Four Applications Of Mindfulness Retreat 2013 with B. Alan Wallace (part 25)

0:02 Oh yeah. So if the modern, which is to say over the last 135 years or so, the modern scientific study of the mind had been launched and perpetuated, been continuously developed in the way that all other branches of the natural sciences have been developed, then it would have started with that meditation, the careful observation of the phenomena you're seeking to understand. And that was exactly William James' vision. Report an error in the passage at 0:02 Highlight the passage at 0:02

0:33 And he was one of the great pioneers of modern experimental psychology. That was his vision of how they should proceed. In fact, he wrote an article, a scientific essay, called A Plea for Psychology as a Natural Science. It's a lovely article. You can find it online. A Plea for Psychology as a Natural Science. And what he was playing, and he was not a religious man, not Christian, not anything else, but a radical empiricist. Report an error in the passage at 0:33 Highlight the passage at 0:33

1:00 And I think one of the least dogmatic people I know of in kind of modern intellectual history. He was making his plea to his scientific colleagues, the general public, let us approach the mind like every other natural phenomenon. It is a natural phenomenon. And so with all other natural phenomena for which science has provided us with so much knowledge, replicable, consensual, truly, truly building a body of knowledge with many derivative benefits in technology, he said, let's give the mind a chance. Report an error in the passage at 1:00 Highlight the passage at 1:00

1:28 Subjective mind as a term referring to a wide array of subjective mental experience. In other words, things we're already familiar with, emotions, attention, memory, imagination, feelings, desires, perceptions, states of consciousness, etc., etc., that whole domain of reality. He said, let us simply approach this like every other field of inquiry of the natural sciences. Report an error in the passage at 1:28 Highlight the passage at 1:28

1:53 And he said, let introspection, let us rely first, foremost and always on introspection as the spearhead, the driving force, the central avenue or mode of inquiry to the mind as direct observation has been central to every other branch of natural science, whether it's elementary particle physics, cosmology, botany, geology, etc., etc. Report an error in the passage at 1:53 Highlight the passage at 1:53

2:17 This is the glory of modern science and it starts with Galileo, not with Copernicus, but with Galileo. That it was empiricism first. He knew the immense weight, the inertia of the Roman Catholic doctrine, of medieval doctrine, and so much reliance upon ancient wisdom, and much of it turned out to be false. Report an error in the passage at 2:17 Highlight the passage at 2:17

2:36 But his view, and where he really created a lot of waves, was this. He wrote a letter, I think it was a letter or an article, and he said, As a devout Christian, with a very deep belief, very deep belief in Christian doctrine, A lot of respect for the great sages of ancient Greece. But he said, I won't give the whole of reality to theologians. Report an error in the passage at 2:36 Highlight the passage at 2:36

3:03 The spiritual, the nature of God, the Trinity, heaven, hell, spirits, angels, all of that, that's your domain. But when it comes to things like physics and rolling balls down a ramp and looking through a telescope, this has to trump whatever your beliefs are. And that is if we come up with empirical evidence that just refutes what you believed, and it doesn't matter how long you've believed it and what great authorities you're citing. Report an error in the passage at 3:03 Highlight the passage at 3:03

3:29 But if I can see moons around Jupiter, and you say it's impossible because all celestial phenomena all go around the Earth in perfect circles, but I can see that there are moons going around Jupiter, then... And experience has to trump whatever you believe, and I don't care why you believe it, but it's wrong. Because I made a very good instrument, and I made these observations, and we found, so I'm sorry, but you can't have all of reality. Report an error in the passage at 3:29 Highlight the passage at 3:29

3:56 You can have the spiritual domain. And you philosophers, you can do philosophical stuff. But when it comes to the natural world, the world of physics, I'm sorry, but you have to give some ground here. So in other words, he was demanding turf. And that was the first challenge. It was really the first challenge, I think, in the modern era. Report an error in the passage at 3:56 Highlight the passage at 3:56

4:16 Saying you don't have the final say over everything when it comes to the movement. Well, like the sun. The sun wasn't supposed to have any spots. According to Aristotle, all those celestial bodies are pure. They don't have pimples or sunspots. Well, yes, they do. He found them. They're supposed to be smooth. Well, no, they aren't. Report an error in the passage at 4:16 Highlight the passage at 4:16

4:36 The moon has craters, big ones, pockmarks. You shouldn't have them. Sorry, I saw them. And you can see them too. It's not that I'm clairvoyant or I'm mystical and so forth. Look through the instrument, see if the instrument's good. Look through it and see what you see and you'll see that I'm right and you were wrong for the last 2,000 years. Report an error in the passage at 4:36 Highlight the passage at 4:36

4:54 And of course, likewise, earth going around sun, sun going around earth. Well, he was the first one to come up with empirical evidence. That was very troubling to people who had a monopoly on the whole of reality. Because that's what the union of the academics, the university people and the church, total fusion and with the state. That's a very massive body of authority. They said, we're covering everything. Report an error in the passage at 4:54 Highlight the passage at 4:54

5:15 You little wimp, you know? And he said, well, you may be covering everything, but a lot of what you're covering is wrong. Step aside. I'm carving out one piece of the pie, and we're going to call it natural philosophy, and empiricism trumps dogma. They didn't like him. They sent him to his room. Stay in your room forever, you know? House arrest. But he's kept on writing. He was very pugnacious. Report an error in the passage at 5:15 Highlight the passage at 5:15

5:37 And so here we are here. So this is what William James was saying. When it comes to the mind, follow Galileo. Don't follow what everybody believes because of so much inertia from whether it's 2,000 years or 400 years. Follow the evidence. And the only way you get cutting-edge evidence, new evidence, is by looking very carefully and refining your means of making observations. So in Galileo's lifetime, he developed the 8-power telescope, then 20-power, then 30-power, and of course he kept on making better and better observations. Report an error in the passage at 5:37 Highlight the passage at 5:37

6:08 So back to William James, he said, first, foremost, and always rely on observation because this is the scientific approach. And complement that by studying the mind indirectly by way of behavior, indirectly by way of brain correlates, all good, but after all, this is science. Observe the phenomenon, unless you can't at all, but you can, and it's called introspection. Report an error in the passage at 6:08 Highlight the passage at 6:08

6:26 And what he wanted to understand was all of these kind of things, the contents of subjective mental experience. But there was something missing that Galileo had and William James didn't. And as much as I respect him, he didn't, and for very good reason. And that is, I think, just from one session is quite obvious. And that is, we're just practicing introspection, we were monitoring, we were expecting intro. Report an error in the passage at 6:26 Highlight the passage at 6:26

