Plurk paste

Preface
It all started in London in 2005, when we first discussed the theme of consciousness. That same year we saw each other in Washington, DC, to talk about the neuronal basis of meditation at a meeting organized by the Mind and Life Institute.1 For eight years, we took every chance we could to continue our exchanges all over the world, twice in Nepal, in the rainforests of Thailand, and with His Holiness the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India.2 This book is the result of this extended conversation, nourished by friendship and our shared interests.
The dialogue between Western science and Buddhism stands out from the often difficult debate between science and religion. It is true that Buddhism is not a religion in the sense we usually understand in the West. It is not based on the notion of a creator and therefore does not require an act of faith. Buddhism could be defined as a “science of the mind” and a path of transformation that leads from confusion to wisdom, from suffering to freedom. It shares with the sciences the ability to examine the mind empirically. This is what makes the dialogue between a Buddhist monk and a neuroscientist possible and fruitful: a broad range of questions can be broached, from quantum physics to ethical matters.
We have attempted to compare the Western and Eastern perspectives, the different theories concerning the constitution of the self and the nature of consciousness as seen by the scientific and contemplative points of view. Until recently, most Western philosophies have been built around the separation of mind and matter. Scientific theories that are today attempting to explain how the brain works bear the mark of this dualism. Buddhism, meanwhile, has proposed a nondualistic approach to reality from the start. The cognitive sciences see consciousness as being inscribed in the body, society, and culture.
Hundreds of books and articles have been dedicated to theories of knowledge, meditation, the idea of the self, emotions, the existence of free will, and the nature of consciousness. Our aim here is not to make an inventory of the many points of view that exist on these subjects. Rather, our objective is to confront two perspectives anchored in rich traditions: the contemplative Buddhist practice, and epistemology and research in neuroscience. We were able to bring together our experiences and skills to try and answer the following questions: Are the various states of consciousness arrived at through meditation and training the mind linked to neuronal processes? If so, in what way does the correlation operate?
This dialogue is only a modest contribution to an immense field confronting the points of view and knowledge about the brain and consciousness of scientists and people who meditate—in other words, the meeting between first- and third-person knowledge. The lines that follow take this path, and we feel humility in front of the size of the task.
We sometimes allow ourselves to be swept away by the themes close to our hearts, which translate in certain places into changes in direction or repetitions. We made the choice to retain the authenticity of the dialogue because it is rare and productive to develop an exchange over such a long period. We would nevertheless like to apologize to our readers for what may seem like an oversight.
This dialogue allowed us to make progress in our mutual understanding of the themes we addressed. By inviting our readers to join us, we hope they too will benefit from our years of work and investigation into the fundamental aspects of human life.
Notes
1. The Mind and Life Institute was founded in 1987, the result of a meeting of three visionary minds: His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso; Adam Engle, lawyer and entrepreneur; and the neuroscientist, Francisco Varela. The objective of the Mind and Life Institute is to encourage interdisciplinary dialogue among Western science, the human sciences, and contemplative traditions. It aims to support and integrate the first-person perspective, arising from the experience of meditation and other contemplative practices, into traditional scientific methodology. This objective’s determining influence is seen in several books: Train Your Mind—Transform Your Brain by Sharon Begley, Destructive Emotions: How Can We Overcome Them? by Daniel Goleman, and The Dalai Lama at MIT by Anne Harrington and Arthur Zajonc. 2. These conversations were held in September 2007 in Frankfurt, in December 2007 and February 2014 in Nepal, in November 2010 in Thailand, and on a few other occasions in Hamburg and Paris. 1 Meditation and the Brain
A Science of Mind
Our capacity to learn is far superior to that of other animals. Can we, with training, develop our mental skills, as we do for our physical skills?
Can training the mind make us more attentive, altruistic, and serene?
These questions have been explored for 20 years by neuroscientists and psychologists who collaborate with people who meditate. Can we learn to manage our disturbing emotions in an optimal way? What are the functional and structural transformations that occur in the brain due to different types of meditation? How much time is needed to observe transformations like this in people new to meditation? Matthieu: Although one finds in the Buddhist literature many treatises on “traditional sciences”—medicine, cosmology, botanic, logic, and so on—Tibetan Buddhism has not endeavored to the same extent as Western civilizations to expand its knowledge of the world through the natural sciences. Rather it has pursued an exhaustive investigation of the mind for 2,500 years and has accumulated, in an empirical way, a wealth of experiential findings over the centuries. A great number of people have dedicated their whole lives to this contemplative science. Modern Western psychology began with William James just over a century ago. I can’t help remembering the remark made by Stephen Kosslyn, then chair of the psychology department at Harvard, at the Mind and Life meeting on “Investigating the Mind,” which took place at MIT in 2003. He started his presentation by saying, “I want to begin with a declaration of humility in the face of the sheer amount of data that the contemplatives are bringing to modern psychology.” It does not suffice to ponder how the human psyche works and elaborate complex theories about it, as, for instance, Freud did. Such intellectual constructs cannot replace two millennia of direct investigation of the workings of mind through penetrating introspection conducted with trained minds that have become both stable and clear. Any sophisticated theory that came out of a brilliant mind but does not rest on empirical evidence cannot be compared with the cumulated experience of hundreds of people who have each a good part of their lives fathomed the subtlest aspects of mind through direct experience. Using empirical approaches undertaken with the right instrument of a well-trained mind, these contemplatives have found efficient ways to achieve a gradual transformation of emotions, moods, and traits, and to erode even the most entrenched tendencies that are detrimental to an optimal way of being. Such achievements can change the quality of every moment of our lives through enhancing fundamental human characteristics such as lovingkindness, inner freedom, inner peace, and inner strength. Wolf: Can you be more specific with this rather bold claim? Why should what nature gave us be fundamentally negative, requiring special mental practice for its elimination, and why should this approach be superior to conventional education or, if conflicts arise, to psychotherapy in its various forms, including psychoanalysis? Matthieu: What nature gave us is by no means entirely negative; it is just a baseline. Most of our innate capacities remain dormant unless we do something, through training, for instance, to bring them to an optimal, functional point. We all know that our mind can be our best friend or our worst enemy. The mind that nature gave us does have the potential for immense goodness, but it also creates a lot of unnecessary suffering for ourselves and others. If we take an honest look at ourselves, then we must acknowledge that we are a mixture of light and shadow, of good qualities and defects. Is this the best we can be? Is that an optimal way of being? These questions are worth asking, particularly if we consider that some kind of change is both desirable and possible.
Few people would honestly argue that there is nothing worth improving about the way they live and the way they experience the world. Some people regard their own particular weaknesses and conflicting emotions as a valuable and distinct part of their “personality,” as something that contributes to the fullness of their lives. They believe that this is what makes them unique and argue that they should accept themselves as they are. But isn’t this an easy way to giving up on the idea of improving the quality of their lives, which would cost only some reasoning and effort?
Our mind is often filled with troubles. We spend a great deal of time consumed by painful thoughts, anxiety, or anger. We often wish we could manage our emotions to the point where we could be free of the mental states that disturb and obscure the mind. It is easier indeed, in our confusion about how to achieve this kind of mastery, to adopt the view that this is all “normal,” that this is “human nature.” Everything found in nature is “natural,” but that does not necessarily make it desirable. Disease, for example, comes to everybody and is perfectly natural, but does this prevent us from trying to cure it?
Nobody wakes up in the morning and thinks, “I wish I could suffer for the whole day and, if possible, for my whole life.” Whatever we are occupied with, we always hope we will get some benefit or satisfaction out of it, either for ourselves or others, or at least a reduction of our suffering. If we thought nothing would come of our activities but misery, we wouldn’t do anything at all, and we would fall into despair.
We don’t find anything strange about spending years learning to walk, read and write, or acquire professional skills. We spend hours doing physical exercises to get our bodies into shape. Sometimes we expend tremendous physical energy pedaling a stationary bike that goes nowhere. To sustain such tasks requires at least some interest or enthusiasm. This interest comes from believing that these efforts are going to benefit us in the long run. Working with the mind follows the same logic. How could it be subject to change without any effort, just from wishing alone? We cannot learn to ski by practicing a few minutes once a year.
We spend a lot of effort improving the external conditions of our lives, but in the end it is always the mind that creates our experience of the world and translates this experience into either well-being or suffering. If we transform our way of perceiving things, then we transform the quality of our lives. This kind of transformation is brought about by the form of mind training known as meditation.
We significantly underestimate our capacity for change. Our character traits remain the same as long as we do nothing to change them and as long as we continue to tolerate and reinforce our habits and patterns, thought after thought. The truth is that the state that we call “normal” is just a starting point and not the goal we should set for ourselves. Our life is worth much more than that. It is possible, little by little, to arrive at an optimal way of being.
Nature also gave us the possibility to understand our potential for change, no matter who we are now and what we have done. This notion is a powerful source of inspiration for engaging in a process of inner transformation. You may not succeed easily, but at least be encouraged by such an idea; you can put all your energy into such a transformation, which is already in itself a healing process.
Modern conventional education does not focus on transforming the mind and cultivating basic human qualities such as lovingkindness and mindfulness. As we will see later, Buddhist contemplative science has many things in common with cognitive therapies, in particular with those using mindfulness as a foundation for remedying mental imbalance. As for psychoanalysis, it seems to encourage rumination and explore endlessly the details and intricacies of the clouds of mental confusion and self-centeredness that mask the most fundamental aspect of mind: luminous awareness.
Wolf: So rumination would be the opposite of what you do during meditation? Matthieu: Totally opposite. It is also well known that constant rumination is one of the main symptoms of depression.
Wolf: It is encouraging for our dialogue to have contrasting views on strategies to cure the mind. I suspect that the practice of meditation is often misunderstood. I have had little practice with it, but I learned to see what it is not: it is not an attempt to confront oneself with unresolved problems to search for their causes and eliminate them. It appears to be quite the contrary.
Matthieu: When one looks at the process of rumination, it is easy to see what a troublemaker it is. What we need is to gain freedom from the mental chain reactions that rumination endlessly perpetuates. One should learn to let thoughts arise and be freed to go as soon as they arise, instead of letting them invade one’s mind. In the freshness of the present moment, the past is gone, the future is not yet born, and if one remains in pure mindfulness and freedom, potentially disturbing thoughts arise and go without leaving a trace.
Wolf: You have said in one of your books that every human being possesses in his mind a “nugget of gold,” a kernel of purity and positive qualities that is, however, concealed and overshadowed by a host of negative traits and emotions that deform his perceptions and are the major cause of suffering. To me, this sounds like an overly optimistic and untested hypothesis. It sounds like Rousseau’s dreams and seems to be contradicted by cases like that of the feral child Kaspar Hauser. We are what evolution imprinted by genes and culture via education, moral norms, and social conventions. What then is the “golden nugget”?
Matthieu: A piece of gold that remains deeply buried in its ore, in a rock, or in the mud. The gold does not lose its intrinsic purity, but its value is not actualized. Likewise, to be fully expressed, our human potential needs to meet with suitable conditions. Awareness and Mental Constructs
Matthieu: The idea of an unspoiled basic nature of consciousness is not a naïve assessment of human nature. It is based on reasoning and introspective experience. If we consider thoughts, emotions, feelings, and any other mental events, they all have a common denominator, which is the capacity of knowing. In Buddhism, this basic quality of consciousness is called the fundamental luminous nature of mind. It is luminous in the sense that it throws light on the outer world through our perceptions and on our inner world through our feelings, thoughts, memories of the past, anticipation of the future, and awareness of the present moment. It is luminous in contrast to an inanimate object, which is completely dark in terms of cognition.
Let’s use this image of light. If you have a torch and you light up a beautiful smiling face or an angry face, a mountain of jewels or a heap of garbage, then the light does not become kind or angry, valuable or dirty. Another image is that of a mirror. What makes a mirror special is that it can reflect all kinds of images, but none of them belongs to, penetrates, or stays in the mirror. If they did, then all these images would superimpose, and the mirror would become useless. Likewise, the basic quality of the mind allows all mental constructs—love and anger, joy and jealousy, pleasure and pain—to arise but is not altered by them. Mental events do not belong intrinsically to the most fundamental aspect of consciousness. They simply occur within the space of awareness, of various moments of consciousness, and are made possible by this basic awareness. This quality can thus be called basic cognition, pure awareness, or the most fundamental nature of mind. Wolf: What you said has two implications. One is that you seem to attribute value to stability or objectivity; it’s like a validation criterion. The second is that you dissociate conscious awareness from its contents. You assume that a platform in the brain functions like an ideal mirror, not introducing any distortions by itself, not being influenced by the content it reflects. Are you defending a dualistic stance, a dichotomy between an immaculate mind and an observer, on the one hand, and the contents in this mind that are then fraught with all kinds of interferences and distortions? Contemporary views on the organization of the brain deny clear distinctions between sensory and executive functions and interpret consciousness as an emergent property of the integral functions of the brain. Thus, I have problems with the distinction between an immaculate mirror and reflected contents. I cannot conceive of an empty platform of consciousness— if it is empty, then it would just not exist; it would not be defined either.
Matthieu: Not at all. It is not a duality. There are not two streams of consciousness. It has more to do with various aspects of consciousness: a fundamental aspect, pure awareness, which is always there; and adventitious aspects, the mental constructs, which are always changing. We should rather speak of a continuity.
Consciousness, at all levels, is but one dynamic flow made up of instants of awareness, with or without content. At any time behind the screen of thoughts, one can recognize a pure cognitive faculty that is the ground of all thoughts.
Wolf: This would then require at least two distinct entities: an empty space, which acts as a vessel with all the qualities you described; and the contents that, however muddled, do not affect the vessel. Matthieu: Why two entities? The mind can be aware of itself without requiring a second mind to do so. One aspect of the mind, the most fundamental aspect of it, pure awareness, can also be awareness of itself without requiring a second observer. If the mirror and its contents bother you, then pure consciousness could also be compared to a piece of clay and mental constructs to the various shapes that the same clay can assume. No matter what shape you give to the clay, the clay is always there and never essentially changed.
Wolf: To have such an immaculate inner eye, such an ideal mirror that remains unaffected by and entirely decoupled from all emotions would—in my mind—requires a dissociation of the personality. There would be the immaculate observer, detached from emotions, affections, and misperceptions, and then there would be the other one, also part of you, who gets enmeshed in conflicts and misperceives situations because he has deeply fallen in love or is disappointed. Is the mental practice a tool to achieve such a dissociation of the self?
What is your experience here? Is the creation of such dissociation—if this is what meditation aims at—not a hazardous experiment? Matthieu: The point is not to fragment the self but to use the capacity of the mind to observe and know itself to free oneself from suffering. We actually speak of nondual self-illuminating awareness, which emphasizes this point. There is no need for a dissociation of personality because the mind has the inherent faculty to observe itself, just as a flame does not need a second flame to light itself up. Its own luminosity suffices.
The practical point of all this is that you can look at your thoughts, including strong emotions, from the perspective given by pure mindfulness. Thoughts are manifestations of pure awareness, just like waves that surge from and dissolve back into the ocean. The ocean and waves are not two intrinsically separate things. Usually, we are so taken by the content of thoughts that we fully identify ourselves with our thoughts and are unaware of the fundamental nature of consciousness, pure awareness. Because of that we are easily deluded, and we suffer.
The entire Buddhist path is about various ways to get rid of delusion. Take the example of a strong experience of malevolent anger. We become one with anger. Anger fills our whole mental landscape and projects its distortion of reality on people and events.
When we become overwhelmed by anger, we cannot dissociate from it. We also perpetuate a vicious cycle of affliction by rekindling anger each time we see or remember the person who made us angry.
Although anger is clearly not an enjoyable state of mind, we cannot help triggering it over and over again, like adding more and more wood to the fire. We thus become addicted to the cause of suffering.
But if we dissociate from anger and look at it dispassionately with bare mindfulness, then we can see that it is just a bunch of thoughts and not something fearsome. Anger does not carry weapons, it does not burn like a fire or crush one like a rock; it is nothing more than a product of our mind.
Wolf: Doesn’t it follow that positive emotions are equally detrimental because they lead to misperceptions and hence to suffering? Matthieu: Not necessarily. It all depends on whether a mental event distorts reality. If the mind recognizes, for instance, that all beings aspire to be free from suffering and becomes filled with altruistic love and the strong wish to free them from suffering, then as long as it has this wisdom component, it can remain attuned to reality. It recognizes the interdependence of all beings, acknowledges their common wish to avoid suffering and achieve happiness, and ascertains the deep causes of their suffering. If, in addition to this, altruistic love is not biased by our various attachments and grasping, then it will not be afflictive.
Instead of obscuring wisdom, it will manifest as the natural expression of wisdom.
But to conclude the analysis of anger, instead of “being” the anger and fully identifying with it, we must simply look at anger and keep our bare attention on it. When we do so, what happens? Just as when we cease to add wood to a fire, the fire soon dies out; anger cannot sustain itself for long under the gaze of mindfulness. It simply fades away.
Wolf: And so would love, empathy, sorrow, and all the other strong emotions. Do you aim for a clear mind without emotions? I doubt that such emotion-free human beings can survive and reproduce unless they have the privilege to live in a highly protected environment.
Working with Emotions Matthieu: The aim is not to cease to experience emotions but to avoid being enslaved by them. In Western languages, the word emotion comes from the Latin root emove, which means “to set in motion.” An emotion is what sets the mind in motion, but much depends on how it does so. Your mind can be set in motion by the wish to alleviate someone’s suffering. This is not afflictive. In addition, it does not make sense to try to block the arising of thoughts and emotions because they will surge in the mind anyway. The important point is what happens next. If afflictive emotions invade the mind, then you are in trouble. If, at the moment they arise, you find a way to let them undo themselves and vanish, then you have skillfully dealt with them.
By freeing anger, for instance, as it arises, we have avoided two unpractical ways of dealing with it. We did not let anger explode, with all the negative consequences that arise from such outbursts, such as hurting others, destroying our inner peace, and reinforcing our tendency to become angry often and easily. We also avoided merely suppressing anger, putting a lid on it while leaving it intact, like a time bomb, in some dark corner of our mind. We dealt with anger in an intelligent way, by letting its flames vanish. If we do so repeatedly, then anger will begin to arise less often and less strongly. Thus, the habitual tendency of becoming angry will gradually become eroded, and our traits will be transformed.
Wolf: What you have to learn then is to adopt a much more subtle approach to your internal emotional theater, to learn to identify with much higher resolution the various connotations of your feelings.
Matthieu: That’s right. In the beginning, it is difficult to do it as soon as an emotion arises, but if you become increasingly familiar with such an approach, it becomes quite natural. Whenever anger is just showing its face, we recognize it right away and deal with it before it becomes too strong. If you know someone to be a pickpocket, then you will soon spot that person even if he mingles with a crowd of 20 or 30 people, and you will keep a careful eye on him so he will not be able to steal your bag. Wolf: The goal is then to enhance your sensitivity to the subtle flow of your emotions to be able to control them before they become a menace.
Matthieu: Yes, by becoming more and more familiar with the workings of the mind and cultivating mindfulness of the present moment, you will not let the spark of afflictive emotions become like a powerful fire that blazes out of control and destroys your happiness and that of others.
In the beginning, this requires purposeful effort. Later, it can become effortless.
Wolf: It is not unlike a scientific endeavor except that the analytical effort is directed toward the inner rather than the outer world. Science also attempts to understand reality by increasing the resolving power of instruments, training the mind to grasp complex relations, and decomposing systems into ever-smaller components.
Matthieu: It is said in the Buddhist teachings that there is no task so difficult that it cannot be broken down into a series of small, easy tasks. Wolf: Your object of inquiry appears to be the mental apparatus and your analytical tool, introspection. This is an interesting self-referential approach that differs from the Western science of mind because it emphasizes the first-person perspective and collapses, in a sense, the instrument of investigation with its object. The Western approach, while using the first-person perspective for the definition of mental phenomena, clearly favors the third-person perspective for its investigation. I am curious to find out whether the results of analytical introspection match those obtained by cognitive neuroscience. Both approaches obviously try to develop a differentiated and realistic view of cognitive processes. It may be that our Western way of using introspection is not sophisticated enough. The fact is that some concepts of the human brain’s organization that have been derived from intuition and introspection are in striking conflict with concepts derived from scientific inquiry—which sometimes gives rise to heated debates between neuroscientists and scholars of the humanities. What guarantees that the introspective technique for the dissection of mental phenomena is reliable? If it is the consensus among those who consider themselves experts, how can you compare and validate subjective mental states? There is nothing another person can look at and judge as valid; the observers can only rely on the verbal testimony of subjective states.
Gradual and Lasting Changes Matthieu: It is the same with scientific knowledge. You first have to rely on the credible testimony of a number of scientists, but later you can train in the subject and verify the findings firsthand. This is quite similar to contemplative science. You first need to refine the telescope of your mind and the methods of investigations for years to find out for yourself what other contemplatives have found and all agreed on.
The state of pure consciousness without content, which might seem puzzling at first sight, is something that all contemplatives have experienced. So it is not just some sort of Buddhist dogmatic theory.
Anyone who takes the trouble to stabilize and clarify his or her mind will be able to experience it.
Regarding cross-checking interpersonal experience, both contemplatives and the texts dealing with the various experiences a meditator might encounter are quite precise in their descriptions.
When a student reports on his inner states of mind to an experienced meditation master, the descriptions are not just vague and poetic. The master will ask precise questions and the student replies, and it is quite clear that they are speaking about something that is well defined and mutually understood.
However, in the end, what really matters is the way the person gradually changes. If, over months and years, someone becomes less impatient, less prone to anger, and less torn apart by hopes and fears, then the method he or she has been using is a valid one. If it becomes inconceivable for someone to willingly harm another person, if the person has gradually developed the inner resources to successfully deal with the ups and downs of life, then real progress has occurred. It is said in the teachings that it is easy to be a great meditator when sitting in the sun with a full belly, but meditators are truly put to the test when faced with adverse circumstances. That is the time when you will really measure the change that has occurred in your way of being. When you are confronted with someone who criticizes or insults you, if you don’t blow a fuse but know how to deal skillfully with the person while maintaining your inner peace, you will have achieved some genuine emotional balance and inner freedom. You will have become less vulnerable to outer circumstances and your own deluded thoughts.
An ongoing study seems to indicate that while they are engaged in meditation, practitioners can clearly distinguish, like everyone who is not distracted, between pleasant and aversive stimuli, but they react much less emotionally than control subjects. While retaining the capacity of being fully aware of something, they succeed in not being carried away by their emotional responses.1 Normal subjects either do not perceive the stimuli (e.g., when being purposely distracted by being asked to perform a cognitively demanding task) and do not react or perceive it and react strongly.
Wolf: I can see the virtue of this attitude. However, negative emotions also have important functions for survival. They have not evolved and been conserved by chance; they help us to survive. They protect us and help us avoid adverse situations. We have only talked about the disconnection and detachment of the negative components while preserving the positive components—empathy, love, carefulness, mindfulness, and diligence. For reasons of symmetry, one should expect that positive emotions also hamper an unbiased view of the world and fade with mental training.
Matthieu: If love and empathy are biased with attachment and grasping, then they will surely be accompanied by a distortion of reality.
Consequently, from a Buddhist perspective, biased empathy and grasping love are not positive because they result in suffering.
Conversely, altruistic love has positive effects on all concerned: the beneficiaries as well as the one who expresses that love. Similarly, strong indignation in the face of injustice can motivate one to engage energetically in actions intended to right the wrong. If such indignation is not mixed with hatred and is not superimposed on reality, then it is constructive, unlike malevolent, out-of-control anger.
It will result in less suffering and greater well-being for all. The positive or negative nature of an emotion should be assessed according to its motivation—altruistic or selfish—and its consequences in terms of well-being or suffering. Wolf: How can we conceive of a process that is uniquely initiated by our own brain? You want to change something in your brain by reducing as many intrusions as possible from outside; you can undertake a long promenade through your own brain trying to evoke certain feelings.
This would seem to require a certain dissociation, a level splitting, because there needs to be an agent that works on another level to induce a change. You need to monitor your emotions, you need to alert your inner senses to have those emotions—because I think you can only work on them if you activate them—and then you have to learn to differentiate them. How do you do this? What are the tools?
Outer and Inner Enrichment Matthieu: The mind obviously has the ability to know and train itself. People do that all the time without calling it meditation. They voluntarily memorize things, as a student will do; they enhance their mental skills in playing chess and solving various problems through mental training. Meditation is simply a more systematic way of doing this with wisdom—that is, with an understanding of the mechanisms of happiness and suffering. This process requires perseverance. You need to train again and again. You can’t learn to play tennis by holding a racket for a few minutes every few months. With meditation, the effort is aimed at developing not a physical skill but an inner enrichment. I understand that the development of brain functions comes from exposure to the outer world. If you are born blind, then the visual areas of the brain will not develop and will even be colonized by the auditory functions, which are more useful to a blind person.2 In the late 1990s, research showed that rats kept in a plain cardboard box show reduced neuronal connectivity. But if they are placed in an amusement park for rats, with wheels, tunnels, and friends, within a month they form many new functional connections.3 Soon after, neuroplasticity was also shown to exist throughout the life course in humans.4 However, most of the time, our engagement with the world is semi-passive. We are exposed to something and react to it, thus increasing our experience. We could describe this process as an outer enrichment.
In the case of meditation and mind training, the outer environment might change only minimally. In extreme cases, you could be in a simple hermitage in which nothing changes or sitting alone always facing the same scene day after day. So the outer enrichment is almost nil, but the inner enrichment is maximal. You are training your mind all day long with little outer stimulation. Furthermore, such enrichment is not passive, but voluntary, and methodically directed.
When you engage for eight or more hours a day in cultivating certain mental states that you have decided to cultivate and that you have learned to cultivate, you reprogram the brain. Wolf: In a sense, you make your brain the object of a sophisticated cognitive process that is turned inward rather than outward toward the world around you. You apply the cognitive abilities of the brain to studying its own organization and functioning, and you do so in an intentional and focused way, similar to when you attend to events in the outer world and when you organize sensory signals into coherent percepts. You assign value to certain states and you try to increase their prevalence, which probably goes along with a change in synaptic connectivity in much the same way as it occurs with learning processes resulting from interactions with the outer world.5 Let us perhaps briefly recapitulate how the human brain adapts to the environment because this developmental process can also be seen as a modification or reprogramming of brain functions. Brain development is characterized by a massive proliferation of connections and is paralleled by a shaping process through which the connections being formed are either stabilized or deleted according to functional criteria, using experience and interaction with the environment as the validation criterion.6 This developmental reorganization continues until the age of about 20. The early stages serve the adjustment of sensory and motor functions, and the later phases primarily involve brain systems responsible for social abilities.
Once these developmental processes come to an end, the connectivity of the brain becomes fixed, and large-scale modifications are no longer possible.
Matthieu: To some extent.
Wolf: To some extent, yes. The existing synaptic connections remain modifiable, but you can’t grow new long-range connections. In a few distinct regions of the brain, such as the hippocampus and olfactory bulb, new neurons are generated throughout life and inserted into the existing circuits, but this process is not large scale, at least not in the neocortex, where higher cognitive functions are supposed to be realized.7 Matthieu: A study of people who have practiced meditation for a long time demonstrates that structural connectivity among the different areas of the brain is higher in meditators than in a control group.8 Hence, there must be another kind of change allowed by the brain.
Processes of Neuronal Changes
Wolf: I have no difficulty in accepting that a learning process can change behavioral dispositions, even in adults. There is ample evidence of this from reeducation programs, where practice leads to small but incremental behavior modifications. There is also evidence for quite dramatic and sudden changes in cognition, emotional states, and coping strategies. In this case, the same mechanisms that support learning—distributed changes in the efficiency of synaptic connections—lead to drastic alterations of global brain states. The reason is that in a highly nonlinear, complex system such as the brain, relatively small changes in the coupling of neurons can lead to phase transitions that can entrain radical alterations of system properties.
This can occur in association with traumatic or cathartic experiences.
The rare sudden onset of psychosis is also likely due to such global state changes, but this is probably not what occurs with meditation because this practice seems to lead to slow changes.9
Matthieu: You could also change the flow of neuron activity, as when the traffic on a road increases significantly. Wolf: Yes. What changes with learning and training in the adult is the flow of activity. The fixed hardware of anatomical connections is rather stable after age 20, but it is still possible to route activity flexibly from A to B or from A to C by adding certain signatures to the activity that ensure that a given activation pattern is not broadcast in a diffuse way to all connected brain regions but sent only to selected target areas. The strength of interactions among centers can be modified by actually modulating the efficiency of the connecting synapses or dynamically configuring virtual highways. The latter strategy is probably based on the same principle as the tuning of a receiver to a specific radio station. The receiver is entrained into the same oscillation frequency as the sender.
10 In the brain, myriad senders are active all the time. Their messages must be selectively directed to specific targets, and this routing must occur in a taskdependent way. Thus, different functional networks need to be configured from moment to moment, and this must be achievable at time scales much faster than the learning-dependent changes of synaptic efficacy. The training phase in meditation is probably capitalizing on the slow, learning-related modifications of synaptic efficiency, whereas the fast engagement in a particular meditative state of which experts seem to be capable likely relies on more dynamic routing strategies.
