The Mind-Bending Science of Advanced Meditation | Matthew Sacchet

What it is, how beginners can get a taste, the dangers of striving, and whether tech can make it easier. Dr. Matthew D. Sacchet, Ph. D https://meditation.mgh.harvard.edu/sacchet/., is an Associate Professor and the Director of the Meditation Research Program at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital (Mass General). Since 2012, he has authored more than 120 publications, presented more than 150 times at international, national, regional and local conferences and speaker series, and been cited more than 8,000 times. In this episode we talk about: What Matthew's learning about advanced states of meditation, and what they do to the brain What relevance advanced meditation might have for the rest of us How we might get a taste of these states ourselves Whether technology might ultimately help some of us advance more quickly The psychological risks of practicing deep end meditation Related Episodes: Dr. Richie Davidson, Daniel Goleman – Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain and Body https://www.danharris.com/p/daniel-goleman-dr-richard-davidson-923 Nirvana | Joseph Goldstein https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/nirvana-joseph-goldstein/id1087147821?i=1000633240234 A Meditator in the Arena | Sam Harris https://meditatehappier.com/podcast/tph/sam-harris-306 Willoughby Britton, Jared Lindahl -- Does Meditation Have a Dark Side 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Dan Harris?

  This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

• 0:18Dan Harris?

  Hello, everybody. How we doing? I love all of our episodes, of course, but I am, I have to say, unusually excited about this one. We're doing something we haven't done in a while. In fact, we're diving into the deep end of advanced meditation. As you know, I'm a huge fan of what I'll call everyday mindfulness. I think there are profound benefits to be had from just meditating a little bit daily-ish. But honestly, that is just the tip of the iceberg. Just as scientists are exploring the many mysteries of outer space, there is a vastness of inner space that contemplatives have been exploring for millennia and which science is only now really beginning to probe.

• 0:58Dan Harris?

  I love thinking about the fact that various meditative traditions over many, many centuries have created these elaborate maps of the mind, of the path to enlightenment, and researchers are now endeavoring to see whether those maps might be true. Today, I'm talking to a young researcher from Harvard Medical School who's been studying the brains of advanced meditators. We talk about what he's learning about rarified states of meditation, what those states do to the brain, what relevance all of this might have for the rest of us, how we might get a taste of these states ourselves, and whether technology might ultimately help some of us jump the line and advance more quickly. We also talk about some of the psychological risks of deep end meditation. Dr. Matthew D.

• 1:42Dan Harris?

  Seket, PhD, is an associate professor and the director of the Meditation Research Program at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, otherwise known as Mass. General. Since 2012, he's authored more than 115 publications, presented more than 150 times at international, national, regional, and local conferences and speaker series, and has been cited more than 7,500 times. Impressive dude. Matthew Seket, coming up right after this. If you care about supporting independent media and if you care about being a node of sanity in an insane world, there are a few quick, easy and free ways that you can support me and my team, which I would be really grateful for.

• 2:25Dan Harris?

  One way to do it is to sign up for my newsletter, which comes out on Monday mornings. It's a little dose of sanity in your inbox at the beginning of a busy week. The second way to do it is to follow and subscribe to the show wherever you're listening or watching right now. That really helps. Three, share your favorite episode with a friend. This is a great and low stakes way to connect with somebody in your orbit, and not for nothing, it also helps us grow. And all of these things take about 30 seconds, and they really do help. You will be supporting me and my team and our mission, and I, as I said, would be immensely grateful. You can find everything we do at danharris.com. It's all right there. Thank you. I mean that seriously. We'll be right back with more show.

• 3:07Dan Harris?

  If you care about supporting independent media and if you care about being a node of sanity in an insane world, there are a few quick, easy and free ways that you can support me and my team, which I would be really grateful for. One way to do it is to sign up for my newsletter, which comes out on Monday mornings. It's a little dose of sanity in your inbox at the beginning of a busy week. The second way to do it is to follow and subscribe to the show wherever you're listening or watching right now. That really helps. Three, share your favorite episode with a friend. This is a great and low stakes way to connect with somebody in your orbit, and not for nothing, it also helps us grow. And all of these things take about 30 seconds, and they really do help.

• 3:48Dan Harris?

  You will be supporting me and my team and our mission, and I, as I said, would be immensely grateful. You can find everything we do at danharris.com. It's all right there. Thank you. I mean that seriously. We'll be right back with more show.

• 4:04Dan Harris?

  Matthew Sackett, welcome to the show.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  Thanks so much for having me. It's such a true pleasure.

• 4:10Dan Harris?

  Likewise. We don't talk about the deep end of the pool as it pertains to meditation enough on this show, and it's something that I love talking about, so I'm really excited for this conversation. You have said that you think we're on the cusp of like a new wave of science, a third wave of meditation research specifically, which centers on what, and I think this is the term you use, advanced meditation. So I'd love to hear more about that. What do you mean by advanced meditation? And what do you mean by this third wave?

• 4:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, great question. Thanks so much for asking that. It's at the core of how I approach this, how I think about this. When I have looked at the literature, when I've looked at sort of how we're thinking about meditation and how science has informed sort of a broader mainstream understanding, I see these waves, right? This is the framework that I've developed and I've put into the literature and put into some public facing articles, like a Scientific American article that recently came out. And to me, there are, we can articulate the trajectory of this field, the evolution of this field of meditation in these waves. And the first wave, as I see it, is a focus on what you might call

• 5:20Speaker 01

  like initial efficacy studies, an initial understanding of is meditation helpful? Can it reduce stress? Can it mitigate anxiety and other kinds of mental and physical health related symptoms? And that was really the focus, in large part from maybe the mid 90s until 2005 or so is really the focus of what I would say is this first wave, right? And then what I call the second wave was principally focused on understanding what you might call mechanisms of the health related effects that were started to, that were starting to be unpacked in the first wave, right? So maybe there are cognitive

• 6:02Speaker 01

  psychology studies, neuroscience studies, looking at how the brain works, how the mind works in these contexts, what are the sort of cognitive mechanisms, right? And the crux of my argument and sort of what I see is that I believe we're entering what you might call a third wave, a third epoch of meditation research, right? And this wave is, I believe, characterized by a focus on what I call advanced meditation, right? You could call it the deep end of practice, but essentially going beyond mindfulness, going beyond an initial focus of meditation on stress reduction, applications of meditation

• 6:45Speaker 01

  for work burnout and other kinds of clinical applications, and really thinking about what happens with time and mastery with meditation. What are the states, stages, skills, transformations that might occur with time and mastery, right? And this is advanced meditation, right? So what does that look like? Like, what kind of things are we interested in? We're interested in what you might call ecstatic bliss states, deep insights into how the mind works, different kinds of compassionate and altruistic stances and orientations towards oneself and the world and others, and also what you might call transformation, right?

• 7:27Speaker 01

  These are changes that are enduring and lead to someone living a better life, a happier life, right? These are the kinds of things that we're interested in, in the study of advanced meditation.

• 7:41Dan Harris?

  And so by transformation, I assume you're pointing to what the Buddhists would call, and maybe even in some other traditions, would call enlightenment?

• 7:49Speaker 01

  So I know this is sort of a mindfulness-related podcast, and there's a big focus on Buddhism in it. So that's certainly language that we're comfortable using and we're thinking about as sort of a... In the literature, we use this phrase meditative endpoint to be sort of outcomes and milestones of mastery in advanced meditation. And what the Buddhists have called, it's often translated in English as enlightenment or awakening from nirvana, nibbana, and other terms of sort of deep transformative endpoints, is exactly something that we're very interested in and that we are studying and that we intend to develop a modern, comprehensive, scientific understanding of. So that's exactly right, yes.

• 8:36Dan Harris?

  I have a million questions and I love all of this, but just to restate your basic thesis and make sure I understand it and by extension, the audience understands it, although they may understand it before I do. But I think what you're saying is that we've had several decades of research into what I might call like basic mindfulness for people at the beginning or intermediate stages, five, 10, 15, 20 minutes a day. What does it do to your stress hormone levels? What does it do to your blood pressure, your immune response? Changes in parts of the brain like the amygdala, which regulates fear, anxiety, stress and the prefrontal cortex, which regulates our capacity to pay attention, sort of basic, but not in a pejorative way, the way, the way

• 9:18Dan Harris?

  kids are using the word basic these days, but in a sort of a very widely applicable sense. And what you're saying, if I hear you correctly, is that, yeah, okay, that type of meditation is terrific. However, it really is just the beginning stages of an ancient, really complex and fascinating set of traditions, including Buddhism, where you can go quite far. And we want to look at that spectrum of practice. How's that for a restatement?

