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February 3rd, 2009 alex
Guest: Buddhist scholar and author of the upcoming Mind in the Balance, Dr. Alan Wallace discusses Buddhism and atheism.
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Alex: Is the Dalai Lama an atheist?
“In the framing itself, the question is already skewed. It’s not so obvious to a person who’s totally immersed in western civilization and has almost no glimmering of understanding of anything outside of western civilization. Frankly, so much of the rhetoric, this antireligious rhetoric from the likes of Richard Dawkins and so forth, is just wildly unconsciously and uncritically ethnocentric. Do the Buddhist themselves, and I’m honing in on your question. Do the Buddhist themselves ask are we atheists? Well, I’ve never seen that question posed. In Buddhism that would be regarded as such a dumb and uninformed question that is not even worthy of a response.” — Dr. Alan Wallace
Alex: Welcome to Skeptiko where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris.
On today’s episode, we have a lot to cover and we have a very interesting interview coming up. But before we get to that, I wanted to bring you up to date on the medium experiment because I know a lot of you are interested in that and have done a fantastic job of following it. Giving us feedback, both positive and negative, skeptics and believers if you will, and I wanted to bring you up to date on where we are.
So as most of you know, we’ve been doing this medium experiment over the last couple of months where we ask people who wanted to connect with their love ones to fill out an online survey and record a short message. Then we went out and asked several mediums to do a reading for that person. In doing this, we’ve collaborated with skeptical folks, folks from the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe, skeptics who listen to this show. We tried to design the experiment that takes into account the skeptical view of medium readings.
So we’ve been doing this, it’s been very, very interesting, very preliminary at the same time. We’ve been poking around trying to find out what works. We’ve had some successes if you will in the first two trials, especially the second trial that showed some kind of interesting results. But then we did the third trial and it really threw me for a loop and it caused me to rethink a lot of aspects of this experiment. So with that mind I want to take some time today and step back and tell you where we’ve been and where we’re going. So let me start with the big picture stuff, my biggest takeaways thus far. Then I can tell you a little bit about where we’re going.
So the first big takeaway for me from the medium experiment is that there’s definitely something going on here and it’s absolutely just criminal that more researchers aren’t investigating this. At this point, I’ve had a chance to work with dozens and dozens of mediums, probably 30 or 40, and have been involved with well over 100 readings. I don’t even know exactly how many. For all those, I can tell you the information that I’ve seen come through is nothing short than amazing. They’re not always right, the mediums aren’t, but they’re way, way above chance levels and that’s just a gut feel without me putting any statistics on it. But my big takeaway from this is there’s definitely something going on and I feel so strongly about that because every once in a while you get these dazzlingly accurate, out of the blue insights that are impossible to explain by conventional means.
So the big takeaway, there’s something going on here. The second big takeaway is that experimentation in this field is not that hard really. This stuff is doable. The basic format that we’ve started up here where mediums listen to a brief recording and then answer multiple choice questions. It’s seeming like it’s a pretty good way to go about this. So this is all doable but it’s also tricky in some very subtle ways that we’re continuing to find out.
Let’s start from the beginning. You remember when I first started this experiment, I was really emphatic about saying that this is about anomalous cognition and that we shouldn’t ask the question is this mediumship versus remote viewing, psyc versus superpsyc or telepathy or any of those things until we just establish the basic fact that anomalous cognition is somehow going on here. I still hold by that. I think that’s correct. But what I didn’t see is the second half of that equation, the cold reading part. Now recall that cold reading means using ordinary logic and deduction to give the appearance of psychic abilities. But let me explain how that’s relevant to this experiment, how it factors in.
You may recall then on a couple of episodes back on Skeptiko, we heard from Dr. Steve Novella. His conclusion on the experiment was that even if we achieved success, we wouldn’t really be showing anything other than whether mediums are better cold readers than the rest of us. Now, while I don’t think Steve had that quite right, he did touch on a point that I’m coming to understand as more and more important and that’s that you can’t do an experiment like this, an experiment where you’re asking two groups to do multiple choice questions. You can’t do that and then draw too many conclusions about the overall results of the one group, the mediums, versus the other group, the skeptics. You can’t do that because, as Steve was alluding to, some folks are just better cold readers than others. Now I’m not sure that mediums fall into that category but let’s set that aside for a minute and deal with the fact that some folks are better at cold reading than others. We’ve definitely proven that in this experiment.
So that means two things, one, you really have to find your best cold readers, really study them. Number two, you really have to study what they’re coming up with. Like the example I gave you last time where a cold reader in trial two, concluded that since the sitter had an Australian accent they’d be less likely to be a murder victim. That’s good stuff, and it points out just how much some people can do with just a very little amount of information. So really taking into account the cold reader aspect of this experiment has caused me to come a different understanding of what this experiment is all about.
So here’s how I’d reframe the central question of this experiment based on what we’ve learned, and that’s this: can cold reading techniques explain the apparent anomalous cognition that mediums demonstrate? See, I don’t think you can just ask if mediums can demonstrate anomalous cognition because then you have folks like Steve’s saying, “Yes, but they’re just really good at cold reading.” What I really need to do is ask if I know that some people are really good at picking up these little clues from the sound of a person’s voice and their name, then let’s see how far they can go with that information. Then, let’s see if mediums can do better because really, that is the prevailing view among science at this standpoint. The prevailing view is that mediums are just using cold reading techniques. So what you have to do is find the best cold readers and really study their answers and see if their claim about cold reading really holds up.
Now there’s one other thing to interject about the cold reading claim, the cold reading hypothesis as it’s usually given and that’s that the explanation has to be explicit. Now I’ve gotten into it so you skeptics, you’re not allowed just to throw the cold reading blanket on there and say, “Maybe they can do it with cold reading techniques.” You should really be able to explicitly say, as you’ve done, as the good cold readers in our experiment have done. You need to say, “This is how this led to this.” If you leave it open, if you leave it “my gut feel,” if you leave it “my instinct,” any of that stuff, then you’re not doing cold reading and you’re entering into the realm of anomalous cognition that can’t be explained. So let’s make that clear: cold readers have to be able to explain how they do it if their claim is to have merit.
Now this change in how we view cold reading doesn’t result in any huge differences in the experiment but it does have some in the way we’ll set it up and do it in the future. Particularly, it’s going to have some impact in how we analyze the results. So if my big takeaway number one is that there’s definitely something going on, and number two is the experiment is doable but tricky in some subtle ways, then my final big takeaway is that this is a pretty big effort. The sooner I move it into the hands of university researchers the better because it’s taken way too much of my time. Not that I regret being as hands-on as I have been because it’s really given me a unique vantage point and a clear sense of how to do this and how to fund this research this in the future. But it’s definitely time to get some more researchers involved and that’s what we’re going to do.
That’s also an open invite if any of you are interested in receiving some funding to take on this research, e-mail me. I’ve already had several researchers who are in the queue on that but I’d love to have more of you to consider and I will definitely keep all of you updated as we go forward in selecting and funding people to do this. That doesn’t mean that I’m done doing it either. I’m going to be going forward as well but I really want to make it a priority to move this research to the next level because it’s ready. I’ve learned a lot and I have to move on and do some other things.
Okay, so with those three points out of the way, that’s enough about the big picture. Let’s talk about trial three and why I reshuffled the deck in the middle of the trial. First, the numbers. We had 40 cold readers go through the trial, none of them got all four correct. Then I had four of our best, at least best based on the two previous trials, go through the trial and none of them got all four right either. You hear the disappointment in my voice? I was disappointed, I really was. That’s when I jumped in and called a temporary stop to things.
For the last few weeks, I’ve been scrambling around trying to figure some things out because pretty quickly, in looking at the numbers, I realized that there was a lot going on. There’s a lot of interesting back stories from the little bit of data we got from our mediums and from the larger amount of data we got from our cold readers. Let me give you some of those back stories. First, not only did none of the cold readers get all answers correct, they really didn’t even come up with much cold reading stuff, and that’s good. That’s progress in terms of it shows that we were able to learn from our mistakes, if you will, in the first two trials and realize how to tighten up some of the information that we gave and made it harder for cold readers to do their things. As a matter of fact, we’ve even since then come up with some more ways and all that will just make it better and better.
