https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=jkWNBdBDyoE
Welcome back to Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. So last time we continued looking through the myth of Siddhartha’s awakening and we talked about him leaving the palace, the having mode, his attempt to rediscover, recover the being mode and the difficulty he faced in pursuing self-denial as passionately as he had pursued self-indulgence and why this ultimately failed because it’s still working within the same operation of trying to have a self and then we looked at Siddhartha’s commitment to the middle path, an attempt to overcome that through the cultivation of mindfulness and then we began our exploration of mindfulness. We first looked at what it meant, sati, it’s this deep remembering, this recovering of the being mode that leads to a fundamental transformation and alleviates the existential anxiety and distress that Siddhartha was experiencing and potentially And then we started to take a look at that, the practice of mindfulness and its attempt to address at least an individual or personal experience of a meaning crisis and we were doing that because we were trying to investigate more broadly the mindfulness revolution and how that is response to the meaning crisis within the West. We began by noting that the study of mindfulness is misleading in some ways, the scientific study, because it begins with a feature list and as we’ve noted multiple times, feature lists leave out the IDOS, the structural functional organization. In order to do that we brought out four sort of central characteristics in the feature list, being present, not judging, insightfulness and reduced reactivity or an increased equanimity and then we noted that what we need to do is to make distinctions between the types of features, between those that are states that we can engage in, actions we can perform and traits we can cultivate. Once we did that we opened up the possibility of asking causal questions, how can the practice of being present, for example, produce the trait of insightfulness and then we also could ask constitutive questions, what’s the relationship, the part-whole relationship, for example, between being present and not judging. That being said, we then also noted that we have to replace the language of training with the language of explaining, they operate according to different principles and for different goals and we began that by starting to ask what does it mean to be present and then we talked about concentration, we talked about different senses of that and the kind of soft vigilance that’s actually conducive of insight discussed by Alan Langer and others. This kind of involvement that is very much about conforming to be inter-essay, becoming deeply interested, connected to the structural functional organization of something. We noted that that took us into discussion of paying attention and all the while remembering this idea that we got from Siddhartha Tottama’s story about tuning, getting the right tuning, optimization and we started to talk about attention and made the argument that attention is not very well served by the spotlight metaphor, while that metaphor does give us the idea of attention altering salience, the metaphor misses a lot of what attention is doing. We began to investigate what’s missing by making use of Christopher Moll’s idea that attention is not a direct action performed by walking but it’s something you do by modifying something else, by optimizing something else. That’s why you can successfully pay attention by doing many disparate or different kinds of things. You can pay attention by optimizing your seeing into looking, by optimizing your hearing into listening, by optimizing your seeing and listening into a coordinated tracking of what somebody is saying like you’re doing right now. All of those are different ways in which we’re paying attention. So what we needed was an understanding of attention that could capture the way it’s an optimization strategy which lines up with this tuning idea and how such optimization might be linked to a response to existential modal confusion and the alleviation of the suffering found therein. So I want to continue that discussion about attention and start to point towards what might be going on. If you remember, Moll talks about this idea of cognitive unison, getting a bunch of processes to share a goal, to be coordinated together in some fashion. Now he leaves it abstract like that and I think we should try and investigate a little bit more further, more concretely, what that might mean. And there’s a lot, attention is one of the hottest areas in cognitive science right now. There’s a lot of good work done by Frank Wu, by Sebastian Watzel, Christopher Moll, many people are talking about this and I’m not pretending to canvas all of that rich and very fertile and very, like it’s very creative, it’s advancing. I’m not trying to do that, I’m trying to pick up on some key themes here because what we want to understand is how can mindfulness train attention so as to cause more insight, to make one more dispositionally capable of insight. Because after all, and we’ve talked about this before, when we’re talking about wisdom, we’re not talking about an individual insight, we’re talking about a systematic set of insights that are mutually related to a fundamental transformation of the person’s, as we said last time, existential mode. So let’s talk a little bit more again about what’s missing from the model of attention. So this cognitive unison, I think we can make use of another important cognitive scientist, philosopher scientist who did work on attention and