Matthieu: You could thus gradually slow down the traffic on pathways of hatred and open wide the routes of compassion, for instance. So far, the results of the studies conducted with trained meditators indicate that they have the faculty to generate clean, powerful, well-defined states of mind, and this faculty is associated with some specific brain patterns. Mental training enables one to generate those states at will and to modulate their intensity, even when confronted with disturbing circumstances, such as strong positive or negative emotional stimuli.
Thus, one acquires the faculty to maintain an overall emotional balance that favors inner strength and peace. Wolf: So you have to use your cognitive abilities to identify more clearly and delineate more sharply the various emotional states, and to train your control systems, probably located in the frontal lobe, to increase or decrease selectively the activity of subsystems responsible for the generation of the various emotions.
Matthieu: You can surely refine your knowledge of the various aspects of mental processes themselves.
Wolf: Sure. You are aware of them, and you can familiarize yourself with them by focusing attention on them and then differentiating between them, forming category boundaries as one does when perceiving the outer world.
Matthieu: You can also identify the mental processes that lead to suffering and distinguish them from those that contribute to well-being, those that feed mental confusion, and those that preserve lucid awareness.
Wolf: Another analogy for this process of refinement could be the improved differentiation of objects of perception, which is known to depend on learning. With just a little experience, you are able to recognize an animal as a dog. With more experience, you can sharpen your eye and become able to distinguish with greater and greater precision dogs that look similar. Likewise, mental training might allow you to sharpen your inner eye for the distinction of emotional states. In the naïve state, you are able to distinguish good and bad feelings only in a global way. With practice, these distinctions would become increasingly refined until you could distinguish more and more nuances. The taxonomy of mental states should thus become more differentiated. If this is the case, then cultures exploiting mental training as a source of knowledge should have a richer vocabulary for mental states than cultures that are more interested in investigating phenomena of the outer world. Emotional Nuances
Matthieu: Buddhist taxonomy describes 58 main mental events and various subdivisions thereof. It is quite true that by conducting an in-depth investigation of mental events, one becomes able to distinguish increasingly more subtle nuances. If you look at a painted wall from a distance, it looks quite homogenous. However, if you look closely, you will see many imperfections: the surface is not as smooth as it seems; it has bumps and holes and white, yellowish, and dark spots, and so on. Similarly, when we look closely at our emotions, we find that they have many different aspects. Take anger, for instance. Often anger can have a malevolent component, but it can also be rightful indignation in the face of injustice. Anger can be a reaction that allows us to rapidly overcome an obstacle preventing us from achieving something worthwhile or remove an obstacle threatening us. However, it could also reflect a tendency to be short-tempered.
If you look carefully at anger, you will see that it contains aspects of clarity, focus, and effectiveness that are not harmful in and of themselves. Likewise, desire has an element of bliss that is distinct from attachment; pride has an element of self-confidence that does not lapse into arrogance; and envy entails a drive to act that, in itself, is not yet deluded, as it will later become when the afflictive state of mind of jealousy sets in.
So if you are able to recognize those aspects that are not yet negative and let your mind remain in them, without drifting into the destructive aspects, then you will not be troubled and confused by these emotions. This process is not easy, to be certain, but one can cultivate this capacity through experience.
Effortless Skills Matthieu: Another result of cultivating mental skills is that, after a while, you will no longer need to apply contrived efforts. You can deal with the arising of mental perturbations like the eagles I see from the window of my hermitage in the Himalayas. The crows often attack them, even though they are much smaller. They dive at the eagles from above trying to hit them with their beaks. However, instead of getting alarmed and moving around to avoid the crow, the eagle simply retracts one wing at the last moment, letting the diving crow pass by, and extends its wing back out. The whole thing requires minimal effort and is perfectly efficient. Being experienced in dealing with the sudden arising of emotions in the mind works in a similar way. When you are able to preserve a clear state of awareness, you see thoughts arise; you let them pass through your mind, without trying to block or encourage them; and they vanish without creating many waves.
Wolf: That reminds me of what we do when we encounter severe difficulties that require fast solutions, such as a complicated traffic situation. We immediately call on a large repertoire of escape strategies that we have learned and practiced, and then we choose among them without much reasoning, relying mainly on subconscious heuristics. Apparently, if we are not experienced with contemplative practice, we haven’t gone through the driving school for the management of emotional conflicts. Would you say this is a valid analogy? Matthieu: Yes, complex situations become greatly simplified through training and the cultivation of effortless awareness. When you learn to ride a horse, as a beginner you are constantly preoccupied, trying not to fall at every movement the horse makes. Especially when the horse starts galloping, it puts you on high alert. But when you become an expert rider, everything becomes easier. Riders in eastern Tibet, for instance, can do all kinds of acrobatics, such as shooting arrows at a target or catching something on the ground while galloping at full speed, and they do all that with ease and a big smile on their face.
One study with meditators showed that they can maintain their attention at an optimal level for extended periods of time. When performing what is called a continuous performance task, even after 45 minutes, they did not become tense and were not distracted even for a moment.11 When I did this task myself, I noticed that the first few minutes were challenging and required some effort, but once I entered a state of “attentional flow,” it became easier.
Wolf: This resembles a general strategy that the brain applies when acquiring new skills. In the naïve state, one uses conscious control to perform a task. The task is broken down into a series of subtasks that are sequentially executed. This requires attention, takes time, and is effortful. Later, after practice, the performance becomes automatized.
Usually, the execution of the skilled behavior is then accomplished by different brain structures than those involved in the initial learning and execution of the task. Once this shift has occurred, performance becomes automatic, fast, and effortless and no longer requires cognitive control. This type of learning is called procedural learning and requires practice. Such automatized skills often save you in difficult situations because you can access them quickly. They can also often cope with more variables simultaneously due to parallel processing. Conscious processing is more serialized and therefore takes more time. Do you think you can apply the same learning strategy to your emotions by learning to pay attention to them, differentiate them, and thereby familiarize yourself with their dynamics so as to later become able to rely on automatized routines for their management in case of conflict? Matthieu: You seem to be describing the meditation process. In the teachings, it says that when one begins to meditate, on compassion, for instance, one experiences a contrived, artificial form of compassion. However, by generating compassion over and over again, it becomes second nature and spontaneously arises, even in the midst of a complex and challenging situation. Once compassion becomes truly part of your mind stream, you don’t have to make special efforts to sustain it. We say it’s “meditating without meditation”: you are not actively “meditating,” but at the same time you are never separated from meditation. You simply dwell effortlessly and without distraction in this wholesome, compassionate state of mind.
Wolf: It would be really interesting to look with neurobiological tools at whether you have the same shift of function that you observe in other cases where familiarization through learning and training leads to the automation of processes. In brain scans, one observes that different brain structures take over when skills that are initially acquired under the control of consciousness become automatic. Matthieu: That is what a study conducted by Julie Brefczynski and Antoine Lutz at Richard Davidson’s lab seems to indicate. Brefczynski and Lutz studied the brain activity of novice, relatively experienced, and very experienced meditators when they engage in focused attention.
Different patterns of activity were observed depending on the practitioners’ level of experience. Relatively experienced meditators (with an average of 19,000 hours of practice) showed more activity in attention-related brain regions compared with novices. Paradoxically, the most experienced meditators (with an average of 44,000 hours of practice) demonstrated less activation than the ones without as much experience. These highly advanced meditators appear to acquire a level of skill that enables them to achieve a focused state of mind with less effort. These effects resemble the skill of expert musicians and athletes capable of immersing themselves in the “flow” of their performances with a minimal sense of effortful control.12 This observation accords with other studies demonstrating that when someone has mastered a task, the cerebral structures put into play during the execution of this task are generally less active than they were when the brain was still in the learning phase.
Wolf: This suggests that the neuronal codes become sparser, perhaps involving fewer but more specialized neurons, once skills become highly familiar and are executed with great expertise. To become a real expert seems to require then at least as much training as is required to become a world-class violin or piano player. With four hours of practice a day, it would take you 30 years of daily meditation to attain 44,000 hours. Remarkable!
Relating to the World
Matthieu: Mind training leads to a refined understanding of whether a thought or an emotion is afflictive, attuned to reality or based on a completely distorted perception of reality. Wolf: What is the difference between the two? You consider the afflictive state as enslaving, as narrowing, as masking valid cognition—in brief, as a fundamentally negative state that is not tuned to reality. I fully understand that your strategy works well as long as the source of conflict is solely your own pathology, but most conflicts arise from interactions with the world, which is clearly not free of conflict. Are you not assuming that the world is ideal and good and that it would be sufficient to purify one’s mind to be able to recognize this fact?
Matthieu: There are two ways of looking at this. The first one is to clearly recognize the flaws and shortcomings of the world, where beings are mostly ruled by mental confusion, obscuring emotions, and suffering.
The other way is to recognize that each and every sentient being in this world has the potential to get rid of such afflictions and actualize wisdom, compassion, and other such qualities.
Afflictive mental states begin with self-centeredness, with increasing the gap between self and others, between oneself and the world. They are associated with an exaggerated feeling of selfimportance, an inflated self-cherishing, a lack of genuine concern for others, unreasonable hopes and fears, and compulsive grasping toward desirable objects and people. Such states come with a high level of reality distortion. One solidifies outer reality and believes that the good or bad, desirable or undesirable qualities of outer things intrinsically belong to them instead of understanding that they are mostly projections of our mind.
In contrast, an act of unconditional benevolence, of pure generosity —as when you do something to make a child happy, help someone in need, save a life even, with no strings attached—even if nobody knows what you have done, this generates deep satisfaction and fulfillment.
Wolf: I am fascinated by the fact that what you tell me seems to put strong emphasis on the cultivation of an autonomous self. Not a selfish, possessive ego, but a strong, confident self. Matthieu: I am not talking about the strength of the ego or self-centeredness, which is the troublemaker, but a deep sense of confidence that comes from having gained some knowledge about the inner mechanisms of happiness and suffering, from knowing how to deal with emotions, and thus from having gathered the inner resources to deal with whatever comes your way.
13
How Young Can One Start to Meditate?
Wolf: I take from your description that meditation requires a high level of cognitive control. However, cognitive control depends on the prefrontal cortex, which becomes fully functional only during late adolescence. Does this imply that only adults can practice meditation?
If not, would it not be preferable to begin with meditation as early as possible to capitalize on the plasticity of the brain and make it an integral part of education? We know that the acquisition of other abilities, such as playing the violin or learning a second language, is much easier in early life. Can children master a technique that requires so much cognitive control? Matthieu: Indeed there are stages in our emotional development, but I think that even at early stages, there is a possibility to do some kind of training. In our monastery at Shechen, we don’t formally teach meditation to children and young novices (from 8 to 14 years old).
But they do participate in long ceremonies in the temple, which resemble group meditations, during which there is a soothing atmosphere of inner calm and emotional rest, so the children begin to be exposed to these states of mind at an early age. I am sure it helps a lot to simply provide an environment that calms the mind rather than constantly provoking waves of emotional disturbances, as is often the case in the West, with noise, violence on TV, video games, and the like.
Besides this, in a traditional Buddhist setting, young children are mostly taught through example. They see their parents and educators behave on the basis of the principles of nonviolence toward humans, animals, and the environment. One cannot underestimate the strength of emotional contagion, as well as the way of being’s contagion.
One’s inner qualities are immensely influential on those who share one’s life. One of the most important things is to help children become skilled in identifying their emotions and those of others, and to show them basic ways of dealing with emotional outbursts.
Wolf: This is one of the goals of every educational system, to strengthen the ability to control one’s emotions, and a rich repertoire of tools is available to achieve this: reward and punishment, creating attachment to role models, educational games, storytelling, and so on. All cultures have recognized the virtues of controlling emotions and developed a large variety of educational strategies to that end. Matthieu: I must add that, although it certainly requires some maturity to achieve lasting stability in emotional control, it still seems possible to begin this process at an early age. Children do find strategies to recover a sense of balance and inner peace after going through emotional upheaval. In a book called The Joy of Living, Mingyur Rinpoche recounts how as a child he was extremely anxious and had frequent panic attacks. He was then living in Nubri, in the mountains of Nepal, near the Tibetan border. He came from a nice, loving family —his grandfather and father were great meditators—and did not experience any particular traumatic event, but he had these uncontrollable bursts of inner fear. But even at the age of six or seven years old, he found a way to alleviate his panic attacks. He used to go to a cave nearby and sit there alone, meditating in his own way for a couple of hours. He felt a welcome sense of peace and relief, as if turning off the heat, and he deeply appreciated the quality of those contemplative moments. Still, that was not enough to get rid of his anxiety, which kept on creeping back.
At the age of 13, he felt a strong aspiration to do a contemplative retreat and embarked on the traditional three-year retreat that is often practiced in Tibetan Buddhism. In the beginning, things became even worse. So one day he decided that enough was enough and that the time had come to use all the teachings he had received from his father to go to the depth of his problem. He meditated for three days uninterruptedly, not coming out of his room, looking deep into the nature of mind. At the end of it, he had gotten rid of his anxiety forever. When you now meet this incredibly kind, warm, and open person, who radiates well-being and inner peace, displays such great warmth and sense of humor, and teaches with limpid clarity on the nature of mind, you find it hard to believe that he ever experienced anything close to anxiety. He is a living testimony of the power of mind training and furthermore of the possibility to embark on it from an early age.14
Mental Distortions Wolf: In German we have a saying, “Komm zu dir,” which means “cut the strings”—the ties that attach you to something, that make you do what others want, that make you believe what others believe, that make you be kind because somebody else wants you to be kind. If you get caught in this net of dependencies, then we say that you “lose yourself.” This is why a protective environment that generously grants self-determination is indispensable, as long as the cognitive control mechanisms of children are strong enough to protect them from losing themselves in the face of imposed intrusions and expectations.
Matthieu: After recovering from a fit of anger, we often say, “I was beside myself” or “I wasn’t myself.”
Wolf: “Ich war außer mir”—“I was out of myself”—we also say this in German. Life sometimes confronts us with situations that we simply cannot cope with by remaining equanimous and that drive us “out of ourselves.” However, we have developed strategies to recover equilibrium. Some of these may be innate, whereas others may be acquired by learning.
Matthieu: This is meant to be the fruit of practice. Strong emotions may still arise in the mind, but instead of invading and overpowering the mind, they vanish like a whisper.
Wolf: That sounds wonderful. Usually it takes quite some time until you get back into a quiet state. One of the reasons is that the stress hormones released in highly aversive situations decay rather slowly.
Matthieu: With experience it does not necessarily take a long time. In fact, it can come down as quickly as bubbling milk taken off the fire. If you let the emotion, even a strong one, pass through your mind without fueling it, without letting the spiral of thoughts spin out of control, the emotion will not last and will vanish by itself. Attention and Cognitive Control Wolf: Earlier, we were talking about the possibility of using mental practice as a tool to fine-tune the inner eye and the ability to use introspection to explore the cognitive functions of the brain and learn to form more differentiated categories of emotions and of cognitive processes in the same way that one can fine-tune one’s perception of the outer world. Experts in perfume factories, the “noses,” learn through practice to distinguish mixtures of odors that for most of us smell the same. It is conceivable that mental practice can do the same thing to the cognitive abilities of the brain and sharpen awareness of one’s own cognitive processes. This does require a substantial amount of cognitive control because in this case attention—unlike in the case of the “noses”—has to be directed toward processes originating within the brain.
There is now convincing neurobiological evidence suggesting that mental practice uses attention mechanisms to activate and analyze internal processes so that they can become the subject of learning processes.15 I allude to the seminal work by Richard Davidson and Antoine Lutz, who recorded electroencephalograms of you and other Buddhist practitioners while you were meditating.16 When I first saw these data at the meeting in Paris that was organized in memoriam of Francisco Varela, a good friend of both of ours, I was struck by the fact that there was a striking increase in meditators’ brains of the amplitude of oscillatory activity in a frequency range of 40 Hz, the so-called gamma frequency band. These oscillations were discovered some 25 years ago in the visual cortex and were suspected to play an important role in cognitive processes. Since then much work has been performed to investigate the putative functions of oscillations and synchrony in neuronal processing.
Of the many different functions that this temporal patterning of neuronal activity is likely to serve, its involvement in attentional mechanisms is particularly important in the present context. Several laboratories provided evidence that focused attention is associated with an enhancement of gamma oscillations and neuronal synchrony.
17 If attention is directed to a particular subsystem in the brain to prepare it for processing, one observes an increase of synchronous gamma oscillations in that system. If you are about to direct your attention to a visual object, then the anticipation of having to process signals from this visual object increases oscillatory activity in the beta and gamma frequency range in visual areas of the cerebral cortex.
Likewise, if one anticipates that one will have to process an auditory signal, and one will have to use this signal to initiate a motor act, the brain begins to synchronize the oscillatory activity among the areas that will be involved in the future process—in this case, the auditory cortex and the premotor and motor areas. This facilitates rapid “handshaking” between the concerned areas and prepares the necessary coordination between sensory and executive structures.18 Thus, when a stimulus actually appears, the responses to this stimulus are enhanced and better synchronized than when the stimulus was not anticipated. This prerequisite is necessary to ensure rapid information processing and safe transmission of computational results across the cortical network.19 The phenomenon of binocular rivalry illustrates the close relations among synchronous oscillatory activity, conscious perception, and attention. If the two eyes are presented with different patterns that cannot be fused into a single coherent percept, then only one of the two images is perceived at any one time. If, for instance, a set of vertical lines is shown to the right eye and a set of horizontal lines to the left eye, one does not perceive a superposition of the two gratings, which would look like a checkerboard. Rather one sees either the vertical or horizontal grating, and these percepts keep on alternating every few seconds due to internal switching mechanisms. The question is, how is this selection and switching process achieved at the neuronal level?
At the early stages of visual processing in the primary visual cortex, this switch in perception is associated with a change in the synchronization of neuronal responses to the gratings. The grating that is actually perceived at a particular moment evokes responses that are more synchronized in the 40-Hz range than the responses to the grating not perceived at that moment.20 Each eye physically “sees” the same pattern all the time, but the subject perceives only the vertical or horizontal grating. These experiments suggest that it is easier for perceptual signals to access the level of conscious processing if they are well synchronized.
Matthieu: Why does this switching happen without the subject being able to control it? Wolf: The signals from either the right or left eye are suppressed to avoid seeing double images. We perform this suppression all the time without being aware of it, and it is only under experimental conditions that we take notice of this phenomenon of interocular suppression. Because it involves an internal process to decide which of the available sensory signals should have access to consciousness, interocular suppression is frequently used as a paradigm to investigate the signatures of neuronal activity that are required for any neuronal activity to reach the level of conscious perception. In this context, it is noteworthy that practitioners of meditation can deliberately slow down the alternation rate of binocular rivalry.
21 I experienced this myself after a few days of Zen practice while staring at the white wall in front of me. As I could infer from the changes in the far periphery of the visual field, the signals conveyed by my two eyes to my brain became suppressed in alternation at a remarkably slow rhythm of a few seconds.
Matthieu: I did that once with Brent Field at Anne Treisman’s laboratory at Princeton and found out that it was possible to slow down the automatic switching between the left and right images and keep the perception of only one image up to 30 seconds or even a minute.
Wolf: The neuronal correlate of a conscious perception compared with nonconscious processing appears to be a sudden and strong increase of precise phase synchrony—or, one could also say, of coherence of oscillatory activity, first in the gamma frequency range and subsequently during the maintenance period also in lower frequency ranges. Access to consciousness seems to require a particularly wellordered global state of the brain.22
Matthieu: So it’s the same as Francisco Varela’s “moony face experiment”? Wolf: Yes, it is closely related to Francisco’s experiment with the moony faces. He found an increase of gamma oscillations and synchrony between cortical areas, when subjects were able to identify a human face in pictograms consisting of black-and-white contours. If they failed to see a face and just perceived noninterpretable contours, the gamma oscillations had smaller amplitude and were less well synchronized.23 Now, this excursion was long but necessary, as you will see that it is closely related to the neuronal correlates of meditation—what Richard Davidson saw in your brain when you engaged in meditation.
Matthieu: Not only me of course, but quite a few other meditators…
Wolf: …quite a few others, fortunately, because in science you need repeatability. What he saw was a surprising increase of a highly coherent oscillatory activity in the gamma frequency range of 40 to 60 Hz.
The most interesting observation, however, was that this increase occurred over the central and frontal brain regions but not, as is the case when you direct attention to the outer world, over sensory areas.
This finding suggests that you engaged your attentional mechanism to focus attention on processes in higher cortical areas, those areas that process highly abstract concepts, symbols, and maybe also feelings and emotions. It is difficult with electroencephalographic investigation to localize the activated areas, but the source of this activity is likely in areas other than the primary sensory areas because there was no sensory stimulation. Dangerously misleading in such measurements are artifacts caused by non-neuronal processes, such as muscle contractions and eye movements. I hope these potential sources of artifacts have been controlled for in the experiments on meditators.
One way to interpret these findings is that you intentionally activate internal representations, focus your attention on them, and then work on them in much the same way as you process external information.
You apply your cognitive abilities to internal events. Matthieu: Or you keep a meta-awareness of a particular state that you are trying to develop, such as compassion, and maintain this meditation state moment after moment—
Wolf: —keeping your attention focused on particular internal states, which can be emotions or the contents of imagination. In essence, it is the same strategy as one applies with the perception of the outer world—except that most of us are far less familiar with focusing attention on inner states.
Matthieu: This fits with the definition of meditation, which is to cultivate a particular state of mind without distraction. Two Asian words are usually translated as “meditation”: in Sanskrit, bhavana means “to cultivate,” and in Tibetan, gom means “to become familiar with something that has new qualities and insights as well as a new way of being.” So meditation cannot be reduced to the usual clichés of “emptying the mind” and “relaxing.”
Wolf: Just as in cases where we focus attention on external events, learning occurs as a consequence of attending to something. When one attentively observes an object, one learns about the object.
Changes in synaptic connections between neurons occur, and the next this object is observed, it will appear more familiar. It is recognized much more easily and faster, and it can be recalled from memory and enter awareness—but all this is only possible if one directs one’s attention toward the object while it is perceived. Matthieu: It could be maintaining and cultivating the experience of benevolence. Altruistic love, for instance, occurs in everyone’s mind from time to time, but it usually does so in a transient way and is quickly replaced by another state of mind. Because we do not cultivate altruistic love systematically, this short-lived state will not be well integrated in the mind and will not lead to lasting changes in our dispositions. We all experience thoughts of lovingkindness, generosity, inner peace, and freedom from conflict. Yet these thoughts are fleeting and will soon be replaced by other thoughts, including afflictive ones such as anger and jealousy. To fully integrate altruism and compassion in our mind stream, we need to cultivate them over longer periods of time. We need to bring them to our minds and then nurture them, repeat them, preserve them, and enhance them, so that they gradually fill our mental landscape in a more durable way.
The idea is not only to generate but to perpetuate over an extended period of time a powerful state of mind that is saturated with benevolence. Elements of repetition and perseverance are common to all forms of training. However, the particularity here is that the skills you are developing are fundamental human qualities such as compassion, attention, and emotional balance.
Wolf: Right. Meditation, then, is a highly active, attentive process. By focusing attention on those internal states, you familiarize yourself with them, you get to know them, and this facilitates recall if you want to activate them again.
This must go along with lasting changes at the neuronal level. Any activity in the brain that is occurring under the control of attention is memorized. There are modifications in synaptic transmission; synapses will strengthen or weaken. This in turn will lead to changes in the dynamical state of neuronal assemblies. Thus, through mental training, you create novel states of your mind, and you learn to retrieve them at will. I find it remarkable that this possibility has been discovered at all. What was the incentive to withdraw attention from the outer world, direct it toward internal states, subject them to cognitive dissection, and eventually gain control over them? Why is it that Eastern traditions have focused so much on the internal rather than the external universe? Matthieu: Well, I guess it is because these mental states are key determinants of happiness and suffering. This is truly important in anyone’s life.
What I find even more surprising is how little attention has been paid in the Western world to the inner conditions of well-being and how much people underestimate the capacity of the mind to transform the way we experience things.
Wolf: A particularly fascinating aspect is that this kind of mental training leads to changes in the brain that are long lasting and persist beyond the meditation process. A recent study from Harvard University showed that in long-term meditators, the volume of the cerebral cortex is increased in certain areas of the brain.24 Research done at my daughter Tania’s laboratory has also shown that structural changes occur in the brain of subjects initially new to meditation who trained for nine months in three types of practices: three months of mindfulness, three months in perspective taking, and three months in lovingkindness. Each type of meditation produced structural modification in a specific area, which are different from one meditation to the other. Such increases in volume have also been observed after learning motor skills or intensive sensory stimulation and are due to a learning-dependent increase of the neuropile (i.e., the compartment containing the connections between neurons). The number and size of synapses and their targets, the spines of the dendrites, increase, just as with other forms of training and learning.25
Attentional Blink Wolf: Another well-controlled study points in the same direction and suggests long-term modifications of the mechanisms that control attention. It appears that the maintenance of the high level of attention required to sustain meditative states causes a modification of the mechanisms that sustain attention.
Let me explain the finding. A researcher in the laboratory of Anne Treisman, an expert in attention research, investigated a phenomenon called attentional blink in long-term meditators.26 One can show a sequence of words or images in rapid succession and adjust the parameters in such a way that subjects perceive only a fraction of the stimuli. Once subjects perceive one image, the next image, maybe even the next two images, will not be perceived because the brain is still engaged with the processing of the first image and thus has no attentional resources left to process the following image or images.
This inability to process the subsequent images is called attentional blink. The idea is that attention, while it is engaged in processing one consciously perceived image, is not available for the processing of the next one. Heleen Slagter and Antoine Lutz have also shown that after three months of intensive training in meditation on full awareness, attentional blink was considerably reduced.27
Matthieu: So, when you have a quick succession of images, letters, or words, when you clearly identify one of them, that process involves your mind to such an extent that you will not be able to see one or more of the images that follow just after the one you have recognized.
Wolf: The time interval during which you are “blind” is in the range of 50 to a few hundred milliseconds depending on the complexity of the processed image and subject age. The surprising finding was that experienced meditators, even if they had already reached a certain age —the blink interval increases with age because attentional mechanisms slow down—had remarkably short blink intervals. They perceived each of the stimuli even at high presentation rates.
Matthieu: There is an unpublished result about a 65-year-old meditator who showed no attentional blink at all. Wolf: We have confirmed this. In aged long-term practitioners, the attentional blink was as short as in young controls.28 This finding indicates that long-term meditation alters attentional mechanisms.
Another remarkable finding has been reported in the follow-up study that Richard Davidson performed with you and your colleagues. It showed a close correlation between the amplitude of the attentionrelated, highly synchronous gamma oscillations over central cortical areas and your subjective judgment on the actual depth and clarity of your meditative state. It is important to demonstrate such correlations between biophysical measures and subjective phenomena; if there is a statistically significant correlation, then it is likely that there is more than an accidental coincidence and perhaps even a causal relation. As far as I know, these robust and convincing data show that meditation is associated with a special brain state and does have lasting effects on brain functions.
Matthieu: Regarding attentional blink, from an introspective perspective, it would seem that usually someone’s attention is captured by the object because it goes to the object, sticks to the object, and then has to disengage from the object. There is a moment of thinking, “Oh, I have seen a tiger” or “I have seen that word.” Then it takes some time to let it go. But, if you simply remain in the state of open presence, which is the state that works best to reduce attentional blink, you simply witness the image without attaching to it and therefore without having to disengage from it. When the next image flashes, a 20th of a second later, you are still there, ready to perceive it. Wolf: So the process of meditation has two effects: You learn to work on your own attentional mechanisms, and then you become an expert in engaging and disengaging attention at will. The question is how deeply these practitioners process the individual pictures. Apparently they attach less attention to each image and therefore can perceive the successive images more easily. Could it be that they just process less thoroughly and therefore can follow more rapidly than naïve subjects, that they perform less analysis and therefore are less refractory? Are meditators in general dealing with the phenomena in the outer world in a different, perhaps more superficial way, just brushing past it and not taking anything seriously?
Matthieu: I don’t think it’s a question of being “serious” but rather of the relative magnitude of grasping and attaching to perceptions and outer phenomena.
Wolf: Not attaching to them?
Matthieu: Yes. Buddhism says that if we don’t engage constantly in the process of attraction and repulsion, this is liberating. You also spoke about instruments, such as microscopes and telescopes, with which humans extend their cognition. From a contemplative perspective, fine tuning one’s introspection toward perceptive and mental processes, rather than being powerless against and blindly caught in their automatisms, corresponds to enhancing the quality and power of the mind’s telescope. This allows one to see those processes happening in real time and not be carried away and fooled by them.