• 9:52Speaker 01

  That's really, really well said, Dan. And I think you touched on a couple of things that I didn't say explicitly, but I think are super important, that my intention to develop this science and the third wave of advanced meditation isn't to denigrate or look down on or anything on 10 minutes a day mindfulness for stress reduction. Like, that's super powerful stuff. Millions and millions of people have benefited from that. I've done research on that sort of first and second wave for years. I mean, I think it's really important, but sort of, I think a key point here is that I believe that these initial waves are sort of growing and evolving. And now we're entering what's possible after having that foundational understanding. Part of our ability to now study advanced meditation is this foundation

• 10:35Speaker 01

  and the first and second waves on mindfulness, you could say. And then I think you also touched on a really important point that I didn't emphasize as much and as clearly as you did, but we're interested in Buddhist advanced meditation and from different lineages and different types of stages and states, but this isn't about Buddhism. It's not about any particular tradition. This is about Incredible human capacities that I believe are fundamental to everyone and everyone. It's just about being human, right? And that's something that I think is important because a fair amount of our research so far has focused on Theravada and Buddhist states and stages of practice.

• 11:17Speaker 01

  But it's really important that we don't think of ourselves as Buddhist scientists or something like that. It's not what we're doing. We're really trying to understand the foundation.

• 11:27Dan Harris?

  That may be somewhat of a historical quirk, given that the, many of the people who popularized mindfulness meditation, as well as sort of more explicitly Buddhist meditation in this country, there were Americans who went over and studied in Asian countries where the predominant flavor of practice was Theravada Buddhism, which is the old school Buddhism. The Theravada was then followed by Mahayana, which is, includes Zen, and then Tibetan, and within Tibetan, there's Vajrayana. So there are these various schools, but a lot of the folks who went over to Asia in

• 12:07Dan Harris?

  the 60s and came back and helped popularize meditation in this country had come from places like Thailand and Burma, where they were studying, again, Theravada, old school Buddhism. And so as a result, we have a lot of scientists in this country who are looking at those maps of enlightenment, the states and stages envisioned by pursuing that flavor of practice. What happens at the deep end of the pool if you take that as far as it can be taken? However, there are all these other schools of Buddhism and then schools of meditation or contemplative practice within Hinduism, within Sufi Islam, within Judaism, Christianity, Shamanic traditions.

• 12:52Dan Harris?

  And I think what I hear you say is, I, Matthew, want to look at the lot of it.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I largely agree with what you said. I mean, we're interested in a lot of it and kind of contextualizing advanced meditation more broadly and ideally and ultimately developing a science that can be sort of a meta-tradition or something that can help make sense of all these traditions together, right, which in the context of comparative mysticism is sort of a holy grail and through science, I believe, is possible. I do want to add one thing that I see how you've connected the dots with like Theravada in Buddhism being the sort of roots of modern mindfulness and a lot of our most well-known teachers sort of coming out of that Theravada. But I want to add that from my perspective also

• 13:36Speaker 01

  that the Theravada framework, I think, does have some particular ease of application in the context of modern science, right? It's a particularly sort of psychologized framework, if you want to call it that. Certainly, there's some aspects of the Theravada that lean on other things, but a lot of the descriptions and the sort of systematic explanations and some of the frameworks that are provided by that tradition are arguably easier to study and to translate into modern science, right? So it's one of the main reasons I've focused on it. And I should say that like the mainstream teachers, I would say, haven't really been talking about advanced states and stages of practice so much. It's happening more, like we're seeing more manuals published on some of the deeper

• 14:21Speaker 01

  stuff. But I think my read of it, and others might disagree, is that to initially introduce mindfulness and meditation at the scale that they have and had incredible success with and changed millions of people's lives, was focused a little bit more on sort of stress and daily practice, this kind of less intensive daily practice and sort of being happier and healthier in sort of a daily way in that sense. I just wanted to add that.

• 14:48Dan Harris?

  I'm glad you're adding that. I don't know, you and I may be in a distinct minority, although I have my suspicions that perhaps if we position this conversation correctly, we'll be growing that minority in a significant way, that yes, it is, it is true, I'll speak for myself, most of us, myself included, are going to be in the shallow end of the pool, and again, not on the pejorative. We don't have the time, we have busy lives, we have, I have a kid and several jobs and a lot going on. And I think that that's roughly similar to many of the people listening in. So yeah, we're going to be more in the 10 minutes, or in my case, a little closer to 60 minutes a day of meditation. But if you

• 15:29Dan Harris?

  want to go all the way, or even a significant portion of the way within the Theravada map, or even the maps that these other schools have, for most people, as my understanding, it's going to require quite a bit of time on silent meditation retreat, long ones. You may disagree with that, I'd be interested to hear your point of view on that. But nonetheless, what is available at the deep end of the pool is incredibly interesting, whether you're going to go there or not, because it's, it says so much about what these minds are capable of, what's on the menu when it comes to the human experience that I don't

• 16:09Dan Harris?

  think most of us even consider. Okay, I'm rambling now, but does anything I'm saying landing with you?

• 16:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I in large part agree with that. Yeah, I think I would just add that part of what, you know, the work that we're doing is aimed towards is understanding exactly that question of how can we help people access these kinds of practices and states? And maybe they're busy people, or can you do it on a week-long retreat? Or do you really need to do three months? And what's possible around facilitating effective practice? And whether it's better verbal instructions, or some kind of technology, or something, which is kind of an open question, which I'm happy to talk more about. But that is part of what we're interested in, is one, simply raising awareness around these kinds of practices and better understanding them, but also can Can we accelerate practice?

• 16:59Speaker 01

  Can we create containers that are particularly amenable to more people?

• 17:04Dan Harris?

  Right? Yeah.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  I think it's fair to say that historically, these kinds of practices were considered quite esoteric and maybe small communities had access to this. And my hope is that we can democratize, is one word that you might use, access to deeper practice. And there's a lot of things that come up with that that I'm happy to talk about on this call with you. But one is safety. These are very powerful practices. And if more people are getting access to them, how do we introduce these in a way that's safe? Right? And my hope is that a rigorous science of advanced meditation directly informs all those questions. Right? And really helps to create frameworks,

• 17:46Speaker 01

  inform frameworks and ultimately help more people practice this stuff.

• 17:52Dan Harris?

  I love that. And I want to come back to it in a big way. I want to talk about the safety issues. I want to talk about whether there are technological advances that might help us skip the line, as it were. Let's just stay on a higher level for a second. One of the things that's fascinated me for a long time, and I would love to hear you talk about it. I'll try to describe my basic understanding of this. We have all of these contemplative traditions, the various schools of Buddhism, Theravada, Zen, Tibetan, Vajrayana, within Tibetan Buddhism. And then we have contemplative lineages, as discussed earlier, within the Abrahamic faiths and Hinduism and shamanism. Many of these schools have their own maps,

• 18:35Dan Harris?

  basically a description of what happens. If you do these practices, these maps say reliably and predictably, certain things should happen in your mind, which lead to various stages of. In Buddhist speak, enlightenment. And the Theravada map you discussed earlier is in some ways, I think you were pointing at like the sort of the most detailed and psychologically rigorous map. I don't know the maps well enough to make that assertion on my own, but I basically, I guess, I guess I'd like you to talk about this concept of mapping, which I find so fascinating that you, people have been meditating for so long and for so many millennia and

• 19:19Dan Harris?

  at such high dosages, they've been able to map these extraordinary states of consciousness that are on offer, but not really in our daily lives so much. So can you just hold forth in a general way about this concept?

