The Shamatha Project Adventure
In the summer of 1974, while I was still an undergraduate, I had the opportunity to attend a
remarkable summer school. It was the inaugural summer of a new Buddhist university in Boulder,
Colorado: the
One evening, I found myself in a meditation class taught by Joseph
Goldstein – at a time when hardly anyone knew that name. It was at dusk, and the room in which
Joseph was teaching began to grow dimmer and dimmer, and it became progressively harder and
harder to see. I remember this particular detail because of what Joseph said to us next. He said, “If
you notice your experience closely, you’ll see that there arises in the mind an intention to turn on
the light”. Noticing your experience carefully, arising in the mind: an intention. In that
single
sentence my understanding of the mind from neuroscience, introspection and Buddhism now came
together – and I was hooked.
Intentions arise in the mind. This experiential observation informs us that “we” are in no particular
location. We are embedded in this body, in this environment, responding to cues from within and
without. I pursued this investigation of subjective experience through a number of meditation
retreats that ran from morning until nightfall, with silent times of sitting and walking. In one of those
retreats, I had an asthma attack and was determined to use meditation to clear my breathing. The
more I tried, the worse it got. Eventually, when I could barely breathe at all, I felt the upward turned
palm of my hand grow large and my
self
grow small and I was able to lovingly care for my sick
body by my own hand. So I got up – and I took a spray of albuterol. In that simple act of self-care, I
not only gave myself the gift of breath, but I taught myself an important lesson: I recognized the
degree to which I was able to ignore
common sense
, on the one hand, and how capable I was of
my own care, on the other. This process of introspection and examination of experience is
intimately tied with learning how to become our own parent, an essential task of adulthood. And it
led me to wonder: what is going on when we meditate?
One question we could ask scientifically is:
what do people do when they meditate?
However, it’s
very difficult to answer this question. Mental practice doesn’t give you a particular signal. But you
can ask a more important question:
what do people do differently because they have meditated?
This is a scientifically tractable question.
One of the central characters in my journey towards investigating this question is my friend and
colleague, Richie Davidson, a well-known psychologist, neuroscientist and meditation researcher.
In 1990, Richie was due to give a talk to His Holiness the Dalai Lama regarding our research on
brain activity and emotions at a meeting of the Mind and Life Institute in Dharamsala, India
but
was unable to go. I remember him looking at me with a glint in his eye and asking, “Do you want to
go to Dharamsala?” Three weeks later, I found myself giving a presentation to His Holiness.
While in Dharamsala, I roomed with Francisco Varela, arguably the intellectual father of the dialog
between Buddhism and cognitive science
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