It seems that the different types of meditation that have been investigated have all had quite different signatures in the brain. They might all generate gamma waves, with different magnitudes, but they certainly activate distinct areas of the brain. Wolf: This is what you would expect because if you direct your attention toward particular emotions, train in developing compassion, or train in pure attention and empty the workspace of consciousness of any other content, then you are probably engaging different brain systems, which should result in different activation patterns. You will probably always find the attention-dependent activation patterns because meditation always requires focused attention, but the content-related activation patterns will depend on whether you direct your attention to visual, emotional, or social contents. In addition, one expects to find specific activation patterns in the respective brain regions. The common denominator of meditation, and this may sound surprising, is the high level of cognitive control.
Matthieu: After the 2000 Mind and Life meeting, I went to visit Paul Ekman, the world’s leading expert on the facial expression of emotions, at his lab in San Francisco. He had a few of us go through a test in which we were presented with faces showing a neutral expression. Then for 1/30th of a second, a picture flashed of the same face showing one of the six basic emotions that are universal to all human beings: joy, sadness, anger, surprise, fear, and disgust. You could see that there had been a change, but it was very, very fast. If you were to go slowly, frame by frame, then you would see that the single image with the emotion is clear—a broad smile, a cringe of disgust, and so on.
But when it is only displayed for 1/30th of a second, it looks like only a quick twitch in the face, which then immediately goes back to its neutral expression. The emotion thus briefly displayed is quite difficult to identify without training. Those microexpressions, as Paul calls them, occur involuntarily all the time in daily life and are uncensored indicators of one’s inner feelings, but usually we are not skillful in identifying them.
Wolf: Exactly. Matthieu: It turns out that a small number of people naturally recognize these microexpressions quite well, and you can learn to recognize them through training. In our case, two meditators took the test. Personally, I didn’t feel that I had done well on the test, and I felt that the skill required did not have much to do with meditation. It turned out, however, that we actually scored higher and were more accurate and sensitive to the microexpressions than several thousand other people tested previously.
29 According to Paul, this capacity to identify microexpressions might have been related to an enhanced speed of cognition, which would make it easier to perceive rapid stimuli in general, or greater attunement to the emotions of other people, which would make reading them easier. In general, the ability to recognize these fleeting expressions represents an unusual capacity for accurate empathy.
People who do better at recognizing these subtle emotions are more interested, curious, and open to new experiences. They are also known to be conscientious, reliable, and efficient.
Wolf: It could be related to the reduction of attentional blink and simply result from the ability to perceive short-duration events, or indeed it could indicate that your perception of emotions is more refined.
Attention, Rumination, and Open Presence
Matthieu: You see, regarding attention, if your mind wanders somewhere else, when the sudden change of facial expression happens, it draws back your attention, but it’s too late. The expression is already gone. But if your attention is clearly dwelling in the present moment, in a state of readiness at all times, then when the event happens, you are there.
You don’t have to be brought back to the present moment by a sudden change. So either it is a matter of bare attention or your sensibility or openness to others’ emotion is enhanced—probably a combination of both. Now should I come back to the other points that you mentioned? Wolf: Sure.
Matthieu: You spoke about directing attention inward. The fact is that our attention is constantly facing outward. Most of the time, we are directing our attention to the outer world, to forms, colors, sounds, tastes, smells, textures, and so forth.
Wolf: Which is important for surviving.
Matthieu: Of course, there is no question about that. If you need to cross a street, then you have to be aware of all that is going on. One of the great Tibetan masters used to face the palm of his hand outward. Then he would turn his palm inward, commenting, “Now we should look within and pay attention to what is going on in our mind and to the very nature of awareness itself.” This is one of the key points of meditation. Some people find this to be a rather strange thing to do.
They think it’s quite unhealthy to pay too much attention to our mental processes and that we should rather remain engaged in the world. Some even find the adventure scary.
Wolf: I am going to interrupt you. Yesterday, you said this occupation with oneself, with one’s inner states, is rumination and just the opposite of what meditation should do. Could you differentiate that from what you’re talking about now? Matthieu: That’s different from rumination. Rumination is letting your inner chatter go on and on, letting thoughts about the past invade your mind, becoming upset again about past events, endlessly guessing the future, fueling hopes and fears, and being constantly distracted in the present. By doing so, you become increasingly disturbed, selfcentered, busy, and preoccupied with your own mental fabrications and eventually depressed. You are not truly paying attention to the present moment and are simply engrossed in your thoughts, going on and on in a vicious circle, feeding your ego and self-centeredness.
You are completely lost in inner distraction, in the same way that you can be constantly distracted by ever-changing outer events. This is the opposite of bare attention. Turning your attention inward means to look at pure awareness and dwell without distraction, yet effortlessly, in the freshness of the present moment, without entertaining mental fabrications.
We did some other experiments with Paul Ekman and Robert Levenson at the University of California, Berkeley, that I think relate well to this concept of bare awareness. They involved the startle reflex, which occurs, for instance, when one is confronted with a loud, surprising sound. It triggers a strong expression of surprise in the face, often a strong jerk of the body, and a significant physiological response (changes in heart rate, blood pressure, skin temperature, etc.). Like all reflexes, the startle reflects brain activity that normally lies beyond the range of voluntary regulation. Usually, the more people react, the stronger they tend to experience negative emotions, such as fear, disgust, and so on.
In our case, the scientists used a sound at the top of the threshold for auditory tolerance—a very loud explosion, like that of a gunshot or a large firecracker going off near one’s ear. In general, some people do better than others at moderating the startle, but many years of studies have shown that out of the several hundred people tested, no one could prevent the muscle spasms of the face and the bodily jump.
Some people almost fell off their chair and, a few seconds after the startle, displayed an expression of relief or amusement. However, when we applied the strategy of the meditation of open presence, the startle almost disappeared.30
Wolf: Even though you didn’t know what was going to happen? Matthieu: In some trials you can see a countdown from 10 to 1 on a screen before the explosion, and in other trials you just know that it will happen within five minutes or so. The meditator is asked to either sit in a neutral state or engage in a particular meditation state. Personally, when I used the meditation of open presence, the explosion sound seemed softer and less intrusive. Open presence is a state of clear awareness in which the mind is vast like the sky. The mind is not focused on anything, yet it is extremely clear and present, vivid and transparent. It is usually free from discursive thoughts, but there is no intention to block or prevent the thoughts from arising. Thoughts undo themselves as they arise, without proliferating or leaving traces.
If you can remain properly in this state, the bang becomes much less disturbing. In fact, it can even enhance the clarity of the open state.
Wolf: So it’s not focused attention on any content—
Matthieu: —but it’s never distracted either.
Wolf: You open your window of attention—
Matthieu: —yes, but without effort. There is neither mental chatter nor particular focus of attention except resting in pure awareness, rather than focusing on it. I cannot find any better word; it is something that is luminous, clear, and stable, without grasping. That’s the state of mind in which the explosion creates almost no emotional reaction in the face and no change in heart rate variability.
When we repeated the experiments on two other occasions, I tried to engage in self-induced rumination and imagination, remembering a particular vivid experience from my own life. I became completely taken up by my chain of thoughts.
Wolf: You call this internal chatter? Matthieu: Yes, either internal chatter or mental fabrications. When the explosion occurred as I was purposely engaged in this distracted state, I was much more startled by the noise. My personal interpretation is that the bang suddenly brought me back to the reality of the present moment, from which I was so far away, lost in my thoughts.
However, if you remain in pure awareness, you are always in the freshness of the present moment, and the explosion is simply one of these present moments. You don’t have to be brought back to anything because you are already there.
It is understandable that in normal life, when there is a surprising event that requires immediate attention, perhaps even something necessary for your survival, if you are distracted at that moment, the more your mind is wandering somewhere else, the stronger the startle will be.
Wolf: So the startle reaction would be the result of shifting attention from concrete, remembered, or presently experienced events toward the unexpected new stimulus.
Matthieu: Yes, or rather shifting from being somewhere else in your mind to the present moment.
Wolf: Thus, in a state of pure awareness, you are already in the present; attention is there but it is not directed—
Matthieu: —and yet it’s available completely.
Wolf: The spotlight of attention is wide, you are prepared, you don’t have to first disengage attention from some other content, and therefore you are not startled.
Mindfulness and Distraction Matthieu: As we cultivate attention, we should understand that it is a powerful tool, so it should be applied to something that contributes to freedom from suffering. We can also use effortless attention to simply rest in the natural state of mind, in clear awareness that is imbued with inner peace and makes us much less vulnerable to the ups and downs of life. Whatever happens, we will not suffer much emotional disturbance and can enjoy greater stability. Obtaining this pure mindfulness of the present moment has many advantages. We may also use attention to cultivate compassion. If the mind is constantly distracted, even though it looks as if one is meditating, then the mind is powerlessly carried away all over the world like a balloon in the wind. So the increased resolution of your inner telescope, combined with sustained attention, is an indispensable tool to cultivate those human qualities that can be developed through meditation. In the end, freedom from suffering becomes a skill.
Wolf: I am fascinated by the way you put it. The fact that it requires attentional control and repetition suggests to me that you use the strategy of skill learning, which relies on procedural rather than on declarative memory. We possess two distinct mechanisms for the long-term storage of information. One is the memory system, which is able to store information acquired in a one-trial learning situation.
When you bite into a piece of fruit that has a hard kernel and it hurts, you will remember this for the rest of your life and never do it again.
We call this declarative or episodic memory. The contents of this memory can usually be reported verbally, we are conscious of them, and we typically store information about the event as well as the context in which it occurred and its exact timestamp in our biography.
This process is different from learning a motor skill such as piano playing, skiing, or sailing—you have to practice over and over again until you become an expert and the skill becomes automatic. This is procedural learning and engages procedural memory. You have to practice, and you have to do it in a particular way. In the beginning of skill acquisition, practice is very much under the control of attention and consciousness: you have to dissect the process into steps, and you need a teacher who tells you how to do it, or you do it by trial and error, which is less efficient— Matthieu: —hence the importance of having a skilled teacher, especially when engaging in meditation.
Wolf: Teachers help, they speed up the process, but you have to practice yourself. The neuronal substrate that supports these skills cannot shift instantly into a new state. You have to tune the neuronal circuits little by little over a long period of time; finally, when the skill is acquired, it becomes less and less dependent on attention and becomes more and more automatized. Imagine driving your car. You don’t invest any attention anymore in driving your car through a region in your city that you know well. You can engage in an attention-demanding conversation while you drive and execute a complex sequence of cognitive and executive acts without conscious control.
Matthieu: The same is said about meditation: In the beginning, meditation is contrived and artificial, and gradually it becomes natural and effortless.
Wolf: As I briefly mentioned before, during the acquisition of skills, a shift occurs from cortical to subcortical systems. In the beginning, when conscious control and focused attention are required, neocortical structures have to be engaged, in particular those involved in attention in the frontal and parietal lobes. However, once the skill has been acquired and becomes more automatic, activity in cortical control systems decreases and other structures become more involved.
In the case of motor skills, these structures are in addition to the cerebellum and the basal ganglia, the motor areas of the cortex that are always required. Matthieu: It’s clearly explained in meditation instructions that the first stages of meditation are always somehow artificial and require sustained efforts. Whether it comes easily in a spontaneous flow on some days or you feel bored on other days, you have to maintain the continuity and meditate day in and day out. It is said that it is better to do many short, regular, and repeated sessions of meditation rather than lengthy sessions only every week or fortnight.
Wolf: Which is exactly what you need to do when learning a skill learning and forming procedural memories. Much research has been done on the dynamics of skill learning and the neuronal substrate of procedural memory. It would be interesting to see whether the strategies that have been discovered as optimal for acquiring skills through procedural learning resemble those that have been intuitively worked out by teachers of meditation. Is it true, for example, that meditation sessions held just before you go to sleep are particularly effective? Because it is during sleep that procedural memory traces are shaped and consolidated.
Consolidating Learning through Sleep Matthieu: For most people who don’t have the opportunity to do retreats or meditate a lot every day, it is said that the most important times are early in the morning and before going to sleep. By meditating or doing any type of spiritual practice early in the morning, you set the tone for the day and set in motion a process of inner transformation that will somehow carry on through the day’s activities, like an invisible stream. To use another image, the fragrance of the meditation will remain and give a particular perfume to the whole day. It will create a different atmosphere, a different attitude, a way of being, and a way of relating to your own emotions and those of other people. Whatever happens during the day, you have an inner state of mind to which you can return. During the day, from time to time, you can also rekindle the meditation state, even for short moments, to enhance your experience.
Before falling asleep, if you clearly generate a positive state of mind, filled with compassion or altruism, it is said that this will give a different quality to the whole night. Oppositely, if you go to sleep while harboring anger or jealousy, then you will carry it through the night and poison your sleep. This is why a practitioner will endeavor to maintain a positive attitude right up to the moment of falling asleep, trying to maintain a clear and luminous state of mind. If you do so, then the flow will continue through the night. Wolf: This theory corresponds well to recent data on the relevance of sleep for learning and memory processes. It is well established by now that you have to go through a repetitive sequence of characteristic sleep patterns to consolidate memories—slow-wave sleep, so-called deep sleep, and the paradoxical sleep, rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, during which the brain is highly active and exhibits electrographic patterns indistinguishable from being awake, aroused, and attentive. These sleep patterns alternate during the night and serve to reestablish the equilibrium of the brain. Because of its plasticity, the brain undergoes changes while it responds to the environment. Throughout the day, new memories are formed, new skills are acquired, and all this is associated with changes in myriad synaptic connections. To maintain stability, the networks have to be recalibrated in response to these changes, and this recalibration seems to occur during sleep. Memory traces become reorganized, the relevant is segregated from the irrelevant, and newly learned contents get embedded in their respective association fields.31 This is the reason that the contents of dreams are often related to events of the preceding day. The sleeping brain reactivates these memory traces to work on them, integrate them with previous traces, and consolidate them. During the early phases of sleep, the activity patterns caused by the experiences preceding sleep are replayed by the brain, often in time lapse (i.e., on a contracted time scale). This could be the explanation for why meditators report that the state they achieve right before going to sleep carries into their sleep.32 However, this experience is not specific to meditation. Many people have experienced that learning the vocabulary of a foreign language is most efficient if one rehearses the list of words just before closing one’s eyes. During sleep, the rehearsed contents are consolidated in the absence of interfering experiences and are usually retrievable with great clarity the next morning.
Matthieu: Also, when you need to make an important decision and feel a bit confused and uncertain about it, if you clearly put the question of what you should do in your mind before falling asleep, the next morning the first thought that comes into your head seems to indicate the most meaningful choice, the one that is less distorted and biased by mental projections, hopes, and fears. Wolf: This is why we say Schlaf darüber, “Sleep on it,” when a difficult problem needs to be solved. Insight often presents itself on awakening.
Matthieu: I also wanted to mention that it is quite striking that people who engage in long-term meditation retreats—in Tibetan Buddhism in particular, practitioners do retreats that last more than three years— require much less sleep. These meditators come from different backgrounds. Some are monks or nuns, some are highly educated in Buddhist philosophy, others are not, and many are lay practitioners.
Of course, all have different temperaments. Nevertheless, in our retreat center in Nepal, for instance, after about a year of practice, almost everyone works their way down to just four hours of sleep.
They typically sleep from 10 at night to 2 or 3 in the morning depending on the individual, and they do so without forcing themselves and without feeling any signs of sleep deprivation. They feel fresh during the day and don’t doze off during their practice.
It is true that during the day, they don’t face a great amount of novelty, they are not exposed to stressful circumstances, and they don’t have to deal with all kinds of events and situations.
Nevertheless, they are far from being inactive, and the schedule of meditation exercises is quite demanding. It includes intense cultivation of attention, compassion, visualization techniques, and other skills. How would you interpret such a striking physiological change? Wolf: Here, several points come to my mind. First, it is known that young children (and this also holds for young animals), who have a lot to learn during the day because nearly everything they experience is novel to them, need to sleep much more than adults. They have to cope with massive changes in the functional architecture of their brains—and presumably not only because they have to learn more than adults but also because their brains are still developing, with new connections being formed and inappropriate connections removed.
These massive circuitry modifications require permanent recalibration and therefore long sleep episodes. Actually a positive correlation exists between the amount of sleep you need and the amount of novelty you have to digest. If one enriches the experience of animals or humans during daytime, then it increases the length of sleep, and it also changes the sleep pattern. This correlation between the novelty of experiences (i.e., the amount of disequilibrium inflicted by learninginduced changes in the functional architecture of the brain), on the one hand, and the amount of sleep required, on the other hand, supports the notion that sleep is required to reinstall the brain’s homeostasis.
Complex dynamic systems with a high degree of plasticity, such as the brain, are susceptible to disturbances of their equilibrium and are permanently at risk of entering critical states. When subjects are deprived of sleep for a long period of time, their brains become unstable. One consequence can be epileptic seizures, which are a reflection of supracritical excitatory states. In fact, doctors sometimes use sleep deprivation to diagnose epilepsy because it makes these pathological patterns more likely to occur. Other equally dramatic consequences of sleep deprivation are disturbances of cognitive functions with delusions, illusions, and even hallucinations. Memory functions deteriorate because there is no time to consolidate the engrams and regain equilibrium after the imbalance generated by learning. Moreover, attentional mechanisms deteriorate, which further impedes cognition and learning.
But let’s come back to the question of why meditators in retreat need less sleep. I would think it’s because they do not have to deal with novelty. They work on known and already stored contents, and thus there is probably less to be reorganized. The main task is consolidation, and this can perhaps be achieved even in the meditative state, as the brain is only minimally exposed to external stimulation. Matthieu: That’s right. The cultivation of skills and their consolidation is actually the main work of meditation. A study carried out in Madison, Wisconsin, in Giulio Tononi’s laboratory, in collaboration with Antoine Lutz and Richard Davidson, showed that, among meditators who had completed between 2,000 and 10,000 hours of practice, the increase of gamma waves was maintained during deep sleep, with an intensity proportional to the number of hours previously devoted to meditation.33 The fact that these changes persist in these people at rest and during sleep indicates a stable transformation of their habitual mental state, even in the absence of any specific effort, such as a meditation session.34
Wolf: It would be interesting to look at the sleep patterns people display while in retreat. The different sleep phases may have different functions, and it has been hypothesized that one serves consolidation while the other reestablishes equilibrium and orthogonalizes memory traces to reduce superposition and merging of memories that need to be kept segregated.
Matthieu: Can you explain that? Wolf: The brain’s memory is associative; it’s not like computer memory, where you have distinct addresses for distinct contents. In the brain, different memories are stored within the same network by differential changes in the coupling of neurons. The equivalent of a particular engram is a specific dynamic state of the network, a state characterized by the specific spatiotemporal distribution of active and inactive neurons of the network.
Let me put it simply. Assume we have 26 interconnected neurons, A to Z, that can become active in different combinations because their connections have been strengthened and weakened in a specific way through previous learning. The memory trace of content 1 would then consist of the predisposition of neurons ACD to be active simultaneously, content 2 would correspond to the coactivation of neurons AMZ, and so on. Now, if you store more and more contents into this network, you run into problems of superposition. The neuronal representations of different contents may become too similar or merge with one another, such that the representations may become blurred and ambiguous.
Matthieu: Can you give an example?
Wolf: The boundaries between the assemblies of neurons representing different memories may become blurred because the same synapses, the same connections, may have to be used for the representation of different contents. The greater the number of different patterns you want to store in this network, the more sophisticated the arrangement of the coupling of the neurons must be to keep these patterns separate from each other and distinguishable.
Matthieu: Is it like when there are too many images in a mirror? Wolf: Or too many different transparencies laid on top of each other. They will fuse and become blurred through interference. So you have to arrange your transparencies in a way that minimizes superposition and thus optimizes discriminability. Here is an example. You try to retrieve a name from memory, but its retrieval is blocked by another similar name that keeps popping up instead. In this case, the neuronal representations of the two names are not sufficiently segregated or orthogonalized. Improving the segregation of overlapping representations is thought to be one of the functions of sleep. One of the mechanisms could be to better bind the two names to their respective association fields, such as the differing contexts in which they have been stored. Whether the two functions, consolidation and orthogonalization of memory traces, are served by different sleep phases is still unknown, but it is conceivable that the one is more associated with consolidation and the other more with cleaning and arranging things properly. Therefore, it would be interesting to investigate the sleep patterns of meditators in retreat to see which phases dominate during their reduced sleep time.
Matthieu: Well, one indication might come from body movement. I was told that an average person turns over more than 15 times during a night.
When His Holiness the Dalai Lama was told this fact by a sleep specialist, he wondered whether we really move that much. I was also a bit puzzled. Some meditators sleep through the night in a sitting position, cross-legged, when they do long retreats. So we would not expect them to move that much. Other meditators traditionally sleep on their right side, with the right hand resting under their cheek and the other one extended along their body.
Wolf: Is there a reason? Matthieu: It’s quite complex. The teachings say that by sleeping in this position, we press down and inhibit the subtle channels of the body that are on the right side, which are said to carry negative emotions, while we facilitate the movement of the energy through the left side channels, which carry positive emotions. It is intriguing that this fits well with the notion that the right prefrontal cortex is related with negative emotion, whereas the left one is activated when positive emotions are experienced. Another reason for sleeping on the right side is not to press down on the heart.
Some years ago, when I was doing an eight-month retreat, I tried to observe myself. Once or twice a night, I would look at the small clock on my table to check the time. Over seven months, I tried to notice my position when I awoke. Every time, whenever I woke up in the middle of the night or when I was about to get up in the morning, I just had to open my eyes to see the clock right there in front of my eyes. I never found myself even once gazing at the ceiling or facing the other way. So I am pretty confident that I didn’t turn much during the five or so hours that I was sleeping.
Wolf: This would then suggest that you alternate much less between different sleep phases because these turns tend to occur during transitions.
Matthieu: While you go from a dream to deep sleep and so forth.
Wolf: Right, although nowadays people think that you also dream in slowwave sleep. The structure of the dreams may be different, but the brain is working in both phases, and high-frequency oscillations also occur in the slow-wave sleep phases. These fast oscillations are superimposed on the slow waves, and because fast oscillations are likely to be associated with the recall or activation of memories, dreaming may also occur in these deep sleep phases. It’s a bit difficult to find out because if you wake up people, you don’t know whether what they tell you has been experienced right at that moment or they are remembering dreams from earlier in the night. Matthieu: Is there a connection between remembering a dream more or less clearly between these two kinds of sleep?
Wolf: Again, it’s difficult to say. I think the literature says that if you wake people up during the REM sleep period, the paradoxical sleep phase, then the probability of having a dream recalled is higher than if you wake them out of deep sleep. However, I don’t know how valid the statistics are.
In the morning, you have a lot of paradoxical sleep phases. They increase throughout the night and reach a peak in the morning just before you wake up. Usually you remember the dreams that occur in the morning much more frequently than those that occur in the middle of the night—unless you have a dramatic dream that wakes you up.
This finding would suggest that dreams occurring in REM sleep are more easily remembered.
Compassion and Action Matthieu: You spoke about beta and gamma waves and their function in creating some kind of synchrony or resonance among different parts of the brain, which makes you ready for a task. This process seems to be in agreement with meditation. It appears, for instance, that when meditators engage in compassion meditation, which activates gamma waves more powerfully than any other meditation practice, there is a particular activation of the frontal areas of the brain, the executive part, although the meditator is not doing anything. From the contemplative perspective, we could interpret that as a complete readiness to act for the sake of others, which is a natural quality of genuine altruism and compassion. If you are not caught inside the bubble of self-centeredness and are less involved in relating everything to yourself, then the ego ceases to feel threatened. You become less defensive, feel less fear, and are less obsessed with selfconcern. As the deep feeling of insecurity goes away, the barriers that the ego created fall apart. You become more available to others and ready to engage in any action that could be benefit them. In a way, compassion has popped the ego bubble. That’s our interpretation.
That’s why those states of compassion and open presence give the strongest gamma waves of all meditation states, more than focused attention, for instance.
Wolf: I think focused attention would engage much less neuronal substrate because you concentrate on a certain subtask, which in terms of brain architecture means you are using a certain subsystem.
You activate and prepare this subsystem to come into play quickly by condensing all your resources in this subsystem.
Matthieu: The technical term in Tibetan for this meditation translates to “onepointed focused attention.”
Wolf: This should then lead to focused gamma activation of the areas that process the contents to which you are attending. One would expect the most widespread coherence to occur in association with the state that you call “complete openness”—or what is the right term? Matthieu: Open presence. Of course, these words are approximate. It is quite difficult to put such experiences into words. But it turns out that unconditional compassion produces even higher gamma activation than open presence.
Antoine Lutz and Richard Davidson showed that when one plays recordings alternately of a woman crying out in distress and a baby laughing to experienced meditators in a state of compassion, several areas of the brain linked to empathy are activated, including the insula. This zone is more activated by the distress cries than by the baby’s laughter. A close correlation is also observed among the subjective intensity of meditation on compassion, the activation of the insula, and cardiac rhythm.35 This activation is all the more intense when the meditators have more hours of training. The amygdala and cingulate cortex are also activated, indicating increased sensitivity to others’ emotional states.36 Your daughter Tania and her team have also shown that the neural networks for altruistic compassion and empathy are not the same. Compassion and altruistic love have a warm, loving, and positive aspect that “stand-alone” empathy for the suffering of the other does not have. The latter can easily lead to empathic distress and burnout. While collaborating with Tania, we arrived at the idea that burnout was in fact a kind of “empathy fatigue” and not “compassion fatigue,” as people often say.
37 Barbara Fredrickson and her colleagues also showed that meditating on compassion for 30 minutes per day for six to eight weeks increased positive emotions and one’s degree of satisfaction with existence.38 The subjects felt more joy, kindness, gratitude, hope, and enthusiasm, and the longer their training was, the more marked were the positive effects.
Compassion, Meditation, and Brain Coherence Matthieu: These results of compassion meditation must represent a state of high coherence because the mind is entirely filled with benevolence and lovingkindness for all and compassion for those who suffer. To begin, you might focus on a particular object. To arouse lovingkindness, you will imagine, for instance, a lovely child and feel nothing but benevolence toward that child. When that mental state has clearly arisen in your mind, you make it grow and sustain it until it fills your whole mental landscape. Then you simply try nurturing this state, to keep it present, full, and vast.
Wolf: Let me try an interpretation of that. It may be wrong; it’s speculative. The brain must be able to differentiate between good and bad states, consistent and inconsistent states.
Matthieu: In what way?
Wolf: The brain must know whether a particular dynamic state is a valid result, either of a perceptual act or a deliberation process, or whether the state is still part of the computations that eventually lead to the result. All you have in the brain is spiking neurons. There is always activity, a continuous stream of ever-changing activity patterns. The brain is constantly performing computations on incoming signals and searching for the most likely or plausible interpretations, and at a particular moment in time, a sudden transition occurs toward a result.
We are aware of this transition, and therefore the brain must be able to distinguish activity that is supporting the computations toward a result and activity that represents the result.
Matthieu: Can you give an example of the result? Wolf: There are many examples ranging from solutions to intellectual puzzles, riddles, and mathematical problems, to the apparently effortless solutions to perceptual problems. Imagine a cluttered scene with figures on a complex background. Your visual system performs complicated computations to isolate the figures from the background and identify them through comparison with stored knowledge, and all of a sudden there is this moment—Eureka! I have it! I have recognized it, I have the solution. This solution is a particular spatiotemporal activation pattern that is not so different from the patterns generated while the brain is searching for the solution. The question is how the activation patterns, which represent a solution, differ from those that reflect the computational process that leads to the solution. There must be a signature to neuronal states that are solutions that does not vary regardless of the content of the solution.
In addition, this signature must have various degrees of magnitude because we are to ascribe various degrees of reliability to a particular solution.
Matthieu: In what way?
Wolf: Some solutions are not very trustworthy. Perhaps I get to the end of a deliberation process but—
Matthieu: —you are not satisfied. Wolf: Right. I realize that this is not a reliable solution or that it is only a preliminary solution. I have to continue, or I have no solution at all, and I have to do more computation. The brain must have evaluation systems that are able to distinguish these activation states. Otherwise you wouldn’t know when to stop a computation and talk about the result, and you wouldn’t know what the quality of the result is.
Therefore, the brain must have a way to evaluate internal states: “This is a satisfying state. This is a dissatisfying state.” These valueattributing systems also support learning processes because you want to favor states that are identified as good states, and you want to disfavor states identified as bad states. Thus, the polarity of the changes in synaptic connectivity that mediate the learning has to be switched as a function of the value attributed to a state. That is, to favor the reoccurrence of a state, the connections between neurons supporting that state should be strengthened and vice versa: Connections favoring adverse states should be weakened to render generation of such states less likely.
Matthieu: This is similar to the fundamentals of training happiness as a skill, first recognizing which emotions and mental states are disturbing and which favor happiness. Then one works at fading out the former and developing the latter.
Wolf: Let me come back to your statement that the training and experience of compassion is also a pleasant state.
