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A documentary series hosted by experimental psychologist and writer Miguel Farias exploring the phenomena of meditation.
Miguel interviews many world-leading historians, psychologists, neuroscientists, philosophers, and practitioners from diverse backgrounds in an attempt to understand this uniquely human discipline.
Funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation
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The Academic Podcast.
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Agency.
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Hello and welcome to the Buddha Pill Podcast. My name is Miguel Farias. I am an experimental psychologist and writer, and in this series of four episodes, I intend to introduce to you what I'm calling a multidimensional science of meditation.
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And what do I mean by this? Well, what I'm proposing is that we need to start thinking about meditation in a different way. That we are carrying around ideas and stereotypes that have failed to help us understand the practice that humans have been engaging in for at least 4,000 years. Let me give you an example of such stereotypes. Meditation is about finding happiness in the present moment.
Well, historically, the opposite is closer to the truth. Meditation was developed by individuals that were very little interested in the present moment. What traditional meditators aimed for was a deep transformation of oneself. This transformation generally meant being less interested in everyday needs and personal desires, including the desire for personal happiness.
Now, this probably sounds strange if we have only heard about meditation as a way of reducing stress. Meditation can help with stress, but it's something like a side effect, and certainly isn't the whole story. Something else that I want to focus on during this podcast is the astonishing variety of meditation practices. If we include all those that were developed over centuries but are no longer used, we are talking about.
Hundreds of techniques. And these practices were used across all spiritual traditions. We must speak not only of Buddhist and Hindu meditation, but also Christian, Jewish, Islamic, or Taoist practices. This is why in this podcast I will make the case for a multidimensional science of meditation. One that includes the varieties of practice, of its aims.
But also of the many places of exploration they can take us into. The various states of consciousness, one might say. And if you're asking yourself, why should I care about meditation? Just think about how a greater understanding of diverse states of consciousness would potentially help us to better understand each other's lived experiences. The task ahead is ambitious.
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But I am doing this in very good company. Over the next four episodes, we are going to meet and talk with diverse experts on meditation: psychologists, philosophers, historians, neuroscientists, as well as expert meditators from various traditions. I want to try and understand what meditation is and what it isn't, the role that science and religion play in its practice. And above all,
I want to make a case for why we should want to understand it better. And that much of the current misunderstanding about meditation is undesirable and in some cases even dangerous.
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You are listening to the Buddha Pill Podcast.
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When you hear the word meditation, what pops immediately into your mind? focusing, like mindfulness a little bit.
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Taking some time to like focus on
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yourself and calm your mind. Meditation helps to release pressure and that's that's something people use.
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I always imagine a a Buddhist monk trying to focus on his breathing, trying to empty his mind completely.
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Focusing on one thing or focus rounding.
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Connect to higher energy.
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Maybe
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Maybe just to develop better your inner thoughts. Maybe to reach enlightenment.
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Many people today believe they have a rough understanding of what meditation is. But let me introduce to you someone who has been meditating daily for over 45 years. Her name is Swami Ambikananda. She is a priest in the Hindu tradition and has translated the earliest Indian scripture about yoga into English, the Kata Upanishad.
She wakes up every day at four in the morning to meditate for at least two hours. Miguel, so Darling! It's this
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Fabulous to so God it's been ages. So we're going to talk about meditation.
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Well, I d i we we are going to talk about meditation, but I'd like to start in the beginning. I'd like to start with you. Who are you?
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That's an extraordinary question. It's one I have been contemplating for oo fifty years now, but I'm assuming you just want to know what's my name in this world Swami Ambikananda now.
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What time do you wake up?
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four, four thirty ish round about there. You know. I'd I'd much rather sleep till ten, but that's the time my body wakes up.
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What you do.
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The usual thing that monastics do, boring stuff, meditation, reading, that kind of stuff.
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What is the usual meditation you do in the morning?
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I I use various yoga practices of meditation, most often a dharama practice focus, focusing on one thing.
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What would that be? A text, a a sound?
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Usually a sound, mantra.
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So would you combine the sound and the image? Yes. Isn't that difficult to focus on two things at once?
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No, not particularly. What might happen in the med during the meditation is one of them drops away. If it's a particularly good meditation, all of it drops away, including yourself.
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If everything drops away, what are you left with?
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yes, I wish I could tell you. We can't reduce it. It's this is our problem is we want to reduce everything to a description. And we can't. The mystery can't be described or portrayed.
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So after having been doing this practice for a long time, you would say that you still cannot describe the outcome, what what it is that is coming out of it.
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No, you cannot. Because in order to describe it, you have to observe it.
