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Dan’s second stay in Asia was in 1973, this time on a Social Science Research Council postdoc, ostensibly a venture in “ethnopsychology,” to study Asian systems for analyzing the mind and its possibilities. It started with six months in Kandy, a town in the hills of Sri Lanka where Dan consulted every few days with Nyanaponika Thera, a German-born Theravadan monk whose scholarship centered on the theory and practice of meditation. (Dan then continued on for several months in Dharamsala, India, where he studied at the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives.)

Nyanaponika’s writings focused on the Abhidhamma, a model of mind that laid out a map and methods for the transformation of consciousness in the direction of altered traits. While the Visuddhimagga and the meditation manuals Dan had read were operator’s instructions for the mind, the Abhidhamma was a guiding theory for such manuals. This psychological system came with a detailed explanation of the mind’s key elements and how to traverse this inner landscape to make lasting changes in our core being.

Certain sections were compelling in their relevance to psychology, particularly the dynamic outlined between “healthy” and “unhealthy” states of mind.1 All too often our mental states fluctuate in a range that highlights desires, self-centeredness, sluggishness, agitation, and the like. These are among the unhealthy states on this map of mind.

Healthy states, in contrast, include even-mindedness, composure, ongoing mindfulness, and realistic confidence. Intriguingly, a subset of healthy states applies to both mind and body: buoyancy, flexibility, adaptability, and pliancy.

The healthy states inhibit the unhealthy ones, and vice versa. The mark of progress along this path is whether our reactions in daily life signal a shift toward healthy states. The goal is to establish the healthy states as predominant, lasting traits.

While immersed in deep concentration, a meditator’s unhealthy states are suppressed—but, as with that yogi in the bazaar, can emerge as strong as ever when the concentrative state subsides. In contrast, according to this ancient Buddhist psychology, attaining deepening levels of insight practice leads to a radical transformation, ultimately freeing the meditator’s mind of the unhealthy mix. A highly advanced practitioner effortlessly stabilizes on the healthy side, embodying confidence, buoyancy, and the like.

Dan saw this Asian psychology as a working model of the mind, timetested over the course of centuries, a theory of how mental training could lead to highly positive altered traits. That theory had guided meditation practice for more than two millennia—it was an electrifying proof of concept.

In the summer of 1973, Richie and Susan came to Kandy for a six-week visit before heading to India for that thrilling and sobering retreat with Goenka. Once together in Kandy, Richie and Dan trekked through the jungle to consult with Nyanaponika at his remote hermitage about this model of mental well-being.2

Later that year, after Dan returned from this second sojourn in Asia as a Social Science Research Fellow, he was hired at Harvard as a visiting lecturer. In the fall semester of 1974 he offered a course, The Psychology of Consciousness, which fit well the ethos of those days—at least among students, many of whom were doing their own extracurricular research with psychedelics, yoga, and even a bit of meditation.

Once the psychology of consciousness course was announced, hundreds of Harvard undergrads gravitated to this survey of meditation and its altered states, the Buddhist psychological system, and what little was then known about the dynamics of attention—all among the topics covered. The enrollment was so large that the class was moved into the largest classroom venue at Harvard, the 1,000-seat Sanders Theatre.3 Richie, then in his third year of graduate school, was a teaching assistant in the course.4

Most of the topics in The Psychology of Consciousness—and the course title itself—were far outside the conventional map of psychology in those days. No surprise, Dan was not asked to stay on by the department after that semester finished. But by then we had done some writing and research together, and Richie was excited by the realization that this was what his own research path would be and was eager to get going.

Starting while we were in Sri Lanka and continuing during Dan’s semester teaching that course on the psychology of consciousness, we worked on the first draft of our article, making the case to our colleagues in psychology for altered traits. While Dan had, of necessity, based his first article on thin claims, scant research, and much guesswork, now we had a template for the path to altered traits, an algorithm for inner transformation. We wrestled with how to connect this map with the sparse data science had by then yielded.