that’s Michael Polanyi. And he pointed out that attention has an important structure and we’ve been trying to follow the platonic idea of turning the feature list into a feature schema, picking up on structures. And the way in order to bring out what Polanyi is talking about, I’m going to run through an experiment with you, an experiment you can sort of follow along with me. So let me describe it to you first. I need you to get some object like a pencil or a pen and we will call that your probe. Nothing untoward is meant by that, that’s just what it’s called in psychology. It doesn’t involve any alien doing graphic things to your body or anything like that. So what we’re going to do is, let me describe it to you first. Okay, what I’m going to ask you to do is I’m going to ask you to find some object that you could put on a desk in front of you or hold in your hand and then you’re going to do the following. Do not start yet because I want to describe it to you. I’m going to ask you to tap on the object as if you were blind and you’re trying to figure out what the object is. Its shape, its structure, its weight, its density. Oh, that’s a cup, right? That makes sense. Now it’s important while you’re doing this, you should close your eyes I’m using touch because touch is slower than sight and so you can become more aware of what’s happening. Now it’s important while you do this that you continue tapping. So I’m going to ask you in a moment to close your eyes, start the tapping and then while you’re doing it continue the tapping as you are following my instructions and this will give you a sense of what you’re doing. Okay, so what I want you to do is close your eyes, you start tapping on your object, right? Start tapping until you start to form an image of the object in your mind. Okay, so your eyes are closed, you’re starting to get an image of what that object is in your mind. Okay, so right now you’re aware, like you’re focally aware. What you’re focusing your awareness on is the object. I want you to keep tapping but I want you to shift your awareness into your probe. Feel how your pencil or your pen is moving around shifting. Okay, keep tapping and then I want you to shift your awareness into your fingers and feel how your fingers are moving around shifting around. Okay, some of you may be able to pick up on the individual feelings that are occurring in your fingers. Now go back, feel your fingers and your thumb how they’re moving. Now feel how the probe is moving and now allow the tapping to reveal the object to you once again. So I’ve done this multiple, multiple times with people and what’s interesting is the following thing. Most people find this very readily easy to do and a couple things. When you’re initially tapping, for example, I was aware of my cup but then my awareness moves into my marker and then my awareness moves into my finger and when my awareness is in my finger I’m not aware of the cup at all. Then I was able to reverse it. I go from being aware of my fingers to being aware of the probe to being aware of the cup. You’re saying what’s all this about what’s going on? Well there’s an important structure. Let’s take a look at it step by step. So here’s the cup or whatever your object was, right, and I’m tapping on it with my probe. Okay, now here’s the interesting thing. It’s not like I was completely unaware of my probe because if I was completely unaware of it I couldn’t manipulate it but I wasn’t actually aware of it. I was aware through it. I was aware through my probe of the cup. So I’m aware through this and I’m aware of this. So it’s like my probe is transparent to me and I’ll get let me give you an analogy right now where this is opaque, right? Here’s the analogy. I’m thinking about and we talked about this before but let’s do it again and it’s like my glasses are like my framing, right? My glasses are transparent to me in the sense that I’m looking through them, beyond them, by means of them. They’re transparent to me but what I can do is I can redirect my awareness so that I’m now looking at my glasses rather than through them. So my glasses have now become opaque to me. So I can do a transparency to opacity shift. Now what does that ability to shift indicate? Well, this is part of Polanyi’s idea. Here’s my probe. I’m aware through my probe. He has what I call a subsidiary or an implicit awareness because I’m aware through it. I’m not aware of it. I’m aware through it, right, of my focal object, for example, my cup. And this I have a focal awareness or an explicit awareness. Now his point, which is really quite good, right, is that attention is this kind of structuring phenomena. What it is, it’s always attention as he says from to. It’s an attention through subsidiary awareness into focal awareness. When I’m paying attention, I’m doing this. But here’s the interesting thing. I was then able to step back and make this focal, right, and now it’s my fingers that I’m aware through my fingers of my probe. And then I can even step back and be aware of my feelings, what some people would call sensations. So I can keep stepping back and stepping back. So I’m looking at the cup through my probe. Now I’m looking through my fingers at the probe. And now I’m looking through my feelings at my fingers. And of course, the whole time I was actually looking at the cup, I was doing all of that. I was looking through my feelings, through my fingers, through my probe, into the cup. You see the spotlight metaphor is missing all of that layered, recursive, dynamic structuring that’s going on. And notice you can move in both directions. You can do a transparency opacity shift in which I step back more