So cold readers didn’t really come up with much, with one small exception and that’s a story in and of itself. A couple of cold readers looked at the first reading for Athena trying to connect with Elizabeth, and said, “Bam! That’s got to be the professional medium because only a medium would name their kid Athena.” Well, they were right in that Elizabeth was the medium and Athena was the daughter but it turns out they were a very strong Greek family and the naming of their daughter “Athena” had more to do with their ancestry and that being a very, very Greek name than anything else. So that’s really more of a lucky guess than anything else, but nonetheless, it’s an interesting connection.
There’s also a connection between this reading, Athena trying to connect with Elizabeth, and the other back story that I wanted to tell you about. It has to do with the quality of some of the readings that I did get through. I just mentioned earlier that none of the four mediums that we tested on trial three got all four of them right, nonetheless, some of the readings that they gave were amazingly accurate. I wanted to share one of those readings with you to give you a feel for what kind of readings we’ve been getting in these experiments. Also to highlight a point that I’ve often thought about but never had an opportunity to talk about. That is sitting from my vantage point and running this experiment with skeptics or cold readers on one hand and mediums on the other, as soon as you start doing that you immediate realize how completely different the process is for the two groups.
Now, skeptics naturally assume that mediums are doing the same thing that they’re doing, that they’re doing this cold reading stuff. As soon as you get into this you realize they’re doing anything but that, just the opposite of that. They want less information, not more. They want to totally engage their right brain and totally shut off their left brain. They complain whenever they have to use logic and deduction, and that’s been somewhat of a problem with the experiment. For example, having to type while you do a reading is difficult for some people.
So anyways, just as someone who’s been involved in this experiment, I just can’t stress that enough. It comes through so clearly that the way these people are getting this information is so completely different than what you would normally think if you assume they’re doing cold reading. That said, I know that doesn’t matter to a lot of you and you really need to see the results. I want to see the results too, but I can’t ignore the fact that that’s just painfully obvious as soon as you get in your work with these people.
So as a small way of demonstrating that, let me give you an example of one of the readings that we got for Athena trying to connect with Elizabeth and you can look how different this is than a cold reading process. Here it goes.
“I am the psychic,” she says very clearly. I had a hard time figuring out who this was so I just asked her to come through and then I’d know and that’s the first thing she says. She’s a very proud woman, almost regal in the way she holds herself, her posture. She says something about her cat, White. She’s with her husband. She says, “His poor heart misses me.” She says, “I finally have my son back. He’s with me now, better than ever.” I see a room in their house that’s very rich in color, decorated in reds and golds, very warm, curtains that filter the light, candles. It was her special place and that’s where her husband goes now to feel her. They have kept this room the same for her loved ones to spend time in.
She had a special drink that she always drank. It’s sweet and fruity, not sure if it’s wine or not. She’s also referring to “my books.” She says they have to be read. She says, “I was write about so many things, but there’s so much more to it than you know on your plane.” She’s very happy and at peace and highly progressed on the other side. She says she is around you often and guides and protects you but everything is still your choice. She says that, “my cause of death was that it was my time, time for me to fly and move on. Take care of yourselves, I love you and I’ll be waiting for you.”
Now some of you who are more skeptical might view that reading as just a usual kind of mumbo jumbo, tarot card, fluff stuff. But there’s a couple of points in there that are just amazingly accurate and we actually went back and confirmed them with the sitter. One small point is the point about the room and the fact that the husband never lets anyone go in the room, won’t sleep in the room. No one is allowed in the room except to go and talk to his deceased wife, that wasn’t in the description but comes through in the reading.
The second thing that is completely nonexistent in the description but comes through in the reading is confirmed by Athena is this issue of the books. There were these books and they were discovering her books and they found all these journals and these books that she’d written and they’re even trying to get them published. So this was something that was very important to her, no one knew about, we didn’t know about in the initial description but it’s something that turns out to be very important to the family, very important to the sitter.
So the fact that this reading was such a hit is an interesting back story to the little bit of data that we have, but it also points out some of the problems. Number one is, in the descriptions that we’ve been giving, we provide so much information that it makes it hard to understand whether the medium is coming through with any new information or is just somehow echoing back the information we’ve given in the description. So that’s something we want to change going forward because one of the things I’ve come to see is that the readings are important. Even if they present some problems in statistically measuring their accuracy, I think we want to create an experiment that allows the readings to come through unencumbered by a lot of detailed descriptions. That’s also something that our mediums are asking for again and again and again is, “Why so much description? Isn’t that really my job?”
So as I look at the clock here on my recording, I see that I’m already well past 15 minutes. Since I am less than halfway through describing all the changes that we are implementing with the new experiment, I think I better cut this off here. Leave room for my very interesting interview with Dr. Alan Wallace on Buddhism and atheism, somewhat of a follow up to the last episode of Skeptiko when that topic came up.
So I’ll certainly have much more to say about the medium experiment in the upcoming episodes of Skeptiko and stay with us for that. In the meantime, stick around for a great interview with Dr. Alan Wallace.
(Start of interview with Dr. Alan Wallace)
Alex: As many of you would recall, the last episode of Skeptiko featured an interview Denyse O’Leary, one of the co-authors of the book The Spiritual Brain. In the course of that interview, we meandered into a subject that stirred up a bit of a controversy among you, our listeners, and that’s the issue of Buddhism and atheism.
Well, as a way of following up on that, I’m very pleased to welcome back to Skeptiko, Dr. Alan Wallace, one of the foremost scholars and lecturers on Tibetan Buddhism in the west, an author of many books on the topic. If you go on Amazon and Google “Alan Wallace,” you’ll find Contemplative Science, Embracing the Mind, The Attention Revolution, Genuine Happiness with a preface by the Dalai Lama, and many, many other books. So Dr. Wallace, thank you for joining us and welcome back to Skeptiko.
Alan: My pleasure to join you once again.
Alex: As I said, this is really a response to something that came up last episode and there’s so many things that I’d love to talk to you about and time permitting we’ll get to all of that. But let’s jump right into this first issue. Obviously, in the last 10 years there’s been this resurgence of atheism and some would say angry atheists like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, New York Times bestseller books. They’ve popularized this position that belief in God is anti-science and just plain dumb and whatever you think about that position that is what this new atheism is all about. I think where I’m coming out of this is when we encounter Buddhism, despite its popularization in recent years, it’s still a little foreign and strange to a lot of people in the west. Out of this soup of western culture that we all mix together, we have this idea that maybe Buddhism is somehow atheistic. We might have heard about that. So let me boil it down to a simple question, is the Dalai Lama an atheist?
Alan: This question is almost like, “Why do you beat your wife?” In the framing itself, the question is already skewed. It’s not so obvious to a person who’s totally immersed in western civilization and has almost no glimmering of understanding of anything outside of western civilization. Frankly, so much of the rhetoric, this antireligious rhetoric from the likes of Richard Dawkins and so forth, is just wildly unconsciously and uncritically ethnocentric. Underlying these critiques and it’s quite homogenous, Daniel Dennett should know better, is the frankly, uncritical and uninformed classification of Buddhism as a religion. That if it looks like a religion, it smells like a religion, it looked a lot like Christianity, there’s prayer and so forth, therefore it must be a religion.
What is ethnocentric about this is the very categories of religion including as well as philosophy, science, these are western constructs born out of Euro-American civilization. We take them uncritically as if these are somehow referring to real absolute entities and we simply discovered the definitions of these categories. Then just blandly, casually in the most cavalier fashion, superimpose them on traditions of inquiry and so forth that are outside of the western Euro-American nexus. So, this is just illegitimate. This is illegitimate as asking flat footedly whether the Dalai Lama is an atheist.
So this type of question, and of course I’m not criticizing you at all, it’s a perfectly legitimate question within an absolutely ethnocentric framework. It really calls for a deepening of one’s own framework and a critical reflective attitude about the nature of the question itself and the constructs that we bring to it. Number one, Buddhism is not simply a religion as defined by the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. So we better take a fresh look. Within the Buddhist community, this is the question that’s virtually never posed by people like Dennett and Dawkins and so forth and so on.
Do Buddhists themselves ever ask themselves, “Is our tradition a religion?” No, they don’t because they might have a word that corresponds to our western term of religion. Do the Buddhists themselves, and I’m honing in on your question, does the Buddhists themselves ask are we atheists? Well, I’ve never seen that question posed. In Buddhism that would be regarded as such a dumb and uninformed question that is not even worthy of a response.
