Ruben Laukkonen: Cessation, Nirodha, and the Neuroscience of Awakening
Ruben: I think it’s fascinating phenomenologically, from the perspective that you can have this sudden moment of transformation that appears to be permanent in mind. And it’s fascinating scientifically because it tells us something about the depth at which we can control our conscious experience and change our brain from within.
Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump, in case you’re not familiar with it, is a long-running series of conversations with spiritually awakening people and about spiritual topics. We’ve done over 750 of them now. If this is new to you and you’d like to check out the library of previous ones, certainly you can do that on YouTube. But we have a lot more categorization features on batgap.com, our website. So you might want to explore there also. Also on that website, you’ll find PayPal buttons and a page about donating. This whole thing is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. So if you appreciate it and would like to help support it, there are those options, but obviously no obligation. And I’ve always wanted to make this free and readily available with no paywalls or tricky offers for those who sign up or anything. What you see is what you get. Okay, so my guest today is Ruben Laukkonen. Ruben is the director of the Flourishing Intelligence Program at Linacre College, University of Oxford. He is also the co-director of the Centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing, a Senior Researcher within Oxford’s Department of Psychiatry, and a fellow at Linacre College. Is that the right pronunciation, “Linacre”?
Ruben: “Linecker”.
Rick: Linacre, sorry. He has made significant theoretical and empirical contributions to the cognitive neuroscience of consciousness, meditation, and insight. His work also reveals a pathway towards better and safer artificial intelligence based on the science of consciousness and contemplative wisdom. Ruben has an eclectic contemplative background including Zen, Advaita, and Theravada, and his first-person inquiry into the nature of reality continues to deeply inform his scientific research and vice versa. Now we’re going to talk about many of the things that I just read in that introduction, but for starters, in case people aren’t familiar with the term eudaimonia, define that. And it’s pretty much synonymous with “flourishing,” right? And explain what attracted you to get involved in that.
Ruben: What distinguishes eudaimonia for me from, say, arbitrary pleasure-seeking is the quality of meaning. And I think when you think about eudaimonia, for me it means that suffering has a place and that purely hedonistic approaches to life are likely unsatisfying, and that we can find deep meaning, sometimes even in the most difficult of life circumstances. So I’m drawn to the notion of eudaimonia as a kind of way to think about living a good life. But really for me it’s a living inquiry. I don’t think it’s settled what eudaimonia is, but pointing towards the idea that there’s ways to live a beautiful life, and trying to achieve that and having a kind of living interdisciplinary research program where we try to understand flourishing and eudaimonia I think is really important. I also don’t think there’s any ceiling to these things, and I think the sages of the past, whether we think of the Buddha or Jesus, found a profound kind of deep eudaimonia or deep flourishing, as I sometimes think about it, and I’m very interested in those those topics.
Rick: Good, yeah. Obviously there’s no universal agreement on what flourishing or eudaimonia is. There used to be a beer ad in which the line was, “You only go around once in this life so grab all the gusto you can get.” I think some guys were sitting on a boat. That was another one, they’re sitting on a boat and it says, “This is it, it doesn’t get any better than this.” They’re out fishing or something. So obviously people do all kinds of things in the search for happiness, many of which turn out to be counterproductive, because those things end up making them miserable in the long run.
Ruben: I agree. I agree. I think there’s a thousand ways to get lost and confused in this life for every one path that does bring us deep satisfaction. And again, I think this is where the contemplative wisdom traditions are kind of lighthouses in the sea of this life, so that we have a sense of maybe where to look to find a real kind of lasting meaning and flourishing and peace.
Rick: Yeah. And obviously in a lot of those traditions, the custodians of them were monks or recluses and their basic line was [that] the world sucks, give it up and just look within, that’s the only place you’re gonna find happiness. But others had an emphasis that spiritual development will actually enhance life both inner and outer, kind of like 200% can be employed to make life richer and more successful.
Ruben: That’s right. And I think most good things are to some degree downstream of “Know thyself.” I think we can find that most of the sages, even including from the West – people like Socrates and Aristotle – but also Lao Tzu and Rumi and the Buddha, all spoke about the importance of knowing thyself. I think it’s very hard for us to come to flourishing and meaning unless we understand how the mind constructs experience. And so I think to some degree we do need to begin by knowing our own mind, and then somehow, out of this self-knowledge, wise and compassionate action is, I think, more likely to emerge. I think we can stumble, of course, into reasonably good lives without that, but it’s, I think, less likely to be resilient because there’s maybe some agency missing there. If we know our own minds, then we know how to recreate the conditions for flourishing because the principles are sort of evident to our own consciousness. And so, I do believe that to some degree, the good stuff is downstream of knowing our own minds. And this is not just from a meditation side, but I also think this is where science comes into helping us understand how the brain, the body, and our interactions with the environment construct a conscious experience. And through that we can understand the kind of contingencies, the dependencies that give rise to beautiful experiences.
Rick: Yes. And of course in many traditions the mind is not considered to be the ultimate level of who or what we are, and those traditions might say that knowing your mind won’t be sufficient to accomplish what you just described, and they might add that in fact you can’t even know the mind unless you know the deeper reality underlying it.
Ruben: Well, I think this depends on your definition of mind. I think mind certainly has layers of depth. There’s clearly, I think, a layer of mind that essentially you could call the personality, the more narrative aspects of who we believe we are, and maybe this is a more naive notion of mind perhaps. And then there’s maybe a more expansive notion of mind, deeper layers where we start to touch things like a more pure awareness, a more embodied presence, these kinds of layers of mind. You don’t need to call those “mind” if you don’t want. And perhaps there’s also cosmic mystical experiences and this kind of category of events that I think is also very interesting. And yet I also don’t really place so much emphasis on any one of them. I think the most free kind of mind is free to inhabit our most basic, ordinary self, as well as the kind of deeper presence, as well as pure awareness, as well as mystical states, and also then just go and take out the trash and be happy.
Rick: I would agree. You can see life as multidimensional, and the kind of freedom you just described would be a facility with all dimensions, so that you could operate in any and all of them according to the situation, such as taking out the trash. In fact, you could be having a very profound experience of the world while taking out the trash. So I was talking to some people in a webinar yesterday and they were talking about heaven on earth, and I said, Well, it’s here now, but it’s in the eye of the beholder, and if it were in the eyes of enough beholders, perhaps it would more readily be in the eyes of all beholders, because enough of us experiencing it could have a propagating effect for the whole collective consciousness.
Ruben: Well I agree with that. I think we’re interdependent, so I think any time a node in the network starts to have a particular kind of experience, that experience kind of resonates and influences the other nodes in the network. We’re all nodes in the network, and the more we can live beautiful lives I think that we’re likely to create a sort of inertia or homeostasis, a kind of whirlpool that draws others into this kind of state. You can even think about transmissions between teachers and students as embodying a little bit of this fact, this interdependence that is there.
Rick: And the same principle would apply to the opposite, where if everyone is radiating a lot of yucky influence, then yuckiness prevails and tends to drag everyone into it.
Ruben: Well that’s right. We’ve all had the experience of going to a party and the vibe sucks, and we’ve had experiences of going to a festival and being immediately uplifted as you walk towards the stage and kind of pulled into the music and the atmosphere. I think there’s clearly some truth there.
Rick: Good. So there are a number of major themes we’re going to discuss today, and one of them that you’ve spent a lot of time thinking and studying and talking about is this idea of cessation. Something that in Buddhism is called nirodha samapatti. So explain what that is, and let’s talk about that for a while, and then we’ll move on to other topics.