and more into my mind. Or I can go the opposite way. I can do an opacity to transparency shift. That’s when you went the opposite way. That’s when you go from looking at your fingers to looking through your fingers at your probe and going from looking at your probe to looking through your probe to the cup. And your attention is doing that all the time, flowing in and out, doing a transparency and opacity shifting. Now that’s very important because that’s an important, what you’re seeing is how many different processes are being coordinated, integrated together to optimize and prioritize, to use an important term from Watson, this particular object or this particular scene or situation. So that’s one way in which attention is operating. Now for reasons I’m not quite sure of, I think it has to do something with we’re using a visual metaphor and the way vision is oriented in our bodies. We tend to use an in-out metaphor for this. Like that’s why I’m using stepping back and looking at as opposed to like looking through. Notice also something that’s really important for where we’re going to need this when we talk about gnosis and participatory knowing. Notice when I was, if you’ll allow me, when I was knowing the cup through the probe, I’m indwelling the probe. It’s not like I’m participating in how the probe is being with respect to the cup. I’m sort of indwelling it. I’m not knowing the probe, I’m knowing through the probe. I’m inter-essay. I’m so deeply interested that I’m actually integrated with it and through it into the cup. The way my vision is integrated with these glass lenses so that I’m actually seeing through them and by means of them. Now the point about this and we’ve talked about this before of course is this also works not with just technology but with psychotechnologies. We talked about this with second-order thinking. You can so integrate literacy for example into your cognition that you don’t look at literacy very much, you automatically look through it. We’ll come back to that. Alright, so this is right, as I said, this seems to be, people talk about this metaphorically as moving in and out with their awareness. So one of those ways attentions work is it moves in and out. You can right look through a lot of processing deeply out into the world or you can step back and look at a lot of processing and withdraw towards the center of your mind. There’s another important axis upon which your attention is working and I can bring it out by a famous example. So you give this to people and you ask them to read it and they say, what does it say? And they’ll say the cat and they’re like, oh yeah. And then you point out to them that they’re reading this as an H and they’re reading this as an A and these are exactly the same thing. Why are you reading one as an H and the other as an A? And so what they’ll typically say to you is, well, because it fits in with this word as an H and it fits in with this word as an A. So let’s use language we’ve already developed. The letters are the features and the word is the gestalt, the overall structure. Now notice here, it’s almost a pseudo Zen problem. In order to read the words, I must read each individual letter, but in order to disambiguate each letter, I must have read the whole word. Therefore, reading is impossible. Now, of course, reading isn’t impossible, which means something else has to change. What has to change is your model of attention. The searchlight metaphor, the spotlight metaphor can’t address that problem. Here’s what your attention is actually doing. It’s simultaneously going up from the features to the gestalt, the eidos, the structural functional whole, and it’s going down from the gestalt, the words, to the individual letters, the features. It’s simultaneously doing that. Your attention is also doing this. So not only is your attention flowing in and out, right, doing transparency, opacity, shifting. It’s also flowing up and down between feature and gestalt. Your attention is doing all of that. It’s doing it right now. And the spotlight metaphor doesn’t capture any of that. And mindfulness has to do with making use of all of this complex, dynamical, remember what dynamical systems are, dynamical processing. These are dynamic, self-organizing processes, and they can be optimized. And mindfulness optimizes them in some way. So I’m going to put something up on the board. It looks like a graph, but it’s not a graph because it doesn’t have absolute position. It’s just a schema because it has relative position. So when I move this way, like we were talking about when we were talking about Polanyi’s work, I’m doing transparency to opacity shifting. And going this way is to do transparency to opacity, and to go this way is to do opacity to transparency. It’s not an app. No position is transparent and the other is opaque. It’s always the direction that matters. The more I move this way, the more I’m stepping back and looking at, the more I go this way, the more I’m indwelling and looking out into the world. Then we have this. I can be going down from the Gestalt to the features, using the word to decide the letters, for example. And I can be going up from the features to the Gestalt. Nothing is inherently a feature. Look, the letters are a feature in the word, but the word is a feature in the sentence. Nothing is absolutely a feature. It’s always relative. That’s why I’m putting these double arrows. This isn’t a Cartesian graph. Okay, this is not a Cartesian graph. This is a schema. But one thing you should know is that although I can describe, and you can understand these two axes independently, they’re almost always operating in a highly dynamic integrated