[Don Salmon]

Hi Zak – thanks for this. I have always thought Iain has not understood either the Buddhist teaching on non duality or the Christian teaching on evil as privation. I thought Wilson in a very short space offered a brilliant correction.

[Don Salmon]

Hi Andrei:

Glad to see you here.

I’ve been a member of this channel since the format was revised back in September. Lots of very interesting discussions (and remember, if you have a specific topic of interest you don’t find, you can start your own group)

My greatest interest is in practice. I just wrote a note saying that there are a number of highly qualified teachers, therapists, meditation specialists and others who have been, for decades, teaching methods of shifting attention that are completely in synch with what Iain writes.

I’ll just mention two for now:

Dr. Les Fehmi, a psychophysiologist. He is probably the most well known. He developed methods of shifting attention over more than 50 years, and taught thousands of people how, simply by changing how they attend to the world, can quite literally cure depression, anxiety, severe trauma and many kinds of physical pain. He also used these methods to help couples, and even to train Olympic athletes.

Dr. John Yates (aka “Culadasa”) has done work far more profound, in my view. He had been a neuroscience professor but devoted himself in the last decades of his life to teaching meditation.

I came across Yates’ extraordinary book, “The Mind Illuminated,” In 2016. At the time it was easy to contact him, and I wrote him about the startling parallels between his meditation techniques and Iain’s observations about how attention in the LH and RH is different. Synchronistically, he had just come across Iain’s work the week before I wrote him, and he agreed there were rather remarkable parallels (Even though he had minor neurological quibbles).

I’ll give you just one practice if you’d like to play with it. For thousands of years, the Tibetans have practiced “sky-gazing” – allowing the gaze to rest in pure, objectless open space.

The connection with the hemispheres is simple- when we look at something that has no objective “things” to hold on to, to grasp, the whole narrative structure of the left hemisphere starts to break down. Fehmi used to have people start just by noticing space more often in the midst of their lives – the space between objects, the space between people, and more profoundly, the “space” between thoughts (or better still – if this is not too confusing – the “space” underlying thoughts, a sense of deep stillness and silence that it’s possible to discover as being always present underlying all experiences.

Once again, welcome!

[Don Salmon]

Hi Daniel:

I just looked over all my comments, and though I indirectly referred to Whit’s comments, the only specific issue I wrote at any length about is climate change.

Do you know up until 2007, it was impossible to tell, simply by someone’s belief about human-caused climate change, whether they were Right or Left, conservative or liberal?

So if you could be more specific – tell me in a clear, detailed way how my comment that in my view, having been trained as a research scientist and examined numerous studies on climate change, is a reflection of a particular hemispheric or political bias?

Now that a majority of conservative politicians accept human caused climate change, how would my agreement with them reflect some sort of political bias?

I’ve noticed an increasing number of conservative politicians stating they are in full agreement with the science now – but they contest the “Left’s” emphasis on government intervention as contrasted with market approaches. I didn’t say anything about what I thought should be done in regard to this now universal agreement that human caused climate change is a problem, so I don’t quite see how you glean some kind of bias when as far as I can see, Right and Left, conservative and liberal, are in full agreement with the point I made about people who in the past have denied humans contribute to climate change.

[Don Salmon]

Isn’t that based on the saying “Man is the measure of all things”?

My understanding is that is symbolic of “Mind” being the measure of all things. It is, the Indian philosophers and Desert Christian “Fathers” say, the dividing mind which carves up the seamless unity of the world into apparently separate, disconnected things.

I just got an email today from a friend who teaches meditation, noting that both dogs and little kids are great reminders that, instead of living all the time in stressful mind-created psychological time, constantly fretting about the past and either worry or craving something that’s going to happen in the future, we can rest, let go of the mind’s compulsion to measure time and space and so immerse ourselves in present (Timeless) experience, that our hearts open, we reconnect with our deeper timeless-space less Consciousness and begin to see things as William Blake hinted:

When the doors of perception are cleansed, we see things as they actually are – Infinite.

