Jeffrey Martin's study of Non-symbolic consciousness

Hi everybody,

I've been curious about this guy ever since I listened to the Buddhist Geek interviews with him (and then watched the vimeo video posted here by Jackson recently ). As Chris Marti helpfully reminded me, several people involved in these forums have gone through the interview process with him. I am curious, if anyone feels like sharing, what you all thought of his interview process as well as his overall view. I've kind of been hoping to find transcripts of his interviews, as I'm REALLY curious what kind of questions he asks.

One of my main concerns is that the commonality Martin finds behind all "enlightened" people are:
1) a "lack" of "thought"
2) a "lack" of "emotion"
3) a "lack" of "intention"

Everything else seems to go by the wayside, as far as the fruits of practice are concerned. Could this be something caused by biases inherent in his interview process? I find that I am (somehow) both in favor of and strongly opposed to the watering down of spiritual practice into these three commonalities.

Anyway, I would love to hear your thoughts. I will do my best to reply, but I am having a bit of an allergic reaction to forums recently and will also have rather limited computer access for the next few weeks. But I promise to reply when I can, to this thread at least, even if I can't seem to muster the brain power to join in on all the other fascinating conversations I find going on here.

All the best,
Ian Reclusado

(with minor edits for better word flow)

"One of my main concerns is that the commonality Martin finds behind all "enlightened" people are:
1) a "lack" of "thought"
2) a "lack" of "emotion"
3) a "lack" of "intention"
Everything
else seems to go by the wayside, as far as the fruits of practice are
concerned. Could this be something caused by biases inherent in his
interview process? I find that I am (somehow) both in favor of and strongly opposed to the watering down of spiritual practice into these three commonalities. "

Ian - This brings up a lot of things for me. One is that practice and its methods have very important functions, and it is important to support people in their practice, not undermine it. But we don't live on ashrams, listening only to our gurus - we read forums where people say things that make us worry about our practice. That said, it is not a scientist/researcher's job to be skillful - his audience isn't practitioners (except by accident, because they are all curious to know) - he's writing for his peers, and he needs to use language that makes sense to them. I'm not sure this info is useful for the average practitioner. It just sounds sort of cold and horrible, not motivating, doesn't it?

As to the three things you list there, perhaps all the other things he found were so variable (because not all pracitioners were Buddhists, for example), that those were the three that topped the list. "Lack" may imply lack of a sense of agency (not me, not mine) or a subsidence of that kind of mental activity altogether. Who knows. I swear that study is due to be published soon, and the guy has a book or two out also, no?

I think you should address the question I hear between the lines: :"Is my practice going to fry my brain and turn me into a zombie? I thought it was supposed to make me a nicer person, compassionate and happy." Is that what's really on your mind when you hear stuff like that? I can reassure you I know a dozen people from various backgrounds who are awakened and all of them are kind, sweet, lovely people who worry, dwell, fuss and fret far less than your average person (ie tend to be quite relaxed and happy), hold down normal jobs, have families, and are well-liked by their friends.

That said, I'm off to New Haven to get a brain scan for neuroscience. We'll see what strange conclusions get drawn from that. Perhaps that if I meditate while lying down I tend to fall asleep.

There are a lot of reasons why scientific psychological research doesn’t seem applicable to the every-man/woman.

Consideration of the “goal” is important here. Martin’s research, as I understand it, started out as a way of figuring out which types of treatments are helpful for different types of people based on where they’re current level of development in some area. Finding certain characteristics that are common among a certain population that correlate to the efficacy/effectiveness of certain treatments was a part of this process.

So, when he got to the point of considering folks who are awakened to some degree, the same process was used. How do they report their experience? What are the similarities and differences? When a large enough percentage of the sample population described only a few things that were deeply in common, he chose to focus on those things. If he were to continue to divide the group according to matching characteristics, the sample size would eventually be too small for his research findings to be considered “supported” in any meaningful way.



