The Dalai Lama has said that Buddhism and science are deeply compatible and has encouraged Western scholars to critically examine both the meditative practice and Buddhist ideas about the human mind. A number of scientists and philosophers have taken up this challenge. There have been brain scans of meditators and philosophical examinations of Buddhist doctrines. There have even been discussions of Darwin and the Buddha: Do early Buddhist descriptions of the mind, and of the human condition, make particular sense in light of evolutionary psychology? This course will examine how Buddhism is faring under this scrutiny. Are neuroscientists starting to understand how meditation “works”? Would such an understanding validate meditation—or might physical explanations of meditation undermine the spiritual significance attributed to it? And how are some of the basic Buddhist claims about the human mind holding up? We’ll pay special attention to some highly counterintuitive doctrines: that the self doesn’t exist, and that much of perceived reality is in some sense illusory. Do these claims, radical as they sound, make a certain kind of sense in light of modern psychology? And what are the implications of all this for how we should live our lives? Can meditation make us not just happier, but better people? All the features of this course are available for free. It does not offer a certificate upon completion.
Meditation
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Del curso dictado por Princeton University
Buddhism and Modern Psychology
3005 calificaciones
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De la lección
The Buddhist Prescription
Conoce a los instructores
Robert WrightVisiting Lecturer
Religion Department and the Center for Human Values
Okay, so in this segment we're going to talk a little about meditation.
This is not a how to meditate course.
And if it were I wouldn't be the most qualified to teach it by a long shot.
But I did want to give both those of you have meditated
and those of you who haven't, some sense for the varieties
of meditation and meditative experience that are available, and in particular
how they connect to themes in Buddhist thought and in this course.
Now, if you've never meditated you may have the idea that meditation is
this really hard thing, you've gotta
master this technique and practice, practice, practice.
And you know what?
You may actually be right.
I mean, different people are different.
Some people it comes very easily to.
Not to me.
I actually meditated a number of times without feeling
that it was sufficiently rewarding to sustain a practice.
I finally went with kind of total immersion and went to a, a one week silent
meditation retreat, and at that point meditation became
kind of accessible to me, you might say.
Even then it took a lot of work.
But again, your, your mileage may vary.
And moreover there are some things you can do, some kind of shortcuts you
can try to take to at least get a sense for what mediation may have to offer.
Now one of these came up in a conversation I recently had
with Shinzen Young and I'll show you a little bit of that conversation.
Shinzen Young is an example of one of these Western Buddhists I've talked about.
In fact, he was kind of a pioneer in western Buddhism.
I think it was more than 40 years ago that having
left America he became ordained as a Buddhist monk in Japan,
and then he came back, and became a teacher of meditation,
and he, he's kind of got his own system of teaching meditation.
He, he might not call himself in every respect an orthodox Buddhist.
I don't know, but his, his, his teaching is
very much grounded in a, in a Buddhist sensibility.
So in this part of the conversation we start out
talking about something that, that was alluded to, in lecture one.
Which is how meditation can change your view of your feelings.
>> When meditation works it gives you a skill set that allows you to experience
physical and emotional discomfort with greater poignancy.
But less problem.
>> So by greater poignancy you almost mean you almost perceive
it more acutely in a sense but it causes you less trouble.
What, what do you mean by?
>> It's exactly what I mean.
>> Okay.
>> That so, you, learn how to escape into discomfort.
There's two ways to deal with discomfort.
Escape from it.
If you can, great.
[LAUGH] But what if you can't?
Well, if you can't, it's good to have in your quiver
of life arrows, so to speak the ability to escape into it.
Then you sort of have your cake and eat it too.
You experience the richness of being human.
And part of that is uncomfortable.
>> Mm-hm.
>> But the sense of problem, the sense of suffering is diminished.
>> Mm-hm.
>> So now how that takes place, well that's a tleast an hour talk.
>> It is.
Although can I interrupt you, and, and, and
just mention one little kind of exercise I've
suggested to people as a shortcut to getting
the, the idea that I think sometimes actually works.
What I've said is, when you're feeling really sad.
And these are people who haven't necessarily meditated at all.
When you're just feeling sad, bor, on the border of depressed.
Sit down, close your eyes and just try to accept it.
And just say, bring it on.
What does, what does sadness feel like?
