Is Intention Really Probabilistic?

 

A friend recently sent a link to an Atlantic article, written by Bahar Gholipour, whose provocative title,  "A Famous Argument Against Free Will Has Been Debunked", prompted me to do some thinking about intention. The article reported on the history of the Bereitschaftspotential, or readiness potential. The readiness potential was discovered in the 1960's by two German scientists, Hans Helmut Kornhuber and his graduate student Lüder Deecke. They collected a group of volunteers and hooked them up to an EEG machine, then asked them to sit in a booth and move one of their fingers at random, whenever they decided to do so. Up until then, cognitive neuroscientists had mostly focused on measuring brain activity related to perception. This experiment was the first to measure brain activity related to an internally generated intention.

What scientists found is that the brain started showing evidence that a movement would occur about 500 ms before it actually did. This was unexpected, as a half second delay between the evidence of an upcoming movement and the moment was a huge gap. The discovery provoked widespread attention and discussion among cognitive neuroscientists and philosophers of science, but nobody really knew what it meant. Benjamin Libet at UC San Francisco seized on the experiment and decided to take it further. Libet wanted to know why it takes almost a half second between the brain "deciding" to move and the actual movement itself. In particular, Libet wanted to determine if a person is actually conscious of the upcoming movement, that is formulates the intention to move, at the half second mark or not. Libet refined the experiment by asking the volunteers to watch a clock and record the time when they consciously decide, or notice the intention to, move their finger. What he found was that the decision only became conscious 150 ms before the movement. Apparently, the brain was actually "deciding" to move before the decision became conscious. Libet interpreted this as evidence that free will is basically an illusion and that the brain unconsciously but deterministically controls movement.

Libet published his work widely, and the results caused a furor,  particularly among philosophers. In the over 2,000 year history of Western philosophy and religion, there has been a continuous debate between those philosophers who maintain that humans, unique among animals, have the ability to control their destiny through free will, and those who maintain that fate determines destiny and that we have very little control over the events in our lives except in a minor way. Humans have an intuitive sense that the choices they make in their lives are not somehow predetermined and therefore they are in control of their own fate. On the other hand, at the macrolevel, the level of human perception and events, the physical universe obeys certain natural laws that have been formulated in a deterministic fashion. Quantum mechanics certainly loosened up determinism at the microlevel, and approaches such as Bayesian networks can extend a probabilistic approach to macrolevel events. Nevertheless, people have the implicit feeling that they can choose and that their choices make a difference in the course of their lives, so their fate is not predetermined but nevertheless is not a matter of random chance.

Free will is central to the Christian notion of sin and redemption. While the standard Christian (basically Catholic) belief is that God gave humans, unique among the animals, the power to choose to behave in a moral and compassionate manner (or, as the Catholic Church would have it, according to Catholic teachings) or not, much of how the universe evolves is determined by God's will. Some Protestant religious thinkers on the other hand, like John Calvin, rejected free will for predestination, the premise that certain people were bound to be saved, and there was nothing anyone could do to change their fate. In Catholicism, a sinner can always experience redemption through God's grace, whereas in Calvinism, there is literally nothing you can do to have your sins forgiven, and neither you nor anyone else will know about whether you will be saved until you die.

In Buddhist philosophy, the tension between free will and destiny is resolved through karma and intention, and the way they interact with dependent origination, the process by which the mind creates suffering. Intentional acts, especially those with moral effects or consequences, result in the generation of karma. Good karma results from acts motivated by good moral intention, neutral karma from acts motivated by neither good nor bad moral intention, and bad karma from acts motivated by bad or evil intention. In the traditional interpretation, karma is built up in kind of Cosmic Blockchain,  where the causes and effects of actions reverberate as the future circumstances in which a person finds themselves, including the circumstances in which they are reborn in their next life.