At this point one ends up being stuck on a few characteristics that are, perhaps, quite insufficient for describing, in depth, the experience of awakened individuals. But I don’t think that’s the point of the research, so much as it is to find what therapies or practices are useful in helping a certain population of individuals to continue their development. The program seems to be part qualitative and part quantitative, which further adds to the confusion regarding what exactly the point of the research is and who it applies to.



One of these days I’ll get around to talking to him about it

@ Ona: No, in fact the question between the question is: Should we take this guy and his findings seriously? I have a pretty firm confidence I'm not going to end up a zombie. Wisdom traditions don't stick around for centuries because they make zombies (unless you include Vodou... )

How valuable do people find his work/conclusions? Groundbreaking? Useless? Undecided?

Also, I am with you on the idea that, just because these three are the only commonalities, it doesn't follow that they are the ONLY IMPORTANT THINGS. That's overly reductionistic, in my book. And I'm not actually sure if Jeffrey Martin is even saying that the other things don't matter, so maybe I'm shooting at a ghost here...

@Chris: Those three conclusions are how I recall him summarizing his findings in the Buddhist Geeks interview. I might have mis-heard or mis-remembered, but I feel fairly confident I didn't (though would be happy to admit I was wrong if I am wrong).

I would very like to hear your take on what exactly he means by "non-symbolic consciousness" and how that might differ from "enlightenment". My memory is that he kind of glossed over that whole thing with a "we came up with the term non-symbolic consciousness because it explains what we're looking for, but doesn't piss any body off". Yeah, okay, but what are you actually looking for then? Is it simply, what lies beyond the wall of "self-help"?

In regards to your later post, I fully respect that researchers are doing their best with very little to go on. That's science at it's most exciting, as far as I'm concerned. And although there are no real dichotomies, there is still "awakened" and "non-awakened", right? Given the complexity of one's practice, I wonder how that is even scientifically measurable (other than as a kind of subject "that was it!").

@Jackson:

"When a large enough percentage of the sample population
described only a few things that were deeply in common, he chose to
focus on those things. If he were to continue to divide the group according to
matching characteristics, the sample size would eventually be too small
for his research findings to be considered “supported” in any meaningful
way."

While I respect that this is how science works, and I definitely don't have any better suggestion, I am still wondering if this isn't throwing the baby out with the bathwater? Granted, he may be trying to rescue the baby by getting a larger sample size. We'll have to wait and see...

@ et all:

In regards to the "no thoughts, no emotions, no agency":

My thought on the matter was that anyone who says that they don't have thoughts, emotions, or agency are people who are still assuming that thoughts, emotions, and agency can only be experienced somehow separately from their perception of reality. They are, in a way, clinging to a kind of "phantom limb" separate self (to paraphrase Jackson's earlier post). It's not there, but because they think that's the only way any of these three things can exist, then, because there is no separate self, these three things cannot exist.

My bet is that they actually do have all three, but the people haven't yet learned a new way to language their experience. They're still stuck in the way they used to think about these things before the big switch... Which I admit is fully a guess, and nothing based on my own experience, but that's my current adhoc explanation.

In regards to the more general issue:

I have the utmost respect for Jeffrey Martin's work and what he's trying to do. To make a serious scientific stab at understanding the "pseudo-science" of self-help is a tremendous task, particularly because he is doing it to find out what works, not to disprove it. I'm just not sure if tacking on the world's wisdom traditions to a study that began as only involving more recently developed self-help techniques is going to allow for a meaningful study. It seems like it could be like strapping a jet engine to a hang-glider...

woosh.

From J. Martin's second Buddhist Geek interview (emphasis mine):

"Now if we go all the way to the end of the scale, if we were to deal
with research participants that seem to be, if this is some sort of
progressive scale, if we were to go all the way to the other end of
that.
At that point really the thoughts are gone.
I mean no matter how
much you try to get people to look for them.
They’re gone.