fashion. Very often, as I’m moving towards a Gestalt, grabbing a bigger picture, I’m using that bigger pattern to look more deeply into the world. So often, I’m doing this. I’m grabbing bigger patterns, and I’m using those deeper patterns to look deeper into the world. So when you find this is what we do in science, for example, I find this and this and this, I get a pattern, and then I find a way to integrate it together, and then I use that pattern to look more deeply into the world. This is what this is, right? I found a pattern and it allows me to look more deeply into the world. I’m no longer looking at these individual things, force, mass, and acceleration. I’ve integrated them together, and that allows me to look more deeply into the world. Often, when we’re stepping back and looking at our minds, our awareness processes within attention, we’re also often breaking up Gestalt into features. For example, you were breaking up your experience of your whole finger into individual sections of your finger when we were doing the experiment. You were breaking up the whole of the cup into individual moments of contact. So very often, we’re all with these two to come together. Let’s call this scaling up of attention and scaling down of attention. First of all, let’s map these onto mindfulness practices to make clear why we’re doing this. I teach my students Vipassana, a very traditional form of meditation. Notice what the word meditation means. It actually means moving towards the center. We know it’s going to have this aspect to it. What do you do? Typically, you train people by telling them to pay attention to their breath. First of all, what they’re doing is paying attention not to the world, they’re stepping back, but they’re not really paying attention to their breath. What you tell them is the following. Again, language of explaining, not the language of training. Look at it in a much more fine-grained. You tell them to pay attention to the feelings and sensations that are being generated in their abdomen as they breathe. As they inhale, they’re feeling sensations in their abdomen and as they exhale. What they’re doing is trying to do that like I did with my finger. They’re trying to maintain and renew their interest, constantly make it salient to themselves. Now notice what’s happening. Normally, our embodied sensations, I’m not happy with that word for philosophically important reasons, but I don’t have time to go into it right now. Normally, we don’t pay attention so much to our sensations, we pay attention through our sensations to the world. Normally, I’m not paying attention to my feelings, I’m paying attention through my feelings to the cup. In meditation, I’m stepping back and not looking through my sensations, I’m stepping back and looking at them. That’s like I don’t look through the way my mind is framing things, I’m looking at the framing. I also do something else. I don’t just look at it as one blob, I do something like observational analysis. I break the gestalt up into separate experiences. I’m doing this. I’m stepping back and looking at and I’m breaking the gestalt of my experience up into its features, its atomic features, if you’ll allow me a metaphor that you shouldn’t push too far. That’s what you do in meditation. We’ll talk about why would you do this, why would that matter? And importantly, our question is, why would that help cause insight? So that’s meditation, that’s for passing, for example. I also teach my students a contemplative practice. So the word meditation means to move towards the center and that fits perfectly with Vipassana and this kind of thing. Contemplation, now it bespeaks how overly simplified the West is in trying to understand this in that these terms are now treated as synonyms. Contemplative practices, meditative practices, it’s all the same thing. Aren’t these just synonyms? They’re not synonyms and paying attention to their etymology will quickly reveal this. First of all, the Latin etymology. Look, what’s in the center of this is temple. It comes from a temple which actually comes from the Latin word for a part of the sky that you look up to to see the signs from the gods. To contemplate is to look up towards the divine. This also goes well and it’s convergent with contemplatio, the Latin term was a translation of this Greek word, theoria. Theoria also originally doesn’t mean generating a theory. A theory is a species of theoria because what I do with theoria is I try to see more deeply into reality. Do you see? Meditation is moving this way and contemplation is moving that way. Meditation emphasizes scaling down, contemplation emphasizes scaling up. I was taught both. In fact, I was taught three things in an integrated fashion. I was taught Vipassana, a scaling down strategy. I was taught Metta, a scaling up strategy and you’re scaling up with your sense of identity by the way. We’ll come back to that later. Then I was taught Tai Chi Chuan because Tai Chi Chuan is about moving in and out, in and out, flowing between these inner and outer movements in a dynamic and optimizing fashion. Why teach me all these things together? Because it’s actually a system of these psychotechnologies that will optimize your cognition for insight. Okay, so do you remember we did the nine dot problem? We talked about that. Remember the fact that you can misframe things. Let’s do the nine dot problem again. Join all nine dots with four straight lines and people find it difficult. Why? Remember we talked about this. They automatically listen to the words. Remember, they automatically and unconsciously project a square there and then they automatically take this to be a