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The Laws of Dreaming

What might science look like in another reality? In lucid dreaming, an investigator can form a hypothesis in waking, fall asleep, become lucid, and then – in rainbow lab coat and marvellous wind-swept Vidal Sassoon hairdo – test her hypothesis as the dream surges around her.

Can We Conduct Science In Another Reality?

Dreams are difficult to get a handle on for most of us. We project through them like blunt-nosed missiles, responding to the unfolding action automatically, never questioning the larger often-impossible context, however many iridescent blimp-sized taquerias (to quote a recent example) are floating through the scenery. The neurobiology shows an under-activated prefrontal cortex; certain high-level decision making capacities are offline. We are in a kind of trance. The fact that our short-term memories seem also to be disengaged doesn’t help. Most of us carry only fragments of our experiences with us back to waking, and these fade quickly in the bright light of daytime concerns.

lucid dreaming the science of dreaming

It is possible, however, to change you relationship to dreaming, as everyone who has seen Inception now knows. It’s called lucid dreaming. Your slumbering frontal lobe “wakes up” inside the dream itself, and – blinking, slightly stunned, patting your chest in disbelief like a cartoon character – you set off to explore. Reason, memory, intentionality are all intact. It is difficult to communicate how shocking and disorienting a real lucid dream is to those who have never had the full experience. This is not a bit of dissociated self-consciousness directed towards some washed-out dream fragment. It is your waking self and body moving through a sensorial-rich wraparound world every bit as real as the daytime one. You can feel the air in your lungs, the grit on the sidewalk. You cannot believe this is an actual existential option of 21st century life. Why don’t we learn about this in school? It’s as though there is a huge twin Earth floating next to the moon that no one can see. A blind spot the size of reality.

The story of how lucid dreaming was scientifically validated is a fascinating one. What I’d like to talk about here are the apparent laws of physics in the dream world, laws of physics that are also, weirdly, psychological laws. It is not the case that anything goes in dreams; as with a video game or an operating system (or, for that matter, waking reality), there exist certain fundamental constraints that seem to be true for everyone. In the case of dreaming, both expectations and a lack of stable sensory input play a role in shaping the action. If the dreamer is lucid, these constraints are subject to empirical investigation. I’ll say this another way: You can conduct experiments.

This is science in another mode, something psychologist and altered-states pioneer Charles Tart called, in a classic 1972 Science paper, “state-specific science.” Tart argued that science needn’t be specialized for use in waking reality alone; in fact, the basic principles of good observation, well-trained investigators and evidence-based theory can be applied any place the mind is clear – including inside a lucid dream. This means that a scientifically-minded investigator can form a hypothesis in waking, fall asleep, become lucid, and then – in rainbow coloured lab coat and marvellous wind-swept Vidal Sassoon hairdo – test her hypothesis in the dream world itself, documenting the results on her return to waking.

One of the few researchers who actually practices state-specific science is the psychologist Stephen LaBerge, the man who proved the existence of lucid dreaming to the scientific world. Among his experiments he has looked at how time passes in a dream, as well as how specific dream movements corresponds to areas of activation in the motor cortex. Many of the following laws are inspired by his experiments and observations.

THE LAW OF MECHANICAL DISORDER
As depicted in Richard Linklater’s film Waking Life, mechanical devices – clocks, lights, gearshifts, particle-beam accelerators – don’t work properly in the dream world. It sounds random and improbable, but this actually turns out to be the case when you try it yourself. Perhaps it has something to do with the evolution of the mind: no motors or delicate moving parts on the savannah.

THE LAW OF TEXTUAL DISORDER
Many dream workers have commented on the relative infrequency of reading, writing, and arithmetic in the dream world. When writing does appear, it’s often scrambled and unreadable, or it morphs between readings. LaBerge’s explanation for this is that two different brain systems are operating when you look at writing: a part that deals with appearances, and a separate part that deals with meaning. The implied meaning may stay the same, but, as we’ll see below, in dreams, appearances are never static.

THE LAW OF NARRATIVE MOMENTUM
If you linger for too long in any one place, the dream world begins to fray and you will wake. Dreams are in a constant state of flux; the best strategy for riding them seems to be to keep moving. I have also had the bizarre experience of moving somewhere so quickly that I arrived in an entirely blank space, as though the world had not yet loaded up. It felt like standing at the edge of creation.

THE LAW OF DELAYED CAUSE AND EFFECT
Astute observers will notice a delay in dreams. Simultaneous events are impossible for the very good reason that they’re not happening in the physical world; they are happening in a model of the world where our brain creates the continuity.

THE LAW OF SELF-FULFILLING EXPECTATIONS
In dreams, what you expect to happen often will happen, and first impressions often become the dream “reality.” This is because our minds are not neutral, and our learned and hardwired assumptions about the world run free in our dreams like escaped felons. This, says LaBerge, is true even of the basic operational laws of the dream world, which is why dreams are usually equipped with gravity, space, time, and air. Of course, this doesn’t explain why light switches don’t work even though we expect that they will. Perhaps an older logic cannot be overruled.

THE LAW OF EXTREMA
Whatever you notice in dreams seems to become more exaggerated. Steep stairs get steeper, a trickle becomes a stream becomes a flood. The writer Bucky McMahon experienced this law when he tried to pass through a dream wall:

“The wall is an oddly mottled collard-coloured green and sickly organic in appearance. My arm, as I extend it toward the wall, doesn’t look so good either—all chitinous and glimmering, reddened and singed. Numerous grub-like fingers sprout from my fist, more the longer and more closely I look.”

LeBerge believes this phenomenon reveals one of the functions of consciousness: “When we attend to some element in the memory array, that element then becomes more activated.” In lucid dreaming there are no external constraints on vividness, so the features keep getting enhanced in a kind of feedback loop. So you’re interacting with a tree in the dream, and your brain keeps buzzing “tree” in the memory array, and the longer you look the more your internal ideas and associations about trees start to pile up, and the tree gets huge and grotesque and unstable. You then, obviously, try to have sex with the tree.

These represent just a few laws – no doubt there are others to discover. Find out for yourself. Lucid dreaming is not that difficult to learn, although for most it is difficult to sustain. One day this landscape may be filled with scientists, inspecting the walls with their dream magnifying glasses and comparing cross-reality protocols. Until then, the whole endeavour is thrillingly DIY.

Happy Enough Podcast

In this episode, Jeff chats with Garvia from the Happier Enough podcast about how he got into meditation to help his mental health, what meditation is, how it helps quiet unproductive thoughts and how you – the skeptical, busy person with a mile-long to-do list – can start incorporating it into your happiness practice.

From the Happy Enough podcast, episode #4 Why you (yes you, the skeptic) should try meditation: “Meditation, a practice that can calm your mind, has been around for thousands of years. Science shows it can help people feel happier. Yet many people feel resistant to meditation – like it’s not for them, or that they don’t have the time for it. Garvia speaks with Jeff Warren, a meditation teacher and practitioner who writes the daily meditations on the Calm app. They discuss how Jeff got into meditation to help his mental health, what meditation is, how it helps quiet unproductive thoughts and how you – the skeptical, busy person with a mile-long to-do list – can start incorporating it into your happiness practice.”

 

Love in the Time of Coronavirus

“If someone says ‘Love in the Time of Corona’ one more time I am literally going to punch them.” A post is about knowing when and how to meditatively engage with our anxiety and our discomfort, and knowing when and how to pull back and rest.

“If someone says ‘Love in the Time of Corona’ one more time I am literally going to punch them” – from NYRB’s Pandemic Journal.

Hello friends. I hope everyone is safe and healthy – and furiously washing their hands!

I just got back to Toronto from Costa Rica, so I’m in self-isolation, pacing around inside, like so many others. With anxiety running high and all this extra time on (some of) our hands, it is a good time to meditate. And by that I mean the deliberate practice of cultivating sanity and care. 

This post is about how to do this responsibly. It’s about knowing when to engage with our anxiety and our discomfort, and knowing when to pull back and rest.

Last week my friend Scott Davis and I led a movement and meditation retreat in the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica – a very wild place at the edge of the world. It was tense, to say the least. Everyone huddled around a weak and intermittent wifi signal as flights got cancelled, airports closed, and concern mounted for friends and family back home and around the world.

Through it all, Scott and I did our paradoxical best to keep both social distancing and hold a strong container. In the end, it may have been the most powerful retreat I’ve been a part of. Because it was real. The practices we engaged in were not practices for checking out. They were practices for checking in. For being with our own fear and reactivity and insecurity, for taking care of ourselves and each other.

