Mind Science

This book was okay. I think it needed its length to explain the profundity (or perceived profundity) and importance of the practices. There’s very little science in here, and psychoanalytic concepts are provided as science. It’s mostly a written recording of a workshop to teach nerds how to chill out and get in touch with their bodies.

Introduction

• This book is an informal meditation workshop with some spiritual-ish insights mixed in.
• They would like to make three distinctions…
  • Science vs Scientism - Attacking beliefs that don’t line up with your world view, despite science being imperfect.
  • Spirituality vs Religion - Religion, similarly abused as science, used to serve personal and social/cultural wants/needs. Genuine spiritual inquiry can be as valid and methodical as scientific inquiry - both produce tentative hypotheses.
  • Belief vs Direct Experience - getting data for yourself vs from a (reputable or unreputable) authority.
• Meditation is novel in western culture.
• Tart’s vibe - “Meditation and Mindfulness for the scientifically Talented/Handicapped”

Meditation may initially be difficult.

The Tuscon III Workshop

3 techniques - calming (concentrative), self understanding (insight), deeper processes in ordinary life (Gurdjieffan self-remembering)

Karma is just another word for consequence. Better/accurate awareness leads to better karma.

Ch1 - Science and Meditation are Compatible

Essential Science vs Scientisim

Essential Science

1. Get data
2. Theorizing - warning - you can rationalize anything, it needs to look plausible.
3. Testing - repeatable confidence
4. Consensual Validation - limit dimensions if possible. Others can help you validate your tests and theories. They float the idea that you don’t know enough to be arrogant.

They also discuss how ideas are presented - the law of gravity vs the theory of gravity.

Early Psychology as a Science of the Mind

• Initial psychology failed miserably. Behaviorism was the rigid response. Introspection was viewed as a hopeless pursuit. Behavior observation cuts out too much of the picture.
• We need to get our own priors out of the way - or at least become aware of them. So…
  • We need to cut down on conscious agitation to observe clearly.
  • We need to be very careful to avoid setting expectations.

Ch2 - Concentrative Meditation

• A quiet environment, while sitting, is ideal.

Basic concentrative meditation.

• You may realize your mind is busy - you are simply becoming more aware of that.
• It’s simple - focus on one thing.
• A quiet space without interruptions or expectations is ideal.
• As a beginner - reducing time pressure helps. You can check your watch mid-session when you are more skilled. Use a digital timer/alarm until then.
• Personal thought - distractions that demand attention vs ambience.
• Social expectations help - peer pressure to keep going.

Step 2 - Calming and quieting the body

• You don’t need to scratch that itch. Util you get good at this - try to sit still.
• It is unlikely your aches and pains will be indications that something will be damaged. Don’t hurt yourself though.
• They recommend a wooden straight-backed chair.
• If you have to cough - just get it over with and don’t stress.
• Tart: (Paraphrased) Yeah - this is a distraction for the ‘undisciplined’ mind - but a necessary step. No - you don’t need to believe anything I say.

Ch3 - Practice - Concentrative Meditation

The Ritual

• Allot 15m
• Close your eyes, take a deep breath, release, relax
• Sitting still is important - but use the first few minutes to get comfortable as you sit. Try to stay still after this.
• Gently bring your attention back to the focus.
• Focal point - the feeling of movement of your belly as your breathe.
• Breathe at whatever rate feels natural.
• If you notice interference…
  • be aware => relax => return attention
• There are no shoulds or should nots
• Mind wandering? be aware => relax => return attention

Questions:

• Mind wandering / seeing images? Return focus. You don’t need to push away distractions - let them fade and return to your focus.
• Hypnosis? Hypnosis is more goal oriented - with an authority figure. Meditation is about learning to ‘still’ the ordinary mind. If you do self-hypnosis - don’t do it now, this is different.
• Yes - other aspects of the belly (warmth, temperature) are distractions.
• Figuring out a precursor to a thought is an infinite path - avoid that. (Personal thought - are “precursors” just generative and evidence searching in nature?)

Storytime I guess…

• An expert meditator was mad because they could not go >2hrs without a thought. (So - don’t set your expectations super high.)
• Quiet is nice - but it’s a tool to get you to other insights.
• They prefer teaching to focus on the belly movement because it gets us literally out of our heads.
• This isn’t pass/fail - but a gradual process.
• Thoughts come and go - you can hold your focus on your belly through them as you improve. You can use this to stay present through annoyances as you improve.

Practice 2

• Let your eyes OR let your focus gently rest in front of you. Park them there and don’t look around, but don’t stare.
• Repeat previous steps.
• (They leave them in silence for 5-10m.)
• They point out some distractions, and suggest they can be there as you continue to let your focus return to your belly. Other stimuli can exist while you maintain focus.

More Q&A

• Thoughts are distractions - even if tagged as important.
• Personal Thought - maybe get some mind wandering time out of the way in your prep.
• … Yeah I know, we’re stuck piloting a meat mech.
• If you do not notice your body, you cannot enjoy it.
• Knowledge != proficiency
• Knowledge of your body is not intellectual, and that’s ok.
• Personal thought - the “inherent wisdom” of the body could be misattribution.
• Yeah - you can choose other foci - even concepts. (Personal thought - isn’t this just controlled rumination?)
• Be reasonable with your expectations - it gets better.