Back in Cambridge we mulled all this over in long conversations, often in Harvard Square. As vegetarians at the time, we settled on caramel sundaes at Bailey’s ice cream parlor on Brattle Street. There we worked on what would become a journal article piecing together the little relevant data we could find to support our first statement of extremely positive altered traits.

We called it “The Role of Attention in Meditation and Hypnosis: A Psychobiological Perspective on Transformations of Consciousness.” The operative phrase here is transformations of consciousness, our term then for altered traits, which we saw as a “psychobiological” (today we’d say “neural”) shift. We contended that hypnosis, unlike meditation, produced primarily state effects, and not trait effects as with meditation.

In those times the fascination was not with traits but rather altered states, whether from psychedelics or meditation. But, as we put it in talking at Bailey’s, “after the high goes, you’re still the same schmuck you were before.” We articulated the idea more formally in the subsequent journal article.

We were speaking to a basic confusion, still too common, about how meditation can change us. Some people fixate on the remarkable states attained during a meditation session—particularly during long retreats—and give little notice to how, or even if, those states translate into a lasting change for the better in their qualities of being after they’ve gone home. Valuing just the heights misses the true point of practice: to transform ourselves in lasting ways day to day.

More recently, this point was driven home to us when we had the chance to tell the Dalai Lama about the meditative states and their brain patterns that a longtime practitioner displayed in Richie’s lab. As this expert engaged in specific kinds of meditation—for instance, concentration or visualization—the brain imaging data revealed a distinct neural profile for each meditative altered state.

“It’s very good,” the Dalai Lama commented, “he managed to show some signs of yogic ability”—by which he meant the intensive meditation over months or years practiced by yogis in Himalayan caves, as opposed to the garden variety of yoga for fitness so popular these days.5

But then he added, “The true mark of a meditator is that he has disciplined his mind by freeing it from negative emotions.”

That rule of thumb has stayed constant since before the time of the Visuddhimagga: It’s not the highs along the way that matter. It’s who you become.

Puzzling over how to reconcile the meditation map with what we had experienced ourselves, and then with the admittedly scant scientific evidence, we articulated a hypothesis: The after is the before for the next during.

To unpack this idea, after refers to enduring changes from meditation that last long beyond the practice session itself. Before means the condition we are in at baseline, before we start meditating. During is what happens as we meditate, temporary changes in our state that pass when we stop meditating.

In other words, repeated practice of meditation results in lasting traits— the after.

We were intrigued by the possibility of some biological pathway where repeated practice led to a steady embodiment of highly positive traits like kindness, patience, presence, and ease under any circumstances. Meditation, we argued, was a tool to foster precisely such beneficial fixtures of being.

We published our article in one of maybe two or three academic publications interested in such exotic topics as meditation back in the 1970s.6 This was a first glimmer of our thinking on altered traits, albeit with a flimsy science base. The maxim “probability is not proof” applied, in a sense: what we had was a possibility, but little to pin a probability on, and zero proof.

When we first wrote about this, no scientific study had been conducted that would provide the kind of evidence we needed. Only long decades after we published the article would Richie find that for highly adept meditators, their “before” state was, indeed, very different from that of people who had never meditated, or done very little meditating—it was an indicator of an altered trait (as we’ll see in chapter twelve, “Hidden Treasure”).

No one in psychology in those days had talked about altered traits. Plus, our raw material was highly unusual for psychologists: ancient meditation manuals, then hard to come by outside Asia, along with our own experiences in intensive meditation retreats, and chance meetings with highly adept practitioners. We were, to say the least, outliers in psychology —or oddballs, as we no doubt were perceived by some of our Harvard colleagues.

Our vision of altered traits made a leap far beyond the psychological science of our day. Risky business.