Now is your question worthy of a response, the answer is definitely yes. It’s coming out of a western context. But now the first question is not an answer to that question but a question to the question and that is when you ask is the Dalai Lama an atheist. Exactly what you mean by a theist or an atheist. So let’s start with an atheist is obviously is a person who’s not a theist. So who is a theist and which means, “What do you mean by God?” So if by this, by this term “God,” we’re referring to the God of Abraham, who’s male, who created the universe, who governs the universe. Punishes the disobedient and rewards the obedient. That’s who God is and God created the universe [inaudible 00:23:07] and he’s looking after you and responds to your prayers. Is omnipotent and omnipresent and omnibenevolent. Do Buddhists believe in such a God? No. I don’t think any Buddhist believe in that God, at least none that I ever met and the Dalai Lama doesn’t either. So if that is what you’re defining as God then the Dalai Lama is an atheist. Well the Dalai Lama, does he walk around thinking, “I’m an atheist, I’m an atheist.” I very much doubt it. It’s an absurd category because this whole Abrahamic notion, a rather prude and primitive one as I’ve expressed it, bringing in mind a much more subtle notions of the deity within Christianity, this is simply not an issue that even comes up in Buddhism.
So does Buddhism characterize itself as atheistic? The answer is definitely not. Is the Dalai Lama and Buddhism atheistic? With respect to that definition of God, which many Christians and Jews embrace, then the answer is yes.
Alex: Let me reflect back to you a couple of things that you brought up to me in the e-mail exchange that we had that really struck me as getting to the heart of this. The first is that you suggested that this kind of dialogue of lumping or trying to categorize Buddhism as atheistic is uninformed, and here’s the part I like, “quasi truth that creates confusion and alienation.” I’d like you to hone in on the confusion and alienation. Then I’d also like you to reflect on the essay that you sent me that I guess is published in your book, this is your point here. “Some take this position that Buddhism is atheism, to show the inferiority of Buddhism over their own creed. Others do it as a means of demonstrating Buddhism’s superiority over other religions. But on the whole, most people categorize Buddhism in this way because it’s the conventional position to take and they never think to question it.” Would you like to add anything to that?
Alan: Again, what I’m critiquing here is the unreflective, unself-critical use of the terms as if, that we’ve simply taken the categories of atheism and a theism, pluck them out of reality. Then asking how Buddhism stands out to that without recognizing that both of these categories, atheism and theism, are deeply imbedded within our own Euro-American culture, deeply imbedded specifically with the Abrahamic religions. So [inaudible 00:25:32] some of them whom are sympathetic to Buddhism. They like to present Buddhism as being atheistic because it shows Buddhism is not as delusional as religions they regarded as being completely whacko. But then they want to subsume Buddhism into their own materialistic framework, very eager to do so which is just an utter violation and evisceration of Buddhism.
Now Christians there are some, and of course there are all kinds of Christians. Some are very sympathetic to Buddhism, open minded and others not so open minded or sympathetic. But I’ve read this repeatedly in print, Christians, sometimes Jews, certainly Muslims, like to depict Buddhism as atheistic, but as if they have to franchise on determining and defining what is God, in which case who gave them that right? Did God give them that right? If they believe so, then all very well, but this is rather again simply naively ethnocentric and unworthy of cross-cultural discussion.
Alex: I think that’s really interesting and I would add a little personal anecdote. I’m not a Buddhist but I’ve been inspired and influenced by some thinkers of that tradition. In particular, I remember back going through a phase when I was really quite a bit angry about my Christian upbringing, something a lot of people go through. I remember reading the book, Living Buddha, Living Christ by the Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh. I thought that book was a real opening for me because what he did, and he comes from a different Buddhist tradition than you most know about, the Tibetan tradition.
Alan: Quite so, yes.
Alex: But he shows in a deeper way how these traditions might be linked at a deeper level that we don’t appreciate unless we start pulling things apart. Both pulling them apart and then putting them back together. So pulling apart the ethnocentric or the cultural aspects to it, but then also looking deeper and exploring what might be the underlying spiritual dimension to these traditions. So any thoughts on that and in particular, how different Buddhist traditions, and there are many, and there are many different viewpoints as I understand it within each tradition, and how all those come to bear on untangling this mess?
Alan: Indeed, yes. It’s a very rich question. I agree with you this book by Thich Nhat Hanh is a marvelous read. There’s a somewhat similar and also very thought provoking book by the Dalai Lama called The Good Heart. His dialogues with a marvelous Benedictine monk named Brother Lawrence Freeman, on the interface between Christianity and Buddhism. For what its worth, within less than two weeks my latest book will be published called Mind in the Balance: Meditation in Science, Buddhism and Christianity.
There’s a lot of Christianity in it. I’m treating Christianity with great sympathy and I hope some insight. Looking into occurrence of meditative practice and theory that if run through the Christian tradition from earliest times right to the times of the dessert fathers, the medieval era. Right up to the time of the renaissance and somewhat right into the present day. Showing, I think very significant parallels in the kind of methods that are used of contemplative inquiry and the type of insights that are gleaned from such meditative practices. Drawing parallels between these type of practice and theories with Buddhism which then raises the whole issue or allows us to take a fresh look I think at the very notion of divinity within Christianity that is not all that kind of character that I presumed as earlier. But from a contemplative perspective they’re much, much deeper.
More nuance than I think profoundly experiential notions of other divine, which actually has very strong parallels, remarkable parallels with some of the deepest contemplative insights within Buddhism. Obviously, this is something for each reader to judge for him or herself. But I’ve done my best to draw some meaningful parallels and acknowledging the difference. Also planning out of the, I believe, meaningful parallels in modern science that may point to the same reality.
So I think that would be a basic stance, is to look more carefully at the different notions of the transcendent within the western traditions, the Abrahamic traditions as well as various forms of eastern spirituality, not only the many schools of Buddhism but also Taoism, Confucianism. Bring some nuance to it and then as you say, break them apart and then put them back together so that we can approach all of these traditions in a sympathetic way, a charitable way. Seeking as much understanding from them as possible and not as little as possible.
Alex: That’s wonderful. One other point I want to approach this from, and it came up in my discussion with Denyse O’Leary and The Spiritual Brain. I kind of drew out the difference in how I see Christianity, and again those terms fail us when we talk about Christians and Buddhist. Of course, it’s just not a homogeneous group. But I really appreciate the Dalai Lama’s position on the relationship between science and new discoveries, particularly in consciousness research and how that would affect his faith, his religion. The way I read that and I want you to steer me and tell me if I’m wrong here, but he is open to whatever discoveries come about because he is about seeking the truth. Therefore, science is his ally in understanding the truth.
What I really called upon Denyse to do or what I lamented is that more Christians don’t seem to take this perspective and they seem to take a defensive perspective vis à vis science and say, “Science, you can’t prove anything that I believe wrong.” It just seems that when you turn the equation around like my understanding of the way that the Dalai Lama has is say, “You don’t have to prove anything. It’s not about proving me wrong, it’s about let’s go arm in arm together and just try and discover this mystery. Try and unravel it and try and discover the truth. That will really get us all to where we want to be.” Any thoughts on that?
Alan: Sure. As you can imagine I have quite a few. I think the place I want to start is a fundamental distinction between Christianity as it has evolved especially over the last 1,500 years, and Buddhism. That is in Christianity salvation is a gift of God, whether you’re a Roman Catholic, whether you’re a protestant, salvation is a gift and one receives the gift by way of faith, by way of belief, by way of obedience but not by way of knowledge.
So in the Jewish tradition, we go back there we’ll see that God rewards his children who are obedient but punishes those who are disobedient. The very notion that Islam is one of submitting to God’s will, submitting to God’s will and those who submit to God’s will, follows God’s will then open for themselves the path to salvation. So it’s really all about faith, beliefs and obedience and then worship of course and good deeds. But primarily the proceeding in Buddhism, the path to liberation, the means to liberation is above all, and it’s very explicit in Buddhism, it’s knowledge. It’s knowing reality as it is and not simply philosophical knowledge or inferential or conceptual knowledge but direct empirical knowledge through immediate experience. This is what liberates. What we are liberated from are the tendencies of ignorance and delusion as well as derivative mental imbalances and afflictions such as craving and hostility.
So science is foremost and above all a tradition of knowledge. That comes with assumptions, it comes with [inaudible 00:33:17], theological influences, philosophical biases, all kinds of things. But above all, what makes science, science is that it’s a method of inquiry and the discoveries made by using the myriad of methods of inquiry of the scientific community. So in this regard, it would appear that science and Buddhism would be natural allies that is both of all place the highest priority not on obedience or conformity or faith or simple belief or submission but rather knowledge.
