Myths about Nonduality and Science by Gary Weber

post by Vadim Golub (a schizophrenic mind) · 2025-01-15T18:33:33.783Z · LW · GW · 0 comments

Contents

  Myth one: relying on ancient religious teachings and practices is necessary.
  Myth two: having “no self-referential thoughts” is not necessary for non-duality.
  Myth three: you don’t need to practice… you’re already “enlightened”.
  Myth four: mystical experiences are a mystery.
  Myth five: a spiritual path needs levels, titles and an end point.
  Myth six: psychedelics can produce persistent non-duality.
  Myth seven: all research results are reliable.
  Myth eight: if there’s no “I”, you won’t be compassionate.
  Myth nine: non-duality is a psychotic state.
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The text is a lightly edited transcript of the presentation "Myths about Nonduality and Science" given by Gary Weber at the conference “Science and Non-Duality” in 2015 at San Jose, CA^[1]. Non-duality (from Sanskrit advaita) is an ancient way to describe the state of the absence of problematic self-referential thoughts. The presentation undermines common myths about non-duality and provides a scientific ground to understand that state. In addition, it highlights a rational scientific backing to some of spiritual practices and traditions including meditation and the usage of psychedelics. It may be interesting to all who are curious about cognitive sciences and how to get rid of problematic thoughts. 

 

I was trying to see if I could find some way out of my suffering, DIY. I was in a graduate school, working on PhD. One day walking down towards campus I had the epiphanous moment of stepping back and looking at what was going on in my head. It turned out that it was just blah-blah-blah. It was about nothing, in particular. Worthless. It had nothing to do with my doctorate thesis, nothing whatsoever. For whatever reason I had all these thoughts up there [in the head] and I didn’t think it was okay.

I’d suffered a lot by the time I was in my late 20s and so I had a lot of narrative going on in my head. It was very painful. And there was no reason it should have been like that. I’d got good money to get through the graduate school, got assistantship, wife two kids, everyone was fine, very healthy. But I had this problem. And so I thought, “Is there some way I can stop this?” I had no reason to believe it was possible. I had not read anything that it was possible. But I knew somehow that I had to stop this thing.

So I set about trying to find a way to stop this narrative. It turned out, as I got on this path, I was going to do it DIY — one. I was being trained as an empirical scientist, so I was going to do it empirically, scientifically, with no philosophy, no religion, absolutely naked. The idea was — can I run the experiments myself? Give me the lab notebook, I’ll run the experiments, and I’ll see if it works or not, and I’ll say “yes” or “no” to the experiment. That was all I was going to do.

I decided that sources have to be contemporary and trying to do this thing scientifically, empirically. I didn’t want anything from 2,500 years ago, 2,000 years ago, a thousand years ago. That had been passed down through God knows how many hands. People with vested interest have making it come out some way. The idea was it’s got to be those parameters: very scientific, contemporary sources that I could validate, that I had videos of, people I could talk to, could’ve met them myself. It had to be absolutely a clean dataset and clean sources.

Myth one: relying on ancient religious teachings and practices is necessary.

So this idea of relying on all this traditions: philosophy — I was not a philosopher, I was an empiricist, so no philosophy; no religion — I came from a blaming shaming religion, I’d had enough of that, thank you very much. So I was trying to find some way out of my suffering. This was the reason I had to do this thing. I was focusing on thoughts that I had and could I reduce them. So empirical, open source, secular teachings.

And the hardest part of it was: it was going to have to function in the real world. I couldn’t become completely dysfunctional. It had to be an operating system that I could live with. And the most important distinction was, in addition to these different difficult caveats, it had to be a state. Not just an experience.

I met a lot of non-duality people who say, “Well, I had an experience 26 years ago. I can still remember it, it was fantastically vivid. I’m a non-dualist.” And I’d say, “Well, not so much.” Because we have a lot of research now on memories. I was in a false memory fMRI study. I mean you might have a two years old memory of something and you might’ve called it up four or five, six, eight times. It’s not correct anymore. Your memory is absolutely incorrect. So it had to be a lasting state. Mini-me is down here because it really came to be a process of trying to find a mini-me in less-me involved operating system.