At the retreat I recorded two jungle-sound filled meditations, available here. Different meditation techniques help in different ways. The first meditation – “Pendulation” – is 25-minutes long, and is more educational than relaxing. It is also quite intense, so be aware of that. It’s about how to address anxiety and challenge responsibly in a meditation practice: the necessary pendulation between opening and expanding capacity, and then moving back to safety and comfort and knowing our limits. This is absolutely relevant for right now. Fear, like the coronavirus itself, is contagious. It is also workable – in a sense, treatable. But first we need to understand the medicine. 

The second meditation – “Caring Hands” – is softer and shorter, about 17 minutes. Scott and I had been up all night dealing with a retreatant in great distress, and afterwards I was cracked open and raw. It’s about how to hold ourselves – and each other – with care.

The text below is adapted from a talk I gave before the first meditation. It provides some important context. I hope both meditations will be helpful for these uncertain times.

Love
Jeff

The Real vs the Ideal
Talk given at Finca Exotica, Costa Rica, March 17, 2020

This week has been a kind of user’s manual for the body and mind.

With Scott you’re learning some of the basic physical movements of being an ambulating bipedal human, what it means to have hips and shoulders and a scapula, which I didn’t even know I had. Oh, that’s what that is!

So we are learning basic movements of operating from our core, of mobility, of pushing and pulling. Principles that no matter what you do, as you go out in life, they’re going to be applicable. No matter what sport you do, no matter what movement that you do, whether you’re walking, or playing, or lounging around.

And with me we’re exploring some of the basic principles of having a mind, of working with the larger container of our awareness, our experience.

I’d like to lay out a dialectic here, a model for how to think about this exploration. Then I’ll lead a meditation practice that I hope will animate that model.

The dialectic is between the real and the ideal. The real is where you are and who you are, your exact body and mind, with its particular attributes and gifts and limitations.

In the case of my body, that means, among other things, a separated clavicle, a broken neck, and a messed up right ankle and hip. So when I explore Scott’s movements, I have to always come back to what I can actually do based on my physical limitations.

Here’s my point: the posture, the movement – they’re ideals. I know I’ll never actually arrive there. I’ll never get to “perfect” with this body. Even so, the attempt to move towards this ideal is important. It expands my mobility, it extends the range of conditions in which my body can flourish. Instead of stagnating, I am alive to my edge, working to change and improve and stay dynamic. And when I reach my limit, I say, ‘nope, I’m good.’ I stop. I don’t override the signals my body is giving me, for the sake of some idiotic self-improvement regimen. This is what it means to care for ourselves as we really are, not as we wish ourselves to be.

We need an identical understanding when we work with our patterns of mind. There is, on the one hand, this important movement towards improvement and healing and change. Towards actively working on the beliefs and patterns and behaviors that prevent us from being present and happy in our lives.

You could say the direction of contemplative practice is towards being centred and available to life independent of conditions. No matter what intensity is rising in us externally or internally, we have this aspiration as practitioners to be centered and poised inside that intensity. And from that place, to then respond in the most intelligent and caring way to whatever life is asking of us.

Except … guess what? Just like the perfect posture, or the perfect movement, this idea of centredness and happiness independent of conditions is an ideal. It’s not real. Nobody will ever totally get there. There will always be some situation, some internal or external intensity that will hook us and overwhelm us and take us over our edge.

What happens then?

We accept our limitations and take care of ourselves. Sometimes instead of trying to improve and change ourselves, we need to relax and accept ourselves exactly as we are. That means turning our attention to where we are resourced and nurtured. Maybe that looks like chatting with friends, or taking a bath, or going for a walk in nature. Maybe it looks like meditating on the breath – whatever works for you. This is us being real: Where am I right now? What are my limits? What have I learned about how to care for myself?

And then after we rest and recharge, we go back into the world and resume the work of expanding capacity. Working on the world, working on ourselves.

So one direction is acceptance, and the other is change. And there are skills that help us move in both directions. The skill of going out, towards challenge, towards our ideal self and world … this is the skill of equanimity, the skill of opening to ever-more of life. And when we get to our limits and need to pull back… this is the skill of care (care infused with equanimity – equanimity is everywhere!). Of course there are other skills too. Like the skill of clarity – of discernment, of self-understanding – of knowing when to move out, and when to move back in the first place.

Let’s do a practice. It has four parts. Part one we explore the skill of equanimity and what it feels like to open. Part two we find a homebase – a comfortable and calming place to put our attention that we can use to come back to. Part three we explore how to open to some intensity, and pendulate back to homebase as needed. And finally in part four we let it all go, and return to rest.

Taking care of ourselves in life means knowing how to do all these things. I believe this passionately. There’s a time for being a warrior, and a time for being a caregiver. And here’s the thing: they’re all caring. Change and acceptance are both expressions of caring.

The Change Room Podcast

From The Change Room Podcast: In this episode, we discusses how spiritual practices can either help individuals recognize, accept and connect with their particular mental health and neuro-identities (best case!) or (worst case!) lead to a disconnection and denial.”

From The Change Room Podcast, episode #1, Mental Health and Spiritual Bypassing with Jeff Warren: “In this episode, author and meditation teacher Jeff Warren discusses how spiritual practices can either help individuals recognize, accept and connect with their particular mental health and neuro-identities (best case!) or (worst case!) lead to a disconnection and denial.”

 

The Secret to Sustaining a Practice: Structure

The most important element for sustaining a meditation practice isn’t what practice to do, or how to do it, it’s how to show up, day after day. It’s structure.

The most important element for sustaining a meditation practice isn’t what practice to do, or how to do it, it’s how to show up, day after day. It’s structure.

I’ve noticed two kinds of people in this respect. The first, let’s call them Type As, are good with structure. They’re self-starters, they’re organized, they like routines and are good at building them. A large number of meditators are in this camp. It’s not that these people are naturally “good” at meditation (although they may be that too), it’s that they’re good at structure.

And then … there are my people. The Type Bs. Our brains aren’t structured that way. We’re attentionally-challenged. Fun to be with at parties, but also easily hijacked by whatever new thing comes along. It’s not that we’re absent-minded, or not exactly. It’s more that we’re “present-minded somewhere else,” as the great William James once put it. For these people – for me – getting to meditation is a hellacious struggle, even though I mostly enjoy it once I’m there.

The cruel truth is many of us who most need meditation, are the least able to get to it. We’re trying to create structure with an unstructured brain. It’s a Catch 22, a brutal and paradoxical conundrum that many in the unstructured camp will have despaired of at one point or another.

Fortunately, there’s hope.

If you can’t create structure using your own inside resources, a smart tactic is to borrow structure from the outside, and put your nervous system inside of it. That’s one of the big insights from the science of behavior change: it’s not about willpower; it’s about environmental design.

Here are four examples: four ways that an ADD meditation teacher – that’s me – gets himself to meditate:

First, I trick myself. I make commitments – like the New Year’s Challenge. Or I make a promise to sit with a friend. Or I join a weekly or online group, creating some kind of accountability where the guilt of letting people down or breaking your commitment is greater than whatever neurotic forces are keeping you off the cushion.

Second, I do quick-hit meditations like the ‘singles’ on the 10% Happier app. Because they’re short and on-the-fly and they give me a mini-structure I don’t have to think about. I say this not only as a teacher on the app, but as someone who personally benefits from using it.

Third, of course sometimes I do manage to sit on my own, miracle of miracles, usually at the start or end of the day, so I don’t have to think about it. Yoking meditation to another habit (like the habit of waking up, or the habit of going to sleep) is one way to work smart.

Finally, I weave the core “skills” of meditation – concentration, clarity, equanimity, care – into other activities. So: walking around, exercising, hanging out with people, whatever. This may be the most important trick. The main reason we sit and don’t move in meditation is to create the ultimate simple medium to cultivate these skills. But the skills can be cultivated anytime. In fact, that’s exactly what happens once you’ve done the practice for a while. You get a taste of the skills in sitting, and can now more easily find them in other parts of your life.

So, to give one example, let’s say you’re walking to work. On your walk, you can deliberately choose to pay attention to something besides your worries: maybe the sounds around you, or your feet on the ground. As you cruise down the street, get granular about what you notice. See if you can maintain an open attitude to the sights and sounds, and smooth out any tension or bracing in your body as you move. If you do that, you’re building concentration, clarity, and equanimity in motion, without having to be on any kind of formal meditation schedule .