THE SCIENCE CATCHES UP

When an imaginative researcher concocts a novel idea, it starts a chain of events much like natural variation in evolution: as sound empirical tests weigh new ideas, they eliminate bad hypotheses and spread good ones.7

For this to happen, science needs to balance skeptics with speculators— people who cast wide nets, think imaginatively, and consider “what if.” The web of knowledge grows by testing original ideas brought to it by speculators like ourselves. If only skeptics pursued science, little innovation would occur.

Economist Joseph Schumpeter has become known these days for the concept of “creative destruction,” where the new disrupts the old in a market. Our early hunches about altered traits fit what Schumpeter called “vision”: an intuitive act that supplies direction and energy for analytic efforts. A vision lets you see things in a new light, as he says, one “not to be found in the facts, methods, and results of the preexisting state of the science.”8

Sure, we had a vision in this sense—but we had paltry methods or data available for exploring this positive range of altered traits, and no idea of the brain mechanism that would allow such a profound shift. We were determined to make the argument, but were years too soon for the crucial scientific piece in this puzzle.

Our dissertation data were feebly—very feebly—supportive of the idea that the more you practice how to generate a meditative state, the more that practice shows lasting influences beyond the session itself.

Still, as brain science has evolved over the decades, we saw mounting rationales for our ideas.

Richie attended his first meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in 1975 in New York City, along with about 2,500 other scientists, all exhilarated that they were seeing the birth of a new field (and none dreaming that these days those meetings would draw more than 30,000 neuroscientists).9 In the mid-1980s one of the early presidents of the society, Bruce McEwen of Rockefeller University, gave us scientific ammunition.

McEwen put a dominant tree shrew in the same cage for twenty-eight days with one lower in the pecking order—the rodent version of being trapped at work with a nightmare boss 24/7 for a month. The big shock from McEwen’s study was that in the brain of the dominated rodent, dendrites shrank in the hippocampus, a node crucial for memory. These branching projections of the body’s cells allow them to reach out to and act on other cells; shrinking dendrites mean faulty memory.

McEwen’s results ripped through the brain and behavioral sciences like a small tsunami, opening minds to the possibility that a given experience could leave an imprint on the brain. McEwen was zeroing in on a holy grail for psychology: how stressful events produce lingering neural scars. That an experience of any kind could leave its mark on the brain had, until then, been unthinkable.

To be sure, stress was par for the course for a laboratory rat—McEwen just upped the intensity. The standard setup for lab rat living quarters was the rodent equivalent of solitary confinement: weeks or months on end in a small wire cage and, if the rat was lucky, a running wheel for exercise.

Contrast that life in perpetual boredom and social isolation to something like a rodent health resort, with lots of toys, things to climb on, colorful walls, playmates, and interesting spaces to explore. That’s the stimulating habitat Marion Diamond at the University of California at Berkeley built for her lab rats. Working about the same time as McEwen, Diamond found the rats’ brains benefited, with thicker dendritic branches connecting neurons and growth in brain areas, such as the prefrontal cortex, that are crucial in attention and self-regulation.10

While McEwen’s work showed how adverse events can shrink parts of the brain, Diamond’s emphasized the positive in her studies. Yet her work was largely met with a shrug in neuroscience, perhaps because it posed a direct challenge to pervasive beliefs in the field. The conventional wisdom then was that at birth we host in our skull a maximum number of neurons, and then inexorably lose them in a steady die-off over the course of life. Experience, supposedly, had nothing to do with this.

But McEwen and Diamond led us to wonder, If these brain changes for worse and for better could occur with rats, might the right experience change the human brain toward beneficial altered traits? Could meditation be just such a helpful inner workout?

The glimpse of this possibility was exhilarating. We sensed something truly revolutionary was in the offing, but it took a couple more decades before the evidence began to catch up with our hunch.

