Destructive Emotions: How Can We Overcome Them? : A Scientific Dialogue With the Dalai Lama - Hardcover

Goleman, Daniel

 
9780553801712: Destructive Emotions: How Can We Overcome Them? : A Scientific Dialogue With the Dalai Lama
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0553801716 ISBN 13: 9780553801712
Verlag: Bantam Dell Pub Group, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

A fascinating dialogue between the Dalai Lama and a group of leading international scientists and philosophers unites cutting-edge research in education, psychology, and neuroscience with Buddhist practice to discuss how to cope with, transform, and eliminate negative emotions.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Daniel Goleman, Ph.D., is the author of the worldwide bestsellers <b>Emotional Intelligence</b> and <b>Working with Emotional Intelligence</b>, and is co-author of <b>Primal Leadership</b>. Nominated twice for the Pulitzer Prize for his journalistic work covering the brain and behavioral sciences published in <i>The New York Times</i>, he is currently co-chair of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence at Rutgers University and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Aus dem Klappentext

ingly rational, intelligent people commit acts of cruelty and violence?<br><br>*What are the root causes of destructive behavior?<br><br>*How can we control the emotions that drive these impulses?<br><br>*Can we learn to live at peace with ourselves and others?<br><br>Imagine sitting with the Dalai Lama in his private meeting room with a small group of world-class scientists and philosophers. The talk is lively and fascinating as these leading minds grapple with age-old questions of compelling contemporary urgency. Daniel Goleman, the internationally bestselling author of <b>Emotional Intelligence</b>, provides the illuminating commentary--and reports on the breakthrough research this historic gathering inspired.<br><br><b>Destructive Emotions<br><br></b>Buddhist philosophy tells us that all personal unhappiness and interpersonal conflict lie in the “three poisons”: craving, anger, and delusion. It also provides antidotes of astonishing psyc

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The Lama in the Lab

Lama Oser strikes most anyone who meets him as resplendent—not because of his maroon and gold Tibetan monk's robes, but because of his radiant smile. Oser, a European-born convert to Buddhism, has trained as a Tibetan monk in the Himalayas for more than three decades, including many years at the side of one of Tibet's greatest spiritual masters.

But today Oser (whose name has been changed here to protect his privacy) is about to take a revolutionary step in the history of the spiritual lineages he has become a part of: He will engage in meditation while having his brain scanned by state-of-the-art brain imaging devices. To be sure, there have been sporadic attempts to study brain activity in meditators, and decades of tests with monks and yogis in Western labs, some revealing remarkable abilities to control respiration, brain waves, or core body temperature. But this—the first experiment with someone at Oser's level of training, using such sophisticated measures--will take that research to an entirely new level, deeper than ever in charting the specific links between highly disciplined mental strategies and their impact on brain function. And this research agenda has a pragmatic focus: to assess meditation as mind training, a practical answer to the perennial human conundrum of how we can better handle our destructive emotions.

While modern science has focused on formulating ingenious chemical compounds to help us overcome toxic emotions, Buddhism offers a different, albeit far more labor-intensive, route: methods for training the mind, largely through meditation practice. Indeed, Buddhism explicitly explains the training Oser has undergone as an antidote to the mind's vulnerability to toxic emotions. If destructive emotions mark one extreme in human proclivities, this research seeks to map their antipode, the extent to which the brain can be trained to dwell in a constructive range: contentment instead of craving, calm rather than agitation, compassion in place of hatred.

Medicines are the leading modality in the West for addressing disturbing emotions, and for better or for worse, there is no doubt that mood-altering pills have brought solace to millions. But one compelling question the research with Oser raises is whether a person, through his or her own efforts, can bring about lasting positive changes in brain function that are even more far-reaching than medication in their impact on emotions. And that question, in turn, raises others: For instance, if in fact people can train their minds to overcome destructive emotions, could practical, nonreligious aspects of such training be part of every child's education? Or could such training in emotional self-management be offered to adults, whether or not they were spiritual seekers?