So in this regard, yes, the Buddha does want to join arm in arm with the scientific community. Recognizing there are complementary strengths to scientific and Buddhist, especially Buddhist contemplative and philosophical inquiry. The great strengths of science being the use of technology to observe and to investigate objective, physical, quantifiable phenomena, that includes individual subjective reports. Their verbal reports of their mental state, their behavior, brain state themselves, environmental, physical influences on the brain and behavior on the mind. Western science, I’m referring now especially to the cognitive sciences, is very strong in this regard. Buddhism doesn’t have the technology, the MRI, the EEG and many, many other, the behavior methods or the statistical analysis and so forth. So this is a great strength of the western tradition.
But when it comes above all to the study of the mind, which is utterly central to Buddhism that didn’t even enter into scientific inquiry until the late 19th century. When it comes to the study of the mind, the great strength of Buddhism is the direct observation and penetrating investigation of the mind from a first person perspective, which after all is the only way that we have any direct way of measuring any mental phenomena at all. So in this way there’s a complementary.
Now the Dalai Lama has repeatedly stated, and I know he completely means it, that if the scientific community shows compelling empirical evidence to repudiate any Buddhist claim including some of the core planes, even reincarnation and so forth or the nature of the mind. Then, Buddhism will follow the truth, will follow the evidence. What Buddhism will not follow are simply the metaphysical assumptions that saturate so much of the mind sciences, which in fact are hardly ever called into question, and for which there are virtually no methods for even repudiating or putting these assumptions to the test.
To give a couple of examples, all mental states and processes, all states of consciousness are generated solely by the brain in relationship with the body, the physical environment and the social environment. That is an assumption that’s virtually never questioned in the scientific community, yet it’s never put to the test, and there’s virtually no discussion about whether it’s even true. It’s never been validated, it’s hardly even being tested. Another statement, all mental states and processes, all states of consciousness are themselves biological processes within the brain. That may be true but nobody’s ever demonstrated it and in fact the relationships between the subjective experience and the neural correlates remains a mysterious one. No one has ever demonstrated that it is a correlation of equivalents.
A third and final one is that at death a brain does in particular, all mental states, processes, states of consciousness vanish because they’re simply immersion properties or functions of the brain. That’s an assumption that never gets tested, is never even called into question and has never been validated. Buddhism is not going to go along, at least Buddhists like the Dalai Lama are certainly not going to go along with metaphysical assumptions that saturate scientific inquiry, often presented as scientific truth without any empirical evidence and that are never even put to the test. For Buddhists like the Dalai Lama to accept that, we would simply have to be naïve, gullible and have a lemming mentality that goes along with the herd without ever questioning the direction the herd is going in.
Alex: Right. I think the trend line on the cutting edge of consciousness research is really pointing in a direction that is very complementary to the Buddhist perspective on that. We’ll see how it all pans out. I just think that that is the way in my view to bridge this false dichotomy of science versus religion. I know religion is a fuzzy word to attach to Buddhism, but still, the way to overcome that false dichotomy is to join arms and say, “We all just want the truth, let’s figure out the best tools and means to get there.” I think that’s exactly what you said.
Let me switch on the final topic that I wanted to talk about today. I want to touch on meditation and you talk about contemplative science and first person observations of the mind. I think you’re talking about in simple terms, meditation. For many of us in the west that’s still almost a character if you will of Buddhism is this connection with meditation.
In our forum, in the Skeptiko forum, we’ve had some very interesting discussions about meditation. Some people who are wondering how to get started in meditation or are just curious or not so curious and don’t think it’s such a great thing. I just want to point people to, and I thought you could take a minute to talk about your podcast series, on meditation. I think it’s outstanding and from someone who has to really work at their meditative practice like I do and that’s why I’m still on your first or your second series which I’ve listened to probably 100 times, the same one over and over again. But tell us a little bit about if you would your podcast series and meditation from a western perspective if you will, because I think that’s what really to me came through and came alive in the meditation series that you offer. Like I said, I’ve listen to many, many and read many, many books over the years and I really found yours especially good for me I guess is the only way I can say it.
Alan: Let’s look briefly at this word “meditation” which once again we need to bear in mind is an English word, not a science word or Tibetan word. The English word “meditation” traces back to the Latin root which means “to measure.” So meditation, I’m going to come back to Buddhism, but actually even though this is a western entomology, it’s actually quite useful even in the Buddhist context. That is in so far as we’re interested in understanding subjective experience, our immediate experience of the body, immediate experience of the environment, and then above all our own minds. There is no technology devised yet that can directly measure any type of subjective experience at all. Directly observe, directly detect, not even physical pain and very well trained physicians know this well. They know about neurocircuitry and so forth, parts of the brain, nerve endings and all of that, but it is not a one to one correlation to pain. Even if it were a one to one correlation, simply finding the neural correlates pain does not imply that the neural correlates themselves are pain.
So if one is really interested in understanding mental phenomena, then like any other branch of science the primary mode of inquiry according to Buddhism and according to Galileo for the entire physical universe is observe it carefully and directly. This is a major feature of meditation. To observe carefully, rigorously, critically one’s own state, mental processes and states and so forth. Not only simply to understand them which is crucial, but understand them in order to learn how to heal the mind of its inflictive tendencies and bring forth from the mind its own inner resources of qualities that are conducive to our own and others’ wellbeing. Qualities of mindfulness, of equanimity, of attentional skills, of generosity and so forth.
So this podcast series is I think made available over the Santa Barbara Institute for Conscious Studies of which I’m the director, the website SBInstitute.com. So there’s a whole series there and the essential theme here is to make these available to people whether they’re Buddhist or not Buddhist, with no sense of trying to convert anybody to a world view. But simply make available and make which I believe very rich, provocative and insightful methods of first person contemplative inquiry that can be used by anyone.
I’m hoping in the process of this that the Christians themselves, the Christian community will rediscover their own immensely rich heritage which has been largely obscured over the last few centuries by various factors I won’t go into right now. But I’d love to see something of a contemplative renaissance taking place within the Jewish tradition, the Christian, the Muslim and so forth so that when religious people come together, we’re not limited to talking about or debating our metaphysical beliefs. Likewise, in religious and science conferences, meetings, encounters, we’re not simply squaring off and with the religious people trying to defend their beliefs while the scientists are defending their beliefs in the midst of also presenting empirical data. But in fact that the contemplatives from various religious traditions and Buddhist that we can all show for the time being our metaphysical assumptions, both materialistic as well as theistic as well none theistic. Show for the time being even assumptions about reincarnation, karma and so forth. Shelving doesn’t mean to dismiss or repudiate or even marginalize, it just means that it’s set to the side and focus on the experience.
In so doing and proposing this, I’m really following the strategy of William James, he’s one of my heroes, in his promotion of what he called “radical empiricism.” That is it’s come right back to immediate experience itself, take it seriously wherever it leads us and not shunt off or marginalize types of experiences that do not correspond to or somehow may be called into question some of our most deeply cherished assumptions. Whether they’re Christian, Buddhist or materialistic, let’s get back to experience.
Alex: Great. I think there couldn’t be a better way to end it. I thank you again for your time and hopefully this will generate some more interesting discussion and of course, there’s always more in your books. I also would encourage people to visit SBInstitute.com. Dr. Wallace, thanks again for joining us.
Alan: Thank you for the opportunity.
(End of interview with Dr. Alan Wallace)
Alex: Thanks again to Dr. Alan Wallace for joining us today on Skeptiko. If you’d like more information about Dr. Wallace, including a link to his new book, Mind in the Balance, visit the Skeptiko website at Skeptiko.com. I also invite you to take part in our Skeptiko forum, which has quite a lively discussion on these topics. Also on our website, you’ll find a link to all our previous shows, an e-mail link for me where you can drop me a note. That’s going to do it for today, until next time, bye for now.
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January 25th, 2009 alex
Guest: Christian science writer, and author of The Spiritual Brain,Denyse O’Leary, on the compatibility of Christian doctrine to new discoveries in human consciousness.
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Alex Tsakiris: Welcome to Skeptiko where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers and their critics. I’m your host Alex Tsakiris.