6:54 And to some degree, I think you were observing images, thoughts and what have you. But to be able to do that in a rigorous fashion, not spotty, not folk psychology, not sporadic, not cluttered up with a bunch of junk of projections and assumptions and beliefs and biases and so forth and so on. To be able to do that rigorously in a way that would be replicable, so multiple people, as free as possible from ideological bias and so forth, and even methodological bias, simply saying, I'm going to take a look as clearly as I can, to be able to do that in a sophisticated, rigorous, replicable fashion. Report an error in the passage at 6:54 Highlight the passage at 6:54

7:29 So multiple people could come to the same discoveries with very transparent, reasonable, unbiased modes of inquiry. To do that, isn't it obvious that it would behoove you, Behoove us all to be able to make sustained observations. And that is be able to choose, to make a choice. I'm now going to spend 24 minutes observing this domain, this sixth domain. It's not a mystical domain, you saw that. There's nothing occult or weird or the third eye or anything like that. Report an error in the passage at 7:29 Highlight the passage at 7:29

8:03 It's the other domain, it's the one that's left over. The one that you can't see with any of the five physical senses, you can't detect with any instrument of science, but you certainly can detect it. And we just did. And the stuff arising in that, in order to really explore that domain, which is what Vipassanā is about, to explore that domain, to not only observe it, but to explore it and make replicable and perhaps very transformative discoveries in that regard, the ability to be able to focus your attention there and do it for 24 minutes continuously can be very useful. Report an error in the passage at 8:03 Highlight the passage at 8:03

8:36 And not peck at it like Woody Woodpecker. A couple of seconds and you're off into La La Land. Oh yeah, where was I? And then... Does that sound familiar at all? Report an error in the passage at 8:36 Highlight the passage at 8:36

8:49 William James studied attention, or he collated a lot of research. He really had a very, how do you say, encompassing mind. And he found at that time, this is 120 years ago, that the average attention span for just focusing like in a mental image, that you can kind of focus and not lose your mind. Three seconds. Report an error in the passage at 8:49 Highlight the passage at 8:49

9:09 Three seconds. That was 120 years ago. And I know a man who's right at the forefront of that type of research. He was at Harvard and now he's at Stanford University. His name is Steve Coslin. Very, very good cognitive psychologist. I mean, very highly regarded. And he's spent a lot of his time, his professional research, has been looking into mental imagery. Report an error in the passage at 9:09 Highlight the passage at 9:09

9:30 Doing some very ingenious research in that regard. I haven't spoken to him since he moved out west to Stanford in California. But I met with him at least a couple of times when he was still at Harvard. And the subjects that he would invite into his lab for him to do research on, so they would be really the objects rather than subjects, that he would invite them and give them tasks and then monitor how good these people were in terms of generating mental imagery, manipulating general mental imagery, sustaining mental imagery. Report an error in the passage at 9:30 Highlight the passage at 9:30

10:00 So it was very much about that. Well, he had Harvard undergraduates. So you can assume they're just overall exceptionally bright. And highly motivated, and this is important research, they're probably quite gung-ho, and so they're intelligent, they're bright, they're sane, they're motivated, and so how long can those bright youngsters focus their attention? Report an error in the passage at 10:00 Highlight the passage at 10:00

10:20 Now this is just a few years ago, seven seconds. That's the best of the best, seven seconds. Well, if Galileo, now just jump back 400 years, if Galileo having set his telescope, Report an error in the passage at 10:20 Highlight the passage at 10:20

10:35 Could look through it for only three to seven seconds at a time and then somebody's bumping him. Oh crap. Oh crap. I almost had it. And that's always, every time he looks at a telescope, somebody's whacking him after three to seven seconds. Report an error in the passage at 10:35 Highlight the passage at 10:35

10:52 I don't think you would ever get the moons of Jupiter. Because for that, what you see is Jupiter the big dot and you see the little dots. But the little dots can be stars. And if you keep on getting bumped every three seconds, they still look like stars. You have to have a sustained, Focus there and see are those stars static? Is Jupiter stars, the background stars, they're static? And the planets move across them. Report an error in the passage at 10:52 Highlight the passage at 10:52

11:16 Everybody knows that, right? And so if they're stars, they'll remain static and Jupiter will move on its way and those little things that seem to be around it aren't. It just happened to be cruising past and there they are. So okay, they're stars. Big deal. But if you can track Jupiter from night to night to night and see those little critters are going with it, they're not stars. Report an error in the passage at 11:16 Highlight the passage at 11:16

11:36 And if you can see their movement relative to Jupiter, that they're going around it, voila, you've just made a really important discovery. You discovered the moons of Jupiter, which he did. But you can't do that with a bunch of snapshots or three-second interludes. It has to be continuous, right? And so this is what William James missed. Report an error in the passage at 11:36 Highlight the passage at 11:36

11:56 He wrote with, I think, unparalleled brilliance. I mean, I have read and appreciated his writing so much on the value. of developing sustained voluntary attention, the role of attention in our daily life, the role of attention in morality, the role of attention in education. Report an error in the passage at 11:56 Highlight the passage at 11:56

12:14 So many areas. He has such, such insight. And he writes so clearly that even a person like me can understand. It's really quite breathtaking. But then when it came to the trainability of attention, then for very good reason. I mean, we're all in a way locked into time and place. He was locked into New England. Report an error in the passage at 12:14 Highlight the passage at 12:14

12:33 He was very transatlantic, so he was very familiar with France, Germany, England, very much at home on the continent in England and, of course, North America. Lived at Stanford for a while. He taught there for some time. But he never made it out of Eurocentric civilization. He never ventured out. I don't think he really had much interest, and he had virtually no knowledge. Report an error in the passage at 12:33 Highlight the passage at 12:33

12:51 Very little. Never made it to India or China or Southeast Asia. Never made it to Australia, for that matter. And so his personal experience was just locked in. To what he knew, and that's true for all of us. But he never met anybody, with the exception of one Swami that came to Harvard. And he met him and he was quite moved. Report an error in the passage at 12:51 Highlight the passage at 12:51

13:10 He thought, whoa, that guy has some serenity that I wish we had because he's got something we don't. But he didn't pursue it. And he made some very ridiculous comments about Orientalism and the Orientals, which looked like he got a bad cold or something. Really quite silly statements. But when it came to the trainability of attention, Based upon his database, how can we blame him? He was doing his best based upon everything he knew and the people he knew, what they knew within his database, apart from that one weird swami who came and went. Report an error in the passage at 13:10 Highlight the passage at 13:10

13:43 He said, there's no evidence that attention can be trained. It looks like it can't be trained. It would be great if it could, but it can't. It looked like attention is just hardwired. You're either born scatterbrained, you're born focused, but it looked like that's the brakes. And that was the end of it. Report an error in the passage at 13:43 Highlight the passage at 13:43

13:59 And that was pretty much the end of it for the 20th century. I don't know, frankly, of a single cognitive scientist who seriously questioned that in the 20th century. And that's a lot of time when we see this exponential growth of knowledge in virtually every branch of science, including psychology. But that one question, that little itsy-bitsy question, can attention be trained or not, it seems to have been utterly overlooked. Report an error in the passage at 13:59 Highlight the passage at 13:59

