The Science of an Optimal Mind - Dan Brown, Ph.D. | The FitMind Podcast

and we call that sange the complete purification or eradication of all negative states in the flourishing of 80 85 positive states of mind all at once i happen to think that has profound implications for mental health they live in a world of total positivity all the time because it affects everybody around you um well dr brown welcome to the fit mine podcast thanks for joining me my pleasure so i guess starting at the beginning how did you first get into meditation and psychology well i started out as a molecular biologist actually but when i was in grad graduate school or before undergraduate school i was growing invisible bugs in the in the lab all day and that seemed irrelevant during the vietnam era war so i just left the field and changed the psychology and i never turned back after that i've been a psychologist since 1971 i've been harvard medical school for 38 years i've been teaching meditation for the tibetans for 48 years it's a long time wow yeah so in this episode i was hoping to focus on really what the human mind is capable of um and what it what its full potential looks like in terms of experiencing positive qualities of mind like focus vitality joy and clarity and so i was hoping you could share from your experience and your research what the mind is really capable of well enormous amount i come at that from two perspectives for the last 30 years i taught a course in performance actually at harvard medical school i do one one a year for surgeons and primary care docs another version for judges i have another version for ceos the best of west western psychology and positive psychology on performance excellence and then i've covered pretty much the translate tibetans for for almost 40 years now so we've covered the map there and that's it that's a much more far-reaching map than we have in the west so i can answer that question from two perspectives east and west i guess i'm more interested in the west because it seems to me that tibetans have just been at this for longer and they have a more refined sense of and more refined training tools for getting the mind into these optimal states well there is a literature on performance excellence and it's been around for about 30 30 30 40 years in the west it started out with athletes but now it's extended out in all directions for being the best at whatever you're doing in life so one of the things that we do in performance excellence is we try and evoke a peak performance state so if i would say to you imagine the time an activity that you want to be the best of the best in whatever you're doing maybe your golf game maybe a tennis game it may be your work so think of something that you want to be the best in and think of a time that you were engaging in that activity and you were the very best at what you were doing and remember way back into the when you're doing the best that you could do really performing at the peak performance level or ideal performance level what was that state like see if you can identify the characteristics of that state what happens is most people can do that so we call that a discrete state of consciousness it's different from our own normal waking state no we're normal waking state we're very distracted we can't pay attention to anything and our mind is filled with wandering a lot and filled with just junk random thoughts but if people are in peak performance mode they have a heightened state of attentiveness so if you look at the neuroscience of that there's an area of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex which is we have competing tension on demands if i were to show you an index card it had a big print and it said green but the color of the text was red you do a double tape do you focus on the color and you focus on the text so when you have a task like that with repeating intentional demands and it requires you to put some effort to focus on one thing and turn the other thing out that's called a stroop test in psychology and when people are given competing potential demands like that they activate the acc the anterior cingulate cortex the acc is that area of the brain that's under active in children and adults who have attention deficit disorder riddle into that or i'll selectively activate the acc and put it back online is drugs there's medications when you do concentration meditation not mind awareness meditations concentration-based meditation you activate the acc when a performance when you hypnotize somebody they activate the acc when an athlete goes into a spontaneously into a peak performance zone and they're in the flow they activate the acc the brain's an equal opportunity employer it doesn't make a difference where they use mind-body techniques or drugs they all they have the common pathway of activating the acc and put it back online so all these methods involve a heightened state of attentiveness so when a person is in a flow state they are in a heightened state of attentiveness mike shakes and mihai who did his research on flow said there's two things involved in flow states one is heightened state of attentiveness the second is what he calls a skill to challenge race so you you find out what your level of skill is and you and you're always challenging yourself just a little bit above that if you go too high above that you have a disorganizing effect of anxiety if you don't challenge yourself enough you get bored and you get distracted so the idea is always finding new ways of challenging ourselves who are always learning something and staying on that edge and if you do that in the heightened state of attentiveness then you're in a flow state yes so that's the western side and i actually think i misspoke i meant to say that i'm more intrigued at least currently by the eastern um what the eastern world has found in this regard and it's wondering if you could talk a little about your study mapping complex mind states and what you found let me say something about the contrast between east and west yeah of course the west has tended to focus on short duration states of performance excellence being at the top of your game a judge being totally attentive to in the courtroom a ceo running a business meeting with exquisite skill that's performance excellence short duration doing things well whereas in the east the emphasis