Our Trip to India: Dharamsala Day 7
by Siegfried Othmer | October 27th, 2014by Siegfried Othmer, PhD
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Day 7
September 22 (Monday)
On this, the first day of our course, only a few of us were needed for setup and lecture. The program offered all others the opportunity to visit long-term meditators who were living the life of hermits in the nearby mountains for periods of three up to a dozen years. At seven in the morning, the group struck out for the nearby mountain regions, along roads that were even more primitive, to reach paths that then led to the spare huts occupied by the hermits. Bags of goods had been prepared that included warm socks for the winter, food items, and other necessities. Barbara and Kara went along, hiking on paths that would challenge a mountain goat. Particularly for Barbara, the trek took a physical toll. Nevertheless, Barbara said that this was a price gladly paid in order to be in the company of monks whose devotion was to simplicity and self-discipline.
For the course we had to get ourselves partway down the mountain again to the spacious grounds of the Tibetan Medical Institute, Men-Tsee-Khang. This meant another wild ride on the road that was no road. By now we had already gotten used to the fact that things happen slowly here. Breakfast had been slow to be served. A mere cup of coffee takes a long time to prepare as well. But on the road a different dynamic takes over, and everything takes place over my mental speed limit. I always preferred the back seat so that I wouldn’t have to watch so closely. After all, the left front seat would, in our land, be occupied by the driver. If I was going to sit there, I also wanted the steering wheel and the brakes.
In the late morning we set up the classroom with all of the computers, while I put the finishing touches on my part of the presentation. Of course there were last minute changes to be made, because I had totally overhauled my presentation for this occasion. A delicious lunch was then served in the roof garden, amidst beds of drying leaves that would become feedstock for the fabrication of herbal medicines. And then the course began with introductions; nine attendees in all from Men-Tsee-Khang. Five were women, including several from the Research Department. One of the physicians was the Director of the Men-Tsee-Khang clinic in McLeod Ganj, which is one of the 58 clinics that the Institute now runs in India and in neighboring countries. The personal names were difficult for us because there was so little connection to familiar names that would have made them easier to remember.
Our original course outline had set out that I would cover the development history of synchrony training and Alpha-Theta in the first segment, on the basis that this would be most congenial to our audience, and that the second portion would be committed to talking about the development history of SMR/beta training. However, the months that I had spent in preparation for this visit led me in another direction. It was important to lay the groundwork for the whole enterprise of self-regulation, be it biofeedback or neurofeedback, and that was also the common ground between us because the roots of our field go back to the yogis of India. This Eastern influence goes all the way back to Johannes Schultz and his Autogenic Training in the early twentieth century in Germany, which likewise did not rely on any instrumentation. Schultz had been set upon this path by finding out about the extraordinary capability of yogis to alter their own physiological state at will. Schultz’s work was the impetus for Josephson’s Progressive Relaxation, and that kicked things off in the United States.
The second wave then came in the sixties, and in order to refresh my memory on this phase, I re-read Elmer and Alyce Green’s wonderful book, Beyond Biofeedback. Here is the story of Swami Rama, who came to the Menninger Clinic on several occasions to allow his extraordinary powers of control over his physiology to be documented with the new instrumentation. This led to a flourishing of research into temperature training, heart rate variability training, and Alpha-Theta training at Menninger. We all know what happened then: On the basis of sloppily done research by some narrow-minded academic researchers, alpha training was subsequently discredited, and the Greens were reduced to non-person status within the Biofeedback Research Society. Eventually they departed to form their own organization.
Another key figure at the time, who was likewise assigned non-person status was Barbara Brown, surely the most prolific writer on biofeedback and neurofeedback, with a number of very popular books to her credit during the seventies. New Body, New Mind was published in 1974; Stress and the Art of Biofeedback was published in 1977; and Supermind was published in 1980. This was not that long ago (we got into the field in 1985), but now it seems like ancient history. It occurred to me rather recently that perhaps Barbara Brown had been as falsely maligned as Elmer and Alyce Green. I found copies of her books in used bookstores, and to my delight found yet another researcher of great insight and abundant common sense. The popularity of her writings at the time was well deserved, and very little of what she wrote then would meet with disagreement now within the field. Brown had in fact taken her own path to the discovery of EEG neurofeedback independently of both Joe Kamiya and Barry Sterman. It had been Barbara Brown that got the Biofeedback Research Society started. She personally sent out all the invitations. With the downfall of alpha training, she too was no longer welcome at their meetings. Years later she was disabled by a stroke. At the 25th Anniversary meeting of the AAPB, it was merely said that she was living in a nursing home. Nothing more. She had indeed become a non-person. She died in 1999.
The Greens and Barbara Brown were prominently featured in the introductory portion of my talk, along with Swami Rama. I also drew on the book Two Views of Mind by the neuroscientist Christopher deCharms. The subtitle of the book is “Abdhidharma and Brain Science.” Here deCharms makes an earnest attempt to uncover what the Eastern discipline of introspection, of ‘direct experience,’ and the philosophical constructs to which it gave rise, can contribute to our understanding of the brain from the Western perspective. He interviewed a number of Tibetan scholars, and the encounter between the two perspectives as recorded here is illuminating.