14:21 And I find it one of the most astonishing things about 20th century science. With this incredible growth of knowledge and so many things, so many sometimes ridiculous questions that are posed and many important ones. Here's one so central as William James could not have made plainer. This is enormously important, the role of attention in our daily lives in pretty much every aspect. Creativity, business, education, sports, you name it. Report an error in the passage at 14:21 Highlight the passage at 14:21

14:44 If attention can't be trained, it's going to be fantastic. If it can't, well tough luck. He assumed based on his data, can't be. And then it was kind of assumed for a hundred years. Can't be. Amazing! And then only in the first decade of this century-millennium, pretty much drawing from Buddhism, a bit of Hinduism, then, oh, maybe it can be trained. Report an error in the passage at 14:44 Highlight the passage at 14:44

15:06 And now the evidence is already coming in. It's so fast. Of course it can be trained. 20 minutes a day for a few weeks, you can train your attention. But there it is. That's the missing piece he didn't have. And so from 1875 or so until 1910 when he died, there was this introspectionist movement. By him and Tichner and Wilhelm Wundt, very, very bright people in North America and Europe, tried to get the engine going of taking introspection as being central to the scientific inquiry and nature of the mind. Report an error in the passage at 15:06 Highlight the passage at 15:06

15:39 But there were problems to it. There were problems that had to be weeded out. There were limitations to it, of course. But above all, the common denominator, none of them. Not Tichner at Cornell. Not Wilhelm Wundt at the University of Leipzig. Not James at Harvard. None of them had any sophisticated techniques for developing attention skills. So they're trying to do this but without having any method for stabilizing, refining and developing attention skills. Report an error in the passage at 15:39 Highlight the passage at 15:39

16:09 No samādhi at all. They basically took folk psychology. It kept folk psychology. After 35 years it was still folk psychology. William James said psychology now is what physics was before Galileo. But at least they were trying. But develop really nothing with respect to developing attention skills and developing metacognitive skills. They tried simply to use what they had and some people are good and some people are poor. Report an error in the passage at 16:09 Highlight the passage at 16:09

16:31 Then he died and then this fellow John Watson came along and just buried him under a ton of asphalt and said, we will now make no reference to subjective experience. We will not talk about emotions, desires. We will not talk about those anymore. We will not use the C word, consciousness. Don't talk about it. Report an error in the passage at 16:31 Highlight the passage at 16:31

16:49 And we will not use introspection at all. We will study scientifically and that means we will study things that are objective, quantifiable and physical. And we'll call this psychology in some strange, weird reason. Because it's not physical, it's not objective and it's not quantifiable. Nevertheless, stop talking about things that are subjective, qualitative and non-physical. Report an error in the passage at 16:49 Highlight the passage at 16:49

17:14 Just stop talking about it and stop even acknowledging the existence of introspection. And now we can really be scientific and that's study behavior. And we'll simply say that all ostensibly mental activity is actually subtle forms of behavior, including thoughts and dreams. They had wild imaginations. Report an error in the passage at 17:14 Highlight the passage at 17:14

17:31 And that dominated academic psychology for a good 60-70 years and to a large extent still dominates academic cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience. So the missing link, I think, once again, why they were not able to develop robust data, conclusions, discoveries across labs. But they kept on coming up with... Report an error in the passage at 17:31 Highlight the passage at 17:31

17:50 Kind of biased discoveries that were heavily influenced top-down by the heads of the labs. They were always biasing, leading the witness, so to speak. And so they weren't corroborating. It looked flaky from the outside. And after 35 years, they pretty much gave up. It lingered a little bit in phenomenology, where introspection has some role. Report an error in the passage at 17:50 Highlight the passage at 17:50

18:08 In gestalt psychology, in psychophysics, it has some role. Of course, in psychotherapy. People who go through psychotherapy, like Freudian psychotherapy, they must be utilizing introspection. But in terms of a rigorous discipline for exploring the nature of all types of mental events, it's still not happened. And there's an enormous ideological bias to prevent it from happening. Report an error in the passage at 18:08 Highlight the passage at 18:08

18:30 Come back to the missing link. If you can't sustain your attention, it's very, very hard. Sustain it in a way that doesn't wear you out, stress you out, in other words, relaxation. If you can't sustain it, but you keep on just pecking at it and then wandering off again, if you don't have stability, it'd be very hard. And if you don't have clarity, You forget it, then you're just making dull, vague, nebulous type of observations, which are kind of useless. So those three qualities, relaxation, so you don't get stressed out in the process, stability, so you make really continuous observations, and then clarity, so you have high resolution, precision, sophistication, and make discoveries, and then across the board, just as mathematicians make discoveries, so they can replicate, even though it's entirely an inside job. Report an error in the passage at 18:30 Highlight the passage at 18:30

19:14 I mean, when they're making discoveries, they're all internal. But then they talk amongst themselves and they come to consensus. And that's why we have great big math books of consensual knowledge about mathematics, even though there's nothing physical about it. And there's nothing third person in terms of just bringing in the hoi polloi and they'll corroborate it. No, it's only professional mathematicians. And so there I'm drawing a strong parallel as had before, that the first person science of the mind can be as replicable, as rigorous, as robust, as... Report an error in the passage at 19:14 Highlight the passage at 19:14

19:43 The science of mathematics. But you have to have the tool. And if you don't have, if you've not developed attention skills, it's going to be amateur level indefinitely. I'll give one more analogy. It's one of my favorite, all-time favorites. Report an error in the passage at 19:43 Highlight the passage at 19:43

20:00 The value of being able to develop sustained attention. And what may be discovered through sustained attention that you don't get with a lot of staccato little pecks or interludes of in and out, in and out. I believe it was 2003. I pretty much got the data correct, I'm pretty sure. About 2003, using the Hubble telescope. They did the Hubble Ultra Deep Space Probe. Report an error in the passage at 20:00 Highlight the passage at 20:00

20:22 I'm pretty sure that's what it was called. Somebody came up with the idea of taking this Hubble telescope, which is now about to retire, I think, pretty soon, and be replaced by a newer model. But somebody had the idea of taking this state-of-the-art, the best telescope up there orbiting the Earth, and focusing it. Report an error in the passage at 20:22 Highlight the passage at 20:22

20:42 On a very tiny region of space, I mean really, really tiny, one twelve millionth of the night sky, or one-tenth the diameter of the moon, a tiny, tiny, a little tiny region of the night sky. I believe it was from the Northern Hemisphere, I'm quite sure it was. But this particular region, having, you know, they've gotten pretty much, they've looked at the whole night sky, and astronomers at that point had found this one region was quite remarkably dark. Report an error in the passage at 20:42 Highlight the passage at 20:42