Dependent arising is the basic process by which the mind generates suffering and karma. Physical contact with sense organs (including the mind) creates painful/pleasant feeling, which then generates craving for more or less of the feeling, which then generates the intention for action, and actions that then result in karma. Dependent arising can be moderated by generating the intention to not act on the experience of craving, mindfully noting the arising of craving without acting on it, and thereby short circuiting the process. Dependent arising can even be completely eliminated by uprooting the root cause, Avijjā, or ignorance of the causes of suffering and their cessation, a process corresponding to the traditional Theravada notion of enlightenment.

Among some Buddhist teachers, Libet's discovery is viewed as a kind of confirmation of the Buddhist philosophical interpretation based on dependent arising. The preconscious part of the readiness potential could be viewed as the arising of contact + feeling, where in the case of finger movement, the "sense organ" is the mind exercising a decision. The conscious generation of the movement can be viewed as the clinging + craving part, carrying through the intention to move at random, installed in place when the volunteer began the experiment. The moral impact of moving a finger is basically neutral - so long as the finger isn't, for example, positioned on the trigger of a gun pointed in someone's direction and the intention to kill is present. So Libet's work was not as surprising, and not as threatening to the intellectual foundation of the Buddhist tradition as it was in Western philosophy.

In the Atlantic article, Gholipour goes on to report some new developments in the history of the readiness potential. In 2010, Aaron Schurger, a researcher at the National Institute of Health and Medical Research in Paris, was studying fluctuations in neuronal activity. Like many natural processes, the activity of neurons rises and falls in recognizable rhythms. Schurger took records of neuronal activity, lined them up by their peaks,and calculated the reverse average, using the same procedure that Kornhuber and Deeke used in their original EEG study, but with far more data. The result was a graph that looked like the readiness potential. Schurger interpreted this result as indication that the readiness potential was not the cause of the movement, but that the movement was generated at a time when the brain's neuronal activity was already primed for motor action, in a similar way to how the brain makes decisions about whether an external perception corresponds to something. The brain gathers evidence, weighs it against past experience, and comes up with a decision, for example that the sensation of red and smell of perfume comes from a rose. In the case of random movements, because their is no sensory input, the brain weighs the evidence and determines whether it is sufficient to fulfill the previously generated intention to randomly move the finger.

Gholipour interprets this as vindicating the notion of free will, but I'm not so sure. Viewed from the Western perspective, I think the situation becomes worse. Like quantum mechanics, whether or not we actually perform some action is now a matter of probability, not our decision to act. When an action becomes probable due to the brain's neuronal activity being in a particular state, it happens. The missing piece here is intention, and intention rarely enters directly into the Western philosophical discourse around free will. But intention and free will are not the same. Intention is more an inclination in the direction of action, sort of a background behind the actual decisions. Actions with intention behind them generate karma, random actions do not.

So the next question for cognitive neuroscience is: what is the brain activity behind intention? Does it establish a kind of overall scope or shape for the neuronal action? Can it be viewed in brain activity? How about an experiment where one group of volunteers is told to generate the intention to randomly move their fingers whenever they want to and the other group is told to suppress the desire for movement should it occur?







Image from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/164240717639974117/

How a Consideration of Bullshit Jobs Leads to a Hypothesis About Karma and the Creation of the Self

Recently I came across a book by David Graeber called Bullshit Jobs - A Theory. Graeber published an essay entitled "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs" in Strike!, a radical online magazine, in 2013. Graeber asked the provocative question: "Does your job make a meaningful contribution to the world?" and requested people to send him email about their work situation.  Graeber was referring to jobs like HR consultants, financial consultants, corporate lawyers, and lobbyists, the kind of jobs which Douglas Adams, the science fiction writer, characterized as "telephone sanitizers". These jobs contribute very little to people's overall well being, in contrast with kindergarten teachers, waiters, road workers and nurses where the actual work is connected with a product or service that people genuinely need. Graeber's inbox was flooded with email from people responding to the essay about how unsatisfying the nature of their jobs were. The response was overwhelming. Some people reacted angrily to the question, based on a specific political view (typically libertarian) that jobs which didn't contribute simply wouldn't exist in a capitalist economy. So Graeber decided to write the book.

