under the guidance of Gen Lamrimpa. September 1992. Photo by author.
Picture 11.
Geshe Topgey as we were departing after his discourse on compassion. September 1992. Photo by
author.
Another monk, Geshe Thopgey (
, gave us a life-changing talk on the nature of
compassion. When we asked him how sadness and compassion could differ, he explained that
while sadness could
catalyze
the arising of compassion, they are separate mind streams. In fact,
he went on to say that one actually must learn to
love the conditions of suffering
as deeply as a
mother loves her child, eliminating the desire to push those conditions away through aversion, in
order to adequately gain insight into their causes and conditions and understand how to most
creatively be of benefit.
There was no question that these monks were extraordinary. Yet it could be argued that these
monks may have always been extraordinary. Perhaps the wisdom they shared with us was simply
part of who they were and was not due to their meditation practice or monastic training. We
decided that in order to investigate the relationship between meditation practice and mental
training effects, we needed to undertake a longitudinal study, free of cross-cultural problems, in the
West.
In 2007, in close collaboration with Alan Wallace and a team of researchers at UC Davis and
elsewhere, we launched such a longitudinal study, The Shamatha Project. In so doing, we began to
honor Varela’s 1990 vision. The basic idea was for Alan Wallace to teach westerners focused
attention meditation in a 3-month full-time retreat setting while we scientists measured a variety of
changes in psychology and physiology that might reflect learning due to practice.
Our project was designed to investigate four main questions:
(1) Can attention be trained through focused attention meditation?
(2) Can training in loving-kindness, compassion and other beneficial aspirations support attention
and improve emotion regulation?
(3) Are improvements in attention related to psychological function?
(4) What are the subjective, behavioral, neural and physiological correlates of such training?
To recruit suitable participants we advertised primarily in Buddhist print and internet publications,
and received 142 applications in total. The applicants were screened, since not all of them were
physically or psychologically able to take part or had enough prior meditation experience. We then
selected a group of 60 meditators and divided them randomly into two same-size groups, matched
for age, sex, education, ethnicity and meditation experience. We also shipped 32 laptop computers
all over America, Europe and Mexico in order to gather behavioral data on a variety of cognitive
and emotional tasks before anyone was told whether they would be assigned to the initial retreat or
the control group, to further verify that the groups were matched.
While the first group began their three-month retreat, the 30 in the control group were flown to the
retreat center where they underwent the same tests as the retreat group at roughly the same time,
but without embarking on the same intensive meditation practice. This was repeated at the middle
and at the end of the first three-month retreat period. Three months after the first retreat had
finished, the control group took part in the same three-month retreat program, again taught by
Alan Wallace.
So on to Shambhala Meditation Center in Red Feather Lakes, Colorado, we went.
349