• 19:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. And I do want to, I do hope to just, I don't know if it's a clarification on my own behalf, but I think the Theravada map is particularly, can be a particularly amenable to scientific inquiry and sort of the psychological rigor and systematic unpacking of the states and stages that that tradition has done. But there are others, just to be clear, and I might argue that Theravada has had, offers some ease over some other traditions, but that's sort of a complex topic and I don't mean to sort of denigrate or put on any kind of hierarchy in that way. But to get more to your question directly, that's, that's a big part of what we're interested in is articulating that very question of what is a map of meditative development? You know, we use this term meditative development in our work to point towards a developmental

• 20:18Speaker 01

  trajectory that might include different kinds of stages, that include different kinds of cognitive, affective, psychological qualities. It's not just a linear progression, like sort of the way that you could envision mindfulness research to date is that in large part, it's been focused on sort of the development of like this single dimension construct of what you might call mindfulness. There's more to it, but that's one way to sort of frame where we're going. And instead of having a single construct of are you more or less mindful, right? Can we articulate states and stages of practice that unfold with time and mastery? That might reflect the kind of development that we see in sort of normative human development

• 21:03Speaker 01

  from a fetus to an infant to a toddler to a young child to an older child. Like in psychology, we can think about those kind of developmental stages. Can we do that in meditative development, right? It's really kind of blowing open the doors in a much more nuanced view of what might be possible. Right. And then to get to your question about different traditions, it's like dovetailing from what I said earlier in this conversation, that my intention is to understand sort of fundamental capacities of the human mind, human consciousness. I believe this is something that we're investigating is that there's sort of different arcs

• 21:43Speaker 01

  and different kinds of meta trajectories that can be helpful for orienting different kinds of practices from different traditions into a meta model, into a model that can account for various traditions, right? And for example, right, I'll just give a little example. In Theravada and Buddhist insight practice, right? There's something that's sometimes called the progressive insight or stages of insight, which includes different stages of practice that are characterized by different sorts of insights, different kinds of knowledges. That's the way it's described in the tradition.

• 22:23Speaker 01

  And one of these stages, sort of a set of these stages are called in Pali, the liturgical language of Theravada Buddhism, the dukkha nanas, right? Which might be translated as the knowledges of suffering, right? And these knowledges and insights that happen are around nature of different psychological phenomenon that include some kinds of psychological challenges and sometimes difficulties for some people, right? And when I look at that, I think that's really interesting for a whole bunch of reasons. And I'm kind of bringing this into the conversation to make up sort of pet example to point towards the initial question of different traditions. But if you look at other traditions.

• 23:09Speaker 01

  Those traditions might describe in their sort of models of spiritual development, meditative development, similar kinds of things that you might be able to map on to certain qualities of the dukkhananas, for example, right? Like, one of the sort of quintessential examples that's thrown around in this context is, in a Christian context, you might look at the dark knight of the soul, right? In this progress toward God, in sort of a Christian context, there's this thing, the dark knight of the soul, that can be very challenging and sort of require a certain kind of death of the self, or death of the ego, or sort of as one moves toward God in a sort of Christian context, right? So, a radical hypothesis of sorts is like, maybe these are kind of fundamentally similar

• 23:52Speaker 01

  things, and can we study this? And can we try to build connections? Because like, at face value, you might say, wow, that's really radical, like, dark knight of the soul, like dukkhananas, like, this is some really wild stuff, but wait a second. The dukkhananas in the Theravada tradition was developed in Southeast Asia, and Christianity and this dark knight of the soul wasn't, yet it's these core pieces of what you might call soteriology, the science of salvation for these different traditions. What's going on here? Right? Historically, in comparative mysticism, that's not the focus of my academic work, comparative mysticism, but there's a field of comparative mysticism. And my understanding is sort of the dogma in that field, sort of the way that that

• 24:36Speaker 01

  field functions, is to not try to make those connections, is to not say, look, the dark knight of the soul is similar to the dukkhananas, and claims like that for a variety of reasons. But I think with scientific inquiry, and different flavors of scientific inquiry, that we can start to build really meaningful bridges that may have not been possible historically in a more humanistic, comparative, mystical, academic pursuit. So this is really an exciting time to be doing this work. You know, we have the incredible new technologies to look into the brain, incredible access to meditators facilitated in large part by the internet, and abilities to communicate easily with people far away, and develop communities and things like that.

• 25:19Speaker 01

  And wow, we live in this society that's even maybe open to this, right? And maybe is even receptive to a third wave of meditation research, and what that might mean for the mainstreaming of advanced meditation. It's this incredible time to be doing this kind of work. The stars are sort of aligning, in my opinion.

• 25:36Dan Harris?

  The right causes and conditions, to put it in Buddhist language. Just to restate what I think you said there is about the maps and all these traditions having their own maps and people like you looking at all of the maps simultaneously and seeing, wow, actually, in Theravada Buddhism, they describe the dukkha nyanas, the knowledges of suffering, which is basically the fancy way of saying, if you meditate enough, you're likely to go through some hard shit, and we're calling it the dukkha nyanas. And in Christian mystical traditions, they call it the dark night of the soul. And wow, okay, we have these, they may be talking about the exact type of thing here.

• 26:16Dan Harris?

  So maybe we can step back and say on a, without even getting entangled in the various traditions, we can say there's something true about the nature of the human mind, that if you do enough meditation or contemplative work, certain things will happen, no matter what style of practice you're engaged with. Am I close?

• 26:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's accurate. So while I've presented that side of it and you nicely articulated it, I also want to add that I believe that different traditions are going to emphasize different things that might even lead to different aspects of their phenomenology, their sort of lived experience and the feelings and things that happen that they experience. So I think there's sort of, on the one hand, the possibility that there's these sort of arcs that go across traditions, but then also honoring the diversity of these traditions and different emphases that they may have, right? And how that might lead to different kinds of meditative endpoints or different kinds of perspectives on those meditative endpoints that may have their own qualities, right? So it's, on the one hand, I think there's a really interesting opportunity here to

• 27:22Speaker 01

  build sort of bridges between these traditions, but also a chance to understand, like, why do they sort of manifest differently? Like, why do some of these practitioners appear to interpret the meditative endpoints differently, for example, or experience certain kinds of meditative development in some traditions that they don't as much in others, right? Even the dukkha nyanas and the dark night of the soul, like, some sort of Buddhist traditions really don't emphasize that sort of thing, and it's really not part of their sort of meditative development context. So there's a lot to unpack here, but I did want to sort of provide some broad strokes of what I think are really interesting possibilities here. Another way to say it is there's just a ton of work to be done, a lot of research to be done.

• 28:05Dan Harris?

  That point is well taken. I think you're complicating the discussion in helpful ways. And what just gets me thinking about is that, I mean, I think everybody knows there's so much fascinating exploration and understanding and science to be done around what's happening in the universe out there. But it seems to me that there's the same amount of exploratory potential in our own minds that I don't think has gotten that much cultural and academic attention as of yet.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  I completely agree.

• 28:39Dan Harris?

  Coming up, Matthew talks about what is actually at the deep end of meditation, the six domains of advanced meditation, how this research is relevant to normal people like us. I also talk about my experiences on retreat and the impact they have and have not had on my life. And we talk about how not to fixate on your meditation progress.

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• 30:50Dan Harris?

  Okay, so you said before, and I'm just making a guess at what's going through the minds of people listening, and my guess is that they may want to know more about like, okay, you keep talking about these maps and the deep end of the pool, but like, tell me more about what do you mean by that? What do you do to get there? And what are these experiences? You listed a few of them earlier, ecstatic bliss, insight. Can you put some meat on the bone there in terms of like, what is there really at the deep end here?

• 31:18Speaker 01

  So it's a great question. And I guess one thing that we could sort of hone in on, and I know your audience maybe leans toward sort of mindfulness and Buddhism, is an example like enlightenment or nibbana, or it goes by different terms in a Therabata Buddhist perspective. And I can unpack about how we think about something like that and how we might develop a science around it and why I think that's helpful, right? So one place to start is from the first person perspective, what you might call the phenomenology, right? And this is what someone experiences, right? And a big component of our research, among

• 32:01Speaker 01

  other components, is trying to understand this, is trying to put language to this, find ways to communicate these kinds of things, right? And we spend a lot of time with advanced practitioners, speaking with them, right? And getting a sense of what happens in their minds when they Practice advanced meditation when they have had enlightenment experiences, after enlightenment experiences, things like that. And this approach is to be united in our, the way that we approach this science is uniting this with what you might call a second person perspective, which is context and explanations and sort of narrative provided by the wisdom traditions, right, in large part.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  And then the third component is what you might call a more empirical approach, sort of data-driven, measurement-based approach, right? And we bring all three of these to bear on our investigation of meditative endpoints, advanced meditation, meditative development. So we can talk about any of these sort of things to help someone understand what these things are, right? So you sort of gestured toward your audience and what they might be thinking about. And I think maybe one audience member is particularly interested in, what's the neuroscience of this, right? I need to sort of think about biology and sort of, is this real? Like, I need to get a handle on it that way. And I could say, okay, well, we can talk about the neural correlates of different aspects

