In this final session, noted researchers, including the heads of some of the most renowned medical centers in the US, synthesized and presented what they had learned during the conference, and presented their visions for the future. These talks were, without exception, heartfelt and quite moving.
Ben Shapiro noted some issues in studying meditation using scientific protocols. One type of obstacle involves credibility: there remains some skepticism of psychosomatic illness as somehow “not real”; and there is a tendency to disregard the expertise of meditators.
When actually conducting a clinical trial, such standard procedures as randomization and proper controls are more difficult when the “treatment” is meditation practice.
From an ethical standpoint, meditation practices are grounded in religious tradition, which provides a framework for ethical behavior. He wondered how to maintain a standard of morality in meditation research when these techniques are figured for mass consumption. We are dealing with the deep structure of the human mind, after all.
Ralph Snyderman of Duke University noted that medicine and Buddhism have a shared goal of healing and freedom from suffering. It is stupendous to learn that mental training affects both the structure and function of the brain, and through regulation of hormone levels, impacts a person’s physiology. By the same token, repeatedly entertaining destructive emotions also remodels the brain to perpetuate same, and causes health problems in the body. Even in advanced cases, symptoms can be alleviated by mental training.
Buddhist technologies of mind can alleviate mental and physical suffering in otherwise “normal’ people, by attenuating the pathology as well as the pain of a condition (e.g. psoriasis).
He noted a few milestones of medicine: in the 1600s the heart was understood as being a muscle that pumps blood; previously it was more of a magical object. In 1847 Dr Somelweiss developed a germ theory of disease in response to the scourge of “childbirth fever”, and was enthusiastically reviled for same.
The current shortsightedness of medicine, he said, is in imagining disease has having a) a single that b) can be “fixed”. Contact with a doctor is sporadic: it happens when one is ill, and in response to a problem. Furthermore, the doctor is held (by all parties involved0 to be the authority on a person’s health. People often can’t or won’t assume responsibility for their own well-being.
Right now two major public health crises are going unmet. One is the prevalence of drug use and violence in our society. Another is the ubiquity of chronic diseases caused by lifestyle. Among the ethical values we should incorporate into our lives, we should avoid abusing our own bodies.
The next commentator was Wolf Singer, who had earlier presented research describing coordination and synchrony of brain activity as a possible mechanism of attention, intention, meditation and “eudemonic well-being”.
I must admit that I have exhibited some bias in not including this data in my summaries of the meeting. To be honest, I was not able to follow his presentation-- the most academic of them all—well enough to feel comfortable either summarizing or evaluating his findings. Really, material at that level merited a more in-depth discussion than was possible given the constraints of the presentations.
No event on the scale of Mind & Life XIII can be all things to all people, and in this case the technical aspects of experimental design and findings were sacrificed in order to present material suitable for not a just a scientific layperson, but a completely naïve audience whose main experience with the material lay in having minds themselves.
Those of us with some experience in scientific discipline would have appreciated a more thorough discussion of the research. At the very least, a poster session would allow the aficionados to engage with the material on a more technical level.
But I digress. Here are my notes, which paraphrase Dr Singer’s words, hopefully to some degree of accuracy:
Brains aren’t omniscient by have evolved to optimize survival. They focus on material objects in the relative world. We have a poor understanding of complex systems; rather we focus on models that allow useful predictions about the future. We preconceive the world as simple and linear, and imagine the brain to contain a “mover” and to function like clockwork.
The assumption of linearity leads to the conclusion that there must be a “mover”. How incredible the internal misunderstanding by which we can’t see our own functioning, and can’t see how our minds really work.
One of the Commentators: There is a focus on analytical sciences in the West, which purport to study reality from outside the system, from a “third person” perspective. In the East, the focus has been on developing an understanding of the inner world—working from a first person perspective.
Wolf Singer: Which view is correct? A scientist has means at her disposal to confirm her findings. From an intuitive approach, how does the brain know it’s right?
(From here there followed a discussion of the neurobiology of “a question being answered.”
Commentator: Perhaps “result” states correlate to a sustained pattern of synchrony (the topic of Dr Singer’s presentation) that persist long enough to convince the intellect that an answer has been reached, via that pleasant “Aha! Yes…” feeling.
Perhaps we strive for those pleasant (sustained synchrony) states when controversies are resolved. Perhaps meditation allows various agents to become parallel and find peace, and a sense of “answer.”
Singer: Do we rely on the wisdom of the ages, relayed by meditation practitioners, to find answers to the nature of Mind?
His Holiness; Brain and Society are two complex systems on different scales. A single neuron has no notion of generating consciousness or being part of a broader process. Just as the individual sees only the local environment and the limited scale of immediate experience. There is a similar lack of comprehension of what it means to be embedded in the great body of life. We have not been “built” to understand such things. And we cannot deliberately steer a direction by means of linear thinking and action. Sensing the complexity of the system, we feel despair that the much-loved Self cannot control everything. There’s the danger of a collective depression…and concomitant delusive behavior.
We must see beyond the Self…and embrace uncertainty. Long-distance compassion is now necessary in a global community.
This is not to say we should abandon the Western notion of self and the scientific attitude, but we can see through the selfish self, and foster a view of science as one discipline among many.
Asked to account for the emergence of consciousness and mental processes, His Holiness said, ”There is no fixed, unchanging ‘I’.” Rather there is a coming-together or two things: brain and mind. You cannot find the self within its own reality.
Ancient Indian thought (Buddhist and otherwise) supposed that, besides the physical and mental bases of the self, there are constructs, whose reality can only be understood on the basis of something other than itself.
In asking, “how do we know things are true,” His Holiness noted that there is a distinction between sensory perception and mental understanding. According to Madhymaka philosophy, a valid mental event must a) relate to the object and b) not be contradicted by other valid experiences. To that the Buddhist worldview would add that c) it should not be controverted by insight into the deeper nature of reality.
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