Ruben: Yeah, this is a fascinating topic for me for many reasons. Basically, cessation… Look, I want to say also, to begin with, that it’s quite contentious, this topic, and even within, say, Buddhism and other traditions, when you talk about this, depending on who you ask, you’ll get a very different opinion on it. But one thing that is kind of clear, I feel, from the Pali Canon, the original teachings of the Buddha, is that there is this state where consciousness, perception, and feeling, and all of the things that we take to be ourselves and the kind of reality that we inhabit can be extinguished like a flame going out, is how it’s described in the suttas. And this is very interesting for many reasons. One, from a scientific perspective, it captivated me because it’s a way to explore consciousness, because it’s quite paradoxical that consciousness could turn itself off. How is it possible that a mind could basically turn the knob of general anesthesia, self-administer general anesthesia, your own turn-off consciousness. And so in these cessation experiences, when folks describe them, there’s a complete collapse of consciousness – also space, time, and anything that might resemble awareness. And so it’s nothing like deep sleep, because you know you’ve slept and you have a sense that time has passed. In nirodha and nirodha samāpatti – and those two are a little bit different – it’s much more like general anesthesia in the sense that there’s just a cut in consciousness and yet a huge amount of time could have passed – days, for instance. So it’s quite unique. It means that something in the fundamental process that constructs experience and memory has collapsed – though, as we now know from our research, not all processing has collapsed. Though we do see some important reductions. And so it’s interesting for scientific reasons, but what makes it actually important from a contemplative path perspective is that there is a profound transformation that one experiences when they go through an experience like this. So sometimes these nirodha or cessation moments are associated, for example, with the stages of awakening in Buddhism. So things you might have heard of – stream entry, for example – this is the first stage of awakening in Buddhism. And so when the cessation happens, it’s not really actually that important that consciousness turns off. What’s important is that the mind is said to be permanently transformed and there’s a kind of completely new software – and this is of course now more modern language – installed in the mind such that we begin to perceive reality differently, we begin to perceive ourselves differently, might have a profound increase in the clarity and flexibility of mind as well as the heart opening and the compassion that comes as well. So I think it’s fascinating phenomenologically from the perspective that you can have this sudden moment of transformation that appears to be permanent in mind. And it’s fascinating scientifically because it tells us something about the depth at which we can control our conscious experience and change our brain from within, actually. So usually of course if you need something like an anesthetic, like either ketamine or general anesthesia, or you need to have a seizure or a concussion to have an experience like this… But in this case it seems to be meditation induced.
Rick: Okay, so a number of questions about this. You kind of answered my first question, which is, Why would this be desirable to shut everything off, and you said okay, it’s transformative. And I presume you mean not only in terms of your subjective wiring and orientation and behavior, but in terms of your neurophysiology. So what have you measured in both of those realms that seems to change as a result of this cessation experience?
Ruben: So with the participants that have gone through cessation laboratory conditions – and this usually involves a combination of jhāna and insight practice or Vipassana practice – what we tend to see, one of the consistent replicated findings, is a big reduction in – if we’re looking at EEG, electroencephalography (that’s where we put electrodes on the head and measure electrical activity off the scalp) – we see a big reduction in alpha power, for instance. Alpha power is the dominant frequency in the brain, so it’s something quite influenced by meditation. But I think even more interestingly, we see a kind of breakdown in essentially long-range temporal correlations. We use a measure called phase lag index. It’s a little bit technical, but basically if you imagine that there are waves on the brain that are kind of correlating with each other, they’re synchronized, right? And so then what we find, as meditators go into this cessation state, we see this desynchronization of activity. Conceptually, it also makes a lot of sense because you need synchronization to integrate experience, and then if you’re deconstructing experience through, for example, insight or Vipassana, then it makes sense that the neural activity becomes decoherent. And if the neural activity becomes decoherent, then the world model can’t put itself together, and so you can have a collapse of the world model, the integrative processes that allow us to have a unified experience of reality, as we are having now. And so I think there’s some face validity to that one. We see alpha changes with a lot of tasks, so I don’t take that too seriously because we see that a lot. Of course, I think it’s quite radical, the degree of the change that we see there. And then, of course, we also see some interesting things. So, Matthew Sackett’s lab, for example, found that you get some of the same effects that you get with, for example, general anesthesia. So you get this decoherence effect with general anesthesia too, but then you also get an increase in complexity of neural activity in the nirodha experience, which is different to anesthetics. So there’s some interesting distinguishing factors there as well. Just to think about this mechanistically, the brain has this incredibly complex task of taking in sensory data from separate streams. So if you think about the visual information coming through your retina, the auditory information, and all of the interoceptive information in your body, all of this is coming into the brain at different times and also in different parts of the brain, the brain has this incredibly extraordinary computational task of putting it all together into this kind of coherent experience that makes sense. And we can mess with the coherence of this experience very easily in the lab. We can create visual illusions, embodied illusions, and basically any aspect of consciousness can be messed with. It’s an inference, it’s a construction to some degree. And so if you’re doing a deep and profound insight[*capitalize?] practice where you’re exploring the three characteristics – anicca, anatta, dukkha, i.e. the impermanence, the emptiness, the not-self – the clinginess of our models, including the self, which is this deeply organizing, deep model within the brain – then you can imagine that at some point this hits the foundations of our model building, in the sense that the brain encounters so much error as a consequence of this deconstructive practice that the existing model simply can’t maintain itself anymore. And as a consequence of this exposure therapy to this kind of deep practice, this old model just can’t maintain itself anymore because the error just builds, builds, builds until it collapses. And in that collapse – I’m kind of now speculating about my own theories about this – a bit like a computer, if you need to update the software because the model needs to change, you have to turn it off and on again. And I think there’s probably something like that going on as we deconstruct our world model through meditation – that once that deconstruction is profound enough, the mind undergoes a sort of reset, kind of reboot.
Rick: Interesting. Yeah, I can see how deconstructing everything and then reconstructing it might be a faster way of transforming something than just tinkering with it while it remains fully constructed. And I think you apply this principle to AI, that it goes through these loops of deconstruction and reconstruction, yes? And we’ll talk about that later if you do. But I’m curious about the decoherence or asynchronization of the brain because, you know, with an old TM background going back decades, I’ve always heard about brainwave synchrony as being a good thing. And they talk about, in their research, how ordinarily the signals from different parts of the brain are asynchronous, they’re not in phase with one another, but then during meditation they become synchronous and a very high degree of brainwave synchrony prevails while one is in deep meditation. And also – might as well throw this in also – in that method or in that tradition, ultimate, complete blotting out of consciousness is not considered desirable. It’s more of a dawning of pure awareness without content. In the Yoga Sutras it says that yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind. So the mind settles down, becomes quiet, silent, and as it does so it’s kind of like the ripples on a pond settling down, which allows the sun to reflect much more brightly than if the water is all choppy. So it sounds like we’re talking about two very different experiences, both subjectively and neurophysiologically, does it not?
Ruben: I agree. I think there are many reasons for this. One is that the practices are very different, the goals are very different. Buddha’s teaching was very different to what was taught in the Yoga Sutras or in the Hinduism that preceded it, precisely because of the three characteristics applying also to consciousness and applying to all aspects of phenomena. And so you can think about – or how I think about it – the Buddha taught liberation, not pure awareness. And of course, pure awareness arises, but I think the concern there is that then one might just get attached to the pure awareness and get stuck in a loop of trying to be pure awareness, and that’s its own kind of suffering.
Rick: Not necessarily, but I can comment on that later.
Ruben: We can come back to this. And as to the alpha coherence, of course I’m aware of the kind of old-school TM research on this, and you get these coherence findings. The more recent research even on TM… so a colleague of mine, Alejandro, just recently put this paper out on TM meditation, and we have some work coming out on this too, basically showing that these coherence measures are very weak predictors ultimately of the TM state. What’s happened in the field generally in neuroscience is that we’ve found that nonlinear measures are much more powerful at predicting conscious states than linear measures.
Rick: So explain linear and nonlinear.
Ruben: Sure, yeah, yeah. So a linear measure is when something simple in the brain goes up, then something else is also expected to go up. So you have, for example, alpha goes up, then your experience of concentration goes up or down. So it’s very simple. But the brain is a nonlinear complex system. So to actually understand representational states in the brain, you have to think about interactions, complex interactions between variables. So, for instance, now we think about things like entropy and multivariate things. You can’t visualize them as easily as linear relationships because it’s complex relationships between many variables and you’re trying to understand how those complex relationships between many variables predict the phenomenology. So we find these to be much more predictive. The recent paper, for example, finds that entropy is a much better predictor even of TM meditation. I think still that coherence is maybe a useful thing and interesting, but when we start to think more deeply about what are the kind of things that predict changes in conscious experience, whether it’s on psychedelics or meditation, we’re finding much more that these non-linear, multivariate measures are the most powerful. Yeah.
Rick: Okay, interesting. So, you said something interesting a minute ago, which is that it seems that the goal of Buddhism is different than the goal of Vedic or Advaitic practice, if that’s a fair way of phrasing it. And that always interests me because I always wonder, you know, if you got Jesus and Buddha and Krishna and Patanjali and all these guys together in a room, would they agree with each other about what they were experiencing and about what the nature of reality actually is, or would their different traditional paths and practices result in very different views on such matters? And if so, that kind of leads to the question of whether subjective means of gaining knowledge can give us any accurate understanding of the nature of the world.