While Graeber does devote part of the book to discussing bullshit jobs as "spiritual violence", in this post, I'd like to discuss another point that he brings up, which fundamentally underlies his premise but is rather peripheral to his basic argument. This point nevertheless seems to go to the heart of how desire results in the creation of an illusory self-view, and even, ultimately, why a person perceives a job as being bullshit rather than not. From the Buddhist standpoint, karma is cause and effect, the fact that actions have consequences (or more specifically intentional actions have consequences). The Twelve Links of Dependent Origination are based on karma, each link being connected to the following one through a cause and effect relationship. Experience is created through the twelve links.

An important characteristic of a bullshit job is that it has no effect on the world. Graeber sites research by the German psychologist Karl Groos from 1901 in Chapter 3. Groos looked at the response of infants that were allowed to make some predictable effect on the world, versus infants that were prevented from having such an effect. The effect didn't need to have any benefit to them. An example is an infant that discovers it can move a pencil by randomly moving its arms. The infant discovers that they can have the same effect by moving their arms again. The result is expressions of total joy, which Groos coined "the pleasure of being the cause". Groos suggested this reaction was the basis of play, exercising causality simply for the pure joy of exercising it. Subsequent work has confirmed Groos' initial observation and expanded on it. In the footnotes, Graeber cites work by Francis Broucek from 1977 in which Broucek maintains that the sense of causal efficiency is the core of sense of self, and not a property of a predefined self. In other words, the pleasure derived from experiencing one's physical presence as a cause is the fundamental basis upon which the illusion of a sense of self is created.

Now one could argue that a baby accidentally knocking over a pencil once and deriving an obvious sense of pleasure from the action isn't intentional action. Intentional action means action formulated with some aim or plan to accomplish some effect. Because the action is accidental, there is no intention behind it. However, the next step, the baby knocking over the pencil again,  in order to experience that same sense of joy or happiness does involve intention. In fact, it is an example of the Twelve Links of Dependent Origination at work, specifically the link between feeling (pleasure at being the cause) and craving (wanting to have that effect happen again), then doing something about it to make the effect happen. The next step in the Twelve Links is clinging, thinking about getting more of the pleasant sensation, planning how to get it, etc. A baby might be too young to do much planning, and its capacity to move around is not well developed enough to do much about fulfilling such a plan even if it could make one, but ultimately, when the baby gets old enough to crawl, it can find other stuff and knock it over to watch it fall. And when it grows up to be an adult, it will feel a sense of unsatisfactoriness to its life if its put into a job where the actions it has have no consequences at all, basically a bullshit job.

Therefore, undermining the connection between experiencing one's physical presence as a source of causal efficiency seems like a fruitful place to look for practice opportunities.

Image source:  https://physics.aps.org/articles/v10/86

Emptiness and the Disappearance of Perception

While most beginning meditation books stress basic mindfulness or being "in the moment", Rob Burbea in his book Seeing That Frees goes beyond that, describing how to develop a view of emptiness around specific aspects of the five skandhas, which is basically the sravaka emptiness of the individual person, and a view of emptiness of phenomenon, which is the Mahayana emptiness of the world. He also describes how to do analytical meditation, something I've encountered in my readings of Tibetan texts but which receives almost no attention at all in the Zen and Theravadan texts I've mostly been exposed to in the past. As I tend to be of an analytical mindset (being an engineer) I've been curious to see just exactly what was involved in analytical meditation on emptiness. 

One of the nonanalytical meditative techniques Burbea recommends is to perform anatta (not-self) meditation on various perceptions. So rather than cognitively noting the sensations as in the Mahasi technique, or noting the three characteristics around them, you instead note how they are empty of any essence or core, because they are dependent on causes and conditions to arise and pass away. While he says you can go into the causes and conditions, he recommends that you not dwell on them, but just briefly note their empty nature.