Matthieu: I would rather call it a fulfilling state. Wolf: As the electroencephalographic data indicate, this state is a highly coherent state. It is associated with a high degree of synchrony of high-frequency oscillations. Now comes my speculation. Maybe the signature of a solution is coherence, a state of synchrony, the moment at which ensembles of neurons engage in well-synchronized oscillatory activity. All the value-assigning systems would have to do to detect such coherent states is take samples of the actual activity patterns present in cortical networks and determine the degree of coherence or measure the amount of synchronicity. This task is not difficult because neurons are able to distinguish between synchronous and temporally dispersed input, the former being much more efficient in driving the neurons. As long as the patterns are temporally dispersed and rapidly changing, the value-assigning systems would not be activated, and the cortical activity would be classified as resulting from ongoing computations that have not yet converged toward a result. If, however, the activity has become highly coherent, the value-assigning systems would become active, signaling that a result has been obtained.
Now, if the signature of a result is the coherence of a state, the transient synchronization of a sufficient number of neurons distributed over a sufficiently large number of cortical areas that lasts sufficiently long to be considered valid or stable, the internal evaluation centers would signal that a result has been obtained and enable learning mechanisms to fix that state in case it needs to be remembered, strengthening those connections that support this particular state.
Let me now extend this: We know from experience that it is pleasant to arrive at results. “Eureka” can be an extremely fulfilling feeling. Thus, activation of evaluation centers appears to be associated with positive emotions—one of the reasons that we sometimes work hard to obtain solutions. Maybe we have an explanation here for the rewarding emotions associated with meditation. As the available data suggest, you generate an internal state during meditation that is characterized by a high degree of coherence, by the synchronization of oscillatory neuronal activity across an extended network of cortical areas. This condition should be ideal for the activation of the evaluation systems that detect globally coherent states and reward solutions with positive feelings. What you practice in meditation is perhaps the generation of such globally coherent states without, however, focusing on particular contents. You generate the state that has all the signatures of a good and reliable solution without any specific content. Extrapolating from how it feels to have obtained a solution to a concrete problem, I imagine that you get a feeling of content-free harmony, a feeling that all conflicts are resolved and everything has fallen into place.
Matthieu: Yes, we call it fulfillment, wholesomeness, inner peace. That brings us back to what His Holiness the Dalai Lama often says, with a good touch of humor, when he explains that the bodhisattva—the ideal embodiment of altruism and compassion in the Buddhist path—has in fact found the smartest way to fulfill his own wish for happiness. The Dalai Lama adds that when thinking and acting in an altruistic way, it is not at all guaranteed that we will actually benefit others or even please them. When you try to help someone, even with a perfectly pure motivation, they might look at you suspiciously and ask, “Hey, what do you want, what’s the matter with you?” But you are 100% sure to be helping yourself because altruism is the most positive of all mental states. So the Dalai Lama concludes, “The bodhisattva is smartly selfish.” In contrast, the one who only thinks of himself is “foolishly selfish” because he only brings distress on himself.
Wolf: It seems indispensable that the brain can evaluate its own states, distinguish the unwanted from the wanted, and then attach emotions to these states so that unwanted states can be avoided and wanted states approached. If you have an inner conflict, this state is unwanted, and you are driven by unpleasant feelings to get out of that state, to search for a solution. So there must also be a characteristic signature to activation patterns that represent a conflict. This signature should again have a generalizable format because, although conflicts can have many different reasons and arise at many different levels of processing, the feelings associated with conflicts are similar, suggesting a final common path for the evaluation of conflicts.
However, to the best of my knowledge, we do not yet know what the neuronal signature of conflict is. It must again be a particular state of activity—maybe a particularly low level of coherence. Matthieu: Many people are literally destroyed by inner conflicts.
Wolf: We know from animal research that certain reward systems modulate their activity as a function of conflict, and evidence indicates that, among other regions, the anterior cingulate cortex monitors internal conflicts.39
Matthieu: Inner conflicts go together with a lot of rumination.
Wolf: Yes, but we ignore the nature of the activity patterns representing conflicts and ruminations. Maybe it is a condition where mutually exclusive assemblies compete for prevalence, thereby causing instability, a permanent alternation between metastable states—
Matthieu: —we simply call that “hope and fear”—
Wolf: —if no stable state is reachable, if the internal model of the world that the brain permanently has to update by learning continues to be in disagreement with “reality.” If the brain is striving for stable, coherent states because they represent results and can be used as the basis for future actions, and if pleasant feelings are associated with these consistent states, the one purpose of mental training could be to generate such states in the absence of any practical goals. However, to generate such states right away, detached from any concrete content, may be difficult. This is probably the reason that you initially imagine concrete objects—why you try to focus attention on specific, actionrelated emotions to evoke positive feelings such as generosity, altruism, and compassion, which are all highly rewarding attitudes.
Matthieu: As opposed to selfish behavior. Wolf: Exactly. So you use this imagery as a vehicle to generate coherent brain states, and if the contents are pleasant, then a joyful condition is created. Then, once you gain more expertise in controlling brain states, you learn to detach these states from their triggers until they become increasingly free of content and autonomous.
Altruism and Well-Being
Matthieu: I think it may be a bit unfair to view compassion as merely a pleasant experience because compassion and fulfillment are highly intertwined. Human qualities often come in a cluster. Altruism, inner peace, strength and freedom, and genuine happiness grow together like the various parts of a nourishing fruit. Selfishness, animosity, and fear come together as the parts of a poisonous plant. The best way to become truly compassionate is out of wisdom, by deeply realizing that others do not want to suffer, just like you, and want to be happy, just as you do. Consequently, you become genuinely concerned with their happiness and suffering. Helping others may sometimes not be “pleasant,” in the sense that you might have to deliberately endure some “unpleasant” hardship to help someone, but deep within is found a sense of inner peace and courage and a sense of harmony with the interdependence of all things and beings.
Wolf: You are right. If you are able to combine your own well-being with altruism and compassion, it is a win-win situation. However, what I am asking is, what state does the brain identify as a pleasant state? We know that we have those states, when we have a solution, when we have resolved a conflict, when we have helped others—particular brain states must also be experienced as good states. As the electrophysiological correlates of your meditation states suggest, these good states are apparently states of high coherence among many areas of the cerebral cortex. Is this at all a plausible assumption? Matthieu: You know better than me about coherent states, but it makes sense to me. To come back to inner conflicts, they are mostly linked with excessive rumination on the past and anxious anticipation of the future, and thus they lead to being tormented by hope and fear.
Wolf: I see it as an exaggeration of the otherwise well-adapted and necessary attempt to use past experience to predict the future, an attempt that is likely to not always converge toward a stable solution because the future is not foreseeable. Maybe it is the clinging to the fruitless search for the best possible solution—that is by definition impossible to find—that frustrates the system and causes the uneasy feelings.
Magic Moments Matthieu: “I am anxious to know whether this will happen or not.” “What should I do?” “Why do people behave like that with me?” “I am so worried that they people are saying things about me.” Such streams of thought lead to unstable states of mind. That feeling of insecurity is reinforced by hiding in the bubble of self-centeredness to protect oneself. In fact, within the confined space of self-centeredness, rumination goes wild. Thus, one of the purposes of meditation is to break the bubble of ego grasping and let these mental constructs vanish into the open space of freedom.
When in daily life people experience moments of grace or magic, when walking in the snow under the stars or spending a beautiful moment with dear friends by the seaside or on top of a mountain, what happens? All of a sudden, the burden of inner conflict is lifted.
They feel in harmony with others, with themselves, with the world.
They feel good, and so the inner conflict disappears for some time. It is great to fully enjoy such magical moments, but it is also revealing to understand why they felt so good: pacification of inner conflicts and a better sense of interdependence with everything, rather than fragmenting reality into solid, autonomous entities, a respite from mental toxins. All of these are qualities that can be cultivated through developing wisdom and inner freedom. This practice will lead not to just a few moments of grace but to a lasting state of well-being that we may call genuine happiness. It is a satisfactory state because the feelings of insecurity gradually give way to a deep confidence.
Wolf: Confidence in what?
Matthieu: Confidence that you will be able to use those skills to deal with the ups and downs of life, sensations, emotions, and so on in a much more optimal way. Your equanimity, which is not indifference, will spare you from being swayed back and forth like mountain grass in the winds by every possible blame and praise, gain and loss, comfort and discomfort, and so on. You can always relate to the depth of inner peace, and the waves at the surface will not appear as threatening as before. Could Feedback Replace Mind Training?
Wolf: Thus, through mental training, you familiarize yourself with states of inner stability, thereby protecting yourself against fruitless ruminations. If these desirable states have a characteristic electrographic signature that can be measured and monitored, then we could use biofeedback to facilitate the learning process required to obtain and maintain these states. It might help to familiarize oneself with these states more quickly. Admittedly, this approach is a typical Western aspiration to circumvent cumbersome and time-consuming procedures and look for shortcuts on the way to happiness…
Matthieu: You know about the experiments during which scientists implanted electrodes in a region of the brain in rats that produces sensations of pleasure when stimulated. The rats can stimulate themselves by pressing a bar. The pleasure is so intense that they soon abandon all other activities, including food and sex. The pursuit of this feeling becomes an insatiable hunger, an uncontrollable need, and the rats press the bar until they die from exhaustion. So, I am convinced that any shortcut will result more in a state of addiction than in a deep change in your way of being, as is acquired through mind training.
The perception of inner peace and fulfillment is a byproduct of having developed an entire cluster of human qualities. Grasping onto perpetually renewed pleasant sensations would probably achieve different results. As for feedback, however, as you know, a research project is underway with your daughter Tania which seems to indicate that expert meditators, when given feedback about the activation state of particular brain areas, can modulate at will compassion, attention, and even negative feelings such as disgust or intense physical pain.40 Wolf: But in this case, you first generate the characteristic activation patterns associated with these emotions and learn something about the quantitative relation between activity and the intensity of a feeling.
My question was whether you consider it possible to enhance by trial and error certain brain states that are displayed to you via a feedback loop and then, step by step, get more and more familiar with these states until you can generate them intentionally.
Matthieu: It may not be impossible, but I don’t think it’s the best way to proceed, and I don’t really see the point of doing so. Simply getting feedback on one particular skill may not help beginners because all of these skills—attention, emotional control, empathy—need to be developed simultaneously, and that is what meditation techniques do.
Also, the continuous, long-term use of these techniques, what we call meditation, is based on wisdom, on a deep understanding of the way the mind works, and on the nature of reality (as being impermanent, interdependent, etc.). Feedback techniques may lack the richness of contemplative methods used to develop empathy, altruism, and emotional balance. However, for therapeutic purposes, such feedback training might have great virtues and help people who lack a particular skill, such as attention or empathy, to focus more on developing that skill. They also might help us understand better how the brain functions.
Further, mere feedback or, even worse, direct stimulation may not result in changes in ethical behavior, as in the case of meditation.
Stimulating areas of the brain that induce nice sensations, for instance, or taking drugs that make you feel high all the time is unlikely to make you become a more compassionate and ethical human being. It might even leave you feeling more dependent and powerless than ever once the stimulation has ceased. Wolf: Some drugs seem to directly activate the structures in the brain that normally would become active only as a consequence of brain states that we addressed as the “good” states—the states free of conflict, the states corresponding to solutions, the coherent states. The drugs obviously do not generate these complex states but act directly on the systems that evaluate these states. They fool these value-assigning systems.
Matthieu: That is why generating one pleasant sensation after another just to feel good would be at best an impoverished version of mind training and could even have opposite effects. It is impoverished in the sense that the entire idea of the wholesome flourishing of a human being comes from cultivating a vast array of qualities ranging from wisdom to compassion that are meant to achieve genuine happiness and a good heart, which can be said to be the goal of life.
Wolf: Since the flower power era, psychoactive drugs have often been advocated as a means to open doors toward a better understanding of oneself, by widening one’s realm of experience and creating altered states of consciousness that can be remembered and even cultivated once the drug’s effects have faded. Since around the same time, biofeedback has been propagated as a technique to enter states of relaxation. If you are in a relaxed, idling state, with eyes closed, large regions of the brain engage in synchronized oscillatory activity in the alpha-frequency range around 10 Hz. This activity can be measured easily. If its amplitude is converted into a tone and subjects are asked to try to increase the intensity of that tone, then one observes after some time that subjects are indeed able to increase their alpha activity —and they also report entering states of relaxation. Matthieu: Interestingly enough, a preliminary study with meditators trained in Tibetan Buddhism indicated that when one suddenly clears the mind of all mental chatter, alpha waves all but disappear for a while. After the detonation that normally triggers a startle response, the meditator’s mind is left in a crystal-clear state devoid of mental constructs and discursive thinking. So, if these results are confirmed, then a meditator would relate alpha waves to mental chatter, the little chaotic conversation that seems to be going on most of the time in the background of our mind.
Wolf: Certainly alpha is suppressed when you focus your attention on something. It is reduced when you open your eyes and engage in scrutinizing the environment, an observation which suggests that the alpha a rhythm is incompatible with the engagement of attention. It appears to serve the suppression of potentially distracting activity.
However, other evidence suggests that alpha serves as the carrier rhythm for the coordination of higher frequency oscillations and thereby might play a role in the attention-dependent formation of functional networks. I would predict that there is little alpha when you are engaged in your type of meditation because you produce this massive gamma activity, and high gamma activity usually excludes alpha activity.
Matthieu: As mentioned earlier, we should correct the naïve image of meditation that still predominates in the West as sitting somewhere to empty your mind and relax. Of course, an element of relaxation is present, in the sense of getting rid of inner conflict, cultivating inner peace, and freeing oneself from tensions. Also, an element of emptying your mind can be seen, in the sense of not perpetuating mental fabrications or linear thinking and resting in a state of the clear freshness of the present moment. However, this state is neither “blank” nor dull relaxation. It is a much richer state of vivid awareness. Also, one does not try to prevent the thoughts from arising, which is not possible, but frees them as they arise. Wolf: When you say “linear thinking,” you mean serial thinking, going from one item to the next, the typical feature of conscious deliberation.
Matthieu: I mean discursive thinking, chain reactions of thoughts and emotions, which results in constant mental noise.
Wolf: Rumination, then, is endless spirals of thoughts.
Matthieu: Yes, it’s a nonstop proliferation of thoughts based on selfcenteredness, hopes, and fears that are mostly afflictive.
Wolf: It would be interesting to perform a thorough study of the electrographic signature of this chattering or mind wandering. It would perhaps be feasible if it were possible to deliberately switch between chattering and nonchattering states. It would be nice to know the signature of these states of serial processing that make you go from A to B to C in search of a solution. It should be the signature of the states that precede decisions.
Matthieu: When people are lost in their thoughts, that automatic process may go on for quite some time, and suddenly they find themselves somewhere else completely.
Wolf: That can be agreeable. It sometimes happens when you read—at least that happens to me. You read and then discover that your eyes continue to go through the lines, but your mind is somewhere else, following a different path. This experience is not necessarily unpleasant, and on occasion it may even spark a creative moment. It may, all of a sudden, provide you with new insights, with unexpected solutions. Matthieu: That could be, if you evoke wholesome memories or situations, but still it pertains to the wandering mind, which creates an obstacle to clarity and stability. If you want to evoke particular states of mind, then it would be best to do it with a sense of direction, which contributes to inner flourishing, rather than just drifting along with your thoughts.
Wolf: Unstable states need not be unpleasant, and I suspect they could even be an indispensable prerequisite for creativity.
Matthieu: Research done by the neuroscientist Scott Barry Kaufman has indicated that brain states favorable to creativity seem to be mutually exclusive with focused attention. According to him, creativity is born from a fusion of seemingly contradictory mental states that can be limpid and messy, wise and crazy, exhilarating and painful, spontaneous and yet arising from sustained training.41 Wolf: I wish to come back to discussing the virtues of aversive brain states. As mentioned already, there must be brain states that are identified as desirable and are associated with positive feelings.
Likewise, there must be states that the brain tries to avoid—that are associated with or lead to aversive feelings. The latter are certainly as important as the former in guiding our behavior, promoting learning, and protecting us from running into dangerous traps, just as pain is as important as satisfaction. The aversive states motivate the search for solutions that resolve the conflict. Now, aren’t there two complementary strategies to avoid the aversive feelings associated with conflicting brain states? One would consist of taking drugs that dampen the systems causing the aversive feelings—it is like taking painkillers to avoid pain. Along the same lines, you can repress the bad feeling using distraction or attending to something else or you learn to tolerate the aversive state. These strategies allow you to cope with the symptoms but don’t address the cause.
Or, and this is the second strategy, you try to go to the root, find out what the problem is, and then try to resolve it. This strategy may require rumination and inflict temporarily even more aversive feelings, but it may eventually lead to the elimination of conflicting causes and converge to a solution. Both strategies have their virtues.
Clearly, the elimination of causes is always preferable. However, if the conflict is not resolvable, if the costs for its resolution are too high, or if it is an illusory conflict, drugs, repression, or learning to cope may be more appropriate than striving for a final but unattainable solution. To which of the two strategies do you think meditation comes closest? Could it be that it is a technique to resolve conflicts by simply dissociating the aversive feelings from the problem, by dissolving the feeling and not coping with the problem itself? If this were the case, then I would assume it is a practice ensuring well-being only in a highly protected environment like a monastery or some other similarly ideal circumstances.
Then there is a third state that I would like to call the idling state, which is associated with neither good nor bad feelings. The brain hovers above ground, ready to engage but not yet engaged in any goal-directed activity. Matthieu: We call that a neutral or an undetermined state. It is neither positive nor negative, but it is still imbued with mental confusion.
Wolf: Every human being is familiar with these three states—positive, neutral, and aversive—because our brains are built that way. We have all developed strategies to avoid the negative states and to stay as long as possible in the former two—and I assume that evolution programmed us that way to ensure our survival in a complex, uncertain world. Now you claim that with mental training, we can reprogram our brains so that we can spend more time in the positive states, with the dual effect that we feel better and at the same time behave more in a way that reduces conflicts in our interactions with the world. This would indeed be the key to heaven on earth, and to me it sounds too good to be true. Where then are the limits of this seemingly golden way to global happiness?
Are There Limits to Mind Training?
Matthieu: There are obvious limits to our physical capacities, such as how fast we can run or how high we can jump, and to most of our mental faculties, such as the number of items we can store in our short-term memory, our ability to remain perfectly attentive to a task for a long time, the amount of information we can process simultaneously when faced with many different stimuli, and so forth, although such faculties can be trained to an extent. However, can there be a limit to human qualities, such as compassion or lovingkindness, which are more like qualia than quantities? I don’t see why, no matter what level of compassion is now in our mind, we cannot continue to increase it, to make it even clearer and vaster. I don’t see what could limit that.
You can always conceive of a fuller, deeper, more intense compassion. This is an important point for mind training. His Holiness the Dalai Lama often says that, yes, there are limitations to what one can learn in terms of information, but compassion can be developed boundlessly. Wolf: Interesting. I would have thought the reverse. Compassion is an emotional state, so its amplitude should somehow be encoded in the activity of neurons mediating this state. Learning leads to engrams, and because of the combinatorial nature of engrams that we discussed earlier, the storage capacity of the brain is enormous. This is exemplified by the well-known case of certain idiot savants, who have difficulties in conceptualizing abstract relations and therefore have to use the brute force of memory to cope with the world. The vast number of neurons and the even more numerous connections modified by learning allow the brain to produce a virtually infinite number of different engrams. If a particular memory were implemented by a particular activation pattern in which something like 100 neurons participate at any one moment in time, then you have more possible states, at least mathematically, than you have atoms in the universe.
Matthieu: One hundred neurons connecting with every other neuron?
Wolf: No, if you take the 1011 neurons but you define a state as a specific constellation of 100 neurons, then of course you have many different 100-neuron packages in this space of 1011 neurons. Each of them can have many different states, and this gives you this unimaginably large number of possible states. This incredibly high-dimensional storage space is, however, not fully exploitable because of the superposition problem mentioned earlier. Engrams must not overlap too much to remain retrievable as separate representations.
Matthieu: Then how come we don’t all have such incredible faculties to memorize and calculate like the autistic savants?
Wolf: In fact, we all have it but we don’t realize it. If you take your visual memory, for example, you can come to a place somewhere in the world where you haven’t been for 20 years and you will recognize that a house is missing and remember that you have been there before. Matthieu: Or you come to a house where you have not been for a long time and immediately recognize tiny details such as the shape of a door knob or a teapot, when only a few minutes before arriving you could not have described them to save your life.
Wolf: We take this for granted because everyone can do this. Think about the memory capacity that is required to store all the scenes that you have perceived in your life. It is gigantic! You know how much memory is required to store a simple picture taken with a digital camera. We go through the world and store all the scenes that we perceive. We do not and cannot recall them at any time, but if the association cues are provided, we realize that they are stored quite reliably. So we all have this memory capacity, but it is not economical to use this brute force strategy of remembering everything to solve problems. It’s much more economical to derive a rule and remember the rule, or just remember where you can find the information. It is more elegant to conceptualize and store a reduced, abstracted representation. Why store a complex situation with all the details if you can represent it with a single symbol, a single word?
Young children have less access to this economical strategy because they still have to acquire the ability to form abstract descriptions and use symbols. Therefore, they rely more on the brute storage strategy, and this is the reason that they always beat you in games like Memory. If the acquisition of the strategy relying on concepts and symbols is impaired because of a brain injury or genetic disposition, then the brute force strategy to remember everything in detail is cultivated. It helps to some extent to cope with life, but many of those autistic savants struggle with normal life because they have difficulties in representing complex relations.
Matthieu: And emotion? Wolf: Some of the “memory giants” are actually deficient in recognizing emotions. Autistic children, for example, have difficulties in deciphering facial expressions and associating emotions with them, which makes it difficult for them to deduce from their caretakers’ facial expressions whether what they are doing is right or wrong. This prevents them from attaching to their social environment and developing social skills. When children act, they always look at the caretaker at some stage to find out whether their behavior is appropriate. If they cannot interpret the caretaker’s expression, it becomes difficult for them to develop cognitive functions and to attach to the world, and then they get more and more isolated. Here is another reason for the seemingly enormous memory capacity of certain autistic children: Because they cannot invest in social relations, their environment gets impoverished, and they direct their interest toward other sources of information, such as timetables, calendars, and so on, and then they practice, rehearse, and memorize. That said, I am not a specialist in this field, and you should take everything I just said with caution.
Matthieu: I recently learned about someone, Daniel Tammet, who is able to recite, in proper order, 22,514 decimals of the number Pi. It took him more than five hours, and he did it without a single mistake. He said that he did not feel anxious about remembering such an incredible amount of numbers, only about reciting them in public. He also mentioned that, in general, whenever he feels anxious, just thinking of numbers calms him down and makes him feel secure.42 Wolf: These examples illustrate impressively that brains are capable of performances that go way beyond the imagination of most of us and that, at first sight and without proof of the contrary, we would have judged as impossible. Maybe the same holds for achievements that can be accomplished with intensive mental training. I would not know, however, how to quantify the magnitude of compassion because it is hard to measure phenomena that only exist in the firstperson perspective.
The question of whether there is an upper limit to human qualities such as compassion and lovingkindness is not easy to resolve. Let’s assume for a moment that these emotions are encoded in the intensity or salience of neuronal responses. In principle, there are three ways to increase the saliency of neuronal responses. One consists of increasing the discharge rate of the neurons. This strategy is applied for the encoding of sensory stimuli: The stronger the stimulus, the higher the discharge frequency of the encoding neurons. The second strategy is to recruit more and more neurons: The stronger the stimulus, the more neurons will respond because even the less excitable neurons will become active. The third strategy is to increase the synchronicity of the neuronal discharges because synchronous activity drives target neurons more effectively than temporally dispersed input, and therefore synchronous activity propagates more easily and more rapidly within neuronal networks.
Apparently, the brain can use the three strategies interchangeably, as we have recently been able to show in a study published in Neuron.43 We exploited a visual phenomenon called contrast enhancement. The perceived contrast of a grating pattern can be enhanced if it is displayed on a background grating that differs from the target grating either in its orientation or by the relative spatial offset of the stripes.
In both cases, the perceptual effect of enhanced contrast is exactly the same, but recordings from the neurons in the visual cortex that respond to the target show that in the first case neurons become more active, whereas in the second case their activity stays the same but becomes more synchronized. Still, there should be an upper limit.
Once all neurons in the respective structure discharge at their maximal frequency and in perfect synchrony, no further increase in saliency is possible. So, I would predict that there is a limit to the intensity of an emotion. Matthieu: I should add that when I said that one can always conceive of a fuller and deeper compassion, I did not refer only to the emotional aspect of compassion. Understanding the deeper causes of others’ suffering and generating the determination to alleviate them also arises from wisdom and “cognitive” compassion. The latter is linked to the comprehension of the more fundamental cause of suffering, which, according to Buddhism, is ignorance—the delusion that distorts reality and gives rise to various mental obscurations and afflictive emotions such as hatred and compulsive desire. So this cognitive aspect of compassion can embrace the infinite number of sentient beings who suffer as a result of ignorance. I don’t think we have to worry about the magnitude of such cognitive compassion exhausting the capacities of the brain.
Meditation and Action Matthieu: To come back to one of your initial questions, I should reply to the accusation of selfishness and indifference that is sometimes leveled at hermits and meditators. Such opinions reflect a deep misunderstanding about the Buddhist path because freeing oneself from the influence of self-centeredness and ego clinging is precisely what makes you more concerned with others and less indifferent toward the world. Meditation is a key process for developing and enhancing altruistic love and compassion. You could argue that it would be even better if the hermit left his hermitage to go and help people. Otherwise, what is he contributing to society? How would he learn about human interaction when remaining alone in his hermitage? This argument makes sense at first glance. Yet there are simple answers to these questions. You need time and concentration to cultivate a skill. While thrust into the often hectic conditions of the world, you might be too weak to become strong, too weak to help others and even to help yourself. You don’t not have the energy, concentration, and time to train. So this developmental stage is necessary, even if it does not appear to be immediately useful to others.
When you build a hospital over a few months or years, the plumbing and electricity works do not cure anybody, yet when the hospital is ready, it provides a much more powerful tool to treat patients. It is worthwhile taking the time to build such a hospital, rather than just saying, “What’s the point in waiting? Let’s operate in the street.” Hence, the idea is to develop skills in an environment that is conducive to mental training, so that one becomes strong enough to display and maintain genuine altruism and compassion even in the most trying and adverse circumstances, when it is most difficult to remain altruistic. I have now been exposed to the world of humanitarian activities for a number of years, and I have seen over and again that the main problems that plague the humanitarian world —corruption, clashes of ego, weak empathy, discouragement—stem from a lack of maturity in human qualities. So the advantages of spending dedicated time to develop human qualities are obvious. You thus gain inner strength, compassion, and balance before embarking on serving others.
Developing the right motivation is a crucial factor to everything we do. The famous Tibetan saint and poet Milarepa said that during the 12 years he spent in solitary retreats in the wilderness, there wasn’t a single moment that wasn’t dedicated to others. By this he meant that he was dedicated to developing the qualities needed to truly benefit others. In the Buddhist path, the core motivation of the apprentice bodhisattva is, “May I achieve enlightenment in order to gain the capacity to free all beings from suffering.” If such an aspiration is genuinely present in your mind, then your practice is the best investment you can make for the benefit of others. This is not the result of indifference but of the sound reasoning that you have to prepare yourself and build up the necessary strength to be of use to humanity.
Wolf: So it should become an integral part of life; you should go through this period in some stage of your development, but then you should interact with others again and not stay in the hermitage or in the protected environment of monasteries. For teachers it may be appropriate to stay in monasteries because they will transmit their wisdom to the pupils, but others should stay there only temporarily and then engage in the world for its betterment.
Matthieu: It also makes sense to see that as long as you are still a mess yourself, there’s no point going out and messing around with other people’s lives as well. You need to be skillful in recognizing when you are mature enough to meaningfully help others. Otherwise, it is like cutting the wheat when it is still green. Nobody benefits from it.
Wolf: But then, as long as you judge yourself not to be ready yet, you need to be supported by others who earn a living and have no chance to enjoy this protected maturation period. There are cultures in which these mental training practices do not exist at all, and yet somehow those ethnic groups have made it: They developed ethics, rules, morality; they reproduced; and they got along quite well. So it can’t be the only way—it might be, but need not be, the best way, we don’t know—but surely there must be other ways that also bring forth good people and stable societies. Matthieu: Yes, of course, but somehow one must come to a point where one looks within and sincerely tries to become a better person.
Wolf: Is it then impossible to be raised and educated in a conventional way and still develop the ability to sharply distinguish your feelings, to feel empathic, to be a good parent, and so forth? From what we have discussed so far, there does not seem to be much chance for the development of all these good qualities if one is not lucky to become the pupil of a highly trained practitioner. Isn’t education also an effective and perhaps complementary strategy to improve human qualities? It might even have the advantage that it does not require so much cognitive control as meditation and therefore can be applied early in life, when the brain is still developing, plastic, and shapeable.
