#94: Exploring Consciousness & Deep Awareness - Doug Kraft

0:02Hey, welcome to the Fitmind podcast. It's been a while, been away for over a year now, and it's really good to see you back here. I'm excited to welcome a guest who's been a longtime mentor. His name is Doug Craft, and he has explored the mind extensively from many different angles. So he's been a psychotherapist, Unitarian Universalist minister, he's been a meditation teacher and trained with some of the greatest meditation teachers around the world. And we share Vandevimla Ramsey as both of our kind of main teacher. And he's also studied bioenergetics and brings a lot of neuroscience into his writings.

0:42He's written several books. This is a recent one called Presence, Quiet Awareness, and How It Emerges in Meditation and the Brain. And he has a more recent book called Deepening. So I hope you'll enjoy this far-reaching conversation, get into consciousness and many kind of deep topics, exploring the mind and how you can train it. So without saying anything further, here is my conversation with Doug Kraft. Doug, welcome to the FitMind podcast. Thanks for coming on. Glad to be here. Glad to be here. And I hear you're fresh off of a meditation retreat. Is that right? Yes, I've been on a sort of quasi-retreat here for about a week.

1:25Okay, lovely. For those who haven't attended a meditation retreat, what would that kind of look like in your day-to-day life? um well you know the usual image of a retreat is uh you go off on some private setting someplace and so you get completely out of your um you know the accoutrements of uh of your life uh and you kind of submerge yourself in another environment and then there's uh you know meditation schedules and interviews and stuff that's set up um when i'm doing a private retreat though i just go off by myself and um what i'm trying to do uh at this stage of my life i'm 75 and i can feel my body you know kind of slowing down a bit and i'm trying to get my work down to the point where i can be sort of on a half retreat most of the time which for me means uh meditating um you know two and a half to maybe four hours a day and then have family and other stuff, you know, and going on at the same time.

2:38My kids are all grown and out of the house. So there's my wife and me and Lila, our cat, interact loosely. And then I spend a lot of time meditating. Well, it sounds like a good balance. I remember reading on your website once there were some instructions for kind of doing a home retreat and one recommend right one recommendation you gave based on I think something Ram Dass said is that you could just go in your room for like 24 hours and essentially do nothing and learn a lot about your mind that way yes yeah yeah it was an interesting set of instructions too because uh you know he was saying well so much you can do well you do some exercises and maybe you know and so you go ahead and do all that but you're not doing those for 24 hours uh and then you twiddle your thumbs for a little bit and then eventually you sort of run out of stuff to do and you're just left alone with an unchaperoned mind um and that's basically what a retreat is you know to uh because uh for meditation you know a lot of people aren't familiar with it it has this kind of image of what you're trying to do is learn to control the mind and get it into a quote-unquote meditative state and the definition of meditation that i like much better and it comes straight from the buddha is just to learn to observe what's going on in the mind and uh it's an extremely optimistic view of humanity in the sense of what the Buddha was saying, if we can just see clearly enough what's really going on, then we'll know what to do and what not to do.

4:31And so the trick is how to pull that off. and there from my perspective there are two elements that are really important so I call it kindness and wisdom and the two elements are one of finding some ways of naturally tapping into what you could call uplifted states you know things like you know love kindness

5:11generosity certainly equanimity peacefulness uplifted qualities and and of course as anybody who's ever meditated for 10 minutes you know realizes as you can set that up for yourself and then the mind wanders off mind has a mind of its own it'll just go And so how you relate to the wandering mind and to relate to that skillfully is just incredibly important because that's what you'll be doing a lot is to how to figure out how to really bring the mind back to quiet. it. My wife is a birthright friend, in other words, a Quaker. And so she started meditating when she was like three years old in this Quaker meeting.