21:08 Like it seemed to be like the least popular neighborhood in the... In the heavens from the Northern Hemisphere, like really not much happening there. So why don't we do a one million second exposure of this little dark spot, the least populated area of the universe from the Northern Hemisphere. And let's just get a million second exposure and see what we see. Now million second exposure is basically the same as good old ordinary photography. Report an error in the passage at 21:08 Highlight the passage at 21:08

21:36 Keep the lens open at night and get exposure. of things that you won't get with a snapshot. It's the same thing. But here the Hubble telescope was going around the Earth, and so they did it in 400 revolutions. It's all computer-driven, of course, but they're compiling, they're adding, adding, adding 400, 400 lingering sustained views of that little tiny remote view of a remote part of the night sky. Report an error in the passage at 21:36 Highlight the passage at 21:36

22:05 400 revolutions divide 400 into a million seconds, that's how many seconds per each. Each time before it kind of slipped off and they couldn't observe that part anymore. So cumulatively, 400 editions, you come up with a million seconds. So that's a million second exposure. And so now what do you see in that little remote dark spot where there seems to be almost nothing? Now that you've had a sustained one million second exposure by the best telescope going, what do you see? Report an error in the passage at 22:05 Highlight the passage at 22:05

22:35 Well, they compiled all the data. They created an image. And the image showed that in that little tiny spot, that dark spot of the night sky, they saw that there were, you ready? 10,000 galaxies. 10,000 galaxies. And a galaxy has an order of magnitude between 100 billion and a trillion stars each. Report an error in the passage at 22:35 Highlight the passage at 22:35

22:58 And that's in the low-rent district. That is where, you know, not many people wanted to live. I mean, I'm joking a bit, but of course that was the area of least density that they could find. 100,000, 10,000, 10,000 galaxies. Overall, the current estimate, in contrast to 90 years ago, during Hubble's own era when he made the first discovery of the Andromeda galaxy, that was number two. Report an error in the passage at 22:58 Highlight the passage at 22:58

23:22 So we're number one galaxy, that's number two. He discovered, I think, five, which is quite remarkable. That was 90 years ago or so. Since then, it's moved from five to about 100 billion. That's how many galaxies they're estimating are there in the whole universe now, 100 billion. So this is a tiny little remote area, 10,000, merely 10,000. But each one, again, has up to a trillion stars in it. And now scientists are saying that it looks like they're probably on average about one planet per star, which means some will have more, some will have less, but on the average. Report an error in the passage at 23:22 Highlight the passage at 23:22

23:53 So that's a lot of population, if any of those planets are populated. But the point of that, it kind of blows my mind, it expands my mind to think along those lines. And somebody actually sent me a photo, the photo of the Hubble Ultra Deep Space Probe, and there it was. You can't see 10,000 galaxies, but you can see, whoa, that's not exactly low population there. There's a lot happening in that little speck of dark sky. Report an error in the passage at 23:53 Highlight the passage at 23:53

24:18 So this is, I love astronomy, just because it's so expanding, so marvelous to enlarge our understanding of the universe, of time and space. And that's what we get from Galileo to 400 years. That's the ingenuity of the human mind. We are so better prepared than merely survival and procreation when we can go from Galileo's 8 power telescope to the Hubble telescope and they have better now. That's just some evidence of just the power of the human mind way beyond. Report an error in the passage at 24:18 Highlight the passage at 24:18

24:47 I mean, so many more orders of magnitude beyond anything we possibly need for survival and procreation. And of course, not very useful. I mean, what are we going to do with that knowledge except for it expands the mind. It's a good thing. But then we can ask, well, but what if? What if modern science had begun not with Galileo? Because it didn't have to start with physics. God didn't say that. It did start with physics. The next major revolution was in biology. Report an error in the passage at 24:47 Highlight the passage at 24:47

25:12 The next revolution was again in physics. And we've had mind sciences, but with no revolution. What if, shall we just go down that kind of fantasy lane for a moment? What if the first great natural scientist, moving out of the dogma, the lack of empiricism, the reliance upon authority, of metaphysics and all of that, that just saturated medieval thinking, There was some empiricism, but nothing like Galileo. He really was a boat rocker. What if the first person to initiate the scientific revolution was not a physicist, but what if it were William James? Report an error in the passage at 25:12 Highlight the passage at 25:12

25:46 William James, living back there in the early 17th century. And William James saying, you know, we have all these philosophies and theologies and so forth about the mind, but I'm a radical empiricist. And what if he, like Galileo, Galileo having not invented but refined the telescope and used it scientifically for the very first time, what if William James, it's all a what if, it's just for fun, but what if a person like William James had appeared there and he had maybe, let's say, traveled off to India and said, wow, they've really got something going here. Report an error in the passage at 25:46 Highlight the passage at 25:46

26:16 Let's bring this good back. That Samādhi stuff, that's really cool and we don't have it. And he brought this foreign import in and said, there's some really cool stuff going on here. Try this out. Take you five years or so. But develop Samādhi. And then see what you can use with that telescope. And you can develop, anybody can develop it, but you need a conducive environment. And then they started off there. A mind scientist, Galileo, who took this radically empirical approach that Galileo did, but he had the telescope. Report an error in the passage at 26:16 Highlight the passage at 26:16

26:41 The telescope for the mind. And what if, what if, this William Jamesian Galileo sort, having really refined his attention and making sustained observations of the space of the mind, like for a million seconds, Report an error in the passage at 26:41 Highlight the passage at 26:41

26:58 Without distraction, what might be discovered? Is the space of the mind only as big as your head? Or is the space of the mind as large as space itself? Report an error in the passage at 26:58 Highlight the passage at 26:58

27:11 That was another story. That's a story we didn't get to hear. Because how it did evolve was physics to biology to psychology. Report an error in the passage at 27:11 Highlight the passage at 27:11

27:22 Two revolutions for physics, one for biology. Zip for mind science because they're still relying on the metaphysics of the 19th century and the physics of the 19th century. So I really think they've hit a wall. Until they overcome the dogma of materialism, which is rooted in 19th century physics, hitting a wall here. Report an error in the passage at 27:22 Highlight the passage at 27:22

27:41 But we don't have to, and scientists don't have to. The younger generation, I have now three, I guess I call them students of mine, they're training with me, three neuroscientists. They've all given up on neuroscience, they've all become full-time yogis. Report an error in the passage at 27:41 Highlight the passage at 27:41

27:54 They may get back to neuroscience, but they say, no, life is short. Meditate first, I'll get to neuroscience later. I'm going to take first, foremost and always the introspection because I'm interested in the mind and not just the matter inside the head. And so that generation, younger generation, we're not abandoning science. Report an error in the passage at 27:54 Highlight the passage at 27:54

28:10 I never want people to do that. But seeing the limitations of science and then the complementarity of other modes of observation, that's what this is about. So this is our Hubble telescope and that is developing lability. We got a little taste of it in 24 minutes. How about spending 5,000 hours doing that? Report an error in the passage at 28:10 Highlight the passage at 28:10