is on being the master at everyday living it's so we can in western terms we can call that a state rate distinction you can either develop short duration states of performance excellence which is the western emphasis like for athlete performing the best of his game or you can emphasize just being and manifesting everything about everyday life is mastery that's the approach in the east so it's very different i think when i first in 1970 early 1970s for nine years i lived with a tibetan master at summers in new jersey and the thing i learned most about living with him was that he had a simple lifestyle his his teaching was about how he lived his life fully every moment that's the emphasis in the eastern literature how to live a life fully with everything you do we call that now in western terms we call that vital engagement in everything you're doing so how to translate those temporary performance excellence times to doing everything well all day long that's the difference between the two and in the eastern traditions at least in tibetan buddhism there are three maps the first is what takes you from the very beginning of practice up to a taste of awakening the second is how you stabilize awakening so you have it all the time and the third is how you develop that awakening to full enlightenment those are the three maps so and you have the only study that on the north circuit of awakening and what is awakening for those listening who might not be familiar with the term or how would you define it you operate out of a limitless timeless non-localized field of awareness you're operating under that huge vast expanse being at a huge vast expanse the totality of brilliantly knowing awareness it's lucid it's bright it's loving and it's absolutely boundless and limitless this is accessible to everyone yes it's part of what we call buddha natures and everybody has it but most people don't recognize it so you have to get the right teachings to learn how to recognize it so what the reason is because the ordinary mind clouds it over and if you look at something like the hot sutra mantra which is very popular sanskrit goes like this what it literally means is gone gone gone way beyond gone way way beyond oh what a realization now let me unpack that for you because the entire path is there usually what happens is when we start visibility of practice we are so caught up in thought if you look at the western studies on mind wandering mode the average person spends at least 50 to 60 percent of his waking time in one wondering mode so we're we're caught up in fantasies mostly about the self daydreams about the self self importance and most of those doubts about ourselves so that the mind one alone has a kind of negative feeling to it quality to it to spend at least over half your waking existence in my wondering mode that's not a very trained mind and we get so caught up and thought we get lost in it we think that's all there is i think therefore i am according to khan or this card so we identify with thinking so if you concentrate the mind down focus on one object like say the rising and falling of the breath when you get very deeply concentrated there are nine stages of concentration but you learn to stay on the object for longer longer periods of time and thought elaboration winds down and eventually stops you get long periods of stillness absent of any thought activity so if you're not operating a thought where you're operating out of you begin to see that you're operating on that field of awareness absent of all thought because when you're not distracted by a thought or caught up in it you can see that you can you can shift from operating out of thought mode conceptual thought mode to operating under the pure field of awareness and awareness has attention to it it's much faster than thought and whatever your mind puts his attention on it puts his awareness or intention on it does just that without an interference we call that making the mind serviceable so whatever their mind's intention is it just does that immediately with lightning speed so you learn to operate out of awareness mode the field of awareness rather than operating on a thought that's the first gote awareness gone beyond thought you don't get rid of thought you just shift your basis of operation so you're not operating out of thought you're operating under the field of awareness instead in a stable way and that's what concentration trains you to do you quiet the mind enough and focus and you so you hold that view of operating out of the field of awareness in a stable way we say the view is the meditation and every level of practice is a different view it's like a key that opens up a gateway to a whole level of practice so now you've gone beyond thought to operating out of that field of awareness but still that awareness is contaminated by the sense of self i still think that dan's doing the meditation but if i do emptiness himself and i go beyond the sense of self i can operate out of that field of awareness cleanup of self so i'm not operating on a thought and i'm not operating on myself that's the second got the awareness itself gone beyond personal identity so i can actually shift out of self mode which i spend a lot of my waking time during the day and you know operate out of that larger field of awareness cleanup of thought and self that's the second gotta then i come to realize that time is is a construction of mine so if i look at that field of awareness and i really look into it carefully i can see that events will still come and go within the field of awareness within time the field itself is changeless and timeless and i can lock onto that timelessness of the field then i can open it up so it's not only timeless and because time and space are related i can open it up in such a way that it's not only timeless but it's boundless and huge infinite and if i do that in the right way without getting mental constructions back and imposing limits and boundaries on it i can cut through those limits and boundaries so it's truly limitless so i have to do it carefully enough so that i have two things now it's changes in timeless on the one hand it's boundless and limitless on the other hand you know that's what i'm operating out of now now that that larger field of awareness is everything is interconnected within that field it contains the everything every all the