• 33:29Speaker 01

  of enlightenment experiences, which we published a couple of papers on recently. And then someone else might say, well, what does this mean from a lineage perspective? Maybe they're particularly oriented toward Buddhism or something like that. And we can point them toward different descriptions of attainments and stream entry and enlightenment and these things as described from those traditions. And we can also point people towards experiences, right? That sort of, all these things relate to one another and there might be some overlap, but you know, there's ways that someone might say, look, like, after this enlightenment experience, I was profoundly clear and my sense of self was super diminished and I was deeply at peace, something like that, right? So there's different ways to describe these different things. And I'd sort of pick this toy example on how we might go about describing what this

• 34:14Speaker 01

  could be, right? But we could do that for different kinds of advanced meditative states and stages too, right? Like, we could talk about ecstatic bliss states, like the jhanas. We've been doing a bunch of research on the jhanas. We could talk about different insight stages, different kinds of experiences with. Compassion and sort of different compassion oriented practices and experiences that can unfold in time. And then there's this other big question related to this of like, well, how do you experience these things? Right? Like, what do you do? How much time does it take? And it's a really big question, right? There are a bunch of different teachers and traditions and styles of practice. And again, with all of these things, I'm gonna, I feel a little repetitive, but we're trying to identify, as scientists might do,

• 34:59Speaker 01

  the metastructure that might help explain different contexts and sort of help to reduce variance across these different traditions and types of practice, right? So one way that we might think about this is in our work, we've articulated a class of advanced meditative practices called Advanced Concentrated Absorption Meditation. Right? So what is this class of practices? Well, they're principally characterized by absorption, right? Absorption is a term used in psychology to mean when someone experiences what you might call sort of unification with a psychological object.

• 35:41Speaker 01

  So someone might have a reference point with like flow states. If they're like super, super into their work, or they're playing a sport really intensively and sort of the only thing in their mind is like this object of what they're working on, or what they're, the game they're playing, or the sport they're playing. That's a flavor of absorption, right? There's not much else going on. I mean, there's technically, there's some issues with that simplification, but in the context of advanced concentrative absorption meditation, we use the acronym ACAM. We can start to unpack different types of absorption meditations across traditions. For example, we see evidence of absorption in Jewish Kabbalah, Sufi mystical traditions, Buddhist Theravada, Theravada Buddhist practices,

• 36:27Speaker 01

  and different other flavors of Buddhism in the Vedic tradition, South Asian, other South Asian traditions. So if we can start to articulate that, well, there's this, what we're calling a class of advanced meditation that have this characteristic of absorption, it gives us a conceptual anchor to. Start to communicate it in the scientific literature. And so there's a whole discussion we could have, well, what are absorption states? And we can talk about jhana, so if that might be of interest to the audience and a particular flavor of absorption meditation that we've been studying. But there are other flavors of advanced meditation, too. Another type that we've been studying is what we call advanced investigative insight meditation.

• 37:06Speaker 01

  So this is characterized by observing the nature of phenomena of one's experience closely, right? And what happens when someone sort of masters that or goes really deep in that, right? So this is a different class of advanced meditation. And we could also talk about, well, what are the kinds of things that someone might do to move in the direction of doing some of these advanced practices? That was part of your question as well. And one example of how to move toward advanced concentrative absorption meditation in the context of jhana might be to do a lot of concentration practice on the breath or the nostrils, right?

• 37:49Speaker 01

  And there's different ways to kind of lean into that, and there's different suggestions and different kinds of traditions. But after gaining a certain kind of stability of mind over time, certain things might start to happen that can be described through an existing lineage, like the Theravada or something like that. So I think a sort of big, broad point that I'll also, I know I'm dropping a lot of stuff here, but another thing I want to emphasize is that from my read of different wisdom traditions and different kinds of advanced practices, it seems like there's a bunch of different ways that the mind can be honed to go really deep.

• 38:31Speaker 01

  And it looks like there are some similarities and some differences across these ways of honing. And that's something that I think is like super important and super interesting, and that is part of what we're trying to articulate in our research. All right, so I know I just said a lot, but that's some way that I would answer your question. And as you can tell, I could talk about this all day, so I hope that was helpful.

• 38:57Dan Harris?

  It is, and I love listening to it. And to say, I wanna, I wanna go deep into the jhanas. Matthew did describe it, but this is a specific experience that is apparently, I'm saying apparently because I've never experienced it myself, apparently available to meditators. But before I get into that, because the jhanas are super fascinating to me. I'd be curious, how are you studying this? Are you doing the, the thing of taking advanced meditators and putting them in fMRI machines? Like, what does this, what does your work look like?

• 39:31Speaker 01

  So I think broadly, I did introduce this idea of first, second, and third person perspective, sort of nicely integrated. I guess I just might add to that, that to me, if we do meaningfully integrate first, second, and third person rigorously, that creates a really satisfying scientific framework. And I just wanted to add that, because there's, there's really a power there, I think, that isn't valued enough in the field that we've been emphasizing in some of our work. But to get back to your question, what does our work look like? Right? Ultimately, our goal is to develop a comprehensive science of advanced meditation. So what is, how do, what do I mean by that?

• 40:11Speaker 01

  And what I mean by that is doing work that is highly multidisciplinary, that informs a really deep understanding across domains of advanced meditation. Right? So to be even more clear and direct about what I mean by that, I articulate the work that we do into six different domains. Okay? One way to think about these six domains is moving from theory all the way to applications. Right? And my belief is that if we can do that, if we can study theory and applications and everything in between, that allows us to close the loop on understanding and sharing advanced meditation. Right? So this is the scientific endeavor. So I'm going to talk about these six domains.

• 40:52Speaker 01

  The first is what I call theoretical foundations of advanced meditation. This is the development of foundational ideas, ways of communicating, articulating what advanced meditation is, how we study it. This is an important thing to do, so we can then build a science on top of that using language that's been clear. Right? It's almost a philosophical endeavor. Right? So we do a bunch of work in that. The second domain is what I call foundations of advanced meditation. Right? This is sort of a empirical, is there a there there? So this includes studies like some of the stuff I was referencing, like phenomenological studies, just deep interviews and really unpacking very carefully and working with

• 41:34Speaker 01

  advanced practitioners to get a sense of what's going on in their minds in advanced meditation. Another aspect of foundations of advanced meditation is sort of public health and epidemiology, understanding the sort of demographic context of this work, the distribution of these kinds of experiences. Do they occur a lot in some populations? Is there a risk for difficulty? Those kind of questions. The third domain is mechanisms of advanced meditation. This is the work that tends to get the most attention. This is the sort of neuroimaging of monks, advanced practitioners and scanners and stuff like that. But the point is to understand what's happening. What is the why and how from a sort of biological, psychological, cognitive psychology perspective?

• 42:18Speaker 01

  The fourth domain is the development of advanced meditation. I also touched on this previously in this conversation. This is understanding states and stages of practice that unfold with time and mastery, moving beyond a more sort of simple understanding of sort of mindfulness. The fifth domain is related to outcomes of advanced meditation. This can relate to mental health outcomes, different kinds of aspects of thriving, different challenges that can occur, just simply understanding sort of the, even what you might call the clinical context of advanced meditation, what are the outcomes of these practices? Right? And then the sixth domain of the way I articulate our research vision is applications of advanced meditation. So this is understanding, how can we improve training?

• 43:02Speaker 01

  Can we develop better verbal instructions? Can we understand durations of practice and how that interacts with outcomes? Can we develop methods for potentially accelerating practice? Right? Whether it's neuromodulation or psychedelics or whatever it is, like can we study that and understand if it's possible? This is one way I articulate our vision. And we're doing research in all of these domains. So it's not just monks and scanners or something like that. Certainly we do that, but there's a whole bunch of other types of studies that we do as well.

• 43:31Dan Harris?

  That was very helpful to learn a little bit more about what your research actually looks like. I think the question some people might be mulling right now, listening is, well, so how is this relevant to me? If it takes an enormous amount of meditation for most people to become advanced, what does it matter?

• 43:51Speaker 01

  There are different ways I could answer that. One is that I think it's an open question as to, well, at first I should say there's different ways of defining advanced meditation, right? So if we say fourth path enlightenment as according to the Theravada and Buddhist perspective, yeah, like maybe that's going to take like a lot of time and effort presumably. But there's different ways of defining advanced meditation. And that's part of the endeavor that we're on is to articulate, what do we mean by beyond mindfulness, right? So we're actively working on articulating these definitions and giving a sense of when one might transition into something deeper and sort of beyond basic stress applications and things like that. So that's sort of one aspect of how I'd answer your question.