The exercise is intended to develop the same insight as the Buddha had into dependent origination. After a while, the nature of how the mind fabricates reality by clinging to particular perceptions becomes apparent. This clinging doesn't involve any cognitive labeling (i.e. the thought "this is a flower") but rather is built into the basic mechanism of how we perceive, which is why it is so difficult to tease out. In order for us to perceive a flower in front of us or a sensation in our body, there must be an object, the flower or the body with something going on, and the mind must grab onto it and have a particular view about it.

The intent of this meditation is to reduce craving, or reactivity around perceptions, and thereby loosen up the mind to treat perception in a different way. Burbea notes that after a while, perceptions in meditation should be come lighter, and that they should then fade away. The classical texts speak of this in many places, for example this quote from Nagarjuna:

One who sees the absence of 'mine' and I-making does not see.*

In the classical texts, this is called "the pacification of perception (sarvopalambhopasmah in Sanskrit).

I've been noticing something like this in my daily meditation off and on for the last year and a half or so. Basically, I'll sit down and after I make sure my meditation timer is advancing properly (sometimes, if I don't hit the on button just right, it sticks and doesn't advance so I end up sitting for an hour or more instead of 40 minutes), I'll settle in and take note of what sensations happen to be arising in my body. Like this knee has a particular feeling of twisting, or my body is off center. If I need to actually make any physical changes in my posture, I'll make them. Then I will continue to note the sensations and usually tune into the breath at my abdomen. I use that because my Mahamudra teacher likes to have us start with what he calls the "origin point" at the base of the spine as the meditation object. My mental stance or view towards these objects (body sensations and the breath) is quite neutral, that they are just arising and falling as such things do, so more or less like Burbea's emptiness meditation. After a while, the sensations will fade. As the Heart Sutra says: no sound, no taste, no touch, no objects of mind. Shortly before the 40 minutes is up, hearing comes back on line and I hear the meditation timer chime.

Of course, not every daily meditation goes like that, sometimes I have stuff come up from work or in my life, and then need to notice it and return to the breath. I rarely get extreme papancia in my daily meditations though. About the most extreme is some light planning about what I'll do the next day at work, if it's an evening meditation, or during the day, if it's morning.

The funny thing about this fading of perception is that it is pretty easy to see the difference between sarvopalambhopasmah and when I'm drifting off to sleep. Basically, I am able to hold my posture fine and I don't think I am snoring either. Sometimes I do drift off to sleep and slump forward if it's an evening meditation and I've had a particularly long day, so I can tell the difference.  And finally, perception begins to return just before the meditation timer rings for the end of the session, as would be expected. I don't wake up suddenly with that: "Huh? I've just been sleeping for 40 minutes?" feeling. Since I'm going into the session with an intention to sit for 40 minutes, my mind has formulated some clinging around the end of the session; therefore, when the session is about to end, perception returns. The difference in the quality of mind of sleep and sarvopalambhopasmah is pretty obvious, but until I encountered Burbea's book, I was kind of wondering what was going on.

The other interesting point is that the fading is not like the path or fruit moment. These types of disappearance of perception are (or were for me) quite sudden, and twice the disappearance happened when I was doing something other than meditating. In those cases, perception simply stopped then rebooted a few moments later. In another, which occurred during a meditation retreat, the moment was preceded by a kind of strobing of perception which then ceased quite suddenly. And afterwards when the mind comes back on line after path and fruit moments, there is an enormous amount of energy and a feeling of well-being, as if something profound has occurred. So these experiences are quite intense. With the fading of perception in daily meditation, it's kind of like a feeling of comfort and ease, refreshing, not a great deal of energy, so it is more like the term in the classical texts, a pacification.