content of the universe is connected within that larger field that's the gateway of the mahayana vehicle that's why it's called a great vehicle because it's a huge perspective still i'm operating on a duality i'm still looking at something somewhere else in the field and i still localize my consciousness but with the right instructions i can learn to drop away the duality with the right instruction i gotta learn to drop away the localization so i be i become that unbounded homeless so now i'm operating on there's a car crossing over instructions they're very preciously given what we call them pith instructions and they explain exactly what to focus on and how to focus in such a way that opens up awakened awareness so then i drop away the localization and i am that unbounded wholeness and it's infinitely vast huge and loving and vast so what we found was that in so that's the that's the the second the third shift is gone way beyond the convention of time and space to boundless timeless awareness and since that's a bigger shift that's linguistically marked gone way beyond the convention of time and space and the fourth one is called gone way way beyond because when i operate out of awakened awareness i go beyond the ordinary mind to awaken mind it's limitless fast expanse and it's brilliantly lucid and bright and sacred and loving so that's that's what we call gone way way beyond and then the reaction that is ooh what a realization you recognize your true nature well we scanned people i did this in collaboration with judd blue when he was in umass now he's at brown university he has a neurocyclab and i said to judd who took our course i said i said if if you want to study something more than just mindfulness let's study awakening i can give you the subjects and you can scan them when they're not awake and then they're in awaken state and you can see the difference so we scanned them under four conditions in ordinary waking distracted mind five conditions then we scanned them when they were at ocean and waves practice which was the timeless boundless awareness then the refinement of that which we call the natural state the stability of that and then the crossing over instructions for awakening those are the three meditation conditions and the fourth was stable awakening and the first three conditions they had activated the acc the anterior cingulate cortex but the unusual in all 29 subjects did that but the unusual finding was that they had gamma activity which means that that region of interest all the cells are firing synchronistically so weight means awake we interpreted that they were holding the view just right stable and absolutely stable because he was skilled meditators but when they shifted from ordinary mind to awaken mind there in addition to the acc they activated an area of the parietal cortex that's usually associated with shifting from a more local to a more global awareness a huge awareness and they all had gamer activity in that area so we've the unusual finding was gamer activity we found out all the subjects so awake means awake in that region of interest so what they're doing is they're activating that taking that non-localized vast sacred awareness and that's what they're operating out of oh what a realization so if you continue on that path that's the first map to get a taste of awakening it's not very stable so the habits of the ordinary mind will come back and you lose the awakening so then you have to set up the view in this just the right way for crossing over from ordinary mind to awaken mind and if you do that on the pillow and in the right way then you'll shift on the pillow from awakening frequently for longer duration and more immediately it becomes like a learned pathway and the boundary between the ordinary mind and the awakened mind starts to collapse it gets dismantled more and more and after a while all the justice is the intention to set up or shift you from ordinary mind to awaken mind very quickly and once you see that sign of progress that you you can stay in awakening most of the time on the pillow it needs your attention to take that view will set it shifts you from ordinary mind to awaken mind then you take it off the pillow you immediately get up and start doing something like oh i have nature you make a hierarchy of things that are more difficult to stay and maintain awakening and so most people can shift to awakening and go out to nature in a quiet place and stay awake for a part of the time before they go back to shift to ordinary mind again but much harder to converse with people while you're awake and then it's much harder to think when you're awake so i worked with his homeless men retrieving the lineage for the bond for the last 10 years he died this last year he was the best teacher i ever had and um he had me sit in front of his office and he would have a strange steady line of people that would visit him he's as busy as the dalai lama because he's a dalai lama senior meditation teacher one of his senior meditation teachers so he would have me sit in front of his office and converse with people i had to maintain awakening while i was conversing with people didn't have me translating work on my computer while i had to maintain awakening and after about a month i could maintain it pretty much all the time during the day on and off the pillow simple matter of learning then you learn to maintain it during deep sleep and dreaming sleep so you're pretty much awake all the time even though you go through the motions of sleeping you're still wide awake in in your mind you still sleep but there's an alertness and a weakness to it that's it's during the deep sleep and also during dreaming but it's not like western lucid dreaming the western losing dream is ordinary awareness during the dream this is awakened awareness during the dream that's a more difficult task then if you stay awake all the time you hold that view of the vast expanse and then the view will change what we call the ground aspect of awakening to the appearance aspect of awakening so the view naturally becomes how things arise within that vast expanse and everything that arises you see is the liveliness of awakened awareness thought is lively awakened awareness emotions are lively awakened awareness sounds sights body body sensations and lightly awakened awareness it's all a continuous uninterrupted