THE BIG LEAP

The year was 1992, and Richie was nervous when the sociology department at the University of Wisconsin asked him to deliver a major departmental colloquium. He knew he was walking into the center of an intellectual cyclone, a battle over “nature” and “nurture” that had raged for years in the social sciences. The nurture camp believed that our behavior was shaped by our experiences; the “nature” camp saw our genes as determining our behavior.

The battle had a long, ugly history—racists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries twisted the genetics of their day as “scientific” grounds for bias against blacks, Native Americans, Jews, the Irish, and a long list of other targets of bigotry. The racists attributed any and all lags in educational and economic attainments of the target group to their genetic destiny, ignoring vast imbalances in opportunity. The resulting backlash in the social sciences had made many in that sociology department deeply skeptical of any biological explanation.

But Richie felt that sociologists committed a scientific fallacy in immediately assuming that biological causes necessarily reduced group differences to genetics—and so were seen as unchangeable. In Richie’s view, these sociologists were carried away by an ideological stance.

For the first time in public he proposed the concept of “neuroplasticity” as a way to resolve this battle between nature and nurture. Neuroplasticity, he explained, shows that repeated experience can change the brain, shaping it. We don’t have to choose between nature or nurture. They interact, each molding the other.

The concept neatly reconciled what had been hostile points of view. But Richie was reaching beyond the science of the day; the data on human neuroplasticity were still hazy.

That changed just a few years later with a cascade of scientific findings —for instance, those showing that mastering a musical instrument enlarged the relevant brain centers.11 Violinists, whose left hands continuously fingered the strings while they played, had enlarged areas of the brain that manage that finger work. The longer they had played, the greater the size.12

NATURE’S EXPERIMENT

Try this. Look straight ahead and hold up a finger with your arm outstretched. Still looking straight ahead, slowly shift that finger until it is about two feet to the right of your nose. When you move your finger far to the right, but stay focused straight ahead, it lands in your peripheral vision, the outer edge of what your visual system takes in.13

Most people lose sight of their finger as it moves to the far right or left of their nose. But one group does not: people who are deaf.

While this unusual visual advantage in the deaf has long been known, the brain basis has only recently been shown. And the mechanism is, again, neuroplasticity.

Brain studies like this take advantage of so-called “experiments of nature,” naturally occurring situations such as congenital deafness. Helen Neville, a neuroscientist at the University of Oregon with a passionate interest in brain plasticity, seized the opportunity to use an MRI brain scanner to test both deaf and hearing people with a visual simulation that mimicked what a deaf person sees when reading sign language.

Signs are expansive gestures. When a deaf person is reading the signing of another, she typically looks at the face of the person who is signing—not directly at how the hands move as they sign. Some of those expansive gestures move in the periphery of the visual field, and thus naturally exercise the brain’s ability to perceive within this outer rim of vision. Plasticity lets these circuits take on a visual task as the deaf person learns sign language: reading what’s going on at the very edge of vision.

The chunk of neural real estate that usually operates as the primary auditory cortex (known as Heschl’s gyrus) receives no sensory inputs in deaf people. The brains of deaf people, Neville discovered, had morphed so that what is ordinarily a part of the auditory system was now working with the visual circuitry.14

Such findings illustrate how radically the brain can rewire itself in response to repeated experiences.15 The findings in musicians and in the deaf—and a slew of others—offered a proof we had been waiting for. Neuroplasticity provides an evidence-based framework and a language that makes sense in terms of current scientific thinking.16 It was the scientific platform we had long needed, a way of thinking about how intentional training of the mind, like meditation, might shape the brain.

THE ALTERED TRAIT SPECTRUM

Altered traits map along a spectrum starting at the negative end, with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a case in point. The amygdala acts as the neural radar for threat. Overwhelming trauma resets to a hair trigger the amygdala’s threshold for hijacking the rest of the brain to respond to what it perceives as an emergency.17 In people with PTSD, any cue that reminds them of the traumatic experience—and that for someone else would not be particularly noticeable—sets off a cascade of neural overreactions that create the flashbacks, sleeplessness, irritability, and hypervigilant anxiety of that disorder.