The experiential path to wisdom suffers from the flaw of subjectivity from the Western perspective. But subjectivity is also real, and is deserving of investigation. This is where the Tibetan wisdom is centuries ahead of us, simply by virtue of exploring subjectivity in its own terms. Subjective experience is intrinsically holistic and unitary, whereas we do science mainly with a divide-and-conquer strategy, looking at the piece parts to describe the whole. What is needed in order to understand self-regulating entities is a systems perspective, and you can’t get there from an understanding of the parts. And if the self-regulating system at issue also possesses consciousness, then one cannot ignore—or carve out and segregate—the role of subjectivity. Thus in various ways Western science has handicapped its own investigation into these domains.
To my Western-trained eye, there are two essential aspects of a systems perspective that are implicit in Buddhist philosophy. The first aspect is the sundering of compartmentalization within the system. It appears that with practiced introspection, in the form of meditation, there are two boundary-softening outcomes. The boundary between the conscious and subconscious mind and the boundary between the mind and the body become diffuse and indistinct, or (in the original conception) penetrable. In a conceptual framework in which these firm segmentations dissolve, the two prime roadblocks to the acceptance of self-regulation through the augmentation of awareness are eliminated.
The second aspect is the breaking of the boundary between the system and its environment, which requires nothing more than an enlargement of our conception of the system. The system I am referring to is what we label the “self.” In Buddhist philosophy there is an expansiveness, diffuseness and boundarylessness in the understanding of the “self” that is unfamiliar to us in the West and can be referred to as non-self. The Buddhist idea of “self” is quite fluid, much like the changes in a score of music. Buddhist practices of non-attachment or non-identification with the content of our thoughts and feelings is an aspect of this. We are then left with a self that has diffuse boundaries, one that is inseparable from its context, is continuous and changeable in time. The analogy that comes up for me is the whirlwind, inconceivable independently of the context in which it occurs, constantly changing and evolving. The same line of thought leads the biofeedback therapist naturally to the realization that within the brain the distinction is lost between an externally and internally sourced signal that provides information bearing on system status.
Consider, once again, our digestive tract. Strictly speaking, it is outside of us. Topologically, our body surfaces are toroids (donuts). But clearly our digestive tracts are also uniquely our own. Where, then, shall we draw the boundary of the self? Some ninety percent of the cells that we carry around do not contain our genetic code. Where, then, shall we draw the boundary of the self? We only become human through relationship. Where then shall we draw the boundary of the self? Living in intimate relationship with another, where shall we draw the boundary of the self? If Hans Berger’s sister could be aware of the fear of death experienced by her brother miles away, where shall we draw the boundary of the self? By the same token, is biofeedback exteroception or interoception? Such conceptual quandaries are no longer salient within a systems perspective.
These are not trivial concerns. The above three issues have placed boundaries on Western thought in its rejection of the claims for the self-regulation disciplines. None of them present a problem in the Buddhist conception of reality.
At the end of my part Sue prompted me that I had not even mentioned Barry Sterman, whose work constitutes the bulk of my first-day presentation in our regular course. Somehow the cat research—including the poisoning of cats to the point of death by seizure—did not fit in this venue, populated as it was by practicing Buddhists who espouse an obligation to promote the wellbeing of sentient creatures.
Moreover, operant conditioning was no longer the heart of the story when it comes to our baseline approach, infra-low frequency training. Why digress to this myopic and cramped view of neurofeedback when a much more inclusive and compelling vision now avails? The Buddhist trust in the value of direct experience, specifically with regard to the encounter with the uncharted and unchartable depths of the human mind, is thoroughly congenial to our reliance on an enlarged awareness of self to guide the training, and the re-training, of our physiology.
The essential divide between Western medicine and Eastern reliance on the support of self-recovery has here been breached. We have migrated over the years from the top-down prescriptive approach of presuming to know what a particular brain needs and administering the appropriate remedy to an approach that simply enlarges the scope of awareness of the body-mind, thus illuminating the path of recovery for a self-organizing system.
As an example of what could be accomplished with neurofeedback, I presented the recovery learning curves of a Vietnam era veteran. It was just a bit strange to be presenting these data with several Vietnamese people in the room, who obviously had been touched by that war in one way or another.
A second agenda for the day was Sue’s demonstration of the system. This served as a kind of pressure relief valve for the assembled, because up to then they had very little concrete information about what was involved in doing this work. The real skill set that was being called upon was one they possessed already, namely the skill of appraising a person’s status comprehensively. It was up to us mainly to provide a new framework of interpretation in terms that related to our protocol schema.
Dinner was back at Serkong House, where the restaurant was also named Hummingbird. The naming was a bit odd, since there are no hummingbirds in Asia. They are only found in the Americas.
Our Trip to India Continues