Before we start in with my interview with Christian Science writer Denyse O’Leary, I want to take a minute and give you a non-update of the medium experiment. I say non-update because we kind of got about half way into trial three and then decided to revamp things substantially including adding a new voice mail system for mediums to use. So I’ll have more information for you on that in just a couple of weeks. Also a quick update on the Psychic Detective project I’ve been working on Ben Radford, we had been communicating quite a bit in trying to nail that down and hopefully in a month or two, we’ll have follow up on that as well. Finally, the dogs that no experiment is still out there kicking around and my one best dog is back in trial so I hope to have some information on that it’s been very slow going in terms of getting any trials completed. Just kind of normal life stuff for folks makes it hard for them to complete that experiment apparently.
So kind of a non-update update there but coming up, I have what I found to be just fascinatingly frustrating conversation with one of the authors of The Spiritual Brain, Denise O’Leary.
Alex Tsakiris: Welcome to Skeptiko, Denise O’Leary. It’s a pleasure to have you. We’ve had a nice e-mail exchange here and we’re going to talk today about the book that you’ve co-authored titled The Spiritual Brain. But before we get into that I thought maybe you could tell us a little bit about your bio, your background, what you do up there in Toronto.
Denyse O’Leary: I was the faith and science columnist at Christian Week in the mid ‘90s. What I noticed was that very few people were paying much attention to the way in which materialist ideas in science were just not panning out. What I mean is for example, there’s no good explanation for the origin of life on Earth because the most awkward fact is that even though living cells are very complex, life got started almost as soon as the planet cooled. So, an explanation that depended on random events doesn’t change a me[00:03:33] to have a long shelf life.
Alex Tsakiris: Well you know what, I’m going to stir us away from that whole thing because…
Denyse O’Leary: Okay, talk about what you want, that’s just how I got involved.
Alex Tsakiris: No, I appreciate that. I appreciate that and I don’t want to cut off that entirely. I just know that that’s going to – it’s going to show a lot of people down, a lot of people feel like that debate, it just gets into a lot of areas that have a lot of tire marks both good and bad.
Denyse O’Leary: You know what, I don’t have a cat in the fight it won’t matter to me except that I had to face the fact that a lot of things I was hearing *** [00:04:12] results of modern science didn’t make sense.
Alex Tsakiris: Right and let’s fast forward that into The Spiritual Brain. Who’s your co-author on that again?
Denyse O’Leary: Mario Beauregard. He’s an Associate Professor of neuroscience at the Université de Montréal, which is the second largest francophone university in the world. He basically, had been studying people who had had spiritual experiences. *** [00:04:45] it’s not how he got them to cooperate, I’m not sure but he and his graduate student *** [00:04:53] were very diplomatic and they got him to cooperate. They discovered a couple of things that are worth knowing. One is that spiritual experiences, where a person has an experience in which they feel they are contacting a cosmic power outside themselves or complex experiences like an experience where you’re talking to someone that you know that you like.
Alex Tsakiris: Can you define that a little bit what you mean when you say complex?
Denyse O’Leary: A number of brain areas are active. See, it’s only a very simple experience maybe only one brain area would be active. The second complex experience *** [00:05:33].
Now, the only reason that’s important is that many people have attempted to argue that spiritual experience as their cause by some kind of a glitch in the brain. This is unlikely under the circumstances because if it’s a complex experience that looks like a normal experience where there are a number of brain areas active, then it’s not likely to be a glitch. So whatever is happening, it’s not a glitch. The doesn’t prove that the person is contacting a power outside themselves, what it means is that it’s probably not useful to look for a glitch that explains why they think they are.
Alex Tsakiris: Let’s take that one step further because I think, we’re going to find a lot of common ground in the idea that the materialistic and I think when you use materialistic, I think you’re also encompassing atheistic because it really isn’t atheistic world view that is perpetuated with that materialism that that kind of this permeates academia.
Denyse O’Leary: *** [00:06:34] By the way, Mario discovered something else which is that people who say that – I just want to get this *** [00:06:42] , When people have a genuine mystical experience, they generate fatal waves while they are awake, which are normally generated through in deep sleep. So, what he discovered is when they said, “I felt very unusual. It wasn’t like a normal experience.” They’re telling the truth. They’re not imagining it or telling people that to get attention. That’s the truth. If you’re generating those kinds of waves when you were fully conscious you would be aware of – I didn’t mean to interrupt, I just thought that since that was probably the most surprising finding of this research, I wanted to get it in.
Alex Tsakiris: I think those are very interesting points and I think they’re a little footprints in the sand if you will that tells us we are not heading in the right direction when we try and dismiss the spiritual experience as being just some glitch in the brain, which is exactly your point and I’m in complete agreement with you.
Denyse O’Leary: Thank you for permitting me to say that. Now, the other thing is I don’t know that it’s helpful to make it something about atheist versus for example, born again Christians because for example, the Dalai Lama; the head of Tibetan Buddhism is technically an atheist. His religious system does not require the existence of a God and he is a big financer of neuroscience research.
Alex Tsakiris: I’ve talked to a bunch of Buddhist including interviewing Alan Wallace, who is one of the foremost Buddhist scholars and I don’t think that he would agree or a lot of Buddhist would agree in kind of labelling the Dalai Lama or Buddhism in general as being atheistic. You know, I don’t want to get too far field but I think simple words kind of helped and when we start throwing around euphemisms to kind of get away from the idea, there’s a lot of angry atheist out there and they’ve had quite a revival with the books that have come out in the recent years, so I think we know who we’re talking about when we talk about the angry atheist and I think, those are the folks who oppose and that’s not necessarily a bad thing but oppose this idea that materialism is not a complete explanation for the spiritual experience that people are having.
Denyse O’Leary: Thank you Alex, you’ve pinpoint this matter beautifully. It’s not that they’re atheist but that they’re materialist. You see, what I meant to say is the Dalai Lama is an atheist but he is by no means a materialist.
Alex Tsakiris: I don’t know that he’s an atheist though.
Denyse O’Leary: Okay, he is an atheist. Well, rather it’s not important to me that he is an atheist because he’s not a materialist. So, he wouldn’t have a problem with the idea that people have in mind that actually exist. The materialist doesn’t think that the mind actually exist, they think that’s an illusion created by the bunch of neurons in the brain.
Alex Tsakiris: Absolutely. Yes and maybe I am taking in the wrong direction because you know, we are of the same mind about that and no pun intended, but I think the words can get in the way and I think that we were trying to refine that but let’s leave that for a minute.
Denyse O’Leary: Yes, I just wanted to make clear, I don’t use the word atheist as a term of the view, I consider it a technical.
Alex Tsakiris: See I do, I do and I don’t feel particularly a need to apologize about it because I think clarifies, really it gets to the heart of the issue that I think we’re talking about and I think that issue is really, really central to the conversation that I want to have.
Denyse O’Leary: Yes, as a matter of fact, technically for example, this philosopher Plato could have been called an atheist because he dismissed the Gods of his day as unworthy of worship however anyone who thinks that Plato did not have a sense of the mind obviously doesn’t *** [00:10:42].
Anyway, let’s do go on. I agree with you.
Alex Tsakiris: Okay, because I think there’s much to go on too that in these other topics that you’ve covered in the book, The Spiritual Brain and on your excellent blog that kind of is very freewheeling and reaches into a lot of different areas.
Denyse O’Leary: The Mindful Hack.
Alex Tsakiris: The Mindful Hack, thanks for bringing that to the attention of our listeners here. So, some of the topics that come up are prayer, near-death experience, afterlife encounters, all these phenomena that science is wrestling with you see as evidence for supporting this idea of a non-reducible mind; a mind that can’t be reduced to only brain activity. Why don’t you elaborate on that a little bit?
Denyse O’Leary: I’ve always felt that the best way to help people understand what their mind is, is something very simple and that’s the placebo effect. I usually start there. Some people will have this experience and others would have heard about it from others. You’re sick, you’re away from work for a couple of days, I don’t know how employment all works where you live Alex but here, a person has to go to their doctor and get a letter saying, this person really is sick otherwise, they’re going to get their pay doctor, their vacation date to the doctor whatever. So you’re sitting in the doctor’s office and what happened? You start to feel better. You start to feel you’re a fraud. Your only pretending to be sick, but when you woke up in the morning you thought you were a death *** [00:12:16]. So what happened? What happened and this has been studied in a number of research studies and there have been books, conferences about it, basically, at least a part of any illness is what your mind thinks of happening. So, the reason the person who’s sitting in the doctor’s office starts to feel better is that their mind accepts that they’re going to get better because they’re going to get the letter from the doctor, they’re going to stay home for a couple of days and rest and not worry about what’s happening at work. So, suddenly, wellness starts to take over. Now, this isn’t a physical thing, it’s a mental thing.