This narrative thing, that I found unpleasant, wasn’t unique to me. There was a great study in science that was done at UVA by some really good people, some of the best people in the field. And it was saying, what if we can just take some UVA undergraduates and put 150 of them in a room one at a time and tell them, “Okay, be by yourself 15 minutes — no toys, no distractions. You can just be there with the pleasure of your thoughts, and how does that work for you.” Not surprisingly 90% came back and said, “No good, no good.”

Okay, maybe it’s because we got them in a laboratory so they sent them back home, “Go back home, go back to your pod.” They go back to their pod, it’s even worse. First, 15% of them cheated but they were just as bad as those that didn’t cheat. The researchers thought maybe it’s just undergraduates, so they went on in that Charlottesville and rounded up a bunch of people from church, farmers market, average age 42, much more affluent than some of the students — ran them through this thing — same result. Same bad result.

Okay, this is not okay. Take 50 of these people and ask them if they like electric shocks and you find the ones that say, “No, I do not like electric shocks.” “Okay, you are in the pool.” So you get into this thing, you are in the “don’t like electric shocks” pool and they give you a button in your hand and control that goes to an anklet that has a shocking caller on it. You’re going to go back to that room and sit there for 15 minutes again and they will just see how it goes for you. If you need to divert your attention some way to pull it back away from what you do or going through, you just push this button and you’ll get a strong electric shock to your ankle and it will bring you out of your unhappiness.

So as you might imagine from above this didn’t turn out well. Two-thirds of the guys, men, shocked themselves. While only one-quarter of the women did. So women really are smarter than men. But. The guys shocked themselves on the average of 1.5 times and the girls — 2.3 times. But this is an unpleasant state for many people, almost everybody. We have so many things we do not to remain in this state and the talk is about trying to explore the ways to do that.

So I went about some practices. Classical Zen self-inquiry practices. One of the fellows teaching them was Bassui — fourteenth century Zen monk very famous in some sectors (see Bassui Tokushō, One Mind^[2]). And the other fellow you know, hope you all know — Ramana Maharshi, he was really my main man through this thing (see Ramana Maharshi, Who am I?^[3]). And these questions are very simple: “Who am I?”, “Where am I?”, “Who hears?”. For me as an empirical scientist “Who am I?” didn’t work so much. I got philosophical. The ones I liked were: “Where am I?” and “Who hears?”

I went to my Zen masters who represented Rinzai Zen which is the koan school. One guy was a big Mu person, if you know the goal was the Zen koans. I said, “Hey, I can’t get into Mu. It may be a great thing for a Japanese mind, but it doesn’t paradoxically engage me. Something like, ‘Where am I?’ I can throw myself to solve it. I am an empirical scientist. I should know where I am.” So I talked to the Roshi, he said, “Sure. You can do that.”

So I set off to do that, it was actually in our Sutra book anyway. So I went off to do that. My other Zen master — same thing. I asked her about it, she said, “Sure. Perfect. Go ahead and do that thing.” So I just did this. I just asked these questions over and over and over again. Along with affirmations like, “I’m not this body.” This belief that we have we are this body. I just asked them a lot of times.

And after a lot of sitting meditation thoughts stopped. I had to do a lot of hours of self-inquiry, a lot of yoga. I didn’t have any guidance really. Zen people hadn’t really worked self-inquiry. I needed a coach, I didn’t have a coach. So I was in the dark a lot of the time. They stopped. Thoughts stopped. And the surprise for me with that was not that just blah-blah-blah stopped, it’s very quiet up there [holding his hand on his head], like it is now, it’s very quiet, but that the fears and emotions, self-referential ones, also fell away.

Something I hadn’t expected were these two: “free will” and “the illusion of control”. I was very active in corporate industry and I was certain, very certain, in fact, that I had control and I had absolute free will and all that happens: successes and failures were mine. My responsibility. My failures. My successes. And when “I” fell away — just like that, snap — it just fell away right along with everything else.

I was standing there, I got a thousand people working for me: four research labs and a quarter billion dollar budget. And I’ve to go to work. And there’s nothing up there [in the head]. [A voice from the audience, "Great!"] Great! So I go into work expecting whether to be stoned or deified and neither one happens. Nothing happens. You go through the day and you find out that in fact life is even easier, it’s better, it’s cleaner, is simpler, it’s worked so much better than before I’ve got this thing. “Well, okay, if I wasn’t in control and I didn’t have free will, who is running this show?”