Ch4 - Opening up meditation - Vipassana

• Insight in the sense of clarity and accuracy, not figuring out some deep truth or finding a solution. Insight as in removing abstraction.
• Learning to notice without trying to shape our experience.
• Personal Thought - this might be similar to avoiding critical thought in hypnosis.
• Simplest form - sit quietly, sit still, open-minded attention, no attachment or aversion to whatever comes up, don’t try to control anything.
• Pure™️ Vipassana - open minded attention with no attempts to control.
• Start on easy mode - pay attention to the body. If you start planning list, you fell out of vipassana.
• In vipassana, there are no good or bad sensations.
  • Craving a sensation? You lost the game.
  • Don’t hold on to or reject anything
  • See pain as interesting - not bad or something to be avoided.
  • Savor sensation like delicate, nuanced food - without judgement

Ch5 Practice - Vipassana - Opening Up Meditation Ritual

• 5-15m
• Close eyes, settle in
• Sense your whole body - then, tune into any strong sensation
  • If your focus shifts, let it (for this session - stick to sensations)
• Breathing is a fine thing to notice - so is everything else
• Sit ‘n savor
• If thoughts happen - go back to sensing and savoring

Q&A

• Shit - I’m labeling everything!? Don’t fight the labeling - it just makes it worse. Accept it and get back to noticing the body. Label the labeling as “noting” - notice what your brain is up to then move on.
• Appendix 1 covers noting in detail. (It tells you to go RTFM by finding other resources.)
• Don’t fight thoughts - do shift attention.
• It’s ok if the sensation fades quickly.
• Attention is limited - if you are using your mind to label - that is wasted bandwidth that could be used to savor sensation. Personal thought - those GDFs to notice phantom sense are probably getting in the way after a point.
• Vipassana is about coming back to the present.
• Suffering = pain x resistance (sure… sometimes.)
• The ‘point’ of this is to observe with clarity, not to enjoy.

Ritual - Practice 2:

• Sit, chill, relaxed focus or eyes closed
• Follow the strongest body sensation - as if it was the first time you felt it. The ‘strongest’ sensation will change as you continue to meditate.
• The word description is irellevant.
• What’s it like in this moment? (And this moment… 3x)
• Avoid labeling.
• This moment.
• Drifting? Return.
• Attached? Let it go.
• Keep coming back to the actual quality.
• …
• Now split your attention - sounds and body awareness.

Q&A

• Metacognition may come easily or slowly for you.
• If you get good at this - you can notice all sensory systems semi-simultaneously.

Ch6 - Links, Expansions, Concepts

• Tart 1975 - inductions for specific ASCs - looks like it points to the book States of Consciousness (Looking at this, I kinda wish I read this instead of this book…)
• Context explains the usefulness/point/meaning of a type of meditation. (Circle drawing => speaking with spirits.)
• ASCs are not “better” - just a different way of functioning.
• Personality as habit and social conditioning
• This is presenting these rituals as a way to focus on where you want and to be open to noticing sensation.
• Hypnagogic state is different from meditation.
• Huh…

Meditation is “dangerous,” in one sense. If you teach psychotics, really unstable people, how to meditate, they’ll probably get worse…

Tart, C. T. (2013). Mind Science. Fearless Books. (Original work published 2001)

Their point is that if you’re psychologically sound, if something weird happens, you’ll stop and get help.

• Life is already dangerous. Meditation has a very low risk profile compared to daily life.
• Meditation is usually beneficial and generally harmless.

Ch7: Self Observation, Self Remembering in Everyday Life

• If you become more aware of your body, you will naturally relax more.
  • The author admits to still getting pissed off at shit drivers - relatable.
• Western cultures are less adept at recognizing our experience is constructed.
• Accurate self-observation can help you get out of your head.
• The author talks a lot about Gurdjief explaining the importance and benefits of metacognition.
• Vipassana as similar to metacognition and metawareness - they liken this to self-awareness.
• Personal thought - if we turn metacognition into play instead of a stuffy, important, valuable practice - wouldn’t we do it more? Re - the friend who can’t get “deep” enough.
• To self observe - “What are you doing, perceiving, feeling at this moment?” What exactly are you doing? Be curious and non-judgmental.
• The change happens naturally as a byproduct.

Consensus Consciousness:

Capturing of attention by external phenomena/stimulation

Mind <- Attention - Semi Voluntary => External Phenomena

Consensus Consciousness:

Reactive capture of attention, following stimulation by internal processes

Mind <= Attention - Semi Voluntary -> External Phenomena

Self Remembering:

Deliberate deployment of attention

Mind <= Attention - Voluntary => External Phenomena

• Option 1 - notice a sensation? Your attention goes to the sensation.
• Option 2 - notice an internal representation or a thought? Your attention goes to the thought.
• Option 3 (self remembering) - split attention, both are simultaneously in awareness. A small amount of awareness goes to an observer/scientist that is ‘taking notes’

When you split deliberately - you get ‘spaciousness’ - the space between experienced events. The ‘practical’ way to do this is to give a small amount of background attention (5-15%) to a “specified aspect of sensation in your physical body”

The usual practical application of this is to always keep a bit of your attention on your arms and legs. It keeps automatic rushing thoughts at bay, and you sense with more accuracy. (According to them.)

