Our Trip to India: Dharamsala Day 9
by Siegfried Othmer | October 29th, 2014by Siegfried Othmer, PhD
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Day 9
September 24 (Wednesday)
This was the first day of the Dalai Lama’s teaching. We got up at 5:00 AM to get an early start at the line for security checks. Badges had already been obtained previously. The crowd management challenge was immense, with some 600 people expected inside the compound, and a total of 5,000 apparently here for the event. I never imagined myself on a pilgrimage of any kind, but really welcomed this opportunity to hear the Dalai Lama at some length.
By 6:30 AM we had been seated within the hall. Sue and I were privileged to sit to the side of the Dalai Lama on the stage, so we had the benefit of sitting on a raised step rather than on the floor like everyone else. Nevertheless, we had brought seat cushions for our extended stay. And then people just sat and waited. There was not even a lot of restless shifting about. People sat quite still, and it was obvious that this skill had come with extended meditation practice. People could just sit absolutely still for inordinate lengths of time. Eventually chanting began, led by a voice of extraordinary beauty.
At eight o’clock a stirring of monks’ robes alerted us that the Dalai Lama’s entry into the hall was imminent. Everyone rose and bowed in deep respect. And then, after he was settled, the Dalai Lama lightened the mood by beginning the program rather matter-of-factly. He spoke mainly in Tibetan, with translation offered into Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, Hindi and English. The translation, which was received through FM radios given to participants who required them, unfortunately put some distance between what the Dalai Lama was saying and what we heard. Simultaneous translation is extraordinarily difficult under the best of circumstances. Diplomacy comes to mind as a case in point. Diplomats are highly predictable in what they say, since any novelty intruded into their dialogue is immediately dissected for its significance. The free-wheeling dialogue on philosophical topics that we had here presents a challenge of a very different order to the translator.
It was even more of a challenge for us to listen to the four hours of presentation in this indirect manner, and to try to piece together the thread of meaning. Shortly after the start of the lectures, monks came around with large aluminum kettles of tea, and handed out small flat discs of bread. And at two hours, there was a fifteen-minute break. The topic of the day was Chapter 7 of “The Bodhisattva Way of Life,” which led into a treatment of the more daunting Chapter 9. Lunch was then served to all in the afternoon (all 600, not all of the 5,000), after which we went directly to the Medical Institute.
Here we had the opportunity to get the report from the Venerable about the aftereffects of his training experience. The alpha training had indeed taken him partway toward his accustomed meditative state, even in absence of any overt intention. Just to be clear, he had been asked not to venture into his usual meditation discipline but rather merely to let himself respond to the feedback in an unforced way. The previous day had been exhausting for him, and after the extended dinner he had decided to meditate only for about 15 minutes before retiring. Instead it transpired that he experienced two hours of deep meditation, and he was surprised by the length. Clearly he saw this as an effect of the prior training experience.
On this day, he had a chance to experience 40-Hz, gamma-band reinforcement. There was no large amplitude delta band activity this time. We were seeing a low-amplitude broad-band signal characteristic of an activated state in a system that is not dysregulated. This made us even more certain that the delta-band signal we had seen the previous day had been merely an artifact. The Venerable reported that his experience of the 40-Hz training had been much deeper than 10-Hz, and in fact had taken him to 80% of his deep meditation, whereas the 10 Hz training had only taken him to the 40%-point. Sue’s reaction was that this report alone had already made our entire trip worthwhile. There was now support for the supposition that we might be able to aid even seasoned meditators as well as those at the beginning of their practice.
Unfortunately, the Venerable had to depart for his other commitments, so we did not have a chance to pursue this opportunity further. He now spends much of his life teaching. Before departing he showed us a video that had been taken at an event in which mothers—and fathers—were grieving their aborted children. This was a ceremony involving two hours of chanting, during the course of which a number of attendees collapsed in hysteria. The Venerable was curious as to how we might interpret such occurrences, and to understand them in terms of brain mechanisms. For our part, we were curious about how early such events occurred during the two-hour event, assuming the chanting to be serving as a kind of induction. These happenings started within the first five minutes, we were told.
To answer his question, I lapsed into ambiguities. I said that at every level events such as this are difficult to characterize. At the psychological level, what one practitioner might call a psychotic break another might label as a spiritual emergency, and a third might see it positively as spiritual emergence. What is a seizure at one level may also be a conversion experience—a Road to Damascus moment. We face the same ambiguity at the level of the EEG. We observe a paroxysmal event in either case, but in order to characterize it, one simply has to go to the level of the person’s actual experience. Did these people retrospectively see these events as having had a healing effect in their lives? Apparently so. At issue here is the bimodal character of EEG synchrony. It can lead to profound experience as well as to the threshold of instability. And sometimes they go together. Dostoevsky had a seizure aura at one point, and he said that he would give up the rest of his life in order to experience such a moment again. In experiences such as this, there is no escape from subjectivity. No measurement could give us any clue to what Dostoevsky was experiencing.
After lunch a tour of the Medical Institute had been arranged for our group. The pharmaceutical arm of the operation is of course oriented to herbal remedies. The production line begins with sorting a variety of botanical matter and continues with grinding, sifting, pill-forming, drying, and packaging. It ends in a sophisticated quality control laboratory.
For the class, Sue went over the different symptom profiles, and then also discussed more of the particulars around the actual training. And then the staff of Men-Tsee-Khang sprang a bit of a surprise on us. A traditional Tibetan feast had been prepared for the Vietnamese visitors, and we were invited. It was held in a large multi-purpose room that was now filled with Men-Tsee-Khang staff and lively young students. Among other functions, Men-Tsee-Khang serves as a training center or medical college for young people being trained in the medical field. They are both schooled and housed on the same campus as the institute, the clinic, and the pharmaceutical division. Until this evening it was our observation that Tibetans tended to be more reserved, but that was not apparent when the students performed traditional Tibetan music, dance, and of course, a few rock and roll songs that were clearly enjoyed more by the students than the staff.
It had been a long, eventful and beautiful day.
Our Trip to India Continues
That was absolutely amazing. Very enjoyable and illuminating.