Now there’s some different ways how that shows up.
For instance,
those thoughts can return here and there.
There are some people that
they return for early in the morning just after waking for the first 15
minutes or 10 minutes or 5 minutes, whatever it is.
There are some that
returns for if they get very sort of hypoglycemic if they don’t eat, if
they are sleep deprived, those thoughts can return.
So there appears
to be an inhibitory mechanism that we’re dealing with here.
And by the
time you reach the end of this, it’s pretty darn clamped down, unless
the brain doesn’t have what it needs to sort of function normally or
function optimally and then it’s almost like that inhibition can lift a
little bit and some of the people that are in sort of the earlier parts
of those later stages can have some self referential thoughts kind of
bubbling back up.

So that’s an example of how things change.
And as you might
imagine, as you go across that continuum you see what you would sort of
expect in terms of a progression from one of those extremes to the other
one of those extremes.
And we can talk about the same sort of changes.
There’s changes that are very similar for emotion at the end of the
spectrum.
People basically represent that they do not experience
emotion ever. Now that sounds like terrible like it would be some
automaton type existence but in fact no one wants to go back.
Whatever
that’s like not to experience emotion, it’s better than what came before
it.
And lots of times there was a progression into it and what came
before it was pretty darn amazing compared to what came before that.
So
whatever that is to not have emotion, to be on sort of the far end
there, you still have a tremendous sense of well being.
It’s just not
an emotional sense of well being.
So people don’t represent for
instance having love.
If you say do you have love.
They’d say “no I
don’t have any love.”
And that’s true for even things like their kids.
They don’t have fatherly or motherly love for their children even
anymore. So those sorts of extreme forms of love that people maybe
can’t imagine not being a part of their life literally there’s no
experience of them.

Now when we measure their body, we do measure sort of the same type
of physiological responses that you would measure in people that had
emotion.
So it’s interesting because there does appear to be sort of
what you would think of measurable emotional response in the body but
there’s no experience of it."

and then from a bit further on:

You can start at one of those no thought or no emotion, something
else that goes along with it as there’s no sense of agency.
There’s no
sense that you can do anything in the world.
The world is just
unfolding.
There’s no sense that you can make a decision.

There’s not only not a sense that you’re not making a decision,
which can happen at other places in this developmental progression, but
there’s literally just a palpable sense that it’s just completely
impossible to make a decision, completely impossible to take any action.
And so there’s just sort of a set of things that’s sort of snap into
place.
And it does sound like that from the outside.

From there he goes on to explain that these people all act and behave normally, and that they seem to function better than they ever did before. And I don't have a problem with all this, actually. I would bet that it's a pretty nice experience. I'm just not sure if this actually means what Martin seems to think it means, as I understand his explanations. And since some of you have been interviewed by him, what do you think? Is he spot on here? Is it really that these three things don't exist, or is it more that one's perspective on these three things has drastically changed?

- edited to include link and remove unnecessary line breaks -

Honestly I think people certain can experience things that way, but it doesn't radically change them on the outside, so it's likely a change in inner perception. That's not making it any less real - after all, what you experience is real and makes a huge impact on your life - in this case the impact being a massive reduction in stress, anxiety, worry, etc etc and an ongoing sense of well being, right? (among other things)

@Ona: Right, not such a bad thing.

@Chris: But if it's such a small sample size, how can we even know that they are actually "the tail end"? What places them further along the graph than the others?

I will have to read that thread another time, but thanks for pointing it out to me. I am interested.

I've experienced something similar to the no sense of agency for a short period of time, maybe a week or two after a long retreat (not even sure it was continuous throughout). It really did feel sometimes like the world is just unfolding and while I may have had a choice at a certain point, the right choice was so obvious, it was almost impossible to seriously imagine I would do anything else. It was kinda weird but also liberating. It also meant as long as I let that unfolding happen, there was peace. It did not make me feel like a zombie at all.

As for the inhibitory mechanism that he describes, I've said here before, I don't like that interpretation. I prefer to think that it is not the way things work but I can't really say I have evidence either way.

@ Chris: That link answers a lot of my questions, thank you so much for finding/posting it. It clarifies other qualifies for what makes people "long tail" other than the lack of thoughts/emotions/agency. It's also clear that Gary Webber highly approves Dr. of Martin's work, which is also food for thought.