connect the dot problems and so no non dot turns are possible and therefore they can’t get the solution. The solution is here’s four straight lines. One, two, three, four. The reason why people find that so difficult is I have to break the square and I have to not treat it as a typical connect the dot problem. I have to not treat it categorically, to use language you’ve heard already, because you don’t do non dot turns. Remember this. Now notice there’s two moments to having an insight. I have to break up an inappropriate frame. What do I have to do? I have to break up the Gestalt, right? And I also have to de-automatize my cognition. I have to make it not operate unconsciously and automatically. Well, how do I do that? I take stuff that’s normally happening unconsciously and I have to bring it back into consciousness. Yes? That makes sense? How do I do that? I do that by doing a transparency opacity shift. Normally I’m automatically sensing through my probe, but I can shift my awareness and become aware of my probe. I can bring things back into awareness. So you de-automatize cognition by doing a transparency to opacity shift. So I break up the inappropriate frame and I de-automatize my cognition by scaling down. Now interestingly enough, there is lots of work by Noblic and other people showing that you can improve people’s ability to solve insight problems if you get them to do what’s called chunk decomposition and constraint relaxation. Chunk decomposition is just breaking up a Gestalt. That’s what chunk decomposition means. Constraint relaxation is basically de-automatizing your cognition. De-automatizing your cognition. Scaling down helps you to break up the chunks, break up the Gestalts, and it helps you to de-automatize your cognition. But is that enough for insight? It’s not enough. Yes, I have to break up the inappropriate frame, but I have to make an alternative and better frame. I have to, watch, I have to widen, widen my field of awareness. I have to take stuff that was in the background and change its relevance. I have to look more deeply for deeper, broader patterns that I have not considered before. What do I have to do? In order to make a new frame, I have to scale up. And we also have lots of independent evidence, having nothing to do with mindfulness or meditation, that one of the ways you can improve people’s ability to be insightful is if they get training, if they have training or practice or are naturally disposed to being able to scale up. If people can complete patterns in a kind of leaping that C.C. Benner and Baker talk about, right, and other people, we can scale up in that way. If we can take pictures that are out of focus and refocus them mentally so we can suddenly see what the picture is. Again and again and again, when people can scale up better, they’re better at solving insight problems. So both make you better, but there’s a problem because both also make you worse. Because if I just scale up, if I just maximize, like tightening the string, then of course I will immediately project the square and then I’m locked. Well, shouldn’t I just scale down, just meditate, always? If I just keep breaking up gestalts, I’ll never make the solution. I’ll choke myself. That’s what happens when people are choking. You get away, like if you’re sparring with somebody, a way to get them off is to complement them. That was a really good, like, right hook you just threw. Because then the person will start stepping back and looking at it and they’ll get all screwed up because they’ll break up. So notice what I’m saying, because stick with me, because this is really sort of tricky. This can improve your chances for insight by breaking up a bad frame, but it can also mess up your problem solving by causing you to choke. This can improve your ability for insight by causing you to choke. This can improve your ability for insight by causing you to choke. This can improve you to make a better frame, but this can also cause you to leap into an inappropriate frame and be locked in fixation. So what should you do? You don’t want the strings too tight. You don’t want the strings too loose and you don’t want it just halfway. Well, what do you want to do is you want to train people in both of these skills and then train them to flow between them. It’s called opponent processing. So they’re pulling and pushing on each other and so they’re forced to coordinate and constantly get the right degree of attentional engagement that is most dynamically fitted to the world. That’s why the people who train me trained me in all these things. That’s why you shouldn’t equate mindfulness just with meditation. It’s not. So if you pay attention, for example, to the Eightfold Path, you’ll have people be trained in meditative practices, contemplative practices, practices in which you flow between the opposites until you learn, like in a martial art, to get an apt and constantly adjusted fittedness, attentional fittedness to the world. Now this leads very naturally into talking about mystical experiences and the kinds of mystical experiences that people can have within their mindfulness practices. But before I do that, let’s gather. Notice what we’ve said here. We have an understanding of mindfulness. What’s mindfulness doing? Mindfulness is basically teaching us how to appropriate and train a flexibility of attentional scaling so that we can intervene effectively in how we are framing our problems and increase the chances of insight when insight is needed. Notice that this didn’t really explain. How is being present making you more insightful? But I’ve given you a way of understanding being present that works. When I’m scaling