[Paleopsych] CHE: In the Lab With the Dalai Lama
Buck, Ross
ross.buck at uconn.edu
Mon Jan 9 15:29:20 UTC 2006
Herbert Benson in "The Relaxation Response" suggested decades ago that
disciplines such as meditation and prayer share the quality of promoting
deep relaxation, which has the opposite effects of the fight-or-flight
response. That is, they lower autonomic and endocrine arousal, and
promote immune system functioning.
Cheers, Ross Buck
Ross Buck, Ph. D.
Professor of Communication Sciences
and Psychology
Communication Sciences U-1085
University of Connecticut
Storrs, CT 06269-1085
860-486-4494
fax 860-486-5422
Ross.buck at uconn.edu
http://www.coms.uconn.edu/docs/people/faculty/rbuck/index.htm
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Subject: [Paleopsych] CHE: In the Lab With the Dalai Lama
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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