Conscious Living/Conscious Dying

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    Stephen Levine: Conscious Living/Conscious Dying

    This transcript represents the first, half-hour portion of the ninety-minute

    InnerWork video Conscious Living, Conscious Dying. It is one of the 38 programs

    included in the Thinking Allowed book.

    JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Today

    we're going to explore the nature of the healing process. With me is Stephen

    Levine, a poet, an author, a spiritual teacher. Stephen has written numerous

    books, including Who Dies?, Meetings on the Edge, Healing into Life and Death,

    and Grist for the Mill. Welcome, Stephen.

    STEPHEN LEVINE: Thanks, Jeffrey.

    MISHLOVE: You've done an enormous amount of work over the years with people

    who are sick, people who are dying. You've witnessed the healing process in

    operation, undoubtedly thousands and thousands of times. We're going to look at

    some of the many stages of the process. When I refer to healing, I think in this

    context really I'm not talking about medicines so much as spiritual healing. I guess

    a good place to start is to look at the obvious kinds of healing, that is, healing in

    which some kind of a physical recovery occurs -- where a person experiences, for

    example, a spontaneous remission of a terminal disease. Let's talk a little bit

    about that process to begin with.

    LEVINE: Sure. You know, when you ask me, "What is healing?" I still don't know.

    My wife and I, when we were directing the Hanuman Foundation Dying Project,

    worked for a long time predominantly with people who had come to us to ask us

    to help them die. A lot of the people we worked with, as they came to a certain

    point in their process, usually including opening to the reality that death might

    well be in the near future, began to finish business. Our relationships are usuallyrun like business: "I'll give you two; you give me two. If you only give me one, I'm

    going to take my bat and ball and go home; I won't play anymore." So this is kind

    of totaling of accounts that's always going on with people. It's real easy to think

    that finishing business is, "You forgive me, I forgive you; but I'm not going to

    forgive you until you forgive me" -- this always waiting for someone else to give

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    you something. We started to see that many people started to see that the end of

    business was no longer relationships as business. When I take you into my heart,

    our business is done. If you don't take me into your heart, that's your pain and I

    feel that, but it really doesn't affect my business. We started to see people heal

    their relationships towards the end of their lives, where they were really meeting

    other people with such mercy and such care for their well being, that even those

    who were angry -- an example, a really extreme example: A woman we had

    worked with, her mother had been very ill. She'd never really gotten along with

    her mother. Her mother had been very judgmental, quite unkind, abusive. And her

    mother then became very ill, very ill, and she was the only one of the sisters who

    would even go and sit bedside. They all had such contention, felt so judged, they

    really put their mother out of their heart. She was a Zen student. She decided that

    her work on herself was to be there for her mom. She sat next to her mom, andher mom would go into a light sleep and come out, in and out, as people do when

    they're real ill. She would just sit next to her mother and wish her well -- not, "Why

    haven't you given me this? Why didn't you do that for me?" -- not trying to total

    the accounts, but trying to let her mother, as is, into her heart. That's the basis of

    relationship -- as is. Because if I want you to be the least different, then you

    become an object in my mind instead a subject of my heart. Where's the healing

    there? It's just separation. Her mother had been very nasty in her lifetime, and it

    wasn't ending just because she was dying. This woman, day after day, sending

    loving-kindness to her mother. On the day that her mother died, her mother

    looked up at her and said, "I hope you roast in hell. I hope that you have the worst

    possible life." Her mother died cursing her, and she died with her daughter sitting

    next to her, looking at her with soft eyes, and with an open heart saying, "Ma, I

    hope everything's OK for you." Now for her mom it was terrible, but for her it was

    wonderful. She had really finished her business. She was just with another human

    being who was having a hard time. I mean, that's really an extreme story, and

    hopefully we can all get some glimpse of what that one would be. But that's

    enormous healing. The woman who was dying died; the woman who was sittingnext to her was healing.

    MISHLOVE: Who was she healing?

    LEVINE: Herself.

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    MISHLOVE: Herself, yes.

    LEVINE: That's all we can heal. If we're not working on our own healing, we

    certainly can't be contributing to anyone else's healing.

    MISHLOVE: You use the phrase, "take somebody into our heart." That's an

    interesting phrase. I think it seems to have a lot to do with your sense of the

    healing process.

    LEVINE: Yes. A woman's dying in the hospital. She's lived her life in a great deal

    of separation. She has a cancer that has infiltrated her bones. Interestingly, it's a

    lot like this other woman who was dying. Six weeks into the hospital she has been

    so unpleasant to the doctors and the nurses that they don't even want to come inher room. One night she's in a real quandary, her pain is so great. She's been a

    person who has always been able to control. In fact her controlling quality has

    been so extreme that she hasn't seen her children in years, and has never met

    her grandchildren. She's dying alone in the hospital. The nurses and doctors,

    that's not where they want to be; they walk in the room and she's blaming them

    for her pain, them for her illness, them for not being able to cure her. Very little is

    she able to take within herself her own experience. She's pushing it away, pushing

    it away. One night the pain is just so great there's nothing she can do about it.

    And she comes to a point -- it's almost like a drowning person when they just say,

    "I'm going down. This is it; I'm just too exhausted to fight anymore." And maybe

    for the first time in her life she surrendered. It might have been the first time in

    her life she'd ever let go of her separation, of her idea of herself as opposed to the

    whole world. And in that moment something happened, where all of a sudden --

    her bone cancer was mainly in her back and in her hip and in her legs. She was

    lying on her side, in kind of an embryonic state, and all of a sudden she was no

    longer herself lying in the hospital. She was an Eskimo woman lying on her side,

    dying in childbirth, with enormous pain in her back and her legs and her hips. Aninstant later she was a woman lying on her side beside a river in some tropical

    environment, whose back had been crushed by a rockfall, dying alone, with

    enormous pain in her back and her hips and her legs. A moment later after that

    she said she thought she was somewhere in Biafra. Her skin was black. She had a

    slackened, empty breast, at which was suckling a starving child. They were both

    starving, perhaps dying of cholera she later thought, with enormous pain in her

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    back and her hips and her legs. She experienced, the next hour or two -- she said

    she couldn't really gauge time -- she experienced ten thousand women in pain at

    that moment, dying, at that moment. She said as that happened it went from

    being my pain to being the pain. She said, "I had no room in myself. My pain is in

    the mind; but the pain is the pain we all share, and it can be touched, it can be

    experienced in the heart, the heart we all share, the heart of common experience,

    the heart of common concern for the well being of all sentient beings." In the next

    six weeks, up until the time when she died, her room became the center of love in

    the hospital. The nurses would hang out there sometimes on their break. A few

    weeks after this experience, there were her grandchildren sitting on the bed, who

    she'd never met before, playing with grandma, and there were her children, her

    son standing next to her. Right before she died, the day or two before she died,

    one of the nurses brought in a picture of Jesus in the form of the Good Shepherdwith the children and the animals, and this woman, whose heart had been like a

    stone, whose mind had been blocked to all but self concern, looked at this picture

    and the children and she said, "Oh Jesus, forgive them, they're only children."

    Hers is one of the most amazing healings I've ever seen. And that's why I really

    can't say I know what healing is, because I've seen people's bodies get well whose

    hearts were not as healed. There's a healing we took birth for. When we look

    around this plane, around this world, and we say, "How can there be so much

    greed, so much cold indifference, so much suffering?" it's because this is the place

    we come to heal, and everybody doesn't take the responsibility for the healing

    they took birth for. And it may be that some people don't even consider it until

    they find that they may be dying soon.

    MISHLOVE: You seem to be saying that healing of the body is really unimportant.

    LEVINE: Healing is not limited to the body. In fact, I've seen parallel situations,

    with two people with similar diagnoses, where one fought the illness. It was them

    against the illness, and contention filled the room. When they were in pain, theydidn't think they were OK. Just when they most needed mercy, it was least

    available to them.

    MISHLOVE: From themselves.

    LEVINE: From themselves. And they pushed everybody away, and whether they

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    lived or died, what they did is create schism in the family, judgment in the family,

    guilt in the family, feelings of unworthiness in those who loved them most,

    because nobody could help. And I've seen other people in the same situation --

    same pain in their body, same pain in their mind -- say, "I don't have a moment to

    lose. I can't stand to live a moment longer with my heart closed. Too much pain

    for me, too much pain. The world doesn't need another closed heart." I see them

    where their priority is to communicate the care they have for others, and the

    healing in that room -- maybe the sign of real healing is, what are the people

    bedside left with when someone dies? Are they left with their hearts full and a

    sense of connectedness to that person, or are they left frightened of death, scared

    of that person, with much rumination in the mind about how things didn't work

    out, how could I have helped more? Did they leave a legacy of mental suffering

    behind? So I see people heal into death. Now, I've seen people where the persondied with their heart open leaving more healing behind than someone who lived

    and just continued that judgment and that aggression in the family, and the family

    was unhealed, though the body was healed.