down, I’m actually making my mind less representational, less inferential. I’m doing all of this work to become aware of and gain some mastery over my processes of problem framing and thereby training skills that will make me more insightful. What happens if you were just to scale down and practice scaling down and scaling down and scaling down and scaling down? Well, you can actually get to one kind of important mystical experience. So Foreman calls this, and it’s well attested, he calls this the pure consciousness event, the PCE. The pure consciousness event. It’s a kind of mystical experience. You can have after extensive mindfulness practice. I’ve experienced this. Let’s do it. So right now I’m looking at the world. The thing you’re doing when you’re practicing meditation is you try and step back and look at the lens of your mind. What happens is it’s hard to maintain because you have such deep developed habits of directing your attention to the world. You start thinking, I’ve got to do my laundry, I’ve got to do this. Then what you have to do is you have to bring your attention back again. You have to do that. You have to recenter and step back and look at your mind rather than automatically looking through it. You keep practicing. It’s like that. It’s arduous. But these are like doing reps. That’s meditation. Meditation is you’re building this ability to step back and look at your mind. It’s a way of training your body to step back and look at your mind. Then what happens is, remember how we went back in layers? We went into the probe and then into our fingers and into the sensations. When I do this with people, it’s often the people who’ve had some mindfulness training that can step back all the way into their sensations. That’s not a coincidence. Now I’m looking at my mind. Then I start looking at the more subsidiary layers of my mind, the deeper layers by which I was looking at the upper layers. Then I step back again. I step back again. Now I’m just looking at my consciousness. Eventually I step back and I’m not even conscious of anything. I’m not conscious of this sensation. I’m just conscious. That’s why it’s called the pure consciousness event. You’re not conscious of anything. You’re just fully present as consciousness. You’re not aware of yourself. You’re not looking through your self-machinery. You’re not looking through your consciousness. You’re not even looking through your mind. You’re just fully conscious, the pure consciousness event. This is the event that results from this. What about if you were to really scale up? Well, think about things that you might have heard associated with the Buddhist view. I’m going to see everything is interconnected and everything is flowing, impermanent. I’m going to create this overarching gestalt and the gestalt is going to be so overarching it’s going to include and encompass me. I’m going to experience this resonant at one-ment. You already know what that’s like because we’ve already talked about it. Think about that as just a super flow state in which I’m deeply at one with everything. Super flow state, resonant at one-ment. I don’t use atonement because that has a particular Christian meaning that I’m not trying to invoke here at one-ment. See, this model of mindfulness explains why people get into these kinds of mystical experiences. If they do a lot of meditative practices, they will get a pure consciousness event. If they do a lot of contemplative practices, they will develop this empathetic participatory flowing, super flowing resonant at one-ment. Remember, what we want ultimately is we want these two together. There’s a third state and this is actually the state that matters. This is called the state of non-duality. Let me try and explain to you a way in which you can at least imagine you could get into it. It’s a way I train people. Imagine that you’re going to be cycling, scaling up and scaling down with your breath. As you inhale, you scale up and you do that sort of resonant at one-ment. You’re trying to be at flowing at one-ment with everything and then as you exhale, you’re doing the Vipassana. You’re trying to step back as close as you can to the pure consciousness event and you oscillate back and forth with the breath. You often have to do that for years. But what can happen, and there’s other ways of getting into this state. This isn’t exclusive. This is one way, the way I was taught. What can happen is you can have the third kind of mystical experience. It’s not the pure consciousness event. It’s not resonant at one-ment. It includes both and transcends both. It’s both at the same time. Your awareness is deeply to the depths of your consciousness and deeply to the depths of reality and it’s completely at one. It’s all at once. This is a prajna state, a state of non-duality. This is one term for wisdom. This is kind of mystical experience. Now this is the state that’s actually sought for, that non-duality, because this is the state that is the state that is the state that is the state that is the state that’s actually sought for, that non-duality, because this is the state that should lead to a comprehensive capacity for insight. Because you’re not going to have an insight about nine dots and four straight lines. You’re going to have an insight into the fundamental, the guts, the grammar of the agent arena relationship. You’re pushing to the ground of the agent and you’re pushing out to the circumference of the arena and you’re pushing that machinery to optimize so that you can see in as deeply integrated a fashion as possible that connectedness between the two. So you have the capacity for an insight, not into this problem or that