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Stephen Levine: Conscious Living/Conscious Dying
This transcript represents the first, half-hour portion of the ninety-minute
InnerWork video Conscious Living, Conscious Dying. It is one of the 38 programs
included in the Thinking Allowed book.
JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Today
we're going to explore the nature of the healing process. With me is Stephen
Levine, a poet, an author, a spiritual teacher. Stephen has written numerous
books, including Who Dies?, Meetings on the Edge, Healing into Life and Death,
and Grist for the Mill. Welcome, Stephen.
STEPHEN LEVINE: Thanks, Jeffrey.
MISHLOVE: You've done an enormous amount of work over the years with people
who are sick, people who are dying. You've witnessed the healing process in
operation, undoubtedly thousands and thousands of times. We're going to look at
some of the many stages of the process. When I refer to healing, I think in this
context really I'm not talking about medicines so much as spiritual healing. I guess
a good place to start is to look at the obvious kinds of healing, that is, healing in
which some kind of a physical recovery occurs -- where a person experiences, for
example, a spontaneous remission of a terminal disease. Let's talk a little bit
about that process to begin with.
LEVINE: Sure. You know, when you ask me, "What is healing?" I still don't know.
My wife and I, when we were directing the Hanuman Foundation Dying Project,
worked for a long time predominantly with people who had come to us to ask us
to help them die. A lot of the people we worked with, as they came to a certain
point in their process, usually including opening to the reality that death might
well be in the near future, began to finish business. Our relationships are usuallyrun like business: "I'll give you two; you give me two. If you only give me one, I'm
going to take my bat and ball and go home; I won't play anymore." So this is kind
of totaling of accounts that's always going on with people. It's real easy to think
that finishing business is, "You forgive me, I forgive you; but I'm not going to
forgive you until you forgive me" -- this always waiting for someone else to give
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you something. We started to see that many people started to see that the end of
business was no longer relationships as business. When I take you into my heart,
our business is done. If you don't take me into your heart, that's your pain and I
feel that, but it really doesn't affect my business. We started to see people heal
their relationships towards the end of their lives, where they were really meeting
other people with such mercy and such care for their well being, that even those
who were angry -- an example, a really extreme example: A woman we had
worked with, her mother had been very ill. She'd never really gotten along with
her mother. Her mother had been very judgmental, quite unkind, abusive. And her
mother then became very ill, very ill, and she was the only one of the sisters who
would even go and sit bedside. They all had such contention, felt so judged, they
really put their mother out of their heart. She was a Zen student. She decided that
her work on herself was to be there for her mom. She sat next to her mom, andher mom would go into a light sleep and come out, in and out, as people do when
they're real ill. She would just sit next to her mother and wish her well -- not, "Why
haven't you given me this? Why didn't you do that for me?" -- not trying to total
the accounts, but trying to let her mother, as is, into her heart. That's the basis of
relationship -- as is. Because if I want you to be the least different, then you
become an object in my mind instead a subject of my heart. Where's the healing
there? It's just separation. Her mother had been very nasty in her lifetime, and it
wasn't ending just because she was dying. This woman, day after day, sending
loving-kindness to her mother. On the day that her mother died, her mother
looked up at her and said, "I hope you roast in hell. I hope that you have the worst
possible life." Her mother died cursing her, and she died with her daughter sitting
next to her, looking at her with soft eyes, and with an open heart saying, "Ma, I
hope everything's OK for you." Now for her mom it was terrible, but for her it was
wonderful. She had really finished her business. She was just with another human
being who was having a hard time. I mean, that's really an extreme story, and
hopefully we can all get some glimpse of what that one would be. But that's
enormous healing. The woman who was dying died; the woman who was sittingnext to her was healing.
MISHLOVE: Who was she healing?
LEVINE: Herself.
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MISHLOVE: Herself, yes.
LEVINE: That's all we can heal. If we're not working on our own healing, we
certainly can't be contributing to anyone else's healing.
MISHLOVE: You use the phrase, "take somebody into our heart." That's an
interesting phrase. I think it seems to have a lot to do with your sense of the
healing process.
LEVINE: Yes. A woman's dying in the hospital. She's lived her life in a great deal
of separation. She has a cancer that has infiltrated her bones. Interestingly, it's a
lot like this other woman who was dying. Six weeks into the hospital she has been
so unpleasant to the doctors and the nurses that they don't even want to come inher room. One night she's in a real quandary, her pain is so great. She's been a
person who has always been able to control. In fact her controlling quality has
been so extreme that she hasn't seen her children in years, and has never met
her grandchildren. She's dying alone in the hospital. The nurses and doctors,
that's not where they want to be; they walk in the room and she's blaming them
for her pain, them for her illness, them for not being able to cure her. Very little is
she able to take within herself her own experience. She's pushing it away, pushing
it away. One night the pain is just so great there's nothing she can do about it.
And she comes to a point -- it's almost like a drowning person when they just say,
"I'm going down. This is it; I'm just too exhausted to fight anymore." And maybe
for the first time in her life she surrendered. It might have been the first time in
her life she'd ever let go of her separation, of her idea of herself as opposed to the
whole world. And in that moment something happened, where all of a sudden --
her bone cancer was mainly in her back and in her hip and in her legs. She was
lying on her side, in kind of an embryonic state, and all of a sudden she was no
longer herself lying in the hospital. She was an Eskimo woman lying on her side,
dying in childbirth, with enormous pain in her back and her legs and her hips. Aninstant later she was a woman lying on her side beside a river in some tropical
environment, whose back had been crushed by a rockfall, dying alone, with
enormous pain in her back and her hips and her legs. A moment later after that
she said she thought she was somewhere in Biafra. Her skin was black. She had a
slackened, empty breast, at which was suckling a starving child. They were both
starving, perhaps dying of cholera she later thought, with enormous pain in her
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back and her hips and her legs. She experienced, the next hour or two -- she said
she couldn't really gauge time -- she experienced ten thousand women in pain at
that moment, dying, at that moment. She said as that happened it went from
being my pain to being the pain. She said, "I had no room in myself. My pain is in
the mind; but the pain is the pain we all share, and it can be touched, it can be
experienced in the heart, the heart we all share, the heart of common experience,
the heart of common concern for the well being of all sentient beings." In the next
six weeks, up until the time when she died, her room became the center of love in
the hospital. The nurses would hang out there sometimes on their break. A few
weeks after this experience, there were her grandchildren sitting on the bed, who
she'd never met before, playing with grandma, and there were her children, her
son standing next to her. Right before she died, the day or two before she died,
one of the nurses brought in a picture of Jesus in the form of the Good Shepherdwith the children and the animals, and this woman, whose heart had been like a
stone, whose mind had been blocked to all but self concern, looked at this picture
and the children and she said, "Oh Jesus, forgive them, they're only children."
Hers is one of the most amazing healings I've ever seen. And that's why I really
can't say I know what healing is, because I've seen people's bodies get well whose
hearts were not as healed. There's a healing we took birth for. When we look
around this plane, around this world, and we say, "How can there be so much
greed, so much cold indifference, so much suffering?" it's because this is the place
we come to heal, and everybody doesn't take the responsibility for the healing
they took birth for. And it may be that some people don't even consider it until
they find that they may be dying soon.
MISHLOVE: You seem to be saying that healing of the body is really unimportant.
LEVINE: Healing is not limited to the body. In fact, I've seen parallel situations,
with two people with similar diagnoses, where one fought the illness. It was them
against the illness, and contention filled the room. When they were in pain, theydidn't think they were OK. Just when they most needed mercy, it was least
available to them.
MISHLOVE: From themselves.
LEVINE: From themselves. And they pushed everybody away, and whether they
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lived or died, what they did is create schism in the family, judgment in the family,
guilt in the family, feelings of unworthiness in those who loved them most,
because nobody could help. And I've seen other people in the same situation --
same pain in their body, same pain in their mind -- say, "I don't have a moment to
lose. I can't stand to live a moment longer with my heart closed. Too much pain
for me, too much pain. The world doesn't need another closed heart." I see them
where their priority is to communicate the care they have for others, and the
healing in that room -- maybe the sign of real healing is, what are the people
bedside left with when someone dies? Are they left with their hearts full and a
sense of connectedness to that person, or are they left frightened of death, scared
of that person, with much rumination in the mind about how things didn't work
out, how could I have helped more? Did they leave a legacy of mental suffering
behind? So I see people heal into death. Now, I've seen people where the persondied with their heart open leaving more healing behind than someone who lived
and just continued that judgment and that aggression in the family, and the family
was unhealed, though the body was healed.