I’ve just kept watching and kept seeing, in fact, life does itself just perfectly well, thank you very much. I could function actually better with this situation of no-thoughts that I have now than I could before. When you go into a meeting, you know, meeting, and you find out that in fact you are the only person in the room, nobody else was in the room all the time, they were there ten percent of the time, forty percent of the time. And you look like the smartest person in the room because you’re the only one in the room that’s there for the whole meeting.

Also, I found it’s much more creative. Cognition is higher. I’ve spent that way without thoughts now for 17 years except for low-energy, I’m hypoglycemic, or I get very tired. We can think about why it’s the case, why we think we know why it’s the case.

Myth two: having “no self-referential thoughts” is not necessary for non-duality.

It is this idea of having self-referential thoughts, “It’s okay, keep those self-referential thoughts.” Well, it doesn’t work for me. If you want to get really non-dual, you got to realize that those are the canaries in a coal mine. You got self-referential thoughts, a lot of people say, “I’m good. I had this experience ten years ago. I’m non-dual. Yeah, there’s some noise off in the corner as babbling things. But I pay no attention to them. I’m perfectly happy with this.”

In fact, as you find out those are the good indicators you’ve got. Suzuki Roshi called these things “mind weeds” and he welcomed them. They give you a place to show you where’s some work needs to be done. Where you still got an attachment, and so you got something else to do. So if you can absolutely shut them down, get no thoughts — this is no self-referential problematic thoughts.

I work with a lot of knowledge workers over the university town. They live by their thoughts. But the thoughts they live by aren’t these ones about, “Oh, well, my project not going to get refunded again, I’m going to have a terrible time with this… The department chair’s going to throw me out…” — not those kind of thoughts. But the ones about, “Oh, I need to run this project and put it in this way and we will organize it like this…” Planning, problem solving do not change.

It’s easier, cleaner, these are not emotionally charged thoughts. And amazingly, for me, amazingly, the brain can parse those out. The brain can recognize if you’ve got problematic thoughts, or if you’ve got the ones that are just planning. These coded in because of linguistically encoded structure. For almost all residents of our species languages are all — subject, object, doing of some kind, except for four languages. So the problematic thoughts are self-referential ones and the brain can parse them out based on their structure built around “I/me/my”.

You can see these people [see Picture 5]: Ramana Maharshi, Nisargadatta Maharaj, Padrinho Paulo Roberto (ayahuascero) — all are talking about having no thoughts. I was giving a talk in Stockholm in 2010 and Padrinho Paulo Roberto was one of the founders of the Santo Daime church. He was talking in Stockholm about his experiences with ayahuasca. At the end of his talk the very last thing he said was this, “It’s all about having no thoughts.” Which was a big surprise to me, because it was exactly what I was after. So this one says, “Hey, this is fantastic, what a correspondence, that we both have exactly the same perception of why we do spiritual practice — ayahuasca or meditation.”

These are classical resources: Tao Te Ching, Dogen Zenji, Patanjali Yoga Sutras, Bhagavad Gita. Yoga sutras 170 or so sutras. And you find out that, “Yogas chitta vritti nirodaha”, is the second one. The first one — we’re going to talk about yoga. The second sutra is, “Yogas chitta vritti nirodaha”, which is, “Yoga is the stilling of the modifications of the mind.” Depending on how hard you translate that, it means — to stop them. From Bhagavad Gita: “Shanaih shanairuparamed buddhyaa dhritigriheetayaa; Aatmasamstham manah kritwaa na kinchidapi chintayet.” [verse VI, 25] Which is, “Gradually, gradually, grab hold of your mind and put it in the Self, and don’t think about anything else.” So you’ve got a lot of these people saying pretty much the same thing.

Myth three: you don’t need to practice… you’re already “enlightened”.

[Laughter] Exactly! Zen people did this thing back in the 60s, they had to say exactly the same deal. It sells. It sells great. People come in, you tell them, ‘You’re already enlightened. Nothing you have to do. It’s fantastic. Just, you know, come back to the next workshop.” But it turned out that it’s in fact absolutely not true.