So those are four ways I get my unstructured self to meditate: make commitments, use an app, yoke the practice to some other habit, and meditate on the fly.

Not only do all of these external structures help, but by helping, they allow us to build the resources to have more structured brains in the first place.  You get better at keeping habits, by keeping habits.

NOTE: Originally published on the 10% Happier Blog, here.

Lucid Dreaming: A New Frontier of Human Exploration?

Our century marks a New Age of Exploration, into an even more mysterious frontier, with empirical discoveries that may turn out to be every bit as revolutionary as the ones that undergirded the first Age of Enlightenment. One frontier here is the dreaming mind; and the new explorers are known as lucid dreamers.

Originally published in April 2012, Reader’s Digest

The first Age of Exploration happened between the 15th and 17th centuries, when Europe’s great powers dispatched galleons to mysterious new continents. Maps once filled with sea monsters and vague sketches of broken coastline began to accumulate richness and detail. More importantly, actual encounters with exotic indigenous populations prepared the ground for what would become a profound revolution in human knowledge and self-understanding. The Age of Exploration became the Age of Enlightenment.

lucid-dream-flyingOur century marks a New Age of Exploration, into an even more mysterious frontier, with empirical discoveries that may turn out to be every bit as revolutionary as the ones that undergirded the first Age of Enlightenment. The frontier is human consciousness. This article focuses on one particular destination within that: the lucid dream.

The phenomenon of lucid dreaming has been known since at least the ancient Greeks. “Often when one is asleep,” Aristotle said, “there is something in consciousness which declares that what presents itself is but a dream.” Most people have had flickers of this experience in the early morning, after dozily hitting the snooze button, when they drift back into dreaming and are vaguely aware that the unfolding action isn’t quite real.

This is just the very beginning of a far more dramatic experience. It is possible to wake inside the dream itself into fully alert consciousness, with all your psychological faculties intact: reason, memory, agency. Unless this has personally happened to you it is difficult to convey how absolutely mind-blowing and radical the experience is. It isn’t the washed-out memory of a fragmented dream, with you as a detached observer. It’s you – your body, with arms and clothes and Vidal Sassoon dream hairdo blowing in the dream breeze – waking up in an actual world that is every bit as tangible and interactive and real as the world you are in now.

My first full lucid dream happened while I was researching a book on consciousness. The more I read about lucid dreaming and the more researchers I spoke with, the more I expected it to happen to me. In the middle of one normal Tuesday night I woke up in bed next to my girlfriend and looked around. Something wasn’t right. The walls shivered, as though from an earth-quake. It occurred to me I might be dreaming. As soon as the thought entered my head a wave of vertigo passed through me and I found myself standing on a cobblestone street in an old medieval town. I reached down and ran my fingers along the ground. I felt the grit between each smooth stone, felt the breath in my lungs and my heart pounding in my chest.

Although I knew beyond a doubt I was dreaming, there was absolutely no difference in vividness and detail between this world and the waking one. Several people approached and I recall being exhilarated and terrified by the idea that I was about to have a conversation with some … what? – person? character? – some entity from another reality. I was so psyched I accidentally woke myself up. For the next hour I lay thunderstruck in bed, thinking about the ineffable mystery of consciousness. It had been like being beamed down to the surface of an alien planet.

There are now many books and online forums that log people’s trips to this otherworld. Some people explore the space physically, mapping the shifting terrain of the dream. Others rehearse specific activities, using the time to perfect their golf swing or karate moves. Still others fly around looking for adventure and – especially popular with young males – guilt-free safe sex.

Of course, although the usual social constraints and consequences of waking may not apply, this doesn’t mean the dream world will go along with your plans. I spend most of my lucid dreams crashing into walls, getting ignored by dream women and, once, getting beaten up. Alas, it seems that in dreams – as in life – we are at the whim of forces greater than ourselves.

For years the existence of rational consciousness in a dream was regarded as impossible. Sleep scientists dismissed reports of lucid dreaming as “micro-awakenings” – short periods of wakefulness people were confusing with dreams. But the anecdotes continued to pile up until finally, in the early ’80s, American psychophysiologist Stephen LaBerge – himself an avid lucid dreamer – devised an ingenious way to prove that lucid dreams were real.

There are several physiological giveaways to being in a dream state. One clue – twitching eyeballs – turned out to be key for LaBerge. He would fall asleep in a laboratory, wired up to an EEG (electro-encephalogram) which records neuron activity) and also an EOG (electro-oculogram, which measures eye movement), with his awake co-researcher keeping watch. In the dream world, LaBerge – trained to notice dream cues – managed to “wake up.” Fully lucid, he moved his gaze up and down, up and down in an agreed-upon pattern of eye signals.

In the waking world, his co-researcher observed LaBerge’s eye movements, visible as distinctive spikes on the EOG’s sea of erratic waveforms. LaBerge had made the first-ever “transworld communication” between two distinct realities. He was effectively proving to his peers that they no longer had to collect dream reports after the act. Instead dreaming could be investigated as it happened, from the inside.

The sleep-science community was stunned. The results, according to psychologist Robert Ornstein, revealed “the possibilities of human consciousness are greater than we had thought.”

Today lucid dreaming is no longer disputed, and indeed in the past few years scientists around the world have begun to conduct more detailed experiments. Some of them are so strange and improbable they read like Hollywood scripts.

In 2006 a German researcher learned to send signals from the outside world to the dream world using combinations of high and low tones delivered through earphones to dreaming subjects. While asleep, lucid dreamers – perhaps lounging on dream-world park benches – were able to hear the tones ringing in the landscape and then signal back to waking researchers with eye movements. The study established that two-way transworld communication is possible: You can get messages in, and you can get messages out.

In a more recent experiment reported in the October 2011 issue of Current Biology, researchers at Munich’s Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry passed lucid dreamers through a fMRI brain scanner (a technique that measures brain activity by mapping blood flow). As the machine recorded each of their brains in turn, the dreamers clenched and un-clenched their dream hands, even as their actual hands lay motionless. Researchers were able to see this neural activity in the brain in the exact area you would expect to see it had the subjects clenched their fists while awake. This proof-of-concept study is a big deal in the science of the mind. It provides, in the words of one of the researchers, Michael Czisch, evidence that it may be possible to “read the contents of a person’s dream.”

For researchers, lucid dreaming is an opportunity to examine the operating rules of consciousness in a “pure culture” – that is, the mind without the sights, sounds and smells of the external world getting in the way. Without these waking intrusions, scientists may better understand any number of neurobiological issues: What can we learn about the construction of memory by observing it from the outside? What part of the self “wakes up” in a dream and how is that part related to the waking self? How does dream movement compare to real-world motor activity? These questions verge on the philosophical, and yet for the first time there appears to be a concrete way to investigate them.

Even more basic are questions about the nature of this other reality. Lucid dreaming shows that the dream world is amenable to real-time scientific investigation. We can beam down into the dream and execute specific experiments in order to test the dream world’s still-unknown laws of physics, laws that are also (weirdly) psychological laws.

For example, from inside the dream we can drop objects from buildings, test the consistency of dream matter, devise ways to measure how time passes. Not all dream action is random and whimsical. For example, whatever you focus on in a dream becomes more exaggerated. This is probably because whenever we attend to an element in memory, all of its associations get activated. So if we stare at a dream tree then all our ideas about trees pile up in front of us. There is no external world to keep a lid on things. Another example: Whatever we expect to happen in a dream usually does. This is because our minds are not neutral – all our learned and hard-wired assumptions about the world run free in our dreams like escaped felons.

Lucid dreaming is still not widely understood, so exploration is in its infancy. One day scientists and their dream slide rules will Morse-code reports back to their co-investigators up in the waking world. There is also the possibility that as we begin to explore our own internal processes, we may learn something about the external world too, distorted and reflected back into our dreams in ways we’ve hardly begun to appreciate. Until then the whole exploratory endeavour is thrillingly DIY – anyone can join in on the action.

Ocean Mind

Fifty million years ago we shared a common ancestor, a shared seed of mammalian sentience and emotionality. Then we split: one branch stayed on land, and one returned to the water. These two docs are about the mind that returned to the water. How did the ocean shape the brains, the societies, and the sensory worlds of whales and dolphins?