• 44:36Speaker 01

  And then two, some of these advanced states and practices in the context of some of the wisdom traditions, some of the current teachers of advanced practices or teachers that have existed in times past, but are no longer with us. There are plenty of claims that people can practice really deeply and experience some of these advanced meditative things that I've been talking about in as little as a seven day intensive retreat or 10 day intensive retreat. So that's a really interesting hypothesis, right? If someone can go on vacation to Cancun for a week or wherever someone goes on vacation, maybe they could instead go on a seven day meditation retreat. And maybe they do actually start getting more access

• 45:20Speaker 01

  to some advanced practices and experiences.

• 45:24Speaker 01

  So I think that's part of the work that is a focus for us. That's something we care about is starting to unpack that and study that and collect data on it. There's just, there's very little data on this kind of thing. So I think there's sort of this general assumption that I have to renounce my livelihood and my family and my normal life and go become a monastic and ascetic and whatever and practice all day. And then maybe I'll experience some of this stuff. I don't think that necessarily is the case. And that's part of the work that we're doing is to understand that.

• 45:58Dan Harris?

  I say this as somebody who's done many seven and 10 day retreats, one or two a year for 14 years, 15 years, and I've had incredible experiences. Mostly those are brief punctuations on long stretches of boredom. And so the notion that you articulated earlier, that maybe there's a better way to give the instructions that would get people to, I don't know. I mean, I guess I hear that, well, first of all, people have been teaching meditation for millennia. So I don't know what tweaks are possible to the instructions. Maybe you'll learn something through the science. But the other thing is that if I go into the retreat with the idea of quote unquote, getting somewhere, I am fucked from the start.

• 46:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there's really a lot there that I'd love to spend some time on. And one, I guess I would be, and maybe this is, I don't know if this is the context to talk about this, but I am sort of curious, like what is happening on those weeks that are, you're going on retreat, you're going multiple a year. And like, I guess I would encourage you to reflect on maybe how you were before you were doing any of this practice versus how you are now. And if there are some sort of changes that have occurred over sort of long-term development, something like that, or maybe it's the type of practices, like maybe you're not going on a Jhana retreat. So you're not experiencing so much of the Jhana states or something like that. Right? So what are the actual practices? And also there are sort of open questions here around like what might be,

• 47:23Speaker 01

  and we're getting in the weeds in some ways, but there's, there's some question around like, maybe some people's psychologies are different in some ways, or there's different kinds of practices or orientations that could help them sort of go deeper and sort of experience some of the things that we study and talk about in our work. But there's a lot there. And yeah, these are some of the reflections that I have on, upon hearing that.

• 47:48Dan Harris?

  Yeah, just to answer some of those questions. Absolutely, 14, 15 years of meditation, including daily meditation and regular retreats, have had, for me, very significant changes. But I would put them, to the extent that I understand the difference here, I would put them, I think, in the category of like, the basic. I'm less emotionally reactive, I'm more focused, I'm less self-centered, I'm warmer. I'm pretty damn sure I have not entered into a jhana state, meaning like, a highly concentrated, very much non-distracted state where ecstatic bliss is on offer. I might have like, one teacher once described me as like, I'm not in the pizza shop eating the pizza, but like, I'm in the neighborhood and I can smell it.

• 48:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:33Dan Harris?

  And she was describing my practice from the outside in that way. And so I think I've had some periods of, especially if I'm doing loving kindness or metta retreats, where, which, that loving kindness meditation, or the Brahma Vihara's, these practices where you systematically envision people or animals and send specific, like, good vibe type wishes, that, that is a concentration technique, and people use them to get into the jhanas. I don't think I've entered into the jhanas. This, anyway, this is a long way of saying, I don't think that I've entered into the jhanas, or experienced stages of awakening, or enlightenment. I'm pretty damn sure none of that has happened for me, although I'm very interested in it.

• 49:17Dan Harris?

  I can just tell you that the biggest problems I've had in meditation are when I get too interested in it and strive.

• 49:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I'm sympathetic to what you just shared. I think one thing I would think a little bit about is, is really different ways of orienting to one's practice, and what someone might be aware of. Like, there's this question of, like, do certain kinds of mindfulness practices lead to different kinds of awareness of the states and stages someone might be going through, right? And how do we actually become aware of those, right? So, as you might know, there are different types of insight practice, right? There's, you know, Mahasi-style noting is an example, and through Mahasi-style noting, when done in a sort of dedicated, continuous manner... Often can lead to a particularly articulated experience of the stages of insight,

• 50:06Speaker 01

  right? That's, that's one sort of observation. And to be clear, we haven't, that's not like a scientific observation. That's more of like, I'm getting into sort of moving beyond, but we have data for it. And I'm just kind of spitballing here a little bit to give some intuitions about maybe some anchors to think about your practice in this context. But if you might be doing what might be called like a bare awareness insight or vipassana kind of practice where it's less about noting and it's more about radical letting go and being aware of what's happening, but not sort of noting or doing other kinds of insight practice, maybe the states and stages as they unfold, they, it's just not as clear and they, they don't have the same kind of quality that it seems that they might have in labeling noting practice, right? So I don't know exactly what you're doing. And

• 50:50Speaker 01

  there's a bunch of like, maybe the Brahma Vahara practice you're doing, or the, if you're doing any kind of focused awareness on breath or the body or something like that. Like there's, there's many different ways to do this. And it's hard to sort of comment directly on your practice and the nuance there. But I guess I would, I would encourage you to keep talking to the teachers that you're working with, maybe even articulating this kind of thing. And maybe I know your teachers, I don't know. But I'm curious what they would say to that kind of thing, too. Right? There's, there's a lot to say there. And I don't also want to overstate something, not knowing more about your practice and things like that. But yeah, is that helpful?

• 51:25Dan Harris?

  Absolutely. Just to say, my teacher is Joseph Goldstein, reasonably well known. And one of the places he's led me over time, and I think this has been very helpful for me. And this is interesting. I'm not trying to make this about me. I'm trying to illuminate one of the challenges in democratizing advanced meditation and striving, I think, is way toward the top of that list, in my opinion. And one of the places Joseph has led me is to not obsessing about where you are. He calls it playing the practice assessment tapes. That's just another thing to be mindful of when you notice yourself fixating on, can I map my current experience to the Theravada map? And another expression, this comes not

• 52:06Dan Harris?

  from Joseph, but from a different, but also fantastic meditation teacher, Matthew Renssver, who often tells his students, your progress is none of your business. So I'm like, yeah, just chop wood, carry water, to be a little zen about it. Like, just do the practice. And shut the fuck up. Like, don't get overly... That's where I'm at with all of this. And if enlightenment arises, or if I get that experience, okay. But if I spend too much time thinking about it... I like talking about it in academic sense with you, but in terms of my own practice, I've, I've found like a lot of suffering in that direction.

• 52:43Dan Harris?

  Coming up, Matthew talks about the subject of striving and its flip side, some of the psychological difficulties that can arise in meditation. And finally, we talk about Vajanas.

• 53:02Speaker 03

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• 53:35Speaker 01

  I guess I'll say a couple of things. I think that's really helpful context. One is, though, around sort of the definition of advanced meditation, right? And I think I don't want to make it seem like it's only about these ecstatic bliss states and stuff like that. I would argue, based on what you've said, and maybe we could talk more about it to provide more context for that, but I would argue that your transformation that you just described of going from maybe a more neurotic or mind, or whatever language you were using, to having a lot more clarity and calm and presence and stuff like that, like that's, I think that's pretty radical and indicative of advanced meditation in the sense of transformation, right? And maybe it's not fourth path awakening or something like that, which I think we need to really be clear that advanced meditation is sort

• 54:17Speaker 01

  of this broad thing. And I would argue that advanced meditation hasn't been given a ton of attention in the mainstream. It's really been about these sort of five to 10 minute, 15 minute practices for daily stress so you can be better at your job or whatever.

• 54:31Speaker 01

  And then around striving, striving is a really interesting topic, too. I mean, like, it's something that I think about in the context of the work that I do. It's like, we're articulating these advanced states and stages of practice, doing all this research, getting on podcasts and other media and stuff. And there's this risk that people just like, sort of obsess and clench and strive and throw themselves at these states and they think that like, this sort of sense of forcing it is gonna create it or something, and that's really dangerous. It's not good practice, right? So then it gets into this question of safety, and which we can talk more about. But in the sense of striving, it's also having some understanding that some of these experiences might be possible.