problem, but in an insight and into your existential modes of being. This is how you can remember the being mode. You can have a fundamental insight into it. Now this is in fact of course what Siddhartha experienced. He’d been practicing Vipassana and a contemplative practice called Metta very deeply, very powerfully and it looks like one of his great innovations was to conjoin the two together. He often talks about them. And what happened was a radical transformation. He experienced enlightenment. We’re going to talk about what that might mean. So after his enlightenment, after his awakening, he’s walking down the road and people come up to him and his visage has changed. Think about when you are watching, when you see somebody and you know they’re in the flow state and they’re flowing and you’re seeing them and you’re seeing them and you’re seeing them and you’re thinking about what you think about when you are watching when you see somebody and you know they’re in the flow state and they’re flowing and you can that grace and that energy and that the musicality of intelligibility that’s playing across their face and their gestures and their motions and you can’t you’re most of it you’re only picking up implicitly but you’ve got a sense what’s going oh that’s so beautiful that’s so graceful that’s so much power and there’s a charismatic and you’re just caught up in it so these men are approaching Siddhartha and he’s filled with that. And so they say to him, are you a god? Think about what conditions have to be like where that’s a reasonable thing to ask of someone. Any answers very clearly? No, I’m not. Are you some kind of angelic messenger or being no I’m not. Are you some kind of prophet? No, I’m not. Are you just a man? No, I’m not. They’re frustrated. What are you then? I am awake. That’s how he gets his title. He moves from talking about an identity he could have to a fundamental way of being. I am awake. He has fully deeply the depths I try to indicate here. Sati remembered the being mode in a way that isn’t an insight about this or that problem but is a fundamental insight into what it is to be a human being. A systematic set of insights that optimizes your entire being that triggers and empowers a fundamental transformative experience. So as a cognitive scientist, especially one who studies the connections between Buddhism and cognitive science, I’ve become very interested in these kinds of experiences that people have. And I have colleagues and collaborators that are also interested in this. Why do people pursue altered states of consciousness? Why is the mindfulness revolution, which is the pursuit of altered states of consciousness, so powerful? Why are we going through the psychedelic revolution right now? Because unlike other therapeutic pharmaceuticals, psychedelics work exactly by bringing about an altered state of consciousness. Why is this so powerfully important? Why is it that we’re not the only creatures, in fact, that pursue altered states of consciousness? It looks like the more intelligent a creature is, the more it will pursue altered states of consciousness. Why is it that we’re not the creature? The more intelligent a creature is, the more it will pursue altered states of consciousness. Caledonian crows will tumble down rooftops in order to make themselves dizzy, which is a risky thing to do, but they do it because they’re enjoying the altered state of consciousness. Why is it that some of these altered states, mystical experiences, certain types of psychedelic experiences within a therapeutic context, we’re going to talk about all of this, can bring about and afford such powerful transformations? What is it that’s going on there? Here’s what’s interesting. Sometimes people will have a kind of altered state of consciousness that, in my mind, it recapitulates the axial revolution. Look, normally when you have an altered state of consciousness, let’s pick up on Siddhartha’s metaphor, awakening, wakening up. That’s in contrast to being asleep, to dreaming. So what happens in your typical state of altered state of consciousness, one that you experience every night? You’re dreaming. When you’re in the dream state, you think that that world is real. You interact with it as if it’s real, but when you wake up, you go, aha, that was just a dream. That wasn’t real. This is real. This. Normally, when we come out of an altered state of consciousness, we point at it, the finger of rejection, and say, that isn’t real. Oh, I was drunk. That’s not real. Oh, I was high. That’s not real. But sometimes, people have certain kinds of experiences, altered states of consciousness, in which exactly the opposite occurs. They go into that state, and they come back, and they say, that was more real. That was really real. This is less real. Do you see how that’s axial? That’s like, wait, that higher, why do we call it a higher state of consciousness? That higher state of consciousness, that I had access to the real world. When I come back, like somebody in Plato’s cave, I’ve come back out of the sunlight. This, I now realize, is only echoes and shadows. It’s less real. In fact, and because of my desire to be in contact with what’s real, I’m going to change myself, and I’m going to change my world to try and recapture, sati, sati, to remember what that’s like. I want to live in greater contact with that really real. So they start to transform their whole lives and their whole self. The whole agent arena relationship is completely and radically, radically, revolutionarily restructured. This is known as quantum change theory. Bad name, bad name, good theory. People do this. This is, of course, very important for