Part 1 & 2 of Ocean Mind

1. The Fluid Society:

right click here to download

2. Into the Whale:

right click here to download

oceanmind-web-bestFifty million years ago we shared a common ancestor, a shared seed of mammalian sentience and emotionality. Then we split: one branch stayed on land, and one returned to the water. These two documentaries for CBC Radio’s Ideas are about the mind that returned to the water. How did the ocean shape the brains, the societies, and the sensory worlds of whales and dolphins? Drawing on the latest thinking from the world of cetacean neurobiology, animal culture, and a lot more, these docs attempt to capture what it’s like to be a whale. Part one is more scientific; part two more imaginative – features an incoherent rant in a flotation tank, and ends with a soundscape of the whale’s auditory world co-created with my friend, electronic music producer Noah Pred (noahpred.com). Producer on this series was the incomparable Bernie Lucht.

Visit Ideas‘ Ocean Mind website here.

The shows were first broadcast Dec 15th and Dec 22nd, 2008.

Dynamic Care

When you live on a ship at sea, everything gets amplified in the narrow interiors: ruminations, moods, behaviors. Enter COVID-19, and the fact that many of us are stuck inside. Ping ping ping, go the signals. I don’t know about you, but I’m starting to get a clear picture of what I’m comfortable with, and what I’m not. 

When you live on a ship at sea, moods, frustrations and personalities all get amplified. All these signals bouncing around the narrow interior.

Enter COVID-19, and the fact that a good chunk of humanity is now stuck inside. Ping ping ping, go the signals. I don’t know about you, but I’m starting to get a pretty clear picture of what I’m comfortable with, and what I’m not. 

There’s never been a more obvious call to take care of ourselves and each other. Everyone knows this is what’s being asked for. Now is The Moment.

The question is, do we know how to do this? I mean, beyond the improvisations, the impromptu Zoom dance parties and the rotating food drop-offs for elderly neighbours. I’m after something broader and more complete: a balanced model for how to think about practice, one that will help us survive the weeks and months and years to come.

Here’s what I’ve come up with. I call it the Dynamic Care Grid, aka, four kinds of caring practice.

dynamic care grid

The most important thing to know about this grid is it’s a scribbly human mess – and that’s fine. All four quadrants are allowed and necessary, because they’re all caring. And, it matters that we try to balance them – within reason. Otherwise our nervous systems will free-run according to our default habit patterns, and we’ll end up stuck in one quadrant – ie, burnt-out (too much “change world”), self-involved (too much “change self”), or checked-out (too much “accept self” and “accept world”). 

Here’s a brief quadrant breakdown:

“Change Self” is about action. These are practices and activities that keep you alive and learning. It’s working out, it’s deliberately meditating on your anxiety, it’s taking up painting and gardening and finally reading Ulysses. This is about choosing to extend the range of conditions in which your body and mind can flourish. Instead of stagnating, you’re alive to your edges, and work intentionally to expand capacity and stay responsive to your changing situation.

Which sounds like a shit-ton of work! So we also need deliberate “Accept Self” practices, that are about rest and kicking back and flipping the bird at your various self-improvement regimens, including my stupid grid. This is the deep skill of appreciating your limits and giving yourself permission to lounge around doing nothing, maybe watching Netflix, maybe lying on your living room floor blowing saliva bubbles as you stare vacantly at the ceiling. It’s sleeping in. It’s playing with your kid, or your dog, or your genitals. 

Of course we’re in danger of sounding a little too self-involved here; fortunately, we have the entire other half of the grid. Start with “Change World,” home of the caregiver and activist and artist. Now is definitely the time to implement your own peculiar creative service missions: to offer free online music classes, or organize Zoom cocktail parties, or sew face masks for healthcare workers. It’s an opportunity to learn firsthand a paradoxical truth of human life: giving is getting.

And … all that said, our own efforts, however inspiring, are not the end of the story. Contemplatives point to a final form of care that doesn’t fit into our caffeinated model of Western activism. This is the deep practice of “Accept World,” by which I mean a kind of listening. What is this moment trying to tell us? Can we be quiet and humble and respectful enough to listen? Or are we going to cover over this sudden pause with more noise, even the noise of our best intentions? Sometimes the real work is adapting ourselves to the changing world, not forcing the world to adapt to us. I’m not sure what this looks like, and that’s the point. It won’t come from my agenda, or from yours.

The recognition that each quadrant has its place can be liberating. It frees us from the “shoulds” imposed by our internal judge, to say nothing of our culture’s biases and blindspots.

Even within the four walls of our homes, there’s a time for rest and for action, for accepting and appreciating things as they are, and for deliberately working to change them. Rest and acceptance restore our energy; action and change express it. They’re all part of a single dynamic of care.

So that’s the theory. What about some actual practices? We look at this in Part Two, here. 

Jeff

PS – I also just posted this piece about how to engage responsibly with meditation in these intense times.

Quarantine Reading

 “Many people rely on rage to do the work [of activism]. But that rage is actually extremely depleting. I don’t show up out of anger or rage. I show up out of love and compassion.” – Lama Rod Owens

Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love and Liberation by angel Kyodo williams, Lama Rod Owens and Jasmine Syedullah. Civilization doesn’t feature a deliberate pause very often. We’re in one now; it’s a good time to read and reflect. Radical Dharma is a beautiful dialogue about the linked enterprises of social and personal liberation. It’s an example of what dynamic care looks like when it’s lived. A must-read for activists with contempt for self-care, and self-care types blind to the grotesque habit-patterns of social inequity and injustice. 

Fatherhood Unlocked with Dan Doty Podcast

From the Fatherhood Unlocked with Dan Doty Podcast, episode #9  Jeff Warren – Grounding into Fatherhood: “In this funny yet honest conversation with Meditation teacher, Jeff Warren, we recall just how essential our practice has been for keeping us grounded and sane on our journey into fatherhood, and equally how parenthood can replace and intensify The Work.

From the Fatherhood Unlocked with Dan Doty Podcast, episode #9  Jeff Warren – Grounding into Fatherhood: “In this funny yet honest conversation with Meditation teacher, Jeff Warren, we recall just how essential our practice has been for keeping us grounded and sane on our journey into fatherhood, and equally how parenthood can replace and intensify The Work. Jeff shares an air of levity to what is otherwise the very heavy truth of being a dad, along with invaluable yet simple tools he uses to regulate his own ADHD and Bipolar mind in order to stay grounded in his body and right there at home with his kids.”

More HERE.

 

 

Release the amateurs!

Healing and growth, self-regulation and self-understanding — these are too idiosyncratic, too personal, too fundamental to depend on specialists-only. We also need to depend on ourselves and one another. In my mind, nothing will accelerate this more than recasting “teaching” as a creative social activity that any informed person can engage in.

One way to deepen a meditation practice is to share it. I don’t mean tell someone about it. I mean guide them.



We may panic at the thought. Get all up in our heads, wonder if we’re doing it right, imagine we’re not worthy, as though guiding meditation were an esoteric mystery that required years of yogic cave-dwelling: “Only once I have purified the golden reaches of my True Self and defeated the demons of Mara can I come down from this mountain and share my wisdom with regular mortals.”

But you don’t need to be an expert meditation teacher to share a simple practice, any more than you need to be an expert cook to show someone how to boil an egg. 

 “In a light way, pay attention to X. If your mind wanders, come back.” 

Most of the skill involved in guiding this instruction is not the skill of an expert, although an expert will also possess it. It’s mostly the skill of being present.

That’s the accessible end of it. There’s a creative end too. I host workshops and retreats that empower people not just to share practice, but also to invent them. In groups of two or three, people take turns guiding each other in simple ten-minute practices of their own invention. I’m always moved by the personality and originality of what emerges in the room. 

Practice can be reconfigured in so many different ways, across so many different forms. It’s one of the most direct and explicit creative mediums, because it works directly on our in-the-moment experience of reality. Some practices involve a lot of instruction. Others very little. Each practice is a mystery, in the sense that you never quite know how it will land. Also, it’s never about you. Understanding how it is never about you is the guide’s primary learning, and part of the mystery! Because who or what the heck is it about??

As we get more experience with the core skills of practice, we develop more confidence around how to customize practice in a way that works for us. This naturally leads to more curiosity about others: what does this person need? What is the context here? What specific challenges have I personally encountered, what have I done about it, and how can I integrate that learning into both the way I guide and the way I share?  

I get very choked watching people take turns caring for each other. Seeing their unique gifts and personalities and hard-won truths start to come through. 

Sharing practice really can change you. You can’t believe you get to do this; the trust of your fellow humans, their sincerity … it’s humbling. It can give rise to a powerful sense of responsibility and love, the privilege of being there at all. Giving is getting.

Separation falls away.

At this point, I honestly can’t even tell where the creativity ends, and the healing begins. It’s like a wave around the room, a wave around the world. Each new guide a lineage in waiting. 