There is probably a tradeoff between the time that you invest into your own betterment and the time left to improve conditions in the world by interacting with it. The strategy I would prefer is to teach adolescents the practice of mental training so they can use it throughout life to get to know themselves better and become more equilibrated. Still, I would think the most effective way to modify brain functions to the better is education of the young by good caretakers. Children learn by assimilation from caretakers to which they have established tight emotional bonds. Thus, we might be able to bootstrap this process by having mental training as an obligatory subject in teaching curricula. Matthieu: People who are gifted might be able to develop all these qualities in the midst of many other distracting activities. However, for most people, it does help to gather all one’s strength from time to time to nurture human qualities with single-pointed dedication. It is quite possible that someone who naturally has a good heart would immediately succeed in helping others, more than a meditator who starts with a grumpy, selfish mind. The point is that they should both continue to improve themselves further, and cultivation does help vastly.
We should not underestimate the power of the transformation of the mind. We all have the potential for change, and it is such a pity when we neglect to actualize it. It is like coming home empty-handed from an island made of gold. Human life has immense value if we know how to use its relatively short time span to become a better person for one’s own happiness and that of others. This requires some effort, but what doesn’t? So let’s end on a note of hope and encouragement: “Transform yourself to better transform the world.” Earlier, you also alluded to the periods between meditation sessions.
This is a central topic in meditation praxis. We call them “postmeditation periods.” These two phases, meditation and postmeditation, should reinforce each other. In fact, this idea was recently demonstrated in a real-life experiment by Paul Condon and Gaëlle Desbordes, who followed three groups for eight weeks. One group was trained in meditation on lovingkindness, one was trained in meditation on mindfulness, and the third, the control group, was left without any training. After eight weeks, the participants’ altruistic behavior was put to the test by observing the probability that they would offer their seat in a waiting room to someone standing against the wall with crutches, showing signs of discomfort. Before the suffering individual enters, the participant is seated on a bench next to two other people (accomplices of the experimenter, along with the “sick” person) who don’t show the least bit of interest in the standing patient (which accentuates the “bystander effect” that is known to inhibit helping behavior). Strikingly, on average, the meditators offered their seat five times more often than nonmeditators.44 So postmeditation activities and attitudes should reflect and express the qualities developed during meditation. There would be no point in achieving some fine meditation state of inner clarity and stability if you drop it completely the moment you stop meditating. Ideally, at some point, the meditator’s skill and experience should be such that the two states begin to fuse.
Wolf: The same might apply for our discussion. Maybe we should rest and let our brains reorganize what we have learned and continue tomorrow.
Notes
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3. G. Kempermann, H. G. Kuhn, and F. H. Gage, “More hippocampal neurons in adult mice living in an enriched environment,” Nature 386 (1997): 493–495.
4. P. S. Eriksson, E. Perfilieva, T. Björk-Eriksson, A. M. Alborn, C.
Nordborg, D. A. Peterson, and F. H. Gage, “Neurogenesis in the adult human hippocampus,” Nature Medicine 4, no. 11 (1998): 1313–1317.
5. H. Eichenbaum, C. Stewart, and R. G. M. Morris, “Hippocampal representation in place learning,” Journal of Neuroscience 10 (1990): 3531–3542.
6. J. S. Espinosa and M. P. Stryker, “Development and plasticity of the primary visual cortex,” Neuron 75 (2012): 230–249; W. Singer, “Development and plasticity of cortical processing architectures,” Science 270 (1995): 758–764.
7. H. Van Praag, A. F. Schinder, B. R. Christie, N. Toni, T. D. Palmer, and F. H. Gage, “Functional neurogenesis in the adult hippocampus,” Nature 415 (2002): 1030–1034. 8. E. Luders, K. Clark, K. L. Narr, and A. W. Toga, “Enhanced brain connectivity in long-term meditation practitioners,” NeuroImage 57, no. 4 (2011): 1308–1316.
9. S. W. Lazar, C. E. Kerr, R. H. Wasserman, J. R. Gray, D. N. Greve, M.
T. Treadway, et al., “Meditation experience is associated with increased cortical thickness,” NeuroReport 16, no. 17 (2005): 1893; B. K. Hölzel, J. Carmody, M. Vangel, C. Congleton, S. M.
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10. P. Fries, “A mechanism for cognitive dynamics: neuronal communication through neuronal coherence,” Trends in Cognitive Science 9, no. 10 (2005): 474–480.
11. A. Lutz, H. A. Slagter, N. B. Rawlings, A. D. Francis, L. L.
Greischar, and R. J. Davidson, “Mental training enhances attentional stability: neural and behavioral evidence,” Journal of Neuroscience 29, no. 42 (2009): 13418–13427; K. A. MacLean, E. Ferrer, S. R.
Aichele, D. A. Bridwell, A. P. Zanesco, T. L. Jacobs, et al., “Intensive meditation training improves perceptual discrimination and sustained attention,” Psychological Science 21, no. 6 (2010): 829–839.
12. J. A. Brefczynski-Lewis, A. Lutz, H. S. Schaefer, D. B. Levinson, and R. J. Davidson, “Neural correlates of attentional expertise in long-term meditation practitioners,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104, no. 27 (2007): 11483–11488.
13. M. Ricard, Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2006).
14. Mingyur Rinpoche, The Joy of Living: Unlocking the Secret and Science of Happiness (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2007).
15. A. P. Jha, J. Krompinger, and M. J. Baime, “Mindfulness training modifies subsystems of attention,” Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience 7, no. 2 (2007): 109–119.
16. A. Lutz, L. L. Greischar, N. B. Rawlings, M. Ricard, and R. J.
Davidson, “Long-term meditators self-induce high-amplitude gamma synchrony during mental practice,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 101, no. 46 (2004): 16369–16373. 17. P. Fries, “Neuronal gamma-band synchronization as a fundamental process in cortical computation,” Annual Review of Neuroscience 32 (2009): 209–224; A. Lutz, H. A. Slagter, J. D. Dunne, and R. J.
Davidson, “Attention regulation and monitoring in meditation,” Trends in Cognitive Science 12 (2008): 163–169.
18. P. R. Roelfsema, A. K. Engel, P. König, and W. Singer, “Visuomotor integration is associated with zero time-lag synchronization among cortical areas,” Nature 385 (1997): 157–161.
19. P. Fries, “A mechanism for cognitive dynamics: neuronal communication through neuronal coherence,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 9, no. 10 (2005): 474–480; W. Singer, “Neuronal synchrony: a versatile code for the definition of relations?,” Neuron 24 (1999): 49–65; P. Fries, J. H. Reynolds, A. E. Rorie, and R. Desimone, “Modulation of oscillatory neuronal synchronization by selective visual attention,” Science 291 (2001): 1560–1563; B. Lima, W.
Singer, and S. Neuenschwander, “Gamma responses correlate with temporal expectation in monkey primary visual cortex,” Journal of Neuroscience 31, no. 44 (2011): 15919–15931.
20. P. Fries, P. R. Roelfsema, A. K. Engel, P. König, and W. Singer, “Synchronization of oscillatory responses in visual cortex correlates with perception in interocular rivalry,” Proceedings of the National Academy Sciences 94 (1997): 12699–12704; P. Fries, J. H. Schröder, P. R. Roelfsema, W. Singer, and A. K. Engel, “Oscillatory neuronal synchronization in primary visual cortex as a correlate of stimulus selection,” Journal of Neuroscience 22, no. 9 (2002): 3739–3754.
21. O. L. Carter, D. E. Prestl, C. Callistemon, Y. Ungerer, G. B. Liu, and J. D. Pettigrew, “Meditation alters perceptual rivalry in Tibetan Buddhist monks,” Current Biology 15, no. 11 (2005): R412–R413.
22. L. Melloni, C. Molina, M. Pena, D. Torres, W. Singer, and E.
Rodriguez, “Synchronization of neural activity across cortical areas correlates with conscious perception,” Journal of Neuroscience 27, no. 11 (2007): 2858–2865.
23. F. Varela, J. P. Lachaux, E. Rodriguez, and J. Martinerie, “The brainweb: phase synchronization and large-scale integration,” Nature Review Neuroscience 2 (2001): 229–239. 24. S. W. Lazar, C. E. Kerr, R. H. Wasserman, J. R. Gray, D. N. Greve, M. T. Treadway, et al., “Meditation experience is associated with increased cortical thickness,” NeuroReport 16, no. 17 (2005): 1893– 1897.
25. J. Boyke, J. Driemeyer, C. Gaser, C. Buchel, and A. May, “Traininginduced brain structure changes in the elderly,” Journal of Neuroscience 28 (2008): 7031–7035; A. Karni, G. Meyer, P. Jezzard, M. M. Adams, R. Turner, and L. G. Ungerleider, “Functional MRI evidence for adult motor cortex plasticity during motor skill learning,” Nature 377 (1995): 155–158.
26. P. E. Dux and R. Marois, “The attentional blink: a review of data and theory,” Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics 71 (2009): 1683– 1700; N. Georgiou-Karistianis, J. Tang, Y. Vardy, D. Sheppard, N.
Evans, M. Wilson, et al., “Progressive age-related changes in the attentional blink paradigm,” Aging, Neuropsychology, & Cognition 14, no. 3 (2007): 213–226; H. A. Slagter, A. Lutz, L. L. Greischar, A.
D. Francis, S. Nieuwenhuis, J. M. Davis, and R. J. Davidson, “Mental training affects distribution of limited brain resources,” PLoS Biology 5, no. 6, e138 (2007): 131–138; S. Van Leeuwen, N. G. Müller, and L.
Melloni, “Age effects of attentional blink performance in meditation,” Consciousness and Cognition 18 (2009): 593–599. The study in which Matthieu participated was done at Anne Treisman’s lab at Princeton University by Karla Evans. Unpublished.
27. H. A. Slagter, A. Lutz, L. L. Greischar, A. D. Francis, S.
Nieuwenhuis, J. M. Davis, & R. J. Davidson, “Mental training affects distribution of limited brain resources,” PLoS Biology 5, no. 6 (2007): 138.
28. S. Van Leeuwen, N. G. Müller, & L. Melloni, “Age effects of attentional blink performance in meditation,” Consciousness and Cognition 18 (2009): 593–599.
29. For a detailed description of this episode, see chapter 1 of Daniel Goleman’s Destructive Emotions: How Can We Overcome Them?
(New York: Bantam Books, 2003).
30. R. W. Levenson, P. Ekman, and M. Ricard, “Meditation and the startle response: a case study,” Emotion 12, no. 3 (2012): 650–658. 31. G. Wang, B. Grone, D. Colas, L. Appelbaum, and P. Mourrain, “Synaptic plasticity in sleep: learning, homeostasis and disease,” Trends in Neuroscience 34, no. 9 (2011): 452–463.
32. W. E. Skaggs and B. L. McNaughton, “Replay of neuronal firing sequences in rat hippocampus during sleep following spatial experience,” Science 271 (1996): 1870–1873.
33. That is, in the deepest phase of sleep, not during the phase of “paradoxical sleep” (REM) that corresponds to dreams. F. Ferrarelli et al., “Experienced mindfulness meditators exhibit higher parietaloccipital EEG gamma activity during NREM sleep,” PloS One 8, no.
8 (2013): e73417.
34. A. Lutz, H. A. Slagter, N. B. Rawlings, A. D. Francis, L. L.
Grieschar, & R. J. Davidson, “Mental training enhances attentional stability: neural and behavioral evidence,” Journal of Neuroscience 29, no. 42 (2009): 13418–13427.
35. A. Lutz, L. L. Greischar, D. M. Perlman, and R. J. Davidson, “BOLD signal in insula is differentially related to cardiac function during compassion meditation in experts vs. novices,” NeuroImage 47, no. 3 (2009): 1038–1046; A. Lutz, J. Brefczynski-Lewis, T. Johnstone, and R. J. Davidson, “Regulation of the neural circuitry of emotion by compassion meditation: effects of meditative expertise,” PLoS One 3, no. 3(2008): e1897.
36. Other studies suggest that lesions in the amygdala disturb the emotional aspect of empathy without affecting its cognitive aspect.
See R. Hurlemann, H. Walter, A. K. Rehme, et al., “Human amygdala reactivity is diminished by the b-noradrenergic antagonist propranolol,” Psychological Medicine 40 (2010): 1839–1848.
37. O. M. Klimecki, S. Leiberg, M. Ricard, and T. Singer, “Differential pattern of functional brain plasticity after compassion and empathy training,” Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience 9, no. 6 (2014): 873–879.
38. B. L. Fredrickson, M. A. Cohn, K. A. Coffey, J. Pek, and S. M.
Finkel, “Open hearts build lives: positive emotions, induced through loving-kindness meditation, build consequential personal resources,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 95, no. 5 (2008): 1045. 39. M. Botvinick, L. E. Nystrom, K. Fissell, C. S. Carter, and J. D.
Cohen, “Conflict monitoring versus selection-for-action in anterior cingulate cortex,” Nature 402 (1999): 179–181.
40. Tania Singer is director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig. She is well known for her research on empathy and compassion. Matthieu has collaborated with her extensively over the years.
41. S. B. Kaufman & C. Gregoire, Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind (New York, NY: Tarcher Perigee, 2015).
42. D. Tammet, Born on a Blue Day, Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant (New York: Free Press, 2007).
43. J. Biederlack, M. Castelo-Branco, S. Neuenschwander, D. W.
Wheeler, W. Singer, and D. Nikolic, “Brightness induction: rate enhancement and neuronal synchronization as complementary codes,” Neuron 52 (2006): 1073–1083.
44. P. Condon, G. Desbordes, W. Miller, D. DeSteno, M. G. Hospital, and D. DeSteno, “Meditation increases compassionate responses to suffering,” Psychological Science 24, no. 10 (2013, October): 2125– 2127. 2 Dealing with Subconscious Processes and Emotions
On the Nature of the Unconscious
What is the unconscious? For the Buddhist monk, the most profound aspect of consciousness is alert presence. For him, what psychoanalysis calls the unconscious only represents the random mists of mental fabrications. For the neuroscientist, precise criteria distinguish between conscious and unconscious processes, and it is important to identify everything that happens in the mind as it prepares for conscious cognitive processes. Then comes the question of emotions. How to neutralize conflicting situations? How does altruistic love differ from passionate love? Is love the highest emotion? Points of view coincide concerning the effectiveness of cognitive therapy. Matthieu: Let’s explore for a bit the notion of the unconscious, from neuroscientific and contemplative perspectives. Usually when people speak about the unconscious, they refer to something deep in our psyche that we cannot access with our ordinary consciousness. We certainly have the concept, in Buddhism, of habitual tendencies that are opaque to our awareness. These tendencies initiate various thought patterns that can either occur spontaneously or be triggered by some kind of external circumstance. Sometimes you are just sitting there, thinking of nothing in particular, and suddenly the thought of someone or a particular event or situation pops up in the mind, seemingly out of nowhere. From there, a whole chain of thoughts begins to unfold, and if you are not mindful, you can easily get lost in it.
The general public, psychologists, and neuroscientists surely have varying views about what the unconscious is. As for psychoanalysis, what it calls the depths of the unconscious are, from a contemplative perspective, the outer layers of clouds formed by mental confusion that temporarily prevent one from experiencing the most fundamental nature of mind. How can there be something unconscious in a state of pure awareness, devoid of mental construct? No darkness exists in the middle of the sun. For Buddhism, the deepest, most fundamental aspect of consciousness is this sun-like awareness, not the murky unconscious. Of course, this is all expressed from the first-person perspective, and I am sure that a neuroscientist approaching this issue from the third-person perspective will have a different view of the unconscious. Wolf: Yes, I see it a bit differently. As mentioned earlier, an enormous amount of knowledge is stored in the specific architectures of the brain, but we are not aware of most of these “given” heuristics, assumptions, concepts, and so on. These routines determine the outcomes of cognitive processes, which we are aware of, but the routines remain hidden in the unconscious. Usually we are not aware of the rules that govern the interpretation of sensory signals, the construction of our percepts, or the logic according to which we learn, decide, associate, and act.
We cannot move these implicit hypotheses and rules to the workspace of consciousness by focusing our attention on them, as is possible with contents stored, for example, in declarative memory, the memory in which we store what has been consciously experienced.
Abundant evidence indicates that attentional mechanisms play a crucial role in controlling access to consciousness. When attended to, most signals from our senses can reach the level of conscious awareness. Exceptions are certain odors, such as pheromones, that are processed by special subsystems and cannot be perceived consciously.
Then there are the many signals from within the body that are excluded from conscious processing, such as messages about blood pressure, sugar level, and so on. It cannot be emphasized enough, however, that signals permanently excluded from conscious processing as well as transitorily excluded signals such as nonattended sensory stimuli still have a massive impact on behavior.
In addition, these unconscious signals can control attentional mechanisms and thereby determine which of the stored memories or sensory signals will be attended and transferred to the level of conscious processing.
Another constraint is the limited capacity of the workspace of consciousness. At any one moment in time, only a limited number of contents can be processed consciously. Whether these limitations are due to the inability to attend to large numbers of items simultaneously or whether they result from the restricted capacity of working memory or both is still a matter of scientific investigation. The capacity of the workspace is limited to four to seven different items.
This finding corresponds to the number of contents that can be kept simultaneously in working memory. The phenomenon of change blindness, the inability to detect local changes in two images presented in quick succession, demonstrates impressively our inability to attend to and consciously process all features of an image simultaneously.
Perception is actually not as holistic as it appears to be. We scan complex scenes serially, and actually much of what we seem to perceive we are in fact reconstructing from memory. Which of the many signals actually reach the level of conscious awareness is determined by a host of factors, both conscious and unconscious. It depends on what we attend to, and this is controlled by either external cues, such as the saliency of a stimulus, or internal motifs, many of which we may not actually be aware of. Then it may occur that even an attentive, conscious search for content stored in declarative memory fails to raise it to the level of awareness. We are all familiar with the temporary inability to remember an episode or a name and then how a persisting subconscious search process may suddenly lift the content into the workspace of consciousness. It appears that we are not always capable of controlling which contents enter consciousness.
I consider the workspace of consciousness as the highest and most integrated level of brain function. Access to this workspace is privileged and controlled by attention. Moreover, the rules governing conscious deliberations such as consciously made decisions most likely differ from those of subconscious processes. The former are based mainly on rational, logical, or syntactic rules, and the search for solutions is essentially a serial process. Arguments and facts are scrutinized one by one and possible outcomes investigated. Hence, conscious processing takes time. Subconscious mechanisms seem to rely more on parallel processing, whereby a large number of neuronal assemblies, each of which represents a particular solution, enter into competition with one another. Then a “winner-takes-all” algorithm leads to the stabilization of the assembly that best fits the actual context of distributed activity patterns. Thus, the conscious mechanism is suited best to circumstances in which no time pressure exists, when not too many variables have to be considered, and when the variables are defined with sufficient precision to be subjected to rational analysis. The domains of subconscious processing are situations requiring fast responses or conditions where large numbers of underdetermined variables have to be considered simultaneously and weighed against variables that have no or only limited access to conscious processing, such as the wealth of implicit knowledge and heuristics, vague feelings, and hidden motives or drives. The outcome of such subconscious processes manifests itself in either immediate behavioral responses or what are called “gut feelings.” It is often not possible to indicate with a rational argument why exactly one has responded in that way and why one feels that something is wrong or right. In experimental settings, one can even demonstrate that the rational arguments given for or against a particular response do not always correspond to the “real” causes. For complex problems with numerous entangled variables, it often turns out that subconscious processes lead to better solutions than conscious deliberations because of the wealth of heuristics exploitable by subconscious processing. Given the large amount of information and implicit knowledge to which consciousness has no or only sporadic access and the crucial importance of subconscious heuristics for decision making and the guidance of behavior, training oneself to ignore the voices of the subconscious would not be a helpful, welladapted strategy. Matthieu: What you said corresponds with what Daniel Kahneman explains in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow.
1 Although we are generally convinced that we are rational, our decisions, economic or otherwise, are often irrational and strongly influenced by our immediate gut feelings, emotions, and situations to which we have been exposed immediately before taking a decision. Intuition is a highly adaptable faculty that allows us to make fast decisions in complex situations, but it also lures us into thinking that we have made a rational choice, which actually takes more time and deliberation.
I understand that a lot is going on in the brain to allow us to function and have coherent perceptions, memories, and so on. But I was thinking more of the pragmatic aspect of dealing with the particular tendencies that give rise to the afflictive mental states and emotions associated with suffering. My point was that if you know how to relate to pure awareness and rest within that space of awareness, when disturbing emotions arise, they dissolve as they appear and do not create suffering. If one is an expert in this, then there is no need to bother about what is going on down in the subconscious. It is more a question of method. Psychoanalysis, for instance, contends that you need to find a way to dig into those hidden impulses and identify them, whereas Buddhist meditation teaches you to free the thoughts as they arise.
By dwelling in the clarity of the present moment, you are free from all ruminations, upsetting emotions, frustrations, and other inner conflicts. If you learn to deal, moment after moment, with the arising of thoughts, then you can preserve your inner freedom, which is the desired goal of such training.
Side Effects of Meditation Wolf: Here we seem to face rather divergent concepts of the virtues of subconscious processing and the way we should deal with the unconscious dimension of our mind. This brings me to a critical issue: the side effects of meditation. One could argue that a strategy consisting of closing one’s eyes when facing conflicts, in escaping from problems rather than solving them, is perhaps a suboptimal strategy. Let us assume that conflicts exist in the subconscious and that the rumination motivated by these conflicts serves to identify and settle them. Such conflicts could arise from ambiguous bonding between the child and her caretaker in early infancy or from conflicting imperatives imprinted by early education. The causes of such problems cannot easily surface in consciousness because they are part of implicit memories that have been formed prior to the maturation of declarative memory. Such conflicts jeopardize mental and physical health.
Humankind throughout its history has sought relief from such problems, with drugs, cultural activities, and, more recently, a host of specially designed therapies. Most of the latter require one to face the problem to cope with it. Another strategy, which is applied in cognitive and behavioral therapy, attempts to alleviate the problem by unlearning the habit using conditioning paradigms. If one suffers from a particular phobia, then one gets exposed to the threatening events and learns that they don’t cause harm, and after a while, one habituates to the threat and the problem may be solved. Matthieu: We surely need to get at the heart of the issue. But in the end, what we need is to be free from inner conflicts, one way or another, right?
So, there might be ways that involve digging into the past as much as one can, with or without the help of a therapist, and then trying to solve the problem or trauma that has thus been identified, thereby freeing oneself from the afflictive effect. But there are also ways, including those used by Buddhism, that do not attempt to elude the problem but to free any conflicting thoughts that arise in the mind at the moment they arise. If you become expert in those methods, the socalled afflictive thoughts no longer have the power to afflict you because they undo themselves the moment they arise. But that is not all: Experience shows that by repeatedly doing so, you not only deal successfully with each individual arising of afflictive thoughts but you also slowly erode the tendencies for such thoughts to arise. So in the end, you are free of them entirely. Among contemporary Western therapies, cognitive and behavioral therapy also offer methods to attend precisely to a particular emotion that upsets you in the moment and deal with it in a reasonable and constructive way and has therefore some interesting similarities with the Buddhist approach.
Wolf: Let us see what meditation could contribute to the resolution of conflicts that arise at levels inaccessible to conscious processing. I shall take a critical stance and use a real-world problem as an example. Imagine a conflict evolves between two partners that evokes uneasy feelings and causes lasting mental rumination in both parties.
Their two ego bubbles fight against each other, as in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Love and passion exist between them, which are both difficult to control because they are anchored in subconscious spheres. The partners go into retreat and meditate, stop ruminating, and feel fine while they meditate alone in a protected environment.
But will this solve the problem? Will they not resume fighting once they are back home, together, and confronted again with their problems? Matthieu: To openly confront our differences can be a way to pacify a conflict, but it is not the only one. To begin with, a conflict requires two protagonists confronting each other in antagonistic ways. One cannot clap with one hand only. In fact, if one of the persons involved disarms his or her own antagonistic mind, then it will contribute greatly to reducing the conflict with the other person.
We did an experiment at Berkeley with Paul Ekman and Robert Levenson, who, among other things, have been studying conflict resolution. In this case, they wanted me to have two conversations with two different people. The idea was to discuss a controversial topic—in this case, why a former biologist like me, who did research in a prestigious lab at Pasteur Institute, would ever choose not only to become a Buddhist monk but to believe in crazy things such as reincarnation. We were all fitted with all kinds of sensors detecting our heart rate, blood pressure, breathing, skin conductivity and sweating, and body movements, and our facial expressions were recorded on a video camera, to be later analyzed in details for fleeting microexpressions. My first interlocutor was Professor Donald Glaser, a Nobel laureate in physics, who then moved to research in neurobiology. He was an extremely kind and open-minded person.
Our discussion went well, and at the end of the 10 minutes, we both regretted not having more time to dialogue. Our physiological parameters indicated a calm, nonconflictual attitude. Then came in someone who had to be chosen because he was reputed to be a rather difficult person—he was not told about that of course! He knew that we were supposed to get into a heated debate and went straight into it.
His physiology became immediately highly aroused. From my side, I tried my best to remain calm—I actually enjoyed it—and did my best to provide reasonable answers delivered in a friendly way. Soon enough, his physiology became calmer and calmer, and at the end of the 10 minutes, he told the researchers, “I can’t fight with this guy. He says reasonable things and smiles all the time.” So, as the Tibetan saying goes, “One cannot clap with one hand.” As far as your own inner conflicts are concerned, if you use meditation simply as a quick fix to superficially appease your emotions, you temporarily enjoy a pleasant deferral of these inner conflicts. But as you rightly say, these cosmetic changes have not reached the root of the problem. Merely putting problems to sleep for a while or trying to forcibly suppress strong emotions will not help either. You are just keeping a time bomb ticking somewhere in a corner of your mind.
True meditation, however, is not just taking a break. It is not simply closing one’s eyes to the problem for a while. Meditation goes to the root of the problem. You need to become aware of the destructive aspect of compulsive attachment and all of the conflictive mental states that you mentioned. They are destructive in the sense of undermining your happiness and that of others, and to counteract them you need more than just a calming pill. Meditation practice offers many kinds of antidotes.
A direct antidote is a state of mind that is diametrically opposed to the afflictive emotion you want to overcome, such as heat and cold.
Benevolence, for instance, is the direct opposite of malevolence because you cannot wish simultaneously to benefit and harm the same person. Using this kind of antidote neutralizes the negative emotions that afflict us.
Let’s take the example of desire. Everyone would agree that desire is natural and plays an essential role in helping us to realize our aspirations. But desire in itself is neither helpful nor harmful.
Everything depends on what kind of influence it has over us. It is capable of both providing inspiration in our life and poisoning it. It can encourage us to act in a way that is constructive for ourselves and others, but it can also bring about intense pain. The latter occurs when desire is associated with grasping and craving. It then causes us to become addicted to the causes of suffering. In that case, it is a source of unhappiness, and there is no advantage in continuing to be ruled by it. Here you may apply the antidote of inner freedom to the desire that causes suffering. You bring to your mind the comforting and soothing quality of inner freedom and spend a few moments allowing a feeling of freedom to be born and grow in you.
Because desire also tends to distort reality and project its object as something that you cannot live without, to regain a more accurate view of things, you may take the time to examine all aspects of the object of your desire and see how your mind has superimposed its own projections onto it. Finally, you let your mind relax into the state of awareness, free from hope and fear, and appreciate the freshness of the present moment, which acts like a balm to soothe the burning of desire. If you do that repeatedly and perseveringly—and this point is really the most important—this will gradually lead to a real change in the way you experience things all the time.
The second, even more powerful way to deal with afflictive emotions is to stop identifying with them: You are not the desire, you are not the conflict, and you are not the anger. Usually we identify with our emotions completely. When we become overwhelmed by desire, anxiety, or a fit of anger, we become one with it. It is omnipresent in our mind, leaving no room for other mental states such as inner peace, patience, or reasoning, which might calm our torments.
The antidote is to be aware of desire or anger, instead of identifying with it. Then the part of our mind that is aware of anger is not angry, it is simply aware. In other words, awareness is not affected by the emotion it is observing. Understanding that makes it possible to step back and realize that the emotion is actually devoid of solidity. We just need to provide an open space of inner freedom, and the internal affliction will dissolve by itself.
By doing so, we avoid two extremes, each as inefficient as the other: repressing our emotion, which would then remain as powerful as before, or letting the emotion flare up, at the expense of those around us and of our own inner peace. Not to identify with emotions is a fundamental antidote that is applicable to all kinds of emotions in any circumstance.
This method might seem difficult at the beginning, especially in the heat of the moment, but with practice, it will become easier to retain mastery of your mind and deal with the conflicting emotions of dayto-day life.
Love versus Attachment
Wolf: And love, that almighty power that is at the origin of so much suffering and joy, would this wonderful force also fade and turn us into lukewarm beings without passion? Matthieu: Not at all. The constructive aspect of love, at least altruistic love and what psychologist Barbara Fredrickson calls the “positive resonance” between persons, has no reason to disappear. In fact, when you are free from mental distortions, it becomes even stronger, vaster, and more fulfilling.