We’ve learned a lot about neuroplasticity in the last 10 years, last eight years. There was a Harvard study with two months of mindfulness meditation forty minutes a day. The brain undergoes enormous changes very quickly. They can see five brain regions that have actually changed in size in two months. That’s how fast it changes. People, that tell you there’s nothing you have to do, did a lot of practice.

Tony Parsons did years of practice. Poonjaji, Papaji did rea-a-aly tough, tough, long years and years and years and years of practice. They say, “There’s nothing you have to do.” From where they are standing, that’s true. But it’s not from where you’re standing. You cannot just walk in and pick up a violin and say, “Okay, I’m now a concert violinist.” It doesn’t sound very good. You’ve got to learn how to do it.

How fast it changes? Merzenich is one of the top guys in the world right now in neuroplasticity who lived out here someplace [San Jose]. And he had a way to look at the monkeys’ neural map of their face. It changed every week. Every week. How the brain, the central motor cortex, is actually linked into these face maps.

How much you practice and how you practice matters a lot. Malcolm Gladwell’s work on 10,000 hours popularized this concept. The idea was for people to practice 10,000 hours to reach mastery on violin and become concert violinists. It was very small population, maybe 15 people involved and it’s not as clear on concert violinists, precisely, what mastery means. It’s more like, “I know it if I see it.”

But the chess guys, not surprisingly, are really into this. The chess guys will metricate anything. And what they’ve found is the same thing — 11,000 hours to mastery. However, big bandwidth: 3,000 hours to 23,000 hours. And they really know what mastery looks like in Elo points — that’s how they measure success in chess. And so genetics plays a role, genetics matters whether you’re going to be a 3,000 hours person or a 23,000 hours person. But you’re going to practice. It really determines whether or not you reach this and if you can go beyond that. Some chess masters keep growing and growing and growing and growing. Some don’t. Some just peak out and stop.

As Anders Ericsson found out dedicated practice focused on skill elements that are difficult for you is most effective. He did a research that they put in 10,000 hours book. The key point is practice on what you don’t do well. I did zillion hours of yoga and if you’re not careful you just keep doing the same exercise all over and over again. “I’d love to do forward bends. I’ll just do forward bends all the time.” You never do backward bends. If you’re going to expand your yoga practice, do the parts you’re not good at. Meditation practice — do the parts you aren’t doing well, which you try to avoid. As that’s where your growth is going to be.

Myth four: mystical experiences are a mystery.

Not so much. We now have some good models for this. This fellow Newberg is at Penn [the University of Pennsylvania], d’Aquili was also there, he’s passed on but Newberg is still there functioning very much. Their model which is pretty much holding up. I talked to one of the Obi-Wans in the neuroscience yesterday, he confirmed this as possible.

You have two systems: sympathetic and parasympathetic. Excitement and calmness. Those two circuits compete with each other, they go back and forth, hopefully alternating — excited, calm, excited, calm, excited, calm. That’s what they function for. Fight and flight, relax. Two sides. The idea behind the Newberg and d’Aquili’s model being if we can run these so you actually have the two of them at the same time fully activated — they will conflict and they will shut down the inputs to the temporal and parietal lobes, that do the important things for mystical experiences. You just jam the circuits and you just stop anything from going to these places that are expecting input, and almost always get input, and all of a sudden there’s no input. And they’ve postulated that that’s exactly what pushes mystical states into being.

How this manifests in these input starved mystical states? They’ve got two books or three or four books, you can look them up in any place. Hyperquiescence — you get very, very, very still. Hyperarousal, obviously the opposite — marathon runners, voodoo, swimmers, skiers, whatever… It’s flow, we all know about flow, Gladwell’s book [possibly a mistake, "Flow" is a book by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi]. Hyperquiescence with arousal breakthrough — you get really, really, really quiet and then — bang, something happens. You get a breakthrough and you get great bliss, exhilarating energy and absorption. The converse of that is “hyperarousal with quiescent breakthrough”.