Does this mean we don’t need experienced teachers?

Of course not. As we navigate specific challenges and techniques and traditions, we need them more than ever. Thank you teachers, thank you certification programs – we want more of you. We want all levels of professional. And, when it comes to connection and love and the capacity to be present with each other, we want everyone else too. 

Healing and growth, self-regulation and self-understanding — these are too idiosyncratic, too personal, too fundamental to depend on specialists-only. We also need to depend on ourselves and one another.

In my mind, nothing will accelerate this more than recasting “teaching” as a creative social activity that any informed person can engage in. This is the democratization of mental health.

Release the amateurs!

FURTHER ACTION – How do we make mental health practices and support structures more accessible? One way is to start your own practice group with a few friends, and then guide and learn from each other. To that end, download my free Community Activation Kit, right here . 

A life of practice has incalculable benefits. We can help each other get started. 

Dolphin Minds – A Conversation

What would we learn if we could merge parts of the human brain with those of other species? Might we hear the sounds of the past? Live in naked troops, swapping intimate experiences without words? Or build a new social network? A fun and wide-ranging conversation with two smart friends – Lori Marino and Ben Goertzel – published in the Christmas 2011 issue of New Scientist.

Originally appeared in New Scientist, Dec 27, 2011, here

Enter a dolphin’s fluid, hyper-social consciousness

By Jeff Warren

What would we learn if we could merge parts of the human brain with those of other species? Might we hear the sounds of the past? Live in naked troops, swapping intimate experiences without words? Or build a new social network? Jeff Warren spoke to some experts.

Can we know anything about what it’s like to be a dog, a dolphin, a bat?

The standard response to this was articulated back in 1974 by American philosopher Thomas Nagel in his paper, ”˜What it is like to be a Bat?’. Unlike some of the behaviorist thinkers of that time, who viewed animals as little more than stimulus-response automatons devoid of inner life, Nagel didn’t doubt that bats had some form of experience, that it was “like something” to be a nimble, echolocating mammal swooping through the night sky. But he did doubt our ability to say anything true about that experience that isn’t mere projection or imagination.

Nagel may be right, but I believe the human-to-animal mind question is simply an extreme form of the human-to-human mind question: we can never entirely know another person’s experience especially if they come from a wildly different culture, but there are deep points of overlap that can be expanded. So what are the points of overlap with animals – and how can they be expanded?

One answer may be to compare brains and compare environments. I decided to conduct some thought-experiments via Skype with two of the smartest people I know on the question of brains and non-human consciousness: Lori Marino, a comparative neuro-anatomist at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, and Ben Goertzel, author, mathematician, pioneering AI researcher, and former research director of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence in San Francisco.

The Conversation
JEFF: Imagine that in front of us are the disarticulated brains of three different mammals – a human, a dog, and a dolphin. What might we learn if we were to reassemble these pieces in unusual combinations?

LORI: This is deeply creepy, but it so happens it is not entirely an academic question. Something like this is already going on in biochemical research with the work around chimeras. For example, a couple years ago researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig inserted a human gene into a mouse, which caused it to grow human-like neurons in the language part of its brain. The resulting mouse was different, its vocalizations were deeper.

JEFF: In her book Inside of a Dog, psychologist Alexandra Horowitz talks about how being immersed in a world of layered smells might affect a dog’s sense of time because you have historical smell traces all around.

LORI: When a dog goes for a walk, they can receive stimuli that are remnants of the past because smells hang around. I’ve heard that audition is similar, that if we had a big enough amplifier we could pick up sounds of people that aren’t here anymore, events that have happened in the past – although no animal that I know of has that capacity as far as we can tell.

BEN: For a dog, smell and vision synergize very well together when they are trying to find stuff outside. Whereas for humans, audition and vision tie together, and olfaction not so much. So if you had a mind in which all three senses worked together closely, that would be interesting. Suppose it was possible to paste brain lobes together within some kind of neural growth medium. There is no way to determine what effect this would have – you would probably get nonlinear feedback between lobes that would settle into some unexpected configuration.

JEFF: Yet, at the same time, we know basic brain structures repeat themselves from animal to animal. A dog’s amygdale, say, looks a lot like the human amygdala and there is good evidence that is does many of the same emotional regulation things.

LORI: This is part of the complexity of our task. The brain is not just plug-and-play. If you stick a dog’s big olfactory bulbs on top of the human brain there’s going to be reverberations throughout the levels of the brain to adjust. At the same time, there is a tremendous amount of conservation of function and structure in nervous systems. Once you have a bilaterally-symmetrical animal with a brain – that’s it. Everything else is a variation on the theme. We only do nervous systems one way on this planet and that is interesting.

BEN: There’s another important point here. Like the auditory system, the visual system is largely hierarchical, using linear feed-forward and feed-back connections. Whereas if you look at Berkeley neuroscientist Walter Freeman’s model of the olfactory bulb using nonlinear dynamics, it’s more heterarchical in construction. Activity is more chaotic, with the formation of transient patterns of energy called “strange attractors” and other related structures responding to different recognizable smells.

JEFF: Let’s imagine this nonhierarchical system dominated the whole cortex. How might that be expressed in consciousness, in experience?

BEN: It has to do with breaking things down into parts. The whole process of analysis (breaking into parts) and synthesis (making stuff from parts) is built into the structure of audition and vision. A cognitive system that was based on olfaction wouldn’t be based so much on breaking things down into parts and wholes. More just on completion of patterns, I guess.

There seems to be no system with a high level of general intelligence that’s like that on earth, and there may be a reason for that. It may be that the hierarchical structure is a really useful heuristic for being intelligent. And without it, you don’t get that smart. But then that might be a particular artifact of the environment on the surface of earth. If you believe our theory of physics, hierarchy is wired into the universe, because you’ve got quarks and gluons, then you’ve got particles and atoms and molecules and cells and organisms.

JEFF: So says the hierarchical brain.

BEN: Yeah the hierarchal structure is just innate to the universe, and so of course the brain should be oriented that way too. But on the other hand, maybe that’s only one possible way to understand physics because we have a hierarchy-oriented brain.

JEFF: I want to stay with this idea, because it is a really important one when we talk about higher-level consciousness in animals. One way to get at it is with cetaceans – whales and dolphins. Their huge brains are 30 million years old – that’s about 28 millions years older than our big brains. Except these big brains didn’t evolve on land – they evolved in a totally different medium. Ben, last year you published a fascinating paper with Allan Combs in The Journal of Cosmology that is very relevant here.

BEN: I was trying to understand what a consciousness might be like if it evolved in a fluid environment. You could relate this in a speculative way to the mind of cetaceans, although their situation is not as extreme as what we were positing. I was thinking about the extent to which human psychology is adapted to a world of solid objects. Solid objects are like billiard balls – you get stuff bouncing off other stuff and therefore you get the psychology of causation. You also get Lego blocks and building material so you get hierarchical decomposition of wholes into parts. Things we take for granted in our cognition may be artifacts of adaptation to a world consisting of discrete solid objects.

If you grew up on Jupiter where the environment consists of different fluids of viscosity and different intersecting vortices and solitons, you might have a completely different psychology. The environment would be more chaotic and rapidly changing, where each event – at least compared to our “solid” world – is correlated with multiple possible future and past events. Some kind of phenomenology of flow states would be dominant – it might be less about an agent “willing X” than “flowing in the direction of X.” Also, rather than focusing on building items from components, these organisms might focus instead on creating temporary self-organized patterns within flows of movement.

JEFF: You could say this is one reason the study of cetacean communication may be important.

LORI: This has actually been discussed as an explanation why we still haven’t “cracked” dolphin communication. Human researchers want to develop a whistle repertoire for dolphins and figure out what the whistles mean as discrete sounds, and that has been somewhat fruitful and has hinted that there’s a lot of complexity there. But it could be that we’re going down the wrong path. At her Wild Dolphin Project in Florida, zoologist Denise Herzing is developing some sort of gizmo that will permit genuine two-way communication between dolphins and humans.

JEFF: Flow makes me think of emotion. How does the emotional brain of the dolphin compare to humans?

LORI: In some respects it is more complex. Dolphins and whales have the only brain I know of where, over time, the limbic system has dramatically expanded its connections into the cortex. It has an entire paralimbic lobe that no other animal has, and that’s really interesting.