28:27 With professional training, conducive environment, some good lab partners to get some group energy going. What would it be like to have a million seconds? Or how about 5,000 hours of training? 10,000 hours of training? Really professional. And so your whole lifestyle, it's very monkish, much more than being a scientist. Report an error in the passage at 28:27 Highlight the passage at 28:27

28:44 And that's already rather monkish. But very monkish, whether or not with the robes, without robes. That is secondary. Because the whole point of the robes is so you can do this. You can really become a mind scientist and liberate your mind. What would that be like? What multiple dimensions, what phenomena arising in the mind might become evident if and only if you're able to sustain with long continuity, a high degree of high resolution, brilliant, clear, luminous attention to the space of the mind. Report an error in the passage at 28:44 Highlight the passage at 28:44

29:13 And not only just gazing, like star gazing, but doing so as Galileo did. He was not a star watcher, merely. He practiced not only shamatha with his telescope, just looking to see what he could see. In a steady and clear fashion, he was also a Vipassanā practitioner in the sense that when he saw those little dots around the big dot that turned out to be the moons of Jupiter, he had a question. Report an error in the passage at 29:13 Highlight the passage at 29:13

29:38 That's how he discovered the moons of Jupiter, not by saying, oh, little dots, big dots, cool, more big dots, little dots, very cool, little dots, big dots, lots of big dots, little dots. And then, boy, that was fun. That would have been shamatha astronomy. Saw a lot of dots. But the Vipassanā is posing with a question. Posing with a question. Report an error in the passage at 29:38 Highlight the passage at 29:38

29:57 When he observed the phases of Venus, he didn't say, oh, isn't that interesting? The circle is no longer a circle. It's got a curvature on it. No, he did it with questions and discovered the phases of Venus, and that was the first empirical evidence that completely refuted the Ptolemaic view that everything goes around the Earth. Report an error in the passage at 29:57 Highlight the passage at 29:57

30:16 It can't happen if Venus has phases. So we'll come back. Now we'll just stay in this Vipassanā practice. But we're establishing a new base camp here, a new launching pad, a new orbiting telescope, a position, a perspective of stillness and clarity from which we can then observe that the easiest thing to observe is thoughts. Report an error in the passage at 30:16 Highlight the passage at 30:16

30:39 And you can generate them. If you have a hard time because you feel you're carried away by every thought, I'll give it away right now because our time is short. But we may do this in the next session. Report an error in the passage at 30:39 Highlight the passage at 30:39

30:49 If you find, but I just can't do it, every time a thought comes up, I learn about it only after the fact, after it's already carried me away. And it's kind of frustrating because I like to observe it when it's first occurring, but every single time I'm aware of it only after, oh, I was wandering again and again and again. Report an error in the passage at 30:49 Highlight the passage at 30:49

31:07 Can we break that routine, that rut of being able to observe thoughts only after they've carried us away? The answer is definitely yes. No question. I'll tell you how right now. I won't hold you in suspense. But we can all do this. Who doesn't know Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow? That's the secret mantra. But we all know that. Report an error in the passage at 31:07 Highlight the passage at 31:07

31:30 But it can be your telephone number. It really doesn't matter. But there's one we all know. And it's not interesting. So when you say Mary had a little lamb, it doesn't say, oh wow, where's Mary? And where's her lamb? And it doesn't do that. It's just, I've heard that a hundred times. So it doesn't arouse interest in the referent of the words. Report an error in the passage at 31:30 Highlight the passage at 31:30

31:52 Not normally, not for us now. Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow. We can stop right there. You can syllable by syllable generate that little nursery rhyme. Report an error in the passage at 31:52 Highlight the passage at 31:52

32:03 Mary had a little lamb. Continue. Syllable by syllable. Toss it up, so to speak, in the space of your mind. You know when it's coming. Here comes Mary. You know it's coming. Had a little lamb. Syllable by syllable, you very premeditatively, ponderously, slowly spit it out. That is, mentally generate. Mary had a little lamb. Slowly. And syllable by syllable, you are observing the thoughts. Just as, imagine a little girl called Mary. Report an error in the passage at 32:03 Highlight the passage at 32:03

32:44 Imagine her little bonnet and her staff. For some people, something very clear will come to mind. And for everybody, something comes to mind. There's little Mary. Blue bonnet. There's her staff. She has something called a lamb, a little white one. You see the lamb? It may go by if you like. She had one. And look how white its fleece is. Report an error in the passage at 32:44 Highlight the passage at 32:44

33:05 Gosh, white just like snow. So those are images coming up. And you can observe them too. And some people, again, more gifted. Some people, less lift gifted. But most people have something comes to mind. So it can be discursive, as in thoughts. Mary had a little lamb. It can be images. Little girl, staff, lamb. Report an error in the passage at 33:05 Highlight the passage at 33:05

33:24 And that's just for starters. But you can deliberately generate them in this premeditated fashion. And there's just no reason why you can't observe them. And when you do that repeatedly, if you're having a bit of a hard time being able to observe thoughts while they're occurring, then take the reins in your own hand and generate them. Report an error in the passage at 33:24 Highlight the passage at 33:24

33:42 Your telephone number, your address, the size of your shoes, whatever you like. It really doesn't make any difference. Just don't have something that's interesting, so you'll be zipping off to the referent of the thought. Just observe the thoughts as thoughts. Report an error in the passage at 33:42 Highlight the passage at 33:42

33:57 So, all of this really, to sum up, this is all directly related to the observation of mental feelings, pleasure, pain and indifference. Report an error in the passage at 33:57 Highlight the passage at 33:57

34:09 All of this really has a very, very powerful parallel with Report an error in the passage at 34:09 Highlight the passage at 34:09

34:17 cultivating the ability of lucid dreaming. When we're in a non-lucid dream, we're simply identifying with the person that we are in the dream, we're thinking that's who I am, having no idea at all that we'll have such a short lifespan. Because if you think this is who I am, we have no idea the dream is going to be over in maybe five minutes, three minutes, whatever it is, you can have a pretty short lifespan in that dream if that's who you think you are. Report an error in the passage at 34:17 Highlight the passage at 34:17

34:42 So we're not observing ourselves, we're thinking this is who I am. And then we're seeing people and so forth appear in the dream. We're not seeing them as dream images. We're viewing them as, but that's really TL and that's really Angelina and so forth. We're seeing them as being what they are not, as people, as trees, as mountains, as traffic, as somebody robbing a bank. Report an error in the passage at 34:42 Highlight the passage at 34:42

35:09 We're seeing it for what it is not, because we're taking the appearances at face value and we're focusing on them. We're focusing on something that doesn't exist at all, and that is actual people there doing something, and they're not there at all. So it's non-lucidity. We fundamentally are ignorant of the nature of what we're experiencing. Report an error in the passage at 35:09 Highlight the passage at 35:09