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We will revisit SSwami Ambikananda again later in this series. But as we just heard from her, meditation is not something that comes easily. As Swami Ambikananda tells us, this is probably the reason why it has been practiced over centuries by very few people. Even in Buddhist countries, most people do not meditate, and it's far more common for Buddhists to visit temples and pray.
And contrary to what many people think, children are not taught meditation in Buddhist countries. But what is it about sitting quietly with yourself that is so hard? Let's think about it in a different way. What's your state of mind like when you're left in an unstimulated environment? The chances are you might be struggling to imagine this.
Particularly today in a world of smartphones and media devices. There is a sense that most of us have minds that are in need of some kind of distraction, and that we will settle for just about anything, as long as there's something to occupy our minds. And so it would appear that a non-distracted mind is not actually something that we're that accustomed to, or indeed comfortable with. One study designed to examine
How people typically interact with their own thoughts was carried out by Timothy Wilson of Virginia in 2014.
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Yeah, installed.
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The study basically went like this. University students spent time by themselves with no stimulation for 15 minutes. They were asked to spend the time entertaining themselves with their thoughts, with the only rules being that they should remain in their seats and stay awake. Most participants reported that it was difficult to concentrate, and that their minds wandered, even though there was nothing competing for their attention.
And on average, participants did not enjoy the experience very much. Okay, you might think, not much to report here. People get bored when they don't have anything to do, and people don't like being bored. But here's where it gets interesting. That is
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Yeah.
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In a variation of the study, participants received the same instructions to entertain themselves with their thoughts, but also had the opportunity to experience negative stimulation via an electric shock. It was made explicit that the primary goal was to entertain themselves with their thoughts, and that the decision to receive a shock was entirely up to them.
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And yet, many participants elected to receive negative stimulation over no stimulation at all, especially the men. 60% of men gave themselves at least one electric shock during the thinking period, compared to 25% of women. So, although this was a study that still needs to be replicated, it does suggest that the human mind wishes to avoid.
Being without stimulus. There may be very good reasons for this. If you think about how we have evolved as humans, to survive, we have to be sharply aware of our natural surroundings, to look out for danger, or to find food. So we might say that we are not hardwired to sit still and quietly. We have evolved to pay attention to our surroundings, not to the inside of our minds.
Which is why many people find meditating a difficult or even uncomfortable task. But why meditate in the first place, you might be asking? Well, motivations and goals of why people meditate are going to be looked at in greater detail in later episodes of this series. But for now, we're sticking with the question of what is meditation? So, what do we know?
Well, we know that a meditator is someone willfully sustaining a state in which external stimulation is greatly reduced. And we also know that this can be difficult for us to do. We are aware that this practice has existed for centuries, and depending on the cultural context of time and place, meditation has meant different things to different people.
One way to organize this vast variety of meanings and experience is to recognize that there is a difference between those that believe they are engaged in a religious or spiritual activity and those that believe what they are doing has nothing to do with religion whatsoever.
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My name is Ivana. I currently work as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Amsterdam in the department of psychology.
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This is Doctor Ivana Buric, a researcher with a background in psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and molecular biology.
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I specialize in mindfulness research, trying to understand how it works, why it works and for whom does it work best.
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Ivana believes that important advances in science and society can be made through collaborations amongst researchers that don't normally work together. She is also a mindfulness instructor.
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I started having my personal meditation practice still while I was a master student. And it was at a time while I was recovering from a car accident that I was in. And at the time I was having a lot of pain and anxiety during my recovery, which was making it difficult for me to study. So I also had attention problems and I heard that meditation could help with that.
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The chances are that you've heard of mindfulness meditation, which typically involves focusing on your breath, being in the present moment, and observing your thoughts non-judgmentally. Mindfulness is a meditation practice that was originally Buddhist, but has been adapted into a secular context with the aim of reducing stress.
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What I noticed first was changes in my attention, because that was the main thing that brought me to meditation. And I remember that after a few months of practice, I was starting to get back to the attention levels that I had before. And that was very encouraging because when I started it was very difficult to even read one page of text, and my mind would be wandering all over, and with time and with practice.
I could get that intention back, but what I also noticed I could b manage anxiety better. I felt I could understand myself better. I could have feel this increased awareness and I could enjoy the little things in my day in different ways. So that really sparked more interest.
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A reduction in levels of stress and anxiety, coupled with a greater ability to concentrate, sounds like a wonderful thing. And indeed, many people have reported a very positive response to engaging with mindfulness meditation. But would it be an effective discipline for everyone?