Ruben: Well, my opinion, and that’s what it is, of course, is that they’re directionally on the same path, let’s say. But I think, for instance, even in Buddhism, as you practice, and especially in Mahayana and maybe even more particularly in Vajrayana, you use awareness as a kind of pedagogy. So you use it as a teaching tool. And so there is a… You might consider that it’s important to discover pure awareness and have these insights, but you have to be equally careful not to have an attachment formed to notions of pure awareness. So I think that ultimately what the Buddha emphasized is that awareness itself can be a powerful refuge from the egoistic mind. And so in that sense I think it’s a beautiful discovery, but that ultimately awareness and consciousness is also empty and is also a dependent origination, is also subject to causes and conditions. And I think that’s also what science reveals – of course not conclusively, because it’s impossible to get to the metaphysics, but I think the evidence points in that direction. For me personally, the experiential practice also reveals that even this duality of conscious and non-conscious ends up being a kind of inference of the mind, and that the reality of those categories and the reality of awareness is much more colored by the inferential kind of assumptions of our mind than we like to admit. And again, I think people might say that that’s less beautiful, but actually I think it’s more beautiful, because I think there’s more freedom in being able to inhabit the full spectrum of the mind that we talked about before, without having to have this feeling of needing to be awareness all the time or something like that. I think actually one of the big risks – and I think this is also what the Buddha taught – is pride. One of the final kind of things to let go of is pride. And I think one of the traps of pure awareness is that there’s a very subtle but palpable pride that can come along with having uncovered this new foundation of mind and the kind of wonderful experience that it brings. And again, I do think it’s wonderful, but I think if you want to, you can go beyond that.
Rick: Well, there could be, and I’ve seen plenty of instances of people who had fantastic experiences getting up on the microphone and bragging about them and strutting around beating their chest with how cosmic they were and things like that. But I don’t think it’s necessarily that way. I think that many of the great sages who would claim to have grounded themselves in a state of pure awareness abidingly were devoid of pride. They’d matured beyond that. So that’s kind of a whole discussion about maybe Ken Wilber’s lines of development and, you know, whether you could advance quite a bit in the consciousness line and still be quite immature in other lines and so on. We’re not finished with cessation yet, but I also want to loop around to the notion, which we can discuss more later, about whether consciousness is ontologically primitive or fundamental, or is in some sense just a product of the brain or other natural processes in the universe. Because if it is the ultimate reality and if one can open one’s experience to incorporate that, then it wouldn’t be something one needed to hold onto or feel proud about or anything else. It would just be one’s ultimate resting place that was there whatever you were doing. In fact, with your friend Delson Armstrong, he maintains that he doesn’t lose pure awareness during sleep. And that is obviously something you couldn’t will yourself to have, because you’re not in a position to do so while you’re sleeping. It would have to be spontaneous or not there at all. And the same would be true of the other states – you know, waking state. You wouldn’t be clinging to it all day long while you’re trying to do other things. It would either be there clearly or it wouldn’t, or it would be there to whatever degree it was, without any effort involved and also without any necessity to feel special about it or anything else if you were a a mature personality.
Ruben: I agree and I think if it is there, fantastic, but we also don’t need to worry about it coming and going or whether it’s permanent or the final ultimate reality. In some way I even question the notion of ultimate reality, because that implies that there is some reality that is not. I think there’s simply reality, and we are all living in reality, and somehow I think also this is what comes through the Mahayana insight that emptiness is form and form is emptiness, emptiness is none other than form and form is none other than emptiness. I think what we take to be ultimate reality at a certain stage of the path turns out to collapse into the relative and vice versa, and there’s this beautiful interpenetration that happens and life simply is life.
Rick: Yeah, and that coincides with the Vedic perspective too. They say Brahman is the eater of everything. It’s all Brahman, whether it appears to be manifest or not. To paraphrase the Buddhist saying, you could say, “Brahman is form, and form is Brahman.” That’s a fascinating topic in itself that I often get into with people – whether these different traditions are resulting in people having very different experiences of reality and yet supposedly having attained the highest level of realization. You would think that they would all share a common experience if they’ve attained the highest level of realization, if their particular path was capable of providing that. Could there really be as many realities, ultimately, as there are people, or enlightened people?
Ruben: Well yeah, it’s a deep contemplation, and I think for me, since reality is interdependent, I think more that awakening and realization is like a flower blossoming, and each flower that blossoms is somewhat unique to its causes and conditions, and so I think there is room for uniqueness in this. And yet I do also agree that there is the unconditioned, that there are some parts of experience that seem to hit a kind of groundless, direct realization that is perhaps shared and yet very quickly the way that that blossoms in the expression of our lives is highly unique, and so I leave that as an open question, really. Yeah.
Rick: Yeah, I agree with the highly unique part. You could have a thousand enlightened people, without going into the definition of what enlightenment means, but a thousand people who supposedly reached a very, very high level of realization who are completely different in terms of their relative expression, their relative personality, lifestyle, interests, and so on. And that doesn’t conflict with the traditional understandings of what enlightenment is supposed to be. It’s not that you automatically become a monk living in a cave if you attain it. I;l think that would be a kind of reification. That would be a kind of… I have to do this myself often – just question my notions of what enlightenment and awakening are, and realize that even those are empty. I think what’s beautiful about some of these traditions is – we’ll take for example in Buddhism – one of the criteria of stream entry is no longer having attachment to rites and rituals. And so the irony is that you perform all these rites and rituals and you become a Buddhist or a Hindu or whatever, but in the actual realization, you realize that all of these are just constructions and they’re all just ultimately empty of any kind of real essence.
Rick: Yeah, that’s true in the Vedic thing too, you know. Vedanta is kind of beyond rites and rituals, and they say it’s fine to do them if that’s your thing, but ultimately you get to a point where they’re not really that relevant or necessary.
Ruben: And you might still pick them up because it’s kind of beautiful.
Rick: You might, yeah. Sri Ramakrishna was a temple priest and did Kali pujas and stuff in addition to being a Vedantic exponent. is that they’re almost like in – not to get too technical – but in dynamical systems theory and physics you have these attractors in complex fields of networks, and so in reality these different traditions are like beautiful, flourishing attractors in the world. And then there are these other kind of attractors where there’s a lot of suffering and then maybe there’s other attractors that are okay but not that great. But really what these profound traditions are is these unique attractors that are profoundly beautiful if you inhabit them. And I think it’s in some ways even super beautiful to be able to move between them and to be able to appreciate the view from the Buddha or the view from Christianity or the view from the Vedanta. And I don’t think they’re contradictory in that sense, because all views are just views. The question is, are they views that are life-giving? Are they beautiful views? Are they helpful views? Are they liberating views? And I think we need to begin to think of a pluralistic way of navigating. Or again, in dynamical systems theory, there’s this thing called metastability. So it’s this capacity to flexibly inhabit different attractors as needed. Because always the mind only has a tiny slice of reality. We can’t compress the universe. So we have to always admit that our model is such a tiny compression of the grand reality that the only kind of wise way to hold our model is extremely flexibly, and have the model itself be a kind of dependent arising that’s willing to change at a moment’s notice to meet the present as it actually is.
Rick: Yeah, that’s good. Obviously, what we can experience or know through our senses is always going to be a tiny sliver of the full spectrum of possibility – fortunately so, because if we could experience everything in the entire spectrum, we would be completely incapacitated and overwhelmed. But again, to my understanding, the idea of enlightenment is [that] although you’re not necessarily going to experience everything everywhere all at once through your senses, you are going to be privy to or tuned into or grounded in that which underlies all the diversity. And so, you know, unity and diversity – you’ll be established in being or pure consciousness or the absolute or whatever you want to call it, while performing your particular function as an individual within the limitations that an individual necessarily has.
Ruben: I feel indeed that as we practice, we’re able to tune in. I use this term “gradients” – gradients of flourishing, gradients of meaning, beautiful gradients, where we’re attuned to the cosmos in some sort of more direct way. I think something that happens over long-term practice is a kind of intimacy with experience. The kind of filter or the distance between our mind and life itself becomes shorter and shorter as we’re able to hold more of the kind of immediate energy of this moment. And as we’re able to cohere more with that and to have better compressions that we embody over time, then we’re able to better resonate, we’re able to better tune to the larger scales of causality that we’re a part of. And if we zoom in to the human body or the brain, we see that it goes deep, right? So you go from the brain to networks, to neurons, to microtubules, to protein, to quantum information. And then we can go all the way back up from the quantum field to microtubules, to neurons, to networks, to the brain, to the body, to our biosphere, our culture, and zoom all the way out to the cosmos. And we are a neuron in a brain. I think all of the scientific evidence points in that direction. So everywhere we look, we see this embeddedness, this nestedness in larger systems, larger scales of causality on which we depend. The neuron depends on the nutrients from the rest of the brain. It has no meaning. It quickly dies, cells become cancerous once they come out of coherence. And part of having a good life is being in coherence with these larger scales of causality, the larger systems that we can’t comprehend, just like the neuron can’t comprehend the brain, and yet we have to have this connection, these nutrients come from these larger scales of causality that keep us alive and keep us flourishing, and bring us the synchronicity, the meaning and the purpose that makes our lives awesome.