35:28 But it's not simply ignorance, which is quite innocent. I simply don't know. But in the field, in that fertile broth of ignorance, then grows the tendrils of delusion. And delusion is actively misconstruing, misapprehending, getting it wrong. So I'll make two points there. I think all of this is very important. One by a very eminent American historian. Report an error in the passage at 35:28 Highlight the passage at 35:28

35:55 But he wrote a history of humanities discoveries for the last 5,000 years. I could elaborate a lot there, but I'm going to cut the story short. Very, very senior, I think he's Smithsonian Institute, big shot. Very fine, very erudite, renowned historian. And he wrote a whole book on humanities discoveries, and that includes China, India, the Mayans, and then primarily Eurocentric civilization over the last few centuries and all the discoveries we've made. Report an error in the passage at 35:55 Highlight the passage at 35:55

36:21 Overwhelmingly emphasis on that. He was, after all, Eurocentric. But he made a very telling comment at the beginning, in the preface. Having spent who knows how many years researching this and trying to sift through what's most important of all the discoveries we've made for 5,000 years in every field, he made this observation. Report an error in the passage at 36:21 Highlight the passage at 36:21

36:39 Historically speaking, looking back on the last 5,000 years of recorded history, he said the greatest impediment to discovery is not ignorance. It's rather the illusion of knowledge. Report an error in the passage at 36:39 Highlight the passage at 36:39

36:53 It's thinking you already know something that you don't. Or Mark Twain put it more succinctly. He said, it ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you do know, but which just ain't so. Report an error in the passage at 36:53 Highlight the passage at 36:53

37:10 Wonderful vernacular, but the point there is very strong. And it's been true all throughout human history and is ever so important and true now in science itself. And of course, they're not the only ones. We're all human beings. But it's refusing to look into something. Refusing to look with a question mark. Report an error in the passage at 37:10 Highlight the passage at 37:10

37:30 Because you already have an exclamation point. Already a period, a full stop. Don't need to look there anymore. The mind is what the brain does. Any more questions? Okay, let's move on now. We already nailed that one. And now let's carry on. The mind is what the brain does. We already know that, of course. No, you don't. You like to think you do. That's an illusion of knowledge. Report an error in the passage at 37:30 Highlight the passage at 37:30

37:48 But then, if you really think that's knowledge, then you don't question it. You don't question any alternative hypothesis. Because you think you already know. And you would simply silence anybody who is so stupid it does not agree with you. Well, that's happened in many fields of science and philosophy and religion. Report an error in the passage at 37:48 Highlight the passage at 37:48

38:03 Nobody's got a monopoly here. But here it is as we come back to first person. There really is, I think, a tremendous potential here for developing a radically empirical approach to the study of the mind, fulfilling William James' wish, which perished when he perished in 1910, picking up that legacy. Report an error in the passage at 38:03 Highlight the passage at 38:03

38:25 But then drawing in other wisdom traditions. The Buddhist, for example, has a lot to offer. The Hindu, the Christian, contemplative. If we dust it off a bit, we'd see a lot there that was buried with the rise of modern science. And see, there's just a tremendous wealth of discovery waiting us closer than hands reach. So while the astronomers are still thinking about traveling to Mars and possibly distant galaxies and so forth, the greatest unexplored domain of reality as a whole is closer than your own nose. Report an error in the passage at 38:25 Highlight the passage at 38:25

38:55 You know, waiting, just awaiting people to apply the suitable methodology, which William James already pointed to, which is known by multiple other cultures. But we have obscured because of our illusions of knowledge that it's not possible. I mean, it keeps on being told it's not possible, not possible by people who are simply metacognitively retarded. Report an error in the passage at 38:55 Highlight the passage at 38:55

39:17 What else do we say? I don't want to be harsh, but I don't know what else to call it. There's a whole book called The Disappearance of Introspection. By a very senior philosopher at Trinity University. Read it a long time ago. And he gave a 300-page book about how introspection is not possible. Report an error in the passage at 39:17 Highlight the passage at 39:17

39:36 I kind of read it like being, you know, it's weird. Like, oh, and you're intelligent too, but you're demented. It's a very weird combination. So, I do think there's great potential here, but it's not only academic and not only external things, you know, we could change science and so forth, but most important is we're changing right here. Report an error in the passage at 39:36 Highlight the passage at 39:36

39:56 To develop the attention skills so that we can observe emotions arising. And then it raises a host of fascinating questions and Peter has already alluded to one of them. And that is we're observing the mind, even observing the breath, we see how easy it is with a lot of interest and careful monitoring, sustained attention. Report an error in the passage at 39:56 Highlight the passage at 39:56

40:14 How easy it is, whether we like it or not, to have the sheer act of observing the breath already modify the breath. How difficult it is to remove the tentacles of control, of preference, of regulation. And really let it flow. But it's a worthwhile skill, as I've suggested previously. But now we come to even something more intimate. Report an error in the passage at 40:14 Highlight the passage at 40:14

40:36 The breath is something you can observe from outside. If you're breathing, I can measure that. Any scientist can measure that, right? But what scientist can measure your thoughts? Report an error in the passage at 40:36 Highlight the passage at 40:36

40:45 Neurochoralists, of course, not the same thing. What scientist can observe your emotions? Not even pain. I mean, I know a lot of very fine scientists, and I was a little bit surprised when I heard this. If you come to a doctor, a medical doctor, Report an error in the passage at 40:45 Highlight the passage at 40:45

40:58 Physiologists, neuroscientists say, Doctor, I've got this really severe pain in my knee. What can you do for me? It's really quite chronic. And the doctor then runs a whole battery of tests, and this does happen. He said, I'm sorry, but I just don't see anything wrong with your knee. The cartilage, everything is fine. I just don't see it. Well, I'll go to a neurophysiologist. Report an error in the passage at 40:58 Highlight the passage at 40:58

41:17 Well, I've seen your brain, but I don't see anything wrong. I mean, brain's functioning. You've got a brain. It's working. Yeah, I know, but I've got this pain in my knee. Report an error in the passage at 41:17 Highlight the passage at 41:17

41:27 And they say, well, maybe it's psychological. I still got a pain in my knee. Report an error in the passage at 41:27 Highlight the passage at 41:27

41:38 Well, maybe you do, but we don't know. We don't know whether you're lying. We don't know whether you're delusional. In fact, you really don't have a pain in your knee. You just imagine it. Or whether you do have a pain in your knee and we can't figure it out. But a simple thing like that, pain is about as crude, raw, coarse as it gets in terms of subjective experience. There's no way of scientifically measuring whether there's pain in your knee or not. Report an error in the passage at 41:38 Highlight the passage at 41:38