MISHLOVE: Is there a sense -- I've heard this reported by some doctors -- that
the kind of people who do experience a physical recovery from a serious disease
are ornery kinds of people, who are kind of fighting for their lives?
LEVINE: Aggression can be a very strong part. People can fight their illness, and
then it becomes me against my illness. It becomes separation and anxiety. Our
sense is that when you touch that which is in pain with mercy and awareness,
there's healing. Where there's awareness there's healing. I think the word healing
is used in an odd way. To heal is to become whole, right? To come back to some
balance. And yet where's the balance in that process where -- one doctor, for
instance, who helps people heal through modern methods, says that those who
heal are their superstars. And then another doctor I know says that patients who
heal are the exceptional patients. Well, what does that make everybody else -- asecond-stringer, a loser? I mean, the very idea, that very conceptual framework
where you are a good person if you heal, makes you a bad person if you die. Who
needs to die with a sense of failure? It's very dangerous, those ideas. They're very
well intended, because I know those fellows, and they're good fellows, and they
want to help, they sincerely want to help, and they've helped many. But many
have been injured by the idea that, for instance, you're responsible for your
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illness. You're not responsible for your illness; you're not responsible for your
cancer; you're responsible to your cancer. Because if you're responsible for your
cancer, then how are you ever going to heal? If my conditioning caused it, do I
have to get rid of all of my conditioning to be well? I know people who have
meditated for fifty years and are not done with their conditioning, and when their
time is short, energy is low, it just strains them, and maybe causes schisms
within. When we see that we are responsible to our illness, then when pain arises
we can send mercy, we can send kindness. You and I, we're conditioned. We walk
across a room, we stub our toe. What do we do with the pain in our toe? We're
conditioned to send hatred into it. We're conditioned to try to exorcise it.
MISHLOVE: Like, "How stupid I was to do that."
LEVINE: Yes, and we cut the pain off. In fact, even many meditative techniques
for working with pain are to take your awareness, your attention, and put it
elsewhere. Just when that throbbing toe is most calling out for mercy, for
kindness, for embrace, for softness, it's least available. In some ways it's amazing
that anybody heals, considering our conditioning to send hatred into our pain,
which is the antithesis of healing.
MISHLOVE: You've developed a number of guided meditations for dealing with
healing, and part of that process is to really try and feel the pain.
LEVINE: Explore the pain.
MISHLOVE: Explore the pain, and then to know just how we protect ourselves
from getting at it -- that there's sort of a wall of deadening around the pain, to
keep us away from our own pain. It's as if by denying ourselves our own pain, we
deny ourselves life.
LEVINE: It's interesting. You're bringing up a really interesting point. The way we
respond to pain is the way we respond to life. When things aren't the way we want
them to be, what do we do? Do we close down, or do we open up to get more of a
sense of what's needed in the moment? Our conditioning is to close down --
aversion, rejection, put it away, denial. Nothing heals. That is the very basis on
which unfinished business accumulates, putting it away -- I'm right, they're wrong;
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no quality of forgiveness. We know many people who are working on sending
forgiveness into their tumors, into their AIDS, into their degenerative heart
disease. It sounds so bizarre, because our conditioning is to send anger into it,
fear into it. Where can there be healing in that?
MISHLOVE: That's true. The Simontons, a well-known medical couple, have
developed visualization exercises where you imagine the white blood cells being
like cowboys chasing the red Indians, and it's sort of these little battlefields in the
body, and the white blood cells are out win and to heal, so that the immune
system overcomes. You're suggesting that that's not appropriate.
LEVINE: Well, that system does work for people, and I certainly wouldn't want
anyone who's finding that to be a feasible means of working with illness to not doit. But I think we need to watch what it means to add aggression to this mind that
already is so aggressive in moments of fear, in moments of aversion. How can we
work to have that happen, without cultivating aggression? Imagine those people
who have cultivated all that aggression, and the cancer doesn't go away; what
happens? Well, my experience is that that aggression turns inward, and they often
die in self hatred and a feeling of aversion for themselves, of failure: "I really am a
rotten person. I really am dying and abandoning my wife and children. I really am
a terrible person. I really am abandoning my lover and my friends." The mind
takes so quickly to self negation. Anything that reinforces that has to be watched
really closely, because all self negation seems to slow and limit healing. I think
that it's very important in such methods as Carl and Stephanie's method, that one
finds the imagery that's just right for them. A story: A fellow was going to do the
technique, Simonton's technique, and he was a pacifist minister. He said, "I have
really spent most of my life trying to make peace instead of war. I can't have
white sharks eating black gerbils, or however it is." He said, "This is not
appropriate for me; it's not going to work for me." So he was told, "Why don't you
take some time, and find the imagery that's right for you?" And what did he comeup with in a week? The Seven Dwarfs, going in, singing "Whistle while you work,"
digging it up in buckets and carrying the cancer away. And he healed. The wrong
imagery, the imagery that's not appropriate to you. Also, how are you using it? For
the people we're working with -- I wouldn't say with anybody else's method -- if it
works for you, wonderful, but is it making your belly hard? Is there more armoring
in you? That's really the diagnostic device. Are you tightening your belly? Is there
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more holding? Is there more separation? Because if your belly's tight, you heart's
probably going to be closed, and your mind's going to be painting you into a
corner.
MISHLOVE: You seem to suggest in your meditative work that if one can soften
the belly and soften the heart and soften the breathing, that that creates a state
of surrendering to some kind of essential healing that's there available for all of
us.
LEVINE: The word surrender is so funny, because most people, particularly in the
case of illness, equate surrender with defeat. But surrender is letting go of
resistance. Most of what we call pain is the resistance that clenches down on the
unpleasant. In fact, a really dynamic, practical sense of that is that a lot of thepeople we work with, if they're going to take medicine, they'll look at it. They
won't just swallow it automatically. They're not trying to take healing from
outside. They're not giving up control to healing. They're participating in it, they're
taking responsibility for it -- responsibility being the ability to respond, instead of
the necessity to react. They look at the pills, and as they take them in, they guide
them with loving-kindness into the area, because they've put so much attention
into the area they know the inside, the multiple molecular variation of sensation
within, the moment-to-momentness of that area. They direct it into that area, and
they find, for instance with pain medication, that once the resistance has been
gone through, that they can decrease the medication. Because I think a lot of
medications get used up by the resistance before they ever get to the place that
they're being taken to.
MISHLOVE: Our medical system doesn't really encourage people to take
responsibility at that level. It's as if we're passive, not only at the hands of
doctors, but even at the hands of spiritual and psychic healers.
LEVINE: It can be. We're not saying, "Throw away your other practice." We're
saying, "Whatever you're doing to heal yourself, why don't you try to see for your
own self what it might mean if you put mercy into that area?" It's so outside of our
conditioning. We suggest that people treat their illness as though it were their
only child, with that same mercy and loving-kindness. If that was in your child's
body, you'd caress it, you'd hold it, you'd do all you could to make it well. But
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somehow when it's in our body we wall it off, we send hatred into it and anger into
it. We treat ourselves with so little kindness, so little softness. And there are
physical correlations to the difference between softening around an illness --
blood flow, availability of the immune system, etcetera -- and hardness. You know,
if you've got a hard belly and your jaw is tight, and that hardness is around your
eyes, it's very difficult for anything to get through.
MISHLOVE: You seem to really be suggesting not just healing for the sick, but as
a way of life in general. It's as if moment by moment we make the choice whether
to harden or to soften.
LEVINE: Well, the hardening has become involuntary, and the softening, it takes
remembering priorities, that this is the only moment there is, and this is themoment to open. I mean, if we're not doing it now, how will we do it at any other
time? That's why we suggest, don't wait until you get a terminal diagnosis to start
to give yourself permission to be alive, to get on with your life. Now is a good
time.