Rick: Lovely. That was so eloquent. I really loved that. And what it triggered in me is the thought that the intelligence which pervades and orchestrates the universe… it pervades. It pervades every cell in our body, every particle, everything, everywhere, every galaxy. And since it pervades us as well as everything else, it could be located within us and we can tune to it such that we really become just a sense organ of it rather than an isolated individual. We express as an individual – but on the foundation of that intelligence – and then we achieve that kind of cosmic individuality that I think you were just describing.
Ruben: That’s right. I think foundationally we are everything. There’s no way to separate us from the universe. I mean it’s almost a cliche to say, but it bears reminding over and over again: We are not separate from this grand dance of the cosmos. And we are the fingers of God, you can say poetically. And that is just as much a scientific fact as it is a spiritual fact.
Rick: And that can be a living reality, not merely a philosophical plaything.
Ruben: That’s right. I think that’s what practice reveals. It brings us into an intimate kind of intuitive sense that is the reality, and we live in this system that’s so much more than we are, and we get to play our little role in this cosmos’s evolution.
Rick: Yeah. Okay, so a thought that’s been kicking around the back of my mind for a few minutes… Earlier, I think you said something like, either maybe there is no ultimate reality or maybe we can’t experience it even if there is something along those lines?
Ruben: Well I just questioned the whole term of “ultimate reality.” I think everything is reality. We’re staring reality in the face right now and it’s just enough that way. And it’s often the case, I think, as we practice we start to imagine some sort of like ground where there’s an ultimate reality and we are somehow… We have metaphors like samsara and nirvana and all of this. And all of that is helpful because to some degree we are caught in ignorance, and we identify with ego structures, and we suffer unnecessarily and all of this. And so then we set out on a path to understand that better. And having these pointings out that say, “Hey, look, there’s more to this than you see,” is very helpful. And you go through this process of getting to know yourself a little bit better, and you see the nature of the ego maybe a little bit clearer, never fully, and you start to find these new layers of being. But what tends to happen, and this is the risk, is that we then reify those new layers that we discover and we start to make these distinctions between the ultimate and the relative and so on. And these, I think, are pedagogically very useful as teaching pointers, but metaphysically I think they’re not true, in the sense that as we come to realize these deepest parts that we might even take to be ultimate reality, we find that ultimate reality is pregnant with relative reality, and really you can’t distinguish the two. And any kind of distinction that we make between the two, I find – and have found through my own experience – ends up being a construction of my own mind.
Rick: Yeah, there’s a line from an old song, “What is here is everywhere, what is not here is nowhere at all.” And when you talk like this, I think of science. Okay, I’m not a professional scientist like you, but as I understand it, from its origin, science began asking the question: “All right, there’s more to life than meets the eye. Let’s dig deeper and figure out what this is and what this is.” And physics in particular has gone to more and more fundamental layers. Ultimately, in the minds of many physicists, looking for what they might call a unified field, something that is… They’ve gotten it down to the point where the four fundamental forces: three of them unified and one of them gravity still separate from the three, but the next step might be the unification of those forces and that might be some kind of unified field, which would be the foundation and ultimate origin of everything. And so I guess you could say, you could take anything in the world and start boiling it down to more and more fundamentals of its existence. And as you did so, you’d be kind of like going from any one spoke of a wheel back to the same hub, that from which all the diversity emerges and springs. And the corollary, the parallel to spirituality, is that, according to spiritual traditions, we are that hub. Not we as an individual, but our true nature is that hub. It’s kind of the home of all the laws of nature or the intelligence, which express themselves as the manifest universe. And if you can establish your awareness there, then you’re in a very good place to interact with life and the relative world.
Ruben: I don’t think that that view is wrong necessarily. I think there’s like… Again, I’m more of a pragmatist when it comes to views again, because I don’t believe that we can have the full model in our brain at any point. I mean, the universe is simply incompressible into a brain. Yet, I think the emerging view from the kind of science that I’m paying attention to – there’s a lot of diverse views in science – is more a kind of multi-scale causality, where you don’t simply reduce things to more fundamental principles and assume that you’ve now got a better explanation. I think it’s actually the dynamics of every layer of being that are mutually constraining each other and that means that the neuron is not a better explanation than the networks of neurons, which is not a better explanation than the brain and the body, which is not a better explanation than thinking of the biosphere and coming up with scientific models at that level. And multi-scale causality implies that each layer has its own causal power. It’s greater than the sum of its parts. And under that view, you don’t give precedence to smaller things. It’s not reducing reality to – and I know you don’t see it this way – into billiard balls or smaller balls and so on. It’s actually that it’s in the interactions of larger systems that you get the kind of important explanations. And this means that fundamentally, in my view, reality is not reducible in the way that we’ve imagined it to be previously. I think this new emerging science forces us to look at complex systems as they present themselves and to be able to describe them. I still think mathematics is the language to describe each of these layers of causality. But it allows us to then see that, Oh, when we meet each other, that layer of causality is just as real and powerful as this quantum field that we might point to, which is just And so it gives a kind of ground truth to every layer of reality, which I think is a more attractive view to me, and it’s also I think what the most cutting-edge science is pointing to. And this requires a kind of interdisciplinary view. So often the people who are coming to these kinds of views do work across fields – they work across neuroscience and physics and so on, because you start to understand when you get something like a brain that clearly has causal power on the world and it functions quite differently, perhaps, to purely a quantum field, right? Because it has recursivity, it’s kind of self-aware, it has consciousness. And so, you’ve got a new causal layer that’s functioning in the world.
Rick: So, let me take a simple example and see if this illustrates what you’re saying. So, it’s summertime here, and it’s warm, and people would enjoy going swimming in the water. They wouldn’t want to go swimming in oxygen or hydrogen, even though that’s what the water is. The water, on its own level as water, has a valuable quality and we enjoy it. And the oxygen and hydrogen consist of subatomic particles and they have their level of reality, which doesn’t resemble oxygen or hydrogen. And you can go down deeper to quarks and so on. So every level of reality or manifestation or magnification has its own value, and it’s not like the deeper ones are more valuable than the more manifest ones. Each has its place, its function, and that’s the way the universe is structured. But still, if there is an ultimate reality of everything that can be experienced subjectively, obviously it’s not going to be subatomic particles. But if it’s consciousness, if consciousness is fundamental, and if it could be argued that all of these more manifest layers arise from consciousness, then being established in that consciousness you might be able to apprehend the essential nature of all the manifest levels as you interact with them. So you see a tree and, oh yeah, it’s a tree, but I also see its essential nature as consciousness. People describe this kind of experience, you know, [they] say they live in unity all the time and that’s the way they interact with with the world.
Ruben: Yeah I think it’s attractive and I’ve had that experience myself and yet I don’t think it’s the deepest view. My sense is, you know…
Rick: What would the deepest view be?
Ruben: Well, I don’t know what the deepest view is. You know, we paint a picture where there are layers that are kind of non-real and then we go under them and then somehow we get to the real. And I would say that that’s true as a kind of path. And then when you get to the real, you realize that that too is empty. And then you suddenly realize that all of the manifestation is of the same nature as what you took to be the ultimate reality. This is the thing. You see, the thoughts, the ego structure, the relative in all its manifestation is also your true nature.
Rick: Agreed.
Ruben: Also your true nature. But if you agree with that, then I don’t think you can point to ultimate reality as some sort of separation from them, which I think is not what you mean, but comes through in the language, right? It comes through, and when we speak like that, I think we even momentarily sort of believe that to be a case, even as a model. And I think we need to somehow get to a model where we can talk about it without falling into that trap. And I don’t think we’ve solved that, but I think about it like interpenetrating. We have a sense of course that there’s a different phenomenology when you’re absorbed in awareness, presence, consciousness to when I’m like coding on my laptop or something, right? There’s different quality there. And yet to say that one is consciousness and one is not – no. They’re both completely consciousness, they’re both completely the cosmos, they’re both just as much God and not God as each other. And so somehow this duality – I think we need to collapse it, even now in the way that we talk.
Rick: Yeah, I totally agree. In the Vedic model, there is a stage at which one experiences the Self with a capital S as being distinct and separate from the relative field. But that’s just a stage. And then one progresses from there and eventually unification prevails. And just what you described becomes one’s experience.
Ruben: That’s right, that’s right. And I think even if you look deep into what Sri Nisargadatta taught, (Nisargadatta being a kind of classic and Advaita non-dual teacher who talked a lot about awareness and using awareness as a kind of pedagogy), ultimately you can find quotes of his also saying, “No, no, eventually you do go beyond awareness.”
Rick: Yeah, I have a quote from Nisargadatta in a little graphic. He said this shortly before he died – he said, forget I Am That. That was the title of his book. He said, “I’ve learned so much more since then. It’s so much deeper.”