• 55:15Speaker 01

  A flip side of it is that it can be extremely motivating, right? Like, if we didn't have some sense that meditation might do something, why would we do it? There's sort of this question of like, why would we put the time in and why would we make it part of our day if there isn't some sense of like, an outcome that could be valuable? So there's these tensions that I think are important to name and think about how to safely integrate them into, you know, helping more people experience this kind of stuff.

• 55:44Dan Harris?

  Well said. Well, that does bring us to this issue of safety. And I just want to say a little bit about terminology here. So, so when we talk about safety, we're talking about the fact that psychological difficulties can arise while you're doing advanced meditation. Actually, they can arise even, and I don't think it's super common, but it can happen for sure at the shallow end of the pool, too, with people taking a yoga class or doing five minutes of mindfulness with an apit. But more commonly, I think, happens when, you know, on an intensive meditation retreat. And you talked before about how in Buddhism, or in Theravada Buddhism, this stage is often referred to as the dukkha nyanas.

• 56:27Dan Harris?

  And within the Christian mystical tradition, it's called the dark night. However, in recent years... Buddhists have started calling the dukkha nyanas the dark knight. And in fact, I did an interview on the show several years ago, and I'll drop in a link to it in the show notes with my friends Jared and Willoughby. Willoughby Britton, she's quite a well-known neuroscientist. Her husband is a Buddhist scholar, and they've done a lot of work around what they call the dark knight. But they're talking, I think largely within a Buddhist context here. And so if you, Matthew, are interested in democratizing advanced meditation, what do you do about the fact that there are a lot of potholes people can hit here?

• 57:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is an extremely important topic. And I guess I could say so much about this. And Willoughby's been a friend and a mentor at times. I was her first research assistant at Brown in the early 2000s, when I joined her lab as an undergrad. And I think one really broad statement that I think is important to be said in the context of safety in meditation is to not throw the baby out with the bathwater. I think there's this risk that we might think, wow, meditation can be dangerous, and no one should do it, therefore, right? There's sort of this knee-jerk reaction of like, oh, if this is dangerous, like, we should never do this, right? And I think that's really not the right way to think about this. I think it's much more nuanced than that. And the potential outcomes

• 57:51Speaker 01

  of advanced meditation are so important and profound and incredible that it would be such a pity to throw them out. So where do we go from there? What we think about? What are meditative difficulties? And how do we work with them? And how do we avoid them in some contexts, right? And there's this sort of lingering conceptual question of like, what aspects of meditative development might be challenging at times in sort of healthy meditative development more broadly? If the dukkha nyanas, dark knight of the soul, things like that are part of meditative development, at least in some contexts?

• 58:29Speaker 01

  Should they be avoided? Or what does that even mean to avoid sort of a healthy aspect of the practice? Right? But then there's this sort of other side of what we might call like, we use like maybe a term like mental illness or psychiatric diagnoses and things like that, that sometimes people get into sort of this kind of place from deep practice. And this is a really important question that we haven't understood in a modern scientific way. And we don't know exactly how to parse this stuff out. Right? So part of what Willoughby's work has been doing and some of the things that we've been doing is starting to understand what factors might lead to people more likely to have difficult experiences. Are there certain qualities that might give a higher risk to someone experiencing those kinds of things?

• 59:13Speaker 01

  Maybe, which we're currently working on a project like that. I have a practice of not talking a ton about stuff that hasn't been published yet. So I probably won't talk too much about that, but hopefully that comes out soon. Understanding what can lead to difficult experiences from altered states of consciousness in relation to meditation. And what are practice recommendations too? And what are things to sort of look out for? Right? And can we have safety nets on meditation retreats? And can meditation teachers be aware of some of the warning signs? And are there things that might be more risky or might lead to a greater chance of having difficult experiences? Like, these are the kinds of things that we need to answer and then create recommendations for, and then educate teachers around too, right? And practitioners, right?

• 59:58Speaker 01

  There's a certain sense of consent, right? If someone's going to go on a retreat, maybe being clear that it could lead to difficulties or that kind of thing. So there's a sense of consent for signing up for something that could be difficult. But there's also this broad context of like, this stuff is really powerful. Right? If it can, if it can lead to things that we call enlightenment, which are totally radical ways of being for most people's minds, that's really powerful stuff. And wow, like powerful stuff can also lead to deep challenges. It's sort of, sort of part of this story. And I also think that challenges in these kinds of difficulties aren't, like you said, it's not just deep practice. It can happen with lighter practice or psychotherapy. Or people report difficulties with a woman who gives birth.

• 1:00:42Speaker 01

  There's like birth-related experiences that are sometimes radical and difficult. Or psychedelics, right? Psychedelics are super popular right now. Psychedelics can have so-called bad trips and difficulties. And so I think it's really important that we contextualize. Difficult or challenging experiences with advanced meditation in a nuanced way that makes it clear that we can develop ways to implement practices that are safer and to not throw the baby out with the bathwater, to not simply throw your hands up and give up on meditation. I think it's really worth it to stick with it.

• 1:01:14Dan Harris?

  You mentioned technology earlier. Do you think it's possible that we could invent technology that makes getting to advanced meditation easier and quicker?

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  I personally am open to the possibility of studying things like that, but it's not what principally motivates me in this work. I think that if we can develop neuromodulation, whether it's brain stimulation, or neurofeedback, or sort of combined psychedelic meditation practice, or something like that, like if that really works and being really clear about what works means, if that's possible, that seems really useful. But to me, there's so much to be understood and shared among more low-tech possibilities that it's very clearly an effort worth expending. But yeah, whether or not this is going to work is an open question.

• 1:02:09Speaker 01

  I think we need really good science backing that up, if it's the case.

• 1:02:13Dan Harris?

  Low-tech meaning just like better instructions to give to people?

• 1:02:17Speaker 01

  Or existing instructions. It doesn't necessarily need to be better, per se, but maybe instructions that are, maybe they can even be tailored to certain audiences, or not. I think there's a lot of really great meditation practices already out there, and part of what we're doing is studying them and trying to understand them in a modern, scientific way, right?

• 1:02:35Dan Harris?

  So, let me see if I can put a fine point on that. Meaning that if your work and the work of your colleagues continues, we could have a much deeper and holistic understanding of what is on offer across all of these various traditions, what it says about sort of universal...

• 1:02:57Dan Harris?

  Aspects of the human mind and the human condition, so that a beginner, a non-advanced practitioner could come in and you could prescribe forms of meditation that would much more quickly get me to the deep end of the pool?

• 1:03:14Speaker 01

  Potentially, yes. And I mean, I think that's accurate. But for me, there's this question of sort of accelerating meditation training. But that's just one piece of the things that I care about and why we do this work. Ultimately, there's a lot of work to be done in simply understanding advanced meditation from a modern scientific perspective. And I believe that that understanding will enable sort of the memes of society, not meme like an internet joke meme or something, but meme in the more technical sense, as it's sometimes used in academia and other contexts. So sort of ideas that society carries, that people in a society carry together, sort of the meme of advanced meditation being possible, you know, is something that is super valuable and interesting and doesn't really relate to the question of whether or not we can accelerate it.

• 1:03:59Speaker 01

  Right? So there's a lot of questions that we care about.

• 1:04:02Dan Harris?

  So if we understand from a scientific standpoint, what is available for those of us who are willing to do what it takes to get to the level of advanced meditation? If we, through your work and the work of others, understand better what's available and put a scientific premature on it, imprimatur, I've never known how to pronounce that word, then it could normalize this form of practice within the culture.

• 1:04:29Speaker 01

  I think that's one thing that I think would be valuable, like regardless of whether neurotechnology or these other things are going to be useful in the context to accelerating meditative development. Right? And another sort of a big idea in this context that I like to express is like, think of like the transistor, right? Developed by Bell Labs, this sort of technical thing that it wasn't clear exactly how it was going to be useful when it was invented. Right? But it was core to computing, right? And we all have cell phones and computers in our pocket now. And this technology that was developed some time ago has revolutionized how humans live, right? And I think about advanced meditation in sort of a similar way

• 1:05:12Speaker 01

  where it's this fundamental capacity, right? These capacities of the human mind, right? And I think there's incredible ways that understanding this better. Could lead to incredible innovation in a bunch of different domains. Right? Some of the obvious ones we've touched on like mental health, but also personal thriving and life meaning. And understanding advanced meditation offers an incredible window into understanding consciousness more broadly and what the human mind is capable of and the limits of that. And also psychedelics are really popular. I think understanding advanced meditation gives an incredible window into psychedelics. There's questions around artificial intelligence that I think advanced meditation could be

• 1:05:53Speaker 01

  very interesting in the context of and other domains like sustained excellence and peak performance and a bunch of other domains that when we have a better understanding of advanced meditation, I think it'll provide incredible insight and opportunities for innovation and development in a bunch of different really important contexts. And I should say that like, my hope is that through this work, that there's a sort of arc toward a happier and healthier society, that individuals and our society at large becomes happier and healthier, right? Maybe selfishness, hate, ignorance is mitigated. And there's a movement toward generosity, compassion, wisdom, some of these characteristics that seem to be reoccurring in advanced meditative practices and contexts.

