excellent article from the new Shambhala Sun. It was interesting to find out that the Dalai Lama has been engaged in talks with leading Quantum physicists since the 60's, including Heisenberg's primary student; also that they have been doing studies on cave yogis for quite some time. -Vaj
Two Sciences of Mind
In 1979, two cognitive scientists, Francisco Varela and Eleanor Rosch, and a computer scientist named Newcomb Greenleaf—all freshly minted Buddhists—organized what was to be a groundbreaking conference at The Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. Recently established by Tibetan meditation master Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the institute was designed to be a place where meditation traditions and western scholarship would meet on common ground.
The conference, entitled “Comparative Approaches to Cognition: Western and Buddhist,” would be an exciting convergence of East and West. While some participants remember it as stimulating in new and different ways, Rosch describes it as combative, an intellectual melee just short of chair-throwing. As she tells it, “We thought naively that the things we were discovering about mind through Buddhism were so meaningful and right-on that our colleagues would immediately want to sit down and discuss how this deep understanding of the mind fit into the various sciences. Wonderful things would happen. Instead, they looked at the thick reader we compiled, largely from Buddhist sources, and said, ‘What is this?’ When Francisco and the rest of us gave talks, they would say, ‘Huh?’ When the meditation sessions on the schedule failed to immediately provide the ‘information’ that they needed to ‘understand’ what we’d been saying, they reacted, ‘We’re at a conference and you’re asking us to sit here and do nothing?’ When it came time to discuss, they simply revolted. Clearly, we hadn’t gone where they were.” The Buddhism-science dialogue was off to a difficult start.
Francisco Varela, the conference’s leading light, was a walking Buddhism-science dialogue. As an undergraduate student in biology in his native Chile in the early sixties, he had burst into the office of professor Humberto Maturana and blurted out that he wanted to study “the role of mind in the universe.” Maturana, always a free-thinker, replied, “My boy, you’ve come to the right place.” The professor became his mentor and allowed him to explore notions about mind and body incorporating ideas from French phenomenology. Varela went on to Harvard and proved he had no fear of detail by earning his Ph.D. for a study of information processing in insect retinas. He was sure his career would take off in Salvador Allende’s new Chile, but not long after he returned home, the political tides turned, and he had to flee Colonel Augusto Pinochet’s military regime with only $100 in his pocket.
Varela ended up back in the United States, and in 1974, at a point when he felt cast adrift, he encountered an old friend he had met while living in Boston, Jeremy Hayward, a physicist who was a student of Trungpa Rinpoche. Hayward arranged for Varela and Trungpa to meet, and when Varela let on that he was struggling to find what exactly to do, Trungpa Rinpoche offered to teach him how to “do nothing,” quite a feat for someone with a mind as active as Varela’s.
He took to meditation with a vengeance. He saw it as the means for inquiring into his favorite subject, “mind in the universe.” While behaviorism had long since thrown out subjective investigation as so much twaddle, Varela was determined, according to Eleanor Rosch, “to reinstate first-person experience as a source of scientific knowledge, and open scientific inquiry to methods such as meditation.”
When Rosch met Varela in the late seventies at one of Trungpa’s programs, she had just started practicing Buddhism. She had made some pioneering discoveries in the emerging field of cognitive psychology and, like Varela, she saw meditation as the ultimate research tool, the one she had been looking for all her life. The Naropa meeting whetted their appetites, but it left them wanting something more—and better.
Barry Boyce is senior editor and staff writer for the Shambhala Sun.
Excerpted from "Two Sciences of Mind," Shambhala Sun, September 2005.
Also:
Testing for God
In December of last year, Nature magazine, depending on how you view it either the first or second most important science publication in the world, published an article headlined “Buddhism on the Brain.”
While most of the piece detailed a conference on the human mind held at the Dalai Lama’s headquarters in Dharamsala, buried within it was a paragraph which undoubtedly caused some of the relentlessly scientific readers of Nature to clean their glasses and begin reading the startling words out loud.
Fred Gage, a neuroscientist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, who had presented his research showing that the mammalian brain can change and adapt during adulthood, reported a conversation with the Dalai Lama. “At one point I asked: ‘What if neuroscience comes up with information that directly contradicts Buddhist philosophy?’,” said Gage. “The answer was: ‘Then we would have to change the philosophy to match the science.’”
The shock value for scientists was not what this said about the plasticity of Buddhism, but rather hearing the words in the context of the near H-bomb-level conflict between science and religion playing out in the United States. I can give you some sense of the incendiary nature of this dispute from that classic literary measure of the public mind—newspaper headlines.
“Keep Your Church Away From My State,” reads one in Syracuse’s Post Standard/Herald Journal. “Darwin Faces God In Kansas Trial,” exclaims the Ottawa Citizen. “Evolutionary War,” announces the Boston Globe.
Another measure of the intensity of the dispute are the category-5-hurricane rhetorical winds—read all shrubs, trees, and signs blown down, complete destruction of mobile homes—generated by various individual disputants. When meeting a scientist who also believes in divinity, the defiantly atheist New York Times science writer Natalie Angier starts popping mental veins. “How can a bench-hazed Ph.D., who might of an afternoon deftly puree a colleague’s PowerPoint presentation on the nematode genome into so much fish chow, then go home, read a two-thousand-year-old chronicle riddled with internal contradictions of a meta-Nobel discovery like ‘Resurrection from the Dead,’ and say, gee, that sounds convincing?” she writes in an essay on her “god problem.”
To this David F. Coppedge, founder and “chief bwana” of a website devoted to both disproving evolution and promoting “creation safaris,” responds with equal vitriol:
“The laziness of evolutionists is parasitic on society. Did this tall tale by Darwin Party mythmakers bless your heart? Did it do anybody any good? Did it advance civilization or help those in need? Challenge your professor when he wastes your time with improvable assertions and glittering generalities that assume evolution before the evidence even has had a chance to speak.”
The conflict between religion and science is hardly new—the Catholic Church’s persecution of Galileo and battles over Darwinism in the last century leap to mind—but what is startling is the vehemence of the conflict in what, if you judge from the numbers of recipients of Nobel Prizes and the nationality of authors of scientific papers, is the leading scientific country on earth. I will leave it to others to reflect on the Red State versus Blue State, Bushites versus Kerryites sociology aspect of the conflict, and discuss in this essay two things. First, what seems to me to be the essence of the disagreement, and second, some hope if not exactly for a resolution, then for a reconfiguration of complaint.
I wish to approach the first not from a he-said, she-said accounting of what the disputants say is the problem, but from the dim, dark cellar of my youth, where I once had a religion/science moment so profound that it deformed the rest of my life. I had obtained some LSD, and those being the days when the drug was supposed to open up Huxley’s euphonious Doors of Perception, I conceived taking it as a way to encounter God, who to that moment seemed to have gone out of his or her or its way to ignore me.
So I took my tab and laid down on a mattress in a dumpy apartment on the Lower East Side and awaited a divine incarnation. What transpired was instead exceedingly clinical: the splotched walls melted, my body seemed to disconnect from my brain, fantasy flowers bloomed in the melted paint—and then nothing. Reality had become an hallucination, but no god, no higher consciousness, no sense of the divine manifested itself.
Stephen Strauss is an award-winning science writer and former columnist with the Globe and Mail newspaper in Toronto. He now freelances and writes a regular science column for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Excerpted from "Testing for God," Shambhala Sun, September 2005.
- [FairfieldLife] Shambhala Sun article: Two Sciences of Mind Vaj