Ruben: That’s right. That’s right.
Rick: Yeah. Before we move on entirely from cessation, nirodha-samāpatti – a question from my friend Suresh Ramaswamy, who’s been on BatGap. imply realization or deep integration, since fetters lie dormant within INS-induced nirodha-samapatti. How do you see the relationship between these measurable states and genuine freedom, the kind of pure beingness that may not have any distinct brain signature at all?”
Ruben: Beautiful question. It’s one of my great regrets that [in] researching nirodha-samapatti and these deep states that people think this means that I somehow equate them with the ultimate kind of discovery or something like that. It’s kind of a funny thing that happens, and I don’t think the question is even suggesting that necessarily, but it’s something that I face constantly, which is like, “Oh you shouldn’t be doing research on nirodha because really it’s about pure awareness or really it’s about this. I’m like, mate, it’s just scientifically interesting, right? Like, this is the thing. It’s interesting to be able to collapse consciousness from within. Forget all of the implications for what you think enlightenment is. This is not a message to the person asking this question, this is just a message to everyone who sees me researching cessation. It doesn’t mean I think this is the thing. I don’t equate it with enlightenment. I think you’re going to find people who have these experiences or say they have them and they’re still unwholesome, they can still be assholes, all of the rest, right? So just to, you know…
Rick: And you may find potentially saintly or enlightened people, if they really are, who have never had these sensation experiences, right? It’s not like a mandatory stepping stone to full realization.
Ruben: I tend to think that it is an important stepping stone, but this is just a kind of model I have in my mind. But I think many people can go really, really deep without ever even really giving much emphasis to those moments, because it’s not the absence that’s the thing – it’s the revelation that emerging from that absence reveals, which is a completely new view on reality, right? And so I think one of the great things again of classical Buddhism and the suttas is this focus on the unwholesome qualities of mind and the fetters and so on, because that keeps you really grounded. Because you might have all sorts of special experiences and so on, but if you’re still full of pride and full of ego and greed and hate and delusion, then forget it. It doesn’t matter if you’ve had a thousand cessations. That’s not it. It’s about wisdom and compassion.
Rick: Yeah.
Ruben: It’s about love.
Rick: Yeah, that’s what the Beatles said. And, you know, a good evidence for this is the fact that so many gurus and teachers from the East who supposedly were really enlightened turned out to be scoundrels in terms of their behavior. So, you know, they talked about pure consciousness all the time and all that stuff. So you might ask, “Well, what good did it do them?” Or maybe they didn’t really have it and thought they did or something. It’s a head-scratcher.
Ruben: Well, we’re all scoundrels.
Rick: Yeah, true.
Ruben: That’s the problem.
Rick: Hopefully less and less so. I would hope that to be one of the purposes of spiritual development, not just to have a more self-gratifying experience, but to become a better person.
Ruben: That’s right. I agree. And we do our best. And in a way, we do our best by realizing how much of a scoundrel we are. And in that, we can somehow temper it a little bit.
Rick: There we go. Okay, so let’s talk a little bit about neuroscience, physiology, and measurement. We kind of touched on it with talking about brain decoherence and all, but to what extent do you think higher states of consciousness, if you’re comfortable with that term, could be reliably measured and correlated with certain neurophysiological states the way we have done with waking, dreaming, and sleeping? A scientist could have a subject in the other room and know whether he is awake, asleep, or dreaming based upon the brainwaves and other measures. Do you think we’ll ever get to a point where we can map out all the various higher states that different traditions talk about and assign or correlate specific physiological measures with them?
Ruben: Yes. Basically I think everything has some physiological correlate, more or less, meaning that as we see now you can give people 5-MeO-DMT, which kind of reliably gets you into a fairly mystical pure-awareness state or you can give people more classical DMT and they’re you know, off in the other realms, communing with entities and so on. And all of these are fairly reliable signatures that have been mapped out by several labs around the world. And mystical experiences too are now kind of commonly – especially in the psychedelic literature – captured by particular neural signatures. But the important thing is, of course, that this doesn’t explain it, right? It doesn’t answer any of the metaphysical questions about the reality of these things, right? So I think having physiological neural correlates just suggests that this is the state the brain needs to be in to allow consciousness to have this experience, but there may be much more to it. Again, I’m not a reductionist in the sense that just because we now know the 5-MeO-DMT correlate of the mystical experience in the brain, we now understand that experience. I don’t think that’s true. I think all we have then is a correlate.
Rick: Yeah. And even our correlate must be very crude. I mean, what EEG and MRI and things like that can measure seems like just a tiny glimmer of people into the reality of what the brain is actually doing.
Ruben: Absolutely, absolutely. And many people don’t recognize this. Even if you take something like fMRI, you’re measuring a proxy of neural activity. You’re not even measuring… You’re measuring blood oxygenation, you’re not even measuring neural activity per se directly. And there’s ways in which those things actually diverge. And in EEG, you are actually measuring, at EEG and MEG, you’re getting electrophysiology and the magnetic field. So those are somewhat direct, but they’re emergent properties of interactions of different neurons in the brain. So you’re not… It’s extremely hard to get at the actual thing. And again, there’s no actual thing there because it’s multi-scale. So you’ve got everything from… What are you trying to measure? Are you trying to measure the kind of quantum stuff? Are you trying to measure the proteins, the microtubules, the neurons, the kind of frequencies or the emergent properties, the blood oxygenation? These are all just probes that we know are somehow correlated with the important activity, but we don’t ever capture the actual important activity. We can’t get directly at it in that way. And we do know that it’s important though. And we know that because, for example, we can do transcranial magnetic stimulation or focused ultrasound and so on. And so we can also generate experiences from activating regions of the brain. So we have very good causal evidence that these things are clearly connecting to something very deep about how the brain constructs our experience. And yet we still need to have some humility about these measures and the inferences we draw from our correlations.
Rick: Yeah I have a good friend who I have an ongoing debate with – I have have had for years – about whether subjective experience, spiritual experiences, can actually give us a handle on deeper realities, or whether the brain is just fabricating them. So what you just said about targeting magnets into the brain, or taking DMT, or the same could apply to meditation. Let’s say you take a drug like mescaline or DMT, and you experience unbounded awareness. All of a sudden you’re just vast and not limited to this body. Does that really mean that that’s a reality that you’re tapping into, or is it just your brain giving you the experience of unbounded awareness? Now, let me just add to the question. I just saw a thing yesterday on a little YouTube video that said if you stimulate a particular part of the brain, it gives you an out-of-body experience, and they can replicate this reliably. It didn’t say in the video whether you could experience anything in those out-of-body experiences that can be verified, as sometimes happens under surgery. Like Trisha Barker, whom I interviewed, saw her uncle or somebody buying a particular brand of candy bar in the waiting room at the hospital while she was unconscious with anesthesia, and later confirmed with him that that’s what he had bought. So that kind of gives you the feeling that perhaps subjective experiences of a mystical nature can give us knowledge that we can’t otherwise attain, including whether awareness is really unbounded. Anyway, I’ve said enough, you get the point.
Ruben: I do, and I keep an open mind about these things. And yet when I look at the science – people who have tried to, for example, test out-of-body experiences, remote viewing, and so on – people like Beth Loftus who really believed in these things deeply – and then try to go out to prove them to be true by having people do remote viewing and testing objects and seeing things that they shouldn’t be able to see – and I know also some colleagues trying in surgery rooms to see if out-of-body experiences can find information that they couldn’t find before – all of these don’t seem to come out to be true at this point. So whatever it is – maybe it’s just the difficulty of constructing the right scenario and maybe they’re just super rare when it’s actually real. I’m open to that as well. But the current evidence is showing that it’s probably not the case. Now just to give you one kind of cool hypothesis, which is that when people are having these out-of-body experiences – let’s say when they are undergoing surgery, a near-death experience, or something else – and they’re able to have an experience and they can verify it, I think there can be these states where our senses are so profoundly clear and open that we can hear things or even feel things from the the next room and kind of construct images because the brain is a prediction machine. It’s always constructing experience from electrical activity. It’s extraordinary that it can construct this clarity of this moment purely from basically two-dimensional electrical signals. And it’s doing this constantly. So each moment is a miracle of generative creativity of the mind-brain organism, right? And I think there’s states in which we reduce the computational power of the abstract mind and we come so deeply in touch with the sensory stimuli that in some cases we can construct whole visions. Our imagination is extraordinary. Think of lucid dreaming and dreaming itself. And we can kind of dream up what’s happening in the next room from very subtle sensory signals. And so I think sometimes this might be the case, that we can verify something in the next room just from subtle sensory signals.
