their name in the sound of the wind—yet they doubt that these sensations are real. They still have “insight”—a pivotal word in psychiatric literature, indicating that a patient can recognize an altered worldview as a sign of illness, not a revelation. 

By working with people when they are still skeptical of their own delusions, doctors hope to stop the disease before it has really begun. Three years ago, the results of a study of nearly 300 patients who sought treatment because of “recurring unusual thoughts,” “unusual sensory experiences,” or “increased suspiciousness” were published by the North American Prodrome Longitudinal Study, a collaboration of eight prodromal outpatient clinics. The researchers found that 35 percent of patients had a psychotic break within two and a half years of enrolling at a clinic...

Although the DSM [(Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders )] is written by the country’s leading psychiatrists, the neurological mechanisms behind mental disorders are too poorly understood to have much bearing on the way the manual separates health from pathology. Instead, the fifty-eight-year-old book guides psychiatrists toward diagnoses with checklists of behavioral signs that require a “minimal amount of inference on the part of the observer” (according to the 1987 edition). The outer limits of normality are decided by committee, with definitions of illness deferring to consensus opinion. A “delusion,” one of the five key symptoms listed for schizophrenia, is a “false belief . . . firmly sustained despite what almost everyone else believes.” A “bizarre delusion,” a more severe symptom, has gone through numerous revisions. In one edition of the manual, it had to have “patently absurd” content with “no possible basis in fact”; in the next, it involved “a phenomenon that the person’s culture would regard as totally implausible.” After the revision, 10 percent of patients who were previously deemed schizophrenic were given a new diagnosis, the majority of them because their delusions were no longer bizarre.

The DSM is designed to avoid the slippery spaces between disorders, the complaints not easily named or seen. Perhaps more than any other disorder, the psychosis risk syndrome puts pressure on the logic of the entire enterprise, as it forces doctors to break down the process of losing one’s mind. They have to identify delusions before the patient really believes in them. When does a strong idea take on a pathological flavor? How does a metaphysical crisis morph into a medical one? At what point does our interpretation of the world become so fixed that it no longer matters “what almost everyone else believes”? Even William James admitted that he struggled to distinguish a schizophrenic break from a mystical experience.

 There are, as I've said, many "take-aways" in this artcle, among them:

• There is, evidently, some kind of a continuum between total full-fledged psychotic break from reality and "normal" behavior and...
• Those that experience it often, if not inevitably are aware that their beliefs aren't necessarily normal
• And they are often suffering from the delusions they are having
• And we have a responsibility, I think, to try to understand this process, 
• But since we stigmatize the ill and the mentally ill, that's problematic.

More to the point of what I want to say, is I was somewhat struck by what the sufferers of prodrome (pre-psychotic break syndrome) were expressing and my own Zen practice as well as tiny tiny bit I know about neurology; you can't help but be.

Our "self" is something our brain creates for us, and there isn't "one" place in the brain this "self" can be said to reside.  And yet it is just this "self" that apparently suffers in a psychotic break.  The questions that one clinic asks possible prodrome patients include:

Do you daydream a lot or find yourself preoccupied with stories, fantasies, or ideas?
Do you think others ever say that your interests are unusual or that you are eccentric?
Do familiar people or surroundings ever seem strange? Confusing? Unreal? Not a part of the living world? Alien? Inhuman?
Have you ever felt that you might not actually exist? Do you ever think that the world might not exist?

 There are, it seems to me, a number of koans embedded in each of those questions.  Do you daydream a lot? What is a lot? What is a daydream? What is the living world? What is alien? What is inhuman? What does it mean to exist?  How do we know the world exists?

The other question, "Do you think others ever say that your interests are unusual or that you are eccentric?" is even more interesting: I suppose (I hope) the answer to this question doesn't allow the imaginative to be swept into a psychotic diagnosis.

The fact that in  kensho (見性 ), "seeing into one's nature,"  one sees that one's nature is sunyata, is clearly not to say that one's nature is one rock solid unchanging essence. (Or not.)  Is this the same as a psychotic break? Different? 

I think the difference between a Zen practice, including 見性 and a psychotic break is several:

• We generally aren't suffering because we are questioning everything.
• We aren't usually existentially disturbed at the consideration, and acting within, the premise that the self is a construct of the mind; rather, we are for whatever reason, reassured by it, because we understand this is the nature of all beings.
• We try  not to be attached to beliefs and delusions, including the belief in non-attachment.

Also, there is a strong link between the incidences of psychosis and deprivation - whether it's a deprivation caused by being a minority, or by being economically disadvantaged, the incidence of psychosis seems to increase.

We have a responsibility to find out these issues to their core, and to try to help those who need it.  I would also venture - again as a rank nonspecialist who is clearly writing from the most his most ignorant parts - I would venture that the use of mindfulness based methods might be applied to these prodrome people with interesting results.  It's a study that begs to be done, if it's not already being done, simply because the links between the mystical states and the psychotic break are striking.