Pay attention to it.
You know, ac-, just accept it.
Just, just, just ask your, just close your eyes and examine the feeling of sadness.
Get closer to it.
And some of them do report, you know,
although they haven't meditated that oddly they do
sense some of the kind of diminishing of,
of the suffering and, you know what I mean?
>> Well, I totally do.
>> Of course you do.
>> however, I would just slightly disagree,
and say those people in fact have meditated.
>> Okay.
>> You just gave them the essence of meditation.
>> Right.
>> remember, you don't have to have your
eyes closed to be sitting on the floor.
What, what did you have them do?
You had them focus on the discomfort.
You had them try to be precise about the discomfort.
And you had them try to not fight with the discomfort.
>> So, meditation could be as easy for you as one, two, three.
Could be.
But I do want to add one asterisk to, to that conversation.
You know, Shinzen said you know, meditation doesn't have
to be about sitting down and closing your eyes.
That's true and for example, you can find yourself in line
at a store, you're getting frustrated because the person in front
of you is taking so long, why they didn't remember to
take their credit card out before they got to the cash register.
And then you can just decide to look at this feeling of irritation.
And observe it.
And then it loses its power over you and kind of dissolves.
That can happen.
But I do think that mainly happens with
people who are doing a regular meditative practice.
Meditating so regularly that they can then
carry the practice into their everyday lives.
Okay.
So as for kinds of meditative practices.
Well, for starters, there, there are different
kinds of meditation associated with different Buddhist traditions.
so, for example Tibetan Buddhists, when they meditate,
often do a lot of visualizing of images.
You know Zen Buddhists may meditate on these koans these
you know, these cryptic or paradoxical sayings or question, questions.
And sometimes Zen, Zen Buddhists actually meditate, do meditate with their
eyes open, sitting down, kind of looking at a wall or something.
In Vipassana meditation, which is
particularly common in Southeast Asia, there's
a lot of emphasis on observing the workings of your mind.
So there, there are a lot of
different traditions, there are stereotypes about the people
who practice the traditions, so, I heard
once you know, Tibetan meditation is for artists.
Zen is for poets, Vipassana is for psychologists.
But I do think ultimately these traditions have
more in common than they have differences among them.
I think for example, observing your own mind is to
some extent something that winds up happening in almost any tradition.
Even if it is a more explicit goal in Vipassana meditation and in
general I have found in talking to people from different traditions.
When I talk to really serious meditators, by which I
mean people who have meditated a lot more than I have.
I, I find that they're talking the, the same language.
When they're talking about the most profound experiences they've had they tend
to be grounded in, in Buddhist doctrine related to the Buddhist teaching.
So I think maybe more useful than covering all the varieties of meditation
associated with Buddhist traditions Is to look at two basic kinds of meditation.
Both of which are often found within a single tradition
and these are the two types that are pointed to by
those final factors in the eightfold path that we
looked at in the previous segment that is right mindfulness In right concentration.
Those are two kinds of mediation.
Now concentration meditation involves focusing on something very intently.
It could be a mantra, could be your breath, your breathing.
Could be a visual image and you, you focus on it very single-mindedly.
Get absorbed in it.
And this kind of meditation is said to bring great serenity, even bliss.
And in fact, I can attest to the bliss.
one, one thing that happened during my first meditation retreat was
like day four or day five I was focused on my breath.
Breath after breath, and that was something I had a lot of trouble
doing at the beginning of the retreat, but I got really absorbed in it.
And I suddenly just entered this state that can only be described as blissful.
And there was a lot of powerful visual stuff going on.
And I mean, I just remember thinking you know, this must be what heroin is like.
I mean, it was an amazing feeling.
And so I was like, very proud of myself, you know?
I thought I'd finally arrived as a meditator.
So I arranged to talk to one of the teachers after the meditation retreat.
And so I had this little session with him.
And I described the thing, you know, to him.
And I thought he was going to give me a medal or something, I don't know.
You know, I, I guess I didn't think that I had attained nirvana,
but I thought I had done, you know, gotten to some kind of higher plane.
And he said, oh, sounds, sounds nice.
And, and then he said, but don't get attached to it.
And, what he meant, first of all, he's being a good
Buddhist and reminding me, don't get too attached to any pleasure.