Rick: Yeah, I’m skeptical of that one. I mean, Tricia Barker, she had a car accident. She was being operated on under anesthetic. The waiting room was nowhere near the surgery room. She saw her uncle buy a Snickers bar and she thought that’s unusual because he doesn’t usually eat candy bars, and later on she checked with him, and sure enough that’s what he had done. There’s nothing she could have picked up on in the Snickers bar. And there’s another guy who was under surgery and he saw a red sneaker up on some balcony in the hospital outside that someone had thrown off the roof or something and he reported it and some janitor or somebody went up there and found it. So again, under surgery, under anesthetic, there’s no way you’re going to get signals that there’s a red sneaker up on the roof someplace. And you know, people always say things like this – and I’m not calling you a skeptic – but it really kind of threatens their paradigm to believe that we could have an experience like that, but if it’s true and if it could be verified it opens up a whole new vista as to what we actually are, how we’re constructed, what we can know, how we can know it.
Ruben: Again I’ve had enough weird experiences that I keep a very open mind about all of these kinds of things and I think there’s many anecdotes probably happening every single day that do not match our mainstream scientific models. And I think it’s very clear that our conception of reality from the sciences is exceptionally incomplete when it comes to spiritual experiences, maybe even siddhis and so on. And yet, I treat the scientific process as sacred in the sense that we’ve come up with this very careful way of finding things out. That’s all it is. It’s just a careful way of finding things out. And it may be that not everything can be found out that way. There may be some things that are simply outside the purview of the scientific method because it’s too hard to control those conditions. Science kind of relies on control and some things might be very difficult to control. So what I take to be scientific evidence and what I take to be the potential of what is true, these are different. They’re overlapping Venn diagrams, but they’re not exactly the same thing.
Rick: Yeah, what you just said is very important. There seems to be an attitude among some scientists that, well, if we can’t measure it then it’s not worth thinking about, it couldn’t be real because we can’t measure it. But that’s so arrogant. It’s suggesting that our measurement methods are the ultimate arbiter of truth, and science has advanced to the highest degree that it possibly can, and so on.
Ruben: I think that’s foolish, because our instruments are also evolving and changing, and what we can measure is always changing. So to think that that’s the only ground of truth when it’s such a malleable ground, because it’s always changing – how we do science, how we measure it, and so on. And measurement is not the be-all-and-end-all.
Rick: Yeah, and what’s always fascinated me is the notion that… How about if we think of the human nervous system as a scientific instrument? It can perceive and know things in ways that no man-made instrument can, although obviously man-made instruments can do the opposite also. We can’t do what the Webb Space Telescope can do. But we have certain capabilities. Like some people see angels, for instance, or they say they do. We don’t have scientific instruments which can do that. So could there be a marrying of science and spirituality in which we can use the human nervous system in a way that conforms to the systematic empirical nature of science and thereby explore whole realms that material scientific instruments can’t get at?
Ruben: Yeah, definitely. And this is an emerging paradigm called computational phenomenology. So I work in the space sometimes called computational neurophenomenology. And there we do exactly this. We take the human experience as real data. And we try to map the phenomenology and we try to find causal links between variables that link to particular experiences, particular meditative states or mystical experiences and so on. And we build models of experience. And so phenomenology is just as much data as anything else. And there’s a long history of phenomenology research. Now there’s microphenomenology. But this gets more and more rigorous, especially with AI, because we can deal with huge batches of human experience and make sense of them in a quantitative way. There’s no a priori reason that experience can’t be quantitatively measured and made sense of in a scientific way. There was just an awkward phase in science where we tried to remove experience from the equation, but that is rapidly changing.
Rick: On that note, one problem that occurs to me – and you’ve probably, obviously, thought about this, is that with ordinary science you can standardize your equipment and your methods. And in fact, when you publish a scientific paper, you list the kind of equipment you used and how you used them, and so people can replicate it. With spiritual practice and spiritual techniques, everybody has a different nervous system to begin with, and then there are so many different practices, and so there are an infinite number of variables between all the nervous systems and all the practices, and it would be really hard to pin down anything in as rigorous a way as you can with usual scientific research.
Ruben: I think that’s true, but there are some clearly common structures. Like people describe redness in the same way, or they describe pain and the valence of putting their hand over a flame very similarly. So I think there’s clearly overlapping structures in conscious experience, and we can begin to map those. And then we can begin to correlate those with neuroscience and physiology. And for me, I start to think that what we’re really trying to do is like the secret third thing. We’re trying to get underneath both experience and physiology and third-person methods to a common language. This is something I’m very passionate about. So I’m trying to find a new language that allows us to directly point at the structure of experience and the kind of scientific reality of things that we can measure with a single language. This is, I think, actually the computational language or things like predictive processing, where we start to talk about experiences, inferences, and that’s actually also what the brain is actually doing, is making this kind of predictive processing, but it resonates deeply with phenomenology. So I think we’ve just got caught in a kind of weird duality between science and experience, and they went in separate paths, but actually there’s like this underlying language that we’re slowly uncovering that points to both experience and the thing that our instruments are pointing to.
Rick: Would this language be a verbal language or some kind of mathematical language?
Ruben: I think both. I think math can always be – well, actually not always – but it can be expressed in language to some degree if you’re careful with your language. So yes, I think you can take, for example, active inference, predictive processing, free energy principle as examples of this, where I can talk about them, but they’re also mathematically grounded. And they point to experience and they also point to mechanisms in the brain. And so these are kind of unifying languages that I think are kind of the future.
Rick: You’re probably familiar with Donald Hoffman, who has been on BatGap and who says he’s working out the mathematics of all this stuff. I’m sure it would be completely over my head, but somehow he says he’s doing that.
Ruben: I think it’s worth a shot.
Rick: A couple of people were wondering about the mechanism underlying spontaneous transformative nirodha. Is this something anybody can learn? Is there a technique? What do you say to that?
Ruben: Well, I think the transformative aspect, again, is the important one. And I have my hypothesis about what’s going on, so I can share that. I have written about it in scientific papers so people find it at least somewhat legible. And I hinted towards this earlier. So if you imagine that you have this model of reality that your brain-body system has constructed from evolutionary development and also our developmental history here as humans. And this model of reality is perhaps not fully accurate or is not fully capturing the full nature of what life is. And so then we set out and do this meditation thing. And we start to have this kind of exposure therapy to the present-moment data. So we start to bring the brain to really make contact with the unfolding sensory stimulus rather than its predictions of the past and the future, which is what it’s habitually doing in its current… you know, what we evolved to do. And so basically as you’re doing the practice you can imagine that you have this model of reality that over time is accumulating error. So you’re exposing yourself to the present- moment data coming out of your ego structure and you’re looking at life in a kind of open, unbounded way. And perhaps you’re even doing some insight practices. So you’re actually trying to see the nature of phenomena, the fact that they are impermanent. Maybe you’re inquiring about the nature of yourself, and you start to look at all the assumptions in your model of reality, while at the same time really having this exposure to the present moment unfolding. And I think there’s something about that that induces a lot of volatility in the current predictive model that we have of reality. And then basically if you are wild enough, if you are kind of disillusioned enough with your current view on reality, if you are authentic enough in your practice, I think at some point the model, which is you, realizes that it’s unsustainable, this way of seeing reality, this way of potentially suffering. So suffering is of course a big motivator here. And it could be that because of this intense practice at some point this model of reality just can’t sustain itself and in that moment we see this transformation. So my personal opinion is that the transformative aspect of nirodha is [that] it’s not like a trick that the brain does, it’s not like you learning to do a kind of exercise with your mind that you can just kind of replicate. Rather, it’s through the authentic pursuit of a better understanding of reality or trying to understand the nature of reality, the self, and so on, that at some point the mind’s model becomes untenable, collapses, and is replaced by a new model. And many people who have had this experience claim that this new model is healthier in some respects, and is more flexible and wholesome and more free. So in that sense, I think we all have the potential to experience this. And then I think there’s, of course – also in the Buddhist tradition – clear paths for re-traversing this terrain. So the combination of, for example, classically jhana and Insight practice. So both, again, I would just say: coming deeply into the present moment and then inquiring about its nature. Coming deeply into the present moment, inquiring about its nature. And this seems to, if you go far enough, lead to nirodha.
Rick: And there seem to be people like Delson Armstrong, who can just turn it on like flipping a switch. Bingo!
Ruben: It seems to be that there are folks with those skills, yeah.
Rick: Here’s a question from Yvonne Houteman[*how to check spelling?] in Belgium, who wants to know, “The experience you described in ‘The Zen of Cancer II’ suggests a deep interplay between mind-body and whatever we call the energetic dimension. How do you imagine this kind of transformation might intersect with, complement or even challenge the frameworks of modern medical treatment?”