6:04And there was an elder in that meeting who I met once and a wonderful, wonderful man. And he said, you know, meditating is like trying to put a basket of puppies to sleep. And so you have this basket of puppies and one sticks its head up. And so you scratch behind the ears and stroke it a little bit and it quiets down. And another one sticks its head up and you scratch it behind the ears. And eventually, they'll all sort of quiet down. But I just really love that metaphor for it because it has such a loving, respectful mind. I love a respectful attitude towards towards the mind and the heart, rather than trying to shape it up.

6:51Right. Yeah, I think that's so true. Often the picture of meditation that's kind of portrayed in the mainstream would be focusing the mind on one thing. And here you're talking more about qualities of mind. now you mentioned the buddha and i think some folks might not realize this was a historical figure one thing i love about your work doug is that you bring in these ancient wisdom texts and you've studied them very very much in depth but you also bring in the modern science and you bring in your own direct experience so you've talked about how there's kind of this trifecta where you can when the three of these things agree we can be pretty confident that we're getting at you know an accurate map of how this works and how we can train the mind the oral tradition i just finished a book by biku analio who's done a lot of scholarly work on the oral transmission of these uh suttas as we call them these uh threads and um i think it's it's remarkable what has survived and how even though their oral tradition does uh allow for some drift.

8:05There's other pieces that were clearly very important and very rigorously preserved. So yeah, I think we can have a lot of confidence in certain aspects of this, especially the teachings that seem to match our own experience. And

8:27one of those would be what's typically called dependent origination, this idea that the mind is causally linked, that there's pieces of our experience that lead to other parts of our experience. I wonder if you could explain it better than I can in a brief way that someone could notice in their own experience. Well, I think the most fun way to do this is to take any aspect of yourself, maybe something to really appreciate, a habit or the way you think or the way you relate to people and reflect upon it. And we're trying to trace back how you learned that. And so there's business about family history.

9:19You could also look at it from a genetic standpoint. you know what what things is just wired into your genes and you trace those back uh and there are cultural elements and you can trace those back well anything you trace back i mean you get maybe get to an earlier generation of what life was like in your family as a kid or something well and where did they get those values and habits well that came you know from people before them of people before them. And if you keep tracing back anything that you think of as who you are, eventually you will get back into it's just like everything, how everything is directly or indirectly connected to everything else.

10:08And from that perspective, what we are, if you want to talk about me as a person is a collection of qualities at a particular moment in time but all those qualities that were that are there now came from earlier qualities they they arise dependent on earlier qualities causes and conditions as some of the language used in buddhism they all came out of other causes and conditions so there's nothing here that is essentially me that is completely separate and isolated from everybody else because everything that makes up me came from someplace else so we just have this snapshot in the moment um because the reality is that there is no essence within us which is fundamentally separate from everything else and in the language and you know in buddhism and some other places too they they say it's uh we are empty of a self essence um if you have a glass and you say the glass is empty it probably is not empty there's probably air molecules etc but it's empty of water and so that yeah there is this vessel and all this stuff that comes together but it's empty of any self-sustaining permanent essence all its own, that everything we are comes from something else.

11:43And it's a little mind-boggling, and sometimes when you really settle into it, it can be a little unnerving because we like to think of ourself as there's something solid and real here. And there is something that's solid and real, but it's completely transient. You know, everything is changing from moment to moment, sometimes very subtly, sometimes in big ways. Yeah, I guess one very practical example of that is just that after about seven years, all the atoms in our body are different. So, yes, looking back, we could think that we were that person seven years ago. but so much has changed that just in terms of the physical body, we can't even really call that the same person.

12:35Right. Right. And so what you end up with in Buddhism, and some traditions in Buddhism talk about two realities, some talk about three, but the two realities are when I talk about the absolute and the relative. and what we talk about uh you know our cultural socially is me i'm going to the grocery store everybody knows what that means um and so i'm relatively real and it's very convenient you know for organizing people and doing things but on an absolute level that just doesn't work because all the atoms in my hands, everything came from someplace else.