Moving along the trait spectrum toward the positive range, there are the beneficial neural impacts of being a secure child, whose brain gets molded by empathic, concerned, and nurturing parenting. This childhood brain shaping builds in adulthood, for example, into being able to calm down well when upset.18

Chuyenngui

Our interest in altered traits looks beyond the merely healthy spectrum to an even more beneficial range, wholesome traits of being. These extremely positive altered traits, like equanimity and compassion, are a goal of mind training in contemplative traditions. We use the term altered trait as shorthand for this highly positive range.19

Neuroplasticity offers a scientific basis for how repeated training could create those lasting qualities of being we had encountered in a handful of exceptional yogis, swamis, monks, and lamas. Their altered traits fit ancient descriptions of lasting transformation at the higher levels.

A mind free from disturbance has value in lessening human suffering, a goal shared by science and meditative paths alike. But apart from lofty heights of being, there’s a more practical potential within reach of every one of us: a life best described as flourishing.

FLOURISHING

As Alexander the Great was leading his armies through what is now Kashmir, legend has it he met a group of ascetic yogis in Taxila, then a thriving city on a branch of the Silk Road leading to the plains of India.

The yogis responded to the appearance of Alexander’s fierce soldiers with indifference, saying that he, like them, could actually possess only the ground on which he stood—and that he, like them, would die one day.

The Greek-derived word for these yogis is gymnosophists, literally “naked philosophers” (even today some groups of Indian yogis roam naked, coating themselves in ashes). Alexander, impressed by their equanimity, deemed them to be “free men,” and even convinced one yogi, Kalyana, to accompany him on his journey of conquest. No doubt the yogi’s lifestyle and outlook resonated with Alexander’s own schooling. Alexander had been tutored by the Greek philosopher Aristotle. Renowned for his lifelong love of learning, Alexander would have recognized the yogis as exemplars of another source of wisdom.

The Greek schools of philosophy espoused an ideal of personal transformation that remarkably echoes those of Asia, as Alexander may have found in his exchanges with Kalyana. The Greeks and their heirs the Romans, of course, laid the foundation for Western thought down to the present day.

Aristotle posited the goal of life as a virtue-based eudaimonia—a quality of flourishing—a view that continues under many guises in modern thought. Virtues, Aristotle said, are attained in part by finding the “right mean” between extremes; courage lies between impulsive risk-taking and cowardice, a tempered moderation between self-indulgence and ascetic denial.

And, he added, we are not by nature virtuous but all have the potential to become so through the right effort. That effort includes what today we would call self-monitoring, the ongoing practice of noting our thoughts and acts.

Other Greco-Roman philosophic schools used similar practices in their own paths toward flourishing. For the Stoics, one key was seeing that our feelings about life’s events, not those events themselves, determine our happiness; we find equanimity by distinguishing what we can control in life from what we cannot. Today that creed finds an echo in the popularized Twelve Step version of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s prayer:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

Courage to change the things I can,

And wisdom to know the difference.

chuyenngui

The classical way to the “wisdom to know the difference” lay in mental training. These Greek schools saw philosophy as an applied art and taught contemplative exercises and self-discipline as paths to flourishing. Like their peers to the East, the Greeks saw that we can cultivate qualities of mind that foster well-being. The Greek practices for developing virtues were to some extent taught openly, while others were apparently given only to initiates like Alexander, who noted that the philosopher’s texts were more fully understood in the context of these secretive teachings.

