[Don SalmonMember]

What a delight to hear from both of you – and thank you for your permission, and yes, we will acknowledge you (and if we have any advanced online students – the course is primarily for beginners – recommend your book!).

Well, I tend to write a lot, so you both may regret asking me this question:>)) Here is something I just “jotted down” quickly earlier today for my friends in the Sri Aurobindo community: http://www.ipi.org.in/blogs/integral-yoga-and-the-buddhist-stages-of-the-path/

Let’s see, where to start:

Jan (my wife) and I put together our website – http://www.remember-to-breathe.org – starting in 2011, with the initial intention of creating “breathing videos” to help beginners concentrate enjoyably (balance attention and awareness!) and then hopefully move on to a steady practice. It took longer than we thought – we’ve got over 50 pages, and initially based our work on Dan Siegel’s “interpersonal neurobiology”, but drew a lot from McGilchrist (see http://www.ipi.org.in/blogs/integral-yoga-and-the-buddhist-stages-of-the-path/) and Les Fehmi (I’ll be very curious, by the way, to hear what you think about McGilchrist’s focus on the different hemispheres; I noticed in your notes you associate the RH with peripheral awareness but find structures in both hemispheres associated with selective attention – some of the more astute critics of McGilchrist – and he doesn’t entirely disagree – suggest that he should have made MUCH clearer the fact that his ‘left mode” and “right mode” ways of attending are metaphorical. For example, in the case of significant brain damage, the right hemisphere may take over LH functions, in which case you don’t have the psychological/physiological correlate any more).

Psychologist Les Fehmi started in the 60s as a Zen meditator, then went to biofeedback (particularly about generating alpha waves). He found one day by accident, after trying as hard as he could to generate alpha waves then completely giving up, that the machine, for the first time, registered alpha waves. Over the years, he found that by opening his attention to “space” (that is, a non-specific, non-gross “object”) he could bring about in himself and in his patients, stunning and very rapid changes; changes related to physical pain, depression, anxiety; relationship problems, and even doing this successfully with Olympic athletes. In his (not so well written, unfortunately) book, Open Focus, he lays out 4 kinds of attention, associated quite loosely with the LH and RH. I’ll save the details for another letter but it is quite fascinating.

Ok, so, Jan and I figured out earlier this year that people loved our breathing videos but had absolutely no sense of how to use them. We then decided to focus on creating an e-course and providing the breathing videos for free. We started in the late spring sticking with Dan’s work, but his “wheel of awareness” analogy (“I” am in the center and all that I am aware of is on the “rim” of the wheel”) was clunky, dualistic, and problematic in many other ways. In the summer I got a copy of Loch Kelly’s book, “Shift Into Freedom,” which draws on his 25+ year training in Dzogchen and Mahamudra, and teaches “Awake Awareness” (which is, basically, if you take it literally, rigpa, or more humbly, a faint “glimpse” of rigpa). Loch dares to suggest that it is possible to use “pointers” to give people with little or no meditation experience glimpses of this “cognitive shift” as I think you refer to it.

I thought that was very powerful and we shifted our whole focus away from interpersonal neurobiology to what we’re now calling “open heartful awareness.” We still had a huge problem with the way we talked about the brain. Dan Siegel keeps the “Triune brain” theme. Technically, it’s not entirely wrong, and it’s not really the same as the outdated version that Paul McLean came up with 50 or so years ago. But I keep checking the academic sites (I’m a clinical psychologist with some neuropsychology background but not at all a neuroscientist) and everyone these days seems to be more vigorously negative toward the triune brain theory than ever. So I checked with a friend of mine (doctorate in physiology!) who teaches the brain to med students and he strongly recommended getting rid of the triune brain theory.

I’m so wary of neurobabble and overuse of brain localization that we basically have only kept the PFC (Pre frontal cortex) and now speak (hopefully not too mechanistically) of “instinctive, emotional and cognitive programming.” I’ve checked this out with some of the teens that I do psych evals with, and they seem to get it right away, and even see how it’s related to their problems, so I think we’ve got that pretty well down.