41:58 Let alone if you're an amputee and you say, oh, my right arm really itches. And you don't have a right arm. Well, of course, phantom limbs and the itching and so forth can drive you crazy because you want to scratch it and you're pawing it in thin air. But you tell a person with an itch and a phantom limb that, no, you don't because you don't have a limb. They say, I know that's stupid, but I still itch. And you can't disprove it. Report an error in the passage at 41:58 Highlight the passage at 41:58

42:22 I mean, they do itch. And you might be able to find the neural correlate of it, but maybe not. But they still itch. So there it is. The point here is that even something so coarse as physical and something as coarse as pain, even that's invisible. Let alone all the subtler things of dreams, of motivations, of thoughts, of surmises, intuitions and so forth and so on. Report an error in the passage at 42:22 Highlight the passage at 42:22

42:44 It's all 100 % invisible to all modes of objective detection. Now this is a platform, as I said. I'm going to take a break pretty soon. This is a platform, this settling the mind, its natural state. I'll emphasize again, because our time is very short for this, is that it's a platform for opening the door of perception, this sixth mode of perception. Report an error in the passage at 42:44 Highlight the passage at 42:44

43:06 It's not a, what is it called, a third eye, instead of something mystical. It's not a sixth sense, like, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee, you know, it's nothing spooky. Report an error in the passage at 43:06 Highlight the passage at 43:06

43:18 But the weird thing about it is, unless the textbooks are different now than they were 20 years ago when I studied cognitive psychology, I think I mentioned a 500-page book on cognitive psychology and no reference whatsoever to mental perception. The mind does two things. A couple of things. It has reason. It has memory. And then we perceive with the five physical senses. Augmented with technology when possible. But we think. Report an error in the passage at 43:18 Highlight the passage at 43:18

43:41 We have emotions. We remember. And then we perceive. And that's with the five physical senses. But no reference. In 500 pages, no reference to the fact that we have six modes of perception. I found that incredibly bizarre. Something so obvious. Were all the authors of all these books metacognitively impaired? I don't know, but I do find it really bizarre. It's something so obvious. Report an error in the passage at 43:41 Highlight the passage at 43:41

44:05 I won't ask you, I don't want to embarrass anybody, but when we did that little tour, the visual, the five fields, and then I asked you, can you directly perceive anything else, or are you drawing a complete blank? It's that you have no other experience of anything. You're not picking it by the way of the five physical senses. If you didn't, let's talk afterwards. Report an error in the passage at 44:05 Highlight the passage at 44:05

44:27 But I suspect you did. Your emotions, your thoughts, your memories, your feelings. And you're not getting them by inference. And you're not observing your behavior. Or I must, you know, like the old joke about behaviorism. Man and woman make love. They're both behaviorists. Man is back after making love, lights a cigarette and said, it was good for you. Report an error in the passage at 44:27 Highlight the passage at 44:27

44:49 How was it for me? Report an error in the passage at 44:49 Highlight the passage at 44:49

45:01 It's a good joke for which no one was laughing for like 70 years. That's the real joke. So there it is. We're opening the portals of a whole universe here. It's quite an extraordinary universe, and it doesn't cost anything. Report an error in the passage at 45:01 Highlight the passage at 45:01

45:17 The Hubble telescope is very expensive. To run it is very expensive. The new one, that's even more expensive. It's wonderful. I'm glad they have that technology. But this one's for free. And it's the space, the multiple dimensions of your own mind, and observing emotions and not simply feeling them, observing thoughts and not just thinking them, observing memories and not just having memories, and so forth. Report an error in the passage at 45:17 Highlight the passage at 45:17

45:38 And then, as the Buddha suggested, and this is where we'll take the break, let's focus now, we just laid the platform, just laid a little bit of a surface for the next session, which we'll have when we come back. But a platform of opening the doors of perception, of mental perception, and taking a close look. And in tandem with this, hopefully we're developing our attention skills, so we go beyond the level of folk psychology, folk introspection, to professional introspection. Report an error in the passage at 45:38 Highlight the passage at 45:38

46:04 And that's what Tibetan yogis, Indian yogis have been doing for millennia. And so I think it's really wildly high time that we stop being so ethnocentric and simply assume that any mode of inquiry that's not Eurocentric is worth nothing. And that's working hypothesis. I mean, I work with a lot of scientists and that is the working hypothesis. We'll study Western yogis, we'll interview them and so forth. Report an error in the passage at 46:04 Highlight the passage at 46:04

46:25 But what I've never heard, and I've been involved in quite a number of the studies by now, a simple question. What did you discover? I haven't heard that mass at one yet. Report an error in the passage at 46:25 Highlight the passage at 46:25

46:38 Well, zinga. He's one of the eminent ones. I've just met him briefly. I don't really know him. But he's one of the most outstanding neuroscientists in all of the continent. He's in Germany. He's retired now. But his daughter is also outstanding. She's Tanya Singer. I do know her. She now has her own lab, her own Max Planck Institute in Leipzig. But Wolfsinger, Matthew Ricard was with him. Report an error in the passage at 46:38 Highlight the passage at 46:38

46:59 Matthew Ricard is a good friend of mine. And the two of them went up to Tushik Rinpoche, Tushik Rinpoche's monastery. He's passed away also. Way up in the Himalayas on Mount Everest. Very high. There were a lot of yogis there, a lot of monks, and they trekked up into the Himalayas, very romantic, the neuroscientist, this wonderful monk, and when they arrived there, I think Mathieu had already primed them, I'm bringing a top-notch neuroscientist, and by the way, they're all materialists, and so I think they knew, you know, what was coming, got one of those materials coming for a visit, let's show them a thing or two. Report an error in the passage at 46:59 Highlight the passage at 46:59

47:30 And so what Mathieu told me was these monks kind of lined up. And they just, one after another, told them either their own experiences or experiences they knew of other people that were off the charts, paranormal, psychic experiences. Just one after another. Each one of them totally violated the fundamental assumptions of materialism. I think they must have gotten a real kick out of it. And Mathieu was there as the interpreter. Report an error in the passage at 47:30 Highlight the passage at 47:30

47:52 Just one after another. You know, I had this clairvoyant experience, this monk I saw him levitate, this one, I don't know what they're saying, but a lot of stuff is like, kind of like, you know, for I don't know how long it went on, an hour or two. But he kind of basically just sat there and took it and took it and took it. And finally, when it was all over, he turned to Mathieu and he said, either they're totally wrong or we're totally wrong. Report an error in the passage at 47:52 Highlight the passage at 47:52

48:14 Which I thought was really wonderful. That he did consider maybe we're actually totally wrong. Not in the sense that all neuroscientific studies and discoveries are rubbish. Of course that's not true. The great majority of it is really good science. But the underlying assumptions, that's what he's referring to. Either their underlying assumptions and observations are completely cuckoo. Report an error in the passage at 48:14 Highlight the passage at 48:14