[Don Salmon]

Hi again,

Yeah, I don’t even have much time for that first project yet – I’ve got a small group of 15 folks who chat about it from time to time but nothing’s likely to get off the ground till the middle of next year.

Meanwhile, the situation you’re in now – worth some support, group hugs, for sure.

In the 1970s and 80s (I know, you weren’t even born, and toward the end, barely more than a toddler) I was in a joyfully right brain world; East Village, NY City, pianist-composer, mostly doing improv music with avant- garde musicians/actors and dancers. Yet I knew from my teens that some day I would have to learn some legit psychology because ultimately, I wanted to write and explore a new form of “yogic” psychology. It was SO much fun working as a musician.

I came THIS close to doing an alternative – and very right brain – doctoral program, which also would have been great fun, but I realized at some point, I had to do a mainstream program – doctorate in clinical psych.

Not fun.

Virtually every box you checked off – bureaucratic, fundamaterialist, rigid, linear, superficial, not even useless but the entire teaching staff had less psychological insight than just about any 2 dancers/musicians/actors I knew.

The thing about social workers – the whole background, for decades, is a kind of strange mix of modernist bureaucratic thinking AND genuine deep heart empathy, kindness and compassion. It may not look like the heart stuff is there in school – where the left brain to genuine heart caring ratio is at least 80/20 if not worse. But I’ll tell you, among the thousands of psych evaluations I did in consultation with psychiatrists, neurologists, first line therapists, fellow psychologists and social workers, the social workers, hands down, knew about all the resources needed AND had the verbal and interpersonal skills that literally saved so many lies among people I evaluated.

Truly.

But I know the feeling of being in school and having to do nonsense. So i don’t know – every paper I wrote in my masters and doctoral programs, I used as a challenge – how far could I go right up to the line of acceptability to choose wild stuff. I did my masters thesis on lucid dreams – using music I composed to teach people to maintain awareness from waking to dreaming. Almost everyone in my doctoral program was in love with attachment theory. One of my professors said the reason she chose to be on my dissertation committee was because she had a really bad headache the day she read my proposal – which involved using mindfulness to treat physical pain. She tried it, it worked, and that was that.

I even managed to mention, in my final dissertation write up – non duality as the ultimate solution of all physical and psychological pain – and either they were too tired of dealing with my out-there ness after years in the program or they maybe actually liked it. At least, that was the general verdict (I mean, they liked it) at the presentation of my research.

So you only have a few pages for this thing that requires 15-20 pages? Blow their minds. I can tell just from your comments here you write well and think clearly. Show them how awesome you are. For me, that made grad school bearable – I mean, most of my classmates were in their early to mid 20s; I was 40 when I started and in my late 40s when I did my final doctoral presentation.

As for the extreme left brain, you can use it as learning material if you ever treat people with OCD or autism or various personality disorders. (Mostly kidding, though not altogether).

And just think, at the end of next year (or 2 or 3 years) you can join us as we create a totally awesome presentation for teens (video, music, 3D holograms, transporters, collective lucid dreams or whatever is available in super AI by the late 2020s) to blow away the fundamaterialists and complete the 2nd Copernican revolution!

[Don Salmon]

Hi Jamie – I fully agree. I created this little discussion group about a year ago, when this new site was put in place, and quickly realized the site is VERY difficult to navigate.

A few months ago I moved my online courses to one of the best community sites I’ve ever seen – Mighty Networks. I’ve been on that platform for several months and week by week my appreciation grows. I’ve wondered about suggesting to the administrators moving to MN – but I know it took months of hard work behind the scenes to settle on this.

Meanwhile – heres a proposal: you’ve found your way here and obviously have a passion for this. Rather than navigating through the site, have some discussions right here, without defining or confining them.