    MISHLOVE: Is there a sense -- I've heard this reported by some doctors -- that

    the kind of people who do experience a physical recovery from a serious disease

    are ornery kinds of people, who are kind of fighting for their lives?

    LEVINE: Aggression can be a very strong part. People can fight their illness, and

    then it becomes me against my illness. It becomes separation and anxiety. Our

    sense is that when you touch that which is in pain with mercy and awareness,

    there's healing. Where there's awareness there's healing. I think the word healing

    is used in an odd way. To heal is to become whole, right? To come back to some

    balance. And yet where's the balance in that process where -- one doctor, for

    instance, who helps people heal through modern methods, says that those who

    heal are their superstars. And then another doctor I know says that patients who

    heal are the exceptional patients. Well, what does that make everybody else -- asecond-stringer, a loser? I mean, the very idea, that very conceptual framework

    where you are a good person if you heal, makes you a bad person if you die. Who

    needs to die with a sense of failure? It's very dangerous, those ideas. They're very

    well intended, because I know those fellows, and they're good fellows, and they

    want to help, they sincerely want to help, and they've helped many. But many

    have been injured by the idea that, for instance, you're responsible for your

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    illness. You're not responsible for your illness; you're not responsible for your

    cancer; you're responsible to your cancer. Because if you're responsible for your

    cancer, then how are you ever going to heal? If my conditioning caused it, do I

    have to get rid of all of my conditioning to be well? I know people who have

    meditated for fifty years and are not done with their conditioning, and when their

    time is short, energy is low, it just strains them, and maybe causes schisms

    within. When we see that we are responsible to our illness, then when pain arises

    we can send mercy, we can send kindness. You and I, we're conditioned. We walk

    across a room, we stub our toe. What do we do with the pain in our toe? We're

    conditioned to send hatred into it. We're conditioned to try to exorcise it.

    MISHLOVE: Like, "How stupid I was to do that."

    LEVINE: Yes, and we cut the pain off. In fact, even many meditative techniques

    for working with pain are to take your awareness, your attention, and put it

    elsewhere. Just when that throbbing toe is most calling out for mercy, for

    kindness, for embrace, for softness, it's least available. In some ways it's amazing

    that anybody heals, considering our conditioning to send hatred into our pain,

    which is the antithesis of healing.

    MISHLOVE: You've developed a number of guided meditations for dealing with

    healing, and part of that process is to really try and feel the pain.

    LEVINE: Explore the pain.

    MISHLOVE: Explore the pain, and then to know just how we protect ourselves

    from getting at it -- that there's sort of a wall of deadening around the pain, to

    keep us away from our own pain. It's as if by denying ourselves our own pain, we

    deny ourselves life.

    LEVINE: It's interesting. You're bringing up a really interesting point. The way we

    respond to pain is the way we respond to life. When things aren't the way we want

    them to be, what do we do? Do we close down, or do we open up to get more of a

    sense of what's needed in the moment? Our conditioning is to close down --

    aversion, rejection, put it away, denial. Nothing heals. That is the very basis on

    which unfinished business accumulates, putting it away -- I'm right, they're wrong;

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    no quality of forgiveness. We know many people who are working on sending

    forgiveness into their tumors, into their AIDS, into their degenerative heart

    disease. It sounds so bizarre, because our conditioning is to send anger into it,

    fear into it. Where can there be healing in that?

    MISHLOVE: That's true. The Simontons, a well-known medical couple, have

    developed visualization exercises where you imagine the white blood cells being

    like cowboys chasing the red Indians, and it's sort of these little battlefields in the

    body, and the white blood cells are out win and to heal, so that the immune

    system overcomes. You're suggesting that that's not appropriate.

    LEVINE: Well, that system does work for people, and I certainly wouldn't want

    anyone who's finding that to be a feasible means of working with illness to not doit. But I think we need to watch what it means to add aggression to this mind that

    already is so aggressive in moments of fear, in moments of aversion. How can we

    work to have that happen, without cultivating aggression? Imagine those people

    who have cultivated all that aggression, and the cancer doesn't go away; what

    happens? Well, my experience is that that aggression turns inward, and they often

    die in self hatred and a feeling of aversion for themselves, of failure: "I really am a

    rotten person. I really am dying and abandoning my wife and children. I really am

    a terrible person. I really am abandoning my lover and my friends." The mind

    takes so quickly to self negation. Anything that reinforces that has to be watched

    really closely, because all self negation seems to slow and limit healing. I think

    that it's very important in such methods as Carl and Stephanie's method, that one

    finds the imagery that's just right for them. A story: A fellow was going to do the

    technique, Simonton's technique, and he was a pacifist minister. He said, "I have

    really spent most of my life trying to make peace instead of war. I can't have

    white sharks eating black gerbils, or however it is." He said, "This is not

    appropriate for me; it's not going to work for me." So he was told, "Why don't you

    take some time, and find the imagery that's right for you?" And what did he comeup with in a week? The Seven Dwarfs, going in, singing "Whistle while you work,"

    digging it up in buckets and carrying the cancer away. And he healed. The wrong

    imagery, the imagery that's not appropriate to you. Also, how are you using it? For

    the people we're working with -- I wouldn't say with anybody else's method -- if it

    works for you, wonderful, but is it making your belly hard? Is there more armoring

    in you? That's really the diagnostic device. Are you tightening your belly? Is there

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    more holding? Is there more separation? Because if your belly's tight, you heart's

    probably going to be closed, and your mind's going to be painting you into a

    corner.

    MISHLOVE: You seem to suggest in your meditative work that if one can soften

    the belly and soften the heart and soften the breathing, that that creates a state

    of surrendering to some kind of essential healing that's there available for all of

    us.

    LEVINE: The word surrender is so funny, because most people, particularly in the

    case of illness, equate surrender with defeat. But surrender is letting go of

    resistance. Most of what we call pain is the resistance that clenches down on the

    unpleasant. In fact, a really dynamic, practical sense of that is that a lot of thepeople we work with, if they're going to take medicine, they'll look at it. They

    won't just swallow it automatically. They're not trying to take healing from

    outside. They're not giving up control to healing. They're participating in it, they're

    taking responsibility for it -- responsibility being the ability to respond, instead of

    the necessity to react. They look at the pills, and as they take them in, they guide

    them with loving-kindness into the area, because they've put so much attention

    into the area they know the inside, the multiple molecular variation of sensation

    within, the moment-to-momentness of that area. They direct it into that area, and

    they find, for instance with pain medication, that once the resistance has been

    gone through, that they can decrease the medication. Because I think a lot of

    medications get used up by the resistance before they ever get to the place that

    they're being taken to.

    MISHLOVE: Our medical system doesn't really encourage people to take

    responsibility at that level. It's as if we're passive, not only at the hands of

    doctors, but even at the hands of spiritual and psychic healers.

    LEVINE: It can be. We're not saying, "Throw away your other practice." We're

    saying, "Whatever you're doing to heal yourself, why don't you try to see for your

    own self what it might mean if you put mercy into that area?" It's so outside of our

    conditioning. We suggest that people treat their illness as though it were their

    only child, with that same mercy and loving-kindness. If that was in your child's

    body, you'd caress it, you'd hold it, you'd do all you could to make it well. But

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    somehow when it's in our body we wall it off, we send hatred into it and anger into

    it. We treat ourselves with so little kindness, so little softness. And there are

    physical correlations to the difference between softening around an illness --

    blood flow, availability of the immune system, etcetera -- and hardness. You know,

    if you've got a hard belly and your jaw is tight, and that hardness is around your

    eyes, it's very difficult for anything to get through.

    MISHLOVE: You seem to really be suggesting not just healing for the sick, but as

    a way of life in general. It's as if moment by moment we make the choice whether

    to harden or to soften.

    LEVINE: Well, the hardening has become involuntary, and the softening, it takes

    remembering priorities, that this is the only moment there is, and this is themoment to open. I mean, if we're not doing it now, how will we do it at any other

    time? That's why we suggest, don't wait until you get a terminal diagnosis to start

    to give yourself permission to be alive, to get on with your life. Now is a good

    time.

    MISHLOVE: Do you have an opinion about people who are healing practitioners

    who attempt to do healing not for themselves necessarily, but for other people --

    say, spiritual healers?

