Dr. Philippe Goldin and Ryushin Paul Haller spoke tonight as part of the California Academy of Sciences lecture series in San Francisco, at the packed Herbst Theater. This was the last lecture of this season, and we learned tonight that every lecture of this season was sold out, including this one.
Goldin has a Ph.D. in neuroscience and spent 6 years in India and Nepal serving as an interpreter to Tibetan Buddhist lamas. He now works at Stanford. Haller is a Buddhist monk and Abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center.
Goldin opened by saying that now is a time of convergence, a meeting of East and West. The East has had centuries of Zen Buddhist traditions that seem to draw upon some ancient wisdom, and the West has rigorous scientific methodology and study and it excites him that these things are now untied. We now know that zen practices stimulate the brain in a very measurable way, and have tangible, positive effects.
Haller pointed out that both neuroscience and zen are "amoral," meaning they are not attempting to prescribe any sort of moral rightness or wrongness. Instead they seek to illuminate and explain "what is." Incidentally, I found Haller's mannerisms and way of speaking interesting. On the one hand, he's an old man that one might be mistaken for a crazy person or something. But he's actually very thoughtful in his speaking. Also he's Irish and has a bit of an Irish accent, though he's also lived in Russia, Afghanistan, Japan, and Thailand. His appearance and accent don't really match the stereotype of the kind of wiseman that he is.
Meditation Exercise
Haller said he'd like us to do an exercise with him, and that we might find it silly but that it might help us. He asked us to imagine for the next two or three minutes, that we "are not ourselves." Meaning we have no concept of what it's like to be who we are, and instead we are just experiencing the present moment.
He then apologized for asking this, but he said we should all stand up. I thought this moment alone said a lot about him. His apology was sincere in that he was acknowledging that he is kind of invading our personal space by asking us to do anything at all. And we didn't even have some terrible forced interaction with strangers, like Jane McGonigal's disaster thumb wrestling thing. Anyway, after standing up, he asked us to sit down, but in a different way than usual. He demonstrated the method, and said we should imagine that we are not familiar with our chairs, that perhaps they won't be able to hold our weight. So sit down very carefully, and with much attention to whether the chair can take the weight, and what it feels like as we sit down. He then asked us to close our eyes as he suggested we think about our breathing, the feeling of our feet on the floor, the feeling of the muscles on our face, and so on.
This is, of course, meditation. It's something I know a fair amount about from reading science about it, but not something I know of first-hand. Somewhat ironically, he got my attention here. (The irony is that meditation all about the direction of attention.) It's actually very difficult to just think about those things he's saying without thinking about anything else. The mind is whirring and buzzing with thoughts about every kind of thing, and meditation is an attempt to clear the mind of those things. Think of it as trying to balance on one leg. A master of balance is actually someone who, when a slight imbalance begins, can very quickly correct it and return to a balanced stance. Likewise, an expert at meditation can return to an empty mind very quickly when stray thoughts enter.
I am no master. I have written
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Sunday, May 27, 2012 at 11:55PM 