As for romantic love, there is usually a strong component of grasping and self-centeredness that will most often turn into a cause of torment. In this kind of love, one is often loving oneself through the guise of loving someone else. To be a source of mutual happiness, genuine love has to be altruistic. This does not mean at all that one will not flourish oneself. Altruistic love is win-win, whereas selfish love soon turns into a lose-lose situation.
Wolf: Can you selectively remove the grasping component?
Matthieu: Yes, because the grasping component is most often experienced as conflict and torment and the letting go of it as a relief. Joy is felt in letting go. Grasping means, “I love you if you love me the way I want.” This situation is uncomfortable. How can you demand that someone should be the way you want her or him to be? That is unreasonable and unfair. Altruistic love and compassion can apply to any one person and can also be extended to all.
Wolf: How object centered is this? Matthieu: The universal nature of extended altruism does not mean that it becomes a vague, abstract feeling, disconnected from reality. It should be applied spontaneously and pragmatically to every being who presents him or herself in the field of our attention. It can also focus more intensely on particular persons who are naturally close to us. The sun shines over all people equally, with the same brightness and warmth in every direction. Yet people in our lives—our family, our friends—who happened to be closer to the sun of our care, love, and compassion naturally receive more light and heat. This does not mean that this sun of compassion focuses its rays only on them in a discriminatory way, at the risk of actually shine less well on all.
Wolf: How does this differ from the dreams of the flower power movement—dreams that did not pass the test of reality? They were based on similar assumptions: just share love and compassion, and everybody will be happy. It didn’t work out. Adolescents went from their natal family directly into the next family, the commune, without having been alone in between, without the chance to detach and mature. But it was seen as a way to get rid of the self-centered ego by sharing love, affection, responsibilities, and material goods. Is this an idea Buddhist societies would subscribe to?
Matthieu: I can’t say what the flower power people really had in mind. When I mention extending love to more and more people, I did not mean being more and more promiscuous, of course. I meant extending altruistic love and compassion, which is quite different, isn’t it? As far as Buddhism is concerned, extending altruistic love to all certainly does not come at the cost of neglecting one’s own children. The example of the sun is apt: You give your full, undiminished love to those who are close to you, those for whom you are responsible, but you also preserve a complete openness and readiness to extend that altruism to whoever crosses your path in life. This does not have much to do with a collapse of personal relationships and with favoring sexual promiscuity, which is more likely to engender confusion and grasping. Unconditional altruism is a state of benevolence for all sentient beings, a state of mind in which hatred has no place. Wolf: It is a characteristic feature of love that it hurts when the beloved other is not around. Seeking one’s own pleasure may become sad if one cannot share that experience with one’s beloved.
Matthieu: It should not only be when we see some beautiful natural scenery that we wish others could be there too; it should also be when we experience deep inner joy and serenity that we wish others may experience the same. This brings us back to the aspiration of the bodhisattva: “May I transform myself and achieve enlightenment so that I become able to free all beings from suffering.” This is a much vaster and deeper aspiration than simply wishing that a loved one might be there to see a beautiful sunset with you.
Wolf: This sounds reasonable, generous, and mature, of course. But is it within the reach of human capacity? Human beings are uniquely able to bond with others, but when these bonds are stretched, they suffer. It seems to be a deep-rooted trait. When I listen to you, it seems to me as if you advocate a practice that promotes some kind of detachment.
This can certainly reduce suffering and negative emotions such as hatred, revenge, envy, greed, jealousy, and aggression, but doesn’t it also damage the amplitude of the other strong, precious, and utterly joyful feelings associated with highs and lows at the same time? Do you really believe that we can extend our compassion far beyond our personal relations? After all, our cognitive abilities and emotional capacities have been selected by evolution to cope with social interactions within small groups of individuals who know each other.
Are you not taking equanimity in the place of intensity?
On the Joy of Inner Peace Matthieu: I don’t think so. Having inner peace and equanimity does not mean that you cease to experience things with depth and brilliance, nor does it necessitate a reduction in the quality of your love, affection, vivid openness to others, or joy. In fact, you can be all the more present to others and to the world because you are remaining in the freshness of the present moment instead of being carried away by wandering thoughts. What you call the “highs and lows” are like the surface of the ocean: sometimes stormy, sometimes calm. The effects of these highs and lows are heightened if you are near the shore, where there is little depth: sometimes you surf with euphoria on top of the wave, and the next moment you hit the sand or rocks and are in pain. But at high sea, when you have several thousand meters of depth below the surface, whether there are enormous waves or the surface of the ocean is like a mirror, the depth of the ocean below always exists. You will still experience joys and sorrows, but they will occur in the context of a much deeper, vaster mind. You may also remember that research in psychology and neuroscience indicates that states such as unconditional compassion and altruistic love seem to be the most positive among all positive emotions. Among various meditative states, the meditation on compassion is the one that produces the strongest activation of all. Researchers in positive psychology, such as Barbara Fredrickson, have concluded that love is the “supreme emotion” because, more than any other mental state, it opens our minds and allows us to view situations with a vaster perspective, be more receptive to others, and adopt flexible and creative attitudes and behavior.
2 It causes an upward spiral of constructive mental states. It also makes us more resilient, allowing us to manage adversity better.
These states are anything but dull or indifferent.
Harmonious relationships can provide the most wonderful opportunity to enhance the reciprocal feeling of lovingkindness. But you have to build up the inner depth so that this love is vaster than the state of being enraptured by someone and by your own attachment to the feeling this love gives you. Evolution gave us this capacity to feel love for a person who is special to us. This is the case in parental love, particularly maternal love. But we can use this capacity as the foundation for extending the circle of love further and further.
Earlier you asked about difficulty in a personal relationship.
Obviously that can bring intense pain. Yet if you overflow with love toward all living beings, the distress caused by the sudden loss of a dear one will be less disruptive because a vast amount of love still resides in your heart ready to be expressed toward many others.
If such distress occurs, then you should examine its nature. Is it provoked by the fact that your self-centered love has been upset?
Does it prevent you from giving love to and receiving love from others? In truth, the more inner peace and contentment you experience, the more you can stand on your own two feet in a loving rather than an egotistical way.
Wolf: This reduced vulnerability to suffering is then not restricted to monastic life?
Matthieu: That would be a pretty limited application of inner strength! We all have the potential for it because it results from a genuine understanding of the ways the mind works and the cultivation of compassion and inner contentment.
Wolf: Perhaps we should impose two years of meditation practice before people get married, rather than military service. Matthieu: Great idea! People should do that before engaging in any path in life, in fact. In the humanitarian world where I work, you can see that what often derail great humanitarian projects are human shortcomings: corruption, clashes of egos, and so on. The best training for nongovernmental organizations might be to ask all humanitarian workers to do a three-month retreat on altruistic love and compassion. Paul Ekman once told me that we should have a “compassion gymnasium” in every city. Truly, many ways exist to actualize the potential we have to enhance our own basic human qualities through mind training.
One of my teachers told me that to be able to feel unconditional compassion, one needs to develop fearlessness. If you are excessively self-centered, then you naturally feel insecure and threatened by everything around you. But if you are primarily concerned with others and not obsessed with yourself, why should you be so fearful? These qualities could be taught at school in a secular way as part of a program for cultivating emotional balance and fortitude. But for this we would need teachers who are familiar with the way emotions work.
Wolf: Many of us obviously suffer from exactly this problem. We feel uneasy because of some inner conflict, and then we go to work and divert our attention by concentrating on other immediate problems, repress our emotions, and get along until the problems inevitably find a way in again through the backdoor and then require even more effort to be masked and refuted. Obviously, this vicious circle could be interrupted if we invested time and effort from the outset to identify the nature of the shadows.
Watching the Mind, Training the Mind Matthieu: I think the cognitive therapy technique comes quite close to that.
When I met him, Aaron Beck, the founder of cognitive and behavioral therapy, told me he was struck by its convergences with the approach of Buddhism.3 Figuring among the similarities Aaron Beck noticed was eliminating the “six main mental afflictions”: attachment, anger and hostility, arrogance and mental confusion, which are to be slowly replaced by serenity, compassion and inner freedom. He also noted similarities in the application of procedures and meditation techniques aiming to reduce the mental fabrications leading to these afflictions: in particular, being absorbed in intransigent egocentricity.
One of the aims of cognitive therapies is in fact to gain awareness of the mental fabrications and exaggerations that individuals superimpose on certain events and situations. Cognitive therapies and Buddhism also aim to successfully reduce people’s tendency to assign the highest priority, and sometimes exclusive priority, to their own objectives and desires, to the detriment of other people and often their own well-being and mental health. Beck notes that people suffering from psychotic problems experience intensified self-focalization: They relate everything to themselves and are exclusively concerned with the fulfillment of their own wants and needs. It must also be said that “normal” people often display the same type of egocentricity but to a lesser extent and in a more subtle way. Buddhism tries to diminish these characteristics.
What we really need is to identify the mental events that arise in our mind and skillfully resolve them. Many of the things that continue upsetting us are superimpositions on reality, mental fabrications that we can easily deconstruct. We need to be more skillful in paying attention to all the nuances of what is actually happening in our mind and in successfully freeing ourselves from being enslaved by our own thoughts. This is how one can gain inner freedom.
We invest a lot of effort in improving the external conditions of our lives, but in the end, it is always the mind that experiences the world and translates these outer conditions into either well-being or suffering. If we are able to transform the way we perceive things, then we will transform at the same time the quality of our lives. The normal mind is often confused, agitated, rebellious, and subject to innumerable automatic patterns. The goal is not to shut down the mind and make it like a vegetable, but rather to make it free, lucid, and balanced.
Wolf: I fully agree but wish to maintain that there may be many different ways to get there. Different cultures propose different strategies, extending from Socratic dialogues about the essence of things and the human condition to a host of spiritual practices, most of them embedded in religious systems, to humanistic stances based on the ideals of enlightenment, to distinct educational programs, and finally to therapeutic interventions. Would it not be desirable to devote some effort to the identification of the most efficient and practical strategies?
Matthieu: Of course there are many ways to get there. In Buddhism alone, one speaks of 84,000 gates to the path of liberation. What matters is which method actually works for you, according to your own mental dispositions, life circumstances, and capacities. If you want to open a door, then you need the right key. There is no point in choosing a golden key if it is the old rusted iron key that actually opens the door.
Wolf: As far as I can tell, the most efficient strategy so far has been the codification of human rights in modern, democratic constitutions and the installation of sanctions for violating social norms—hand in hand with the development of political and economic systems that protect the freedom of individuals and optimize equality. Surely these measures have to go together with transformations of the individuals embedded in these systems to have the greatest impact. If external causes for suffering are reduced and if social and governmental structures are such that compassion, altruism, justice, and responsibility are recognized and rewarded, then human beings are more likely to exhibit such traits and vice versa. Matthieu: Society and its institutions influence and condition individuals, but individuals can in turn make society and institutions evolve as well.
As this interaction continues over the course of generations, culture and individuals keep on shaping each other. Cultural evolution can be applied to both moral values—certain values are more apt to be transmitted from one individual to another—and beliefs in general, insofar as certain beliefs give people greater chances of surviving.
If we want to encourage a more caring and humane society to develop, it is important to evaluate the respective capacities for change of both individuals and society. If humans had no ability to evolve by themselves, it would be better to concentrate all our efforts on transforming institutions and society and not waste time encouraging individual transformation. But the experience of contemplatives, on the one hand, and the research on neuroplasticity and epigenetics, on the other, has shown that individuals can change.
Wolf: Of course. Otherwise we would not invest much hope in the possibility for education to nurture character traits that reduce individual suffering and contribute to the stabilization of peaceful societies. But the effectiveness of education is undisputed, and so is the value of attitudes that you claim result from contemplative training. It should be investigated whether current scientific evidence shows that meditation has the transformative power you advocate or that societies in which contemplative practices are widespread live in greater peace and inflict less suffering on their members than societies in which such practices are uncommon.
Notes
1. D. Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2011). See also: D. Kahneman, P. Slovic, and A. Tversky, eds., Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982); and D.
Kahneman and A. Tversky, “Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk,” Econometrica 47, no. 2 (1979): 263–291. 2. B. Fredrickson, Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become (New York: Hudson Street Press, 2013).
3. See also the article on this subject by A.T. Beck, “Buddhism and Cognitive Therapy,” Cognitive Therapy Today: The Beck Institute Newsletter (2005). 3 How Do We Know What We Know?
What Reality Do We Perceive?
Can we understand reality as it is? On the level of ordinary perception, the neuroscientist and the Buddhist thinker say no: We never stop interpreting sensorial signals and constructing “our” reality. What are the advantages and disadvantages of this interpretation? Is it possible, with experimental and intellectual investigation, to shed light on the true nature of things? How do we acquire knowledge? Is there an objective reality independent from our perceptions? The first-person approach will be distinguished from second- and third-person exterior approaches. Is it possible to perfect our inner microscope, with introspection, and correct our distortions of reality and remedy the causes of suffering? Wolf: Both of our traditions are deeply involved in fascinating epistemic questions: questions of how we acquire knowledge about the world, how reliable this knowledge is, and whether our perceptions reflect reality as it is or whether we perceive only the results of interpretations. Is it at all possible to recognize the “true” nature of the things around us, or do we only have access to their appearance?
We have two different sources of knowledge to call on. The primary and most important source is our subjective experience because it results from introspection or our interactions with the world around us. The second source is science, which attempts to understand the world and our condition by extending our senses with instruments, applying the tools of rational reasoning to interpreting observed phenomena, developing predictive models, and verifying our predictions through experiments. Both sources of knowledge, however, are limited by the cognitive abilities of our brains because these constrain what and how we perceive, imagine, and reason.
Precisely because of these constraints, we don’t know where the limits of our cognition are; we can only posit that such limits are likely to exist.
Let me give a few examples to illustrate why I think that this is an inescapable conclusion. The brain is the product of an evolutionary process, just as every other organ and the human organism are as a whole. The brain is also the product of an undirected evolutionary game, in which the generation of diversity and selection has brought forth organisms optimized for survival and reproduction. As a consequence, these organisms are adapted to the world in which they have evolved. Life developed only in a narrow segment of the world as it is known to us: the mesoscopic range. The smallest organisms capable of autonomously sustaining their structural integrity and reproducing themselves consist of assemblies of interacting molecules that are confined by a membrane and measure only a few micrometers. One example is bacteria.
Multicellular organisms, plants, and animals reach sizes in the range of meters. All of these organisms have developed sensors for signals that are relevant for their survival and reproduction. Accordingly, these sensors respond to only a narrow range of the available signals.
The algorithms developed for the evaluation of the registered signals have adapted to the specific needs of the respective organisms. Thus, the cognitive functions of organisms are highly idiosyncratic and tuned to a limited range of dimensions. For we humans, this is the world that we can perceive directly with our five senses and that we tend to equate with the “ordinary world.” This is the dimension in which the laws of classical physics prevail, which is probably the reason that these laws were discovered before those of quantum physics. This is the segment of the world for which our nervous system generates well-adapted behavior, our senses define perceptual categories, and our reasoning leads to plausible and useful interpretations of the nature of objects and the laws that govern their interactions.
It follows from these considerations that our cognitive systems have, with all likelihood, not been optimized to unravel the true nature of perceived phenomena in the Kantian sense. Emanuel Kant distinguished between a hypothetical Ding an sich—literally the “thing in itself,” or the essence of an object of cognition that cannot be reduced further to anything else—and the phenomenological appearance of that object, which is accessible to our senses. Our sensory organs and the neuronal structures that evaluate their signals have evolved to capture the information that is relevant for survival and reproduction and to generate behavioral responses according to pragmatic heuristics that serve these functions. Objectivity of perception (i.e., the ability to recognize the hypothetical Ding an sich) has never been a selection criterion. We know today that we only perceive a narrow spectrum of the physical and chemical properties of this world. We use those few signals to construct our perceptions, and our naïve intuition is that these provide us with a complete and coherent view of the world. We trust our cognitive faculties; we experience our perceptions as reflecting reality and cannot feel otherwise. In other words, our primary perceptions, whether mediated by introspection or sensory experience, appear to us as evident. They have the status of convictions.
Matthieu: We believe that we experience reality as it is, without realizing how much we interpret and distort it. Indeed, a gap exists between the way things appear and the way they are. Wolf: Right. We have many examples illustrating this selective adaptation of our cognition to phenomena that matter for our life. One is our inability to develop an intuition about the phenomena that quantum physics postulates. The conditions of this microcosmos are difficult for us to imagine. The same holds true for the dimensions of the universe and the highly nonlinear dynamics of complex systems.
Neither our sensors nor our cognitive functions have been adapted by evolution to cope with these aspects of the world because they were irrelevant for survival at the time when our cognition evolved.
Matthieu: For example, it is quite difficult to imagine something that appears as either a wave, which is not localized, or a particle, which is localized depending on the way you look at it.
Wolf: We also have difficulties with the cosmological scale. Take relativity theory: Our preconceptions resist the idea that the coordinates of space and time should be intertwined and relative because in the mesoscopic world, our ordinary world, we experience space and time as different and separate dimensions. It is interesting, though, that we are nevertheless able to explore dimensions of the world that are accessible to neither introspection nor our primary experience by extending our sense organs with instruments— telescopes and microscopes—and by complementing our cognitive abilities with the analytical and inductive power of reason. We make inferences, derive predictions, and validate them by experiment.
However, all this occurs within the closed system of scientific reasoning, and there is no guarantee that the obtained insights have the status of irrefutability. Matthieu: But here you are referring only to an understanding of reality based on our ordinary sense perceptions. When Buddhism speaks of apprehending “reality as it is,” it does not refer to mere perceptions but to a logical assessment of the ultimate nature of reality. If you ask whether reality is made of a collection of autonomous, self-existing entities, and then conduct a proper, logical investigation, then you will come to the conclusion that what appear to exist as truly separate entities are in fact a set of interdependent phenomena devoid of autonomous intrinsic existence. However, even if one understands this mentally, that does not mean one’s senses will perceive outer phenomena as they are, without any distortion. In fact, the Buddha himself said: Eyes, ears, and nose are not valid cognizers.
Likewise the tongue and the body are not valid cognizers.
If these sense faculties were valid cognizers, What could the sublime path do for anyone?1 Here, the “sublime path” refers to a proper investigation of the ultimate nature of reality.
Wolf: Before commenting on these deep insights obtained by contemplation, I would like to make a few additional remarks on the evolution of our cognitive systems, especially with respect to the transition between biological and cultural evolution. Our basic cognitive functions were initially selected to help us cope with the conditions of a presocial world. At the late stages of biological evolution, there was with all likelihood some coevolution between the emerging social environment and our brains, a coevolution that endowed our brains with certain social skills, such as the ability to perceive, emit, and interpret social signals. These abilities were then further complemented and refined by epigenetic modifications of brain architectures that occur during the development of individuals and are guided by experience and education. Matthieu: Epigenetics refers to the fact that we inherited a set of genes, but the expression of these genes can be modulated by influences that we encounter during our lifetime. These can be outer influences, such as receiving a lot of affection or being abused, or inner influences, such as enduring severe anxiety or having a mind at peace. Some of these modifications can even occur in utero. When pregnant rats are exposed to chronic stress, their children have altered stress responses and react more sensitively to stress. The reason is that some of the genes that code for proteins involved in stress-regulating networks become downregulated, meaning they become less active and produce fewer or none of the proteins they are coding for. Recent research has shown that meditation has a significant effect on the expression of a number of genes, including some related to stress.2
Wolf: Yes, these additional modifications of brain functions are caused by imprinting and learning processes and serve as the major transmission mechanisms for sociocultural evolution. Thus, our brains are the product of both biological and cultural evolution and exist in these two dimensions. Through cultural evolution, those realities that we address as immaterial entities, as psychological, mental, and spiritual phenomena, came into being. These phenomena came into the world because of the special cognitive skills of human beings, which allow us to create social realities such as belief and value systems, and to conceptualize what we observe in ourselves and others, such as feelings, emotions, convictions, and attitudes. If all these phenomena are constructs of our brains—which is, to me, the most likely assumption—then their ontological status, their relation to “reality,” should be subject to the same epistemic limitations that constrain our brains when it comes to perceiving the deeper nature of the world.
Thus, the possibility needs to be considered that not only our perceptions, motivations, and behavioral responses but also our way of reasoning and drawing inferences are adapted to the particular conditions of the world in which we evolved, including the world of social realities that emerged during cultural evolution. How Do We Acquire Knowledge?
Matthieu: Let’s recall that epistemology is the theory of knowledge, the philosophical discipline that investigates the methods used to acquire knowledge and distinguish valid cognition from mere opinions and naïve perceptions. Wolf: From a neurobiological perspective, the distinction between “valid cognition” and “naïve perceptions” is not evident. We consider perception as an active, constructive process, whereby the brain uses its a priori knowledge about the world to interpret the signals provided by the sense organs. Remember, brains harbor a huge amount of knowledge about the world. Unlike computers—which possess separate components for the storage of programs and data and for the execution of computations—in the brain, all these functions are implemented in and determined by the functional architecture of the neuronal network. By “functional architecture,” I mean the way in which neurons are connected to each other, which particular neurons are actually connected, whether these connections are excitatory or inhibitory, and whether they are strong or weak. When a brain learns something new, a change in its functional architecture occurs: Certain connections are strengthened, whereas others are weakened. Hence, all the knowledge a brain has at its disposal, as well as the programs according to which this knowledge is used to interpret sensory signals and structure behavioral responses, resides in the specific layout of its functional architecture. The search for sources of knowledge is thus reducible to the identification of factors that specify and modify the functional architecture of brains.
This leads one to the identification of the three major sources of knowledge about the world. The first, and certainly not the least important, is evolution because a substantial part of the brain’s functional architecture is determined by genes. This knowledge, which pertains primarily to the conditions of the precultural world and has been acquired through evolutionary adaptation, is stored in the genes and expressed in the functional architecture of a newborn’s brain. This knowledge is implicit—we are not aware of having it because we were not around when it was acquired. Still, we use it to interpret the signals provided by our sense organs. Without this immense base of a priori knowledge, we would be unable to make sense of our perceptions because we would not know how to interpret sensory signals. This inborn knowledge is subsequently complemented by extensive epigenetic shaping of the brain’s neuronal architecture, which adapts the developing brain to the actual conditions in which the individual lives.
The human brain develops many of its connections only after birth, and this process continues until ages 20 to 25. During this period, numerous new connections are formed and many of the existing connections removed; this making and breaking is guided by the neuronal activity. Because after birth neuronal activity is modulated by interactions with the environment, the development of brain architectures is thus determined by a host of epigenetic factors derived from the natural and social worlds.
A considerable part of this developmentally acquired knowledge also remains implicit because of the phenomenon of childhood amnesia. Children before age 4 have only a limited capacity to remember the context in which they have experienced and learned particular contents. The reason is that the brain centers required for these storage functions—we call them episodic, biographical, or declarative memories—have not matured yet. Thus, although young children learn efficiently and store contents in a robust way through structural modifications of their brain architecture, they often have no recollection of the source of this knowledge. Because of this apparent lack of causation, knowledge acquired in this way is implicit, just as evolutionarily acquired knowledge is, and often assumes the status of a conviction—that is, its truth is taken for granted.
Like innate knowledge, this acquired knowledge is used to shape cognitive processes and structure our perceptions. Yet we are not aware that what we perceive is actually the result of such a knowledge-based interpretation. This has far-reaching consequences: the genetic dispositions and, even more important, the epigenetic, culture-specific shaping of different brains introduce profound interindividual variability. Thus, it is not surprising that different persons, particularly those raised in different cultural environments, are likely to perceive the same reality differently. Because we are not aware of the fact that our perceptions are constructions, we are bound to take what we perceive as the only truth and do not question its objective status. This constructive nature of perception makes it difficult to distinguish between valid and naïve cognition. Matthieu: Sure, but logical reasoning and rigorous investigation can allow us to unmask the game played by mental fabricationsThe study of the evolution of cultures is a new discipline that has led to remarkable advances over the last 30 years, particularly under the impetus of two American researchers, Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson. According to them, two evolutions occur in parallel: the slow evolution of genes and the relatively fast evolution of cultures, which allows psychological faculties to appear that could never have evolved under the influence of genes alone—hence the title of their book, Not by Genes Alone.3 Boyd and Richerson think of culture as a collection of ideas, knowledge, beliefs, values, abilities, and attitudes acquired through teaching, imitation, and every other kind of socially transmitted information.4 Human transmission and cultural evolution are cumulative because each generation has at its start knowledge and technological experience acquired by previous generations.5 Most human beings are inclined to conform to dominant attitudes, customs, and beliefs. The evolution of cultures favors the establishment of social institutions that define and reward respect for behavioral norms and punish nonconformity to ensure the harmony of communal life.
Still, these norms are not fixed: Like cultures, they evolve with the acquisition of new knowledge. Wolf: Let me give an example of how extensively our a priori knowledge (i.e., cognitive schemata) determines what and how we perceive. The perception of a dynamic process and the derived predictions depend on whether the observer assumes that it is a process with linear or nonlinear dynamics. A prime example of linear dynamics is a mechanical clock. Each swing of the pendulum will, through a cascade of transmission wheels, cause a precisely determined advance of the arms—and if it is a perfect clock that is free of friction or other disturbing influences, then it can be predicted for an unlimited period of time how the arms will move and where they will be at a particular moment in time. The dynamics of the clock follow a continuous and fully deterministic trajectory. The function determining this trajectory is a combination of pendulum swings and the conversion of those swings into a rotation of the arms.
An example of nonlinear dynamics is a pendulum that swings over a surface on which three magnets are fixed in a triangular arrangement. Let’s assume the pendulum is free to swing in all planes.
In this case, the movement of the pendulum is determined not only by the forces of gravity and kinetic energy but also by the overlapping attractions of the three magnetic fields. When one sets the pendulum in motion, it will move on extremely complex trajectories before it finally settles over one of the attracting magnets, but it is entirely unpredictable over which magnet it will come to rest. Even if the pendulum always starts from exactly the same position, it is not possible to predict where it will finally stop. Along the trajectory among the various attracting forces, there are many points where the pendulum could go right or left with equal probability; minute forces determine which way it finally goes. The pendulum’s trajectory would also remain unpredictable if it were kept moving by driving it gently with an oscillating force. In that case, the pendulum would rotate around the three magnets. One could calculate the probability with which the pendulum would be, on average, within the attraction field of one of the magnets, but it would still be impossible to predict when exactly the pendulum would be where. If one were to control a clock with such a “chaotic” pendulum, then one would observe highly unpredictable movements of the arms.
For normal human perception, assume linearity is a well-adapted strategy for two reasons. First, many of the relevant processes around us can be approximated by linear models. Second, because the evolution or trajectories of linear systems are much more predictable than those of nonlinear systems, it provides little advantage to develop intuitions about the dynamics of a nonlinear system if one wishes to make inferences about the future dynamics of that system.
For these reasons, there has probably been no selection pressure to evolve intuitions for highly nonlinear processes. As a consequence, we seem to have difficulty imagining processes that have nonlinear dynamics and drawing the right conclusions about these processes.
For example, because we intuitively assume linearity, we misperceive the complex dynamics of economic or ecologic systems, nurture the illusion that we can forecast and hence control the future trajectories of these systems, and then are surprised when the outcome of our interventions differs radically from what we had expected. Given these evolutionary limitations of our cognitive abilities and intuitions, we are left with the burning question of which source of knowledge we should trust, especially when we are confronted with contradictions among our intuitions, primary perceptions, scientific statements, and collectively acquired social convictions.
Matthieu: Buddhism also emphasizes the fact that a correct understanding of the phenomenal world acknowledges the fact that all phenomena arise through almost numberless interdependent causes and conditions that interact outside of a linear causality.
Can There Be Valid Cognition of Some Aspects of Knowledge? Matthieu: According to Buddhist views, it is quite clear that a gap exists between the way things appear and the way they are. Can we close this gap and, if so, how?
When one is thirsty and sees a mirage in the desert, one may run toward it, hoping to get water, but of course the water is just an illusion. Many such examples show that the way things appear quite often doesn’t correspond to reality. When the way we perceive outer phenomena is dysfunctional—we cannot drink the mirage water—in Tibetan Buddhism, this is called invalid cognition. If our mode of perception is functional, as when we perceive as water what we usually call water—something we can wash with and use to quench our thirst—it allows us to function in the world, and it is therefore called valid cognition. At a deeper level of analysis, which Buddhism calls ultimate logic, if we perceive water to be an autonomous, a truly existing phenomenon, this is considered to be an invalid cognition.
Conversely, if we recognize that water is a transitory, interdependent phenomenon resulting from a myriad of causes and conditions, yet ultimately devoid of intrinsic reality, this becomes valid cognition.
At the level of perceptions, according to the Buddhist theory of perception, which has been debated by commentators for 2,000 years, at the initial moment of perception, our senses capture an object. Then comes a raw, nonconceptual mental image (of a form, sound, taste, smell, or touch). At a third stage, conceptual processes are set in motion: Memories and habitual patterns are superimposed on the mental image depending on the ways our consciousness has been shaped by past experiences. This gives birth to various concepts: We identify this mental image as being, for example, a flower. We superimpose judgments on it and interpret the flower as being beautiful or ugly. Next, we generate positive, negative, or neutral feelings about it, which in turn leads to attraction, repulsion, or indifference. By then, the phenomenon outside has already changed because of the transitory nature of all things.