    LEVINE: If we are all doing it as work on ourselves, that's wonderful. But if we're

    healing someone else, and we're not trying to heal ourselves at the same time,

    that person is in trouble that you're trying to heal, because then you've set up the

    separation of I and other, and I and other is the basis of all fear, all doubt, and all

    the cruelty and confusion in the world. If you come to me and say, "I'm

    depressed," and I touch your pain, your depression, with fear, that's pity, and it's

    a very self-oriented state, pity. I want you out of that state, because I don't want

    to be in that state. But if I can touch your pain with love, that's compassion. Andthen even if you're in pain and I've done everything I can to get you out of your

    pain, if I'm not so hung up on some model of myself as a healer, but just here we

    are, then you can be in pain and I don't close my heart to you. A lot of healers, if

    they can't "heal" you, they have no business with you anymore. But when our

    work is on ourself, then even the teaching of helplessness is honored. Sometimes

    you can't help everybody, but that doesn't mean anything has to come out of you

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    that limits their access to who you are, to your heart, to your connection with

    them. If it's work on yourself, they're in the presence of good healing. But all the

    healers I know who are really phenomenal, who are some of the phenomenal

    healers, they all say God does it. I'll tell you a story. A woman had a very

    advanced cancer. Her doctor told me this story. The cancer really fulminated; it

    was really metastasized in many parts of her body.

    MISHLOVE: Stephen, we're going to have to end quickly. We've got only a minute

    to go.

    LEVINE: OK. Her doctor said, "Well, it doesn't look like you have long to go." She

    went to the West Coast. She thought she'd have a couple of days on the beach, a

    couple of weeks, before she died. She met a healer. The healer lay his hands onher. She was well. A week later she committed suicide. She said, "Well, if it was

    that easy to heal me, I don't deserve to live." Because that healer forgot to say to

    her, "I didn't heal you. You healed you; God healed you. You've done so much

    work, look how easy it was for you to heal." When the healer takes possession of

    healing, he actually injures that person instead of helps them.

    MISHLOVE: You seem to be suggesting that ultimately the basis of healing is self

    acceptance and acceptance of others, and that they're linked ultimately.

    LEVINE: When the mind sinks into the heart, and vice versa, there's healing.

    When we become one with ourselves, there's healing.

    MISHLOVE: Stephen Levine, thank you very much for being with me.

    Huston Smith: The Psychology of Religious Experience

    DVDs of this and otherHuston Smith programs are available. The same program

    is also part of the VideoQuartetThe Roots of Consciousness.

    JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. Our topic this evening is the

    psychology of religious experience, and my guest tonight is one of America's great

    scholars of religious traditions, Dr. Huston Smith. Dr. Smith is a former professor

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    of religion and psychology at MIT. He's the author of the great classic, Religions of

    Man, which has sold over two million copies, as well as six other books on

    psychology, religion, and philosophy, most recently one called Beyond the Post-

    Modern Mind. Welcome, Dr. Smith.

    HUSTON SMITH, Ph.D.: Thank you.

    MISHLOVE: It's a pleasure to have you here. Your background in religious studies

    and philosophy and psychology is very extensive, and the topic that we're going

    to discuss is so very broad in some ways; there are so many religions and they're

    so diverse. And yet ultimately they all seem to reflect the mind of man. Would you

    say that as a scholar of religion you've become a more religious person yourself?

    SMITH: I certainly don't feel that I've become less religious, and I also feel that

    these studies have deepened and broadened my -- what? -- my beliefs. In that

    sense I guess one might say more religious. I think I might prefer to say perhaps a

    little more maturely religious, because I didn't have a strong religious bent from

    my adolescence on.

    MISHLOVE: It's, I suppose, always a little delicate for a scholar, who is supposed

    to be objective, to study something as intense and passionate as religion can be.

    SMITH: Well, some see it as a problem, but I've been fortunate that it's never

    been a conflict for me, because it seems to me that the opposite would be very

    difficult -- that if you were studying something you were not really in love with, or

    you felt that it could not bear the light of careful analysis and added information,

    now that would be a real tension, a real conflict. But it's been one of my blessings,

    I think, that I've been able to spend my professional life working on precisely what

    concerns me most.

    MISHLOVE: My first encounter in a personal or a deep way with the psychology of

    religious experience came from, of course, reading William James's classic --

    SMITH: A wonderful book.

    MISHLOVE: -- in which he described his experiments with nitrous oxide and other

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    drugs at the time.

    SMITH: That's right, yes. Very courageous, adventuresome mind.

    MISHLOVE: And also in the mid-sixties, reading a book by Timothy Leary and

    Ralph Metzner called The Psychedelic Experience, in which they attempted to

    create the analogy between the pantheon of gods in the Hindu and Buddhist

    traditions with the dynamic forces working in the subconscious mind.

    SMITH: Yes, yes. Well, that was a very interesting and indeed important -- what

    shall I say? -- happening of our time, because this correlation and connection, it's

    a very delicate one, as we all know. But between artificially induced paranormal

    experiences and ones that come naturally, they can have, and do at times have, agreat deal in common.

    MISHLOVE: An overlap, at least.

    SMITH: A huge overlap. And the discovery of these substances -- actually a

    rediscovery, because knowledge of them goes back at least three thousand years,

    and perhaps much further than that -- but the fact that we now know how they

    work on the brain has opened this up as a field of study which it had not been

    before.

    MISHLOVE: You were involved in some of the early work at that time.

    SMITH: Well, actually I was right at the eye of the cyclone. That was 1960, and I

    was teaching at MIT, and I had arranged to have Aldous Huxley come on an

    endowed program which enabled luminaries in the humanities to come to MIT. So

    I was his host for the fall of 1960 at MIT, and of course he had written the book

    The Doors of Perception, which was one of the opening books in this area.

    MISHLOVE: Describing his experiences with -- mescaline?

    SMITH: Mescaline. Well, it just happened that that September, when Aldous

    Huxley arrived at MIT, was the exact month that Timothy Leary arrived at Harvard

    from Berkeley. And on the way -- you know the story; it's part of history now -- on

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    his way, he took a vacation swing down into Mexico, and on the edge of a

    swimming pool one afternoon ingested -- what? -- seven mushrooms which

    opened up his mind in ways that totally startled, took him by surprise.

    MISHLOVE: Psilocybin mushrooms, I presume.

    SMITH: That's right, that's right. He had arrived at Harvard with a blank check. He

    was a research professor, had accepted an appointment as research professor in

    the Center for Personality Study, and he could pick his subject, whatever he

    wanted to work on. And the moment he had that experience, he was of course

    absolutely fascinated and mystified by how mushrooms could cause that kind of

    impact upon his mind, but he didn't know what to do with it. But he had read

    Huxley's book. So I actually had a part in getting the two of them together, andit's true, for that fall the three of us were very much in the ring in this matter.

    MISHLOVE: This was at a time, of course, when these drugs were perfectly legal.

    SMITH: Not only legal, but this was respectable. It was research at Harvard

    University. One of the first things that Leary did was to mount an open study in

    which people would simply report their experiences, but he found so many of

    those experiences had a mystical cast to them that he began reaching out for

    someone who might know something about mysticism. And that's where he

    tapped me and involved me in the project.

    MISHLOVE: You had been studying mysticism long before this, I presume.

    SMITH: That's true, right.

    MISHLOVE: Had you thought about the relationship between mysticism and

    drugs prior to your encounters with Leary and Huxley?

    SMITH: Well, only academically, in that I had read descriptions, also Huxley's in

    The Doors of Perception, and as he points out there, phenomenologically, which is

    to say descriptively, if you match descriptions of the experience, they are

    indistinguishable. I actually conducted an experiment on that in which I took

    snippets or paragraphs from classic mystical experiences, and then descriptions of

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    experiences under the psychedelics which were mystical. Of course not all

    experiences under those have that character, but those that did. And then I

    shuffled them up and gave them to people who were knowledgeable about

    mysticism, and asked them to sort them in what they thought --

    MISHLOVE: Which came from the real mystics and which came from the drug

    users.

    SMITH: Exactly. And there was no reliability in their predictions.

    MISHLOVE: That sounds similar to a more recent piece of work I know Lawrence

    LeShan did, where he took statements of mystics and statements of physicists

    and compared them, and they seemed almost indistinguishable as well.

    SMITH: That's right. I'd like to add one other thing. So phenomenologically, which

    again means simply descriptively, one cannot tell the difference. But I think I

    would want to say that that's not the only dimension, because religion is not

    simply an experience; religion is a way of life. And experiences come and go, but

    quality of life is what religion is concerned with. So one has to ask also, not only

    do they feel the same, but is their impact on the life the same?