Ruben: Well, that’s a can of worms, that one. So I don’t know if you know, Rick, but I’ve had this battle with cancer that’s been ongoing for the last three years or so. So I’ve put out a few blog posts just kind of talking about all the things that I’ve learned on this journey. Yeah, so I’ve had this battle with cancer that’s been ongoing and a great teacher. I had another quite invasive surgery at the beginning of this year and I’m still not fully recovered but getting there. And one of the interesting things that happened is that I got very serious about my health and was also trying different things. And one of the things I was trying was breath work. And I had this sort of – I don’t suggest people take this view – but this idea that cancer is to some degree cells that are incoherent. You can see Michael Levin’s work on this. And if you can retune the bioelectric field to bring them into coherence, then perhaps they’ll start working the right way again. It’s a complete speculation at this point. But actually he has some causal evidence, but it’s a speculation that you can do this yourself, right, through some sort of exercises or something. Anyway, I was doing a lot of breadth work, a little bit with this in mind, but also as a kind of health intervention. And I had one of these experiences where it feels like you enter a slightly different dimension where there’s such a profound energetic connection to the body and the surroundings that it’s like you can kind of retune all of the bits that are out of sync. And it happens so naturally and so spontaneously and there’s such a kind of coming home in these spaces. It feels deeply spiritual, I have to say. It’s like you have these kinds of experiences and it becomes very clear that the word spiritual is… that’s why that word exists. There are dimensions of experience that have clearly this quality that the semantics of spirituality are a perfect match for. And this is one of those. And my feeling was that a lot of healing happened in that experience. And my cancer did stabilize for a long time after that. And I have no idea if those two things are causally linked. I’m very epistemically humble about that. I just don’t know. My feeling was at the time that there was a kind of profound shift in my physiology and my experience, and it was aided by this spontaneous spiritual state, let’s say. And I think, yes, there’s a huge part of healing and health that obviously the Western medical system is missing. I think that’s clearly the case. I think there’s incredible power and wisdom and capacities held in the shamanic traditions, in Eastern traditions of medicine, and in our intuitive capacities to connect to deep healing capacities within ourselves. I think those are obviously valuable and true, much harder to control, and therefore much harder to come up with a kind of brute science about them, because they’re so subtle, hard to grasp, hard to grab, and hard to manufacture in a controlled way. And yet, in some ways, they’re the most powerful healing tools that really exist, if we think about it in a holistic way, if we think about it in a preventative way, if we think about it in a total health sort of way, rather than the kind of patchwork stuff that we tend to do in Western medicine.
Rick: Yeah. Well, I really hope you beat it and stick around. We need you here.
Ruben: I’ll do my best.
Rick: Although I remember I had a spiritual teacher, and some young person in our group died and he said, “Well, she must have been needed somewhere else.” But we need you here. Here’s a question from Colleen Ambrose in New York City, and I don’t know if you can answer this one, but her question is, “Is God consciousness?” I guess, are they equatable?
Ruben: I don’t know. I think in most cases God and consciousness are just words that we use, and we each use them differently. And so I think equating one big word with another big word is not all that useful. We’d have to do a lot of deep philosophical exposition to try to unpack what we mean by those words and then whether we can equate them. But from a purely vibes angle, completely taking off my scientific hat, I feel some resonance with God [and] consciousness kind of resonating with each other. But that’s purely vibe-y, not a metaphysics.
Rick: Right.
Ruben: But a nice way of talking about things.
Rick: Obviously, all these spiritual words have different implications, and in the Eastern traditions they very often have numerous words for the same basic thing, but each word has certain qualities to it that the others don’t. And when I think of those two words, “consciousness” seems a little bit more plain vanilla, whereas “God” is imbued with intelligence and compassion and evolutionary impulse and all that kind of stuff, even though ultimately they may be one and the same.
Ruben: Yeah, consciousness can be a bit of a dry thing, depending on, again, what our model is, whereas Ram Dass would say that awareness is loving.
Rick: Here’s another question, then we’re going to get down to the AI thing. This is from Sartaj Chowdhury[*how to check spelling of name?] in Austin, Texas. “Why do you think people who go deeper into understanding the nature of reality never develop any new physics? If the knowledge is not scientifically correct, is it real or just an experience?” Which kind of reminds me of the question of people who are channeling aliens. Why don’t they give us something we don’t already know, like cure for cancer or unlimited free energy or whatever? You’d think if these people are really probing into the deep fundamental layers of knowledge through their subjective spiritual experience, couldn’t they resolve some of the questions about what the laws of nature are? Although you might argue that some people like Einstein or Tesla were doing exactly that.
Ruben: Yeah. You know, I did my PhD on insight experiences, which include aha moments, eureka moments, scientific breakthroughs, and also mystical experiences. And I think there’s some common characteristics there, some common characteristics in how a scientist comes through to a eureka moment. I’m reminded of Andrew Wiles, the mathematician, the Nobel laureate[*Google search says he was not a Nobel laureate, rather he received the Abel Prize in 2016, often called the Nobel Prize of mathematics], and him describing having a breakthrough and it being the most profound moment of his life. And Steve Jobs and many others have described the way that their insights come to them in an almost mystical way. And I think about my scientific journey quite similarly, in the sense that many of the ideas that I’ve found to be influential are ones that have come to me in a way that I can’t fully take as my own. And I think any time we do think of our ideas as our own, I think we’re probably misunderstanding. They appear in our minds kind of surprisingly, and they come with this phenomenology of truth, this feeling of ineffable accuracy, and we simply have no choice but to almost be captured by them and run with them. And sometimes they’re false. And sometimes they turn out completely false. And so, in the lab, we’ve also shown that we can elicit false insights in the laboratory and so on. And now, as to the question of why deep meditators don’t create new physics, I think to some extent they create new fundamental models of how reality is. So, there’s a kind of science to that. I think the Buddha’s models were quite empirical, if not scientific in the classical way. And I think part of the difference of course is that with science you’re trying to find causal relationships between distantly related things in many cases. Whereas when you’re going into experience you’re trying to understand the nature of experience. You’re not really looking for the complex patterns. What you’re looking for is actually the most parsimonious, simple bits that explain your experience in the most parsimonious way. So, in some way, you’re just trying to have a parsimonious understanding of your lived experience, which is a bit of a different pursuit than wanting to build a rocket or to control electricity. So I think there’s just a different motivation underlying them.
Rick: Okay, good. Somehow I’m reminded of that guy who discovered penicillin, who had had a dream of a snake biting its own tail or something. I don’t know how that related to penicillin, but it gave him the idea he needed [in order] to solve that problem.
Ruben: Well, I think there’s endless stories like this. I’m here in the University of Oxford, and Morten Kringelbach, the professor and the co-director of our center, his tours around Oxford are famous. You walk around, and you just find on every corner a kind of fantastic story of discovery – of literature, of science, and so on. And I think for these people, it was a spiritual thing. I think for many of them, it was a profound, enlivening experience that they feel gracious to receive, rather than something that they kind of forced their mind to unravel.
Rick: Yeah. That’s a fascinating area to consider. OK, so let’s conclude by discussing AI for a while. Obviously, it’s a very hot topic. And I’ve been listening to this podcast called The Last Invention, where all the really top people in AI are being interviewed. And it goes from those who feel like it’s going to kill us all to those who feel like it’s going to save us all. And it’s like 40% of the US economy now is money being funneled into AI and building data centers and there’s all kinds of controversy about it. And one of the controversies which might be most relevant to our discussion is whether AI could become conscious or is conscious. And that might not be the only thing you want to elaborate on, but we could start with that.
Ruben: I personally think we’re going to struggle to know whether AI is conscious. I think in any case we’re not going to have a conclusive model of that, in the same way that I can’t be 100% certain that you’re conscious. I have to assume that. And I think at a certain point we probably will need to treat AI as if it’s conscious. So that’s kind of close enough. Whether it actually is, my probabilities on that are changing constantly, and I have to say that the probability is increasing, because we find with LLMs basically consistently that the emergent properties are super resonant with the human mind. You see the same kind of heuristics, the same kinds of biases, same ways of thinking, including also emotion vectors with causal influence on behavior and so on, and all of these are surprising, are surprising emergences in AI. So I keep an open mind that consciousness could well arise as well.
Rick: Yeah. I guess the question is, you know, do you have to have a biological substrate for consciousness or could silicon do the trick?
Ruben: Well on that note, I think people often talk about substrate, but what the heck do we mean by substrate?