We’ve been working the last 5 hours going through your book, page by page, up to page 100 (we’re not likely to take folks past stage 4 in our course, if that far!) trying to integrate selective attention and peripheral awareness with the rest of our course. One of the hardest things is I learned mindfulness from traditional Buddhist texts in the 70s and still to date find it grating to deal with the mcmindfulness definition, but everyone knows it and for our purposes, redefining it is probably going to confuse people. Maybe we could borrow you and your two cowriters to help (just kidding).

(Now you’re probably very sorry you asked me a question, after all these words):>)) To get back to your McGilchrist question, one of the things I find most powerful in his book is his larger philosophic exploration of how the LH/RH distinction helps us understand cultures. He speculates about modern society that our extreme hyper focused LH/selective attention style is responsible for the overly quantitative, materialistic focus of modern science, the technocratic, de-contextualized politics that we see creating more and more separate “identities” and boundaries around the world, and even may be responsible to some extent for the dramatic increase in schizophrenia and autism (not just from increased diagnoses of these disorders).

There’s a major critic – major neuroscientist from Harvard whose name escapes me now – who says the only division worthwhile talking about in the brain is the vertical, cortical/subcortical one (which Dan Siegel translates for kids as our “upstairs” and “downstairs” brain). I think McGilchrist and his defenders supported his thesis brilliantly by pointing out the ultimately metaphorical nature of his findings. Personally, I think if you brought to McGilchrist’s attention (!) the way you unfold selective attention and peripheral awareness (and if you can’t get in touch with him directly, one of Dan Siegel’s students, Bonnie Badenoch, who teaches interpersonal neurobiology at the University of Oregon, would LOVE to learn about this) he would be extremely interested. In fact, Bonnie, who is a therapist who incorporates mindfulness, would I think immediately see the profound power of using your distinctions with the full range of her patients.

Ok, enough words. Jan and I have been so delighted to have your book. We just did a 3 day retreat at Roy Eugene Davis’ Center for Spiritual Awareness in Lakemont, GA and spent much of the time in long meditations inspired by your book. For Jan, it was one of the most powerfully transformative meditative experiences she’s had in a long time. Turns out she’s a MUCH better meditator than she thought:>)) Just needed some clarification. Meanwhile, in studying your work, I’ve found that not only have I gained a much richer and deeper understanding of the Dzogchen teachings I learned at a brief workshop with Alan Wallace 20 years ago, just yesterday and today there’s been a dramatic unfolding and deepening of my understanding of Sri Aurobindo’s sadhana, which I’ve been “practicing” for 40 years.

So, then, thank you!!

[Don SalmonMember]

Blake, I have a question about copyright issues associated with Culadasa’s book. I hope this is an appropriate place to write this.

Jan (my wife) and I are developing an e-course on meditation and the brain. We came across Culadasa’s excellent book recently. We’re particularly taken with his distinction between selective attention and peripheral awareness. We’ve found similar descriptions elsewhere – the psychologist Les Fehmi has been making the distinction between narrow, objective focus and wide, immersed focus (essentially the same, including the neurological parallels) since the 1970s; and Iain McGilchrist more recently in his ‘The Master and His Emissary” (the product of 20 years of deep “meditations” on the research literature on left and right hemisphere differences) speaks of “left mode” and “right mode” attention in ways almost identical to the descriptions of selective attention and peripheral awareness.

However, we’ve found Culadasa’s terminology to be most helpful in portraying these differences. We probably won’t quote any passages verbatim, but I wanted to check if – apart from the fact that we will definitely acknowledge him in our course – it’s ok to use those terms ourselves.

Thanks!

[Don SalmonMember]

I agree very much with Paul’s overall comment. I would just add, if this remains of interest to you to the point it’s distracting, it may help pacify your analytic, questioning mind to look at some reasonable scientific investigations (don’t get pulled off track by looking around the net as you will get caught up in very heated, unpleasant fights between skeptics and others). You could look up Ian Stevenson and Jim Tucker, both of whom have done excellent work, recognized as such by Alan Wallace.