I’m too busy to focus on this project now, but in about 1/2 year I want to take the writings of McGilchrist, B. Alan Wallace, David Bentley Hart and several other excellent writers (perhaps Bernardo Kastrup as well) on the problems of naturalism/physicalism/materialism. But I want to try to write about them (and make videos and music as well) so people can get a much deeper EXPERIENTIAL feel of the problem – AND the many solutions (oddly, neither McGilchrist, Hart or Kastrup say much at all about contemplative practice – yet Wallace makes that the very core of ALL he writes). And I want to present this in a way that a 14 year old of average intelligence with no prior knowledge of science or philosophy and no practice of meditation can relate to it, and see how it affects their life.

If you’re interested in any of this – including anything even distantly related to it – why not start by writing about your interests right here. And in fact, if you convince me, maybe it would be worth the effort to get the administrators to consider moving to Mighty Networks.

[Don Salmon]

Speaking as a psychologist trained in research, my estimation of the value of psychological research has declined over the years, plummeting in 2011 during the infamous “replication crisis” – when it was found that almost all of the foundational research on which psychological science was built over a century was practically worthless, unable to be replicated.

this link to differences in female vs male friendships is particularly embarrassing to me as a psychologist. if you asked even the most mediocre historian, they’d be able to easily pick this completely apart. Look at what the study focuses on – a quantifiable measure of intimacy (the very phrase is utterly incoherent – measures of intimacy – as if closeness was something you measure like friction in an automobile engine). Also, it takes one historical period (not even a whole period but one snapshot in time) in one culture.

If you just go back about 150 years, and look at male correspondence, compared to many if not most contemporary female friendships you’d find a level of intimacy far greater in the correspondence. We are so conditioned by our current experience we just “feel” that this can’t be so, the way we see things now in our little moment of history must be the way it’s always been.

Owen Barfield makes the point that “matter” as we experience it didn’t even come into existence until less than three thousand years ago. Our psychological science is going to most assuredly, as far as I can see, give way to a real science (one infinitely more profound than even the greatest physics we have nowadays)>

But I suspect that’s still some centuries off – probably by the time our whole sense of years, decades, centuries, etc will have so profoundly shifted it will not in any way resemble what we take to be “time” …..now….

[Don Salmon]

Thanks Lucy.

I’m pretty sure I mentioned this somewhere else but if you missed it, you might be interested (speaking of letting go of hope)

Loch Kelly did a fun little informal experiment with a group of 80 people. He taught the zen version of that breath counting exercise (count to 10; if you get lost at any point, go back to 1 and start over – counting only on the exhale)

He divided the people into 2 groups, 40 each.

For group 1, he just gave the same basic instructions as above.

For group 2, he gave one modification – DON’T “try” to focus on the breath or the counting. let your awareness be completely open, taking in the full range of experience. Let the breath simply be presented as an anchor to keep the mind from wandering too far afield, and let the counting “emerge” spontaneously.

The result? After 10 minutes (keep in mind, nobody in the group had done this practice before)

In Group 1, there wasn’t one person among the 40 who was able to count all the way to 10 even once.

in Group 2, every one of the 40 group members kept track of the count, effortless, without losing count even once.

[Don Salmon]

Ah I just saw the note on how you can’t “Try” to fall asleep and thought I’d share some practical tips (Whit, if you’re around – this is about practice to shift from LH to RH mode, and beyond)

This truism about not being able to “try” to fall asleep is pretty much universally accepted in the “how to sleep world” (I’m certified in cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, which is now the #1 recommended treatment, BEFORE pills or supplements or marijuana or whatever and the CBT-I folks all say the same thing)

Probably is it can take some time to learn CBT I and inevitably, people get caught up in it and start trying too hard.

So about 10 years ago the sleep clinicians started introducing mindfulness, which for a lot of people helps them let go of trying, but unfortunately, the way mindfulness is often taught is about “trying” to be in the now, trying to be mindful of sensations, etc.