MISHLOVE: Do you have an opinion about people who are healing practitioners
who attempt to do healing not for themselves necessarily, but for other people --
say, spiritual healers?
LEVINE: If we are all doing it as work on ourselves, that's wonderful. But if we're
healing someone else, and we're not trying to heal ourselves at the same time,
that person is in trouble that you're trying to heal, because then you've set up the
separation of I and other, and I and other is the basis of all fear, all doubt, and all
the cruelty and confusion in the world. If you come to me and say, "I'm
depressed," and I touch your pain, your depression, with fear, that's pity, and it's
a very self-oriented state, pity. I want you out of that state, because I don't want
to be in that state. But if I can touch your pain with love, that's compassion. Andthen even if you're in pain and I've done everything I can to get you out of your
pain, if I'm not so hung up on some model of myself as a healer, but just here we
are, then you can be in pain and I don't close my heart to you. A lot of healers, if
they can't "heal" you, they have no business with you anymore. But when our
work is on ourself, then even the teaching of helplessness is honored. Sometimes
you can't help everybody, but that doesn't mean anything has to come out of you
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that limits their access to who you are, to your heart, to your connection with
them. If it's work on yourself, they're in the presence of good healing. But all the
healers I know who are really phenomenal, who are some of the phenomenal
healers, they all say God does it. I'll tell you a story. A woman had a very
advanced cancer. Her doctor told me this story. The cancer really fulminated; it
was really metastasized in many parts of her body.
MISHLOVE: Stephen, we're going to have to end quickly. We've got only a minute
to go.
LEVINE: OK. Her doctor said, "Well, it doesn't look like you have long to go." She
went to the West Coast. She thought she'd have a couple of days on the beach, a
couple of weeks, before she died. She met a healer. The healer lay his hands onher. She was well. A week later she committed suicide. She said, "Well, if it was
that easy to heal me, I don't deserve to live." Because that healer forgot to say to
her, "I didn't heal you. You healed you; God healed you. You've done so much
work, look how easy it was for you to heal." When the healer takes possession of
healing, he actually injures that person instead of helps them.
MISHLOVE: You seem to be suggesting that ultimately the basis of healing is self
acceptance and acceptance of others, and that they're linked ultimately.
LEVINE: When the mind sinks into the heart, and vice versa, there's healing.
When we become one with ourselves, there's healing.
MISHLOVE: Stephen Levine, thank you very much for being with me.
Huston Smith: The Psychology of Religious Experience
DVDs of this and otherHuston Smith programs are available. The same program
is also part of the VideoQuartetThe Roots of Consciousness.
JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. Our topic this evening is the
psychology of religious experience, and my guest tonight is one of America's great
scholars of religious traditions, Dr. Huston Smith. Dr. Smith is a former professor
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of religion and psychology at MIT. He's the author of the great classic, Religions of
Man, which has sold over two million copies, as well as six other books on
psychology, religion, and philosophy, most recently one called Beyond the Post-
Modern Mind. Welcome, Dr. Smith.
HUSTON SMITH, Ph.D.: Thank you.
MISHLOVE: It's a pleasure to have you here. Your background in religious studies
and philosophy and psychology is very extensive, and the topic that we're going
to discuss is so very broad in some ways; there are so many religions and they're
so diverse. And yet ultimately they all seem to reflect the mind of man. Would you
say that as a scholar of religion you've become a more religious person yourself?
SMITH: I certainly don't feel that I've become less religious, and I also feel that
these studies have deepened and broadened my -- what? -- my beliefs. In that
sense I guess one might say more religious. I think I might prefer to say perhaps a
little more maturely religious, because I didn't have a strong religious bent from
my adolescence on.
MISHLOVE: It's, I suppose, always a little delicate for a scholar, who is supposed
to be objective, to study something as intense and passionate as religion can be.
SMITH: Well, some see it as a problem, but I've been fortunate that it's never
been a conflict for me, because it seems to me that the opposite would be very
difficult -- that if you were studying something you were not really in love with, or
you felt that it could not bear the light of careful analysis and added information,
now that would be a real tension, a real conflict. But it's been one of my blessings,
I think, that I've been able to spend my professional life working on precisely what
concerns me most.
MISHLOVE: My first encounter in a personal or a deep way with the psychology of
religious experience came from, of course, reading William James's classic --
SMITH: A wonderful book.
MISHLOVE: -- in which he described his experiments with nitrous oxide and other
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drugs at the time.
SMITH: That's right, yes. Very courageous, adventuresome mind.
MISHLOVE: And also in the mid-sixties, reading a book by Timothy Leary and
Ralph Metzner called The Psychedelic Experience, in which they attempted to
create the analogy between the pantheon of gods in the Hindu and Buddhist
traditions with the dynamic forces working in the subconscious mind.
SMITH: Yes, yes. Well, that was a very interesting and indeed important -- what
shall I say? -- happening of our time, because this correlation and connection, it's
a very delicate one, as we all know. But between artificially induced paranormal
experiences and ones that come naturally, they can have, and do at times have, agreat deal in common.
MISHLOVE: An overlap, at least.
SMITH: A huge overlap. And the discovery of these substances -- actually a
rediscovery, because knowledge of them goes back at least three thousand years,
and perhaps much further than that -- but the fact that we now know how they
work on the brain has opened this up as a field of study which it had not been
before.
MISHLOVE: You were involved in some of the early work at that time.
SMITH: Well, actually I was right at the eye of the cyclone. That was 1960, and I
was teaching at MIT, and I had arranged to have Aldous Huxley come on an
endowed program which enabled luminaries in the humanities to come to MIT. So
I was his host for the fall of 1960 at MIT, and of course he had written the book
The Doors of Perception, which was one of the opening books in this area.
MISHLOVE: Describing his experiences with -- mescaline?
SMITH: Mescaline. Well, it just happened that that September, when Aldous
Huxley arrived at MIT, was the exact month that Timothy Leary arrived at Harvard
from Berkeley. And on the way -- you know the story; it's part of history now -- on
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his way, he took a vacation swing down into Mexico, and on the edge of a
swimming pool one afternoon ingested -- what? -- seven mushrooms which
opened up his mind in ways that totally startled, took him by surprise.
MISHLOVE: Psilocybin mushrooms, I presume.
SMITH: That's right, that's right. He had arrived at Harvard with a blank check. He
was a research professor, had accepted an appointment as research professor in
the Center for Personality Study, and he could pick his subject, whatever he
wanted to work on. And the moment he had that experience, he was of course
absolutely fascinated and mystified by how mushrooms could cause that kind of
impact upon his mind, but he didn't know what to do with it. But he had read
Huxley's book. So I actually had a part in getting the two of them together, andit's true, for that fall the three of us were very much in the ring in this matter.
MISHLOVE: This was at a time, of course, when these drugs were perfectly legal.
SMITH: Not only legal, but this was respectable. It was research at Harvard
University. One of the first things that Leary did was to mount an open study in
which people would simply report their experiences, but he found so many of
those experiences had a mystical cast to them that he began reaching out for
someone who might know something about mysticism. And that's where he
tapped me and involved me in the project.
MISHLOVE: You had been studying mysticism long before this, I presume.
SMITH: That's true, right.
MISHLOVE: Had you thought about the relationship between mysticism and
drugs prior to your encounters with Leary and Huxley?
SMITH: Well, only academically, in that I had read descriptions, also Huxley's in
The Doors of Perception, and as he points out there, phenomenologically, which is
to say descriptively, if you match descriptions of the experience, they are
indistinguishable. I actually conducted an experiment on that in which I took
snippets or paragraphs from classic mystical experiences, and then descriptions of
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experiences under the psychedelics which were mystical. Of course not all
experiences under those have that character, but those that did. And then I
shuffled them up and gave them to people who were knowledgeable about
mysticism, and asked them to sort them in what they thought --
MISHLOVE: Which came from the real mystics and which came from the drug
users.
SMITH: Exactly. And there was no reliability in their predictions.
MISHLOVE: That sounds similar to a more recent piece of work I know Lawrence
LeShan did, where he took statements of mystics and statements of physicists
and compared them, and they seemed almost indistinguishable as well.