13:30And there's this lovely metaphor that you use sometimes. It's like, even look at your hand. Well, the hand is made up of, well, a thumb and these four fingers, and there's a palm there.

13:45But where is the hand? Is it in the thumb? Well, not really. So in the fingers, not really. So if you take all those elements apart, there's actually no hand there. But you put them together, and we would call that a hand. But there's no essence to it. Did that just go into outer space? Yeah, no, I get what you're saying. basically if i could phrase it in a slightly different way that there is no the concept hand is built from a bunch of parts that individually there's no handness in it right um i guess one place to go from here would be to discuss consciousness because that's on the physical level that the hand and the atoms and so forth but on a kind of first person direct and subjective viewpoint, how could we think about consciousness as an emergent property that's conditioned from other things?

14:54Yeah, so if we go into the science of it, it gets very interesting and hairy kind of quickly. So one of the ways that I look at consciousness from a scientific perspective is actually to start with homeostasis so we have all these systems in the body and they need to have a kind of homeostatic balance for example body temperature body temperature needs to be in a pretty tight range you know we get a temperature goes up five tend to graze or drops find it and we're in trouble hydration nutrition on and on and on and on and on so what happens when an organism organisms homeostatic balances go out they either correct those or they die it's pretty simple um and the one of the quickest ways to get our attention is to make us hurt and that that's a great motivator to do something about it and so you can have a very simple creature you know maybe a small worm or an ant or something like that they would have a bunch of these little homeostatic systems they go out of balance and there's automatic push to go take care of that you get into something like a human being and we just have hundreds and thousands of homeostatic systems and so when one of those goes out of balance rather than being driven directly to satisfy that if a hydration is low to drive so they'll get some water or something with so many systems they're going to conflict with each other so what arises in us is a feeling of discomfort which indicates that some of our systems are going out of balance and as we balance in those it feels good uh and so we get these mass of feelings

17:11that give us some directions, but with a system as complicated as we are, there's no one solution that's going to be best every moment. And so we get a little bit of choice as to, okay, I'm hungry. There's an apple over there. There's a bear walking down the path towards the apple tree. I think I'll get away from the bear and come back and get the apple later. So we decide which one we're going to pay attention to. And out of that is how consciousness emerges. It's this system of weighing all these different feelings that arise. And the interesting thing about it is that it's really based on keeping us alive.

17:55So there's no way to avoid this stuff. So this is kind of the workspace theory of consciousness, right? I think it also relates to information integration theory where there's this, you can think about consciousness as this kind of knowing element, this kind of space in which we're getting all these different signals, some of them conflicting. And then so it can know all of that and make choices or determine where to go from there, almost this biological imperative to have another layer in the system that can make judgments and understand all these pieces of evidence that are coming. Right. So the alternative to that is to, if you don't take care of it, then you die and those genes don't get passed on.

18:46But that takes a long time for things to evolve. So what happened at some time was this system. and what humans are particularly good at or what the human brain is particularly good at is creating models of what's going on out there in the world and it's been a sort of survival mechanism so i get this model there's a hungry animal over there i wonder what happened if i held my arm up to it well rather than actually test it out i can do that in my mind and realize okay, that probably is not going to work so well, so we won't do that one. So it gives us a kind of workspace where we can kind of make decisions.

19:33But I always like to go back to homeostasis because it ties it back to survival, which puts it right back into the core of what it means to be a living organism. Right. I think in your book, Doug, you mentioned there's these kind of primal emotions, these very deep deeply embedded survival instincts that can kind of give rise to very very primal feelings for example fear and and this would go back you know many thousands and even millions of years as the nervous system evolved how does that play into consciousness well it's um the most direct way to say is the work of jak pengsep who was an estonian american i think was the washington university um and um and he was sort of at his peak during the time when um

20:33um you know reward and punishment was was was the big deal and in those uh in those kind of schemes

20:44um the behaviorists that look at reward and punishment think of emotions as being too abstract you know they were just making all this stuff up but he was interested in trying to trace down the biological organism origins of these emotions and what he found was that there are six or seven of them of which there are actually nodes in the brain that if you go in there uh you with a tiny scalpel or electric probe and burn that out then that emotion is gone so for or you can go the other way just go in there and stimulate it so you can take a cat who is sleepy and lazing around and if you get a little probe into the rage centers and you stimulate that, suddenly it tickles.