Looking about for a way to get past this, I settled on the neuroscience literature on the ‘Default mode network” and “task positive network,” But those are terribly boring and misleading names, so we just talk about control mode and experiential mode (which are NOT perfect correlations with LH and RH – actual experience is just never captured by anything neurological)

But I do find, once people learn – meaning become acquainted with what it feels like – to make this shift to experiential mode, it can be effortless to fall asleep. You just let go of control (yes it can be done intentionally!) and within minutes, you’re drifting off into Stage 1, then Stage 2 and stage 3 sleep.

Here’s a video about it: http://www.RememberToBe.Life, the 2nd video on the page.

Even better, here’s some techniques that can help you make the shift: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_TiTWLLt34&feature=youtu.be

[Don Salmon]

Hi Andrei:

Thanks for starting a wonderful conversation.

Regarding Spira, I suppose you may have heard he wrote a book, “The Nature of Consciousness,” with Bernardo Kastrup writing the scientific afterword.

I think Bernardo has absolutely the perfect beginning in approaching materialists;

1. All we know, directly, are forms in awareness.

2. If you, the materialists (or physicalists or whatever) want to posit some purely dead, unconscious, insentient, non intelligent “stuff” which you can’t define beyond “it’s what physicists study,” and this posited stuff not only adds absolutely nothing to our understanding of science, and makes the study of everything but the forms we identify as matter remotely intelligible (and has no idea what matter is in itself to boot) then the burden of evidence is on you – why should we or anybody believe in something which by definition (something outside awareness) for which there can never be ANY evidence?

That’s the starting point. No physicalist has or ever will be able to answer it because it’s irrefutably obvious. How did Sam Harris deal with it for example? He said to Rupert Spira, who made these points to him, “I can’t refute it logically. It can’t be refuted. I just don’t like it and I choose not to believe it.”

And that’s what folks say about the Qanon conspiracy theories.

Meanwhile, we have over a half century of fantastic profoundly powerful practices to deeply alter the way we pay attention (Whit – any time you want to ask about it, let me know).

That to me is the important first step (actually, we have thousands of years of these practices, but the last 50 years has brought a wealth of practices informed by psychology and minimally informed by neuroscience – I say minimally because, probably due to my bias as a psychologist, I personally think neuroscience is extremely almost irrevocably limited in what it understands about our psyches – particularly given that modern academic and clinical psychology also understand hardly more than an infinitesimal aspect of consciousness, if that much!

[Don Salmon]

Hi Andrei:

You got my attention again when you mentioned Easwaran. His translations of the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads and the Dhammapada are among the most popular, and are praised by many critics as well. He was a professor of English at the University of Berkeley, so his mastery of the language (at least, of English!) is not surprising.

He has several collections of sacred poetry that are quite wonderful, “God Makes the Rivers to Flow” being my favorite.

He also, speaking of practice, had a very simple 8 point program. As far as I can recall (it’s been many years since I looked at it, but it’s easy to find online, I’m sure), it involved sacred study, slowing down, repeating a mantra, his own unique form of meditation which involved memorizing sacred passages and reciting them very very slowly (almost like the Lectia Divina of Christianity).

I think he, like every other good meditation teacher, understands the balance of practice vs non practice. Nowadays, people like to teach non practice from the beginning, but after some decades of attempting this, people start to realize that it hasn’t taken them very far or deep. But that’s another point.

Personally, I’ve found that learning to spontaneously shift attention is the key. I’ll leave with one beautiful example. Loch Kelly studied with Buddhist masters of Mahamudra and Dzogchen in Tibet some 40 years ago. They taught mostly “pointing out” exercises. Something that in a way involves no effort, but actually involves a shift of attention.. One of my favorites is this little animation, involving recognizing the “spacious awareness” which is always present underlying all mental/emotional activity (very similar to Krishnamurti’s choiceness awareness”): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkP1-lin590

Now the quite clever practice in shifting attention from Loch: he had a group of 80 people, all doing the same basic Zen counting practice:

Inhale – count 1

Exhale

Inhale – count 2

Exhale

And you continue this way, counting inhalations up to 10, then go back to 1. If you lose track, you start over again.