And I cheated in my meditation practice. I confess to this now after 30,000 hours. And how I cheated was that I was a runner and I could get into the hyperarousal state, I could get the runner’s high. And so I thought, “Well, that’s interesting.” I started to sit and the Zen guys said, “Sit still. Hold your hands where they’re supposed to be and don’t move. If you move we’ve got a stick and we’re going to hit you with the stick.” And they did this. Very tough bunch of guys. So you’re hyperquiescent, you are not moving at all. And so if you’ve got your mind calm down, then you could find yourself in this “hyperquiescent with arousal breakthrough” state.

I’d found I could do that. I could sit, and after about thirty five minutes, which is about the runner’s high time, I’ve got psch-e-ew — a mystical experience. I liked this. Not that I liked it, the brain liked it. This is like a cue ball for the brain. The brain said, “This is the coolest game in town. I get to sit and I get this treat at the end.” Most people go 20 minutes and stop or 30 minutes and stop — you did the hard work and didn’t get anything. The brain says, “This is no fun. How do I do this?”

So I get a cue ball. I just sat, every time I sat, every day until I’d got a cue ball for the brain and the brain really liked this and so the brain loves to meditate. And this is how my practice has been for a long long time. I can still do it. It doesn’t take 30 minutes, though, it takes up, like, 10 seconds. But you can just bring this on, this “hyperquiescent with arousal breakthrough” state — bang! That fast.

Mystical and psychotic states. A lot of questions I get from many many people about this thing. My friends say I’m crazy — am I? My friends say I’m psychotic — am I? And these guys — Newberg and d’Aquili looked at the differences between psychotic and mystical states. I’m not trying to be a psychotherapist or psychiatrist, I’m just saying if you’ve got these kind of experiences, how you talk about the experience, your break from reality, how you describe it, and how you interpret the meaning of that experience — you can pretty much get an idea whether or not you’re “ecstatic and joyful” as you talk about it, or if you’re “confused, terrified and distressed” after it. In the same way, if you “long for return to it”, or if you’re just, “No. I’m not going back there again.” When you talk about it later, for most mystics it’s: “empty your ego, calm, still, peaceful”; psychotics: “messianic, healing powers”.

This is not proscriptive, this is not absolutely take it to the bank. If you can’t function, if you can’t raise your kids, if you can’t do a job, if you can’t go out in the world and function somehow reasonably well, then go see somebody. If not and you fall into the “calm, still, peaceful” categories, then it’s almost certainly mystical experience.

Myth five: a spiritual path needs levels, titles and an end point.

Everybody loves this one. Why they love it? We are evolutionarily bred into liking hierarchies. We became the masters and destroyers of the planet by being able to organize large bunches of ourselves to go out and do some tasks. It required a hierarchical structure. Hierarchical structure benefits from levels and titles. If I say, “Sam, you’re enlightened. But you’re only enlightened at the level three. If you want to get to the level four, Sam, we’re going to need some money here and some more time, the workshops get longer. It’ll be, you know, the usual five thousand dollars for the two weeks is now going to be fifteen thousand dollars for the two weeks. Because of this special teaching to get to the level four.” Or you can take the direct path.

But this is what many people do. To me it’s beyond naive to believe that everybody’s going to go down the same path. You look at a long, long list of relevant parameters: genetics, physical capability, age, where/when born, parents/family/friends, education, past/present drug usage, etc., this isn’t comprehensive but you look at the kind of things that affect your likelihood of success in spiritual matters — it’s a long list. And we all go through these things in different words, we get different intensities of experiences, you’ve different genetics, different family, when were you born, who our teachers were before — it’s silly to believe that they’re all going to go down exactly the same path in exactly the same way. Just doesn’t happen.

The lots of sayings about this both from the Hindus and from the Buddhists that there are lots of paths up the mountain. My first book “Happiness Beyond Thought"^[4] was very much about, “Look, here’s hundred ways — pick one. Pick the one that appeals to you and do it. The one you will pick and do is way better than the one you will pick and not do. So find something you love to do and then go into it and really ingest it and be with it. You can get there by many many paths.”

Myth six: psychedelics can produce persistent non-duality.

Yea-a-ah… No. We have one of the bigger Ayahuasca guys in the world out there in the audience, in a white thing there. He can throw stones if he wants to. The key to this thing you’ve heard much about at this conference is the Default Mode Network. This has started roughly in 2000 and we’ve really fleshed it out, we as a spiritual community and neuroscience community. And we know what this has done.