Later in the book, Burbea's goes into the relationship between intention, perception, and craving, basically unpacking the relationship between my intention to sit for 40 minutes and the return of hearing just before the meditation timer chimes.  Any kind of perception involves a very subtle clinging (tanha in Sanskrit) beyond the feeling of pleasant/unpleasant (vedana in Sanskrit) associated with the bare sensation, links seven and eight in the chain of dependent origination. He also talks a bit about karma, but spends most of that chapter discussing "purification" and catharsis, which many mediators believe and experience as an important part of their practice, but which he emphasizes is ultimately empty. One needs to approach this emptiness with the right mindset, of course, and he talks about that.

Anyway, I highly recommend Burbea's book if you want to check out some interesting approaches to meditation on emptiness. I would, however, be a bit careful about going around and claiming sarvopalambhopasmah as an "attainment" especially if you are on a Bodhisattva Path. Like the Heart Sutra says: "With no attainment, a Bodhisattva dwells in prajnaparimita (the Perfection of Wisdom)". Prajnaparimita is the understanding and perception of the fundamental emptiness under the phenomenal world.



* Mulamadhyamakakarika
Image source: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-03-optical-illusion-insight-world.html

Saving Light and the Bodhisattva Vow

 

So last week I posted the lyrics to a trace song* called "Saving Light" by Garth Emery and Standerwick, with Haliene (an American electropop singer) on vocals. The song was the top trance song of 2017. According to Wikipedia, the lyrics were written by Haliene, Roxanne Emory (Emory's sister and manager), Matthew Steeper, and Karra in 55 minutes. Emery and Standerwick tried various versions before settling on a classic trance interpretation. The lyrics are about bullying, and the music video shows the story of a high school girl being bullied. Money from sale of the song during Feburary last year was donated to an anti-bullying organization. Haliene's soaring vocals certainly are a big contributor to the reason the song did so well.

But the first time I heard the song, it sort of blew the top of my head off, like the picture of the thousand armed Avalokitshvara you see on Tibetan thankas (one of which hangs on my living room wall). I just had to get up and dance. And, a month later, it's still that way. I get this prana in my feet flowing up my back out the top of my head, kind of like a mini-version of the kundalini episode I experienced in the late 1990s. I could not for the life of my figure out why. I've been listening to trance music since the early 2000's, and lately been going to raves and trance festivals, but this was the strongest reaction I've had to a song.

With all due respect to Emory's, Haliene's, and Standerwick's, intentions, I don't think their stated theme was the reason. Bullying is a serious problem and I certainly feel compassion for the victims, but there was something else going on here that I couldn't put my finger on, until today. While I'm fully aware of the issues around reading something into an artist's work that the artist isn't claiming they put there, for me, the lyrics speak to a more spiritual or cosmic theme, a theme broader than the suffering of a single individual, a trans-personal theme so to speak.

Specifically, I feel the lyrics are addressing the Bodhisattva Vow, the vow to be reborn in samsara until every single sentient being is enlightened. The words about standing on the edge where endless meets the end, is about giving up nirvana, which is the end of suffering, for the endless cycle of rebirths. The voices whispering are the voices of all the suffering beings, pulling the bodhisattva back, life after life. In the second verse, the words "You're here, like lightening in my veins" is about prana, which can feel like lightening. Overall, the "you" that's the saving light, is the bodhisattva, so the person standing on the edge is kind of a proto-bodhisattva in the process of transforming into the full-fledged article. There are some aspects of the song that don't quite line up with this interpretation, but overall, I think the song deserves a broader, more spiritual interpretation than the authors originally intended.

The song was sort of an arrow targeted at the heart of my practice.

Whether you believe in rebirth or not is irrelevant I think. You can view it as a metaphor for giving up being comfortable to dive in and help. Or you can wait until you die and see, cause sooner or later you'll find out.


* Trace is a particular sub-genre of Electronic Dance Music known for its high energy, lyrics that often go beyond the usual pop lyrics to encompass drug, spiritual, and religious themes, while, at the same time, being eminently danceable. It originated in Europe, and particularly Berlin, in the mid- to late-1990s. The perfect music for carrying out my meditation teacher's recommendation: "More dancing, less thinking".