    MISHLOVE: Well, I think especially now that we can look back after twenty years

    from the original psychedelic experiments of that type, you can see distinct

    differences between psychedelic cults and real deep religious traditions.

    SMITH: That's right. So I think it's important that, having touched on this subject,

    we not leave the impression that the two are identical in every respect. Simply

    descriptively they are indistinguishable.

    MISHLOVE: What about the original insight that Leary seemed to have in ThePsychedelic Experience that the gods really do exist within us? I think what he was

    saying in effect is that the pantheons of gods from the ancient pantheistic

    religions are real active forces, even of a paranormal variety, within our own

    minds, even if we're Jews or Christians.

    SMITH: Yes. Well, that's another very interesting development in our time -- that

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    in the religions of the West, up to this point divine forces have been imaged

    externally from the self. But when one comes to think of it, when one talks about

    things of the spirit geography falls away, because the spirit is not bound by space

    and time, and therefore the distinction between out there and in here, which in

    our everyday life is very important -- once one modulates to matters of the spirit

    this whole framework of space and time and matter sort of drops away. What we

    are now coming to see is that this talk about out there has a certain naturalness,

    but also certain limitation. One can just as easily turn the tables and talk about

    the divine within. If I can put it one other way: when one looks out upon the world,

    value terms -- that is, what is good, are imaged as up there. The gods --

    MISHLOVE: Heaven.

    SMITH: Heaven; and the gods are on the mountaintops, and angels always sing

    on high. They don't sing out of the depths, the bowels of the earth. But when we

    introspect -- and by the way that imagery is natural, because sun and rain come

    from on high too -- but when we turn our attention inward and introspect, then we

    reach for the other kind of imagery, of depth. You know, we talk about profound

    and deep thought. All this is leading up to the fact that in point of fact this

    distinction between out there and in here is artificial and only metaphorical when

    we're talking about things of the spirit. And now I think in our time -- this is one of

    the changes -- having worked in imagery of the divine being out there, now there

    is a move towards realizing or exploring ways in which the same reality can be

    discovered within oneself.

    MISHLOVE: Another related notion, I think, is the one originally developed by

    Durkheim, the French sociologist, in which he suggests that religions are really

    representations of the group mind of a society, and that the god of each culture is

    an embodiment of what he called the group mind. He almost described that in

    ways that seemed quite paranormal to me, when you begin talking about groupmind -- something like a Jungian collective unconscious.

    SMITH: Well, again, I think it's very useful. For one thing, we are too much given

    to the notion that the mind is simply attached to the brain, and therefore because

    the brain has a given geographical locus, then the mind must too. But I remember

    in a weekend conference down in Tucson a few years ago with Gregory Bateson,

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    he posed to the psychologists Rollo May, Carl Rogers -- all those people were

    there -- he said, "Where is your mind?" And it sort of took everybody aback. But

    what he was leading up to is it's quite wrong to think of the mind as lodged inside

    this skin-encapsulated ego, as Alan Watts used to call it -- that the mind reaches

    out as far as one's environment extends, in Bateson's notion.

    MISHLOVE: And of course we can always go back to the argument of Bishop

    Berkeley that the entire physical universe, that everything we experience -- your

    TV sets, for example -- exist only in your mind.

    SMITH: Right.

    MISHLOVE:There's no other way to identify them.

    SMITH: And we talk about ecology of nature now, but the ecology of mind, we're

    just beginning to get used to that idea. And yet it's an experience. One can walk

    into the room, and in current terminology, feel vibrations. You can sometimes feel

    like a wall of anger or hostility, but one can also sense an ambiance of peace, and

    now the physicists are realizing that physical phenomena really float on networks

    and webs of relationship. So we're only now coming to see that our minds too

    derive, they sort of factor out and congeal out of a psychic medium that

    Durkheim, I think, was quite right in identifying.

    MISHLOVE: You know, I notice though in contemporary religions, particularly

    amongst the evangelistic Christians who are experiencing such a revival, they're

    very concerned about certain errors that people fall into -- you know, the notion

    that one might identify oneself with God in an egotistical way. How do you feel

    about that?

    SMITH: Well, I think they've got a point. I mean, if someone comes along andsays, "I am God," it's perfectly reasonable to ask, "Well, your behavior doesn't

    exactly exemplify that fact." God by definition is perfect, and what human being

    can make that claim? So I think the ministers that you refer to have a good point,

    but it doesn't annul the concept of the divine within, which remains valid. The

    distinction can come, even if we think of the divine within, as Hinduism puts it,

    and they have been perhaps the most explicit of all the great traditions in saying

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    that ultimately, in the final analysis, in their terminology, Atman is Brahman.

    Atman is the God within, and Brahman is the God without. But then they deal with

    the point you're raising by saying, well, a lantern may have a functioning light

    within it, but it may be coated not only with dust and soot, but in egregious cases

    with mud, to the point where that light does not shine through at all. So both

    things are true, but both need to be said in the same breath. Namely, I believe

    that it is true that in the final analysis we are divine and are God, but we should

    immediately acknowledge how caked and coated we are with dross that conceals

    that divinity, and it's, one's tempted to say, an endless quest to clean the surface,

    to let the light shine through.

    MISHLOVE: We were discussing earlier in the program some of your experiences

    with some of the very primitive peoples, such as the aborigines in Australia, intheir I suppose naive native religions, their having a real sense of contact with this

    level of reality.

    SMITH: Well, they do, in two ways, Australian aborigines. One is that they

    distinguish between our everyday experience and what they call the dreaming.

    The dreaming is another level of experience, in which they participate in the life of

    their ancestors, and indeed the creation of the world, in I suppose we might call it

    a trancelike state, but that doesn't quite do it, because even in the midst of their

    ordinary life, half of their mind, you might say, is still on or in this dreaming state.

    But then there's another way in which they're in touch with it, and this has to do

    with parapsychology as we know the word -- telepathy, specifically. I was in

    Australia, basically giving a series of lectures at all the universities there, but

    using my spare time to come in touch with the aborigines, and so I sought out at

    every university the anthropologists who introduced me and put me in touch with

    them. And I did not in that entire swing meet an anthropologist who was not

    convinced that the aborigines had telepathic powers. They simply told me story

    after story, when they would be with them, and suddenly one of the personswould say, "I must go back to the tribe; so and so has died."

    MISHLOVE: That's a strong statement coming from anthropologists, who tend to

    be quite skeptical.

    SMITH: That's right. Their theory was, insofar as they had a theory, the

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    presumption was that these are normal human powers, but like any power it can

    atrophy if unused, and also can be short-circuited if our conceptual mind doubts

    that it is real.

    MISHLOVE: So would you say there are some religious traditions that encourage

    the development and the cultivation of the psychic side of human beings more

    than others?

    SMITH: Well, it's interesting. I'll put it the other way, slightly differently. That is to

    say that most of them believe that these powers are there and that they do

    increase as spiritual advancement occurs. However, they also warn against it, and

    say if you make this the goal, why, you're settling for too little. And also there are

    some dangers; for one thing, this is treacherous water where one is not totallybenign, but also there's a strong temptation, as these siddhis, as the Indians call

    them --

    MISHLOVE: Powers.

    SMITH: Powers, yes. As powers become available to you, people's heads get

    turned, and they become egotistic in their abilities. And so in that way it can be

    counter-productive to the spiritual quest. So the greatest teachers are quite

    unanimous in saying they come, but pay no attention to them.

    MISHLOVE: But aren't there traditions -- the shamanistic tradition, the Tantric

    tradition -- which really do emphasize these powers?

    SMITH: That is certainly so. Now, I guess I tipped my hand a little bit in excluding

    them from the most profound spiritual masters.

    MISHLOVE: Perhaps you do have some preferences.

    SMITH: Well, shamanism is immensely fascinating, and extremely important in

    the history of religion. But sanctity one does not associate with shamans. They

    have immense power, and it can be misused as well as used. I think on balance

    it's been used. So I value them, but they're neither -- what shall I say? -- saints nor

    philosophers.

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    MISHLOVE: Well, perhaps we might liken the psychic abilities in this sense to

    musical ability, or any other natural talent that could be used in different ways.

    And some religions cultivate music, I suppose, more than others.

    SMITH: That's right, that's right. Most shamans are very much linked with the

    people, in helping them with practical problems of life. But the aspect of religion

    that has to do with virtues and compassion and loving-kindness, now, this kind of

    thing is when I speak of profundity, getting into those waters. The shamans, that's

    not their forte. They have a different role.