Alex Tsakiris: Right and I think that whole placebo effect would go a long way for it to explaining the mind body revolution that we’ve had in science and in medicine for the last 20 years. But I don’t think it will ever get as closer to really understanding the potential revolution that we could have on spirituality and consciousness so, the audience that you’re talking to will debate that with you but they’re kind of well aware of that. What I’m more interested in are really the more challenging consciousness phenomena of near-death experience, of prayer research and those kinds of things that really challenge our idea of both of what are the limits and boundaries of consciousness, but also, what is this spiritual dimension that keeps cropping up; is it real, how does it exist and how do we study it.
Denyse O’Leary: Well, as a Roman Catholic Christian, I hold as a doctrine that it’s real. So, I just want to mention that upfront, so if anybody wants to make that a point and they need to know that I would start with the assumption it was real and were fact. However, that wasn’t how I got involved with helping to write a book. The first thing, I’d start with this was respecting near-death experience. The findings were a surprise. You see, traditionally, there was just deaths, right? Sometimes, when a person died, people would hold a mirror up to their mouth to see if there was still breathing or to see if their heart had stopped and if their heart had stopped then they’d put a cloth over their head and that just meant they were death. Well, modern medicine changed that. So you have people who are technically dead, who come back to life because they’re on life support or bypass as it’s called. So the person on cardiac bypass wakes up and says, “You know what, I had an experience where I was – could hear what you were saying in the operating room and you said, yada yada” and it turns out that’s true and he hadn’t decide whether he wanted to come back or not. He decided he would come back. So, this has all been different and new. To be prudently honest, I would resist making hard and fast conclusions about what’s going on. The only thing I think can be scientifically justified at this point is to say, the mind does not bound as closely to the brain as many have believed. If we start with that, we start with something that we can research if you see what I mean.
Alex Tsakiris: That’s very interesting. It’s interesting to me that you limit it there because I really think that the near-death experience is a much greater window into what’s really going on. I think it’s a topic that I really want to make the heart of this interview because it’s something I’m very curious about and that is, if you look at the near-death experience that has now been studied quite extensively in the lab, under very controlled medical conditions and the results are quite astounding and it’s been studied more just by scientists or doctors who have observed it in kind of a more anecdotal thing. But here’s a thing, I look at that, I understand why the neurologist look at that data and dismiss it and don’t change their position. I understand why the psychologists look at it and they don’t want to change their position either. I mean, these guys have built this whole big machine and it’s based on this materialistic view. But what I don’t understand is why this information in this research doesn’t compel Christians. I mean, because if we accept the near-death experience research and again, I think you have to because it’s very compelling, but if you accept it, then you got to start taking the accounts of the near-death experiencers much more seriously and there’s a lot of data there and that data does seemed to kind coalesce around some central points that are repeated over and over again and it had been repeated across cultural, cross time in a typical way that would make us want to accept those accounts. They really challenge some of the fundamental assumptions and doctrines in Christianity. So what do we do with that?
Denyse O’Leary: Okay, well, I’m going to ask you in a minute to explain which assumptions and doctrines they challenge, but I just wanted to say that a common practice in science as I know you will realize is to be fairly cautious when asserting a hypothesis. It’s not that I want to minimize the importance of near experiences when I say what I do. I’m simply saying that if you wanted to start studying in a scientific way, that the wisest way to begin would be at the base, which is that the mind does not appear to be as closely tied to the brain as has been supposed in the past. So if we say that then we can move on to what else can we assume to be true that’s widely accepted. First, we need to accept that it’s not necessarily true that when the brain ceases to operate, the mind does. That’s what the near-death experience essentially shows from a science perspective. Now, if someone wants to go on and make a claim about religion, based on the near-death experience, that’s fine. Now, there’s no problem what they’re making it that traditionally, that the science, it would require us to look at the relationship between the mind and brain and that raises a very interesting question of what is the mind, if it can really be independent of the brain.
Alex Tsakiris: But Denyse, I do feel like you’re kind of trying to find shelter in that same science.
Denyse O’Leary: No, I’m trying to base it.
Alex Tsakiris: I’m trying to base it too and I’m just saying after 20 years of very solid, compelling near-death experience research that’s been assailed by every possible means, ridiculous really a counter claims by materialist and atheist and it’s withstood that. I do think that good science dictates.
Denyse O’Leary: Okay, I don’t know this.
Alex Tsakiris: I’m just saying that I think the accounts that had been recorded by a reliable researchers and people who’ve collected those accounts, I think are very valid in terms of there’s many social scientist who would take those accounts and look at them across culture. I mean, we do these kinds of things.
Denyse O’Leary: No, fair enough. I agree with all that. My only caution is that I sort of like to keep it in the hands of straightforward science because otherwise, you could get things happening that you wouldn’t want to sponsor.
Alex Tsakiris: But straightforward scientists if that’s what you want to call mainstream science, they haven’t accepted.
Denyse O’Leary: I don’t mean the new scientist. I don’t mean the National Enquirer of the *** [00:20:20].
Alex Tsakiris: *** [00:20:21] when I’m referred to. I’m just saying the traditional mainstream scientist do not accept that the near-death experience shows that there is this duality between mind and brain.
Denyse O’Leary: They’re not just looking at the evidence.
Alex Tsakiris: Well anyone can say that at any point. I mean that’s why I think it’s very – you know, when anyone starts pulling this, “Well, let’s be very cautious on the science and all these,” hey, they’re value-free science, forget it, in the society we live in. It’s very freewheeling and we all have to draw our own conclusions based on the evidence and that’s what we’re doing. But here’s the point, if you take those accounts, yes they do undermine the basic doctrine of Christianity in that fundamental way that Christians don’t seem to have any special place in this all loving, merciful light that absorbs so many of these near-death experiencers and there doesn’t seem to be any noticeable difference between a
Christian or a Jew or a Muslim or a Buddhist, there isn’t and that’s what we would expect to see. Moreover, the spiritual figures that often find these folks or help accompany them on their path, are different depending on their cultural background.
Denyse O’Leary: But why would anybody be surprise by that?
Alex Tsakiris: I think Christians would be very surprised by that if they fully accepted that because maybe I’m wrong, I was brought up in Greek Orthodox tradition although I’m not of that persuasion now, but everything I heard never accounted for the fact that there is no special place for Christians in heaven, if we want to throw that word out there.
Denyse O’Leary: In my understanding is that “He who does the Will of the Father is my mother and my brothers.” That’s what Jesus said about the people who…
Alex Tsakiris: Great, I love your interpretation of the bible. It’s awesome.
Denyse O’Leary: Well, okay, no, but I’m just saying, that’s the one I was raised on. There’s no reason to expect from the Christian tradition; at least from the early Christian tradition and certainly from the one I was taught that anything matters as much as actually doomed what you’re supposed to do as a Christian and if whether people do what knowing they’re supposed to do it or not knowing they supposed to do and sometimes worrying they’re not supposed to do it, is what really matters.
Alex Tsakiris: Let’s take that. We will have a real *** [00:22:43] discussion here that we’ve never had in the show but it’s very interesting because take what you just said there and I’m going to re-interpret that and say that belief in Jesus Christ as your personal saviour is not necessary to enter into heaven. That’s how I would interpret what you just said and I think that is fundamentally opposed to at least 90% of the Christians that I know down here in the United States.
Denyse O’Leary: I don’t know where you live. Here’s what I’m going to say from the perspective of the Catholic Christian tradition; Catholics believe that Jesus Christ by the sacrifice on the cross *** [00:23:24] salvation for people whether they know it or not. Obviously, from my perspective as a Catholic, it’s better if people understand than if they don’t understand. But the idea is that not understanding would mean they couldn’t be saved would seem wrong to me.
Alex Tsakiris: I’m just saying, if that’s your interpretation of the Roman Catholic doctrine as you understand it, I just never heard such a liberal interpretation that doesn’t require or at least recommend Jesus as a means of kind of practicing the faith. I think that is fundamentally, one of the things that we get out of the near-death experience and for, if I can add, the prayer research that’s been done where we have Buddhist, monks and people of different faith trying to grow yeast in the petri dish through intention and in prayer and what we’re finding is that your spiritual orientation, your religion, doesn’t seem to have any effect on these experiments or these experiences and you’re telling me that’s completely in line with Christian taught. But I don’t think that’s Christianity.