21:38And it just flies under rage. There's nothing else happening. A little electricity in there. So you found seven of these that show up on old mammals. And the interesting about it, if you go in and you take out all seven of those nodes, the creature goes unconscious. I mean, there just is no consciousness. without these seven being active. And then those seven can be modified and stuff by the cerebral cortex and lots of other things. But it just makes a point at a very primal level without these things, we go into a coma. There is no consciousness. I guess that matches on referencing back to the Buddha and his theory of codependent arising or dependent origination that consciousness is conditioned by a feeling by essentially or proto thoughts and these kind of urges almost you could say I mean this was him observing subjectively his mind so he's looking at how his attention moves in a very deep meditative state which is a bit different than our kind of objective probing and I guess we can't know for certain that the correlation like just because those the experience of awareness shuts off when these brain circuits are inactive doesn't mean those brain circuits cause the consciousness itself but it is interesting that there are prior conditions that are necessary for the light of awareness to be on there right right right right yeah um fascinating now i understand And well, OK, so you have many different fields of interest and you've kind of come at the mind from many different perspectives, psychotherapy, meditation, bioenergetics and science.

23:40So what are you most interested in now with regards to learning about the mind with regards to consciousness? Oh, boy. OK.

23:53what it what interests me the most at this point is

24:05there's ways in which the mind constructs the reality around us um you know one really kind of simple example of this is is right now uh as you're sitting here listening to us talk uh if you just notice the your peripheral field of vision you don't have to look at it but just notice it and notice if there are any colors in it i think most people will perceive lots of colors out there. Well, you're actually not seeing those colors because our perception of color is right in the flovia, right in the center of the eye. And then there are lots of rods around the rest of the eye that pick up black and white, but they don't pick up color.

24:58So when you see the color, it's not because the light is coming in and triggering some neurons that are sending color information into the brain. It's because you have this construct out there and you know from past experience, you know, that this has this color and that's that. And there's a tree over here with some greens. There's a few oranges on it. And it seems like we're seeing that, but it's a mental construct. So, I mean, like it's a little too nerdy, but what I'm really interested in is what happens when our conceptual mind turns off. The deepest type of meditation, the conceptual mind can turn off.

25:59so um that may seem weird to say but so for example when you look at an object out there it takes a little bit of effort a little bit of strain to sort of take those signals and put them together into a ball or a book or a lamp or a shelf and also takes a little bit of effort to take those perceptions and push them into memory so as you relax more and more deeply without going to sleep eventually it gets so quiet that the mind stops putting those things together into perception and stops putting into those into memory and so the experience at that moment is one of blindness. Like there's nothing going on there.

27:08And it feels like you've dozed off to sleep and then you come back out of it. But sometimes when people come out of those, if you'd actually fallen asleep, the mind would be kind of groggy when you come out. But actually when somebody comes out of those, If it really is this process I'm talking about, they will be completely clear, very alert, deeply relaxed, obviously, but there's none of the grogginess. And so in deeper meditation, some of these mental processes can actually shut down. And so there's the question about how to cultivate that. And why would somebody, Doug, for those who this might sound kind of weird, yeah, it might sound weird for them, like, why should they want to head in this direction of non-conceptuality and actually kind of shutting down their awareness?

28:16yeah because because of what happens right right on the edge of that so i can get uh you know i'm sitting for a long time for a couple hours or something like that my mind will get very very still um and but it's not completely still and there'll be little tentative feelings and stuff and i'll notice well that feels like i'm about six months old that feels like i'm about three years old are the and and they're just um you know kind of amorphous uh and stuff it's easy to overlook um but if i if i can see that and see that feeling of say being you know three years old and i know what my father was like and my parents and stuff like that and see those feelings uh And just what I would say is relax into all of that.