• 1:06:36Speaker 01

  Right? So there's this sort of arc toward understanding something so fundamental about the human mind that can form all these different things that may ultimately bring some really interesting positive development for our society and for individuals in that society in a context where and sort of there's a lot that can be said about this, but maybe our global society particularly needs that at this time. There's so much turmoil, climate issues and mental health considerations have never been so prevalent and sort of economic disruption. There's so many domains where there's so much disruption and there's some argument that understanding advanced meditation, these different forms of innovation could help move toward a healthier society. Right? So that's sort of this big arc that came to me as we were talking about this.

• 1:07:22Dan Harris?

  I love it. And I agree. You talked about psychedelics and how understanding advanced meditation could help us understand psychedelics. I always thought about it in the reverse, that psychedelics, in the right dosage and setting, you can have.

• 1:07:39Dan Harris?

  Enlightenment-like experiences on psychedelics that can, if I understand it, give you a better sense of what you should be shooting for in meditation, and I use that term "shooting for" advisedly, not the other way around, but straighten me out.

• 1:07:53Speaker 01

  I think there are different ways of thinking about this, to be clear, but one way of thinking about it is sort of a working model for me is that if you have something like a clearly articulated model of meditative development and absorptive meditative states and so forth, my hunch is that we might be able to place different kinds of psychedelic experiences sort of into this topology of the mind that might be articulated from a rigorous science of advanced meditation. Advanced meditation might provide more of a sort of clear map, a more systematic map, that can then place psychedelic experiences in there. For example, maybe someone is taking a psychedelic and they sort of launch into one of the jhanas or something like that, right? Psychedelic experiences can be very unwieldy, right?

• 1:08:37Speaker 01

  And it's sort of, I don't think they have the same kind of control that advanced meditative states, as we study them and are described in some contexts, do. And so there's all these questions about, well, how do we connect the dots here? And I'm not the first person to have said this, but it's to the sentiment that you expressed. Perhaps psychedelics provide a certain window into some of these advanced meditative states, and perhaps meditation can be more of a door, maybe a way to be more reliable in experiencing these over time, maintaining these kinds of experiences. And there's a lot to be said around that, like the integration process related to psychedelic experiences is a topic of a lot of research right now. We're doing some of that. But ultimately, there's been a lot more work in the research into psychedelics right now.

• 1:09:19Speaker 01

  I would say advanced meditation research is probably 10 years behind psychedelic research. And I think one of the reasons we can now do advanced meditation research is because in part of the successes of psychedelic science in the context of psychiatric care and things like that, talking about altered states of consciousness is much less weird than it was 10 years ago, and that's in part due to psychedelic science.

• 1:09:44Dan Harris?

  All right, so in the, in the remaining time here, let's do what I promised to do earlier, which is talk about the jhanas, which have just come up repeatedly. I'll say a little bit about what I understand the jhanas to be, and then you'll please correct me because I don't know shit. But I am being a little falsely modest there, but I'm not being that falsely modest. Because I, I basically, you know what I've read and talked about a couple of times on this show, which is that if you do specific types of meditation that are good at concentrating the mind, you can, well, you can stumble into the jhanas in any number of ways, but in a meditative sense, in the context of meditation, there are specific types of meditation that have been shown to get the mind quite concentrated, absorbed

• 1:10:28Dan Harris?

  on one thing, maybe the feeling of the breath going in and out at the, at the nostrils, or your loving kindness phrases, may you be happy, may you be safe, that type of thing, you're envisioning a series of beings and sending those phrases. And then, and this, I think, is so cool, that apparently, there are these eight sort of interlocking rooms in the mind that you can progress through, again, reliably and predictably. The first jhana is called delightful sensations, the second jhana, joy, third, contentment, fourth, utter peacefulness, fifth, infinity of space, sixth, infinity of consciousness, seventh,

• 1:11:08Dan Harris?

  no thingness, eighth, neither perception nor non-perception. Okay, so this is just wild sounding stuff to me, and here you are at Harvard studying this stuff. So before we get into your studies, just correct any errors I made there and expand on any of it.

• 1:11:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think what you said is broadly true of how we think about the jhanas. The jhanas are these stable, concentrative, absorption states that negative qualities of mind are reduced or completely absent. Certain qualities like bliss and peace and also in some of the later stages, formless aspects are developed and refined. And this is, it's radical stuff. I mean, it's really radical stuff. Like, if you just read this, it's like, what is going on here? That's sort of the point in some ways. It's one of the reasons I wanted to study this as some of the early work in this really deep end stuff is it's radical. Like this is not overstated. Like the things that are experienced in these states are super deep and rich and powerful.

• 1:12:11Speaker 01

  And it's our practitioners talk about them. It's the things that we're unpacking in the brain. It's super interesting stuff and we're working directly on that. So like the names that you used for the different eight jhana is that's one translation, right? But maybe I'll just sort of walk through the eight a little bit and give some flavor of intuition. The first jhana is, you might say, sort of characterized in large part by a sort of bodily, rich, positive energy. Like if you've ever felt like tingling going up your spine, it's that, but sort of amplified. In Pali, the liturgical language of Theravada Buddhism, the term that's used is piti, which is sort of like, it's the same as prana. If you've heard the word prana in like a Vedic or a yogic context, it's this energy, it's

• 1:12:56Speaker 01

  a sort of rich bodily energy that's very strong in jhana one. And then in jhana two is even stronger. And in jhana two, what's also apparent is sort of a, also a sort of mental joy. You have this sort of bodily joy in rich energy experience, but also sort of a more mental or sort of cognitive joy. And then in the third jhana, the bodily joy is diminished, the sort of emotional cognitive joy is expanded. And then in the fourth jhana, that emotional joy sort of diminishes. And what remains and what's really emphasized in the fourth jhana is this profound peace.

• 1:13:41Speaker 01

  The word equanimity is often used, an incredibly rich, equanimous experience. And the quality in these states is fully absorptive, right? This is not a subtle thing. It's very strong. And then those first four jhanas are what we call the form jhanas. They're sort of linked to like more mundane perceptual and Sensory and sort of mental processes. And then one enters the formless jhanas. So jhanas five through eight. And these jhanas, they're called formless because they don't have that sort of perceptual sensory anchoring. They're more abstract, right? They're kind of beyond perception in that way.

• 1:14:24Speaker 01

  And you labeled them in some kind of way, but to give some kind of intuition. The fifth jhana is a deep absorptive awareness where consciousness is very much full of this sense of spaciousness. Like the sense of three dimensional spaciousness in all directions. And then the sixth jhana is more subtle where it's, it's no longer sort of spacious, but it's conscious, right? It's, it's, it's sort of expansive, but not in the sense of space. And then things get weirder and harder to describe. The seventh jhana is sometimes described as nothingness or something like that. Which is, there's something there that you're sort of aware of, but it's so subtle.

• 1:15:06Speaker 01

  And then the eighth jhana even goes further in that direction where it's sometimes called neither perception nor non-perception. Right? It's extremely difficult to sort of use language to describe. And it's extremely subtle. And these are radical altered states of consciousness. They're in the context of the Theravada. They're often described as sort of preliminary tools as one might move toward more insight based practice. Right? I think that's sort of been lost in the modern dialogue in large part. But to not, it's not just about jhanas. It's about that these practices sort of purify and enable one to move into what might be called insight practice.

• 1:15:46Speaker 01

  And I also want to say that like, some of the work that we've been doing in this space has articulated different types of jhanas. So when we look at different jhana manuals or different ways people practice them and think about them. There appears to be different types. And what we've described in the literature as light, intermediate and deep jhanas. And this is important because there's some degree of lack of consensus among different teachers and some sort of, what you might call like sub-traditions. Around what Jhana is and what Jhana isn't. And I believe that if we can call them light, intermediate and deep Jhanas, we actually solve that issue. And what's light and intermediate and deep about those? One aspect, there's a bunch of things we could talk about, but one aspect is the level of absorption appears to be different.