That’s it.

He divided them into two groups, 40 each. One group simply received the above instructions.

To the second group he said, “Do not make any effort to concentrate on the breath. Simply allow the breath to be present in the background of completely open, effortless, relaxed awareness.

The results?

Not ONE of the 40 people getting the basic instructions was able to get to 10.

EVERY single person in the 2nd group effortlessly reached 10, over and over again.

As the Zen teacher said to the student who asked him to sum up Zen as simply as possible, “Attention.”

The student said maybe that was too simple. “Can you say something else?”

“Attention, attention.”

“But,” the student complained, “what does attention mean?”

“Attention means attention.”

[Don Salmon]

Hi folks:

:(Whit, I’m really hoping you respond to my request for you to clarify what you think I’m missing when I said there’s decades of practice and research regarding very easy, reliable ways to switch modes of attention)

I’m really thinking that a separate group on the meaning of “practice” would be enormously helpful. I think Iain is VERY confused about this, oddly enough, taking a rather LH approach (Andrei, when you’ve been here for awhile, you’ll see I very much question some of the very foundations of trying to associate attention with the brain, but more on that another time)

So this might help folks see where I’m coming from. I was deeply impressed by Brother Lawrence’s “Practice of the Presence of God,” when I was 19. It was the first practice/non-practice” i had come across that deeply impressed me, and I think if you look deeply, it is VERY close (though more of a heart than head approach) to what Michael Singer recommended. Michael, I believe, is quite familiar with and has practiced traditional yogic disciplines. The one he recommended to you – the mindful awareness from waking till sleep (and into sleep and dreams, if possible) – is a universal “Jnana yoga” practice, adapted, I think for modern times.

Then I came across Krishnamurti in 1972, which basically paralyzed me in terms of the idea of any kind of intentional practice. This ended in 1976, when I came across a short pamphlet which was a transcription of a series of conversations with one “David E S Young,” which basically involved Krishnamurt teaching what was quite obviously the clear steps of traditional vipassana (which is somewhat different from modern pop mindfulness).

That was it. I was done with Krishnamurti! I studied for 10 years after that with a teacher who gave me a mantra, which was infinitely beyond anything my intellect could grasp. It had profound effects and my mind simply was silenced in regard to questioning of it.

I’ve been fascinated ever since with the question of practice. I’ve been involved with the Sri Aurobindo community world wide, and often give talks, particularly on the simplicity of practice (the community can be very very intellectual about these things).

I think there is a profound degree of confusion about practice in the modern world, and the best explanation of the problem goes back to the Protestant Reformation. Contemplative practices were quite popular in those days, but Luther, convinced of the depth of sin of human beings, said no practice can confer any spiritual benefit, that it all has to be by Grace (and donations to one’s local church, of course).

Well, we’ve become a largely secular society, dominated by technology and the idea that as far as the physical world goes, everything can be accomplished in a mechanical fashion. As a clinical psychologist, I’ve seen this attitude take over in mental health circles.

So of course when people sick of a mechanical world try to escape to a spiritual consciousness, they leave behind what they think are “mechanical” practices, and rather dogmatically insist – just like Luther – that no practice can “get you there.”.

Between Zen and Chan Buddhism, there’s a 1500 year history of arguments about practice, but I would say Swami Sarvapriyananda in this little anecdote reolved the apparent conflict as clearly as I have ever seen it.

One day, a young monk he knew went to him and said, “Do you know the Ashtavakra Gita?” (this is a very short book which hardly does anything but tell you again and again YOU are THAT – you are already, in Truth, one with that. It even has a sutra, “Your problem is that you meditate.”

So Swamiji (Sarvapriyananda) says yes, why? The young monk replies, “I just found out my guru has this book. Why didn’t he tell me about it before? This book has the highest truth and there iare no other practices needed.”