Image from https://themettagarden.com/2016/06/22/bodhisattva-vow/

Saving Light

 

[Verse 1]
I'm here
Where endless meets the end
Do you see me?
I'm hidden here again
Your whispers found its way
Calling me to stay

[Chorus]
I'm standing at the edge
But something always brings me back
All the voices in my head
Reminding of what I have

If I fall tonight
You can bring me back to life
If I fall tonight
You can be my saving light

[Pre-Drop]
You can be my saving light
You can be my saving light

[Drop]
You can be my saving light

[Verse 2]
You're here
Like lightning in my veins
Now they see me
And they'll never be insane
Your whispers found its way
Calling me to stay

[Pre-Drop]
You can be my saving light

[Drop]
I'm standing at the edge
But something always brings me back
All the voices in my head
Reminding of what I have

If I fall tonight
You can bring me back to life
If I fall tonight
You can be my saving light

You can be my saving light
You can be my saving light

[Outro]
You can be my saving light
You can be my saving light

Garth Emery & Standerwick, featuring  Haliene.

Listen to it here and read about it here.

Meaning and Truth

Nagarjuna Conqueror of the Serpent, 1925. A painting by Nicholas Roerich, (1874-1947)

Recently, a friend at work told me that he had listened to a podcast by Sam Harris interviewing Robert Wright concerning Wright's new book Why Buddhism is True. Knowing that I was a Buddhist, he wanted my opinion about it. I told him that Buddhism, particularly Mahayana Buddhism, has a particular philosophical approach to truth that differs considerably from Western philosophy, but that we should rather talk about it some time over a beer (nonalchoholic in my case). I was of course referring to the Mahayana and Vajrayana notion of the Two Truths, which I've written about before in this blog. Though I haven't read the book, I suspect it is not a particularly nuanced discussion of the topic, and that Wright entitled it that (or his publisher did) as a provocation, which, in many cases, helps sell more books. I'm sure the Dali Lama would never so entitle a book, or even make it the title of a talk. But the topic of truth and in particular its relation to the opposite, namely falsehood, or, when uttered by a person, lies, is in the air right now: "fake news", "alternate facts", etc. With respect to the Western society's discussion, the two truths don't have to do with facts and "alternate facts", they have to do with how reality appears to us and how is actually is.


The Two Truths doctrine is shared by all the Mahayana schools, though they differ on certain points, in some cases greatly in other less. Nagarjuna, the 2nd-3rd century monk whose philosophy serves as the basis for the Madhyamaka school of Mahayana (and who I have also written about previously in this blog here and here) held that conventional truth, or how reality appears to us, is about cause and effect, and ultimate truth, or about how reality is, is about emptiness, i.e. that reality, including cause and effect, holds no abiding substance from its own side. Some schools whose line of argument does not descend from the Madhyamaka, for example the Yogachara/Cittamatras, hold that there is no external reality at all, not even conventionally, and everything we experience as conventional reality is simply a construct of our minds. Nagarjuna never goes that far, but he doesn't specify any view with respect to ultimate reality, he simply uses negation to refute any view you, or in the case of his best known work Mulamadhyamikakarika (the Karikas for short) a theatrically postulated opponent, happen to raise. To do otherwise would simply raise his opinion to the status of a "view" which one could then subject to negation to refute.

Most of the argument in Mahayana and Vajrayana philosophy is about ultimate truth, but Wright and the discussion that is up right now in Western society, particularly the US, isn't about ultimate truth, at least not directly. It's about relative truth. Specifically, what constitutes relative truth. And there Nagarjuna and the Madhyamaka, regardless of their particular take on ultimate reality, have a clear message: truth is what corresponds to cause and effect. In the context of the generation of human suffering, that's Dependent Arising, or Pratītyasamutpāda in Sanskirt. In the context of everyday life or science, its about a particular collection of causes (some of which are technically known as "conditions" if they are not perceived to be the main cause) leading to an effect [1]. Even if cause and effect and Dependent Arising are not ultimate truth, as Nagarjuna so skillfully argues in the Karikas, they are how we perceive reality. If a postulated collection of causes does not lead to a specified effect, then the statement that there is a causal relationship is not true. 
  