So, in fact, the consciousness associated with sensory experiences never directly perceives reality as it is. What we perceive are images of past states of a phenomenon that are ultimately devoid of intrinsic properties. On a macroscopic level, we know, for instance, that when we look at a star, we are actually looking at what that star was many years ago because it has taken that many years for the light emitted by the star to reach our eyes. In fact, this is true of all perceptions. We are never looking directly at phenomena in real time, and we always distort them in some way.
What’s more, the mental image of the flower (or any object) is also deceptive because we generally perceive the flower as being an autonomous entity and believe that the attributes of beauty or ugliness belong intrinsically to the flower. All of this proceeds from what Buddhism calls ignorance or lack of awareness. This kind of basic ignorance is not just a mere lack of information, such as not knowing the name of the flower, its therapeutic or poisonous effects, or the way it grows and reproduces. Ignorance here refers to a distorted and mistaken way of apprehending reality at a deeper level.
In essence, we should understand that what I perceive as being “my world” is a crystallization triggered by the encounter between my particular version of human consciousness and a vast array of outer phenomena not fully determined in and of themselves and that interact in nonlinear ways. When this encounter occurs, a particular perception of these outer phenomena occurs. Someone with insight will understand that the world we perceive is defined by a relational process taking place between the consciousness of the observer and a set of phenomena. It is therefore misleading to ascribe intrinsic properties to outer phenomena, such as beauty, ugliness, desirability, or repulsiveness. This insight has a therapeutic effect: It will disrupt the mechanism of compulsive attraction and repulsion that usually results in suffering.
But let’s return to the initial question. Yes, it is possible to transcend deluded perception and achieve a valid understanding of the true nature of the flower as being impermanent and devoid of intrinsic, autonomous existence, as being devoid of any inherent qualities.
Achieving this understanding is not dependent on our sensory perceptions or past habits. It comes from a proper analytical investigation of the nature of the phenomenal world, culminating in what is known in Buddhism as all-discriminating wisdom, an insight that apprehends the ultimate nature of phenomena without superimposing mental constructs on them. Wolf: Can I just make a comment on how this would fit well with modern neuroscientific views? Evidence from psychophysical investigations of perception and neurophysiological studies on perceptions underlying neuronal processes suggests that perceiving is essentially reconstructing. The brain compares the sparse signals provided by our eclectic sense organs with the vast basis of knowledge about the world that is stored in its architecture and generates what appears to us as a percept of reality.
When we perceive the outer world, we first arrive at a coarse match between sensory signals and knowledge-based hypotheses about the world, and then we usually enter an iterative process to obtain approximations that gradually converge to the optimal solution—a state with a minimal number of unresolved ambiguities. We perform an active search for the best matches between signals and hypotheses until we obtain results with the desired clarity. This latter process of active search-and-match requires the investment of attentional resources, takes time, and is interpretative in nature. What is actually perceived is the result of that comparative process. It appears as if this scenario is fully compatible with your views! It suffices to replace what I address as “a priori knowledge” with what you term “consciousness.” Matthieu: There are two different ways of phrasing that: one from the thirdperson perspective, in the language of neuroscience, and the other from the first-person perspective, based on introspective experience.
You described how our perception of the world is shaped by evolution and the increasing complexity of the nervous system. From a Buddhist perspective, one would say that our world, at least the world we perceive, is intimately intertwined with the way our consciousness functions. It is clear that, depending of their configuration and their past history, different streams of consciousness, whether human or not, will perceive the world in a different way. It is almost impossible for us to imagine what the world of an ant or a bat looks like. The only world we know results from the interdependent relation between our particular type of consciousness and the phenomenal world, which is a complex set of relations among countless interdependent events, causes, and conditions.
Just take the example of what we call an ocean. On a beautiful calm day the ocean appears to us like a mirror made of water, whereas on another day it might be the scene of a wild storm. We can relate these two conditions and still call these various states ocean. But what will a bat make out of the ultrasonic echoes sent up from a perfectly flat sea one day and from a chaotic sea filled with gigantic waves the next day? This is beyond our imagination in the same way that quantum physics eludes our ordinary representations. Thus, Buddhism says that our phenomenological world, the only one we perceive, depends on the particular configuration of the consciousness we have and is shaped by past experiences and habits.
Wolf: This is perfectly compatible with the Western perspective. The philosopher Thomas Nagel stated clearly that it is impossible for us to imagine how it would feel to be a bat.6 The qualia of subjective experience are simply not translatable. Although we humans are endowed with a highly differentiated communication system, our language, and with the ability to imagine the mental processes of the respective human “other,” it is still difficult—if not impossible—to know exactly how others experience themselves and the world around them. Matthieu: We may not be able to bridge the gaps between the way things appear and the way things are in all cases, such as in an optical illusion. Other kinds of gaps, however, perhaps more essential ones, can be bridged. For Buddhism, bridging the gap has essentially a pragmatic goal: to become free from suffering because suffering necessarily arises when one’s perception of the world is deluded and at odds with reality.
Is Cognitive Delusion Inescapable?
Wolf: Let’s pursue further the possibility of distinguishing between appearance and reality. You seem to assume that this epistemic gap can be bridged under certain conditions, whereas I would tend to deny this, maintaining that perceiving is always interpreting and hence attributing properties to sensory signals. In this sense, perceptions are always mental constructs. Matthieu: Sure. I fully agree with you about sense perceptions. But it is not the same when one engages in an investigation of the ultimate nature of reality. This is why it is important to clarify the domains of knowledge in which it is or is not possible to bridge the gap between the way things appear and the way they are. When we think, “This is truly beautiful” or “This is intrinsically desirable or detestable,” we are not aware that we project these concepts onto outer phenomena and then believe that they intrinsically belong to them. This gives rise to all kinds of mental reactions and emotions that are not attuned to reality and will therefore result in frustration.
Imagine a fresh rose that has just bloomed. A poet finds it exquisitely beautiful. Now imagine that you are a small insect nibbling on one of its petals. It tastes so good! But if you are a tiger standing before this rose, you are no more interested in the rose than in a bale of hay. Imagine that you are the rose at the atomic level: You are a whorl of particles passing through nearly empty space. A quantum physicist will tell you that these particles are not “things” but “waves of probability,” arising in the quantum void. What is left of the rose as a rose?
Buddhism calls phenomena events. The literal meaning of samskara, the Sanskrit word for “things” or “aggregates,” is “event” or “action.” In quantum mechanics, too, the notion of object is subordinate to a measurement, hence to an event. To believe the objects of our perception are endowed with intrinsic properties and autonomous existence is, to take again a comparison with quantum physics, like attributing local properties to particles that are entangled and belong to a global reality.
Buddhist thinkers believe that by using a proper method of investigation, one can fathom, intellectually and experientially, the correct nature of phenomena and free oneself from a mistaken, reified, and dualistic apprehension of reality. Recognizing clearly the mechanisms through which we delude ourselves and adopting a view that is much more attuned to the true nature of phenomena is a liberating process based on wisdom. It doesn’t mean that one is not going to be fooled by optical illusions anymore, but that one will not be fooled into thinking that phenomena exist as autonomous, permanent entities. Wolf: This is interesting because when you talk about delusions, you add qualities to them, emotional qualities such as disgusting or beautiful, attractive or repulsive. I had in mind perceptual delusions for which we can obtain objective data by using a physical measuring device in addition to our perception. Without an independent measure, there would be no way to disclose a delusion as such. This is the way science tries to go about recognizing these delusions and finding out why the brain makes these false interpretations. In most cases where delusions or illusions have been investigated thoroughly, it turns out that they are the consequence of an interpretation or inference that serves the perception of the invariant properties of objects.
Without these mechanisms, for instance, we would not be able to perceive the color of a flower as constant irrespective of the conditions of illumination. The spectrum of the illuminating sunlight changes constantly, and so does the spectrum of the light reflected from an object. Without interpretations, the perceived color of a particular rose would not be the same at dawn and dusk. Our brains correct for this problem. They infer the spectral composition of the illuminating light from the relations between the reflected spectra and prior knowledge about the likely color of an object and then compute on the basis of this analysis the actually perceived color of the object.
Thus, depending on context, physically different signals may be perceived as similar, and, conversely, physically identical signals may give rise to different percepts. These inferential mechanisms can give rise to “illusions,” but they have an exquisitely important function for survival—the extraction of constant properties from an ever-changing world. An animal that uses color to distinguish edible berries from other slightly more violet and poisonous berries cannot rely on an analysis of the “true” or actual spectral composition of reflected light.
It first has to assess the spectral composition of the light source—the sunlight—and then must reconstruct the perceived color.
We are completely unaware of the complexity of the computations that ensure constancy and thus survival in our changing world. In essence, all these operations are based on the evaluation of relations.
We rarely perceive absolute values such as those that are measured by physical measurement devices, be they intensities of stimuli, wavelengths of sound, light waves, or chemical concentrations. We mostly perceive these variables in relation to others, as relative differences, relative increments, and relative contrasts, and these comparisons are made across both space and time. This is an economical and efficient strategy because it emphasizes differences, permits for coverage of wide ranges of intensities, and, as mentioned, allows for constancy. Given the advantages of these well-adapted mechanisms, it is questionable whether one should call the resulting perceptions “illusions.”
Matthieu: I am not speaking of the perceived qualities of objects but of the capacity to dispel cognitive delusion, such as the belief that ugliness is an intrinsic quality of the object you behold. As you said, some illusions help us to adapt to the world, but this is not the case with believing in the existence of permanent phenomena or of an autonomous, unitary self within each person.
Wolf: Now, what is an illusion or a delusion in your view or in a Buddhist view? You stated that even in cases where there is no objective measurement device and one can rely only on one’s introspection and perception, it is still possible to distinguish between delusion and reality. I don’t see how this is possible.
Matthieu: The perceptual illusions that you describe can be useful to function in the world, as you rightly pointed out, but they don’t have much impact on our subjective experience of happiness or suffering. The cognitive delusions I described have an opposite result: They cause us to act in dysfunctional ways that produce suffering. The illusions you are talking about are highly adaptive and can be considered wonders of nature. The ones I mentioned are curses that keep us in a state of deep dissatisfaction. The mind might not be a reliable measuring device or a faithful perceptual device, but it is a powerful analytical device. This is true of Einstein’s thought experiments, for instance, and it is also true of Buddhism’s in-depth investigation of the interdependent, impermanent nature of phenomena. Wolf: But can you really extrapolate this view to all cognitive functions, to perceptions of social realities, social relations, and belief and value systems? I think the psychophysical examples I just mentioned teach us that we construct what we perceive and tend to experience the result as real. We probably do this not only in the case of visual or auditory perception of tangible objects but also when perceiving social realities. How can we distinguish between right and wrong when different people perceive the same condition differently, each taking the perceived as real, as correct?
Matthieu: That is why we need logical reasoning and wisdom. If I recognize that no one wants to suffer, then it seems quite straightforward to conclude that harming others is wrong. Wolf: Sure, but if our intuitions and perceptions of the outer world depend on neuronal processes—and I think there is no way around assuming that the “inner eye,” too, is a function of neuronal interactions—then the contents of cognition are determined by the way our brains work and ultimately by genes and postnatal experience. All humans have a rather similar genetic makeup, and therefore we have consensus on many of our perceptions and interpretations. But still we may have rather different experiences, especially when raised in different cultures. Two people observing the same social situation may perceive it in completely different ways. They may come to grossly diverging ethical or moral judgments, unable to convince the other through argument that he or she is wrong because both experience what they experience as the only reality.
The problem is that in the case of the perception of social realities, there are no “objective” measurement devices. There are only different perceptions; there is no right or wrong. This has far-reaching consequences for our concepts of tolerance. Solving such problems with majority votes is clearly no fair solution. Assuming that one’s own position is correct and granting others the right to stay with their “wrong” perceptions as long as they do not disturb us is humiliating and disrespectful. Still, this is what is considered “tolerant” behavior.
What we should do instead is grant everybody that her or his perceptions are correct and assume that this attitude will be reciprocated. Only if this agreement on reciprocity is violated have the dissenting parties the right to exert sanctions.
I take from what you said that you have a recipe for addressing such cases, and this would of course be of utmost importance to settle cultural conflicts arising from diverging perceptions. Do you think that the mental techniques designed by Buddhist philosophy are able to help in such cases of cognitive dissent, of conflicts between different perceptions that both parties experience as real and true?
Can people, through mental practice, find the “correct” solution—in case it does exist—or at least become aware of the fact that the world can be perceived in different ways? Matthieu: As you rightly pointed out, one must be fully aware of people’s ingrained beliefs and moral values and take them into consideration.
That being said, social and cultural perceptions can be as deceptive as cognitive delusions, and they are built up in similar ways. We sometimes perceive people from other races, religions, social ranks, and so on as “superior” or “inferior.” You might perceive someone as a friend one day and as a foe the next. A person from the Himalayas will probably find most modern art meaningless. All these are mental fabrications. That’s where many of our human-made problems arise.
The purpose of the Buddhist approach is not to confront people’s views head on by imposing another view that one considers to be superior but to help people see that all such views can be misleading and that we should not casually take them for granted. For example, when refuting belief in the existence of a self, it does not help to merely proclaim, “There is no self.” Instead, after having thoroughly investigated the purported characteristics of the self and concluded that it does not exist as a separate entity, one would simply invite others to conduct such an investigation and find out for themselves.
So the idea is not to coerce people into seeing things as we see them or adopt our own aesthetic and moral values and judgments, but to help them reach a correct view of the ultimate nature of things as being devoid of intrinsic reality.
In truth, people from different cultures are all superimposing their particular mental fabrications on reality. The problem can be solved if these people investigate reality through logical reasoning and realize that they are simply distorting reality and that neither the object they are looking at nor the subject who perceives it exists as an independent, truly existing entity. As for “right” and “wrong” and ethical judgments, various forms of conditioning and delusions, as we would say in Buddhist terms, lead to various ethical views and systems—some people think, for instance, that taking revenge on someone, even to the point of killing that person, is ethical. But is it logical to kill someone to show that killing is wrong? Sound reasoning can help to identify some universal principles based on benevolence and compassion that may help us reach a consensus about fundamental values that includes care, openness of mind, honesty, and so forth.
Let’s remember that the goal of Buddhism is to put an end to the root causes of suffering. Buddhism considers different levels of suffering in depth. Some forms of suffering are obvious to all: a toothache or, more tragically, a massacre. But suffering is also embedded in change and impermanence: People go for a joyful picnic and suddenly a child is bitten by a snake; someone eats a delicious meal but ends with food poisoning. Many pleasurable experiences soon turn neutral or aversive.
A much deeper level of suffering also exists that we don’t usually identify as such and yet is the root cause of all sufferings: As long as the mind is under the influence of delusion and of any afflictive mental state such as hatred, craving, or jealousy, suffering is always ready to manifest itself at any time.
To take the example of impermanence, at each moment everything changes, from the change of seasons and of youth to old age, to the subtlest aspects of impermanence that take place in the shortest conceivable period of time. Once we have recognized that the universe is made not of solid, distinct entities, but of a dynamic flow of interactions among countless fleeting phenomena, it has major consequences in weakening our grasping onto the reality we see before us. A proper understanding of impermanence helps us to close some of the gap between appearances and reality.
Each Person to His or Her Own Reality
Wolf: What is reality? Is it not that people look at the same thing in different ways? Matthieu: How can one be sure of that? There is no way to prove that a reality exists out there behind the screen of appearances, a reality that exists in and of itself, independent of us and the rest of the world. To assume a substrate beneath appearance may seem rational, but it surely needs to be questioned. Even before the advent of quantum physics, the mathematician Henri Poincaré said, “It is impossible that there is a reality totally independent of the mind that conceives it, sees it or senses it. Even if it did exist, such a world would be utterly inaccessible to us.”7 Simply measuring what we can apprehend in the world does not prove that what we observe exists from its own side and has intrinsic characteristics. Perceptions, appearances, and measurements are just events. While looking at the moon, if one presses one’s eyeballs with one’s fingers, one will see two moons.
One may do that a thousand times, without the second moon being any more real for all our efforts. But we should also ask ourselves whether the first moon is ultimately real in the way it seems to us to be.
This is especially true of the qualities that we ascribe to phenomena.
If something could be intrinsically beautiful, independently of the observer—an object of art, for instance—it would strike everyone as beautiful, whether it be a sophisticated New Yorker or a reclusive forest dweller who has never been in touch with the modern world.
Wolf: So you have a constructivist approach, and you consider that everybody constructs the world in his own way.
Matthieu: Yes, and that way is deluded because we all keep on assigning an element of truth to our superimpositions on the world. What Buddhism does is deconstruct ordinary perceptions by conducting an in-depth investigation of the nature of what people see to make them understand that they are all distorting reality in different ways.
Wolf: I would not say “distorting” because if there is no objectivity, you can’t distort anything—there is nothing objective to distort. People simply give different interpretations. Is There an Objective Reality “Out There”?
Matthieu: Objectivity is not just one of the many versions of what various people perceive but the irrefutable understanding that all phenomena are impermanent and devoid of intrinsic characteristics. This applies to all appearances, all perceptions, all phenomena. Distortion, therefore, is not defined in comparison with a true, self-existing reality. Distortion is to attribute any kind of intrinsic reality, permanence, or autonomy to phenomena.
A nondistorted view is not one of the many ways that things appear to us ordinarily. Rather it is an understanding of the process of delusion, the realization that the phenomenal world is a dynamic, interdependent flow of events and the knowledge that what we perceive is the result of the interactions of our consciousness with these phenomena. That understanding is correct in all situations.
Buddhist texts use the example of a glass of water. They point out that water could be perceived in countless different ways. We perceive it as a drink or something to wash with, whereas for a fish water is like space. Water is known to terrify someone stricken with rabies, whereas it appears to a scientist like a great number of molecules. According to Buddhist cosmology, some sentient beings may perceive water as fire and some as delightful ambrosia. However, behind all these perceptions, is there a true, self-defined glass of water? The Buddhist answer is no.
When a complex set of phenomena interacts with our senses and consciousness, a particular object crystallizes in our mind. We might see this object as something to drink or we might find it utterly terrifying if we are suffering from rabies. At no point in time and space can one find autonomous objects or subjects existing in and of themselves. The glass of water has never been there on its own, endowed with a true, separate reality. It only exists in a world of relations. What Buddhism calls “reality” is not phenomena such as self-existent water but the realization of their impermanence and lack of intrinsic reality. Wolf: This notion fits well with the constructivist position of contemporary neurobiology. Still, the world has certain properties, and animals seem to share the same criteria for the definition of objects and qualities. In our ordinary mesoscopic world, solid, nontransparent objects are called rocks behind which animals can hide, roll down if placed on a slope, and so on. Evidence suggests that all mammals use similar gestalt principles (i.e., similar rules and hypotheses to construct their percepts).
Matthieu: Sure. Different types of consciousnesses that are similar enough— those of human beings and some animals (great apes, dolphins, elephants, and others)—will perceive the world with a corresponding degree of similarity. The more the structures of these consciousnesses differ, the more their world is different. The point is that when you free yourself from cognitive delusions first through an analytic investigation and then through integrating the resulting understanding into your way of relating to the world, you will gradually gain freedom from the compulsive attraction and repulsion that usually result from delusion. Thus, as you get closer to understanding the true nature of phenomena, you get closer to understanding the root causes of suffering and to freeing yourself from these causes. This freedom brings about a more optimal way of being that is much less susceptible to suffering.
Wolf: This is interesting: First you take a constructivist stance and then you question the validity of your constructions and conclude that this epistemic turn, this switch in your cognitive approach, leads to the reduction of suffering.
Matthieu: That’s the goal of the Buddhist path. Wolf: Let me try to understand this. I think many of us who were raised after the Age of Enlightenment assume that suffering can be reduced if we find out how things work and how we can manipulate them for improving our condition. For this strategy, it is imperative to be able to distinguish among delusion, false beliefs, and superstition, on the one hand, and valid interpretations, on the other.
In medicine, for example, we try to find causal relations between events, identify infectious agents, and then develop treatment. These concepts are competing, however. Adherents of allopathic medicine would agree that you need a certain dosage of an antibiotic to make it work. Homeopaths, in contrast, would maintain that it is dilution that matters more than the drug, even if the dilution is so high that it becomes highly unlikely that a single molecule of the drug is actually left in the bottle you buy at the pharmacy. They claim that the treatment is still effective because the water or the pill is supposed to keep the memory of the molecules that had been there before dilution.
We could leave it there rather than trying to find out which treatment is more effective. Or we could perform a double-blind study8 and discover that placebos are as effective as the homeopathic treatment whereas the antibiotic is much more efficient. In doing so, we assign a property to drugs and verify by experiment that the property is causally related to an effect and therefore with all likelihood relevant to the effectiveness of the treatment. By repeating the experiment and establishing dose-response curves, we establish causal relations and ensure that the property of the drug is constant.
However, if I understand your approach correctly, you would deny that the drug has this invariable property, or you would say that it has the defined property only in the special context of this assay.
Matthieu: That is not exactly what I meant. What you describe refers to the difference between what Buddhism calls correct relative truth and erroneous relative truth.
Wolf: Explain that to me. Causality as a Correlate of Interdependence Matthieu: In Buddhism, absolute truth refers to the recognition that phenomena are ultimately devoid of intrinsic existence. Relative truth is to acknowledge that these phenomena arise not in haphazard ways but according to the laws of causality. Far from refuting them, Buddhism is based on these laws. It even emphasizes that these laws are ineluctable and should be understood and observed if one wants to escape suffering. Of course phenomena do have relative properties that allow them to act on other phenomena and be acted on by them through mutual causation. However, according to Buddhism, to believe that penicillin is intrinsically good, no matter what the circumstances might be, is incorrect. For instance, some people happen to be allergic to penicillin. Although in most situations penicillin is beneficial for people at a correct dosage, it’s not beneficial in itself because it can be poison for someone who is allergic to it.
What Buddhism concluded after investigating the fundamental nature of the phenomenal world is that these properties are not intrinsic to the object but arise through particular relations between phenomena. Heat can only be defined in relation to cold, high in relation to low, the whole in relation to its parts, a mental concept in relation to its base of designation, and so on. The same substance could be curative to someone and poisonous to someone else or, like digitalin for the heart, curative in small quantities and poisonous in large quantities. This is also true at the fundamental level of quantum physics, with the absence of local properties in elementary particles, a notion that bothered Einstein and yet has since been proven to be true.
This is all the more true when it comes to judgments, such as beautiful and ugly, desirable and hateful. Yet ordinarily we do reify the world, attribute intrinsic properties to what is around us, and react accordingly in dysfunctional ways that ultimately cause suffering.
That is what I meant. Valid cognition should withstand the most thorough and in-depth analysis. Apparent properties of phenomena don’t. There is a difference between apparent, relative, conditioned properties and intrinsic ones, but typically we ignore it. This is not a mere intellectual distinction—ignoring it causes us to act in ways that stand at odds with reality and are, therefore, dysfunctional. Wolf: When you conduct “thorough and in-depth analysis,” does that include experiments?
Matthieu: It can, of course. In the example that you quoted, the experiment would consist of conducting a double-blind study looking at the effect of penicillin on a large sample of individuals and doing the same with homeopathic medicine. This experiment would lead to the conclusion that you mentioned, which is that penicillin is an active substance, whereas homeopathic remedies are not less but also not more efficient than placebos. That would be considered to be correct relative truth, that is, valid knowledge of the phenomenal world. But no matter what the results of the study are, ultimately penicillin is still an impermanent phenomenon, the properties of which differ depending on circumstances.
Wolf: Is it then that we should detach ourselves from the reality that we perceive, including the social reality with its ethical and moral value systems? Should we abandon the belief that there is anything reliable and constant out there and content ourselves with the insight that “in reality” there are no invariant properties attached to anything, neither to inanimate objects nor to plants, animals, or persons? What do we gain if we abandon the idea that things have invariant properties that allow us to recognize and categorize them and instead adopt the view that properties are merely assigned and permanently changing in a context-dependent way? To avoid the attribution of properties is one strategy to avoid falsification because right and wrong lose their antinomy. However, I cannot see why this relativism should reduce misconceptions and suffering. Matthieu: What you describe would rather fall into the extreme of nihilism.
Buddhism clearly acknowledges the workings of the laws of causality and accepts the idea that, at the relative level, some properties or characteristics of some phenomena might endure for a while so that we may rely on these characteristics to function in our daily life in a coherent way. Stone and wood remain solid long enough, for instance, for us to build our houses with them. But it still remains that they are fundamentally impermanent. The same piece of wood that makes a useful chair for us is desirable food for a termite. Wood will eventually disintegrate into dust. Even now, wood is not fundamentally made of “wood” stuff but of particles or quarks; to view it from the perspective of quantum physics, it is the result of ungraspable quantum events. It all depends on how you look at it.
Although we can use a tool made of wood for a long time in a skillful and useful way, ultimately it is devoid of intrinsic existence. So the relative, conventional truth is not in opposition with the ultimate truth about the nature of phenomena. The latter is simply the ultimate nature of the former.
To conclude that phenomena are impermanent and interdependent is the only outcome of a careful, logical investigation. Any other proposition stating that there must be entities endowed with permanence and intrinsic properties, whether that might refer to atomic particles, the concept of beauty, or the existence of a creator god, cannot withstand such a thorough investigation.
Why would it reduce suffering? When you take the way things appear as being reality, what Buddhist scriptures call “happily taking things for granted without any analysis and investigation,” you are heading for trouble because being at odds with reality will inevitably lead to some kind of dysfunction. For instance, when you cling strongly to something, assuming that it will last, that it is truly yours, and that it is in and of itself desirable, you are not only at odds with reality but putting yourself in a vulnerable situation because all your relations to the object of your grasping are warped. Frustration and suffering will ensue when it turns out that the object is in fact impermanent, it can be destroyed or lost, and it can never be truly yours. It may also suddenly appear to be undesirable simply because your projections onto it have taken a U-turn.
However, if you think, “Phenomena appear as interdependent events devoid of autonomous, inherent characteristics and existence,” because such understanding is congruent with reality, you are much less likely to relate to objects in ways that lead to disappointment and suffering.
Constructing and Deconstructing Reality
Wolf: Your epistemic scheme resembles the position of radical constructivism. Brains construct their views of the world on the basis of inherited and acquired knowledge. Because different brains have different knowledge bases, they may arrive at different views.
Neurobiologists would agree so far. We perceive the world as we do because our brains are the way they are. Because the genetically and culturally transmitted cognitive schemata (priors) are quite similar, we tend to perceive the world in similar ways. You go one step further, however: You stated that one major cause of suffering is that people are not aware of these facts and continue to believe that perception reflects reality. Consequently, if perceptions differ, the respective other is perceived as being wrong and attempts to correct the apparently wrong perception inevitably cause suffering on both sides. Is the Buddhist position that neither right nor wrong exists because the conflict arises only between conceptual attributions that should not have been made to begin with and that there is therefore no point in trying to convince each other through argument?
Matthieu: Not quite. When people holding various opinions and entertaining various perceptions deconstruct their respective delusions, they cannot but agree on the correct understanding of the ultimate nature of phenomena.
Wolf: Okay, but they would not be able to deconstruct their perceptions.
For them, what they perceive is real. They would, however, agree at a metalevel and consent that, irrespective of our idiosyncratic perceptions, the objects of the perceivable world are impermanent, devoid of intrinsic qualities, and only defined in terms of relations. Matthieu: People may still perceive as reality something that is, for instance, nothing more than an optical illusion, but at the same time they will recognize that this illusion does not reflect the true nature of the object perceived. The goal is not to agree on sensory perceptions but to understand that these perceptions result from constructing a fictitious reality. All parties can free themselves from cognitively deluded ways of apprehending reality.
Wolf: In other words, they would continue to see what they see, but they would become aware that this is not the only way it can be seen. This epistemic stance also pervades most of the occidental philosophical schools and agrees perfectly well with what we know about the neurobiological underpinnings of perception.
Matthieu: Yes, that’s right, but it does not stop there. They would further acknowledge that their way of seeing is fabricated. Analytical meditation and mental training would allow them to recognize that their habitual tendencies cause them to attach various qualities to objects even though these qualities are not invariable attributes of the objects. Thus, through training, insight deepens, and one can come to understand the constructed nature of the cognitive processes that take place in our minds. This, in turn, makes it easier to detach oneself from grasping, attraction, and repulsion and achieve greater inner freedom.
Wolf: I find the idea fascinating that the brain, by cultivating insight, should be able to arrive at a level of metacognition that allows it to discover the nature of its own cognitive processes. By “metacognition” I mean a process by which the brain applies its cognitive abilities not to the investigation of objects in the outer world but to the investigation of its own operations. The architecture of the human brain could well allow for such metacognition because its multilayered organization permits it, in principle, to iteratively subject its own processes to scrutiny. Matthieu: You can perceive something as being permanent while understanding at the same time that it is utterly transitory. In this way, you can cease to attribute solid, unchanging qualities to what you see.