Andrews-Hannah et al., Neuron, Harvard, 2010 was one of the seminal papers. 11 centers basically generate this sense of selfing. All of the forms and types of selfing. You’ve got two subnetworks “Self and Other”/”Self in Time” and the core [see Picture 14], you probably all heard about many many times. We’re going to talk about this through here. You can see the good news, bad news is it’s way down, deep in the brain, it’s way down inside you. So the hard thing is you’ve got to get down in there and get a good signal. If you’re going to put EEG on the top of your head, you’ve got to process a lot of signals to make sure it’s exactly coming from this place and a lot of transducers.

Okay, Andrews and Hannah have found out that one of these sub-networks creates this sense of “you” existing through time. “You” as an agent that moves from the past to the present quickly into the future. The other one is the network that produces this sense of “you” and other things: “you” and the chair, “you” and a person next to you. And they’ve found out that whether you do it with meditation, ayahuasca, mushrooms — you produce shutdown of these two circuits: “Self in Time” and “Self and Other”. As you do, you get the classical “All is one” and “Now, now, now.” They all produce this as a main core, certainly ayahuasca doesn’t give you the same experiences as mushrooms do, or meditation does, but a lot of it codes on exactly the same level, psychedelically, mystically.

I was very heavily involved in the Yale study. The subject collaborator and co-conspirator Jed Brewer was at Yale at that time. And the same thing happened. These are Theravadans 10,000 hours plus or minus. [see Picture 15] They looked at three Theravadan meditators and said, “Okay, what happens?” Duh. Theravadans shut these things down — “Self in Time”/”Self and Other”. Not surprisingly, 10,000 hours.

Not a big deal… not a big news because, in fact, you’ve got the Tasking Network and the Default Mode Network, which is really deep down in the core of the brain. The Default Mode Network goes blah-blah-blah and when you’re doing a task and you’re at the Tasking Network, then you’re consumed by your task, the task you love to do, you’ll notice — you’re not thinking.

If you’re rock climbing and doing a high pitch, you’ve got to be really careful, you pay attention and you don’t think. And we like it because we don’t think. If you’re in a chess match… whatever it is what really turns you on, avocation or vocation… this Tasking Network will shut down the Default Mode Network. So these Theravadan meditators were really just tasking. The really interesting thing was when Jed turned on the equipment in between runs, he found out that, in fact, those centers stayed shut down, even without meditation they were shut down, for a while.

We now know we’ve got these three circuits: Default, Tasking and Control Networks. This is the expanded and updated version from Andrews and Hannah, 2014 [see Picture 16], she pulled in a thousand person study from MIT to really work this thing out, and the thickness of these lines is how often they talk to each other, they operate at the same time. You can see you’ve got these two sides — the Default and the Tasking networks, and you’ve got two centers in the Control Network, which Jed Brewer found as well, and their job is to watch and control the situation and they watched to see if the Default Mode Network is shut down. They see if it’s shut down, they can control this thing. Those two centers from the Control Network are called the Salience Network. They are watching the Default Network and the Tasking Network to regulate the switching back and forth.

If you’ve got ADHD, the DMN circuit, blah-blah-blah, won’t shut up. It will not let go. And so you’re at the Tasking Network trying to get a job done, and blah-blahs overrun, and so you can’t concentrate. There’s a lot of good research on that too.

How ‘shrooms work? Exactly the same way meditation works… not exactly, but this is IV [see Picture 17], psilocybin, in the UK, medium level doses, there is no need to worry about digestion, just IV, you can get a clearer picture at the infusion point [see Picture 17, the left side], and how this thing shuts down [see Picture 17, the right side]. As it shuts down, some of your friends may’ve told you, you actually get extremely intense effects, so tracks exactly on meditation.

Ayahuasca — the same thing. It’s a well-known study now, it’s been recently done but it’s become pretty well-known quickly [see Picture 18]. The same thing happens. These two [see Picture 18 the left side, blue areas] — the core centers, before ayahuasca. On ayahuasca in the fMRI — they’re shut down [see Picture 18 the right side]. The same thing happens. It’s a very nice longitudinal study now, we were looking at yesterday at lunch, on long-term usage of ayahuasca. That they all work.