But secondly, this was a retreat in the Vipassana tradition, which means
it was about mindfulness meditation, the second of these two kinds of meditation.
It, it wasn't fundamentally about concentration,
or attaining bliss, or anything else.
We were supposed to use meditation to observe things mindfully.
Okay?
You, you could use, and should use concentration techniques to get to a point
where your mind is kind of stable and calm enough to do the mindfulness meditation.
But that's it, I should have gotten off that rocket
ship, you know, at some lower level than I did.
So what is mindfulness meditation?
Well it consists of observing anything in your realm of experience.
Your own mind, your own feelings.
Anything you can feel.
Sounds you hear while meditating.
And if you're carrying it into everyday life it can be things you see.
But it involves observing these things in a kind of unusual way in a special way.
And you saw some of this in that conversation with Shinzen Young.
In the way he talked about viewing unpleasant feelings.
You know, normally your relationship to a, to a feeling
like anxiety is first of all, you don't like it.
And second of all, it is controlling your thinking.
So, for example, you might be sitting there
going I'm going to screw up that presentation tomorrow.
Or, you may be doing a counter narrative and saying well, it'll be
okay because there's probably nobody in the
audience who really matters that much anyway.
But either way, the anxiety is controlling what you think about.
And it's kind of ironic.
You know, here, you've got this feeling that
you really don't approve of, you don't like.
And yet, you're letting it control your thoughts.
Well, as you may have gleaned from the conversation with Shinzen.
With mindfulness meditation, you are observing in this case a feeling
without like or dislike, that's the idea, without judging it so to speak.
You're observing it you know, kind of objectively.
And as a result it, it doesn't control your thoughts.
Now when you think about it this is kind of an unnatural thing to do,
because after all feelings were designed by
natural selection to influence our thought and perception.
We already saw a little of that in lecture
one, the way fear can influence what you literally see.
And that is very much what feelings
are about from natural selection's point of view.
They are supposed to, to help govern
our behavior, and our thoughts, and our perception.
So to try to turn the tables in this way and, and look at feelings in a way
that, that can disempower them is, is really you
know, quite a, quite a striking thing to do.
and, and very unnatural, you know, and it's, and it's very much
kind of a violation of natural selection's agenda in a certain sense.
and, and this came through in a description
of mindfulness meditation that I heard not long ago
when I was listening to a lecture from Bhikkhu
Bodhi, who you may remember from our previous segment.
These are lectures he actually delivered quite a while ago but
they are available online and here's what he said about mindfulness.
He said, ordinarily the faculty of attention is used as
an instrument for serving our purposes, our biological and psychological needs.
But mindfulness is a kind of attention which
operates independently of all ulterior aims and purposes.
I like that idea of you know, talking about
our, our, our basic biological and psychological needs as ulterior.
You know, as in some sense, kind of illegitimate.
Whereas, you know, from natural selection's point of view, no, these
are, these are the central valid, governing things of your life.
This should determine everything you see about the world.
And he's kind of wanting to cast them aside.
He goes on to say, mindfulness is
attention that functions in an atmosphere of detachment.
It's attention that aspires towards a pure objectivity, an
awareness which reflects the nature of objects exactly as they
are, without adding to them, without elaborating upon them,
without interpreting through the screens of subjective evaluation and commentary.
So the idea is that the mind as it ordinarily works and is designed to
work is not a reliable instrument of perception and of thought.
Now, I agree with that.
I believe that the human mind as it naturally works is not necessarily a
reliable way of looking at the world in, in the most truthful way possible.
And we'll be hearing more of that theme.
But I do want to pause now and
just emphasize what a radical reorientation mindfulness is.
You know, mindfulness, I think, has this reputation
for being this kind of gentle thing, you know.
You eat mindfully, you go through life
mindfully and appreciate the beauty of life.
And, and that's actually all true, that's, that's possible, but
at the same time there's a kind of edge to mindfulness.
Because it does constitute a kind of
rebellion against the agenda of natural selection.
It's not the way we're designed to work.
now, in the next segment, we're going to hear a little more about that.
We're going to talk more about mindfulness and, and, and flesh it out.
We're also going to talk about, you know, mind fleeting and things like that.
And we're going to look at what is going on according to science in the brains of
people who do mindfulness meditation and for that matter other forms of meditation.
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