@ Eran: That's a great description. I can't claim to have felt anything like that myself, not as strongly as you describe it. But I pick up something subtle in your description that I want to explore just a little.

You say "the right choice was so obvious, it was almost impossible to seriously
imagine I would do anything else. It was kinda weird but also
liberating." Which to me is different than "no sense of agency". Not having a choice because your sense of agency is so aligned with reality that it can run automatically (the way our hearts beat or our lungs breathe), is different than having no agency at all.

I can see how if one became habituated in this attainment, it could be described as a lack of agency, but from your description (which I have heard from other people as well) it's not a lack so much a fullness of alignment, a kind of purity. You simply have no need to notice it anymore. Chris, maybe this is what you were pointing toward earlier in regards to the "Big Clues"?

I imagine the thoughts and emotions to be somewhat similar. If we are consciously aware enough them (through practice) and we understand their behavior, then they don't have to stand out for "us" to "act" on them. They just flow naturally. The mountain becomes level with the plane, as the saying goes, but the mountain isn't gotten rid of. It's a step forward to post-mountain, not a falling back to pre-mountain. Our minds have fully learned how to model a "self" and so the self-model, having become obsolete, simply falls away.

@Ian - what you are suggesting and quoting from Eran resonates with my own experience also. It is quite possible other people experience something different, and that I may experience things differently at another time, but at the moment I would concur that the sense of a lack of agency tends to have a quality of everything unfolding as part of the flow of things, in a very natural way, with no need for "me" to try to pretend that it's a result of some effort on my part. Like the heart beating, like breathing. Including the impulse to be kind and patient towards other people. At times I have felt it nicely expressed by the idea of God's Will manifesting, though lately I am not tending to feel so religious.

it's not a lack (of agency) so much a fullness of alignment, a kind of purity.

-ianreclus

I'm not trying to be glib when I say this but it still may come off that way, so apologies. Ian, could the two, that is lack of agency and fullness of alignment, be the same thing? Perhaps the same thing when seen from different angles? From the inside, I'd describe it as being completely aligned with what is. From the outside, it can be seen as lack of agency. Form, Emptiness, all that... you know?

I like Ona's description. Whether or not that's the direction we're heading, I would call that liberation. I find one part especially poignant:

with no need for "me" to try to pretend that it's a result of some effort on my part.

-ona

During my ongoing recent experiment with practicing by not "practicing" I've noticed that a huge amount of time passes in each day in which I am not really all that aware of myself nor feeling any conflict or friction -- I'm just going from one thing to the next.

I have a feeling that this isn't unusual to any of us whether we practice or not. Does anyone relate to this? Is this anything like a "lack of agency" or is it just being spaced out and unaware?

Note: one difference maybe between what I'm talking about and just regular spacing out -- often when I come back to my feeling of being me in the world it will be because I've noticed that everything has gotten very quiet, still, bright and peaceful, with the emphasis on still.

Edit: on further reflection I can remember that kind of thing happening to me before, like in childhood mostly and early adult times before I'd practiced much.

At the most generic level I tend to call these kind of experiences "flow" - you are just engrossed in what you are doing, without even having to think about it. Work just gets done, the day flows by, and there's none of that inner chatter or worry that sometimes natters on about what we should do next and why did we do that and when is this or that happening. My only reason I think not to use a term like spaced out or unaware is because those have a negative ring, as if you are so busy thinking about something that you run a red light. In "flow" you just stop at the red light, not because you think consciously "here comes a red light now I need to lift my foot and move it to the brake pedal" but because it just happens. So there isn't any particular attention to "me doing something" - though if you aren't a person with a meditation practice you might not even notice that or care to say it that way.

In my experience "flow" stops when you pull out and start thinking: oh, now I need to do this or that, or why didn't I get that done sooner and so forth. When you are flowing, there's no need for all that inner chatter, and it just drops away. In fact if you try to make it happen, it tends to kill it.