SMITH: That's right. I'd like to add one other thing. So phenomenologically, which
again means simply descriptively, one cannot tell the difference. But I think I
would want to say that that's not the only dimension, because religion is not
simply an experience; religion is a way of life. And experiences come and go, but
quality of life is what religion is concerned with. So one has to ask also, not only
do they feel the same, but is their impact on the life the same?
MISHLOVE: Well, I think especially now that we can look back after twenty years
from the original psychedelic experiments of that type, you can see distinct
differences between psychedelic cults and real deep religious traditions.
SMITH: That's right. So I think it's important that, having touched on this subject,
we not leave the impression that the two are identical in every respect. Simply
descriptively they are indistinguishable.
MISHLOVE: What about the original insight that Leary seemed to have in ThePsychedelic Experience that the gods really do exist within us? I think what he was
saying in effect is that the pantheons of gods from the ancient pantheistic
religions are real active forces, even of a paranormal variety, within our own
minds, even if we're Jews or Christians.
SMITH: Yes. Well, that's another very interesting development in our time -- that
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in the religions of the West, up to this point divine forces have been imaged
externally from the self. But when one comes to think of it, when one talks about
things of the spirit geography falls away, because the spirit is not bound by space
and time, and therefore the distinction between out there and in here, which in
our everyday life is very important -- once one modulates to matters of the spirit
this whole framework of space and time and matter sort of drops away. What we
are now coming to see is that this talk about out there has a certain naturalness,
but also certain limitation. One can just as easily turn the tables and talk about
the divine within. If I can put it one other way: when one looks out upon the world,
value terms -- that is, what is good, are imaged as up there. The gods --
MISHLOVE: Heaven.
SMITH: Heaven; and the gods are on the mountaintops, and angels always sing
on high. They don't sing out of the depths, the bowels of the earth. But when we
introspect -- and by the way that imagery is natural, because sun and rain come
from on high too -- but when we turn our attention inward and introspect, then we
reach for the other kind of imagery, of depth. You know, we talk about profound
and deep thought. All this is leading up to the fact that in point of fact this
distinction between out there and in here is artificial and only metaphorical when
we're talking about things of the spirit. And now I think in our time -- this is one of
the changes -- having worked in imagery of the divine being out there, now there
is a move towards realizing or exploring ways in which the same reality can be
discovered within oneself.
MISHLOVE: Another related notion, I think, is the one originally developed by
Durkheim, the French sociologist, in which he suggests that religions are really
representations of the group mind of a society, and that the god of each culture is
an embodiment of what he called the group mind. He almost described that in
ways that seemed quite paranormal to me, when you begin talking about groupmind -- something like a Jungian collective unconscious.
SMITH: Well, again, I think it's very useful. For one thing, we are too much given
to the notion that the mind is simply attached to the brain, and therefore because
the brain has a given geographical locus, then the mind must too. But I remember
in a weekend conference down in Tucson a few years ago with Gregory Bateson,
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he posed to the psychologists Rollo May, Carl Rogers -- all those people were
there -- he said, "Where is your mind?" And it sort of took everybody aback. But
what he was leading up to is it's quite wrong to think of the mind as lodged inside
this skin-encapsulated ego, as Alan Watts used to call it -- that the mind reaches
out as far as one's environment extends, in Bateson's notion.
MISHLOVE: And of course we can always go back to the argument of Bishop
Berkeley that the entire physical universe, that everything we experience -- your
TV sets, for example -- exist only in your mind.
SMITH: Right.
MISHLOVE:There's no other way to identify them.
SMITH: And we talk about ecology of nature now, but the ecology of mind, we're
just beginning to get used to that idea. And yet it's an experience. One can walk
into the room, and in current terminology, feel vibrations. You can sometimes feel
like a wall of anger or hostility, but one can also sense an ambiance of peace, and
now the physicists are realizing that physical phenomena really float on networks
and webs of relationship. So we're only now coming to see that our minds too
derive, they sort of factor out and congeal out of a psychic medium that
Durkheim, I think, was quite right in identifying.
MISHLOVE: You know, I notice though in contemporary religions, particularly
amongst the evangelistic Christians who are experiencing such a revival, they're
very concerned about certain errors that people fall into -- you know, the notion
that one might identify oneself with God in an egotistical way. How do you feel
about that?
SMITH: Well, I think they've got a point. I mean, if someone comes along andsays, "I am God," it's perfectly reasonable to ask, "Well, your behavior doesn't
exactly exemplify that fact." God by definition is perfect, and what human being
can make that claim? So I think the ministers that you refer to have a good point,
but it doesn't annul the concept of the divine within, which remains valid. The
distinction can come, even if we think of the divine within, as Hinduism puts it,
and they have been perhaps the most explicit of all the great traditions in saying
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that ultimately, in the final analysis, in their terminology, Atman is Brahman.
Atman is the God within, and Brahman is the God without. But then they deal with
the point you're raising by saying, well, a lantern may have a functioning light
within it, but it may be coated not only with dust and soot, but in egregious cases
with mud, to the point where that light does not shine through at all. So both
things are true, but both need to be said in the same breath. Namely, I believe
that it is true that in the final analysis we are divine and are God, but we should
immediately acknowledge how caked and coated we are with dross that conceals
that divinity, and it's, one's tempted to say, an endless quest to clean the surface,
to let the light shine through.
MISHLOVE: We were discussing earlier in the program some of your experiences
with some of the very primitive peoples, such as the aborigines in Australia, intheir I suppose naive native religions, their having a real sense of contact with this
level of reality.
SMITH: Well, they do, in two ways, Australian aborigines. One is that they
distinguish between our everyday experience and what they call the dreaming.
The dreaming is another level of experience, in which they participate in the life of
their ancestors, and indeed the creation of the world, in I suppose we might call it
a trancelike state, but that doesn't quite do it, because even in the midst of their
ordinary life, half of their mind, you might say, is still on or in this dreaming state.
But then there's another way in which they're in touch with it, and this has to do
with parapsychology as we know the word -- telepathy, specifically. I was in
Australia, basically giving a series of lectures at all the universities there, but
using my spare time to come in touch with the aborigines, and so I sought out at
every university the anthropologists who introduced me and put me in touch with
them. And I did not in that entire swing meet an anthropologist who was not
convinced that the aborigines had telepathic powers. They simply told me story
after story, when they would be with them, and suddenly one of the personswould say, "I must go back to the tribe; so and so has died."
MISHLOVE: That's a strong statement coming from anthropologists, who tend to
be quite skeptical.
SMITH: That's right. Their theory was, insofar as they had a theory, the
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presumption was that these are normal human powers, but like any power it can
atrophy if unused, and also can be short-circuited if our conceptual mind doubts
that it is real.
MISHLOVE: So would you say there are some religious traditions that encourage
the development and the cultivation of the psychic side of human beings more
than others?
SMITH: Well, it's interesting. I'll put it the other way, slightly differently. That is to
say that most of them believe that these powers are there and that they do
increase as spiritual advancement occurs. However, they also warn against it, and
say if you make this the goal, why, you're settling for too little. And also there are
some dangers; for one thing, this is treacherous water where one is not totallybenign, but also there's a strong temptation, as these siddhis, as the Indians call
them --
MISHLOVE: Powers.
SMITH: Powers, yes. As powers become available to you, people's heads get
turned, and they become egotistic in their abilities. And so in that way it can be
counter-productive to the spiritual quest. So the greatest teachers are quite
unanimous in saying they come, but pay no attention to them.
MISHLOVE: But aren't there traditions -- the shamanistic tradition, the Tantric
tradition -- which really do emphasize these powers?
SMITH: That is certainly so. Now, I guess I tipped my hand a little bit in excluding
them from the most profound spiritual masters.
MISHLOVE: Perhaps you do have some preferences.
SMITH: Well, shamanism is immensely fascinating, and extremely important in
the history of religion. But sanctity one does not associate with shamans. They
have immense power, and it can be misused as well as used. I think on balance
it's been used. So I value them, but they're neither -- what shall I say? -- saints nor
philosophers.
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MISHLOVE: Well, perhaps we might liken the psychic abilities in this sense to
musical ability, or any other natural talent that could be used in different ways.
And some religions cultivate music, I suppose, more than others.