48:34 Or, our science is still good but our underlying assumptions are completely false. And he's willing to entertain, maybe that's the case. And then he retired. I don't think there's any causal relationship there. So, this is opening up an avenue of inquiry. And now we'll end on this note. I've said that three times now. Now you know what to predict. We'll end on this note. And then when the Buddha said, closely apply mindfulness to feelings. Report an error in the passage at 48:34 Highlight the passage at 48:34

49:03 He's saying not only observing their manifestation, how they are, observing feelings as feelings, big topic, feelings as feelings, not feelings as me or feelings as my feeling, feelings as feelings, just observing for what they are, but then he brought this factor out. It is that as you're closely attending to, he even said contemplating, as you're contemplating feelings, then observe, examine, carefully investigate the factors of origination. Report an error in the passage at 49:03 Highlight the passage at 49:03

49:31 What are the causing conditions that A trigger that catalyzes the emergence of specific feelings. I feel bad about this person. I feel very delighted with this person. I feel quite neutral about that one. I really don't like this situation, but I love that situation. Alright, fine. But now, look in the whole network of causes and conditions that are triggering, leading to, or are factors of origination for the emergence of feelings. Report an error in the passage at 49:31 Highlight the passage at 49:31

49:58 And we're keeping to the primitive ones. Like, don't like and neutral. Right? Examine them closely. And then examine closely, as they are present, are they permanent or impermanent? Are they abiding or are they staccato? Just arising and passing like staccato, like strobe light, like that. Or are they static, just coming in like parking a truck in your garage? It just sits there. How are they? And then he said examine the factors of disillusion. Report an error in the passage at 49:58 Highlight the passage at 49:58

50:26 Feelings don't last. They don't last. They fade out even if you're really, really depressed. You can't be depressed 24 hours a day. You have to fall asleep sometime or have a nice cup of cocoa. That's not depressing, so you get a little bit of respite. Cocoa is good. Something is going to fade out. There's no emotion or feeling. It just stays all the time homogenously. And so examine the factors of disillusion. What are the factors that give rise to the fading away, the disappearance of feelings? Report an error in the passage at 50:26 Highlight the passage at 50:26

50:57 Examine them carefully. If that's not a science of mind, I don't know what is. It's so crystal clear, crisp. But in order to do that, you need a platform from which you can actually observe the emotions or feelings and not be merely swept away by them or simply identify with them in this process of cognitive fusion. Report an error in the passage at 50:57 Highlight the passage at 50:57

51:15 So, a lot of common ground here. And what I see is a tremendous enrichment of the modern experimental psychology, both cognitive, clinical, affective, the multiple branches, with the enrichment of the first person rigorous, first person observation, which... It's pretty much missing. But then, of course, there's a symmetry here. And there are things about behavior that it's going to be hard, or if not impossible, to acquire simply by introspection. Report an error in the passage at 51:15 Highlight the passage at 51:15

51:44 Paul Leckman's work, for example, has to do with feelings and emotions. Feelings, so pleasure, pain, indifference, pleasure and pain, they are emotions. And the kind of work he's done was studying something like 35 muscle groups in the face. And with the micro-expressions and the subtle expressions, it's really a science, and it was very, very time-consuming, very, very challenging science, to make such a precise observation of facial expression, down to, I mean, really minute tightening of muscles around the eyes, the mouth and so forth, and to find very clear, strong correlations between specific expressions and seven classic universal emotions. Report an error in the passage at 51:44 Highlight the passage at 51:44

52:27 And finally they map one-on-one. And it doesn't matter who you are. Japanese, from Papua New Guinea, Amazon, Berlin, Sydney. He found seven. Seven emotions for which the facial expressions are universal. Quite interesting. That was one of his great discoveries. Nobody had ever come up with that before. And it was refuted by people like Margaret Mead and his predecessors. No, no, it's cultural perspective. It's learned. It's learned by looking at your parents' expressions and so forth and so on. Report an error in the passage at 52:27 Highlight the passage at 52:27

52:55 It was very widely believed until he came along. And he did, in fact, go off to Papua New Guinea to a tribe there who had almost no contact with Eurocentric people. And he studied them and saw how they expressed these same seven emotions. And lo and behold, it was the same as... New York stockbrokers, etc. And so that's the kind of thing you probably won't get from introspection or meditation. You have to go out and do the field research, you have to take a lot of interest in other people's facial expressions, look for patterns, uniformities, regularities. Report an error in the passage at 52:55 Highlight the passage at 52:55

53:27 But then this is useful. It's very, very useful. As a basis, and Paul is a very good man, he's an ethical man, and they've formed really kind of a brotherly relationship with the Dalai Lama. But he's really concerned about how the kind of research he's done could be of benefit. Very seriously concerned with that. Very altruistic. And he said this by knowing how to read other people's facial expressions. Report an error in the passage at 53:27 Highlight the passage at 53:27

53:51 In a way we're taking that which is not given and that we may be looking into their minds by way of the behavioral correlates, looking into their minds and knowing emotions that they may not want us to know about. So in a way it can be a bit invasive. But then you can ask what's the motivation. Report an error in the passage at 53:51 Highlight the passage at 53:51

54:08 And if your motivation is not to exploit them, manipulate them, use them as an it, but if your motivation is one of compassion, and you can see what they're feeling, perhaps you even have it indirectly, by inference, you might have even insight into their emotions that they're unaware of. It could happen. Because we're not always aware of our own emotions. Sometimes our conceptual overlays, our suppositions, our beliefs, drown out the perceptions of our own emotions. Report an error in the passage at 54:08 Highlight the passage at 54:08

54:33 We think we're feeling something we're not. That can happen, of course. Whereas if you can read clearly, By inference, another person's emotions by way of their facial expression, you may be able to help them. As a therapist, for example, you might be able to help them benevolently. As a meditation instructor, you may be able to help them. And then, of course, Buddhism, in terms of all the literature available, we have almost no knowledge about the brain at all. Report an error in the passage at 54:33 Highlight the passage at 54:33

55:00 Might the brain be implicated in meditation? Might be involved somehow? I think it must be. But you won't get that information from the meditators. And so might brain science, sooner or later, might that help meditators learn more about this three-dimensionality of understanding the mind by way of introspection, behavior and brain, bring it all together so we're all learning from each other. Report an error in the passage at 55:00 Highlight the passage at 55:00

55:20 That was William James' vision. Right there, that's it. Let's all learn from each other. No hierarchy, although first, foremost and always, like all the other branches, observation should be really primary, but the other very important as well. And they'll all augment and complement each other. That was his vision that was buried 103 years ago. Maybe it's time to call it forth from the grave. William James, come forth, come forth. Report an error in the passage at 55:20 Highlight the passage at 55:20

55:48 And moreover, we have a tool that he didn't have. He didn't have the attention skills, the way to train them. And that's what we have now. So hallelujah, we're living in the 21st century. Let's take full advantage of it and take a break. Come back at 3.50 and I'll be here. Report an error in the passage at 55:48 Highlight the passage at 55:48