I also think (and I'd love others' opinions on this) that flow is a kind of continuum - from the way a kid can be engrossed in a game to an athlete's or musician's total focus to the kind of mindfulness of the moment one might find doing meditation, walking meditation, raking leaves, doing dishes, driving. I'm not completely sure these are very different, though I think perhaps when one has done a lot of meditation the expansiveness and inclusiveness of the experience can be broader (ie there is a far more acute awareness of every level of sensation, sight, sound, etc all at once).

Does that sound relevant?

Ona, that could be right.

"Flow"

though the way I think I've heard "flow" discussed lately seems to describe something kind of intentional, something a person is practicing to try and enter, which isn't what is going on with me for sure.

So, maybe if your continuum idea is right, then what I've been noticing is more like a kid or athlete being engrossed because there is no expansiveness or acute awareness at all. It really isn't "mindfullness," at least mindfullness as I've tried to practice for so long now. When I used to practice mindfulness (no question I could've been doing it wrong wrong wrong) there was an intention to that activity, a trying to be aware ... mindful. And that intention I think always and inevitably creates friction. The way I understood and practiced mindfulness, getting engrossed and losing awareness was definitely NOT it. (Again, maybe I was doing it wrong)

some notes I guess: what I'm doing is kind of beginning with a real feeling that there is nothing to change about me right now, no need to do anything to improve myself, to become more or better or wiser. It's all done, the past and the future is included in the present so I always have everything I need. There is no perfection, there is no better or worse. Which means that even being upset at myself is okay. I don't really think this is practice or dharma cause it can't really be written about or taught or explained or codified or dogmatized. I'm kind of embarassed to say all that because I know in a way it sounds cool or wonderful but it isn't at all. It's nothing, especially nothing to be impressed with.

And, when I do stop and thinki and feel and reflect, I've actually never felt more selfish or self centered. I'm just doing what feels good and right to me as much as I can.

I hear you, Mike. I tend to think of flow as something NOT intentional, but more that relaxed, effortless just being engrossed in what you are doing, without trying to make it be a certain way. But that might just be my way of using the word. I'm not a huge fan of trying to define every word in fussy ways - I don't mind if you use it differently.

I also tend to agree that when I think of "mindfulness practice" I generally think of a deliberate effort to pay attention to the moment - perhaps part of the point being that eventually it becomes less of an effort, or maybe no effort at all, though some people may hit that no effort zone without delibearte mindfulness practice.

I like your "non-practice" - it sounds like it's just right, and I like that you don't mind just talking about it, even if it doesn't sound like what people think "practice" is supposed to be like.

The loss of a sense of agency is such an intriguing topic, isn’t it?

But it’s tricky. To speak from my own experience, I regularly access a kind of awareness in practice (perhaps I mean “perspective”) which is free from identification with the process of intending. Intending continues, but no sense of an agent of intention. I can see how this could become a default perspective for some people, just as any number of perspectives can become one’s central hub of experience.

What doesn’t make sense to me, however, is the idea that one could maintain any sort of human existence if the intending processes were to cease altogether. That wouldn’t be any different from being in a coma. Last I checked, most of the awakened folks out there taking psychological tests and participating in interviews are not comatose.

Since intention is a mental action, it should be available to awareness if one knows what to look for. But it’s also quite possible to ignore them and get on with life as usual. And this is where the whole “inhibitory mechanism” thing makes sense. If you don’t feel it worthwhile to pay attention to something, you don’t. I don’t watch sports, for example. I’m not interested in sports. I guess that means my awakening resulted in a sports-free state that goes on endlessly. Sports are not a part of my experience anymore… unless I wanted to catch a game sometime. Then I could just find the right channel on my TV.

So, as usual, there seem to be more questions than answers. I think it would be naïve to conclude, at face value, that lacking a sense of agency (or an awareness of intending processes) makes one person more awake than another. And it could be a case of constructing a false hierarchy based on simply placing the individuals with the rarest characteristics at the top. We have to make room for the possibility that construct validity could be lacking (the construct being Martin’s particular conception of “non-symbolic consciousness”), which would make it difficult to draw any sort of meaningful hierarchical conclusions.

I’m just riffing on this, by the way. I’m not opposed to Martin’s research, or even his findings, per se. It’s just fun to dive into it and see what happens