• 1:16:30Speaker 01

  So in deep Jhana, the absorption can be so strong that it can be reported as kind of uncomfortable. It's like electric. It's completely intense in a way that is sometimes people describe the Jhanas as the most blissful experiences beyond states that can be induced by taking drugs or different sex experiences and stuff like that. So this is really radical stuff. And then whereas on the other end, on the light Jhana experience, we've articulated that it seems like there's this light flavor of Jhana that's just much less absorbed. Maybe there are still other aspects of mind present in the background. And this might be a way to solve the way that people are using Jhana in different ways.

• 1:17:15Speaker 01

  Different teachers are using it in different ways. And you touched on this and I touched on it previously, but there are different ways that have been described to access Jhanas. And deep Jhanas may have different methods than light Jhanas. And we've talked about that in our work. And I do just want to, in a set another way, emphasize that Jhana is just one form of advanced meditation and a class of advanced concentrated absorption meditation. And I think there's a very strong foundation and place to start. But there's a lot of work to be done in this space. And there are other flavors of advanced meditation that also deserve a lot of attention.

• 1:17:47Dan Harris?

  When you've looked at the brains of people doing Jhana meditation in the scanner, what are you seeing? Is there anything of note?

• 1:17:55Speaker 01

  Thanks for asking. So we're really doing the first studies in the neuroscience of Jhana. And one thing that I like to emphasize as we describe these studies is that there's a desire to want some really simple solution. Not like there's some brain region that is driving Jhana and wow, we just understand it. It's an easy thing we can put into a sentence. But in practice, What's going on in the brain with jhana? I guess a side note is that we've used something called seven Tesla magnetic resonance imaging for this kind of research, among other technologies. And this technology has actually never been used in meditation research.

• 1:18:34Speaker 01

  And it enables a degree of nuance of mapping the brain that is really rich. And I wouldn't want to sort of oversimplify those effects. So there's a sort of one narrative is that there are complex patterns of brain activity occurring in the cortex, brain stem, midbrain, subcortex, et cetera. There's a lot going on there. But having caveat it all with that, I can mention some patterns that sort of might give some intuition around something that kind of might be helpful for the audience to get a sense of something in this context. And so one effect that we've found, sort of a broad strokes interpretation of what's happening, is that as one deepens through the jhanas, moves from jhana one to jhana

• 1:19:17Speaker 01

  eight, but also along different dimensions from that that are related to the jhana experience, it appears that the brain activity is shifting from being more anterior to being more posterior, right? Moving from the front to the back. And one sort of simple interpretation of that is that brain activity is shifting from maybe more of the prefrontal cortex regions involved in different kinds of cognitive control, executive functioning, self-related processing, different kinds of cognition, right? To posterior parts of the brain that might be more involved in being present, being situated in the moment, things like that, right? That's one sort of broad strokes interpretation of some of the findings that we found.

• 1:20:02Speaker 01

  I can talk about the medial prefrontal cortex and how we've seen that over deepening of jhanas, there's a lot, the activity is reduced in the medial prefrontal cortex. This medial prefrontal cortex activity was also related to what we call in the literature narrative thought stream, which is sort of like internal dialogue, right? So the less activity there was in this MPFC region, the less internal dialogue we were seeing, that's, that's broad strokes. One of the findings that can give some handle on something that we found. We found other effects where we saw with deepening of the jhanas, certain brainstem nuclei either reduce their activity or increase their activity. The brainstem is involved in a bunch of things, but sort of one of the reasons I constructed this study around seven Tesla MRIs

• 1:20:46Speaker 01

  because I wanted to investigate the brainstem. The brainstem's never been the focus of meditation research in the brain before, regardless of advanced meditation. And the reason I did this is because with this hypothesis that what's happening in advanced meditation is really radical and sort of foundational to our conscious experience. And the brainstem is thought to mediate fundamental aspects of consciousness. So we found altered brainstem activity related to the jhanas. This is super radical stuff. It suggests sort of volitional control in some sense of brainstem activity. So these are just some broad strokes of some of the things we found in one of our recent studies.

• 1:21:23Dan Harris?

  What does that mean? Volitional control of the brainstem? I don't even know if I know what the brainstem is. So when you say volitional control of the brainstem, is that, what does that mean? That in theory, some humans, having learned the right forms of meditation, could regulate aspects of their physiological experience through their brainstem?

• 1:21:42Speaker 01

  Right, I mean, that's sort of, in a sort of neuroscience context, that's something that's interesting, right? And not just for sort of meditation geeks like myself. Someone might be a neuroscientist studying something entirely different. They say, wow, like, these people are doing meditation and altering the activity of brainstem nuclei. Like, that's interesting, right?

• 1:22:00Dan Harris?

  What is the brainstem again?

• 1:22:02Speaker 01

  It's, it's at the base of the brain. And different, it's sort of a evolutionarily old part of the brain, you could say. And different parts of the brainstem regulate things like breathing and sort of awareness and a lot of sort of core aspects of the mind.

• 1:22:22Dan Harris?

  So would this explain why?

• 1:22:26Dan Harris?

  For example, some Tibetan Buddhist practitioners have been shown to be able to regulate their body temperature through breathing and meditation.

• 1:22:35Speaker 01

  This is, that's a really, really interesting suggestion. And to my knowledge, no one's done a study on brainstem activity and like Tummo practice, like this various sort of body temperature related practices in Tibetan Buddhism. But that would be something that I would guess, yes. I'm sympathetic to your intuition that that's somewhere that we could look in the brain.

• 1:22:53Dan Harris?

  Matthew, it has been a delight to nerd out with you for an extended period of time. Before I let you go, is there just two questions? One is, anything you wanted to say that we haven't had a chance to let you say up until now?

• 1:23:05Speaker 01

  Just two things. One is that it's going to be very interesting to see how this field evolves and how advanced meditation may integrate with a more mainstream understanding, what kind of opportunities there might be for, you know, people to practice, whether there's for-profit or nonprofit or some hybrid models. But it's a really interesting space and I think there's a lot of opportunity here. And another thing I wanted to express is that there's a ton of work to be done, right? There's so much work to be done in this space. There's continuing research in the domains that I described, these six research domains and other related questions. And our goal is that we're developing a center around this at Mass General in affiliation

• 1:23:48Speaker 01

  with Harvard to catalyze this work and lead the world in the science and education of advanced meditation. We really want to understand the claims that have been made from the various wisdom traditions of the world. We want to understand relations between science and tradition, potentially allowing for different kinds of improvements. We're interested in understanding connections and differences among different kinds of mystical experiences from different cultures and traditions and integrating possible tools from technology and is that going to work, testing that, understanding that. And ultimately, we're interested in really broadening access to advanced meditation. And our intention is to develop this center to catalyze this sort of scientific, educational

• 1:24:31Speaker 01

  and innovation ecosystem to bring advanced meditation to more people, to bring meditation, advanced meditation, and out of the monastery. And we really hope to develop a rich ontology of these kinds of experiences and science-informed training and ultimately massive democratization. And that's the goal of what we're doing.

• 1:24:53Dan Harris?

  I love it. I support it. If people want to learn more about what you're up to at harvard/mgh and/or support it, how could they do so?

• 1:25:04Speaker 01

  Thanks for asking. We have a website that includes our publications and different descriptions of some of the efforts that we have ongoing. It is meditation.mgh.harvard.edu. I tend to post updates on LinkedIn and on Twitter. And if anyone is interested in supporting our work, we do accept donations. There's a link on our website at the bottom of the page. And yeah, thanks so much for having me, Dan. It's such a treat.

• 1:25:33Dan Harris?

  Total pleasure. Let's stay in touch.

• 1:25:39Dan Harris?

  Thanks again to Matthew Sackett. It was great to talk to him. I'll drop a link in the show notes to an interview I did several years ago with two researchers, Willoughby Britton and Jared Lindahl, who talked about the so-called dark night, or the dark side of meditation. Don't forget to check out what we're doing at danharris.com. If you're a paid subscriber, you can hop in the chat today and talk to me. We've got a lot going on over there. It's a burgeoning little community. I would love your support. And I also want to thank everybody who works so hard on this show. Our producers are Kara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.

• 1:26:37Speaker 03

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