And how can we meaningfully measure the experiences of those involved? A fascinating aspect of Ivana's research is that she is interested in measuring not just individuals' subjective experience, but also their biological responses. The title of one of your projects is Psychoneuroimmunology of Meditation. What works, how does it work, and for whom does it work best? Can you tell us something about this?
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Well, the whole point of this approach, this interdisciplinary approach, is to treat the person as a whole. So we shouldn't only focus on measuring psychological aspects of the person, like personality traits or mental health. We should also see how other parts of the person, like the social context they come in, or they biological variables. We should also focus how all these variables together interact and they form the response to meditation.
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Can you give us some example of some of these what are some of these biological indicators?
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So there are different things we can measure. So we can put people through a brain scan, do neuro neuroimaging with fMRI, and we can look at how different neural networks that people are that are activated during rest might be predictive of the meditation response to meditation intervention in future.
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And can we tell for whom meditation will make the this person better in terms of of stress or depression and for whom it will not? Do we know that?
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At the time where we are in psychology, the methods and approaches that we have can provide some early evidence for whom it benefits the most, but we cannot really confidently predict that the person A will have a certain outcome and the person B will have a different outcome.
From some preliminary evidence that we have, it seems that actually biological variables are not as important in predicting the response to meditation. Maybe psychological variables seem to be more predictive, but it's still too early to know. So for now we still need to measure all different kinds of biological and psychological variables to examine them, how they are related to the response to meditation, to in near future hopefully be able to understand it better.
We know also from research that any meditation technique and also any psychological intervention that we might give to people will lead to different responses. So not everybody will respond in the same way. we know that from mindfulness and similar meditation techniques, most people do benefit, but there are some people that don't get any benefits, and for some people it might lead to unpleasant experiences or even adverse effects.
And this is not something that's specific to meditation, it's not some dangerous technique, it's something that we also see in psychotherapy or any other similar approach. All meditation techniques I believe can be useful, but you need to find some technique that really resonates with you personally so that you can commit through a longer period of time and actually benefit from it.
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The idea that there's not a one size fits all solution to any given health intervention is probably not that surprising to you. However, while it may be true that mindfulness meditation won't be a good fit for everyone, it's also true that not all meditation understands itself to be a health intervention.
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And so, if we understand secular meditation, like mindfulness, to be motivated by a want to reduce stress and anxiety, then what about meditation that identifies with a religious or spiritual identity? I reconnected with an old friend, David Brazier, who I thought would be an excellent person to talk to about this subject.
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In the West you think of meditation as this sort of technique that can be stand on its own for a mundane purpose, reducing stress or increasing good behaviour or whatever you think. so it this is not what it's really about. Th th what we've done is we've asset stripped Buddhism and taken a bit out of it and we're trying to use it for a purpose that it was never designed for in the first place.
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David Brazier is a highly respected Zen Buddhist teacher as well as a practicing psychotherapist. He is the president of the International Zen Therapy Institute and lectures internationally. Can you tell us how is this Zen Buddhism different from mindfulness?
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The mindfulness that people know about in the West, what I'll call utilitarian mindfulness, is in my opinion rather different from the mindfulness that it derives from, ultimately, that you find in Buddhism. Mindfulness in Buddhism is about what you keep in mind. So it's not about sharp awareness of the present moment to the exclusion of all else.
It's about having something in mind that'll protect you against what might happen in the present moment. So there has been almost a reversal really in the meaning. The term mindfulness was chosen as the translation of these Sanskrit and Pali terms by a translator called Rhys Davids. And where Rhys Davids first uses this translation, there's a footnote.
And the footnote says, this is the Buddhist equivalent of the Christian, whatsoever ye do, do it in my name, or do it in the name of the Lord. So mindfulness in its original Buddhist context was whatever you do, do it with mindfulness of the Buddha. So that there's a s a strong intrinsic, you might say, ethical component.
In the original Buddhist mindfulness, because if you do everything with the with the Buddha in mind, you're going to do it carefully, compassionately, wisely, and so on. And you're not going to be swept away by whatever impulse may arise in the present moment. whereas mindfulness in its utilitarian modern form is is a a sharpness of attention which is is has its values.
But it's ethically neutral. It's very useful to a burglar, it's very useful to a sniper, to have sharp attention in the present moment. That that's what they need. so it it's not quite the same thing.
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Quite a lot of meditation practices. The aim has been stress reduction. These techniques are helping us to deal with modern post-industrial stress. But is it a necessary requirement that you first de-stress, that your first self-compassion towards yourself before you can move towards?
Developing compassion for others.
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Yes, meditation will result in less stress, but that's not a good reason for doing it. A lot of this is like buying more and more band-aids while compulsively still cutting yourself. You know, Buddhism's concerned with with with solving the original problem, not patching it up.