    MISHLOVE: Well, as our program is beginning to wind up, I wonder if you could

    comment on two things. One is a little bit more on how your exploration ofreligions has affected you personally, and perhaps we can tie it to our viewing

    audience a little bit. Is there some message that you would have for those people

    who would be viewing us right now, in terms of what your studies might convey to

    them?

    SMITH: Yes. Well, like any term religion can be defined as one wishes, and if one

    links it to institutions, I think religious institutions are indispensable, but they're

    clearly a mixed bag, and we've had the wars of religions; but I tend to think this is

    the nature of institutions and people in the aggregate. What government has a

    clean or perfect record, you know?

    MISHLOVE: We're running out of time.

    SMITH: In one sentence. But I think if one takes a basic religious world view, this

    is not only important but it's true, and we need to keep our ears open to those

    truths.

    MISHLOVE: In spite of those problems. Dr. Smith, it's been a real pleasure having

    you with me today. Thank you very much.

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    Kathleen Speeth: The Psychodynamics of Liberation

    This transcript represents the first, half-hour portion of the ninety-minute

    InnerWork video The Psychodynamics of Liberation. It is one of the 38 programs

    included in the Thinking Allowed book.

    JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. Our topic today is "The

    Psychodynamics of Liberation." We're going to explore how it is that we get locked

    into particular limited views of ourselves, and how we can hope to ever transcend,

    to move beyond those small perspectives that we develop. With me today is Dr.

    Kathleen Speeth. Dr. Speeth is a member of the faculty of the Institute of

    Transpersonal Psychology in Menlo Park, California. She is a clinical psychologistin private practice and author of several books, many articles on human

    development, and co-editor of a book called The Essential Psychotherapies, which

    she worked on with Dr. Daniel Goleman. Welcome, Kathy.

    KATHLEEN SPEETH, Ph.D.:I'm glad to be here.

    MISHLOVE: It's a pleasure to have you here again. We get stuck, we get limited.

    Every form of psychotherapy has its own diagnosis of what is the problem -- how

    do we become neurotic, how do we become stuck, how is it that we see ourselves

    in our smallness and can't get beyond it? And then they all offer a way to get

    around it. What I'd like to begin to explore with you are some of the

    commonalities, some of the larger things that we can say about the whole issue of

    liberation. Maybe a good way to lead into that is just to ask you, what is your

    definition of liberation?

    SPEETH: Well, I don't know if we can hope to find complete liberation from

    whatever traps we're in in this lifetime, but I'd say we could move towardliberation, if we find ourselves freer rather than less free, by whatever we

    understand about ourselves, or whatever techniques we use from psychotherapy

    or from any other religious tradition, any other technological helps we can find in

    the culture -- political even.

    http://www.thinkingallowed.com/2kspeeth.htmlhttp://www.thinkingallowed.com/book.htmlhttp://www.thinkingallowed.com/2kspeeth.htmlhttp://www.thinkingallowed.com/book.html
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    MISHLOVE: It seems as if in a sense we're caught in so many veils of illusion,

    that as soon as we break through one -- say, racism -- then we run into another,

    sexism. Or we run into another, religious prejudice. Or we run into another, age

    prejudice. There's no end to the ways in which our perspectives are limited by our

    particular situations. And I suppose at some level maybe that's healthy. Maybe it

    would not be good for a human being to be fully liberated. How would one

    function?

    SPEETH: Well, I suppose the most liberated person from your point of view, what

    you just described, is a neonate -- a tiny baby, just born, who experiences the

    world as a booming, buzzing confusion, doesn't have any concepts to clot the

    world into observable things and repeatable experiences. But perhaps a free

    human being, a free and developed human being, isn't like that. Perhaps they canbe free without giving up conceptualization.

    MISHLOVE: Well, we certainly have ideal models of what this might be, especially

    from the Oriental traditions when they really do talk about spiritual liberation,

    spiritual enlightenment, completely unfettered by the bonds of karma or samsara

    or illusions of various sorts. And yet every time a so-called enlightened, liberated

    guru comes over to the West, it's like the emperor wearing no clothes. It's easy to

    see their foibles.

    SPEETH: So you're disappointed. You feel betrayed.

    MISHLOVE: I wonder, personally, if there is such a thing as enlightenment, really,

    or if it's one of these --you know, "Hitch your wagon to the stars." It's a goal we all

    ought to strive for, but which is not really attainable. There's something about the

    human condition itself which is fundamental. You know, existential reality -- we're

    born alone; we have to deal with death and alienataion, and no matter how much

    we practice yoga or meditation or build communities or begin to see through ourfoibles, we'll always be in these bodies, at least while we're alive.

    SPEETH: Well, that's undoubtedly true. There's a Sufi story about that. Basically,

    the story is about Bahaudin Naqshband, who is the great Naqshbandi --

    MISHLOVE: The founder of one of the major Sufi orders.

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    SPEETH: Right. And he materialized an apple, I don't know why, as some

    demonstration of competence. And the apple had a worm in it. And they said,

    "Well, Bahaudin, you're so powerful that you can materialize an apple. How is it

    that you can't materialize a perfect apple?" He said, "In this context, nothing can

    be perfect." But it isn't just the Eastern meditative traditions that give us some

    help with liberation. I think that Western psychotherapeutic approaches are even

    more appropriate for us, although I certainly have participated in both rather a lot.

    MISHLOVE: My sense is that the Western approach is to say, well, look, the world

    isn't perfect; we've got to live with it, with its problems. And psychotherapy is

    often oriented towards adjusting, coping, dealing with how bad life really is.

    SPEETH: Well, that's one form of psychotherapy. But you practice psychotherapy,

    as I do too.

    MISHLOVE: I do too, and I have another view.

    SPEETH: You have another view. What's your other view?

    MISHLOVE: Well, I tend to think that underlying the basic alienation, the

    separateness, the otherness, the fundamental ground of reality is one of

    connection -- that we're connected with everything. And for me, liberation is really

    becoming more and more in touch with that dimension of being part of

    everything, interconnected with everything. That way, as we move towards that,

    we get closer, I suppose, to what we might think of as our divine reality, and

    ultimately the highest model of liberation must be divinity itself.

    SPEETH: It must be. So the way you're talking now, you sound like Freud talking

    about eros, as opposed to thanatos -- the idea of a life instinct, something thatmoves toward life, and away from dying, away from entropy. Something that

    makes form out of chaos. And you feel that is development, and of course so do I.

    So then, what keeps us from that? What holds us back? What do we need to be

    liberated from, so that we could make connections instead of break connections,

    and get hot rather than cool?

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    MISHLOVE: I would say it's our attachments.

    SPEETH: Uh huh. And what attachments?

    MISHLOVE: It could be an attachment to a habit pattern that we have, or to a

    belief system. My sense is that the unattached mind just gravitates naturally to

    that state. And when I'm with a group of people, I can watch, some of them go

    right there, and you have a sense they're connected and they're with it. And then

    somebody else, their mind just won't let them float to that level, and they've got

    to talk about -- it could be anything; it could be their clothing, it could be art work.

    We have a million excuses that we use for not always resonating, I guess is a word

    I might use, at that level of connectedness.

    SPEETH: Or living enthusiastically. And what do you think holds people back from

    that? You know, Wilhelm Reich would call it an anti-pleasure bias in a character.

    Where does it come from?

    MISHLOVE: That is a good question.

    SPEETH: I mean, we're talking about being liberated from some kind of a net we

    throw around ourselves.

    MISHLOVE: Well, in many people it's clear to me it's trauma. They've been

    traumatized in one way or another, and they're kind of stuck. They haven't

    worked through their trauma.

    SPEETH: And how does that trauma stick people? What really happens? I mean,

    let's talk about it as deeply as we can. What do we need to be liberated from?

    MISHLOVE: Probably -- I'm glad you're asking me all these questions. It's adelight to be interviewed, on my own show. To me, I would say the basic thing is

    self hatred. It's places where we feel that we can't love ourselves. If we've been

    traumatized, we incorporate that, and we think, "I deserved that. The universe is

    telling me I'm that kind of person, who should be punished."

    SPEETH: You're saying two things; in this way I believe we've got a lot of wisdom

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    in the Western psychotherapeutic tradition. One thing you're saying -- and I of

    course agree with you -- is that it's something about going away from entropy and

    toward life. And the second thing you're saying is that it has something to do with

    having been hurt, right? We have to somehow work through some

    nonmetabolized experiences. We need to liberate ourselves from something that

    has gripped us and grabbed us and is holding us back -- something that happened

    very early. And the wish we have to dissolve and to die hangs on.