Denyse O’Leary: *** [00:24:37] just meant. If Buddhist monks can cause yeast to grow more by praying about it, all that that demonstrate is precisely what I think we both suspect, that the mind is not as closely attached to the brain as we think, and that mental events have an influence on our environment. It doesn’t demonstrate that the Buddhist interpretation of the nature of reality is more correct or less correct than the Christian’s interpretation.
Alex Tsakiris: Then let’s switch back to the near-death experience.
Denyse O’Leary: You know, I’m just saying that we need to be clear about this. That only demonstrates that the mind has power and I think we both…
Alex Tsakiris: Yes, right. I don’t know that that level of precision on that one point is as fundamental to what we’re talking about.
Denyse O’Leary: Well maybe it isn’t but if it was after all we demonstrate.
Alex Tsakiris: I still feel like I haven’t answer on that last point. If we’re saying that there is no difference in reaching heaven no matter what your spiritual orientation or beliefs are, I just don’t see how as a Christian you can say that’s in line with Christian doctrine.
Denyse O’Leary: Okay, from a Christian perspective, understanding who Jesus is and what he does indeed, will help a person very much but that doesn’t mean they could not be saved without it, which is a different matter. It’s like the difference between knowing where the lifeboats are stored and somehow survive in the fact that your ship went down.
Alex Tsakiris: You’re just not coming through to me there. I mean, so when you walk in to church, have you ever heard a priest, a bishop, a cardinal say, “Yes, this bible that we have it, it’s not really that important, it doesn’t really matter and certainly a belief in Jesus is not important, all that is matters are your good deeds and your good heart.”
Denyse O’Leary: Of course not. You obviously have never been to my church when scriptures are read. It’s a vast ritual. The thing is a thing can be very, very important but yet God may can try [00:26:48] someone salvation without any of the messages that we normally use. So if someone says to me, “It’s my Muslim friend who died trying to rescue someone in the swimming pool saved.” I would say I will pray for them.
Alex Tsakiris: Yes, but then Denyse, switch in to the science mode and switch your science hat on and say, “Okay, from all these near-death experience accounts” even if you put it like you do that hey, which I don’t agree with, but maybe God has gotten this guy a slack [00:27:19] even though he’s a Muslim. There didn’t seem to be any evidence that there’s any difference. There would be a difference. There would be, Christians are kind of led in at a faster rate or something like that. There isn’t any of that. If anything, it suggests exactly the opposite.
Denyse O’Leary: What do you mean? Have you been to heaven? How do you know? All I’m trying to say is, I don’t know about that. I reasonably believe and I think the history of the *** [00:27:43] of Christians in social betterment worldwide would tend to support it that in fact, it is better to be a Christian but that doesn’t mean that no one else can be saved. It just means it’s easier if you accept certain things upfront. For example, some religion speaks that God is very forbidding and you can’t tell what he’s going to do. But we Christians believe God is our Father and loves us as much as we say. I would say that psychologically that was better.
Alex Tsakiris: That’s a claim. That’s a different claim that we won’t even get into.
Denyse O’Leary: I mean, I’m just saying these since you’re asking me, I’m telling you. No, I don’t have the advantage, you have of having studied near-death experiences for many years. I only looked at them fairly briefly in connection with my work on The Spiritual Brain but enough to convince me there was something left.
Alex Tsakiris: I encourage you to read the accounts and I encourage all Christians.
Denyse O’Leary: I have read them.
Alex Tsakiris: I encourage all Christians to read the accounts because they’re very moving, they’re very spiritual but I can’t really accept what you’re saying. I don’t see how anyone can really read those accounts and then walk straight into Christian doctrine and not feel that they’ve kind of lost something. As long as we’re kind of on this mode, there are similar accounts; incredibly compelling accounts of past life work and this has come up over and over again and by different means. So there’s another area of potential research that again, doesn’t that contradict Christian doctrine and are Christian open to exploring the limits of understanding consciousness by whatever means. You brought up the Dalai Lama a while ago and I’ve often wondered why Christians haven’t taken the same position that the Dalai Lama has regarding science because I think it’s the perfect position and it switches this whole science versus religion thing around. You may know this but the Dalai Lama has very famously come out and said, “I fully support any scientific findings on the beliefs or the teachings of Buddhism and if science proves any of our beliefs or our teachings are wrong then Buddhism must change because we are about discovering the truth.” I just have never heard that kind of openness from the Christian community. It’s always a more defensive, “You haven’t proved anything that I believe wrong” kind of thing.
Denyse O’Leary: I’m not sure they could in the case of Christian tradition. But in any event, yes, now you mentioned reincarnation.
Alex Tsakiris: Correct.
Denyse O’Leary: I assumed that’s what you mean by past life. My sense is that the big problem that people are going to have is to establish that reincarnation shows that people actually inhabited past bodies and not simply that they had access to the mental state.
Alex Tsakiris: Right, but are you familiar with the work that’s been originally done by Ian Stevenson has now been followed up by a number of folks at the University of Virginia?
Denyse O’Leary: No, I keep up with that one I can, I’m just saying that’s my only comment about it that I’m not saying…
Alex Tsakiris: But Denyse, are you familiar with work where they’ve actually looked at unusual birthmarks at entry points where the person had a knife wound or a bullet wound and many of those corresponds.
Denyse O’Leary: No, then obviously, there’s something going on there but all I’m saying is that there’s probably more than one model that might explain what was happening but the one thing I always come back to because I think it’s a base if you like, responsible research is that the mind is not as closely link to the brain as has been formerly thought. So that way, one can move out into an area that’s well-sourced without attracting a whole bunch of pranks because we do need to admit that this sort of research; any sort of research like this and I include that in the Christian community as well as others could attract pranks. So that’s why some of us tend to try to be fairly based on.
Alex Tsakiris: I really have to take issue with that because I think it’s a strategy that folks in the parapsychology and in the other alternative conscious community have tried to do. Have tried to kind of bow to the altar of materialism and say, “No, we just want our little peace over here” and I think it’s a failed strategy. I think the accounts…
Denyse O’Leary: You’re the first person who has ever suggested that I was bowing to anyone like that but you go on.
Alex Tsakiris: Well, I kind of do. I mean, I think the evidence for near-death experience I think is overwhelmingly compelling, but then to say that we can only take that evidence so far because we can only say that we can chip away at the materialistic paradigm, I just think isn’t the way to proceed. I think the way we would proceed if we were on a level footing without the baggage of the paradigm that we had, as soon as we establish that first fact, we’d start digging through the accounts. Our social scientist would then go look at those accounts and they look at them across culture, across time and they do all the kind of analysis that they do and then they’d come back and tell us what some of those accounts mean. I don’t see that as fringe, I don’t see that as fringe in the least.
Denyse O’Leary: No, I don’t think it is either. But I’m just saying that – for example, one author for who’s work I had considerable respect, now I just wish I could think the name of his book but he studied near-death experiences in the Southern United States and he made a practice of not interviewing anyone who had told their story to a large media audience. He only talked to people who had communicated privately with physicians and others. I’m just saying, I think I can see a role for caution in these matters. I thought his caution well-justified and I found his book quite good.
Alex Tsakiris: See, but again, I think you can easily move into a mode where you have two different forms of science. There’s really only one form of science. There is good science and there is bad science and there really isn’t anything in between. It’s like these whole idea of extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. That’s really bull. It should be thrown out the window. It should be buried with all the other old axioms that get thrown around. What is the extraordinary evidence, what is the extraordinary proof, in the terms of near-death experience which I don’t want to get the hang up on. I’m going to do a whole series of shows on it. But the evidence is really overwhelming. The claim that that isn’t is really an extraordinary claim. Let me move it into the past life thing because a lot of people think that that’s so fringe. We have many, many practitioners that are highly credential, you have Brian Wise who’s IV League MD at the university and is using hypnotherapy with his patients and steadily starts regressing people and they’re going back to these past lives and he just feels like he can’t ignore it. At this point, he’s done tens of thousands of these. We have other very well-credential competent folks in this field who if not for the taboo nature of what they’re claiming, we’d be all over studying that. That’s why I’m a little bit resistant to this idea that “Oh we have to move so cautiously.” No, we have to move at the appropriate level of caution as to make sure that the science is good.