If you're if you're stressed, stop doing the things that make you stressed. Not find a way to de-stress and then go and make yourself stressed again the following day and then de-stress and then make yourself stressed again the day after. You've just made yourself ill. it's not going to work, even though the technique might work briefly. Concentrating on the present moment, very popular idea. for sure it'll distract you from your worries.
If you don't worry about tomorrow and you don't worry about the past, while you're doing that exercise, you're distracted from those things and and you'll feel better. But as soon as you stop doing the exercise, the things are still in your intra. You've still got to pay the gas bill tomorrow. You've still got to go and deal with whatever it is, difficult relationship or lack of money or or whatever. You know, the things that are stressing you.
You're dealing with. And while you're doing your here and now exercise, you're not dealing with them. You're just distracting yourself from them. I know self-compassion is very popular these days, but I again this is not really what it's about. you need to get self out of the way. It's it's not
It's not the real message. Compassion. Yes, compassion's good. but compassion isn't you don't have to love yourself before you can love somebody else. If if you do good things for other people, you may feel more at ease, you may feel more confident, you feel may feel more assured, you may have a better life. if you're empathic to the other members of your family, they'll treat you better and you'll have a better life.
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You you don't have to start off with yourself.
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Talking to David, it's clear that many terms relating to what meditation is, such as mindfulness, self-compassion, have quite literally been lost in translation between the East and Western practitioners. And with this cultural adoption process, comes much confusion about the assumed purpose and even presence of meditation as a practice by those with the Buddhist faith.
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If it's in context, if you're born into a Buddhist family in the in the East, you will pick up something about the meditative state of mind. You might never sit on a cushion. Your parents might not very often sit on a cushion, but you will absorb the world view, the centrality of equanimity.
and the sense of a reality beyond the ordinary. You won't be taught to do meditation because it's good for you. The the the practice is much more the life of the community and the ritual of the community, which is the context within which meditation makes sense. The context is more important than the than the technique.
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Another concept which carries a lot of weight in Western popular imagination is that of enlightenment. And again, David believes that we have fundamentally misunderstood this term, as it was originally intended by Buddhists.
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When you look at the Buddhist texts, people are getting enlightened on every other page. And they get enlightened after a 20-minute conversation with the Buddha. They're not enlightened after 25 years of hard training. And most of the accounts of people meditating in the sutras are people who are already enlightened. So I think we've reframed it somehow in how we look at it.
What we mean, what we think we mean by enlightenment, and so on. Enlightenment is seeing the reality as it really is, as Buddhists understand that term, which is not the way science understands it at all, but is like seeing the transcendent reality beyond the mundane world that science studies. That probably does result in you behaving better.
But you don't do it in order to arrive at an ethically justified state. The ethically justified state is is a byproduct. It's a side issue.
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When the historical Buddha lived, there were various practices of meditation already in existence, but he made meditation as one of the important things for for this ability to see deeply. How important have these meditation practices been in Buddhism and why have people been doing it for over 2,500 years?
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In various traditions, in the Kajaba tradition, in Tibetan Buddhism, in Zen, particularly these two have very well-developed lineages of this kind. You have the stories of the transmission of the Dhamma. So through 80-odd generations, the Dhamma has come down to me. Now, when you look at these stories, almost none of these people become enlightened while meditating. They have an interaction with a teacher.
The penny drops, and suddenly, yes, of course. Really, things are like that I never realized before. And then they meditate. And meditation then cultivates that insight. It's truer to say, really, that meditation is something that enlightened people like to do than that meditation is a way to become enlightened.
If you do meditation as a deluded being, then probably you'll just do deluded meditation, and you'll sit on your cushion for as long as you like, and you'll dream about this, that, and the other. And then you might have very pleasant dreams, and you might learn some things, you'll learn a certain discipline, you'll learn to control your impulses, you won't be so impetuous. Meditation done by ordinary people is a discipline, it's it helps to form character.
But thinking of it as a means to enlightenment, it's not gonna do the job on its own. There needs to be a relationship. Meditation detached from a spiritual tradition is of limited utility. Just meditation taught as a secular technique, I well you'll get something from it, but
Meditation in its proper context is not just mental keep fit, it's a spiritual transformation.
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David seems to be suggesting that less focus on the self is a positive step for any aspiring traditional meditator. But this does leave me wondering about the differences between a meditation practice concerned with self-transcendence and one concerned with self-improvement. I put these thoughts to Ivana Burich to see what she made of it. So traditionally, these techniques were developed to promote.
transformations of the self in the sense of making people less interested in themselves and more interested in in in others. So I mean we can s call them I mean broadly self-transcendent motives, right? And the way mindfulness is being used today is mostly for for not for self-transcendent but for self-development purposes.