Swamiji replies, “Yes, I agree the book does reveal the highest Truth. But let me ask you something. Does your guru meditate? “

“Yes.”

“Does he say prayers?”

“yes.”

“Does he engage in ritual celebrations, gardening as karma yoga, devotional practices, disciplined self inquiry?”

“Yes, he does all that.”

“Now, do you think you understand all this better than your teacher?”

“oh no, certainly not.”

“Well, then, when he sees you’re ready, I’m sure he’ll invite you to study the Ashtavakra. Meanwhile, as long as you’ve accepted him as your teacher, why not accept his guidance in terms of practices?”

[Don Salmon]

By the way, if you want one of the simplest switching practices imaginable, here’s one that goes back thousands of years. The Zen Buddhists stare at a blank wall, as did the Chan Buddhists (China). The Tibetans have a pre-Buddhist shamanic practice that may be 10s of thousands of years old – sky gazing.

Just let your attention rest in the midst of a cloudless sky (you can imagine it but it’s likely to have more effect if there’s not the slight personal effort to visualize)

The left hemisphere has nothing to hold on to, if you “grok” what this is about, it’s remarkable how rapidly people who have meditated for years and never experienced awareness without verbal dialog suddenly “get it.”

Try it and see what happens.

[Don Salmon]

Hi Whit:

Perhaps I”m not understanding you. I’ve answered yes, it’s very easy to navigate all kinds of ways with greater LH emphasis, greater RH, and everything in between and all around.

Your mention of a “transcendent” stance is exactly what Dr. Les Fehmi meant by Open Focus (not simply “open monitoring” – but a stance in which one is aware of how one is attending and rather than a typically egoic LH “choice,” there is a kind. of surfing, such that the appropriate balance of different ways of attending occurs and shifts spontaneously.

I say I don’t know if I’m understanding you because I keep writing that this is exactly what Fehmi taught, 10s of thousands of people over more than 50 years, and then you post again wondering if it can be done.

So am I missing something? Do you think there’s something that Fehmi is missing? If you want to see a video I made on this, scroll down to the 2nd video on this page: http://www.RememberToBe.Life. The whole essence of everything we’re teaching is how to make that shift to what we refer to as “experiential” mode.

As you know, I don’t like to identify these things with particular hemispheres, as it’s impossible not to have both hemispheres active at all times, and in fact, “experiential” mode – which you might theorize as having a RH emphasize, requires not just both hemispheres, but awareness of the gut brain, heart brain, subcortical functioning and much else.

So is it that I’m misunderstanding you? Otherwise, the simple answer is yes, it’s been taught not only by Fehmi but Gendlin, Perls, and really, all good meditation teachers do it as well (Thich Nhat Hanh developed language almost indistinguishable from Fehmi’s, and Culadasa taught thousands of students how to reach very advanced states in a matter of months – and just to make the connection, I wrote to Culadasa about McGilchrist’s work. As a neuroscience professor, he had some quibbles with what he thought were McGilchrist’s rigid separation of the hemispheres, but otherwise he thought they were both working along very similar lines. Culadasa’s book “The Mind Illuminated” has over 50 pages on how to recognize selective attention (somewhat LH) and peripheral awareness (somewhat RH) in the process of meditation – whether seated following the breath or in the midst of active life.

I would say Culadasa and Alan Wallace (and Sri Aurobindo, but he’s VERY hard to understand) give the best presentation on the practice of shifting attention I’ve ever seen anywhere.

Is this close to what you’re asking about? If it is, once again, the short answer is, “yes.”

[Don Salmon]

This on the other hand, is a thoroughly “composed” piece – almost like a nursery rhyme. The repeating guitar theme is the basis for the sense of “peace,” and the flowing arpeggios on the piano give a kind of 19th century Methodist hymnal quality to my ears, very much folk American rather than British sounding, I think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIosF-q_pfc (Jan, my wife, put together the evocative images and also is reading Wendell Berry’s poem)