flow of liveliness of awakened awareness and when you can do that all the time then you take what we call both views at once the vast expands simultaneously to the liveliness of whatever arises within that field you do both at once and all it takes is just to hold that view right without engaging anything that comes up in this ocean we say that mental engagement is what causes comic memory traces to form so if you get just the right instructions and you hold it just the right way things will arise within that field of the expanse you're not engaging it so it will immediately disappear like writing on water when you write on water immediately disappears the pattern your right disappears if you hold that view continuously all the time you stop forming any new comic memory traces so it forces the mind to release all the karmic memory traces we call that self-arising self-liberating every moment it becomes an automatic process it takes about seven years to do and after about seven years you exhaust the bin of all negative karmic memory choices there's none left we call that dominator exhaustion you exhaust the bin of carbon memory traces the negative ones because the negative states mess the positive states you get a flourishing of when buddhism has 80 positive states of buddha mind and bondage to 85 positive states depending on how you count them so and we call that sange the complete purification or eradication of all negative states in the flourishing of 80 85 positive states of mind all at once i happen to think that has profound implications for mental health they live in a world of total positivity all the time because it affects everybody around you so we now have enough subjects we're starting to run subjects but the pandemic has slowed us down from running actual live subjects but we identified all the subjects from our group of students we have 30 subjects we're going to run the neural circuitry for sunday and i think what we're going to find is the gamma activity in the medial orbital frontal control cortex the medial or fc is the percentage of the brain that's all the positive emotions coming out of it's also the social positivity this is the social connection part of the brain for social behavior part of the brain so we think that what you're going to see is no negative states in the flourishing of all positive states in this total connection to other people with compassion and love and kindness and that's going to be the gamer activity no mean rfc that's what that working hypothesis is wow we have two we have two subjects if you go beyond the complete purification of negative states then you open up what a two things happen one is that you live in a world of total positivity that no negative stays left or no more and and ordinary perception gets purified normally in tibetan buddhism when we see the world we see it through the the lens of conceptual thought we have five senses in the west eyes for sight etcetera but the tibetan buddhism the sixth is when the six is called the mind perceiver and we use conceptualization to interpret sense data so if i look at this with the eye consciousness this is a color and form but i look at it when the eye conscious is integrated with the mind consciousness it's it's a glass filled with apple juice see the difference i use conceptual thought to appraise and evaluate to depends call that deluded perception so in this purification process you clean up all conceptual thoughts doesn't come up anymore so a funny thing happens you still see the world but you start seeing a worldly sacred world the buddha feels on somewhere you fly off to remotely they're always right here everything is right here the whole world of the sacred model is here you see all people there's deities in that mandala you don't only see the sacred world 100 of the time you live in total positivity it's a remarkable state and then what comes out of that is the embodiment of enlightenment there's a we call the threefold ebola enlightenment there's an infinite vast expanse there's empty expanse is knowing awareness it's totally totally vast and limitless and stable all the time in that ground of that expanse there's the sacred world of the mandala and all the buddha fields are always right here it's spectacular view in substantial like rainbow light but but as all the deities of the mandala and all the retinue deities are here all the time you live in that sacred world and that's called the somboga kaya the dhammakaya the sabogakai and then thirdly what will happen is that that you'll live in that sacred world all the time and it will break your heart more and more than nobody's everybody's clueless about this and that plants what we call the seed of aspiration aspiration will grow to a certain intensity or sometimes it will explode into a million pieces those are called in the monikers the emanations it's the the the the ultimate multitasking so now there are thousands of copies of yourself all guiding beings along the path because you can't stand it they don't see this and you help them out then you get all three bodies at once the infinite vast limitless expanse of blowing awareness brilliantly loose and knowing awareness the sacred world of the mandala and all the beings of buddhism helping guiding people along the path you get all three at once simultaneously stable it's accompanied by awe usually game over that stable you finish the path that's full enlightenment and then your job description becomes what we call enlightened activity trendline you help people going you help people out along the path along the way we now have two students who have finished the path we want to bring them into the neurocircuitry lab and see if we can identify this what the brain is doing during full enlightenment wow so i what you just described i think is something everyone in their right mind would want um my question is well a couple of things come to mind first is like how accessible is this for a western mind given that you know we're not doing five to ten years of preliminary practices most of us and yeah could this mahamudra and zogchen path that you kind of laid out go mainstream or reach a lot of people in the western world well it's only man retrieving the head of the bond the lending sheriff of the bond was very flexible with me and he told me that he didn't have to do the hundred thousand preliminaries