understanding what happened to people like Siddhartha. In fact, most of the world religions that emerge at the axial revolution are predicated on the idea that there are higher states of consciousness that should empower, challenge, and encourage us to engage in such quantum transformation, to go through these radical transformative experiences. It’s obviously at the core of Buddhism. You experience Satori, right? You realize Shunyata. It’s at the core, right, of Vedanta. When I experience Moksha and release, it’s at the core of Daoism. I realize that I realize the Dao. So how is it that these experiences have such authority? But it’s not just that they’re important historically. They’re at the core of the world religions. And you say, well, what about the Western? Like Sufism within Islam and the Christian mystic tradition and like all of the world traditions point to these higher states of consciousness that can bring about these radical modal transformations in our cognition and our very being. But that’s important enough. But like when you do surveys, you look at some of the work that’s been done, 30 to 40 percent of the population has experienced these events. And it’s like flow across cultures, language groups, socioeconomic status, gender, pervasive and universal. Not universal in the sense that everybody has it, but universal in the sense that there doesn’t seem to be any type, class or order of human beings that is not capable of experiencing it. So both qualitatively, historically and quantitatively, scientifically, it’s like this is an important phenomenon. And here’s what’s really important for our purposes. There’s a deep connect. Remember I said before, there’s a deep connection between how often you flow and how meaningful you find your life. That is also the more radically the case for these states. People who have experienced these higher states of consciousness, and undergone these quantum changes, these deep transformational experiences, reliably import, and there’s good experimental evidence to support it, that they have had a significant increase in meaning in life. In fact, many people report these experiences as the most significant in their life and that a lot of the meaning of their life is hinged upon these transformations. There are deep connections between awakening and recovering meaning. There are deep connections between awakening and insight. As I’ve already indicated, we’ll come back to see there’s a deep continuity between this kind of insight, mystical experience and full-blown awakening experience. My lab, we’ve just finished running with my associate Anderson Todd, my lab director, lab manager, Jinsun Kim, all of my wonderful RAs, and they’ll show up in the acknowledgement. We just have submitted a paper because we ran an experiment. We did a massive MTurk survey trying to see if there was a relationship between the two of us, the two of us, and the two of us. We did a more fine-grained analysis, and this is consonant with the work of Samantha Henselman and others, experimental work showing that it’s something like a capacity for insight, making sense, which is often called coherence in the literature, that seems to be what’s doing all the heavy lifting. It doesn’t really matter if you look at the work of the two of us, we’re just showing that we have a very significant relationship between mystical experience and what’s happening in the lab. It seems to be what’s doing all the heavy lifting. So it doesn’t really matter if you’ll allow me so much what the content of your mystical experience is. In fact, very often there’s no content, they’re ineffable. But what seems to be happening is you’re somehow optimizing your capacity for making sense, and outwardly. What’s happening is some improved optimization of this, of anagogy, and people find that deeply meaningful. So there is good reason to believe, I’m not advocating Buddhism here because I’ve already pointed out there are similar claims in all of the mystical traditions, and I’m not claiming that those traditions are all identical, I’m not Aldous Huxley. But there seems to be some deep truths here about the nature of attention, the nature of mindfulness, and the enhancement of the ability to enter into these higher states of consciousness that can significantly alleviate existential distress and bring about a pervasive and profound kind of optimization of our insight and our capacity for finding our lives meaningful. And that would be being able to do all of those things, right? Alleviate the existential anxiety, create a systematic kind of insight, a transformation of agents in an arena that recovers the being mode. Forge transformation. I mean, isn’t that the core of meaning and the ability to do it? Wouldn’t that be the core of wisdom? So what I want to do is I want to continue on, and I want to explore this. What’s going on with mystical experiences? What’s going on with these higher states of consciousness? Why are psychedelics coming back into the center of the cognitive science investigation? We’ve got to talk about consciousness. We’ve got to talk about altered states of consciousness. We’ve got to talk about higher states of consciousness and transformative experience. And what is the knowing that’s going on here? Because there’s no knowing of words. There’s no words. There’s no content. Pure consciousness event. You’re not conscious of anything. Everything’s the same. It’s just there’s the resonant that one thing is that the other is the other. And that’s the reason why it’s the resonant at one minute, the flowing. What kind of knowing is it? That’s what we’re going to take a look at next time. Thank you very much.