I recommend everybody to have some kind of mystical experience. If it needs to be mushrooms, I’m not pimping for mushrooms, I’m a virgin by the way, I’m a virgin on psychedelics. But I encourage people to do something. Get some mushrooms from somebody anybody any place and… [laughter] really… [somebody’s saying, “Backyard.”] backyard, make sure they’re really good stuff but I encourage people to do this.

One fellow here, in the Bay area I’ve worked with, he’s at the conference today. And he’d been practicing very hard — practice, practice, practice, practice — but he wasn’t getting [shows quotes] anywhere. And so I said, “Get some mushrooms.” And magically, someone who he didn’t expect would have mushrooms, gave him a Hershey bar that was wrapped around some mushrooms. And he reached up, took them, lo and behold [claps] — BANGO. Now the brain knew what was possible.

The problem is the brain doesn’t know what’s possible, this is [spreads his hands] its reality. If you show it something else, he says, “Oh, gee, all kinds of things are possible. I can make this. I can make that. I can make peacocks. I can make crawling snakes. I can do all kind of things.” So you say, “Okay, my consensus reality is not the only reality there.” As somebody said on Friday, the brain works on the best effort basis. It’s not trying to do a perfect job of replication, it’s just trying to say, “Well, okay, the lion comes down to the steak. The lion’s hungry. The lion needs a steak.” That’s fitness. However, the lion then says, “Well, okay, my belly is full. I’m looking for a lady lion.” So he doesn’t care about the steak anymore. Now he cares about lady lions. That’s fitness. It’s not perfect but it’s fitness. As your demands change, you adapt, and you move to another object.

So they’re all on the same scale: psychedelics, what I do — persistent non-duality… yeah, persistent non-duality. And you can see what happens. Jeffrey Martin, who isn’t around today, his PhD thesis at CIIS on this: he took five hundred people, cut it down to thirty six of us, he said, “Okay, thirty six are all persistently spent a lot of your time within this non-dual state, this no-thoughts state.” And so we went through all kinds of interviews and testing and everything else, and they were going to see how we do.

Well, Hood, of Hood’s mysticism scale, was actually on Jeffrey’s doctoral committee so this is about as good as it’s going to get. And from these thirty six of us in this population, nine of us scored one sixty — it’s the highest level on the scale and we were that way persistently, ninety percent of the time. So it’s like a ninety percent of the time psychedelic experience on this scale. The common scale.

The problem with psychedelics is you got it six hours and it’s gone. Or eight hours, or fourteen hours and it’s gone. The brain doesn’t get a chance to learn how to do it itself. You’ve got to make the brain learn how to do it itself or it’s not going to be persistent. I met a guy in Yucatan 12/12/12 he had done two thousand trips on the high dose of high strength of acid. So I asked, “How is it going for you?” He said, “Not there yet.” [Laughter] Two thousand! He said, “Well, it’s not working.” And actually he developed an enormous ego around being extreme athlete on acid.

So it doesn’t get you there. You’ve got to somehow find a way to taper it down, make the brain learn how to do it. It’s exactly the same receptors, it’s the same circuitry, it’s the same chemicals, the brain’s got them, it has to work that way or that psychedelics wouldn’t work that way. Plant medicine works because they’ve found out how to hack our system. We’ve discovered that we have synapses and how they worked with cannabinoids.

Myth seven: all research results are reliable.

Everything is fantastic. Not so much. There is a big study in the journal of American Medical Association on mindfulness meditation. Forty seven trials, lots of people, 3515 participants, improved anxiety, etc. However, the guys from the Hopkins [the John Hopkins University] reported, “But only ten of those forty seven trials were without bias.” So you’ve got thirty seven, three-fourth of the trials, the good trials that are biased.

They were biased because if I’m an XY person or religion, say Buddhism… not Buddhism, I’m picking on Buddhism, actually, I have some friends in Buddhism… If you believe that you’re protecting the Dharma [the teaching in Buddhism] and it’s your job to protect the Dharma and you select people from your sect and you run your sect’s practices and you evaluate the goodness of this, the fitness of this against your sect’s attributes, that’s going to be biased. No matter how careful you are, it’s almost impossible to avoid bias. Then that’s been pernicious, but it creeps in — you’ve already done it with the selection of your subjects.