JEFF: So cetaceans have these large, emotional brains. They also have heavily integrated auditory and visual cortexes that may underlie their amazing echolocation. Some scientists have argued that dolphins and killer and sperm whales may be able to see inside each other’s bodies using echolocation – a bit like ultrasound. A dolphin may know if another dolphin is hungry, sick or pregnant. Plus there is the behavioral data, the amazing synchronicity between dolphins, the way they won’t abandon one another.

BEN: I wonder how the self-model differs between animals. We can sort of get a sense of that across human cultures. Asian cultures to a certain extent, and Stone Age people to an even greater extent will sort of naturally take a more extended view of themselves – they look at the social context over the individual.

I would think that with a dolphin, whatever analogue of its self-model is there would be dramatically different. If you always travelled with the same posse and could see inside them, could see if they were stressed or relax, if getting ready to take some action, or be able to see if they are in love with another dolphin every time they swim by. You would naturally get a kind of extended self in way that humans don’t have. Still be some individual nature – dolphin has to protect itself and feed, so not total hive mind – but the individuated self like we have wouldn’t be there.

How you tie that into neuroanatomy is unclear to me. Presumably a large part of what the dolphin cortex is doing is this sort of refined spatial/social modeling that humans don’t have to do and are not that good at. You could hypothesize that if we grafted that aspect of the dolphin’s cortex into a human, all of a sudden we would try to detect very fine details of the physical movements of those around us. We would gravitate towards living in a small tribe of naked people who walked around looking at each other and sensing each other all the time because our natural inclinations would be to have a kind of group embodied extended self.

LORI: There has been a lot of talk over years about the dolphin having an extended self as well as an individual self. There is a dynamic quality to the dolphin way of life. Of course they don’t build houses or make weapons – other beings are their substrate, in a very real sense. It’s interesting to think they evolved from herd animals. They may be an example of a species which has taken the herd mentality mind and jacked it up to a whole new level of complexity.

JEFF: It makes me think that maybe cetacean Enlightenment is individuation.

LORI: Maybe! It does explain a lot of odd social behaviors – mass stranding, synchronization, fact that if want to catch a whole bunch of dolphins all you have to do is go after a few one of them – they don’t leave each other. There is a real social imperative in their world that is strange even to us, as social as we are. Compared to dolphins we’re not social at all.

BEN: So Jeff, what would happen if you took the regions of a human cortex and cerebellum that are adapted for tool building and integrated those with a dolphin brain – and gave them thumbs and fingers?

JEFF: They’d build social networking software, except amplified. They’d build long snaking systems of luge-like mirrors that would channel, direct and facilitate even more social closeness but also amplify those effects in all kinds of inventive and unexpected ways. You could imagine all kinds of new social and cognitive insights.

BEN: They’d engineer a global dolphin hive mind.

LORI: Humpback whales already have that.

JEFF: But would we humans be able to connect with a mind like that?

BEN: When humans describe something they make it precise, divide into parts, recombine them – that’s they how build words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs. Dolphin language may enforce and harmonize with a quite different way of thinking about the world which we can’t understand that well. You can hypothesize it is somehow about flows and forces of influence, that it isn’t about breaking into parts and building up again.

Maybe these two ways of looking at the world are complementary, like the wave and particle in quantum mechanics. Or maybe they are completely incommensurable perspectives on the world that can’t be added up.

LORI: Except at the same time there is still a huge psychological overlap between humans and cetaceans that has to be accounted for. Decades of work on dolphin cognition tells us they are different but they also recognize themselves in mirrors as we do, they are capable of learning and understanding a symbolically-based syntactical language, their memory systems are very similar to ours. Cognitively they are much more like us than we might expect given other divergences. I also suspect that we share basic emotions such as love – and from working with them, I can tell you they definitely have a sense of humour.

JEFF: In a way we are touching on the ultimate cosmic question: what is shared and what is distinct? I would argue there is always a pith of oneness between any life form, just as there is also a multiplicity of difference. An infinite number of perspectives looking out from something that is common. So even between us and a dolphin, at a high level there is a distinct perspective difference that may be incommensurate in the way Ben describes. But on another level, I can look at a dolphin swimming in the water, and know something about the feeling of water, and movement, and the feeling of having a body. It’s different of course, but the point is there is an overlap: both the fact of our mutual skin-and-bone embodiment, and the shared world in which we swim and play.

LORI: In the end it comes down to how far or how close in you want to get. Where do you want to put the lens? The difference between us comes down to a resolution issue.

Reading references

Ben Goertzel and Allan Combs wrote Water Worlds, Naive Physics, Intelligent Life, and Alien Minds, Journal of Cosmology 5, 897-904.

Among Lori Marino’s papers are Convergence in intelligence and self-awareness, Journal of Cosmology, vol. 14; and Cetacean brains: How aquatic are they?, The Anatomical Record, 290.

Jeff Warren wrote Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness (Random House, 2007). You can listen to his two CBC Radio documentaries on whale consciousness here.

 

While You Were Out

Two CBC Ideas documentaries on sleep and dreaming. We spend 1/3 of our lives asleep, and yet there is no consensus as to why. Sleep and dreaming are deeply mysterious. The more you examine them, the stranger and more variegated they get.

While You Were Out (Part 1)

right click here to download

While You Were Out (Part 2)

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whileyouwereout-sleeplab_webTwo documentaries on sleep and dreaming, written while researching The Head Trip. We spend 1/3 of our lives asleep, and yet there is no consensus as to why. Sleep and dreaming are deeply mysterious; the more you examine them, the stranger and more variegated they get. The idea for the docs was to pair advances in sleep science with first-person descriptions of different parts of the night – what is it like to fall asleep, to dream, to be in slow wave sleep, to wake in the night, to become lucid in a dream? It’s all here, including an admittedly bizarre reenactment of a Hawaiian lucid dream.

”˜While You Were Out’ was produced by Alan Guettel. The shows were first broadcast April 10th and April 11th, 2006.

CNN Coronavirus: Fact vs Fiction Podcast

From CNN: “The stress of this the pandemic is getting to us, and today’s election is only heightening the anxiety for some. Today CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta shares tips for coping with all this extra anxiety. Jeff Warren tells us about his experience with meditation and explains some of the benefits.”

From the CNN Coronavirus: Fact vs Fiction Podcast with Dr. Sanjay Gupta, episode Breathe In, Breath Out: “The stress of the pandemic is getting to us, and today’s election is only heightening the anxiety for some. On today’s podcast, CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta shares some tips for coping with all this extra anxiety. Jeff Warren tells us about his experience with meditation and explains some of the tangible benefits. At the end of the episode, Warren leads us all in a 5-minute guided meditation that can be done even while waiting in line to vote today.”

The Animal in Us, The Human in Them

“They have no future without us, the chimps, the elephant, the whales and the rest. None. The question that we, the keepers, are facing is whether we’d mind a future without them ” – “whether we’d be bothered by an Earth with no living vestiges of our own differently shaped selves.” – Charles Siebert

From The Globe and Mail Books section, Saturday October 3rd, 2009.

Chimp-WEBReviewed here: The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society, by Frans de Waal; The Wauchula Woods Accord: Toward a New Understanding of Animals, by Charles Siebert

“The book of nature is like the Bible: Everyone reads into it what they want.” So writes eminent primatologist Frans de Waal about a third of the way into his latest, The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society. As nature readers go, de Waal is among the most accomplished. He has spent the better part of 30 years studying chimpanzees and bonobos, sometimes in the wild, but mostly in his capacity as director of the Living Links Center at Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta, Ga.

And what a sobering education the apes have given him. For six books, de Waal has chronicled their scheming and their turf battles, their amazing problem-solving abilities and sexual politics. From the start, it has been clear to de Waal that the apes represent a kind of proto-human society, with many of our same patterns and preoccupations. These days, there is nothing controversial about this view; it’s trotted out by pundits and newspaper columnists at every opportunity, all of them enthralled by evolutionary psychology – the idea that all of human nature can be explained by adaptive responses formed on the prehistoric savannah – as a kind of arch-explanatory paradigm. If we want to understand ourselves, the thinking goes, then look to our ape ancestors, who exhibit many of the same traits in more elemental form.

De Waal is very much with this program, and he is an astute enough cultural commentator to recognize how the specific details of this narrative influence politics and society. If you believe that humans are fundamentally competitive and selfish – “nature red in tooth and claw,” the body a teaming aggregate of “selfish genes” scrambling over each other to maximize individual profit – then perhaps you let the free markets rule the day. “Can’t fight nature,” shrugs the conservative.

But if you believe humans are by nature altruistic and conciliatory, then perhaps you organize society in a more socially responsible mode, with an emphasis on collective interests.

