Picture 3.
Francisco Varela (1946-2001) in discussion at Kashmir Cottage, McLeod Ganj, India during MLIII.
November, 1990. Photo by author.
Picture 4.
Alan Wallace in a monk’s stone hut on Bhagsu Mountain, above Dharamkot, India, September 1992. Photo
by author.
And he said to me, “You know, we’re two old EEGers. We should do something – a research
project here in Dharamsala”. So we connected with Alan Wallace, a Buddhist scholar,
contemplative teacher and a translator for this meeting – who also was interested in scientific
assessment of Tibetan mental training. These individuals are core figures in my personal journey
towards years of research on the topic of meditation.
In 1992, we embarked upon a research expedition. Funded by the Fetzer Institute, we made our
way to the foothills of the Himalayas in India, above the town of Dharmasala, to the tiny hill station
of McLeod Ganj where the Dalai Lama lives. We brought almost 700 kg of testing equipment with
us (
, in the hopes of building a field lab and perhaps learning more of the effects of
Tibetan mental training from monks who were in retreat.
We met many extraordinary monks. One of them, Gen Lam Rimpa (
was a teacher of
Alan Wallace and led a year-long Shamatha retreat with Alan in 1987. Genla, as we called him,
instructed us not to ask monks in retreat to come to any laboratory we built, but rather he
cautioned us to be minimally invasive and go to them. So we packed the equipment we could carry
in backpacks and traversed goat trails (visible in
) to visit the monks in situ. They lived in
simple stone huts (see
that many had built themselves as part of their meditative
training.
Each monk we visited was welcoming, kind and appeared to take a genuine interest in meeting us.
Since Alan had been a monk in these hills for 14 years and spoke Tibetan perfectly, we were given
a necessary credibility with these yogis. Despite this, most wouldn’t tell us about their meditation
experience. They said, “If you want to know about meditation: meditate”. Thubten Drakpa (see
) was one of the few individuals who talked to us about his meditation practice.
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