Does it make a difference if people are using this for for self development or self enhancement to deal with stress or to deeply change themselves? Does that change their experience of these practices?
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Yeah, I think that this difference that you described from the original focus of self-transcendence and now more to self-development is largely also evidence-based. Like it's informed by research because we actually do see bigger effect sizes on variables such as mental health, reducing stress, improving emotion regulation. And we don't really see such big effects on pro-social behavior or empathy and so on.
So in that sense, it is may perhaps just because it's been more informed by the science that we have been doing in the past decade.
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But is that couldn't those results be driven by the fact that these people are practicing these things looking at stress reduction or depression reduction and not at a deep transformation of themselves?
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Yes, I think that's definitely a possibility. it's not something that we can that easily test in research. It would be very complicated to do that. Maybe you have some ideas, but it's really hard to answer that question.
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So all of these practices or or generally had a very clear ethical framework. So the aim was not to make people happier, but to make them better people. So what what is it that as a psychological researcher are you aiming for? Is it to to get happier individuals or better individuals?
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Well, I think it depends on which researcher you would ask. for me, I believe that mindfulness and meditation techniques can help people get a deeper understanding of themselves, including their personal values. And it can help them live their life more in according to those according with those values. So they can have a better life for themselves, but also for people around them. And they can also have more resilience to mental health, of course, but the way that I see it, it's mainly about
Knowing yourself and your own values and being able to do behaviors that help you go towards those values, even when you feel unpleasant emotions or unpleasant thoughts, that you can still in those times be able to do what matters to you personally. So that's the way that I see it. But I think that's a very depends who you ask. I feel that a lot of mindfulness researchers like me, who ha come from a secular background of psychology, they see it as just an intervention that.
can help people with their mental health.
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Listening to Ivana's answer, it would be tempting to suggest that the real cultural divide between these two understandings lies somewhere in our modern-day fascination with self-esteem, self-development, and similar concepts that emerged with psychotherapy. But David, as a practicing psychotherapist himself, had some interesting ideas about the relationship between therapy and Buddhist teachings. How is it that you articulate?
So your Buddhist spirituality with that of your psychotherapeutic training.
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Psychotherapy as we know it in the West is about strengthening the self, self-entitlement, self-esteem, self-confidence, self-self-self-self-self. And Buddhism is a non-self philosophy, you could say. As I said earlier,
When you look at the stories of the transmission of the Dhamma through the ages, enlightenment comes about through an interpersonal interaction in the great majority of cases. Well, an interaction in which one person comes away more enlightened than before through mostly verbal exchange, by definition, this is psychotherapy. This is what psychotherapy is.
You see, it may be very different from what we typically in the West think of as psychotherapy, but by definition it's a psychotherapy, interpersonal encounter out of which at least one of the parties emerges more mature, more sane, more calm, more adapted to life. this is psychotherapy. So Buddhism in looked at in a certain way is
Psychotherapy. So my conceptualization of it would be that everybody, consciously or unconsciously, and in a great majority of cases unconsciously, is on a spiritual journey, whether they know it or not, think it or not, believe it or not, they are. This is the nature of being a human being. And the job of the therapist is to help people along that path. If I have a client for psychotherapy,
I don't have a plan for them. I try to understand them as deeply as I can, as they are. I trust that if I do that, it will help them to change in whatever way they should change. And they maybe don't know what that is. They probably don't know what that is. My approach to psychotherapy is, I think, in line with my Buddhism, certainly as much as I can do.
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and it's to do with understanding the nature of the person as a spiritual being.
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The idea that we are all spiritual beings, whether we know it or not, may be challenging for those that choose to engage in secular health interventions, such as mindfulness, meditation, and psychotherapy. Yet the similarity of the practices themselves cannot be completely ignored. And at the very least, this speaks to meditation's endurance as a human activity throughout the centuries.
In the next episode of the Buddha Pill Podcast, we shall be looking at the varieties of meditation practice across time and geography, and questioning whether the techniques are different in important ways or whether they are all fundamentally the same.
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Thank you to all our contributors that featured in this episode of the Budapil Podcast. And thank you for taking the time to listen. If you find this show interesting and would like to get in touch, then please do so via the Academic Podcast Agency website. And please have a look at the show notes for any further readings and resources on all of the studies and concepts covered here today. The Budapil Podcast was presented by me, Miguel Farias,
And was produced by the academic podcast agency and perfect motion.