our students didn't have to do that he made an exception instead he made me have the eligibility requirements so we have a level one course that's designed to open up awakening and we have a level two that designed to open up the awakening in a different perspective for a different set of practices and then we have level three which is design three eight which is designed to stabilize awakening and we have to continue to the the sange purification and flourishing states we have another course for that we have about seven or eight different courses that we do in each one he asked me to record develop eligibility requirements that would work for westerners and the deal was that as long as we developed certain eligibility requirements then he would teach us anything at any level so we teach inner fire with central channel practice which is rarely ever taught we teach the full course uh tumor tumor we have we have a film on how to do several recordings that we've done four or five times we've worked out the bugs we translated the text for it we've recorded major just complete set of recordings to the people who are practicing them once they take the course they can get the recordings and they can practice it at home so about six years ago i think it was i was with his only as memory treason and he brought out a a copy of sharjah trustee johnson's work the great bon yogi for the last thousand years he's collected works and he brought out the cave yogi text and he said i have a favor to ask you these tech practices hardly anybody can do anymore they're very advanced so they're all going to die out in the next generation i want you to translate them and put them in a form that works for westerners will you do that what am i going to say no i don't feel like it so i suspended my clinical practice and most of my teaching for about three and a half years and we got i just finished the last one we just got eight books that the translations done and three professional films of different yogic exercises to preserve this culture before it dies out and some of these likely in a fire practice so they're bypassing visions for teaching in the west now just by with eligibility requirements we're trying to make the whole course everything available all these levels available to westerners because if we don't they're going to die the whole tradition dies out so i'm trying to do that while i'm still healthy and we're trying to we got 80 finished and before he died a year ago he sat down and gave me details his fifth instructions are all the advanced instructions for full enlightenment he wanted me to have them so these are like pointers yeah a very detailed explanation so what to look for they're extraordinary methods so we're trying to make it all available to the west so what role do beliefs play in transforming the mind i mean is it possible to get the same effects without changing a materialistic a western kind of scientific materialist belief system because a lot of what you described there you know was this incredible um i guess replicable subjective experience that is described in kind of buddhist terms could that work equally well for a western mind who's maybe comes at it initially skeptical well beliefs operates mostly because by limiting us we have limiting beliefs and there's a western psychology if we look at something like jeff young's what's called the young schema question areas 232 limiting beliefs divided into 18 different categories and we can score themselves up on that and self-take it and then they can you can see what limiting beliefs operate in a daily life core limiting beliefs and beliefs about what this what's possible for the self or what's not possible what's possible and not possible in relationships and what's not possible we get out of life those are the three about the world world and others and our sense of self and and so in the west we've looked at how limiting beliefs operate and prevents us from learning new areas of experience and see we move beyond those living beliefs in buddhism it's not so different at some point in this level one course that we teach we when they get very advanced and they train them out of cognitive awareness so we can put it back online they can actually look at the limiting beliefs that are operating in the meditation practice and we'll be on them so we actually have a stage where we teach people to look at their own limiting beliefs to get in the way of the practice because if they have that many beliefs they won't either want to awaken so we don't replace them with positive beliefs we just we just get rid of the interferences because in the in the see buddhist logicians made it a whole point dignity chandra kiri and others that there are two modes of knowing in the world there's conceptual knowing which is what debate is about in buddhism and it's known to pure awareness in the west we don't acknowledge that the pure awareness is a legitimate mode of knowing is a better mode of knowing we think it's all about concepts but if you mask most post-formal intellectual development there are seven stages beyond adolescent formal development the psja so we think that intelligence stops with adolescence we're in trouble as a race but there are seven post-formal stages and then the last four of those have nothing to do with conceptual thoughts it goes beyond positives out to pure awareness including awakened awareness so it's a better way of operating out of the world to not operate in a thought mode but our beliefs but operate on pure awareness so yeah that makes a lot of sense so you could be ontologically agnostic no required faith and deities or anything and you could still train the mind in along that same path that you mentioned it sounds like because these things open up it's part of the deep structure of the mind one of the things that i'm trying to wrap my head around i'm finishing a book called magic and mystery in tibet where a westerner named alexandra david neal went over to tibet in the early 1900s and experienced and saw some really incredible woman i'm sorry she's a woman oh i'm sorry i meant to say woman um and yeah a french she disguised herself as a coulee to get into old tibet because it was there was the borders were closed yeah she describes herself as a porter and his llama recognized her right away saw what she was doing and tara and yeah and some of