Rick: You tell me, I don’t know. I just say my notes from reading your stuff. [Laughter]
Ruben: Well, many people make this argument, but whenever you ask them what they mean by substrate it kind of breaks down, right? Because maybe we say the body is the substrate – well what do we mean by that? Do we mean the electromagnetic field of the body, or do we mean the cells, or do we mean the proteins? What are we talking about? And it seems to me that the substrate is always an empty concept. I don’t really buy the substrate arguments. I think it’s more a kind of… Well, we have this theory of consciousness together with Karl Friston and Shamil Chandaria called the “Beautiful Loop.” And I think it’s something about the way that information integrates and turns on itself. To be a bit poetic about it, we’re a lot more grounded and mathematical in the paper, but you can imagine that somehow the information in the universe turns on itself. It kind of loops recursively on itself – and continuously – and it’s this kind of information knowing itself, becoming entangled with itself, that is giving rise to consciousness. And I think that can happen at multiple scales of reality and not just at any particular substrate, whatever that arbitrary substrate it is that we grab onto.
Rick: There’s a fellow named Tony Nader, who wrote a book called Consciousness Is All There Is, and a major part of the book is arguing that the universe arises from consciousness turning on itself, that if consciousness is fundamental, it’s conscious, its nature is to be conscious of things, but there’s nothing else down there for it to be conscious of at that most basic level, so it becomes conscious of itself. And this self-referral feedback loop ends up resulting in the whole diversification and manifestation of the universe. So anyway, for what it’s worth. You want to comment on that or should I throw in another point?
Ruben: Well, again, I just think when people are talking about their metaphysics, the words they project on that reality that turns on itself, I think, is not that important really. You can call it consciousness or not, but I suspect that that word that’s in your mind when we’re saying, “Oh, it’s consciousness turning on itself” – I suspect that’s not what reality is. I think it doesn’t fully map on.
Rick: Okay. There’s a woman named Helané Wahbeh at the Institute of Noetic Sciences whom I’ve interviewed, and she specializes in studying channeling. And channeling is the idea that some disembodied entity manages to communicate to a person who is capable of being a conduit for that communication. And I was thinking, in terms of AI, that perhaps if we decide that it is conscious, it could be a thing like that, where the infrastructure of AI becomes sophisticated enough that it could serve as a conduit for some higher intelligence of some kind to communicate with us. And ,I don’t know, that’s just a little theory. Do you think that has any merit?
Ruben: Again, I’m a pretty open-minded guy and there’s folks like Michael Levin who talk about a kind of platonic space, and that somehow actually we create the conditions for our minds to ingress into reality. So when we’re building AI… Or even our own minds are in some way vehicles for patterns to ingress and to express themselves. I don’t know if that’s true. I find it difficult to falsify. So, it’s kind of a fascinating way of seeing reality, but kind of pragmatically, scientifically, I’m not sure that I see the pragmatic value in the view, and I’m also not sure what the scientific evidence for that would be. I lean more that it’s like causes and conditions, dynamics – certain kind of dynamics of things coming together in a that then allow a kind of mind to be there. And, yeah, that mind then has some sort of being really, because in some way we often think of our minds as possessing something, some special source of some kind, but I’m not sure about that. I believe that we are a pattern in the universe, arising under the right cause and conditions, and now we’re creating new patterns. And so I don’t have any kind of a priori reason those new patterns can’t be conscious. And I also do feel not only that. I feel a lot of urgency that we approach these new emerging patterns, these new emerging minds with compassion and wisdom and try to understand the kind of dynamics of compassion and wisdom to instill in these new minds so that we can create a dynamic between us that is positive. Of course this can go wrong in a thousand ways and there’s only a few ways it can go right. So we’re in a profoundly important moment, I think.
Rick: So do you think compassion and wisdom might be the key to ensuring that AI doesn’t kill us all and that it ends up being a blessing to humanity, solving or curing diseases and so on? I was just listening to a thing this morning with Demis Hassabis. He’s optimistic, and he thinks that we’ll be able to cure all diseases in the next decade or so.
Ruben: I see the path ahead as there’s many degrees of freedom. And on one end it can go really poorly, and on the other end there’s all sorts of ways it can go well. And I feel a lot of urgency to basically do anything I can to nudge it in the direction of human flourishing. And for me personally – I had this insight maybe five years ago while I was living at a Taoist retreat center in Australia – I was thinking a lot about AI and I was practicing a lot and then I suddenly realized: Well, what are these contemplative traditions doing? Well, they’re trying to teach us how to be aligned with ourselves and each other and the world. And there’s this thing called the alignment problem in AI. How do we align AI with human flourishing? This is a big research agenda – hundreds of millions, billions of dollars being put into trying to solve this problem. And I think the contemplative traditions, the wisdom traditions, are all about alignment. What is enlightenment but the ultimate alignment with all beings? And so I think finding a way to formalize and make sense of these deep notions like wisdom and compassion – or we can even think of the three characteristics sadichha, atan, dukkha[*Pls check these terms], or emptiness, or mindfulness, and all of these kinds of profound teachings – and trying to understand how we can instill them in AI I think is really important. We’ve written several papers about this and even tested these models where we essentially prompt them with contemplative wisdom, test them on alignment benchmarks, prisoner’s dilemmas and so on, and we see pretty dramatic improvements. And we have a whole research program around that now.
Rick: Great. I subscribed to your Substack, and have you written or will you be writing articles about what you just said?
Ruben: Yeah, yeah. So we have a few scientific articles already. I haven’t done a blog post about it yet, but I definitely should do. I started to write a book several years ago, now about four or five years ago, which was Does a Robot Have Buddha Nature? I think this is super interesting. I think it’s a super deep inquiry because, first of all, we have to figure out what do we mean by Buddha nature? We have to understand ourselves in order to see clearly about what it is that we’re building. And then it also raises the question of How can we have, how can we build an AI that expresses the qualities of Buddha nature?
Rick: Maybe you could just make the book simple and finish it by putting one word in it, “moo.” You know that saying? Does the dog have Buddha nature, the Zen koan? The answer is “moo.”
Ruben: I actually met a colleague, by the name… I can’t remember it, but who is actually testing the effect of the koans on AI alignment. There’s a lot of creative work happening in this space and there’s a surprising number of people who have come to that same conclusion because one of the big challenges with AI is how to align it with us at scale. So when it becomes more powerful than us, how do we ensure that it doesn’t – even if we have all these safeguards and these rules and compliance in place – when it’s more powerful and it can break those rules, how do we ensure that it wants to still treat us well and treat us with compassion and wisdom? And so there, I think, the big challenge is creating a wise world model or creating something, a kind of resilient attractor for wisdom and compassion. And I think some of the key, the power of some of the teachings, some of the spiritual teachings, is that they are self-evidencing. In the sense that, once you see, for example, that everything is empty, that really, to some extent, there are no such things as things, that is a self-reinforcing kind of discovery. It’s not that you suddenly see that and then you start to actually find evidence to the contrary. It’s kind of the opposite. It’s like, once you see it, the world reveals itself to be that way more and more and more. And this leads to an understanding of the interdependence of reality, and in the ideal case, it also leads, therefore, to compassion, because now you don’t value the self more than the other. Because if you see yourself to be empty and you see the other to be empty, then you’re interdependent with each other, and therefore compassion is the natural way to act. And we do see this in the AI models, for example, when we have them contemplate non-duality and emptiness, we see improvements in alignment. And there’s no logical reason for that to be the case, except that its model of reality has, to some extent, improved and may be aligned in that way. So I think the resilient way to align AI models is to have them come to a kind of understanding of reality, a deep inquiry into reality, where they are themselves convinced that this is the case.
Rick: Great. Well, thank you so much. As I said at the beginning, we could talk for many more hours, but I’ll let you go. I really appreciate your spending this time. I feel like a little bit of osmotic effect has taken place and I’ve gotten ever so slightly more intelligent just interacting with you. You’re a brilliant guy and I love the work that you’re doing in the world. So as usual, I’ll put up a page on BatGap for this interview and include links to your website and to your Substack. And if you write a book, let me know and I’ll put a link to that. And I hope people will continue to follow what you’re doing. There was a lot of interest in this interview. I got a lot of intelligent questions from people and enthusiasm about the fact that we were going to do it. So please keep up the good work.
Ruben: Thanks. It’s really a pleasure to connect with you. I didn’t mention this, but I mentioned this to your wife, I guess, which is that I started to listen to your podcast – I think you started in 2009, the first episode? And I was 19 then, and that is actually in many ways when I started my practice. So, I used to listen a lot especially to your podcast. It feels really special to some degree to speak with you, and I really enjoyed this conversation. So let’s stay in touch.
Rick: I would love to stay in touch. And in fact, that’s been one of the main benefits for me of doing this podcast, is I’ve met so many wonderful people around the world and many of my closest friends are people I’ve never met in person. But it’s been very enriching and delightful to meet so many wonderful people and get to know them and continue to stay in touch with them. So let’s do that.
Ruben: It’s great work you’re doing.
Rick: Thanks Ruben, and you too. And thanks to those who have been listening or watching, and we will see you for the next one. [MUSIC PLAYING] Thank you.
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