A Letter to the Community from Professor Charles Tart
RE: Shinzen Young
June 14, 2004
By Charles Tart
This is a brief reminder and some new information about our Fall 2004 ITP gala event, the awarding of an honorary doctorate to meditation teacher Shinzen Young and his weekend workshop on more effective ways to teach meditation.
We will have a catered banquet and social occasion Friday night, October 15th, at which Shinzen will give a brief overview of the adaptations he has made to make vipassana (insight) meditation training more effective, and we will present him with his honorary doctorate. This event will be a fund-raiser for ITP as well as the major social event of the year for the whole ITP community - students, faculty, administration, Board, staff, alumni, friends and supporters. We will discount the cost to students as much as possible. At the workshop the next two days, Shinzen will cover the techniques of meditation he has devised in more detail, leading us in experiential samplings of them as well as conceptual material that helps integrate them into transpersonal psychology. ITP community members will have priority in attending the workshop.
So hold those dates, October 15, 16 and 17 this Fall.
Who is Shinzen Young? At the bottom of this post I will repeat the brief bio material sent out with the first announcement, but let me get more personal. The following is from an introduction I've just written for a book and CD of guided meditation exercises by Shinzen for dealing with pain problems. Sounds True publishers is bringing it out in a couple of months.I first met Shinzen Young in the winter of 1986 at a scientific conference on cutting edge approaches to healing and consciousness, held in the mountains of New Mexico. One of the scientists who knew Shinzen had asked him to give a lecture on meditation for the benefit of us scientists who, by and large, had some Western intellectual interest in meditation and consciousness, but knew little about it practically.
As far as intellectual knowledge for that time goes, I was something of a scientific "expert" by then current Western standards, but I knew that I was quite untalented for actually practicing classical forms of meditation. I had received meditation instruction from a number of teachers, including well-known spiritual teachers from the East, but (except for the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's Transcendental Meditation, which was useful, but didn't do what I wanted it to in almost two years of effort) had pretty much given it up. Clearly you needed some kind of special skill to be a meditator in the classical Eastern sense, and I didn't have that kind of talent. The meditation instructions always seemed to involve an initial instruction of the sort, "First quiet your mind and then... " and I never got past that first step: my mind never quieted!
My psychological studies of consciousness, especially altered states of consciousness, during my career had gained me an international reputation as a scientific authority, and I've always tried to inform my intellectual knowledge of these areas with personal experiential knowledge. I had accepted that when it came to classical meditation practices, though, I just didn't have whatever it took.
I had an unusual reaction when Shinzen gave his lecture at the conference, quite independent of the fact that, intellectually, what he said made great sense. The hairs stood up on the back of my neck! At some level deeper than my intellect, a part of me was saying, "This man is speaking from direct experience, not book learning, he knows what he is talking about!" I had never had this reaction with the famous spiritual teachers I had heard over the years. Perhaps they spoke from direct experience, perhaps they didn't, but they didn't touch me this way.
Shinzen volunteered to teach meditation in 6:30 AM morning sessions for the rest of the conference. At that time, I was not an early riser (especially on dark, cold winter mornings!), but I went, and was very excited with what I learned. I switched from being, in my mind, a person who did not have the needed talents for becoming a meditator, to someone who was not only learning the process, but enjoying it! I still doubt that I will ever be a really accomplished meditator, but I'm not bad, I can teach the basics to others, and a daily meditation has been, off and on (I do get distracted by the busyness of life...), a rewarding part of my life since then.
In next month's reminder, I'll say something about Shinzen's unique approach to using mindfulness meditation to deal with acute and chronic pain and suffering. To just leave you with a hint, as part of his adapting Eastern meditation procedures so they could be taught more effectively in the modern West, Shinzen (who has taught math) often uses this equation:
S = P x R
that is to say,
Suffering = Pain (multiplied by) Resistance
Think about it...
Charley Tart