Mental Health and Meditation...if you're hurting

Get help.

But I do think Kyle's post here  and Petteri's post here needs a response. It's not like I strongly disagree with them, but I do want to put my 2 cents into this.  My response goes like this:

•  Meditation, at least the mindfulness-based koan and shikantaza of zazen should not, in and of itself, be causative in inducing extreme mental states.  Rather I would say that the environment, the teacher, the belief system of the subject, and underlying mental health issues have probably a much bigger role to play here.
• Thus it is not surprising that the article Petteri quoted consists of ancedotes. Then again, when we get to "transpersonal psychology" I think it's safe to say that we're standing a little out of scientific method land.
• The reason I wrote the first two bullet points was my skeptic radar pinged loudly when I started reading Kyle's article.  Now I've seen my fair share of ...um...how to say it...disturbed people...in my years in zendos.  Hang around one long enough and a mentally disturbed person is almost guaranteed to show up.  And this is not surprising: Buddhism promises a path to the transcendence of suffering, and by gum, the mentally disturbed are nothing if not suffering. Two plus two... So why was my skeptic radar pinging loudly?
• It's because real scientific studies show that therapeutic methods based on mindfulness are more effective at treating some kinds of mental disturbances than antidepressants.  It's also because such techniques are correlated with enhancing cognitive function.
• But that's to say that strong medicine can be strong poison if not used skillfully; hence the issues of
• Getting an ethical teacher who is not immovable, and aware of mental health issues
• Making sure the setting isn't like some weird Large Group Awareness Training. (Did I write "Genpo Roshi?" No. I did not write that.)
• And make sure you're at a point in your life where, even if you're feeling suffering (who isn't?), you're not at the point of doing something dangerous.
• What Kyle and Petteri say is quite true: if you've got mental health issues, get them treated. Not only is there no shame in that, as Kyle said, but in reality, if you think you are covering them up well from others, you're only fooling yourself.  Trust me, everyone who knows you wishes desperately you would see the writing on the wall.  Dare to share your feelings with others.
• Having said that, though, I can tell you that I have been quite down emotionally in my life, and my practice has been invaluable to me, and I know that's true for others as well.  Moreover, I've known people whose family had had very serious mental health issues, and they weren't always impressed with the results.   Regarding  mental health, "treatment by professionals" has had a very checkered history of effectiveness to the point that there's lots of people who think Tom Cruise might have a point when he goes psychotic raving about psychiatry.  
• Even today, when it comes to some forms of behavioral disturbances, such as addiction,  most treatments in the US provided by most professionals are more akin to putting the leeches to someone thanto providing a treatment that is safe and effective.  And more Buddhist teachers should be aware of that. Yes, folks, even when it comes to professionals, caveat emptor. 
• Buddhist teachers are not trained mental health professionals, unless of course, they've been trained to be mental health professionals. 
• And finally, as I wrote here, don't forget:  The power of a belief, of a certainty that things are "this way" and "not that way" seems to have a profound effect on the incidence of particular types of mental suffering.  Even in the dark hard times we all experience in meditation, one should try to keep in mind that this is stuff the mind is throwing up to you, and as far as the present moment is concerned it has all the import of an itchy foot.  Hard to keep in mind, I know, I know.  But when once you have had the experience of the waning of such dark feelings and memories you realize that transcendence is possible.  For some it might take skillfully realizing that some kind of counseling or medication is needed before this state can be reached.  But usually, much more frequently, it's going to wane by itself. 

Meditation helps increase attention span!

Now what was I doing?

July 14, 2010

It's nearly impossible to pay attention to one thing for a long time. A new study looks at whether Buddhist meditation can improve a person's ability to be attentive and finds that meditation training helps people do better at focusing for a long time on a task that requires them to distinguish small differences between things they see.

The research was inspired by work on Buddhist monks, who spend years training in meditation. "You wonder if the mental skills, the calmness, the peace that they express, if those things are a result of their very intensive training or if they were just very special people to begin with," says Katherine MacLean, who worked on the study as a graduate student at the University of California - Davis. Her co-advisor, Clifford Saron, did some research with monks decades ago and wanted to study meditation by putting volunteers through intensive training and seeing how it changes their mental abilities.
About 140 people applied to participate; they heard about it via word of mouth and advertisements in Buddhist-themed magazines. Sixty were selected for the study. A group of thirty people went on a meditation retreat while the second group waited their turn; that meant the second group served as a control for the first group. All of the participants had been on at least three five-to-ten day meditation retreats before, so they weren't new to the practice. They studied meditation for three months at a retreat in Colorado with B. Alan Wallace, one of the study's co-authors and a meditation teacher and Buddhist scholar...

