[Paleopsych] CHE: In the Lab With the Dalai Lama
Steve Hovland
shovland at mindspring.com
Sat Jan 7 15:55:04 UTC 2006
Sounds like a bunch of very conventional people
being threatened by an unusual idea...
-----Original Message-----
From: paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org
[mailto:paleopsych-bounces at paleopsych.org]On Behalf Of Lynn D. Johnson,
Ph.D.
Sent: Friday, January 06, 2006 9:43 PM
To: The new improved paleopsych list
Subject: Re: [Paleopsych] CHE: In the Lab With the Dalai Lama
Frank,
This was hilarious! Imagine being against the Dalai Lama*! What
Torquemadas these scientists are!
*He is agnostic on the existence of God! How can one object?
Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.
Solutions Consulting Group
166 East 5900 South, Ste. B-108
Salt Lake City, UT 84107
Tel: (801) 261-1412; Fax: (801) 288-2269
Check out our webpage: www.solution-consulting.com
Feeling upset? Order Get On The Peace Train, my new solution-oriented book
on negative emotions.
Premise Checker wrote:
> In the Lab With the Dalai Lama
> The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.12.16
> http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i17/17b01001.htm
>
> By LEIGH E. SCHMIDT
>
> Even the Dalai Lama's harshest critics at the Society for
> Neuroscience meeting last month, in Washington, would have
> to concede this much: Choosing the exiled Tibetan Buddhist
> leader to inaugurate the professional association's series
> on neuroscience and society certainly got people talking.
> Who would have thought that an announced lecture on "The
> Neuroscience of Meditation" would set off a protest petition
> gathering about 1,000 signatures, a counterpetition of
> support boasting nearly as many names, substantial coverage
> in The New York Times and on National Public Radio, as well
> as ample chatter in the blogosphere? In a culture that likes
> its battles between science and religion to be loud,
> colorful, and Christian -- another nasty squabble, say,
> between evolutionists and creationists -- this controversy
> seemed unlikely to gain much traction. Yet as the dispute
> built momentum in the months leading up to the event, it
> soon became clear that the prospect of the red-robed Dalai
> Lama's urging the study of an ancient spiritual practice
> upon white-coated lab scientists would provide a newsworthy
> angle on the usual wrangling.
>
> Playing upon tensions far less noticed than those that have
> plagued relations between science and conservative
> Christianity, the latest dust-up reveals the spirit wars
> that divide the knowledge class itself. How purely secular
> and naturalistic do the members of that class imagine
> themselves to be, and how committed are they to keeping
> religion at bay in their conference gatherings, university
> laboratories, civic institutions, newsrooms, and think
> tanks? In turn, is "spirituality" a back door through which
> religion gets to enter the conversation, now dressed in the
> suitably neutralized garb of meditation as a universalistic
> practice of inward peace and outreaching compassion? Or does
> religion, even when soft-peddled in the cosmopolitan
> language of spirituality and the contemplative mind,
> inevitably remain an embarrassment to those elites who stake
> their authority on secular rationality? The dispute roiling
> the neuroscience society over the past six months has
> brought such questions front and center.
>
> Inviting the Dalai Lama to speak at the meeting created two
> major border disputes. The first, of modest consequence to
> religion-and-science debates, was the conflict over the
> "political agenda" of the exiled Tibetan leader. In an
> international professional association that includes many
> Chinese scientists, some members were offended at the
> implied endorsement that the event gave to the Dalai Lama's
> larger cause of freedom for Tibetans. The second dispute,
> more insistently debated, was over religion's showing up --
> so visibly, to boot -- at an annual meeting of
> neuroscientists. The almost visceral response by critics was
> to declare a total separation of religion and science, to
> wave the flag for the late-19th-century warfare between the
> two domains. "A science conference is not [an] appropriate
> venue for a religion-based presentation," a professor of
> anesthesia from the University of California at San
> Francisco remarked on the petition. "Who's next, the pope?"
> That sign-off question pointed to a second part of the
> strict separationist logic: Even if the Dalai Lama seemed
> pretty irenic as religious leaders go, he nonetheless
> represented a slippery slope into a mire of superstition and
> authoritarianism. (How else, some critics asked, were they
> to interpret his known affinities with reincarnation and
> monasticism?) "Today, the Dalai Lama; Tomorrow,
> Creationists?" wrote a professor of medicine at the
> University of Toronto, capturing perhaps the most
> commonplace anxiety given voice among the critics. Keep the
> society free of all religious discussion, or else the
> esteemed body might slide into the hell of a Kansas
> school-board meeting.
