If I had six hours to chop down a tree,
I would spend the first four hours sharpening the ax. Abraham Lincoln
Warning: In this essay we are going to mix our metaphors at a dizzying pace. Hint: Look for the scalpel to be in the hands of the elegantly skillful True self and the ax being clumsily wielded by the false self.
The U.S. Congress can crank out policy initiatives in endless profusion (confusion?) and still nothing seems to change in our march toward self-destruction. Disagree? What do you think are the odds of our dealing effectively with global warming; pandemics of antibiotic resistant bacteria; proliferation of nuclear weapons with a nuclear winter hanging over our heads; “hot” wars between: nations, religions or religious sects, corporations and indigenous peoples, political factions, tribal or ethnic groups; international criminal networks; the collapse of overly complex technological systems, transportation systems, energy systems, or money systems, etc. (There’s more but you get the idea.) Like everything logical in the universe—and the universe is logical or we wouldn’t be here—there is an explanation for our colossal failures.
The problem, obviously, is human behavior. That is why this essay appears in the chapter on psychology. What is not so obvious is the intractable nature of those problems that threaten our very existence. Is the explanation for all of these problems counterintuitive? It has to be; that is to say, beyond the purview of conventional thinking, our dominant identity, our delusional worldview and our dysfunctional behavior. The whole structure of human consciousness is out of whack! Want proof, you old skeptic you?
Take the subject of meditation or mindfulness. Meditation can be thought of as a tool or more profoundly as a transformational practice. As a tool it cuts “exceeding fine,” as precisely as a scalpel. How irrational then, would it be to use it to cut down trees? And yet, that is how most of us use this “life-saving” instrument. Life-saving, that is, because it can be used to transform human behavior and transcend human suffering; bold claim?
Let’s invite the human intellect in the guise or should we say disguise of academics. (Don’t laugh you cynics, you should be ashamed!) Amishi Jha, the director of the University of Miami’s Contemplative Neuroscience Mindfulness Research, recently (2014) described the results of her research at the New York Academy of Sciences meeting. Her program received a $1.7 million grant from the Department of Defense. “We found that getting as little as 12 minutes of meditation practice a day helped the Marines to keep their attention and working memory—that is, the added ability to pay attention over time—stable.”
See what we mean—their ability to pay attention to what? Why do we want to keep “stable” the unconscious mental processes of a person trying to distract themselves from their suffering? In the 1970s Jon Kabat-Zinn used meditation to do just that but it made a little more sense in the context in which he used it. He was a professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center and it made sense to give cancer patients a tool to reduce their suffering.
Research in the context of P-B will, of course, be contaminated by the beliefs, attitudes and values of the false self and conclusions will tend to support that narrative and identity. Scientists believe that they are the paragon of reason and tend to be excited when they add to the illusion of human progress.
Michael Posner of the University of Oregon and Yi-Yuan Tang, of Texas Tech University, had their subjects spend 11 hours over two weeks practicing mindfulness meditation. The results were revealed by M.R.I.’s taken before and after the experiment. “They found that it enhanced the integrity and efficiency of the brain’s white matter, the tissue that connects and protects neurons emanating from the anterior cingulated cortex, a region of particular importance for rational decision-making and effortful problem-solving.”
This would be like a study providing tree removal lumberjacks with new and improved, especially sharp, scalpels. Tree removal is not what scalpels are for. Enhancing the functioning of the brain of lemmings so they could find the Cliffs of Dover faster would not improve their survival rate. And indeed, our future survival rate appears to be threatened. Understanding the best use of meditation could help. It could help more than most of us can imagine.
Peter Malinowski, a psychologist and neuroscientist at Liverpool John Moores University in England has at least picked up the scent of the prey we should be chasing. “For some people who begin mindfulness training, it’s the first time in their life where they realize that a thought or emotion is not their only reality, that they have the ability to stay focused on something else, for instance their breathing, and let that emotion or thought just pass by.” This sounds eerily familiar to what a guy in what is now northern India discovered some time ago.
In what is now Bodh Gaya, India 2,500 years ago, Siddhartha Guatama meditated for forty-nine days. He learned to focus on his breathe to the exclusion of the contents of his thoughts, his mind, his emotions, and the sensations in his body. He too became the observer of those aspects of his experience that used to inform his identity but no longer did. He had become the observer.
Bravo Peter Malinowski! Now you need to take the next step in your conclusion. Our thoughts and our emotions are not an aspect of our reality, they are not reality at all; they are an illusion.
The old paradigm also causes other kinds of misunderstandings. The confusion in this case is centered on what are called epiphanies. For our purposes here we will define an epiphany as an insight revealing the nature of reality. Epiphanies defined in this way are what we can expect from a profound meditation practice such as Vipassana or Insight Meditation. In the hands of an unconscious academic researcher the whole business gets a bit twisted.
The following study shows that even when we “get it” we don’t “get it.” Jonathan Schooler runs a lab investigating mindfulness and creativity at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He concluded that mindfulness was not a good thing for creative, divergent thinking, so-called thinking outside the box. His study, published in 2012, was titled “Inspired by Distraction: Mind Wandering Facilitates Creative Incubation.” In short, he was advocating not being present if we want to experience unconventional insights, or if we want to come up with creative solutions to problems.
“‘A third of the creative ideas they [his subjects] had during a two-week period came when their minds were wandering,’ Schooler said, ‘And those ideas were more likely to be characterized as ‘aha’ insights that overcame an impasse.’”
Oh brother! So our representatives in Congress will have more creative insights into causes and solutions regarding America’s problems if they were “spaced out?” From reading the morning headlines most of us would conclude that our politicians are indeed experiencing wandering minds. They are staggering around like sleepwalkers in a dream wherein the problems and the symptoms are confused.
There are more studies like these and will be many more and we can’t expect much to come from all this research. The basic assumptions that underlie the illusion of P-B will cloud the findings and lead to distorted conclusions. Sharpening our meditation practice will avail us little unless we know precisely how to use it. What is the purpose of the razor-sharp meditation scalpel?
Most of us, if we take a 10-day Vipassana meditation course and listen to the discourses (instructions) of S.N. Goenka, will be able to distinguish a scalpel from an ax, intuition from intellect, and Simple Reality from illusion. We will then be able take the responsibility for performing surgery on our own state of being. Cutting out the diseased beliefs, attitudes and values which will transform our story; excising from our false self the identification with our body, mind and emotions; and finally implementing the behavioral therapy that reduces our pursuit of plenty, pleasure and power will find the patient dancing out the door of the hospital healed and happy.
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References and notes are available for this essay.
Find a much more in-depth discussion in books by Roy Charles Henry:
Who Am I? The Second Great Question Concerning the Nature of Reality
Where Am I? The First Great Question Concerning the Nature of Reality
Simple Reality: The Key to Serenity and Survival