Consequently, you would not react in deluded ways. To deconstruct the world of appearances has a liberating quality. You are no longer entangled in your perceptions and cease to reify the phenomenal world. This has profound impacts on the way you apprehend the world and consequently on your experience of happiness and suffering.
When all mental fabrications are unmasked, you perceive the world as a dynamic flow of events, and you stop freezing reality in various deluded ways. Take the example of water and ice. When water freezes, it forms solid shapes that can cut your hand or break your bones if you fall on it. Now, you could think that this is the nature of water: It has a particular shape, it is hard, and so on. You could also make various forms out of ice—flower, castle, statue of a loved one, or representation of a deity. I have even heard music played on instruments made of ice! But with just a little heat, all these different, well-defined forms melt into the same fluid, shapeless water. If you remain mindful of this at all times, then when you see a flower made of ice, you are fully aware of its impermanent nature, that there is nothing intrinsic in either its “flower” quality or its “beauty.” Water is neither a flower nor a castle nor a god. It is a dynamic flow that can momentarily assume seemingly stable configurations. Likewise, if we don’t freeze reality, we will not be caught in reifying it as something solid, endowed with true, intrinsic existence, and we will not be deluded. Wolf: Water is indeed a nice metaphor: A river is never the same at two different moments. This represents the experience of an everchanging world that will never ever come back to the point where it was before. The same holds true for the brain. It is also constantly changing and will never come back to the same state. This permanent and never-repeating flow of changing states is probably the reason that we perceive time as directed.
But why do you say “true”? Why should the ever-changing water be truer than a statue of the Buddha made out of ice or stone? The distinction among ice, liquid water, and vapor is fundamental to the understanding of the properties of matter as it describes different aggregate states of the same molecular constituents. What is the meaning of “true” here?
Matthieu: One is not truer than the other. Neither water nor ice is endowed with true existence. What is true, however, is that all these aspects— solidity, fluidity, form—are impermanent. You could deconstruct water into molecules and particles and particles into merely interconnected events, quantum probabilities, not “things” standing on their own.
Such understanding comes from deeply investigating the way our own mind functions and requires a mind that is clear and stable enough to follow a rigorous process of introspection and make proper use of logic to deconstruct our naïve perceptions of reality.
Wolf: I consider it quite surprising that contemplative techniques lead to insights into the nature of the world that actually contradict our primary perceptions.
Matthieu: Even in the domain of physics, Einstein’s thought experiments and his visionary insights led him to formulate the theory of relativity, which also contradicts our primary perceptions. The same is true, even more so, with quantum physics. Wolf: Intuition and introspection have not proven to be particularly effective tools when it comes to understanding phenomena not directly accessible to our senses. This even holds for the organization and functions of our own brain, an epistemic problem that we shall have to discuss at some stage. In science, we have certain rules or strategies to validate what we believe to be the case. We postulate reproducibility, predictability, consistency, and an absence of contradictions. Sometimes we even apply aesthetic criteria such as beauty because we consider simple explanations as more trustworthy or powerful than complex ones. I can see the point that one can obtain insights through the investigation of the way one’s own mind functions. But how can one validate this process? How can one communicate to others how reliable one’s own introspective evidence is? What is “right” in this context of self-inquiry? I would like to learn more about this.
Refining the Tools of Introspection
Matthieu: Let’s take the example of the telescope. There are two reasons that you would not be able to see something clearly through a telescope: either the lens is dirty or not properly focused or the telescope is unstable and shaking. So when you lack either clarity or stability (or both), you can’t see the object properly.
Wolf: In the case of the telescope, it’s clear. There are objective criteria for what constitutes a sharp, high-contrast image. Modern cameras use these criteria to adjust the focus automatically. But what are the criteria in the case of introspection? How does it feel when the cognitive system is properly adjusted? Matthieu: Well, similarly, you need to make the mind’s telescope more focused,9 clear, and stable. Introspection has long been discredited because the subjects who were asked to engage in it in laboratory studies did so with minds that were distracted most of the time.
Distraction creates an unsteady mind. In addition, an untrained mind lacks the limpid clarity that allows one to see vividly what is happening within oneself. So whether the mind is carried away by distractions or sinks into a cognitive opacity, it will not be able to pursue proper introspection.
Wolf: So stability and clarity would be the two main criteria?
Matthieu: Yes. To use your expression, it certainly “feels” different when the mind is agitated, distracted, and murky versus when it is stable and crystal clear. A clear and stable mind brings not only inner peace but deeper insights into the nature of reality and the mind itself. These effects are not just imaginary but well-defined mental states that can be experienced again and again.
Wolf: Does reproducibility also figure as a criterion, just as in the scientific approach?
Matthieu: Whenever a contemplative whose mind is not constantly carried away into a whirlpool of thoughts investigates a particular aspect of mind through introspection, he usually comes to similar understandings and insights, which is not the case for one whose mind is wild and deluded.
Wolf: In scientific terms, that would be noise reduction—stabilization of your cognitive system.
Matthieu: That’s right. You need to get rid of both mental cloudiness and agitation. Wolf: Is this a quality your “inner eye” can acquire?
Matthieu: Yes, this is the result of sustained practice. Many techniques and meditative practices can help you to progress toward achieving a clear and stable mind. When you thus train your mind, you also perceive and understand mental phenomena more accurately. At the same time, you realize that the boundary between mental events and outer phenomena is not as solid as it seems. This approach is phenomenological because what you are investigating directly is your experience. What else could you investigate anyway? Your experience is your world.
Wolf: Is your advice to consolidate your insight and resist contextual influences?
Matthieu: You will of course still perceive all outer and inner phenomena. You will actually perceive them more vividly and with a penetrating insight because you will have stopped superimposing mental fabrications onto them. This allows for an interindividual consensus among trained contemplatives, which is not the case for untrained subjects. We may compare this process to that followed by mathematicians who, having undergone common training, can understand each other as they reach similar insights and speak the same language. Unless you are trained in mathematics, it would be hard to grasp their concepts and follow their discussions. Likewise, trained contemplatives come to similar conclusions about the nature of mind and about the fact that phenomena are impermanent and interdependent. This verifiable intersubjective agreement confers validity on their understanding.
First-, Second-, and Third-Person Experience Wolf: Mathematicians can take a pencil and write down a formula and then develop a proof using logical rules. How can you, with your teacher—I assume you need a teacher to tune your instrument, your inner eye, your microscope—know that you are going the right way? Matthieu: The way to know that is through what Francisco Varela, Claire Petitmengin, and others in the field of cognitive science call the second-person perspective, in complement with the first- and thirdperson perspectives. The second-person perspective involves an indepth, properly structured dialogue between the subject and an expert who leads the dialogue, asking appropriate questions and allowing the subject to describe his or her experience in all its minute details.
In the Tibetan tradition, for instance, the meditator will from time to time report about his meditative experiences to his teacher. The difference here is that the second person is not just a skillful psychologist but someone who has a deep experience of meditation achieved over many years of dedicated practice and whose experience has culminated in profound, clear, and stable insight on the nature of mind, something often referred to as spiritual realization or accomplishment. On the basis of his genuine and vast experience, a qualified teacher will be able to appraise the quality of the student’s meditative practice and see whether it reflects genuine progress or mere self-deceptions.
You could argue, “From a third-person perspective, how can I verify the validity of such judgments?” Well, you can actually verify all this by yourself, but not without training. A similar process exists in science. If you don’t know much about physics and mathematics, then you begin by trusting the experts because you assume that they are reliable. Why should you believe them? In the beginning, you trust them because they agree among themselves after having carefully verified each other’s findings. But you don’t have to stop there. You also know that if you were to train properly in their discipline, then you would be able to check all this by yourself. You don’t have to trust these experts forever on the basis of blind faith, which would remain unsatisfactory.
Meditation is not mathematics but rather a science of the mind, and it is conducted with rigor, perseverance, and discipline.10 Thus, when experienced contemplatives come to similar conclusions about the workings of the mind, their cumulative experience has a weight comparable to that of expert mathematicians. As long as you have not personally involved yourself in your own investigation and experience, a gap will always exist between what you are told and what you know through direct experience, but that gap can be gradually bridged by enhancing your own expertise. Wolf: Doesn’t this apply to all strategies of gaining insight? You have to agree on certain criteria, you have to agree on certain procedures for the acquisition of knowledge, then you explore, and finally you sit together and try to find out whether you reach a consensus.
Matthieu: It seems appropriate to speak of a “contemplative science” because these are not vague descriptions based on mere impressions. In the Tibetan contemplative literature, one finds entire treatises that describe various steps for analyzing the mind and offer a detailed taxonomy of the various kinds of mental events. They also describe thought processes, how concepts are formed, what the qualities of pure awareness are, and so on. These treatises also teach meditators how to avoid misconstruing fleeting experiences as genuine realization. All these phenomena are described by people who have acquired a penetrating insight into what is going on in their minds.
You could argue that they are all deceiving themselves, but it would be a bit strange if a whole cohort of people with sharp acumen who have refined their introspective faculties to such an extent deluded themselves in exactly the same way at various times in history and in various places, whereas untrained people with wild, confused minds somehow had a more reliable picture of the workings of the mind.
That’s why the Buddha encouraged contemplatives to practice assiduously by saying, “I’ve shown you a path, and it’s up to you to travel it by yourself. Don’t believe what I say simply out of respect for me, but examine the truth of it very thoroughly, as when examining the purity of a piece of gold by rubbing it on a flat stone, beating it, and melting it.” We should take not things for granted without verifying them for ourselves.
Some things are not accessible to your knowledge. Some elude your direct experience forever. When believers of theistic religions speak of the “mystery of God,” for instance, they accept the fact that they will never fully know the nature of God through their limited, imperfect experience. In the case of Buddhism, it is said that other aspects of reality are not accessible to your present cognitive capacities but that are by no means inaccessible forever. What is not clear to you now can become completely clear in the future through investigation and training. Wolf: This would also imply that those who have not adopted these practices should not rely on their firsthand intuitions, their immediate internal judgments, because they haven’t tuned their instrument. They all have to be considered naïve and deluded by blurred perceptions.
Matthieu: Yes, but they have the potential to do so. They remain naïve as long as their potential for understanding remains untapped.
Wolf: Because most of us have untrained minds, because only a small minority has gone through the process of tuning the inner-eye microscope, this situation seems fairly depressing. In the West since the Age of Enlightenment, we have focused on science as the definitive source of knowledge, but because we are all naïve, the great minds—Plato, Socrates, Kant—included, how can we trust our findings and conclusions? This reminds me of a curious conundrum that illustrates how insights derived from introspection and scientific inquiry can diverge. Consider the many and widely differing theories about the organization of our brains that have been derived from introspection and observation of the behavior of the respective other.
Most of them turn out to be incompatible with what we observe once we start to examine cognitive functions with quantitative psychophysical methods and subject brains to scientific investigation.
To the best of my knowledge, this holds for all prescientific theories of the brain, whether formulated in the framework of Eastern or Western philosophies. Does this discrepancy imply that our intuitions are simply naïve because they are untrained? In this case, one would expect that those who have experience with mental practice, who have tuned their inner eye, might come to more valid conclusions about the way their brains function. Trained Buddhist minds should experience the working of their brains in a more “realistic” way than that suggested by our untrained Western naïve intuition. Matthieu: It would be more correct to say that trained contemplatives experience the working of their minds in a more realistic way than untrained people. This does not mean that you will relate your experience with specific areas of the brain as an fMRI machine would do. Whether you are naïve about the functioning of your mind or a trained meditator, in both cases, as you know well, you normally cannot even feel your brain, much less know what is going on in its various areas and networks. That being said, the collaboration between contemplative and brain scientists that has unfolded over the last 15 years or so has shown clearly that these fields can mutually enhance each other’s understanding and correlate first- and thirdperson perspectives.
Through pursing a first-person approach, a contemplative will not find out directly which areas of the brain are involved in compassion or focused attention. However, a trained contemplative will be highly aware of his cognitive processes, of the way thoughts unfold, and of the way emotions arise and how they can be balanced and controlled.
The meditator will also have some experience of what is known as pure awareness, which is a clear and lucid state of consciousness devoid of mental constructs and automatic thought processes. The meditator may also understand that there is no such thing in the mind as a central, autonomous self, which I think fits quite well with the views of neuroscience.
The recent development of what is now called contemplative neuroscience explores how this contemplative knowledge and mastery of the mind relates to specific brain activities and how the meditator may or may not be able to monitor and control these at will.
The experience of contemplatives can also be harnessed to better interpret findings about the workings of the brain, particularly in the field of emotions, well-being, depression, and other heightened states of mind.
A Physician and a Cure Matthieu: To say that most of us are somehow deluded is not fundamentally a pessimistic attitude because there is a way out of our delusion; we are not stuck here. The doctor who diagnoses a sickness or an epidemic is not pessimistic. He knows that there is a big problem, but he also knows that this problem has causes that can be identified and a cure for these ailments may exist. In the Buddhist scriptures, one often compares the Buddha to a skillful physician, sentient beings to sick patients, the teachings as the doctor’s prescription, and the practice of these teachings as the treatment. The main reason not to be depressed is that the mind has the potential to change and cure itself of delusion, so as to perceive reality as it is.
Wolf: The reality you are talking about is then essentially an internal state devoid of delusions and misconceptions because there is no such thing as a true outer reality. Matthieu: It is the reality of recognizing the nature of pure awareness, as well as the nature of suffering and its causes—the mental toxins—and the possibility of getting rid of these causes through cultivating wisdom.
But it is also apprehending outer reality in a more correct way, as interdependent events devoid of intrinsic existence. It is not about gathering detailed information about everything through exploring the intricacies of natural phenomenal realities, as science does, but rather about understanding the fundamental nature of phenomena to dispel basic ignorance and suffering.
Not all knowledge has the same utility in terms of dispelling suffering. A curious person kept asking the Buddha endless questions on all kinds of subjects, such as whether the universe was finite or infinite. The Buddha often kept silent instead of answering. On one of these occasions, he took a handful of leaves and asked his visitor, “Are there more leaves in my hand or in the forest?” The inquisitive person was a bit startled but nevertheless answered, “Of course there are fewer leaves in your hands.” The Buddha then commented, “Likewise, if your goal is to put an end to suffering and reach enlightenment, some kinds of knowledge are useful and necessary, while others are not.” Many things might be quite interesting in and of themselves (e.g., knowing the temperature of stars or the way flowers reproduce) but are not directly relevant to freeing yourself from suffering.
Not all information is equally useful. It also depends on your purpose. Valid knowledge about the process of cognitive delusion is immensely useful if one falls prey to compulsive attachment or hatred because this will help dispel suffering.
The Ethics of Practice and Science
Wolf: I think we are in agreement that one cannot derive ethical values from scientific exploration alone. Science helps us to distinguish between correct and incorrect interpretations of the observable, but it does not liberate us from the burden of making ethical judgments. Matthieu: This is understandable because those ethical values are not the primary goal of science. Knowledge obtained through scientific inquiry has no moral value on its own. It is the way we make use of such knowledge that morality comes in. By contrast, the primary goal of Buddhism is to get rid of suffering, which is obviously linked with ethics.
Wolf: Is it possible then to derive values from introspection, from mental practice? To me it appears that values emerge from collective experiences and become condensed in either religious commandments or systems of law. Communities found out, by trial and error over generations of experimentation, which attitudes either reduced or increased suffering. They then extracted rules of conduct and codified their cumulative experience. These rules were either projected as God’s will to increase their authority and the community’s compliance or were incorporated in legal systems. In both cases, remuneration and punishment are common tools to obtain obedience.
Matthieu: It can be true in some cases. In Buddhism, which invokes no divine authority, ethics is a set of guidelines derived from empirical experience and wisdom to avoid inflicting suffering on others and yourself. The Buddha is not a prophet, a God, or a saint but rather an awakened one. Ethics is really a science of happiness and suffering, not a set of rules proclaimed by a divine entity or dogmatic thinkers.
Because ethics is all about avoiding inflicting suffering on others, having more wisdom and compassion, together with gaining a better understanding of the mechanisms of happiness and suffering and the laws of cause and effect, will foster ethical systems and practices that are more likely to fulfill their purpose.
Three Aspects of Buddhist Philosophy Wolf: So far we have been dealing with three aspects of Buddhist philosophy; please correct me if I have misunderstood something.
One is the philosophical, epistemic position of Buddhism, which is clearly a rather radical, constructivist position that declares most of what we perceive outside of our own mind, and for untrained, naïve humans, also most of what one experiences with one’s inner eye, as delusive.
The second aspect is the conviction that it is possible to fine-tune one’s inner eye through practice to experience what one’s mind and reality are all about.
Finally—and this seems to be the most important point and the consequence of the first two—if the goal to purify one’s mind is achieved and perception is no longer contaminated by false beliefs, then one changes basic traits of one’s personality and thus becomes a better person who can contribute more effectively to the reduction of suffering.
Thus, Buddhist philosophy is partly a sophisticated science of cognition and partly a pragmatic educational system. Unlike Western epistemology, however, it is considered to be an experimental discipline that tries through practice and mental training to clarify the conditions of our cognition and thereby to discover the essence of reality: first fine-tune your internal microscope and then learn about the world.
Western science disclaims that it is able to derive any moral values or formulate rules of conduct based on its observations. All it claims is that ethical choices usually yield better results if they are based on secure evidence and guided by rational arguments rather than by beliefs, superstitions, or ideological dogmas. It further promises that suffering can be reduced by identifying its causes and developing tools for their eradication.
Buddhist philosophy also claims to apply the criteria of an experimental science, but it goes one step further by promising that one is able to derive values from its practice, that practitioners are transformed for the better, and that suffering is reduced in this way. Matthieu: Well said. Yes, an ethical dimension is embedded in the whole Buddhist approach because knowledge is used to relieve suffering.
For this one needs to distinguish the kinds of actions, words, and thoughts that will cause suffering from those that will bring fulfillment and flourishing. There is no such thing as absolute good and evil, only the suffering and happiness that our thoughts, words, and actions bring about for others and ourselves.
Values can also be related to a correct understanding of reality. We would say, for instance, that the pursuit of selfish happiness is not attuned to reality because it assumes that we can function as discrete, separate entities minding our own business, which is not the case. We are bound to fail in that pursuit. On the contrary, understanding the interdependence of all beings and phenomena is the logical ground for growing altruism and compassion.11 To endeavor in achieving your happiness and that of others simultaneously is more likely to succeed because it is attuned to reality. Selfless love reflects some understanding of the intimate interdependence of all beings and all beings’ happiness, whereas selfishness exacerbates individualism and increasingly widens the gap between others and us.
Wolf: You say that these negative attributes are actually deluded perceptions of reality. So you argue in a sense, like Rousseau, that reality is good in its essence.
Matthieu: Reality is neither good nor bad, but valid and invalid ways of apprehending reality exist. These various ways have consequences: A mind that does not distort reality will naturally experience inner freedom and compassion, instead of craving and hatred. So, yes, if you are attuned to the way things really are, then you will naturally adopt behavior that will be conducive to less suffering. Mental confusion is not only a veil that clouds our understanding of the true nature of things. Practically speaking, it also prevents us from identifying the kind of behavior that would allow us to find happiness and avoid suffering. Wolf: Obviously, if you act in agreement with the true conditions of the world, then you will have less trouble because there will be less contradiction, less conflict—
Matthieu: Right. That is why the investigation of the nature of reality is not just pure intellectual curiosity: It has profound repercussions on our experience.
Wolf: Hence, one should sharpen one’s cognitive tools to perceive reality more correctly.
Matthieu: If you recognize that reality is interdependent and impermanent, then you will adopt the right attitude and be much more likely to flourish. Otherwise, as Rabindranath Tagore wrote, “We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.”12 Wolf: We could also express this in Darwinian terms: If one’s model of the world is correct, then one will experience fewer contradictions, make fewer false judgments, cope better with the fallacies of life, and inflict less suffering. Thus, one should try to get a realistic model of the world. I think all cultures have in common the urge to try to understand the world, but the motives and strategies differ. Reducing suffering is certainly one goal, but there are others, too—those who know have better control over the world, they can dominate others, they have privileged access to resources. Realistic models of the world increase fitness.
One way to obtain knowledge is science. The resulting insights can be made explicit and the reasons can be made transparent. Another source of knowledge is collective experience. The insights obtained in this way often remain implicit—one knows, but the origins of one’s knowledge remain opaque. Then there is the strategy that you have explained, which attempts to use introspection and mental practice to learn about one’s condition. Finally, there is the evolutionary, pragmatic strategy to arrive at better models of the world. As creative creatures, we have the option to imagine and test models. We can then select those that work best for us, adhere to those that reduce suffering, and drop those that increase it.
Matthieu: This is crucial.
Wolf: And you can optimize your models—
Matthieu: —through analytical meditation, logical investigation, and valid cognition. Going back and forth between your inner understanding and being confronted with the outer world, you will be able to integrate this deeper understanding into your way of being.
Wolf: The implication is then that the brain can impose on itself a training procedure that induces lasting changes in its own cognitive structures? Matthieu: That’s why a mere theoretical understanding will not work.
Training implies cultivation, repetition that leads to slowly remodeling your way of being, which will be correlated with a remodeling of your brain. You need to acquire a correct understanding and then cultivate that understanding until it becomes fully part of yourself.
Wolf: It’s interesting to investigate how this process can be initiated. You probably need a teacher who tells you that there is something to discover, or is there an internal drive, built into our brains, that motivates self-exploration and promotes self-improvement?
Matthieu: The internal drive arises from a deep aspiration to free oneself from suffering. This aspiration, in turn, reflects the potential that we have for change and flourishing. A qualified teacher plays a crucial role in showing and explaining to us the means to achieve that change, in the same way that the guidance of an experienced sailor, craftsman, or musician is invaluable for those who want to learn those skills. You may wish to reinvent the wheel, but it is senseless not to benefit from the vast accumulated knowledge of those who have mastered their arts and skills, such as mountaineers who have climbed the highest peaks and sailors who have navigated the seas for 40 years. Wanting to learn everything from scratch without benefiting from others’ wisdom is not a good strategy. Many generations of sailors have tried all kinds of ways of navigating and have drawn maps of the many places they have visited. Likewise, Buddhist contemplative science has 2,500 years of cumulated empirical experience of investigating the mind, beginning with Buddha Shakyamuni, and it would be silly to ignore it.
Wolf: I begin to understand you. Longing for happiness and minimizing suffering is the drive, but to get there, you need to make your internal model concordant with the “real” conditions of the world.
Accordingly, we should be able to identify some of these wrong views and wrong ways of thinking. Matthieu: To eliminate wrong views is one of the chief goals of the Buddhist path.
A Summary
Wolf: Matthieu, we had a wonderful morning. I would just like to recapitulate what we discussed. We had an in-depth discussion of epistemic questions comparing Western and Buddhist sources of knowledge, the latter being mainly introspection, mental practice, and observation of the world after having purified one’s mind…
Matthieu: …and pursued an analytical approach to reality. Wolf: An analytical approach that requires one to first fine-tune the inner eye of the mind to purify one’s own cognitive system. This, as I understand it, has far-reaching consequences. One consequence is that it allows one to avoid taking for granted what one perceives and helps one to perceive reality as something that is transitory, not endowed with fixed, context-independent properties. This in turn would permit construction of more realistic models of reality, reduce conflicts between false models and reality, and thereby lead to a reduction of suffering.
One important aspect of this is to learn to disengage to avoid emotional grasping. By realizing that objects have no fixed qualities per se, we detach those qualities from our understanding of the objects. If I understood you correctly, this also applies to the emotions that we associate with social situations and other sentient beings.
Clinging and attachment act like distorting filters on one’s perceptions that prevent us from perceiving the real world—and should therefore be avoided.
I can see the point. We all become victims of our emotions: If one is overwhelmed by deep romantic love or furious hatred, then one is bound to misperceive conditions by misattributing biased qualities to objects. If one is able to disengage from these misperceptions, then reality loses these assigned qualities and becomes easier to handle.
So, mental practice, introspection, and cultivation of the mind are used to attain more objectivity. In addition, this “science of the mind” can serve as the basis of an ethical system. This seems to differ from viewpoints cultivated in Western societies where objectivity is thought to be attainable only from the third-person perspective by relying on criteria such as reproducibility, confirmation of predictions, and so on, and where ethics is not an integral part of scientific exploration, at least not in the natural sciences.
Matthieu: Provided we understand ethics as a science of happiness and suffering, not as dogma disconnected from lived experience. Wolf: The premise is that mental practice leads to the construction of realistic models of oneself and the world. These novel insights, together with the effects of the practice, would then entrain changes in attitude, which, if shared by many in the long run, could improve the human condition.
Matthieu: This will arise from a way of being that has become free from those biases and mental entanglements, and therefore naturally expresses itself as altruism, compassion, and concern for others. This is in particular based on acknowledging that others want to be happy and avoid suffering, just as you do. Such a way of being will express itself spontaneously in ways that are beneficial to others. Your actions will be a spontaneous expression of your way of being.
Wolf: Provided everybody gets his model of the world right, this might work out.
Matthieu: If you maintain proper understanding or perspective, proper view, proper motivation, proper effort, and proper conduct, then it will certainly work in the best possible way. Even if life events and circumstances are unpredictable and beyond our control, we can always try to maintain our direction using the inner compass of right view and right motivation. This is the best way to achieve the goal of freedom from suffering for oneself and others.
Wolf: How can you harvest the wisdom that we believe is collectively gathered over generations and is codified in religious and legal systems—wisdom about how to behave that no single individual can gather in one lifetime? Certain attitudes may be beneficial for the individual’s own life trajectory but may have long-lasting detrimental consequences for society that the individual will never experience.
Such knowledge can only be harvested collectively across generations and cannot possibly be obtained by introspection alone. Matthieu: Although you may not see the final outcome of your actions, as a fundamental principle, you can always check your motivation: is it a mostly selfish motivation based on exaggerated self-cherishing or a genuinely altruistic one? If you keep on generating such a motivation and then use the best of your knowledge, reasoning, and skills to act in that direction, then the effect is much more likely to be positive in the long run.
A correct understanding of reality leads to a correct mental attitude and moment-by-moment behavior that is attuned to that understanding. This in turns leads to a win-win situation of flourishing oneself while acting in a way that is also beneficial to others. Such an optimal way of being will have positive effects first in the family and then in the village or local community and gradually in society at large. As Gandhi said, “If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. … We need not wait to see what others do.” Wolf: This is a profound insight on which probably all spiritual people would agree. However, in a highly interconnected societal system, it matters how others react to the transformation of individuals. Unless a substantial fraction of individuals follow the path of individual transformation, the danger remains that those clinging to power and selfishness will usurp the benevolence of a peaceful minority for their interests. We need normative systems that constrain the power and influence of defectors. Individual transformation and the regulation of social interactions will have to go hand in hand. Here we see the same complementarity of strategies that we encountered when we investigated differences between contemplative and natural science or between first- and third-person approaches toward a better understanding of the world and a betterment of the human condition.
At some stage of our conversation, I hope we will explore to what extent convergence exists between the insights gained from contemplative science, the humanities, and the natural sciences. This comparison should be particularly interesting because the methods applied in the natural sciences are now also applied to investigate psychological phenomena accessible only through a first-person perspective, such as perceptions, feelings, emotions, social realities, and, last but not least, consciousness.
Notes
1. Quoted in J. W. Pettit, The Beacon of Certainty (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1999), 365.
2. P. Kaliman, M. J. Álvarez-López, M. Cosín-Tomás, M. A.
Rosenkranz, A. Lutz, and R. J. Davidson, “Rapid changes in histone deacetylases and inflammatory gene expression in expert meditators,” Psychoneuroendocrinology 40 (2014): 97–107.
3. R. Boyd and P. J. Richerson, “A simple dual inheritance model of the conflict between social and biological evolution,” Zygon 11, no. 3 (1976): 254–262. See also their seminal work: Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 4. R. Boyd and P. J. Richerson, Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 5.
5. Ibid., x.
6. T. Nagel, “What is it like to be a bat?”, The Philosophical Review 83, no. 4 (1974): 435–450.
7. “A reality completely independent from the mind that thinks, sees or feels it is impossible. Even if it did exist, such an exterior world would be forever inaccessible to us.” Henri Poincaré, La Valeur de la science (The Value of Science) (Paris: Flammarion, 1990).
8. A double-blind study is a study in which half of the patients receive a drug and the other half receive a placebo, but neither the person who delivers the medicine nor the patient knows which of these two is being given.
9. See B. Alan Wallace, The Taboo of Subjectivity: Toward a New Science of Consciousness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
10. M. Ricard, Why Meditate? (New York: Hay House, 2010).
11. M. Ricard, Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World (New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company, 2015).
12. R. Tagore, Stray Birds (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1916), LXXV.