the things she describes are almost unbelievable by western standards so i'm wondering like what well some of the kind of psychic phenomenon and um i know now tumo's been studied even by harvard scientists like herbert benson but some of that stuff and what the mind's capable of and how it can heat the body with the tumor practice and um some of these things that she was describing i'm wondering if they like to what extent do our beliefs form collective realities like it almost seemed like tibet was living in like a different world where different physics applied um and i'm wondering if if those same feats that she was experiencing and seeing would be possible in like a western context where people are more skeptical well there are a series of paranormal supernova abilities that come up at certain stages of the practice in patanjali's yoga sutra is a different tradition there are four levels of practice at the end of the second level of practice there's some discussion of the paranormal abilities coming up but they don't they're not stable it says it very clearly in the text it's not very stable but in the fourth book it comes back again in a stable way and there's much more details about the last when you get very far along the path then it's stable maharishi's tried to show people flying people can only hop they didn't they didn't stay in the air the reason why is because you know people come over here with a funny name that doesn't mean but if you look at his background he only knew the first two books the yoga sutras the first two levels of practice he didn't know the last two so that's why he wasn't stable because he didn't they never mastered those practices because he left to teach in the west i learned all four of those levels wow so do you have those abilities some of those abilities that are are you allowed to talk about like your own experience i didn't i didn't develop them i didn't i i did glimpses of those things at times you get those things but not you get fascinated with states you're going to track really quickly so they're not emphasized right but um i've seen a lot of things things like that one time that he's holding this the dalai lama wanted me he asked me if i would get western scientists to study paranormal abilities so probably the subjects i couldn't find anybody who'd want to do it even the people who were doing pharaoh research the only person that did it was bob bob john at princeton who had found that normal people could it would bend the psychokinetic abilities in small and measurable amounts they could have an effect on physical reality so i set up a private audience with him and a dalai lama to talk about this stuff and he thought he was going to she's going to trap the press going to be there so he sent his assistant brenda and then she came in and it was just her in the dalai lama and she called up bob and said bob it's just me and the dalai lama you gotta get over here right away so he raced over there they spent the day together i mediated and they talked about how they could set up research on paranormal abilities but didn't get done because no one wanted to put the reputation online to study the such controversial things wow yeah so like what what are some of the more incredible things that you've seen or you know that you've experienced there's a sopemo which is a festival every 12 years to the life of promise obama they do a tibetan opera where they play out that all the feats of his life and the way the king tried to kill him so many times he reconstituted himself at the end of this festival there's two yogis that sit in a cave for 12 years they take one of them out every 12 years they put a new one in he walks down the path and walks across the lake and he's greeted by the dalai lama i was sitting in a tree watching this whole thing and there was two couple who were filming for national geographic and that's the only thing that didn't come out the film didn't come out and they were walking on the water it just took away it didn't come out the professional film is it didn't come out like the it just got blurred in that for that part of the film exactly wow that is that is spooky but uh we're doing a study of relics now relics are a little millimeter-sized balls of about millimeters brightly colored so when you cremate a great master he leaves behind these relics and they have an influence on physical reality so memory gave me as relics and we're studying them in our stanford research institute we found out they administered even though the master's gone they emit a human bioenergy and they affect things like enzymes and activation and test tubes and decay rates of radioactive materials and it still has an impact on physical reality so great masses never really die so this is the rain they call it the rainbow body right that they leave behind like some kind of material they turn into or light yeah the forms four strategies i translate the book on rainbow body it's not out yet but we're waiting for the relic study to finish we're putting in the book but that will be out in this year there are four methods to change yourself in the rainbow light while you're dying so the body disappears like they like the resurrection and christianity except what the tibetans that i've left behind is a is a is a set of methods of how to do it so it's not limited to one historic person like the son of god jesus these have been around for a long time all the kids know yogi's know how to do that they practice them on a regular basis still do do you think if someone's listening to this right now and they're you know i guess they have enough time to train their mind to that extent is this like accessible to them like how would they go about getting involved and starting down that path well it's all it's about the clarity of the instructions i've worked with the demands 48 years it's a long time i've had great teachers so we make all this available to the west but right now it's hard because we can't offer the level one course anymore because it's a pandemic so we're trying to experiment we're doing it online we'll probably do the first retreat online in sometime this fall i'm still trying to learn enough about zoom so i can do it yeah there's been a lot of zoom retreats nowadays so how would someone who's listening to this where would they check that out where would it be posted well the the