29:26There are just a lot of insights that just emerge right out of that whole process. So what I would say is deep therapy, which is insight-based, and deep meditation, which is insight-based. based, really actually blend together. Because what you try to do in therapy is to open up to faint feelings that may be looming around in the background. And maybe once we push down or something like that, and just open up to all that and let it come up to the surface, it releases.

30:07and I don't know how to say this except to say that it feels like something that I thought of as essential to me the darkness is gone and it feels quite quite freeing and I know that sounds really weird um but i'm just i'm just really interested in that and part of what i do is just my own practice and a part of it is reading um you know various old meditation masters that are talking about processes and higher meditation which really have to do with relaxing so much that the way that we construct the world and put colors out there and all that stuff starts to... It's not like it shuts off, but it just sort of drifts off from the background as being slightly less relevant.

31:12And there is a

31:19kind of joy and contentment that arises out of that which is not contingent upon much of anything. And that's, I know that somehow this sounds very complicated, but it feels really simple and really basic and really very, very much alive. Beautiful description, Doug. That's, yeah, it's profound. and I know it's hard to put these things into words sometimes. Part of what you were describing sounds like making subconscious processes more conscious, which I think people can relate to. Yes. Because that's something that would take place in therapy or we would want to do in all aspects of our lives, like at a more macro level, our habits, becoming conscious of the way we're thinking.

32:20but then what you're really describing goes much deeper than that because it sounds like your mind's so subtle that you can see just the the tiniest movements and start to um i guess let go of kind of buggy software on a deeper level if that's a way of putting it yeah yeah and and it's uh and it's softening into those places where there are tensions so part of it as you're relaxing is looking at any place where something grabs and then rather than trying to get rid of it because that just puts more tension in the tension you know if you just let the awareness go into it and just open up to the tension it's like scratching a puppy behind the ears you know you just sort of stroke a little bit and it softens and it opens and as it does that then some of that tension begins to fade.

33:18And then you're left with a default state, which is quietly peaceful and sort of delightfully alive. And for which any particular identity as being this kind of person or that type of person just doesn't feel relevant anymore. We're just alive. So is this kind of the classic no-self or non-self experience that often the masters are talking about? Yeah. Yeah. And it's not like the self just disappears, but there are...

34:04I can't think of a real good example of it, but just in general, it may be there's some situation that you're very upset about and you're kind of stern all around. and then you look at it at one point and say you know what's the big deal there yeah so somebody you know somebody was upset well see what we can do to take care of that but um i i was meditating in thailand and um and they put me in with a bunch of westerners and i i didn't want to be the westerners i don't be the real people but that's another story um And there was somebody there who was trying to get us through all kinds of things.

34:45So I went to the teacher and I was complaining about what this other person was doing. And the teacher said to me, oh, yeah, misunderstandings happen. And I thought, yeah, misunderstandings do happen. Maybe it doesn't. Why is this a big deal? Of course, misunderstanding happens. and the whole thing just seemed light. It wasn't like the situation disappeared, but it just wasn't that important anymore. And it's not like you end up with nothing in your life that's important anymore. It's like you go into a sort of a jelly brain state or something like that. It's that what is really most essential and most important just becomes very simple.

35:38I have two grandchildren now and I just, you know, when I spend the day with them, it's funny. It's like time moves differently. You know, we get up in the morning and we start doing things and we just sort of bumble along and I get into their time space or something and pretty soon, you know, it's supper time and I haven't, wow, how did that day go by there? We're just kind of being in the moment and enjoying it. So it's that kind of simplicity. And we have very complicated lives, and some things do need some focused attention, et cetera. But if we can see the tension that's generating and relax the tension in it, then our minds are less encumbered in terms of doing what needs to be done and just let the rest of it go.