SMITH: That's right, that's right. Most shamans are very much linked with the
people, in helping them with practical problems of life. But the aspect of religion
that has to do with virtues and compassion and loving-kindness, now, this kind of
thing is when I speak of profundity, getting into those waters. The shamans, that's
not their forte. They have a different role.
MISHLOVE: Well, as our program is beginning to wind up, I wonder if you could
comment on two things. One is a little bit more on how your exploration ofreligions has affected you personally, and perhaps we can tie it to our viewing
audience a little bit. Is there some message that you would have for those people
who would be viewing us right now, in terms of what your studies might convey to
them?
SMITH: Yes. Well, like any term religion can be defined as one wishes, and if one
links it to institutions, I think religious institutions are indispensable, but they're
clearly a mixed bag, and we've had the wars of religions; but I tend to think this is
the nature of institutions and people in the aggregate. What government has a
clean or perfect record, you know?
MISHLOVE: We're running out of time.
SMITH: In one sentence. But I think if one takes a basic religious world view, this
is not only important but it's true, and we need to keep our ears open to those
truths.
MISHLOVE: In spite of those problems. Dr. Smith, it's been a real pleasure having
you with me today. Thank you very much.
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Kathleen Speeth: The Psychodynamics of Liberation
This transcript represents the first, half-hour portion of the ninety-minute
InnerWork video The Psychodynamics of Liberation. It is one of the 38 programs
included in the Thinking Allowed book.
JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. Our topic today is "The
Psychodynamics of Liberation." We're going to explore how it is that we get locked
into particular limited views of ourselves, and how we can hope to ever transcend,
to move beyond those small perspectives that we develop. With me today is Dr.
Kathleen Speeth. Dr. Speeth is a member of the faculty of the Institute of
Transpersonal Psychology in Menlo Park, California. She is a clinical psychologistin private practice and author of several books, many articles on human
development, and co-editor of a book called The Essential Psychotherapies, which
she worked on with Dr. Daniel Goleman. Welcome, Kathy.
KATHLEEN SPEETH, Ph.D.:I'm glad to be here.
MISHLOVE: It's a pleasure to have you here again. We get stuck, we get limited.
Every form of psychotherapy has its own diagnosis of what is the problem -- how
do we become neurotic, how do we become stuck, how is it that we see ourselves
in our smallness and can't get beyond it? And then they all offer a way to get
around it. What I'd like to begin to explore with you are some of the
commonalities, some of the larger things that we can say about the whole issue of
liberation. Maybe a good way to lead into that is just to ask you, what is your
definition of liberation?
SPEETH: Well, I don't know if we can hope to find complete liberation from
whatever traps we're in in this lifetime, but I'd say we could move towardliberation, if we find ourselves freer rather than less free, by whatever we
understand about ourselves, or whatever techniques we use from psychotherapy
or from any other religious tradition, any other technological helps we can find in
the culture -- political even.
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MISHLOVE: It seems as if in a sense we're caught in so many veils of illusion,
that as soon as we break through one -- say, racism -- then we run into another,
sexism. Or we run into another, religious prejudice. Or we run into another, age
prejudice. There's no end to the ways in which our perspectives are limited by our
particular situations. And I suppose at some level maybe that's healthy. Maybe it
would not be good for a human being to be fully liberated. How would one
function?
SPEETH: Well, I suppose the most liberated person from your point of view, what
you just described, is a neonate -- a tiny baby, just born, who experiences the
world as a booming, buzzing confusion, doesn't have any concepts to clot the
world into observable things and repeatable experiences. But perhaps a free
human being, a free and developed human being, isn't like that. Perhaps they canbe free without giving up conceptualization.
MISHLOVE: Well, we certainly have ideal models of what this might be, especially
from the Oriental traditions when they really do talk about spiritual liberation,
spiritual enlightenment, completely unfettered by the bonds of karma or samsara
or illusions of various sorts. And yet every time a so-called enlightened, liberated
guru comes over to the West, it's like the emperor wearing no clothes. It's easy to
see their foibles.
SPEETH: So you're disappointed. You feel betrayed.
MISHLOVE: I wonder, personally, if there is such a thing as enlightenment, really,
or if it's one of these --you know, "Hitch your wagon to the stars." It's a goal we all
ought to strive for, but which is not really attainable. There's something about the
human condition itself which is fundamental. You know, existential reality -- we're
born alone; we have to deal with death and alienataion, and no matter how much
we practice yoga or meditation or build communities or begin to see through ourfoibles, we'll always be in these bodies, at least while we're alive.
SPEETH: Well, that's undoubtedly true. There's a Sufi story about that. Basically,
the story is about Bahaudin Naqshband, who is the great Naqshbandi --
MISHLOVE: The founder of one of the major Sufi orders.
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SPEETH: Right. And he materialized an apple, I don't know why, as some
demonstration of competence. And the apple had a worm in it. And they said,
"Well, Bahaudin, you're so powerful that you can materialize an apple. How is it
that you can't materialize a perfect apple?" He said, "In this context, nothing can
be perfect." But it isn't just the Eastern meditative traditions that give us some
help with liberation. I think that Western psychotherapeutic approaches are even
more appropriate for us, although I certainly have participated in both rather a lot.
MISHLOVE: My sense is that the Western approach is to say, well, look, the world
isn't perfect; we've got to live with it, with its problems. And psychotherapy is
often oriented towards adjusting, coping, dealing with how bad life really is.
SPEETH: Well, that's one form of psychotherapy. But you practice psychotherapy,
as I do too.
MISHLOVE: I do too, and I have another view.
SPEETH: You have another view. What's your other view?
MISHLOVE: Well, I tend to think that underlying the basic alienation, the
separateness, the otherness, the fundamental ground of reality is one of
connection -- that we're connected with everything. And for me, liberation is really
becoming more and more in touch with that dimension of being part of
everything, interconnected with everything. That way, as we move towards that,
we get closer, I suppose, to what we might think of as our divine reality, and
ultimately the highest model of liberation must be divinity itself.
SPEETH: It must be. So the way you're talking now, you sound like Freud talking
about eros, as opposed to thanatos -- the idea of a life instinct, something thatmoves toward life, and away from dying, away from entropy. Something that
makes form out of chaos. And you feel that is development, and of course so do I.
So then, what keeps us from that? What holds us back? What do we need to be
liberated from, so that we could make connections instead of break connections,
and get hot rather than cool?
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MISHLOVE: I would say it's our attachments.
SPEETH: Uh huh. And what attachments?
MISHLOVE: It could be an attachment to a habit pattern that we have, or to a
belief system. My sense is that the unattached mind just gravitates naturally to
that state. And when I'm with a group of people, I can watch, some of them go
right there, and you have a sense they're connected and they're with it. And then
somebody else, their mind just won't let them float to that level, and they've got
to talk about -- it could be anything; it could be their clothing, it could be art work.
We have a million excuses that we use for not always resonating, I guess is a word
I might use, at that level of connectedness.
SPEETH: Or living enthusiastically. And what do you think holds people back from
that? You know, Wilhelm Reich would call it an anti-pleasure bias in a character.
Where does it come from?
MISHLOVE: That is a good question.
SPEETH: I mean, we're talking about being liberated from some kind of a net we
throw around ourselves.
MISHLOVE: Well, in many people it's clear to me it's trauma. They've been
traumatized in one way or another, and they're kind of stuck. They haven't
worked through their trauma.
SPEETH: And how does that trauma stick people? What really happens? I mean,
let's talk about it as deeply as we can. What do we need to be liberated from?
MISHLOVE: Probably -- I'm glad you're asking me all these questions. It's adelight to be interviewed, on my own show. To me, I would say the basic thing is
self hatred. It's places where we feel that we can't love ourselves. If we've been
traumatized, we incorporate that, and we think, "I deserved that. The universe is
telling me I'm that kind of person, who should be punished."
SPEETH: You're saying two things; in this way I believe we've got a lot of wisdom
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in the Western psychotherapeutic tradition. One thing you're saying -- and I of
course agree with you -- is that it's something about going away from entropy and
toward life. And the second thing you're saying is that it has something to do with
having been hurt, right? We have to somehow work through some
nonmetabolized experiences. We need to liberate ourselves from something that
has gripped us and grabbed us and is holding us back -- something that happened
very early. And the wish we have to dissolve and to die hangs on.