retreat on a site called pointingoutway.org okay running outweigh.org and if they want to learn about the western stuff on performance excellence they can go to a site called mind only they want to learn about what we're doing in relational stuff and i work a lot as a psychologist around attachment disorders and relational difficulties there's a site called an attachment project so those are the three probably relevant sites so i'm interested in so you're teaching both this path to basically stabilize awakening and then also the peak performance angle where does that play in with your v with your vision you know is that just like a different interest that you have or is it all kind of integrated in this same vision for awakening more people it's a vision about being the best we can be bringing out the best of human consciousness involving that whether it be the eastern methods or the western methods which is performance excellence research and positive research on positive psychology so i'm interested in both sides of that equation what the west has to what the wisdom they have to offer and then what the east has to offer that and i think i read somewhere heard that you were working with some leaders in china as well like teaching peak performance to help out the tibetans we did a course in china china was originally where these teachings were buddhist teachings were very strong and then in the cultural revolution they all got suppressed but now there's a lot of young chinese who are practicing again tibetan buddhism so we we were invited last year to go on to teach a course in china for the first time so we so we're trying to bring these teachings back to the way they originally were practiced so there are lots of chinese people who are interested in these practices again do you think there's a future in which one of the things that's um that's just interesting is like kind of how meditation has made its way to the west and different with different practices and right now it seems like the terevatin became really popular and kind of turned into mindfulness do you think there's a future in which the mahamudra and zogchen path is like just as widespread and that becomes a more accessible path for people or how do you see all this kind of playing out well the trouble with i think mindfulness is it's taut sloppy now we i did uh outcomes research as a western psychologist on mindfulness researchers for 10 years the outcomes research and what we found is that people weren't getting very far because it's not taught well nobody's ever corrected they make a lot of bad habits of mine and nobody says no not like that do it like this that's a failure to teach so we noticed lots of the mindfulness students had bad habits of mine and nobody ever corrected them i wouldn't let that go by the board so i would just say stop you do this this is a bad habit you're not doing the right way you do it like this when i started teaching the level one retreats i met an old friend of mine who first came over the u.s in the nineteen actually and his name was rahab tulku the nomination of palma zimbabwe he was my roommate for two years and over the years we lost touch because we traveled a lot and he called me up out of the blue when i was teaching the level one retreat in western massachusetts and i'm in upstate new york come visit me so we talked about teaching and yeah i said will you teach with me again and he said if i can deliver you students who have a taste of awakening will you teach them when you forgo all the preliminaries he said normally i would say no to that but i know you so i'll come to your course she took the course and he said you don't care about the preliminaries you don't care about the rituals but you're a single mind about people getting a taste of awakening but they they do they they open that up but it's not stable so i'll do what you ask but you can't just do retreats you have to start following the students on a regular basis so we started following the students and we have a variety of about 2 000 students we follow on a regular basis now and we've seen them move along the path and when they move along we offer more advanced courses and we can i take notes when the students call me so that i can remember for a lot of students and it's about a half an hour every couple of months we can make sure they're staying on the right track that's responsible teaching because i know whether all my students are and i don't know what they're doing what level they're at they don't they don't if we get in the bad habits we will correct the bad habits what what are some of those bad habits that people are falling into well they don't concentrate enough for one thing there's two types of concentration there's continuous staying over time so when you get very concentrated you stay for longer a lot of times on the object before you get distracted and there's complete staying which means you're not dividing your tension between the object and the background noise of thought most people they don't even know we call that problem partial staying or patchy staying so if i this is the rising and falling my breath and i take my flashlight of awareness and it's not stable and i turn it i pick up a piece of that rising breath and then when it's continuing to rise i go and take a vacation and go engage in all that thought thinking about the meditation then here's the falling breath i got a piece of that and while it's continuing i could take a vacation again divide my attention with the thought see the problem here look at the difference that's complete staying so what most people do is they never unders they never see the problem of partial staying they're dividing their attention and apportion it between the object but when you put a little bit on the object and there's about eighty percent of the mind it still engages thought so never get beyond thought and they justify it because the thinking about the meditation well that's just thinking charger calls that conceptual meditation too conceptual meditation so most people never get beyond that stopping thinking means that you know there's no thoughts going on at all for a whole hour of meditating you're operating on an awareness but not out of that very sort of thought well they get dull and they they they or that is they have a sloppy posture the posture keeps the mind alert in patanja's