    MISHLOVE: And the irony is, that "something" is us. It's something we're doing to

    ourselves.

    SPEETH: It's something we're doing to ourselves. So one extraordinary thing

    about liberation, it seems to me, is that the very things that hold us back are thethings that hold us in our families, in the family structure.

    MISHLOVE: Interesting.

    SPEETH: So, for example, Mother doesn't want you to sit and play in your own

    way. She wants to have interaction with you, so she can feel like a good mother.

    That's one example. I just worked with someone today in a therapy session for

    whom that was true. He didn't dare, when he was with his girlfriend, be quiet and

    just look at the fire. He felt he had to keep entertaining his girlfriend. And so he

    was ready to clear the decks of all girlfriends, because he didn't allow himself to

    be himself while in the company of a person who reminded him of his mother. So

    he is not a free man.

    MISHLOVE: Right, right. Because of some conditioning he had had with her.

    SPEETH: Right. Or another example, somebody I worked with whose mother was

    a Holocaust survivor. She was a happy woman, this patient of mine -- a happywoman, and well adjusted, with four or five brothers and sisters who weren't, and

    a mother who was a widow and a Holocaust survivor. And she couldn't give up her

    guilt, because, it turned out, her guilt was the only link she had with her mother.

    MISHLOVE: Uh huh. That's where they could communicate, they could resonate.

    Her mother felt guilty because she was a survivor, I imagine, and therefore in

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    order to kind of enter into resonance with her mother, she had to be guilty too.

    Then they could be guilty together and have a good time.

    SPEETH: Exactly. And they could be connected. Even if they had a rotten time,

    they would be together.

    MISHLOVE: The irony to me is, from my perspective guilt is totally unnecessary.

    It serves no function whatsoever.

    SPEETH: Except the function of connecting one with a guilty subculture. So in

    order to be free, we have to be willing to be solitary, emotionally solitary.

    MISHLOVE:Solitary. What does solitary mean?

    SPEETH: It means that we have to dare to be objective, and not to share, in order

    to become a "we" with other people, not to share their beliefs.

    MISHLOVE: To be able to sort of remove ourselves from the herd instincts.

    SPEETH: Yes. Perhaps to be really free, one can't be a healthy animal in a happy

    herd. Or perhaps one can; but one has to take the chance to find out. And that's a

    courageous step.

    MISHLOVE: You know, one of the things that you've delved into quite extensively

    and written about is the Gurdjieff work. I recall a point that you made about

    Gurdjieff, is that he claimed, as opposed to Western psychotherapies, that all of

    the negative emotions -- anger, hatred, and so on -- were unnecessary. That it

    was possible to live a healthy, harmonious, happy life without any of those. And

    yet in our culture, we have so much reinforcement that says you should be getting

    angry, you should be feeling guilty, you should be negative a certain amount ofthe day. Otherwise you're not owning your emotions.

    SPEETH: Right. And of course that's what I think of as one of the mistakes that

    many therapists make. They render their patients unhappy. That is, people come

    out of therapy feeling entitled to a lot of negative emotions. The fact is that they

    have to come to consciousness, and to be worked through, and to be put aside.

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    Because they're really not necessary.

    MISHLOVE: That's interesting. So for you, part of the definition of liberation

    would be to be liberated from negative emotions.

    SPEETH: One could still have them, but probaby the perverse sustaining of them

    would be gone. I mean, as we sit here, there are probably bombers going

    overhead with nuclear warheads on them, and so forth. We live in a very

    dangerous world, an explosive world. It would be difficult to simply accept that

    without a certain amount of what you might call negativity -- but not to dwell on

    that.

    MISHLOVE:When one looks at warfare in the world, and certain people, such as

    the Middle East, where they're just at each other, at each other, at each other,

    and they have been for thousands of years, one would think the only hope for

    peace in these situations is to somehow be able to communicate to these people

    to let go, to calm down, not to be so negative about it.

    SPEETH: And of course psychotherapy deals with an individual person, rather

    than a whole political scene. And within an individual that same thing is true.

    There are many I's and many subpersonalities.

    MISHLOVE: We're often at war with ourselves.

    SPEETH: And that war has to be ended.

    MISHLOVE: You know, the Muslims have a term, the holy war. And it often does

    refer to an internal war between the personality and the spirit, or various parts of

    ourselves. It's treated as something that we have to engage in; we can't avoid

    these things. The psychologies say the same thing -- you can't just ignore youranger.

    SPEETH: It's certainly not an invitation to repression or suppression at all, to think

    that it might be possible to live in a very deeply content way without that.

    MISHLOVE: What you're saying is that if one were to see the light at the end of

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    the tunnel, work through the anger, then there would be a time in one's life, when

    one had achieved a state you could call liberated or enlightened, where it would

    be possible to let go of that.

    SPEETH: And negative emotions are a little analogous to other substances that

    are misused, like cocaine, marijuana, alcohol. It's an addiction to feel negative.

    And the holy war inside, one meaning of it might be to feel no need to have the

    rush that a negative emotion produces. The rush -- I'm entitled, the feeling of

    being vindicated, etcetera. So that would be one movement toward liberation.

    MISHLOVE: My sense is that part of the dynamics here occurs when we become

    polarized to such an extent that we think that good and evil are at odds with each

    other inside of us, and that one must totally vanquish the other.

    SPEETH: Right.

    MISHLOVE: There is no vanquishing of that kind. They really have to come

    together. And one discovers usually that evil isn't really evil.

    SPEETH: So there's that feeling of wanting to be a whole person, a dappled

    person, a 3-D person -- not a person split into black and white. That's part of

    moving toward liberation -- to be free of the sense of being split inside, into a part

    of me that I love, and a part of me that I despise. So that's another aspect of

    what's necessary to do. And another thing you were saying that seems to me very

    important, is that we need to be free of the necessity to take and defend one

    position. Why should I see everything from a narcissistic point of view? Why

    couldn't I be objective and see myself as the same as other people? That would be

    a big liberation -- if I didn't polarize myself and aggrandize this little one that I am.

    MISHLOVE: You know, I recall a modern writer has a very popular book out rightnow -- The Closing of the American Mind. His point is that we aren't teaching

    people more about good and evil. We're forgetting what he calls traditional, basic

    values. People are becoming too relativistic; we should be attacking evil more.

    You seem to be saying -- and I would agree -- that no, it's just the opposite; we

    should be transcending this good-and-evil polarity.

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    SPEETH: And of course that is goodness, that is freedom. The Sufis have a nice

    way of saying it. They say, "Let go of your preconceptions, and accept your

    destiny." What is the reason to be liberated? What are we being liberated from?

    We're being liberated, basically, from conditioning that we received in early

    childhood, and also from anti-life aspects of probably our biology. I suppose that's

    in the DNA, I don't know. For what reason? It seems to me, so that we can live out

    some kind of personal destiny. And how will we ever know about that if we're

    going through the motions in order to continue some family tradition, or some

    cultural tradition?

    MISHLOVE: You mentioned earlier that Freud had described these two forces --

    eros, the force of life, and thanatos, the force of death. And we both agreed we

    were very sympathetic to the eros force. But what about thanatos? How doesliberation become a factor in our lives as we face death?

    SPEETH: It must be a very important question for many people now, because at

    this time in history the gay community is being terribly, terribly ravaged by AIDS. I

    have a friend who's gay and he's a therapist, and he said he knows forty people --

    patients and friends -- who have died in the last year. He had to face death with

    them, and it's a very good teacher. So it certainly does help a person get their

    priorities straight. What could be more cleansing of stupidity, than to face one's

    death? But as you and I sit here, how different are we from those people who have

    been given a diagnosis of AIDS? I mean, right now, we're also finite.

    MISHLOVE: Right. We also have to die.

    SPEETH: We do. I mean, we are Ivan Ilyich.

    MISHLOVE: But I'm not looking forward to my death just yet.

    SPEETH: Well, why look forward to it at all? The question is to use it to give

    definition to your values right now. Does it help you at all to think that you're

    mortal?

    MISHLOVE: It does. In my own work I pay a lot of attention to issues of life and

    death. Often in hypnosis I take people beyond the realm of death -- to explore, to

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    get in touch with some sense of eternity, which I think is with us all the time. You

    know, it seems to me that it's possible that when people live from a place within

    them that echoes of eternity, death isn't so much of an issue, really.

    SPEETH: So a free man or woman would be impeccable, would be courageous,

    would be able to face his own finitude or his own eternity.