I made the connection with meaning after recently finishing Asanga's (channeling Maitreya's) work Middle Beyond Extremes (Madhyantavibhaga in Sanskirt). I've been struggling with this work for some time now, but after taking a break, I finally managed to put some of it together. What particularly caught my eye is this:
 

Connection and familiarity,
Lack of connection and no familiarity:
Due to the first two, meaning is present and to the latter two, it is not-
This is being unmistaken about syllables [V.14][2]

What this text is saying is that meaning derives simply from two things: familiarity with the words that were spoken or written and a connection with what the words are designating. The commentaries (in particular, the one written by Ju Mipham, the great 19th century proponent of the Shentong) explain this in more detail. If you are not familiar with the words, for example they are in a language you do not speak or you have never encountered them before, then you won't be able to understand what the other person is saying. Similarly, if you are not familiar with what the words designate, you will not understand. The words will convey no meaning to you. So meaning is really the effect of these two causes, namely familiarity and connection, and their role in human conceptual thought.

The connection between truth and meaning is the following. Meaning is something that is linguistically constructed and is part of the conceptual mind. (Relative) Truth is about cause and effect, a statement about the world. To the extent to which statements about cause and effect are always filtered through the conceptual mind, a disconnect can happen between the truth of how we perceive the world and how we describe it to ourselves (which in many cases can influence how we perceive the world). One person can maintain that the connection sits with a particular designation while the other can maintain that it happens through another designation. Either person can have other reasons for maintaining their view on the designation.

And here's the connection with ultimate truth: because there is no abiding essence to reality, in other words because of emptiness, two people can differ on how they perceive it, on how they perceive the cause and effect. They might even perceive the cause and effect quite differently. The decision to agree about a particular case will therefore cause people to perceive reality differently. That perception can either correspond to the underlying physical realty or it can deny it. To the extent that it denies, the people involved are in for trouble down the road.

Image source: Found in the collection of the International Centre of the Roerichs, Moscow. Photo by Fine Art Images / Heritage Images / Getty Images

[1] I would add here "probabilistically lead to an effect". The ultimate truth of emptiness means that even low probability events, like the sun suddenly disappearing, are still possible. They just don't happen very often if at all. Less extreme cases of multiple possible causes leading probabilistically to an effect are also easy to find. Most classical Buddhist philosophy doesn't deal with probability at all.

[2] Dharmachakra Translation Committee translation, p. 136, Wisdom Books, 2006. 

Meditation and Depression

Graph showing positive effect of Transcendental Meditation (not Mindfulness Meditation) on relief of depression

I hang out a lot on the Dharma Overground discussion list, usually checking it once a day as part of my nightly tour of Web sites I’m interested in. Now and then, someone posts a note that goes something like this:

Hi, I’m new on this site, just found out about meditation. I’ve had depression for a number of years and want to see whether meditation can help to relieve it. Does anybody know…

Often the initial post will sit there unanswered for a while, but sometimes a regular will come on and post something like this:

Welcome to the site. I had the same problem as you for many years. It went away after I started meditating regularly, and so far, it hasn’t come back…

Recently, I posted a response to an initial query that went something like this:

Welcome to the site. My advice is to work with a therapist and if the therapist suggests medication, give it a try. If the initial medication doesn’t work, then there are others. If no medication works, then maybe your genetics is such that drugs won’t help and talk therapy, maybe with some meditation under the guidance of teacher might work.

A couple other people responded as in the previous paragraph. You can read the thread here.