>
> More interesting than the purists' boundary monitoring is
> the way the Dalai Lama and his defenders imagine through
> meditation an emerging meeting point for science and
> religion in contemporary culture. The headline study that
> served as the immediate source of intrigue surrounding his
> recent lecture was an article published last year in the
> Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and produced
> by researchers at the Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging
> and Behavior, at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
> That group, led by the psychology professor Richard J.
> Davidson, has been studying long-term Tibetan Buddhist
> practitioners of meditation, comparing their brain-wave
> patterns with those of a control group. Davidson himself has
> been working in the science-religion borderlands for more
> than two decades and has been a leading collaborator with
> the Mind and Life Institute, in Boulder, Colo., one of the
> principal organizations encouraging the
> neuroscience-meditation dialogue.
>
> Shifting the focus of research from altered states of
> consciousness or momentary experiences of ecstasy, which so
> often concerned inquirers in the 1960s and 1970s, the
> Davidson group has been looking for evidence that sustained
> meditation causes actual neural changes in everyday patterns
> of cognition and emotion. In other words, they want to know
> if the brain function of long-term contemplatives is made
> demonstrably different through years of "mental training."
> And not just different, but better: That is, does the
> well-developed meditative mind sustain higher levels of
> compassion and calmness than the run-of-the-mill American
> noggin? Well, after testing eight long-time Tibetan Buddhist
> practitioners and 10 "healthy student volunteers," the
> researchers discovered that the 10,000 to 50,000 hours that
> the various monks had devoted to "mental training" appeared
> to make a real neurological difference. As the study's title
> put it, "Long-term meditators self-induce high-amplitude
> gamma synchrony during mental practice." Davidson and
> company, careful not to overreach in their conclusions, did
> suggest that practices of meditation, and the accompanying
> compassionate affect, were "flexible skills that can be
> trained." Did that mean contemplative practice could be
> abstracted from its religious context and then applied as a
> kind of public pedagogy? Were hopeful supporters wrong to
> read this as a tantalizing suggestion that meditation might
> prove beneficial not only for the mental health of Americans
> but also for the very fabric of society? Where, after all,
> couldn't we benefit from a little more "pure compassion,"
> altruism, lovingkindness, and "calm abiding"?
>
> As novel as it may sound to monitor the brain waves of
> Tibetan Buddhist monks in university laboratories or on
> Himalayan hillsides (Davidson has done both), it is
> certainly not the first time that American psychologists
> have sought to re-engage the spiritual through the
> healthy-mindedness of meditation. At Wisconsin, Davidson
> occupies a research professorship named for Harvard's
> William James, the pioneering psychologist, psychical
> researcher, and philosopher of religion, and it is in the
> tradition of James that the current turn to the
> contemplative mind is best understood. Counter to the
> popular image of Americans as endlessly enterprising,
> agitated, and restless -- all busy Marthas, no reflective
> Marys -- James discerned a deep mystical cast to the
> American psyche and pursued that strain with uncommon
> intellectual devotion. Yet when it came to "methodical
> meditation," James saw little of it left among American
> Christians and turned instead to homegrown practitioners of
> various mind-over-matter cures. He particularly accented
> those "New Thought" metaphysicians who were pushing forward
> a dialogue with far-flung emissaries of yoga and Buddhist
> meditation in the wake of the World's Parliament of
> Religions, held in Chicago in 1893.
>
> Among James's favored practitioners of these newly
> improvised regimens of meditation was Ralph Waldo Trine, a
> Boston-based reformer with a knack for inspirational
> writing. In The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902),
> James used Trine's blockbuster In Tune With the Infinite
> (1897) as an epitome of the emergent practices of
> concentration, mental repose, and healthy-mindedness then
> percolating in New England and elsewhere across the country.