    MISHLOVE: You know, it reminds me of a Zen story of a time when there was

    much warfare in Japan. The monastery was ransacked. A general came in and he

    saw the Zen monk praying, and he came up to him with his sword, and he said,

    "Don't you know I'm a man who can run you through with this sword without

    blinking an eye?" The monk looked up at him and said, "Don't you know I'm a man

    who can be run through without blinking an eye?" The general put his sworddown.

    SPEETH: Right. That is a free man. So when we talk about liberation, we're

    talking about liberation from the perspective of ego, my own personal ego, so that

    I can see from all points of view. And that is divinity. What is divinity?

    MISHLOVE: So it's the ego that separates us from that.

    SPEETH: It's a kind of paranoid clot of attention inside, a trembling, paranoid clot

    inside. Trungpa Rinpoche called it the basic contraction of ego.

    MISHLOVE: The basic contraction of ego. I like it. And I suppose that's also what's

    responsible for selfishness and greed and clinging of every sort.

    SPEETH: Uh huh, right. And of course to the degree that one is getting free of

    that, then it's possible to have empathy with others. If I'm not in a fortress

    protecting myself, maybe I can have a sense of how you're living, what yoursituation is.

    MISHLOVE: I should think there must be a difference, though, between this kind

    of egotistical, or egoistic, clinging, and a sense of when a person is on a real

    mission -- when they're following their destiny, when they're attached to

    something, but it's something greater than themselves -- a life purpose, a creative

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    work of some sort.

    SPEETH: Right. A heroic life. A life like Theseus, who was able to go through the

    labyrinth and kill the Minotaur. Or a life like the life of Einstein, who was able to

    lock himself in a room for two weeks and come out with E = mc2 and so forth.

    That's a heroic life.

    MISHLOVE: Now, how does this relate to the dynamics of liberation? How do we

    free ourselves from the petty clinging, and enter into the heroic life?

    SPEETH: How do we work through enough so that our actions come not from

    deficiency, and not from fear, and not from conditioning, but from what

    Longhenpa called lucid awareness and consummate perspicacity?

    MISHLOVE: That's a mouthful. Consummate perspicacity.

    SPEETH: The sense of doing just the right thing at the right time. How do we get

    there? I think as Westerners we get there on the psychotherapeutic path. There's

    a person named Jack Engel, who's a psychiatrist in Boston. He did a study in

    Burma -- I don't know if he did the study, or who took the data, but the results

    were that Westerners and Burmese sat with a teacher, a Theravadin Buddhist

    teacher, and after six weeks the Burmese had the first level of enlightenment, and

    the Westerners had developed a transference neurosis on the teacher. So for us,

    we're different from the people for whom those meditative traditions were

    developed.

    MISHLOVE: A transference neurosis, for the benefit of our viewers, is where

    they're projecting their own emotions, about their parents probably, onto the

    teacher, and they're working that out.

    SPEETH: Right. And they're acting toward the teacher as if he were a loved,

    feared, or whatever, parent. So for us, we could do the two-person meditation

    called psychoanalysis, in which the therapist sits with evenly hovering awareness,

    and the patient sits or lies with free association of thought. What could be more

    likely to produce self awareness than that kind of working through?

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    MISHLOVE: I love to do therapeutic work with people myself, but I haven't

    necessarily heard of great geniuses, real heroes, coming out that way. Did

    Einstein need a therapist?

    SPEETH: No. And I have to say that Rilke refused psychoanalysis. He was afraid

    that it would interfere with his gift.

    MISHLOVE: This is not to demean therapy.

    SPEETH: No, but I hear what you're saying, and I can only say that in my

    experience, the people that I know, and also my own self, have profited by

    understanding their minds in the therapeutic manner. And that just means to

    conduct your own analysis of your life, with the companionship of a therapist.

    MISHLOVE: My sense is that maybe therapy does get one through certain stages,

    but there are certainly stages on the heroic journey that go beyond what Western

    psychology is equipped to deal with.

    SPEETH: Right. And in fact a hero wants to face his destiny without a cane. So at

    some point he'll have to stand alone and make it, and meet whatever is coming

    toward him.

    MISHLOVE: And I guess ultimately that's everybody's destiny.

    SPEETH: I guess it is.

    MISHLOVE: Well, Kathleen Speeth, it's been a pleasure sharing this half hour with

    you. I think this is for me personally, I'd like to say, one of the most exciting

    interviews I've ever done.

    SPEETH: I'm very glad to be here.

    MISHLOVE: And I hope to have you back again, as well. Thank you so much for

    being with me.

    SPEETH: Thank you, Jeff.

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    Fred Alan Wolf: Physics and Consciousness

    DVDs of this and otherFred Alan Wolf programs are available. The same program

    is also part of the VideoQuartetNew Physics and Beyond.

    EFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. Our topic today is "Quantum

    Physics and Consciousness," and my guest, Dr. Fred Alan Wolf, is certainly an

    authority in this area. He's the author of several books, including Taking the

    Quantum Leap, which is a winner of the National Book Award; Star Wave, a book

    describing Fred's own theories about quantum physics and consciousness; andalso The Body Quantum. Fred, welcome to the program.

    FRED ALAN WOLF, Ph.D.: Thank you, Jeffrey. It's really a pleasure to be here

    and see you again.

    MISHLOVE: It's a pleasure to have you here, Fred. Let's talk about consciousness

    for a moment, because before we can talk about quantum physics and

    consciousness we need to start with a definition. What is consciousness to you, as

    a quantum physicist?

    WOLF: Well, first let's talk about it in general -- not just as quantum physics, but

    what does it mean to be conscious? Just in coming to the studio, I happened to be

    going through a big library, and I was looking at all the books and all the titles on

    consciousness. I pulled one out and looked to see what he had to say; he didn't

    get it. I pull another one out; this doesn't get it. There are a thousand people

    writing books about consciousness, and not one of them really knows exactly

    what consciousness is. To tell you the truth, I don't know what it is either. So eventhough I've written several books about it and have been studying it for many,

    many years, to tell you exactly what consciousness is, is something that's beyond

    my grasp.

    MISHLOVE: It's Goedel's theorem. A system can never understand or explain

    http://www.thinkingallowed.com/2fwolf.htmlhttp://www.thinkingallowed.com/q124.htmlhttp://www.thinkingallowed.com/2fwolf.htmlhttp://www.thinkingallowed.com/q124.html
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    itself in any case.

    WOLF: It's kind of like a mathematical theorem, or if you like, it's so much a part

    of ourselves that we can't recognize it. We can laugh about it, we can joke about

    it, but to really find out exactly what it is, is very difficult to do. However, we

    shouldn't be so discouraged by such a remark as this, because in reality we don't

    know what anything is. If we ask, "What is this? What is that?" all you really do is

    try to describe how it behaves, or what it does, or what it looks like, or what it

    smells like, or what your sensation of it is. You really don't know what something

    intrinsically is. So it's really a philosophical question as to what consciousness

    could be, because that's the ultimate mystery. What I'm trying to describe, and

    what I've learned to describe, is what consciousness does. That may be a different

    issue, and may be something we could address and talk about.

    MISHLOVE: All right. What does consciousness do, Fred?

    WOLF: What does consciousness do?

    MISHLOVE: It sounds like you were describing it in a way, when you said we try

    to discriminate, we try to understand what things are. That is what consciousness

    is about.

    WOLF: The best way I can describe it is to speak of it in terms of some kind of

    huge metaphor, like an ocean of consciousness; or that consciousness is

    everything, it fills the universe. What it does I think is very interesting. Before

    quantum physics, people knew that human beings were conscious. We knew that

    animals were conscious. Some of the ancient traditions, particularly some of the

    Hindu traditions, or the Vedic traditions of ancient Indian religion, speak in terms

    of everything being conscious. Rocks are conscious; your thumbnail is conscious;

    the television cameras that are recording this show are conscious. So they speakabout consciousness pervading everything. But with the twentieth century and

    with quantum physics, we began to see what might be called a new role for

    consciousness -- something that we know happens, but remained inexplicable

    until we began to realize that what we were talking about was the action of

    consciousness. So what I've been doing in my work is talking about something I

    call fundamental acts of consciousness. I call them FACS -- please forgive the pun.