Now, my reason for giving this advice has to do with my experience regarding meditation and depression. Even though I have never had a diagnosis of depression, I experienced major depression after a meditation retreat that I had to leave early in 1996 (you can read about it in my memoir) in which my entire plan for the rest of my life collapsed over the period of about a month. This is what many in the Dharma Overground community and elsewhere call “The Dark Night”. The experience I had is not particularly uncommon but also it is not a forgone conclusion that everybody goes through it. For someone who already has depression, however, starting a serious meditation practice that then leads to further, perhaps deeper depression could be devastating.

So, being a fan of fact based analysis, I got to thinking: what does the research literature say about meditation and depression? Anybody who knows how psychological research works knows that anecdotal reports, such as that cited above by the list posters, are excellent for pointing toward a possible cause-effect relationship, but to really prove it, you need a rigorous statistical study. So I turned to Google Scholar and googled “mediation depression”.

I came across this article on the Web site of the Journal of the American Medical Association. The article is a meta-analysis, which means that it sorts through the primary literature looking at various studies that meet criteria and summarizes the results from those studies. The analysis runs only up until 2012, about when the current popular interest in mindfulness was just starting. The studies surveyed were restricted to those that were randomized clinical trials with controls for placebo effects. Randomized trials are more or less the gold standard when trying to measure cause and effect, and placebo controls are necessary to ensure that the effect is in fact coming from the presumptive cause, and not simply a result of the subject being convinced that they are getting an active treatment, when in fact they are part of the control group. The authors reviewed 47 studies having a total of 3,515 participants.

The results showed that mindfulness meditation had a moderate effect in reducing anxiety, depression, and pain for up to 6 months, but low effect at reducing stress and improving mental health related quality of life. The authors found no evidence that meditation helped with improving mood and attention, reducing or eliminating substance abuse, promoting healthy eating habits, helping with weight control, or improving sleep. In addition, even for depression and anxiety, meditation was no better than other active treatment regimens such as drugs, behavioral (usually cognitive behavioral) therapy, or exercise such as yoga. The authors then go on to note that many of the studies reporting positive effects are uncontrolled or don’t control for placebo effects, and the people conducting the studies often are themselves meditators or have had positive experience with meditation or may have some other vested interest or belief in the effectiveness of meditation for relieving psychological problems.

What to make of this? One way to look at it is that, even though the pharmacological companies have heavily marketed antidepressants for years, they are really not any more effective than meditation, yoga, or talk therapy for helping relieve depression. There is some evidence that genetics may influence the effectiveness of selective serotonin inhibitors (SSIs, the component of many antidepressants). Other studies haven’t found any relationship between a person’s genetics and SSI effectiveness. The same might be true of meditation, that is people with particular genes might benefit more from meditation and talk therapy than from SSIs.* A recent study connected relief from depression to use of probiotics. The digestive tract is known to have many serotonin receptors and the microbiome is currently an active area of research that is turning out to have surprising effects on physical and psychological health. This study has yet to be replicated.

Anyway, based on what I know now, I think I would change my advice to someone who was looking for relief of major depression. The most important point is that you need to work with a therapist, and, if you try meditation, with a qualified (in other words trained) teacher. The reason is that you need to have someone who has the training to give you an objective opinion about whether a particular treatment is affecting your emotional state. Since meditation generally costs little and seems to be about as effective as drugs, starting with meditation is a good way to go. Also exercise, like yoga, and maybe probiotics all are relatively inexpensive and have been shown to help. If you are working with a therapist, then you will probably also be doing some behavioral therapy, and I’ve known some meditation teachers who include that in their approach. Your support network can give you objective feedback. And finally, if nothing else works, try drugs. They are expensive and don't work any better than much cheaper methods.

*I speculated to that effect in the DhO thread, having seemed to recall an article I had recently seen, but upon further searching I could not find the article. 

Image source: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2010-04-depression-transcendental-meditation.html