This, finally, is the news – the very good news – from de Waal’s book: Yes, like our ape ancestors, humans are “incentive-driven animals, focused on status, territory and food security.” But we are also group animals, sensitive to injustice, highly co-operative and sympathetic. We are, in short, both Canadian and American. And so are the apes. And off we go, into the new age of empathy, in what is for the most part an enjoyable tour through a kinder and gentler animal kingdom.

De Waal is an excellent tour guide, refreshingly literate outside his field, deft at stitching bits of philosophy and anthropology into the narrative. He is also pleasingly opinionated; he seems to have columnist aspirations of his own, and his frequent – usually thoughtful and balanced, occasionally facile – digressions on morality and U.S. politics read like boilerplate New York Times editorials.

Empathy, de Waal says, is one of our most innate capacities, one that likely evolved from mammalian parental care. It begins in the body, a deep unconscious synchrony between mother and child that sets the tone for so many mammalian interactions. When someone smiles, we smile; when they yawn, we yawn; emotion is contagious.

The effects of this can be profound; at one point, de Waal describes some research on long-term married couples, who, studies have apparently shown, do come to resemble each other over time. It is as if they “internalize” one another, de Waal writes, the constant synchronization of facial expression and mood slowly morphing two into one.

And chimps, too, feel this contagion – apes ape. They mirror and they console, they grieve and they co-operate, they hold to principles of fairness beyond personal gain. And more besides. De Waal is thorough in his documentation, sometimes too thorough: The second half of the book reads at times like a social scientist’s checklist of category-fulfilling anecdotes.

He makes up for it in his final chapter, which presents a rich and multilayered model of empathy. Like a Russian doll, simple body-to-body “state matching” is contained within a larger concern for others, and this in turn is contained within the imaginative ability to take on another’s perspective. As humans, this may be our greatest gift, though, as de Waal demonstrates, perhaps not ours alone.

If de Waal only points us toward this intriguing and still mysterious perspective-taking capacity, journalist Charles Siebert – also a poet, and thus perhaps more willing to take literary risks – takes us further. In his Wauchula Woods Accord: Toward a New Understanding of Animals, Siebert tries to go in – through the eye, directly into the “deep-brown, druggy swirl” of a chimp’s steady gaze.

The chimp in question is Roger, former circus performer and now resident of the Center for Great Apes in Wauchula, Fla. Siebert meets Roger one afternoon while touring the rehabilitation facilities. The author, we learn, is “uncommonly attuned” to chimp vibrations; several encounters with chimps in the past have left deep impressions on him, and Roger himself seems to recognize in Siebert something familiar. They become acquainted, as it were, and Siebert decides one night to hold a vigil in front of Roger’s cage, for eight hours sitting face to face with his “primatological doppelganger,” wondering at Roger’s almost-humanness and his own forsaken animality, locked together into a strange communion, “like two primates,” Siebert writes, “passing in the night.”

This single encounter is the primary narrative thread of the book, and if at first the device feels a bit contrived, it eventually pays off – indeed, after returning again and again to Roger looking out from his enclosure, his long fluttering hands, the tight whorls in his facial hair, something unexpected beings to happen.

Not unlike de Waal’s “internalization,” these moment-by-moment descriptions create a present-ness with Roger that is rare in the literature. It goes, finally, beyond anecdote, because Roger isn’t actually doing anything clever, or primal, or even interesting. He’s just being. How weird, we come to realize – how completely astonishing, in fact, his being actually is. And so we are taken out of ourselves, into a gently expanded community of nature.

If Roger is an avatar of suffering at human hands, he also represents something new: a “humanzee,” in Siebert’s language, one of several thousand exiles from the wild, domesticated (in Hollywood studios and traveling circuses and roadside zoos) just enough to be estranged from their heritage and then abandoned in an inhospitable limbo state somewhere between animal and man. Siebert tells the stories of other humanzees, sometimes pulpish and bizarre, as in Stalin’s dreams of a Red Army of human-ape hybrids, sometimes heartbreaking, as in the story of a young female chimp raised as human and then returned to the forest.

The writing is terrific, breezy and good-natured, with just the right amount of controlled outrage. The book’s emotional centre is about elephants, not chimps, an almost biblical parable of “wholesale psychological and cultural collapse” that Seibert first told in the pages of The New York Times Magazine. Their parents slaughtered before their eyes, and bereft of parental guidance, a generation of young African and Indian elephants are wreaking havoc on the countryside, trampling huts, goring villagers, even – in an act of human-like perversity that’s as revealing as anything else – raping and killing rhinos.

The wild isn’t just in revolt; it’s suffering full-blown PTSD. This is the judgment of Uganda-born animal ethologist Eve Abe, who noticed the similarities between the rogue elephant teenagers and the hollow-eyed child soldiers of her village, who often witnessed their own parents slaughtered and grew up in horrific conditions.

Like humans, sensitive elephants depend on a web of familial and social relations for orientation and guidance. Without it, they unhinge. They are animals, in Siebert’s memorable phrase, with “minds enough to lose.”

The Wauchula Woods Accord is an animal manifesto, a plea to see our wild cousins as integral parts of ourselves. With the world’s remaining wilderness frontiers collapsing, this recognition can’t come soon enough. “They have no future without us, the chimps, the elephant, the whales and the rest. None. The question that we, the keepers, are facing is whether we’d mind a future without them … whether we’d be bothered by an Earth with no living vestiges of our own differently shaped selves.”

Can you care about something too much?

Recently I did a Do Nothing Project broadcast on the subject of equanimity, the skill of accepting our experience in the moment. I did OK for the intro and the guided meditation, but then things went off the rails. A post about the perils of losing yourself in caring.

Recently I did a Do Nothing Project broadcast on the subject of equanimity, the skill of accepting our experience in the moment, without resistance or interference.

I did OK for the intro and the guided meditation, but then things went off the rails.

First, our four-month old son Eden started crying in the next room. I could feel Sarah’s annoyance – I have a loud voice, and she’d asked me to keep my talk at a reasonable level during the broadcast. Except I guess I don’t really know how to do that, so Eden was wailing, and I could see Sarah anxiously checking the video monitor, and it also happened to be sweltering in the room so sweat was pouring down my face, and then – right on time – comes The Question. 

More than any other practice-related question, this is the one I dread. It gets asked at every retreat and class, and on this day two different people emailed it in. Here’s how one fellow put it: 

“If equanimity involves learning to accept what is, then is equanimity training yourself not to care?”

It’s a deep question, one that gets to the heart of meditation and practice. It is also, for me, a triggering question. And so, already rattled by the crying and the heat, I gave a rambling answer – with lots of panicked hand-waving – and then abruptly ended the broadcast. Afterwards, I thought: ‘Did that really just happen?’ Did I just completely lose my equanimity talking about equanimity?’ 

Yes I did.

We all have things we believe in, deeply held opinions that shape who we are and what we do. For myself, learning about equanimity was a revelation. All my life I’d been an intense and fixated person, agonized about this, feverish about that. I held no opinions lightly; either I cared about something passionately, or it was dead to me. Equanimity showed me how to hold my cares – and myself – more peacefully.  

But then, as I got into practice, my old habit of fixation found a new subject: meditation itself. This happens to a lot of practitioners. “I want to get relaxed NOW!” We bring our habits of pushing and control to an undertaking that, at its heart, is about trusting and letting go of the need to control. 

In my own case, other, darker tendrils of conditioning began to creep in. The most toxic was an old family belief that equates any attempt to help myself as the height of selfishness. If this inner critic had a voice, it would be Kaa, the hypnotist serpent from The Jungle Book: ‘Of coursssee you sssell meditation Jeffrey, that’ss because you don’t care about people. Children are ssstarving in Africa, and all you do is sssit on your asssss.’

This message is so ingrained in my nervous system, that even now, when I speak about the importance of acceptance, I get a shadowy defensive feeling around my eyes, like I should be a little ashamed of myself. And so, predictably, I overcompensate. My arguments become shrill, my actions exaggerated; I end up distorting the truth I want so badly to communicate. 

But equanimity has nothing whatsoever to do with our passions and our opinions about the world, because it’s not actually happening in the world. Equanimity happens in our subjective experience. Equanimity is a bubble of space that lives inside us, that lets us relate to sensations and convictions lightly in the moment, so that, in the next moment, we can act more sanely and effectively. 