These very questions had been raised over the course of a remarkable five-day dialogue held the year before between the Dalai Lama and a small group of scientists and a philosopher of mind at his private quarters in Dharamsala, India. The research with Oser marked one culmination of several lines of scientific inquiry set in motion during the dialogue. There the Dalai Lama had been a prime mover in inspiring this research; in a real sense, he was an active collaborator in turning the lens of science on the practices of his own spiritual tradition.

But the experiments in Madison were merely one manifestation of that deep collective inquiry into the nature of emotions, how they become destructive, and possible effective antidotes. This book renders my account of the conversations that inspired the Madison research, of the larger questions behind the research, and of the greater implications for us all of this sweeping exploration into how humanity might counter the centrifugal drag of our destructive emotions.


Assaying the Transcendent

It was at the invitation of Richard Davidson, one of the scientists who participated in the Dharamsala dialogues, that Oser had come to the E. M. Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior, on the Madison campus of the University of Wisconsin. The laboratory was founded by Davidson, a leading pioneer in the field of affective neuroscience, which studies the interplay of the brain and emotions. Davidson had wanted Oser—a particularly intriguing subject—to be studied intensively with state-of-the-art brain measures.

Oser has spent several months at a stretch in intensive, solitary retreat. All told, those retreats add up to about two and a half years. But beyond that, during several years as the personal attendant to a Tibetan master, the reminders to practice even in the midst of his busy daily activities were almost constant. Now, here at the laboratory, the question was what difference any of that training had made.

The collaboration began before Oser went near the MRI, with a meeting to design the research protocol. As the eight-person research team briefed Oser, everyone in the room was acutely aware that they were in a bit of a race against time. The Dalai Lama himself would visit the lab the very next day, and they hoped by then to have harvested at least some preliminary results to share with him.

With Oser's consultation, the research team agreed on a protocol where he would rotate from a resting, everyday state of mind through a sequence of several specific meditative states. To overhear that conversation would have been eye-opening for anyone who thinks of meditation as a single, vaguely defined Zen-like mental exercise. Such an assumption is akin to thinking of all cooking as the same, ignoring the vast variation in cuisine, recipes, and ingredients throughout the world of food. Likewise, there are dozens and dozens of distinct, highly detailed varieties of mental training—too loosely lumped together in English under the term meditation—each with its own instructions and specific effects on experience and, the research team hoped to show, on brain activity.

To be sure, there is a great deal of overlap among the kinds of meditation employed across differing spiritual traditions: A Trappist monk reciting the Prayer of the Heart, "Kyrie eleison," has much in common with a Tibetan nun chanting "Om mani padme hum." But beyond these large commonalities, there is a very wide variety of specific meditation practices, each unique in the attentional, cognitive, and affective strategies they employ, and so in their results.

Tibetan Buddhism may well offer the widest menu of meditation methods, and it was from this rich offering that the team in Madison began to choose what to study. The initial suggestions from the research team were for three meditative states: a visualization, one-pointed concentration, and generating compassion. The three methods involved distinct enough mental strategies that the team was fairly sure they would reveal different underlying configurations of brain activity. Indeed, Oser was able to give precise descriptions of each.

One of the methods chosen, one-pointedness—a fully focused concentration on a single object of attention—may be the most basic and universal of all practices, found in one form or another in every spiritual tradition that employs meditation. Focusing on one point requires letting go of the ten thousand other thoughts and desires that flit through the mind as distractions; as the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard put it, "Purity of heart is to want one thing only."

In the Tibetan system (as in many others) cultivating concentration is a beginner's method, a prerequisite for moving on to more intricate approaches. In a sense, concentration is the most generic form of mind training, with many nonspiritual applications as well. Indeed, for this test, Oser simply picked a spot (a small bolt above him on...

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Verlag
Bantam Dell Pub Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2003
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0553801716
ISBN 13 
9780553801712
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
404
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
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