MISHLOVE: And the irony is, that "something" is us. It's something we're doing to
ourselves.
SPEETH: It's something we're doing to ourselves. So one extraordinary thing
about liberation, it seems to me, is that the very things that hold us back are thethings that hold us in our families, in the family structure.
MISHLOVE: Interesting.
SPEETH: So, for example, Mother doesn't want you to sit and play in your own
way. She wants to have interaction with you, so she can feel like a good mother.
That's one example. I just worked with someone today in a therapy session for
whom that was true. He didn't dare, when he was with his girlfriend, be quiet and
just look at the fire. He felt he had to keep entertaining his girlfriend. And so he
was ready to clear the decks of all girlfriends, because he didn't allow himself to
be himself while in the company of a person who reminded him of his mother. So
he is not a free man.
MISHLOVE: Right, right. Because of some conditioning he had had with her.
SPEETH: Right. Or another example, somebody I worked with whose mother was
a Holocaust survivor. She was a happy woman, this patient of mine -- a happywoman, and well adjusted, with four or five brothers and sisters who weren't, and
a mother who was a widow and a Holocaust survivor. And she couldn't give up her
guilt, because, it turned out, her guilt was the only link she had with her mother.
MISHLOVE: Uh huh. That's where they could communicate, they could resonate.
Her mother felt guilty because she was a survivor, I imagine, and therefore in
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order to kind of enter into resonance with her mother, she had to be guilty too.
Then they could be guilty together and have a good time.
SPEETH: Exactly. And they could be connected. Even if they had a rotten time,
they would be together.
MISHLOVE: The irony to me is, from my perspective guilt is totally unnecessary.
It serves no function whatsoever.
SPEETH: Except the function of connecting one with a guilty subculture. So in
order to be free, we have to be willing to be solitary, emotionally solitary.
MISHLOVE:Solitary. What does solitary mean?
SPEETH: It means that we have to dare to be objective, and not to share, in order
to become a "we" with other people, not to share their beliefs.
MISHLOVE: To be able to sort of remove ourselves from the herd instincts.
SPEETH: Yes. Perhaps to be really free, one can't be a healthy animal in a happy
herd. Or perhaps one can; but one has to take the chance to find out. And that's a
courageous step.
MISHLOVE: You know, one of the things that you've delved into quite extensively
and written about is the Gurdjieff work. I recall a point that you made about
Gurdjieff, is that he claimed, as opposed to Western psychotherapies, that all of
the negative emotions -- anger, hatred, and so on -- were unnecessary. That it
was possible to live a healthy, harmonious, happy life without any of those. And
yet in our culture, we have so much reinforcement that says you should be getting
angry, you should be feeling guilty, you should be negative a certain amount ofthe day. Otherwise you're not owning your emotions.
SPEETH: Right. And of course that's what I think of as one of the mistakes that
many therapists make. They render their patients unhappy. That is, people come
out of therapy feeling entitled to a lot of negative emotions. The fact is that they
have to come to consciousness, and to be worked through, and to be put aside.
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Because they're really not necessary.
MISHLOVE: That's interesting. So for you, part of the definition of liberation
would be to be liberated from negative emotions.
SPEETH: One could still have them, but probaby the perverse sustaining of them
would be gone. I mean, as we sit here, there are probably bombers going
overhead with nuclear warheads on them, and so forth. We live in a very
dangerous world, an explosive world. It would be difficult to simply accept that
without a certain amount of what you might call negativity -- but not to dwell on
that.
MISHLOVE:When one looks at warfare in the world, and certain people, such as
the Middle East, where they're just at each other, at each other, at each other,
and they have been for thousands of years, one would think the only hope for
peace in these situations is to somehow be able to communicate to these people
to let go, to calm down, not to be so negative about it.
SPEETH: And of course psychotherapy deals with an individual person, rather
than a whole political scene. And within an individual that same thing is true.
There are many I's and many subpersonalities.
MISHLOVE: We're often at war with ourselves.
SPEETH: And that war has to be ended.
MISHLOVE: You know, the Muslims have a term, the holy war. And it often does
refer to an internal war between the personality and the spirit, or various parts of
ourselves. It's treated as something that we have to engage in; we can't avoid
these things. The psychologies say the same thing -- you can't just ignore youranger.
SPEETH: It's certainly not an invitation to repression or suppression at all, to think
that it might be possible to live in a very deeply content way without that.
MISHLOVE: What you're saying is that if one were to see the light at the end of
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the tunnel, work through the anger, then there would be a time in one's life, when
one had achieved a state you could call liberated or enlightened, where it would
be possible to let go of that.
SPEETH: And negative emotions are a little analogous to other substances that
are misused, like cocaine, marijuana, alcohol. It's an addiction to feel negative.
And the holy war inside, one meaning of it might be to feel no need to have the
rush that a negative emotion produces. The rush -- I'm entitled, the feeling of
being vindicated, etcetera. So that would be one movement toward liberation.
MISHLOVE: My sense is that part of the dynamics here occurs when we become
polarized to such an extent that we think that good and evil are at odds with each
other inside of us, and that one must totally vanquish the other.
SPEETH: Right.
MISHLOVE: There is no vanquishing of that kind. They really have to come
together. And one discovers usually that evil isn't really evil.
SPEETH: So there's that feeling of wanting to be a whole person, a dappled
person, a 3-D person -- not a person split into black and white. That's part of
moving toward liberation -- to be free of the sense of being split inside, into a part
of me that I love, and a part of me that I despise. So that's another aspect of
what's necessary to do. And another thing you were saying that seems to me very
important, is that we need to be free of the necessity to take and defend one
position. Why should I see everything from a narcissistic point of view? Why
couldn't I be objective and see myself as the same as other people? That would be
a big liberation -- if I didn't polarize myself and aggrandize this little one that I am.
MISHLOVE: You know, I recall a modern writer has a very popular book out rightnow -- The Closing of the American Mind. His point is that we aren't teaching
people more about good and evil. We're forgetting what he calls traditional, basic
values. People are becoming too relativistic; we should be attacking evil more.
You seem to be saying -- and I would agree -- that no, it's just the opposite; we
should be transcending this good-and-evil polarity.
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SPEETH: And of course that is goodness, that is freedom. The Sufis have a nice
way of saying it. They say, "Let go of your preconceptions, and accept your
destiny." What is the reason to be liberated? What are we being liberated from?
We're being liberated, basically, from conditioning that we received in early
childhood, and also from anti-life aspects of probably our biology. I suppose that's
in the DNA, I don't know. For what reason? It seems to me, so that we can live out
some kind of personal destiny. And how will we ever know about that if we're
going through the motions in order to continue some family tradition, or some
cultural tradition?
MISHLOVE: You mentioned earlier that Freud had described these two forces --
eros, the force of life, and thanatos, the force of death. And we both agreed we
were very sympathetic to the eros force. But what about thanatos? How doesliberation become a factor in our lives as we face death?
SPEETH: It must be a very important question for many people now, because at
this time in history the gay community is being terribly, terribly ravaged by AIDS. I
have a friend who's gay and he's a therapist, and he said he knows forty people --
patients and friends -- who have died in the last year. He had to face death with
them, and it's a very good teacher. So it certainly does help a person get their
priorities straight. What could be more cleansing of stupidity, than to face one's
death? But as you and I sit here, how different are we from those people who have
been given a diagnosis of AIDS? I mean, right now, we're also finite.
MISHLOVE: Right. We also have to die.
SPEETH: We do. I mean, we are Ivan Ilyich.
MISHLOVE: But I'm not looking forward to my death just yet.
SPEETH: Well, why look forward to it at all? The question is to use it to give
definition to your values right now. Does it help you at all to think that you're
mortal?
MISHLOVE: It does. In my own work I pay a lot of attention to issues of life and
death. Often in hypnosis I take people beyond the realm of death -- to explore, to
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get in touch with some sense of eternity, which I think is with us all the time. You
know, it seems to me that it's possible that when people live from a place within
them that echoes of eternity, death isn't so much of an issue, really.
SPEETH: So a free man or woman would be impeccable, would be courageous,
would be able to face his own finitude or his own eternity.