The task lasted 30 minutes and was very demanding. "Because this task is so boring and yet is also very neutral, it's kind of a perfect index of meditation training," says MacLean. "People may think meditation is something that makes you feel good and going on a meditation retreat is like going on vacation, and you get to be at peace with yourself. That's what people think until they try it. Then you realize how challenging it is to just sit and observe something without being distracted."

But then you knew that, didn't you?

More on Hypnotism and Zen Meditation

Wikipedia describes hypnotism as:

...a mental state (state theory) or set of attitudes and beliefs (non-state theory) usually induced by a procedure known as a hypnotic induction, which is commonly composed of a series of preliminary instructions and suggestions.^[1]...

Contrary to a popular misconception - that hypnosis is a form of unconsciousness resembling sleep - contemporary research suggests that it is actually a wakeful state of focused attention^[2] and heightened suggestibility,^[3] with diminished peripheral awareness.^[4]

They also note as "criticism" of hypnosis that:

Skeptics point out the difficulty distinguishing between hypnosis and the placebo effect, proposing that hypnosis is so heavily reliant upon the effects of suggestion and belief that it would be hard to imagine how a credible placebo control could ever be devised for a hypnotism study.[6]

It could be said that hypnotic suggestion is explicitly intended to make use of the placebo effect. For example, Irving Kirsch has proposed a definition of hypnosis as a "non-deceptive mega-placebo," i. e., a method which openly makes use of suggestion and employs methods to amplify its effects...

On PBS last night (at least in the Portland OR area) there was a program called "The Human Spark," in which it was asserted that humans have their unique capabilities because their brains are wired more towards social organization, abstraction in time and in considering others, and in imagination. Our brains are profoundly developed in these areas compared to other species (though they didn't mention dolphins).

Clearly both mindfulness and Zen meditation meditation and hypnosis have the effect of attenuating those areas in the brain doing this advanced human species stuff. As Petteri notes in a comment on my last post, though, in the cases of mindfulness and Zen meditation you are directing your mind, without preconceived expectations (if done correctly) whereas in the other case somebody's telling you, giving you cues, in effect, what you will experience.

Oh, but that's pretty much the same thing as a "guided meditation," isn't it? That, of course, is not the same thing as being given directions in how to meditate, which is what's in the Buddhist sutras - i.e., focusing on the breathing, mindfulness, etc. No, we're talking about things like, oh, "Now speak with the voice of non-duality." Yes indeedy, behavior and brain people think things like that, i.e., hypnosis, are a lot like a big ol' placebo. I for one can't discern a difference. BTW, one other nice thing about koan practice as well, is there's not really any cues given - there's no logic to the words of the damned koan, and yes indeed, in sanzen logical explanations aren't given any positive feedback.

And so, "guided meditation" as hypnosis is critique #501893 of "Big Mind": if someone's giving you cues as to what to expect, what to see, it's their production, and not even yours.

I don't think I answered all the questions in my last post, but at least I think I've outlined a bit of the answers, which, yeah, I know, Zen practitioners already know.

Mindfulness, Meditation, and Self-Hypnotism

In the last post below I mentioned,"caveat emptor especially when it comes to 'guided meditations.'"

I think that this is a useful topic to explore, and while I don't have the time here, would like to raise the questions:

• How is guided meditation like/unlike self-hypnosis or hypnosis and should we care?
• What is the difference between mindfulness and meditation?
• What's the difference between guided meditation and the Buddha's instructions to his disciples on meditation?
• What's the difference between guided mediation and instructions on meditation in general?
• What's the difference between the Zen practices of koan practice and shikan taza and "guided meditation?"

Given that whatever you do, whatever you practice or do not practice, it is you who signs on the dotted line, these questions are important, I think.

Been there, done that...

Not in the Vipassana tradition, but Robert Wright pretty much sums up what happens when you're focusing on awareness and non-attachment for a few days with others doing the same.

Finding: The brain helps maintain a stress-cycle

It's not for nothing that people get stuck:

Reporting earlier this summer in the journal Science, Nuno Sousa of the Life and Health Sciences Research Institute at the University of Minho in Portugal and his colleagues described experiments in which chronically stressed rats lost their elastic rat cunning and instead fell back on familiar routines and rote responses, like compulsively pressing a bar for food pellets they had no intention of eating.

Moreover, the rats’ behavioral perturbations were reflected by a pair of complementary changes in their underlying neural circuitry. On the one hand, regions of the brain associated with executive decision-making and goal-directed behaviors had shriveled, while, conversely, brain sectors linked to habit formation had bloomed.

In other words, the rodents were now cognitively predisposed to keep doing the same things over and over, to run laps in the same dead-ended rat race rather than seek a pipeline to greener sewers. “Behaviors become habitual faster in stressed animals than in the controls, and worse, the stressed animals can’t shift back to goal-directed behaviors when that would be the better approach,” Dr. Sousa said. “I call this a vicious circle.”

At the very least, when one practices forms of mindfulness meditation, one gets the ability to "step out of the loop," and with practice, one remembers to be able to do this more and more.