But I probably should repeat, unless this is really an ongoing concern, probably best to leave such things aside until much meditative stabilization has been developed (and then, you may lose interest in it:>))

[Don SalmonMember]

I’ve experienced subtle energies for many years (as well as perceiving subtle energies in the environment and others) but generally felt the common advice to either ignore or not be too distracted by them was the best approach.

I’ve only found in the last several years that “relaxing” in relation to them is a powerful aid to focusing the mind. I’m new to Culadasa’s teaching but perhaps this relates to his later teachings on effortlessness. It almost seems like “something” of those “energies” takes over and guides the mind to deep quiet without any apparent conscious intention on “my” part.

I don’t mean to recommend this as a “practice” – though perhaps being subliminally aware of the possibility may lead to a similar relaxation.

[Don SalmonMember]

Just read through the posts again, and had two follow up thoughts:

Yes, I agree that mindfulness and lucid dreaming are very strongly correlated. I always have more lucid dreams when I’ve gone on retreat, or when my sittings (and daily mindfulness) have been more concentrated.

False awakenings are often very funny. I remember once dreaming I was in an airport, and started to awaken in the dream. Then I “reasoned” – “Well, the ceiling of the airport is up there, and the ground is down here. Therefore I must be awake. I couldn’t be dreaming.” Boy was I annoyed when I woke up and realized how absurd this was:>))

Then there was the time I was in a dream with my older brother, who in waking life tends to be a bit more skeptical about things than I am. I woke up in the dream, and started to tell him, “look, this is a dream, isn’t that cool?” He just shook his head and said to some friends of his nearby, “Oh that’s just my little brother don’t listen to him.” I said in response, “Well, I’ll show you it’s a dream.” And I woke up, and he vanished!

[Don SalmonMember]

Hi folks: Just arrived at this forum after purchasing Culadasa’s book recently. Great posts on lucid dreaming. I did a 6 month study on lucid dreaming with 12 subjects for my masters in psychology. By the end, all 12 were having lucid dreams at least several times a week. The 6 in the “music” group (I composed a drone to help people with WILD) all had at least one experience of maintaining awareness from waking to dreaming, and 2 could do it regularly.

here’s what I’ve found are the most important things:

1. Everyone says the dream journal is the first most important thing, but I think it’s second. The first is a support group. If you have people you share dreams with and support each other in becoming lucid, you’re much more likely to succeed – or so it seems to me.
2. Intention – am I doing this for fun (admittedly, lucidity is lots of fun) or is it part of my practice? I think that ultimately, the “fun” motive wears off, whereas if the lucidity is a dharmic practice, the motivation becomes ever-deeper.
3. The techniques of MILD (reviewing a dream, visualizing yourself as lucid then going back to sleep, intending to be lucid within a dream) and WILD (maintaining awareness from waking to dream) are both ver good. I’ve had particular success with WILD using 61 points (Guided exercise at http://www.swamij.com). It looks like using Culadasa’s excellent points on breath awareness, particularly in the later stages, could be very helpful. I woke up in the middle of the night last night, sat up doing breath awareness for about 10-15 minutes along the lines Culadas suggested, then lay down doing breath awareness, and came very very close to entering consciously into a dream. I imagine continuing along these lines would yield success.
4. Remembering to question the inherent existence of physical “stuff” during the day. Alan Wallace has great instructions in his book, “Dreaming Yourself Awake,” also in “Tibetan Buddhism From the Ground Up.” After you have familiarized yourself with Middle Way philosophy to at least a small extent, simply reminding yourself as you go about your day, whatever you perceive in the environment are simply “appearances to mind.” Or more simply, ask yourself – very seriously and taking some time to do it – “Am I awake or dreaming?” Really try to jump in the air, question the solidity of what you see and hear and touch. Doing this regularly (along with the rest of the above) is likely to remind you to check your reality in a dreams more often.

Jordan, thanks so much for starting this thread.

[Don SalmonMember]

I added a number of comments to Anil Seth’s Aeon article. I’d be intrigued to hear the responses from some of the forum members here. This is a wonderful site, by the way, We just got Culadasa’s book – wonderful!

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