MISHLOVE: You know, it reminds me of a Zen story of a time when there was
much warfare in Japan. The monastery was ransacked. A general came in and he
saw the Zen monk praying, and he came up to him with his sword, and he said,
"Don't you know I'm a man who can run you through with this sword without
blinking an eye?" The monk looked up at him and said, "Don't you know I'm a man
who can be run through without blinking an eye?" The general put his sworddown.
SPEETH: Right. That is a free man. So when we talk about liberation, we're
talking about liberation from the perspective of ego, my own personal ego, so that
I can see from all points of view. And that is divinity. What is divinity?
MISHLOVE: So it's the ego that separates us from that.
SPEETH: It's a kind of paranoid clot of attention inside, a trembling, paranoid clot
inside. Trungpa Rinpoche called it the basic contraction of ego.
MISHLOVE: The basic contraction of ego. I like it. And I suppose that's also what's
responsible for selfishness and greed and clinging of every sort.
SPEETH: Uh huh, right. And of course to the degree that one is getting free of
that, then it's possible to have empathy with others. If I'm not in a fortress
protecting myself, maybe I can have a sense of how you're living, what yoursituation is.
MISHLOVE: I should think there must be a difference, though, between this kind
of egotistical, or egoistic, clinging, and a sense of when a person is on a real
mission -- when they're following their destiny, when they're attached to
something, but it's something greater than themselves -- a life purpose, a creative
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work of some sort.
SPEETH: Right. A heroic life. A life like Theseus, who was able to go through the
labyrinth and kill the Minotaur. Or a life like the life of Einstein, who was able to
lock himself in a room for two weeks and come out with E = mc2 and so forth.
That's a heroic life.
MISHLOVE: Now, how does this relate to the dynamics of liberation? How do we
free ourselves from the petty clinging, and enter into the heroic life?
SPEETH: How do we work through enough so that our actions come not from
deficiency, and not from fear, and not from conditioning, but from what
Longhenpa called lucid awareness and consummate perspicacity?
MISHLOVE: That's a mouthful. Consummate perspicacity.
SPEETH: The sense of doing just the right thing at the right time. How do we get
there? I think as Westerners we get there on the psychotherapeutic path. There's
a person named Jack Engel, who's a psychiatrist in Boston. He did a study in
Burma -- I don't know if he did the study, or who took the data, but the results
were that Westerners and Burmese sat with a teacher, a Theravadin Buddhist
teacher, and after six weeks the Burmese had the first level of enlightenment, and
the Westerners had developed a transference neurosis on the teacher. So for us,
we're different from the people for whom those meditative traditions were
developed.
MISHLOVE: A transference neurosis, for the benefit of our viewers, is where
they're projecting their own emotions, about their parents probably, onto the
teacher, and they're working that out.
SPEETH: Right. And they're acting toward the teacher as if he were a loved,
feared, or whatever, parent. So for us, we could do the two-person meditation
called psychoanalysis, in which the therapist sits with evenly hovering awareness,
and the patient sits or lies with free association of thought. What could be more
likely to produce self awareness than that kind of working through?
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MISHLOVE: I love to do therapeutic work with people myself, but I haven't
necessarily heard of great geniuses, real heroes, coming out that way. Did
Einstein need a therapist?
SPEETH: No. And I have to say that Rilke refused psychoanalysis. He was afraid
that it would interfere with his gift.
MISHLOVE: This is not to demean therapy.
SPEETH: No, but I hear what you're saying, and I can only say that in my
experience, the people that I know, and also my own self, have profited by
understanding their minds in the therapeutic manner. And that just means to
conduct your own analysis of your life, with the companionship of a therapist.
MISHLOVE: My sense is that maybe therapy does get one through certain stages,
but there are certainly stages on the heroic journey that go beyond what Western
psychology is equipped to deal with.
SPEETH: Right. And in fact a hero wants to face his destiny without a cane. So at
some point he'll have to stand alone and make it, and meet whatever is coming
toward him.
MISHLOVE: And I guess ultimately that's everybody's destiny.
SPEETH: I guess it is.
MISHLOVE: Well, Kathleen Speeth, it's been a pleasure sharing this half hour with
you. I think this is for me personally, I'd like to say, one of the most exciting
interviews I've ever done.
SPEETH: I'm very glad to be here.
MISHLOVE: And I hope to have you back again, as well. Thank you so much for
being with me.
SPEETH: Thank you, Jeff.
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Fred Alan Wolf: Physics and Consciousness
DVDs of this and otherFred Alan Wolf programs are available. The same program
is also part of the VideoQuartetNew Physics and Beyond.
EFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. Our topic today is "Quantum
Physics and Consciousness," and my guest, Dr. Fred Alan Wolf, is certainly an
authority in this area. He's the author of several books, including Taking the
Quantum Leap, which is a winner of the National Book Award; Star Wave, a book
describing Fred's own theories about quantum physics and consciousness; andalso The Body Quantum. Fred, welcome to the program.
FRED ALAN WOLF, Ph.D.: Thank you, Jeffrey. It's really a pleasure to be here
and see you again.
MISHLOVE: It's a pleasure to have you here, Fred. Let's talk about consciousness
for a moment, because before we can talk about quantum physics and
consciousness we need to start with a definition. What is consciousness to you, as
a quantum physicist?
WOLF: Well, first let's talk about it in general -- not just as quantum physics, but
what does it mean to be conscious? Just in coming to the studio, I happened to be
going through a big library, and I was looking at all the books and all the titles on
consciousness. I pulled one out and looked to see what he had to say; he didn't
get it. I pull another one out; this doesn't get it. There are a thousand people
writing books about consciousness, and not one of them really knows exactly
what consciousness is. To tell you the truth, I don't know what it is either. So eventhough I've written several books about it and have been studying it for many,
many years, to tell you exactly what consciousness is, is something that's beyond
my grasp.
MISHLOVE: It's Goedel's theorem. A system can never understand or explain
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itself in any case.
WOLF: It's kind of like a mathematical theorem, or if you like, it's so much a part
of ourselves that we can't recognize it. We can laugh about it, we can joke about
it, but to really find out exactly what it is, is very difficult to do. However, we
shouldn't be so discouraged by such a remark as this, because in reality we don't
know what anything is. If we ask, "What is this? What is that?" all you really do is
try to describe how it behaves, or what it does, or what it looks like, or what it
smells like, or what your sensation of it is. You really don't know what something
intrinsically is. So it's really a philosophical question as to what consciousness
could be, because that's the ultimate mystery. What I'm trying to describe, and
what I've learned to describe, is what consciousness does. That may be a different
issue, and may be something we could address and talk about.
MISHLOVE: All right. What does consciousness do, Fred?
WOLF: What does consciousness do?
MISHLOVE: It sounds like you were describing it in a way, when you said we try
to discriminate, we try to understand what things are. That is what consciousness
is about.
WOLF: The best way I can describe it is to speak of it in terms of some kind of
huge metaphor, like an ocean of consciousness; or that consciousness is
everything, it fills the universe. What it does I think is very interesting. Before
quantum physics, people knew that human beings were conscious. We knew that
animals were conscious. Some of the ancient traditions, particularly some of the
Hindu traditions, or the Vedic traditions of ancient Indian religion, speak in terms
of everything being conscious. Rocks are conscious; your thumbnail is conscious;
the television cameras that are recording this show are conscious. So they speakabout consciousness pervading everything. But with the twentieth century and
with quantum physics, we began to see what might be called a new role for
consciousness -- something that we know happens, but remained inexplicable
until we began to realize that what we were talking about was the action of
consciousness. So what I've been doing in my work is talking about something I
call fundamental acts of consciousness. I call them FACS -- please forgive the pun.
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What is a fundamental act of consciousness? It's an action in which something is
perceived. Now, in ordinary physics, or in ordinary physiology, or in most of the
classical realms of science, perception is something which is taken to be outside
the realm of physicality. In other words, if you perceive something, you know that
you see something. Light will strike your retina; you'll get an idea, or something
will pop off in your brain, or something of that sort. But we never got the notion
that somehow the act of seeing something was affecting what you were seeing or
what you were looking at. But in quantum physics we've learned that when you're
looking at very small objects, subatomic particles for example, the very action of
looking at them disturbs them to such an extent that we never really get a
complete picture as to what they actually are. Now, this has led me to think that
consciousness may be at the core of this problem as to how perception can affect
and change reality, and that maybe what we're doing when we're thinking orfeeling or sensing or even listening to a conversation is using this action of
consciousness, this fundamental act, which sort of what I call pops the qwiff -- that
suddenly alters the physical reality of, say, the human body.