In the Greco-Roman tradition, qualities such as integrity, kindness, patience, and humility were considered keys to enduring well-being. These Western thinkers and Asian spiritual traditions alike saw the value in cultivating a virtuous life via a roughly similar transformation of being. In Buddhism, for example, the ideal of inner flourishing gets put in terms of bodhi (in Pali and Sanskrit), a path of self-actualization that nourishes “the very best within oneself.”20

ARISTOTLE’S DESCENDANTS

Today’s psychology uses the term well-being for a version of the Aristotelian meme flourishing. University of Wisconsin psychologist (and

Richie’s colleague there) Carol Ryff, drawing on Aristotle among many other thinkers, posits a model of well-being with six arms:

· Self-acceptance, being positive about yourself, acknowledging both your best and not-so-good qualities, and feeling fine about being just as you are. This takes a nonjudgmental self-awareness.

· Personal growth, the sense you continue to change and develop toward your full potential—getting better as time goes on—adopting new ways of seeing or being and making the most of your talents. “Each of you is perfect the way you are,” Zen master Suzuki Roshi told his students, adding, “and you can use a little improvement”— neatly reconciling acceptance with growth.

· Autonomy, independence in thought and deed, freedom from social pressure, and using your own standards to measure yourself. This, by the way, applies most strongly in individualistic cultures like Australia and the United States, as compared with cultures like Japan, where harmony with one’s group looms larger.

· Mastery, feeling competent to handle life’s complexities, seizing opportunities as they come your way, and creating situations that suit your needs and values.

· Satisfying relationships, with warmth, empathy, and trust, along with mutual concern for each other and a healthy give-and-take.

· Life purpose, goals and beliefs that give you a sense of meaning and direction. Some philosophers argue that true happiness comes as a by-product of meaning and purpose in life.

Ryff sees these qualities as a modern version of eudaimonia—Aristotle’s “highest of all human good,” the realization of your unique potential.21 As we will see in the chapters that follow, different varieties of meditation seem to cultivate one or more of these capacities. More immediately, several studies have looked at how meditation boosted people’s ratings on Ryff’s own measure of well-being.

Fewer than half of Americans, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, report feeling a strong sense of purpose in life beyond their jobs and family obligations.22 That particular aspect of wellbeing may have significant implications: Viktor Frankl has written about how a sense of meaning and purpose allowed him and select others to survive years in a Nazi concentration camp while thousands were dying around them.23 For Frankl, continuing his work as a psychotherapist with other prisoners in the camp lent purpose to his life; for another man there, it was having a child who was on the outside; yet another found purpose in the book he wanted to write.

Frankl’s sentiment resonates with a finding that after a three-month meditation retreat (about 540 hours total), those practitioners who had strengthened a sense of purpose in life during that time also showed a simultaneous increase in the activity of telomerase in their immune cells, even five months later.24 This enzyme protects the length of telomeres, the caps at the ends of DNA strands that reflect how long a cell will live.

It’s as though the body’s cells were saying, stick around—you’ve got important work to do. On the other hand, as these researchers note, this finding needs to be replicated in well-designed studies before we can be more sure.

Also of interest: eight weeks of a variety of mindfulness seemed to enlarge a region in the brain stem that correlated with a boost in well-being on Ryff’s test.25 But the study was quite small—just fourteen people—and so, needs to be redone with a larger group before we can draw more than tentative conclusions.

Similarly, in a separate study, people practicing a popular form of mindfulness reported higher levels of well-being and other such benefits up to a year later.26 The more everyday mindfulness, the greater the subjective boost in well-being. Again, the numbers in this study were small, and a brain measure—which, as we’ve said, is far less susceptible to psychological skew than self-evaluations—would be even more convincing.

So, while we find the conclusion that meditation enhances well-being an appealing idea, especially as meditators ourselves, our science side remains skeptical.

Studies such as these are often cited as “proving” the merits of meditation, particularly these days, when mindfulness has become the flavor du jour. But meditation research varies enormously when it comes to scientific soundness—though when used to promote some brand of meditation, app, or other contemplative “product,” this inconvenient truth goes missing.

In the chapters that follow, we’ve used rigorous standards to sort out fluff from fact. What does science actually tell us about the impacts of meditation?

***

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