Denyse O’Leary: No, I would agree with that. But I’m just saying that often, that means of moving fairly cautiously in a sense that one does not want to multiply hypothesis beyond what you can very strongly base. We know that there is a near-death experience. Now, apparently some people from what your telling me, have access to information about other people’s lives who are dead, that you cannot account for how they had that information. As I say, I must insist the furthest I’d be prepared to go is simply to say that the mind is obviously not closely bound to the brain and every subsequent hypothesis needs to be based on that, if you see what I mean. That doesn’t mean you have high fathers, I don’t care whether your high fathers has agrees with my religious convictions or not, I’m just saying it must be that the hypothesis must be based on each other.
Alex Tsakiris: Yes, maybe. It’s just kind of sounds like you’re again maybe letting your religious doctrine kind of drive some of that. This should be issues scientifically that should be on the forefront of Christian taught. They really should.
Denyse O’Leary: Well, maybe, I mean, I’m not at the forefront of Christian taught, I’m just a science journalist who happens to be Catholic and I agree that it would be very interesting to study it. The biggest problem for Christians worldwide by the way is religious persecution, did you know that?
Alex Tsakiris: Like take a statement like that, “The biggest problem for Christians is religious persecution,” is that a scientific claim?
Denyse O’Leary: Yes.
Alex Tsakiris: Then we’d have to define problem, we’d have to define persecution and then we have define Christendom and what is Christianity because I think despite what you said, I don’t think that what we’ve just agreed on would be accepted by the wide, wide vast majority of Christians in terms of the place that Jesus Christ plays in the kind of spiritual hierarchy and I know you’re not willing to go there based on the data that you have so far. But if that is a working hypothesis, I think that changes Christianity in the fundamental way and then it calls in the question whose being persecuted and who’s being prejudice against and all those other things are up for grabs.
Denyse O’Leary: In my own country there were big problems for Christians in the sense that the – well, the human rights commissions have taken a number of cases against Christians who were simply enunciating the doctrines of their churches and so forth. No, there is a big problem. But it doesn’t matter, all I’m trying to say is that most Christians wouldn’t really care much about reincarnation because in so many places, the big problem is just to leave at peace with one’s neighbours.
Alex Tsakiris: Not to me, because I don’t understand why there is a burning desire among spiritual people to find the truth and to push for the truth and there doesn’t seem to be. I would say, in this conversation, I’d say you’re a very, very open person and I appreciate the dialog greatly and it’s very helpful to…
Denyse O’Leary: What do you take *** [00:39:21]
Alex Tsakiris: I think science and the scientific method is a wonderful gift. It’s a gift that we’ve been given to penetrate as far as we’re able towards the truth and I think, my read of it is that Christianity as a whole has been complicit in how this great gift has really been hijacked. It’s been hijacked by the materialist and the Christians haven’t done a good job of getting it back and the only way to get it back is the position I think that’s best enunciated by the Dalai Lama that says, “Hey, whatever we want to prove. We don’t want to just sit back and say which we often hear Christian saying is, you can’t prove anything I think is wrong, no it has to be. I want to know the truth. I want to push sides to its limit to understand if what I believe is true and I think the consciousness studies that were on the verge of trying to understand can provide a window into – I think they already have but they can’t provide a window into knowing what’s true. I don’t know, I don’t understand why thoughtful Christian people aren’t on the forefront of that.
Denyse O’Leary: Well, some are.
Alex Tsakiris: Who?
Denyse O’Leary: Well, Jeffrey Schwartz.
Alex Tsakiris: Who’s Jeffrey Schwarz?
Denyse O’Leary: He’s a neuropsychiatrist and the author of The Mind and the Brain. I mean, yes, of course, there are a lot people like that, why shouldn’t there be. The thing is I guess, all I meant was that I can understand why you wish more Christians would involve with that it’s just that worldwide, Christians in all walks of life were involved in different things.
Alex Tsakiris: Of course, but we’re talking about the leadership. When we talk about the Dalai Lama, we’re talking about the spiritual leader of the Buddhist tradition and we don’t see anything on that scale in any denomination of Christendom coming forward and really saying that the discoveries that we’re making in consciousness can help us better understand the validity of these doctrines and I think that’s a failing of Christianity. I think it will wind up to furthering these divide between science and religion when really what we need is the joining of science and religion.
Denyse O’Leary: Well, you know, you might be interested then in some of Benedict XVI statements and pronouncements. You know there is various things going on at Vatican as a matter of fact, including right now an assessment of origins of life, which I realize isn’t directly your issue, but anything they were going to say about human consciousness would likely be found in step-by-step on stuff like that.
Alex Tsakiris: I think, you know, circling back maybe the point that we started on and maybe we can kind of wrap it up there but I don’t understand that either. I don’t understand – consciousness is fundamental to the issue of the origins of life as you well know. But as soon as you separate out the idea that consciousness has this dualistic nature, we don’t know when it begins, we don’t know when it ends, we don’t know what’s necessary, we don’t know what’s sufficient to cause it. As soon as we fully address those issues, well then, origin of life is completely up for grabs because what is life – but it also challenges the social issues that seemed to be at the centre of the Christian taught in terms of abortion and stem cell and all that, those are all up for grabs too because we don’t know where those fall. But again, I don’t see Christians leading the church in saying, “Well, you know, we’re not really sure what the position should be on abortion, we need to understand what consciousness is all about. We don’t understand what the position should be on stem cell, we need to understand more about consciousness.” That’s not what I hear.
Denyse O’Leary: Well, no, that wouldn’t be a Christian position anyway.
Alex Tsakiris: But the Christian position should just be whatever science, whatever real science tells us that’s the direction we go because that’s as closest we can get to truth.
Denyse O’Leary: I’m not sure because fundamentally, you’ll have to decide whether the unborn child matters or not and that is basically…
Alex Tsakiris: Well fundamentally, you have to decide what a child is and I think, where that really comes down to is consciousness.
Denyse O’Leary: Not necessarily.
Alex Tsakiris: But for most of us, we make a distinction in our lives between that which is conscious and that which isn’t. We give more significance and this I don’t want to get into, it’s a whole thing, but I mean, a rock we assume doesn’t have consciousness, a dog does, we tend to give special privileges to dogs over rocks. So I think consciousness is fundamental to that debate and anyone who doesn’t think so, I just don’t know where they’re coming from.
Denyse O’Leary: Well, I have at least several children, I would have to say that I don’t believe that two months old children are conscious in any normal way.
Alex Tsakiris: I do. Having raised four I think…
Denyse O’Leary: That’s fine you can prove it. I didn’t observe it and I look after many children, but I’m just saying that it would never have occurred to me to judge human right on the basis merely of consciousness although I agree that consciousness is an important aspect of the human experience.
Alex Tsakiris: Central. I mean, to me it so tramps everything else that you know, if you don’t start with consciousness, it doesn’t even make any sense to talk about the rest of it. It’s an 80/20 rule but yes, there’s other things that I guess you would have to factor in there, but until you understand consciousness, you don’t have a hope of understanding in my opinion.
Denyse O’Leary: However, in deciding how it shall help fellow human beings, I would not have thought trying to determine how conscious thing work was the best approach, that’s all I’m trying to say and I don’t think the Christian tradition is likely to move in that direction because the fact that they are fellow human beings *** [00:45:28] creates a claim on us whether their degree of consciousness has of course gone to…
Alex Tsakiris: Well that’s maybe a whole different issue. I mean, I think, everyone is all human beings and I think animals are bestowed with consciousness and this ability that is different from the brain. But hey, I don’t know that but my main point is those are areas of research that don’t receive enough attention. I think, you know we’re probably in agreement – we’re on agreement on so many things but it’s fun and interesting to really kind of highlight the points where maybe we don’t totally come together in terms of our view of the world. But I greatly, greatly appreciate you taking the time today Denyse and we’ll certainly have links to your book.
Denyse O’Leary: Yes, please do let me know because our link to our interview at The Mindful Hack.
Alex Tsakiris: The Mindful Hack, yes, you have very interesting blog that’s out there. Yes, I’ll be in touch with all that. We’ll have a transcript up as well as the audio version of it. Delightful talking to you.
Denyse O’Leary: Well, thank you and have a wonderful day.
Alex Tsakiris: Thanks again to Denyse O’Leary for joining me today on Skeptiko. If you’d like information on her book, her links to her website, please visit the Skeptiko website, you’ll also find links on our previous shows, our forum and e-mail link where you can drop me a note. That’s going to do it for today, stay with us in the future, much much more to come, until then, bye for now.
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