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    What is a fundamental act of consciousness? It's an action in which something is

    perceived. Now, in ordinary physics, or in ordinary physiology, or in most of the

    classical realms of science, perception is something which is taken to be outside

    the realm of physicality. In other words, if you perceive something, you know that

    you see something. Light will strike your retina; you'll get an idea, or something

    will pop off in your brain, or something of that sort. But we never got the notion

    that somehow the act of seeing something was affecting what you were seeing or

    what you were looking at. But in quantum physics we've learned that when you're

    looking at very small objects, subatomic particles for example, the very action of

    looking at them disturbs them to such an extent that we never really get a

    complete picture as to what they actually are. Now, this has led me to think that

    consciousness may be at the core of this problem as to how perception can affect

    and change reality, and that maybe what we're doing when we're thinking orfeeling or sensing or even listening to a conversation is using this action of

    consciousness, this fundamental act, which sort of what I call pops the qwiff -- that

    suddenly alters the physical reality of, say, the human body.

    MISHLOVE: In other words, in subatomic physics, if I want to look at a particle, I

    literally have to touch it. I have to bounce a photon or something off of it in order

    to do that. What you're suggesting is that consciousness acts in this way; it

    touches the things that it perceives.

    WOLF: That's right.

    MISHLOVE: It almost becomes one with them, merges with them a little bit, in

    the process of perceiving.

    WOLF: Right. The way I kind of look at it is that consciousness is a huge oceanic

    wave that washes through everything, and it has ripples and vibrations in it. When

    there are acts of consciousness, the wave turns into bubbles at that moment, itjust turns into froth.

    MISHLOVE: It kind of reminds me of those Japanese woodcuts where you see the

    waves reaching out like fingers.

    WOLF: Exactly, exactly. That's a good metaphor. It reaches out like fingers, and

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    it's the action of those fingers that disrupts and alters the patterns of physicality

    that were previously arranged by the earlier acts of consciousness. In other words,

    there's a continuation of this movement. Each one is disruptive; each one is a

    little bit chaotic, so that things are never quite exactly the same as they were.

    There's like an ever-changing light show going on, a bubbly light show going on. I

    think this action takes place not only in our minds and our brains, but even at the

    level of the subatomic particles that make us up. In fact, that may be how the

    universe got created in the first place.

    MISHLOVE: And this is your whole point, that we're composed of this stuff. We're

    composed of this frothy little ocean. If we could see ourselves under an electronic

    microscope, it's about all we'd look like, I suppose.

    WOLF: Yes, it would be a rather bizarre looking light show, of things popping on

    and off, vanishing and reappearing, matter created out of nothing and then

    vanishing. And in that vanishing and creation, an electromagnetic signal is piped

    from one point to another point. That's really kind of an amazing description.

    MISHLOVE: It's almost remarkable, when you talk about it that way, that I'm here

    looking at you and you look like a humanoid.

    WOLF: Right, exactly. In fact there was one guy who tried to make a metaphor of

    that. He said, "Suppose I were to put you in a room, and put a wall between us,

    and all I could listen to was your voice, or better yet, no voice. All I could really do

    was read a computer readout coming through the wall, and I could ask you

    questions by typing them in to you, and then you'd feed them back to me. Could I

    ask you enough questions so that I could discern that what was behind the wall

    was a real human being and not a machine feeding you back data?"

    MISHLOVE: Interesting.

    WOLF: Interesting question. So the question is, you look at me, I look at you, and

    we say, "Ah, that must be a human being." But if we really wanted to get very

    Cartesian, like Descartes did, about everything, we might begin to say, "Well, how

    can I really know that that's a human being behind there? What kind of questions

    can I type out, or can I ask it, in order for it to feed me back and say, 'Ah, yes, I'm

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    a human being just like you, Fred.'" But then the question is, "Is Fred a human

    being who's asking?" Maybe this is the robot talking to you, and you have to ask

    yourself the same kind of question.

    MISHLOVE: You're getting at the nature of paradox here a little bit, aren't you?

    WOLF: Yes, we're getting at the very nature of what consciousness is, really, in

    raising these humorous ways of looking at it. If we try to address it, I think, totally

    scientifically and totally objectively, I think we run into a real brick wall. Literally;

    it's that brick wall that's erected that keeps the person behind and you in front. In

    fact, if you start to address your own body as that kind of a thing, you say, "Ah,

    this is not a hand; this is a machine. Look, it does this, it does that."

    MISHLOVE: A hundred and twenty-four joints.

    WOLF: Exactly. We look at the articulation, we watch how the blood flows, we

    know the pressures in the heart, we know the atrium does this and that does this,

    and we know how -- mechanically, we can see it perfectly. But yet, something is

    missing in it all. Even if I try to make it as mechanically clear as possible, we know

    something's missing, and that thing that's missing is something we call

    consciousness.

    MISHLOVE: Norman Cousins once talked about the body as being made of

    spiritual tissue. He was kind of getting at that angle.

    WOLF: What I'm getting at, is that possibly we can't really address the question

    of what consciousness is, if we purely look at it in its objective, causal framework.

    MISHLOVE: You're a physicist, and a theoretical quantum physicist. And when we

    get to that level of quantum physics, it seems as though the mechanical notionsof the universe break down completely. Everything's fuzzy, it's frothy, it's foamy,

    it's probability waves. Doesn't that sort of seem to be like consciousness?

    WOLF: Well, let me quote from Newton about this, even though we're talking

    quantum physics. Literally, I feel like a child at a seashore, when it comes to

    seeing where quantum physics is pointing. I feel like we're on the verge of a

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    gigantic discovery -- maybe the nature of God, maybe the nature of the human

    spirit. Something of that sort is going to emerge from this, because our normal

    notions -- in fact the notions upon which we think science makes any sense at all,

    the notions of space and time and matter -- they just are breaking down, they're

    just falling apart, like tissue paper before our eyes. Wet tissue paper; it isn't even

    good tissue paper. It doesn't hold anything up anymore. So we're beginning to see

    that -- for example, in classical physics the idea that the past influences the

    presence is pretty normal. Everybody says, "Oh, of course."

    MISHLOVE: One-way causality.

    WOLF: One-way causality. Everybody says, "Oh yeah, naturally." I mean, that's

    what Newton said, that's what they all say. OK, but there's another notion. Whatabout the future influencing the present? Is such an idea just an idea that comes

    about through parapsychology, or through mystical insight? Quantum physics

    says no, it says that definitely there is a real mathematical basis for saying actions

    in the future can have an effect on the probability patterns that exist in the

    present. In other words, what takes places now, what choices are being made

    right now, may not be as free to you as you think they are. To you it may seem

    uncertain -- well, I'll do this or I'll do that. But if you realized that what you did in

    the future is having an effect now, then it wouldn't be as obvious. So it's hard to

    talk about it because the future's yet to come, right?

    MISHLOVE: Well, I was thinking about this today. I just saw a movie, one of these

    Back to the Future kind of things, Peggy Sue Got Married -- these visions of people

    traveling through time. And I thought to myself, if I were in touch with who I will

    be twenty, thirty years from now, if I had the insights today that I will have then,

    how would I do it? What would I do different today?

    WOLF: Well, suppose you found out that you do have those insights, and youactually have them right now, but the problem is that we haven't developed our

    acuity for believing those insights as strongly as we have our acuity for believing

    the past. Most of us have made mistakes in the past, right? We're all schlemiels

    when it comes to the past: "Oh God, if I'd only done that differently in the past."

    OK, well, this is your opportunity to do it now in the future. And though it's in the

    future, you can envision something about yourself that's better than it is right

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    now. In fact, I guess that's what positive thinking is really all about, isn't it? And if

    we can tune to that picture and visualize it, sort of get a clear picture as to what it

    is, it will propagate back to the present right now, and will affect the choices that

    you're going to make now, so that a lot of the struggle you have, having to deal

    with the past, will sort of vanish away.

    MISHLOVE: In other words, if I hear you right, you're suggesting that we should

    kind of be talking and thinking to ourselves who we were twenty years ago, to

    make sure that we made the right decisions then, so we can be who our best self

    is right now.

    WOLF: That's right, that's right.

    MISHLOVE: Isn't that interesting?

    WOLF: We need to recreate the past. I mentioned this in an article I wrote about

    time, saying that the past is not fixed, that there's no absolute past. I'm sure there

    are events that we would all agree on. For example, we could agree on the Nazi

    Holocaust. OK, fine, but can we agree on what was going on in the German mind

    during the Nazi Holocaust? Can we agree on what was going on in our minds when

    we were ten years old? I mean, can we really come to grips and say, "OK, when I

    was ten years old I was really this bubbling kid, or I was just --"

    MISHLOVE: Do we know what goes on in Reagan's and Gorbachev's minds when

    they meet?

    WOLF: Exactly. It's not so much what's going on in their minds, but do we really

    have a fix on saying that the events we write down now about what happened in

    the past were really those events? Obviously we're creating the past; obviously

    we're making choices now. And there are feelings involved.

    MISHLOVE: But now there's a difference between in