Ch8 - Practice - The Morning Exercise and Self Remembering

• Start with a body scan
  • Take 5-10m
  • Tune into sensations - particularly arms and legs
• Then - hold onto the awareness of your limbs through your day.

Ritual

• You don’t need to do this before trying again through your day - but it can help you prepare
• The following exercise, ideally, should be spread out over 10-20m
• Start…
  • Close your eyes, settle in
• Notice…
  • Right foot (spends a few minutes here)
    • Savor, notice, note, don’t label, etc
    • Ankle
    • Calf
    • Upper half
    • Hip
  • Right forearm - wrist to elbow
  • Elbow to shoulder
  • Repeat - starting left shoulder
    • Left leg - still moving part by part
  • Both feet
  • Both lower legs
    • You’ll miss details as your focus widens - that’s okay.
  • All of legs and feet.
  • Add hands.
  • Add forearms.
  • Add upper arms.
  • Broaden - add hearing.
    • Notice sound and the absence of sound.
• Eyes open - look around - continue to include the sensation of limbs. Don’t look at anything in particular - look at everything as if it was brand new.
  • While holding on to this, hold on to listening and sensing.
• End

Try to keep this up for the end of the talk - or, half joking, for the rest of your life.

Q&A

• This sucks and is too hard! Reduce the difficulty, just the hands.

• (A student talks about hypnagogic flips.)

• I was alternating focus! Simultaneous focus is hard. Alternating is OK. (They may be intimating that simultaneous is ideal, but eh.)

• Their brief thoughts on EMDR. They think the eye movement and focus distractions may help people from getting stuck in habitual thoughts.

• They mention looking at the big dipper tonight, try to see it for what it is - as a bunch of points of light

• They mention Carl Jung’s view that…

  • Aw what the fuck does this actually mean…

Jung talked about powerful contents coming up from the collective unconscious, archetypes, that then constellated the rest of functioning around that core, but constellation is really a far more general principle about the organization about prception.

Tart, C. T. (2013). Mind Science. Fearless Books. (Original work published 2001)

By holding some attention back - we experience with better accuracy instead of getting stuck or having them augmented by feedback loops.

• Yup, maintaining awareness of your arms constantly is hard. It is extra hard during intellectually demanding tasks. Be practical - you can do this during mundane tasks.
• Tart describes himself as a “transpersonal behaviorist”
• They ramble on about how much of our lives are on autopilot (and suggest we avoid it)
• … Not sure I buy that trauma is ‘stored in the body.’ Associations? Sure.
• … And cue the meditation dogma.
• Personal Thought - look - we are all conditioned by our environment. The author is conditioning us right now, and I’m conditioning you by simply writing this. You can’t just piss and moan about your environment conditioning you when it’s the only available perception we have.

Ch9 - Toward a Science of Consciousness

• There is a lot of rambling in this chapter. I am not the target audience.

Warning - most of these thoughts on this chapter aren’t Tart’s, they’re mostly my disagreements.

• IDGAF (currently) about David Chalmers. Give me tools, not the leftovers of mental masturbation.
• Sure - your thoughts may feel more accurate - but feelings are (easily and demonstrably) fallible.
• An expectation to learn can probably encourage false insights. Recreational hypnotists have been doing this for at least 30 years, mostly to the detriment of themselves and their partners.
• Guess I’m in the camp of questioning the structure and design of the “question.”
• (You should skip my notes on this chapter, I’m being a pissant.)
• Suggesting sensory deprivation was enough to get effects out of a reasonably tame, quiet sitting-in-a-staged-psych-ward experiment. Those not being told it was a “sensory deprivation” setting had no wild subjective alterations.
• Bro! The effects you describe from Vipassana MATCH your sensory deprivation conditions. You could easily be deluding yourself and you just laid out the mechanism!
• … Ugh.
• “When I use unconscious I generally mean it in the Freudian sense.” … “Subconscious I generally use in a wider sense, to include a lo of…”
  • This is where I mentally ragequit… Fuck this bullshit, Freud, Jung, and their overhyped, clearly invalidated mental masturbation.
• Tart you were a cool dude that researched cool things but I am not on board with this chunk.

Ch10 - Practice - Vipassana to Self Remembering

Structure: Concentrative => vipassana => self remembering

• Prep concentrative
• prep vipassana
• Stay in vipassana
• find a partner
• Stare at their hand ala vipassana, noticing
• Do that for a while, then switch
• Talk - but stay in vipassana

Ch11. Taking the practices to life

They had some parting words. I liked the meditation advice the pro-psychoanalytic perspectives were painful.