yoga sutras there's a great tradition in working with different postures because they all make the mind fit and keep the mind alert but when when tm came to the west it was dumbed down for westerners they did away with the posture so you can sit sloppy and spin your mantra and what you're doing is you're training yourself to have mind wandering simultaneous and dullness simultaneous to concentrating on the object that's crappy meditation so that's a good example of a bad habit it's built into the system yeah so it seems i mean in the west we're so conceptual it like we're brought up and schooled to be very conceptual and label everything and plan things and so um hold on a second i gotta i gotta i gotta put this battery back on otherwise i'm gonna shut up okay yeah yeah take your time sorry about that i didn't i didn't know that i was working without my battery it's just going to shut off there no worries at all i'm getting that uh wind sound again give me that question again oh yes so i was just gonna ask um yeah like so in the west were were taught to be very conceptual from a young age in the schooling system and whatnot so like how much concentration practice is required before someone could get to that state how long did do you find that it normally takes someone how many hours of practice or how many retreats or however you measure that before they can get to a state where they're non-conceptual and they're fully staying with the breath and i know that probably depends on their aptitude and everything too but like this is not a question of how long it takes it's a question of how what clear clarity the instructions are we do that and we're going to cover nine stages of concentration in two and a half days well someone could go all the way to the ninth stage in two and a half days wow and then is that concentration because what i found when i've gone on longer retreats like a gowanka retreat for example where you're pretty much meditating all day for 10 days then as soon as you're off retreat um you quickly lose that concentration because you're on your phone and your you know your attention zipping all over the place and obviously you know you try your best to be mindful but even so the the concentration fades pretty quickly so i guess what kind of prevent daily lifestyle and the amount of distractions it does make concentration deteriorate but um but you can sustain it somewhat during the day you have a daily practice you can sustain it over and against an offset most of that the idea is to get a certain proficiency in it during the retreat so that you don't lose it all in your daily life you can sustain a certain minimal level of concentration and so then from that point the mind is serviceable enough it sounds like where you could go through these different stages that you mentioned yes exactly and so one of the things when when i'm focused on say the breath um it still feels like there's a mini me that's kind of pointing my concentration there but when you were describing this practice and you said you know you want to get to the point where eventually it doesn't feel like there's a you there that's doing the meditating right does that happen on its own as you get more and more focused on the breath or is that so it's all the intention of awareness and that intention has what we call in it's it's called enlightened intention the path shows itself to itself for the sake of its own realization so if at the further the further you get along the path the more the past shows itself to itself for the sake of his own realization just gonna get out of the way the whole path will show itself to itself and you get very more advanced you get downloads of complete teachings that you don't need from the teacher after a while so um yeah for people who are listening to this and they're just very excited about getting you know getting started or beginning to learn these practices um you know it sounds like your retreat is going to be in the fall maybe that would be a good place for them to look forward to but then are there other resources that you'd recommend someone diving into where they could like get started on a practice well if these lineages traditional traditions so i'm not recommending other lineages because they don't know them enough all i can do is recommend what i know what i put my heart into but you have other resources right we we transmit these instructions from heart to heart from generation to generation they're very precious yeah well it's what i love is it's so clear the instructions i mean i haven't um i've just dived in i went on your website and i saw you have some kind of initial videos that are accessible to anyone who kind of you know i think signs up but it's free and they're just it's very clear the instructions um you know there's no there's no extraneous words or there's you know it's very it's laid out systematically step by step which i think is really refreshing awarding matters i spent 30 years doing hypnosis with people wrote three textbooks on hypnosis and one of the things you learned about hypnosis is that learning matters and in pith instructions about how to open up these states of mind and away in meditation the wording matters so we have to translate all the stuff to put in the form that works for westerners i think that's what i've learned over the last 48 years trying to do this it's how to put in the form that works for westerners having the experience of knowing the states that makes it easier because i know how to describe them in western terms though yeah well listen thank you so much for the work you're doing and really appreciate your time coming on the podcast and discussing all this with me my pleasure liam [Music] you

Channel: FitMind

Views: 16,868

Keywords: dan brown, dr dan brown meditation, dan brown interview, dr. dan brown, daniel brown, daniel p brown, dr. daniel p. brown, attachment, awakening, dan brown awakening, consciousness, spirituality, mental health, mindfulness, meditation, buddhism, mahamudra, dzogchen, indo-tibetan, bon, hypnotherapist, meditation master, tibetan, pointing out the great way, translate, neurocircuitry, dalai lama, psychology, peak performance, performance excellence, tummo, inner fire, supernatural abilities, podcast

Id: hrCgFwLXks8

Length: 55min 15sec (3315 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 12 2020