Equanimity is hearing the baby cry, or feeling our defensiveness (our anger, our hurt) in reaction to something, and instead of acting from inside these intensities, we expand out, and act from our poise. And sometimes we succeed, and sometimes we fail. We fail because every one of us has something that hooks us, some beautiful neurotic passion that overwhelms our composure. 

I think this is exactly as it should be: welcome to the human condition. And, we should try to have equanimity anyway.

Why? Because equanimity is the opposite of not caring. We need it, to ensure the things we care about have the best chance of being expressed and honoured and protected. But of course, if I’m going to successfully reach you with this message, then it’s me who needs equanimity. Right now I care about it just a little too much.

Dropping In – An Omega Podcast

From the Dropping In – An Omega Podcast: “In his conversation with Omega digital media director Cali Alpert, Jeff reveals why he thinks meditation is one of the most radical acts, how we can tailor a practice to fit our individual needs, and how we learn best in community.”

From the Dropping In – An Omega Podcast, Season 3, episode #1: Make Your Nervous System Sing: “Jeff Warren, coauthor of Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics, speaks from his own experience with ADD when he says that a more fun, accessible approach to meditation is urgently needed today.

In his conversation with Omega digital media director Cali Alpert, Jeff reveals why he thinks meditation is one of the most radical acts, how we can tailor a practice to fit our individual needs, and how we learn best in community.”

More HERE.

 

Expanding Mind I – Science, Consciousness, Reality

Fun talk with writer scholar Erik Davis, including riffs on hypnagogia, lucid dreaming, scientific vs spiritual knowledge, the role of science journalists in describing the nature of reality, how ocean may shape mind, and more.

right click here to download
realityA conversation with cultural critic and scholar Erik Davis for his Progressive Radio Network show “Expanding Mind.”Check out Davis’ website –  Techgnosis – has much excellent writing. Fun talk, with riffs on hypnagogia, lucid dreaming, scientific vs spiritual knowledge, the role of science journalists in describing the nature of reality, how ocean may shapes mind, and more.

Core Skills of Meditation and Practice

If a practice is important to us, if it’s deepening our engagement with the world, if it’s teaching us about who we are, then you can be sure many of these basic skills are present and probably increasing. Understanding the skills is central to being your own life teacher, and to sharing practice with others.

In any committed practice – whether a person is playing music, moving in martial arts, or sitting in meditation – very particular mind-body skills are being trained, again and again. I consider the following four skills to be part of the common language of practice: concentration, clarity, care, and equanimity.

If a practice is important to us, if it’s deepening our engagement with the world, if it’s teaching us about who we are and helping us feel connected to others, then you can be sure at least two or three of these skills are spinning away in the background. These skills are often easier to notice and train in seated meditation, where there are relatively few distractions. But seated meditation is not for everyone.

Learning to recognize and develop these skills allows us to turn any life activity into a deep and transformative practice. They spiritualize the secular, and thus are central to being our own life teacher.

Here’s my breakdown:

CONCENTRATION 
Concentration is the skill of choosing what to pay attention to, and then staying with it as long as we want. With commitment, concentration leads to stability, calm and satisfying experiences of merging with the action. Examples of concentration are getting absorbed in playing a sport or an instrument, getting absorbed in the sensation of breathing, or maybe in the experience of making love. We tap into concentration anytime we deliberately choose to commit our attention in some way. It also allows us to focus on something besides our worries!

CLARITY
Clarity is the skill of noticing what’s really there. It leads to sharper discernment and increased wisdom. It gets trained in many practices, from insight meditation to psychotherapy, from nature observation to journaling to conscious communication. Any practice or activity that teaches self-awareness increases clarity. As does anything that teaches us to be curious about the patterns in the world around us. 

CARE
Care is the skill of saturating both our actions and our perceptions with love and respect. It leads to doing things well and to treating people well, including ourselves. We exercise this in so many activities: Anytime we craft something with love, anytime we notice the humanity of the people around us, anytime we write a letter of appreciation. The way we care for ourselves and each other may look different at different times, but it is part of a single dynamic process.

EQUANIMITY
Equanimity is the skill of non-interference, of allowing self and world to be exactly what they are in a given moment. It is the basis of honesty and openness and trust. When we’re vulnerable in a conversation, when we trust the creative work that’s coming through us, when we pause and exhale and are actually present for what’s going on (pleasant or unpleasant) … all of these train equanimity. Equanimity is everything. 

Three of these skills are at the heart of my teacher Shinzen Young’s paradigm of “Mindful Awareness”

The more we exercise these skills – in any practice – the stronger they get. Eventually, they start to overflow into other parts of our life. That’s when a practice goes supernova.

Now it’s no longer just some thing we do in a narrow context. The skills have become habits of mind and heart that are available everywhere.

 

 

FURTHER VIEWING

Sometimes I call these four skills the “four medicines” – here is a video of me talking about them, followed by a guided meditation.

Thanks to my  teacher and mentor Shinzen Young, whose understanding of the core “attentional skills” of mindfulness continues to inform my own. He’s written a lot on this subject, but to get a real sense of Shinzen’s precision nerdiness, video is the way to go. Here is Shinzen on concentration, sensory clarity, and equanimity.

The skill of “care” is my own addition. There are many many ways to organize human experience. What skills would you add?

Dreaming as Practice

Jennifer Dumpert teaches a course on dreaming at Pacifica Graduate Institute in California. A short video interview I did for her class, talking all about Aristotle and houses on wheels and “memory catching” Brenda Lee’s Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.

Click the image above, or right click here to download the whole video.

UrbanDreamscapeJennifer Dumpert has an interesting dream practice: when she has a memorable dream she wakes up and walks out of her San Francisco pad and then looks for some evocative place in the city to embed the dream. Maybe it’s the slope of a particular awning over an old storefront, or a particularly vivid red stop sign. She embeds dream details into the psychogeography, and then takes pictures of the scene so she remembers where she put the dream. She’s done this for years. Now when she walks around the city it’s hectic with dream information, two worlds overlapping in all kinds of unexpected ways. You can read more about her project here: www.urbandreamscape.com

Jennifer is a professor at Pacifica Graduate Institute in California, where she teaches a course on dreaming. Here is a short video interview we did for her class.

Practices Are Habits We Choose

Lately I’ve been thinking about the word “practice”. Both established practices lots of people do – yoga, tennis, active listening – and weird customized practices people invent – visualizing success, pretending to be a tree, or darning moth holes while listening to Amy Winehouse. 

Lately I’ve been thinking about the word “practice”.

It’s been rolling around in my mind and running under my thoughts. Meditation practice, artistic practice, piano practice, sports practice, therapy practice, work practice. Whatever. Both established practices many people do – yoga, tennis, active listening – and weird customized practices people invent – visualizing success, pretending to be a tree, or darning moth holes while listening to Amy Winehouse. 

My working definition of practice is any activity or way of being that we engage in regularly and deliberately. We all have habits that creep up on us and get in our way: the popular habit of procrastination, for instance.

Practices are the habits we choose. In that choice, we shape how we experience our minds, our bodies, our life. 

I think practice, however strange or mundane a particular one may seem on the surface, is one of the keys to mental and emotional health. As such, I think our practices can support us to make positive change on the planet. I think any practice that we commit to with intelligence and heart will train many of the same skills that get trained in sitting meditation. And I think all practices, over time, teach us important things about ourselves and the world.

The journalist in me has been delighted by the inventiveness and range of people’s practices. For example: 

Mary, a writer. Mary has a practice of holding eye contact with animals, even – in her words – “a guinea pig I recently taxidermied.” She explains: “The act of looking deeply into a face tells my nervous system that I’m not alone. In the purest, non-narrative way, it reminds me of the shared experience of being alive.”

Or Richard, a limo driver. For hours on end, he drives. It’s a job, but also, it’s not a job. “I call it ‘windshield time'” he says. “No radio, no talking, just me and the road.” He needs this time, he says. “It gives me peace.”

*Or any of these humans, who share a range of creative practices, ones that benefit both ourselves and the world.

For myself, practice has been an indispensable part of my life. From my swimming practice, which helps manage my energy, to various awareness practices, which help manage my sanity. Even this writing and sharing is a practice, part of a deliberate strategy I use to work out creative ideas.

What’s your practice?  

I love hearing how different practices work for different people, the many ways they train us and teach us and change us. Some good examples here.

It’s exciting to think of practice this way, as a creative medium every human shares, whose ‘works’ we can (and should) pass around and try on for ourselves. There’s no hierarchy from this perspective; no special artist over here, or enlightened person over there. We all have something to teach each other about being human.

So: go practice something!