MISHLOVE: In other words, in subatomic physics, if I want to look at a particle, I
literally have to touch it. I have to bounce a photon or something off of it in order
to do that. What you're suggesting is that consciousness acts in this way; it
touches the things that it perceives.
WOLF: That's right.
MISHLOVE: It almost becomes one with them, merges with them a little bit, in
the process of perceiving.
WOLF: Right. The way I kind of look at it is that consciousness is a huge oceanic
wave that washes through everything, and it has ripples and vibrations in it. When
there are acts of consciousness, the wave turns into bubbles at that moment, itjust turns into froth.
MISHLOVE: It kind of reminds me of those Japanese woodcuts where you see the
waves reaching out like fingers.
WOLF: Exactly, exactly. That's a good metaphor. It reaches out like fingers, and
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it's the action of those fingers that disrupts and alters the patterns of physicality
that were previously arranged by the earlier acts of consciousness. In other words,
there's a continuation of this movement. Each one is disruptive; each one is a
little bit chaotic, so that things are never quite exactly the same as they were.
There's like an ever-changing light show going on, a bubbly light show going on. I
think this action takes place not only in our minds and our brains, but even at the
level of the subatomic particles that make us up. In fact, that may be how the
universe got created in the first place.
MISHLOVE: And this is your whole point, that we're composed of this stuff. We're
composed of this frothy little ocean. If we could see ourselves under an electronic
microscope, it's about all we'd look like, I suppose.
WOLF: Yes, it would be a rather bizarre looking light show, of things popping on
and off, vanishing and reappearing, matter created out of nothing and then
vanishing. And in that vanishing and creation, an electromagnetic signal is piped
from one point to another point. That's really kind of an amazing description.
MISHLOVE: It's almost remarkable, when you talk about it that way, that I'm here
looking at you and you look like a humanoid.
WOLF: Right, exactly. In fact there was one guy who tried to make a metaphor of
that. He said, "Suppose I were to put you in a room, and put a wall between us,
and all I could listen to was your voice, or better yet, no voice. All I could really do
was read a computer readout coming through the wall, and I could ask you
questions by typing them in to you, and then you'd feed them back to me. Could I
ask you enough questions so that I could discern that what was behind the wall
was a real human being and not a machine feeding you back data?"
MISHLOVE: Interesting.
WOLF: Interesting question. So the question is, you look at me, I look at you, and
we say, "Ah, that must be a human being." But if we really wanted to get very
Cartesian, like Descartes did, about everything, we might begin to say, "Well, how
can I really know that that's a human being behind there? What kind of questions
can I type out, or can I ask it, in order for it to feed me back and say, 'Ah, yes, I'm
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a human being just like you, Fred.'" But then the question is, "Is Fred a human
being who's asking?" Maybe this is the robot talking to you, and you have to ask
yourself the same kind of question.
MISHLOVE: You're getting at the nature of paradox here a little bit, aren't you?
WOLF: Yes, we're getting at the very nature of what consciousness is, really, in
raising these humorous ways of looking at it. If we try to address it, I think, totally
scientifically and totally objectively, I think we run into a real brick wall. Literally;
it's that brick wall that's erected that keeps the person behind and you in front. In
fact, if you start to address your own body as that kind of a thing, you say, "Ah,
this is not a hand; this is a machine. Look, it does this, it does that."
MISHLOVE: A hundred and twenty-four joints.
WOLF: Exactly. We look at the articulation, we watch how the blood flows, we
know the pressures in the heart, we know the atrium does this and that does this,
and we know how -- mechanically, we can see it perfectly. But yet, something is
missing in it all. Even if I try to make it as mechanically clear as possible, we know
something's missing, and that thing that's missing is something we call
consciousness.
MISHLOVE: Norman Cousins once talked about the body as being made of
spiritual tissue. He was kind of getting at that angle.
WOLF: What I'm getting at, is that possibly we can't really address the question
of what consciousness is, if we purely look at it in its objective, causal framework.
MISHLOVE: You're a physicist, and a theoretical quantum physicist. And when we
get to that level of quantum physics, it seems as though the mechanical notionsof the universe break down completely. Everything's fuzzy, it's frothy, it's foamy,
it's probability waves. Doesn't that sort of seem to be like consciousness?
WOLF: Well, let me quote from Newton about this, even though we're talking
quantum physics. Literally, I feel like a child at a seashore, when it comes to
seeing where quantum physics is pointing. I feel like we're on the verge of a
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gigantic discovery -- maybe the nature of God, maybe the nature of the human
spirit. Something of that sort is going to emerge from this, because our normal
notions -- in fact the notions upon which we think science makes any sense at all,
the notions of space and time and matter -- they just are breaking down, they're
just falling apart, like tissue paper before our eyes. Wet tissue paper; it isn't even
good tissue paper. It doesn't hold anything up anymore. So we're beginning to see
that -- for example, in classical physics the idea that the past influences the
presence is pretty normal. Everybody says, "Oh, of course."
MISHLOVE: One-way causality.
WOLF: One-way causality. Everybody says, "Oh yeah, naturally." I mean, that's
what Newton said, that's what they all say. OK, but there's another notion. Whatabout the future influencing the present? Is such an idea just an idea that comes
about through parapsychology, or through mystical insight? Quantum physics
says no, it says that definitely there is a real mathematical basis for saying actions
in the future can have an effect on the probability patterns that exist in the
present. In other words, what takes places now, what choices are being made
right now, may not be as free to you as you think they are. To you it may seem
uncertain -- well, I'll do this or I'll do that. But if you realized that what you did in
the future is having an effect now, then it wouldn't be as obvious. So it's hard to
talk about it because the future's yet to come, right?
MISHLOVE: Well, I was thinking about this today. I just saw a movie, one of these
Back to the Future kind of things, Peggy Sue Got Married -- these visions of people
traveling through time. And I thought to myself, if I were in touch with who I will
be twenty, thirty years from now, if I had the insights today that I will have then,
how would I do it? What would I do different today?
WOLF: Well, suppose you found out that you do have those insights, and youactually have them right now, but the problem is that we haven't developed our
acuity for believing those insights as strongly as we have our acuity for believing
the past. Most of us have made mistakes in the past, right? We're all schlemiels
when it comes to the past: "Oh God, if I'd only done that differently in the past."
OK, well, this is your opportunity to do it now in the future. And though it's in the
future, you can envision something about yourself that's better than it is right
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now. In fact, I guess that's what positive thinking is really all about, isn't it? And if
we can tune to that picture and visualize it, sort of get a clear picture as to what it
is, it will propagate back to the present right now, and will affect the choices that
you're going to make now, so that a lot of the struggle you have, having to deal
with the past, will sort of vanish away.
MISHLOVE: In other words, if I hear you right, you're suggesting that we should
kind of be talking and thinking to ourselves who we were twenty years ago, to
make sure that we made the right decisions then, so we can be who our best self
is right now.
WOLF: That's right, that's right.
MISHLOVE: Isn't that interesting?
WOLF: We need to recreate the past. I mentioned this in an article I wrote about
time, saying that the past is not fixed, that there's no absolute past. I'm sure there
are events that we would all agree on. For example, we could agree on the Nazi
Holocaust. OK, fine, but can we agree on what was going on in the German mind
during the Nazi Holocaust? Can we agree on what was going on in our minds when
we were ten years old? I mean, can we really come to grips and say, "OK, when I
was ten years old I was really this bubbling kid, or I was just --"
MISHLOVE: Do we know what goes on in Reagan's and Gorbachev's minds when
they meet?
WOLF: Exactly. It's not so much what's going on in their minds, but do we really
have a fix on saying that the events we write down now about what happened in
the past were really those events? Obviously we're creating the past; obviously
we're making choices now. And there are feelings involved.
MISHLOVE: But now there's a difference between in
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