A lot of it can’t be reproduced. There was another meta-study published in Science on psychological studies and 97% of the studies they’ve picked had a very high significance — very “great study”, “fantastic awesome study” — so they went back and tried to replicate it. Only thirty-six percent of them were good at replicating. They could not replicate the results in the rest of them. So what’s the value of those studies? Not very high. The statement about different psychotherapies says that at least twenty-five percent of them are overstated to defectiveness for the same reason — people say, “Oh, that’s an outlier. Oh, that doesn’t count at all. I know this person — they’re crazy.” So you end up then with a very carefully controlled population, so you get good statistics, so you get tenure, so you get funded, so you get more research dollars, whatever.

Without science we’re screwed, right? Because it’s the best tool we have, the only tool we have for some of this stuff. We’re not doing as well as we could. If we did a lot better, it’d help us a lot more.

Myth eight: if there’s no “I”, you won’t be compassionate.

I get this a lot. I got called non-human at one panel discussion in Netherlands. “You aren’t a human being because you don’t have these desires and these bad things.” Compassion, for most people, is really reciprocal altruism. I give Sam something. So I’m expecting something back from Sam. This goes into the hierarchical structure, it holds the structure together, because if I give something to Sam, and he gives to me something back later, so Sam and I are, kind of, locked together, we’re in the same structure, we know where we are in this thing. It’s the glue of the hierarchy.

There are all kinds of things we’re expecting out of this. [see Picture 20] And Trivers and Stevens did tons of work on this, there’s even the center out here on reciprocal altruism. But it’s really just, “Let’s make a deal.” If you watch carefully, you can feel it in yourself. I’m helping this person “down here”, I’m “up here”, they’re “down there”, they need this thing from me, and you give it to them and say, “Ah” — karma points, heaven points, “I’m on my way now.” You’re expecting a reward, if not now, later.

In fact, your compassion is all about you. You have to guess who said this thing. “Human beings may be naturally selfish”, this guy’s really well tuned in, scientifically upbeat, “But they are also naturally compassionate, science shows. Helping someone else makes you feel good”, this is scientific research, we know this, “By nature every human being loves oneself, but by helping another you are building your own happy self.” You are building your ego by doing this process of helping Sam and getting something back from Sam. It doesn’t take your ego down, it actually strengthens it. Guess, who said this… yeah… Dalai Lama.

Myth nine: non-duality is a psychotic state.

And this is a serious problem for people. DSM-5 which is the diagnostic manual by which psychologists and psychiatrists can bill medic care or whoever, health care systems. And there has been a manual. Dr. Allen Frances from the DSM-5 Committee from Duke [the Duke University] actually chaired the study, he wrote a blistering… almost a repudiation of the study and said that, in fact, this fuzzy boundary, like for ADHD is so broad now that many, many, many people fall into this thing that didn’t before. And he also said, basically everybody someplace will be in there.

Take one of the big Obi-Wans in depersonalization disorder, and this one lists off twenty characteristics of depersonalization disorder. So I took the Hood’s mysticism scale and I listed twenty things and they’re the same twenty things. I mean mystical things lined up exactly with the depersonalization disorder. So you’ve got to somehow find a psychologist, there’s someone in the Bay area, who understands this problem. That, in fact, what we call mysticism, we think is fantastic — they’ve categorized, psychopathologized it. Just be aware of this. If you’ve started hearing people, “Oh, you’re psychotic. DSM-5 says this”, there’s a lot of controversy about this whole thing. About, “DSM-5, period.” But in particularly about the depersonalization disorder.

That’s all I have. Thank you.

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1. ^{^}

   Gary Weber, Myths about Nonduality and Science, 

2. ^{^}

   Bassui Tokushō, One Mind, https://www.thedaobums.com/topic/12089-zen-master-bassuis-one-mind/

   (excerpted from "The Three Pillars of Zen" by Philip Kapleau)

3. ^{^}

   Ramana Maharshi, Who am I?, https://archive.arunachala.org/docs/collected-worm/who-ai/all-languages/who-am-i-english.pdf

4. ^{^}

   Gary Weber, Happiness Beyond Thought, https://www.amazon.com/Happiness-Beyond-Thought-Practical-Awakening/dp/0595418562

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