> Though an unabashed popularizer, Trine was not a
> lightweight. With an educational pedigree that ran from Knox
> College to the University of Wisconsin to the Johns Hopkins
> University, he moved easily in Harvard's wider metaphysical
> circles and energetically engaged various progressive
> causes. In much the same way that current studies promote
> the clinical applications of meditation, Trine emphasized
> the healthful benefits that accrued from cultivating a calm
> yet expectant mind. He had no scanners or electrodes, but he
> had the same hopes about improving the mental and physical
> health of Americans through elaborating a universal practice
> of meditation, one that transcended the particulars of any
> one religious tradition and represented a kind of
> cosmopolitan composite of all faiths. And while Trine did
> not have the Dalai Lama at hand, he did have extended
> contact with a well-traveled Sinhalese Buddhist monk,
> Anagarika Dharmapala, with whom he compared notes and
> devotional habits at a summer colony in Maine as he was
> putting together his own system of meditation for Americans.
> Like other inquirers then and now, Trine was all too ready
> to look to Asia for a practical antidote to American
> nervousness.
>
> The real payoff for Trine, as it is for Davidson and his
> colleagues, was not established simply through a calculus of
> productivity or cheerfulness: Would encouraging meditation
> or other visualization techniques make people more alert and
> proficient at the office or on the playing field? Would it
> make them feel happier and less disgruntled? Trine, like
> James and now Davidson, was finally more interested in
> saintliness and compassion than in helping stressed-out
> brain workers relax and concentrate. It is hard not to hear
> a hint of Davidson's pursuit of altruism in Trine's "spirit
> of infinite love," the moral imperative to "care for the
> weak and defenseless." And it is hard not to see that the
> world of William James and Ralph Waldo Trine is alive and
> well as American investigators wire up Tibetan Buddhist
> hermits in a search for the powers of the concentrated mind,
> the mental disciplines of harmony, compassion, and peace
> that might make the world a marginally kinder, less selfish
> place. That optimism about human nature -- that the mind has
> deep reservoirs of potential for empathy and altruism -- had
> a lot more backing among liberals and progressives in 1900
> than it does today. Still, the considerable hopes now
> invested in meditation suggest that the old romantic
> aspirations, spiritual and otherwise, continue to flourish,
> especially among members of the mind-preoccupied knowledge
> class.
>
> P erhaps the most important dimension of the Dalai Lama's
> turn to the laboratory is the notion that the
> religion-science wound will be salved through recasting
> religion as spirituality. The Nobel laureate's latest book
> explicitly suggests as much in its title, The Universe in a
> Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality. In
> doing so, he expressly appeals to all those Americans who
> fear fundamentalist incarnations of religion and who instead
> cast themselves as intellectually curious and spiritually
> seeking. Religion, on this model, is not a domain of
> authority competing with science but an inward terrain of
> personal experience and individual probing. Spirituality,
> the Dalai Lama writes, "is a human journey into our internal
> resources." Representing "the union of wisdom and
> compassion," it shares with science a progressive hope for
> "the betterment of humanity." In those terms, religion as
> spirituality becomes the handmaiden of science itself,
> joining it in an open quest for knowledge, empirical and
> pragmatic, unconstrained by ancient creeds, cosmologies, or
> churches. In such exhortations the Dalai Lama shows a fine,
> intuitive feel for much of American intellectual and
> religious life, but he is hardly telling today's Emersonian
> inquirers something about the universe that they do not
> already affirm.
>
> A practice of meditation made palatable to scientists,
> secularists, and seekers would no doubt look pallid to all
> those monks, hermits, and saints who have taken it to be an
> arduous and ascetic discipline. Still, the American pursuit
> of "spirituality," reaching a crescendo in the past two
> decades, has been all too easy to dismiss as paltry and
> unsubstantial, labeled as foreign and threatening to
> more-orthodox versions of a Christian America. In this
> often-charged religious environment, the Dalai Lama has
> astutely laid hold of the science-spirituality nexus as a
> cultural foothold. As he has discovered in this latest
> brouhaha, that move has hardly lifted him above the wider
> debates, whether about materialism or intelligent design,
> but it has allowed him to connect with America's more
> cosmopolitan and progressive religious impulses. When
> William James was asked directly in 1904, "What do you mean
> by 'spirituality'?," he replied: "Susceptibility to ideals,
> but with a certain freedom to indulge in imagination about
> them." In mingling with neuroscientists who have warmed to
> his talk of spirituality, the Dalai Lama may well have found
> his own avatars of William James.
>
> Leigh E. Schmidt is a professor of religion at Princeton
> University and author of Restless Souls: The Making of
> American Spirituality (HarperSanFrancisco, 2005).
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