Why the Mind Won’t Stay Still, with Liam McClintock (Karuna)

Speaker 1 · 0:02Welcome everybody. Today is a special day in the history of mindfulness exercises. We have our first guest teacher who is a certified mindfulness meditation teacher from our program. We have Karuna joining us from Damasuka Monastery right now. He's been a monastic at this revered Buddhist monastery for about a year. Before that, he's a graduate, got his BA from Yale University. He went on to work in finance at a private equity firm. He's undertaking his master's degree. He's writing his dissertation for an MS in applied neuroscience right now at King's College. As I said, he's a Samanara at a respected monastery right now, undertaking quite a few precepts as a Buddhist monastic. He's sharing what he's learned around the neuroscience of craving and samadhi and the role of mindfulness in this freely, just out of a spirit of generosity, care, and compassion. A lot of his teachings are in our members' area right now. And this is what he's dedicated his life to, including this life of service and awakening.

Speaker 2 · 1:32Just be here now. This has uh become a very common lingo or a common message in meditation. Just be here now. It's that easy, just be here now. But the question is the problem, why doesn't the mind stay here now? Why doesn't the mind just stay with that feeling of loving kindness or just stay with the breath? So easy. Why doesn't it stay there? Why is the mind unstable? In other words, and there's different ways of calling this. You know, it's agitation in the mind. There's some kind of stress there, like something needs to get done, or a dis-ease, a feeling of dis ease. Like I can't just sit here and be happy. I need to do something, or it's attention. And traditionally, this is known as dukkha, which is a poly word that comes from do meaning bad and ka meaning whole. And it actually referred to the hole of a wheel with an axle. And so if the hole didn't fit around the axle, there would be a bumpy ride. And this is kind of what it's like in the mind most of the time, right? It's a bumpy ride. It's like there's some kind of agitation, something to do, some problem to fix. So we're just gonna walk through the chain of causality here. So the direct cause, according to the Buddhist tradition, and then as we'll talk about the neuroscience, but just starting with the direct cause in our experience of this tension is craving. And craving is a word, is the I like it, I don't like it mind. It's wanting this moment to be different, it's reactivity, it's grasping. And traditionally, the word in Pali is tanha, which means thirst. And the cause of that dis-ease is this thirst for something to be a little bit different than it is now. And there's many levels of craving, but I'll talk about three levels of craving. So there's the macro craving, which is like, I need a new house to be happy. It's not that you want things, there's nothing wrong with wanting things, but it's I need a new house to be happy. I need a new car to be happy, I need a new partner to be happy. So that's the macro level of craving. Then there's the everyday level of craving, which is like, I need that chocolate bar to be happy right now. That person looks attractive and I need to go talk to them to be happy right now. And this everyday level of craving is associated with the chemical dopamine often. So dopamine is actually creates in in the brain that it creates an uncomfortable, agitated feeling, which is it's different than the kind of dopamine that's related to the feeling of loving kindness, which is associated with other neurochemicals as well. But the feeling of dopamine that comes from needing a chocolate bar, the first time you eat that chocolate bar, the dopamine neurons give you a reward, but then soon they pair with the very thought of the chocolate bar or the very trigger of the thought of the chocolate bar. And they stimulate you to go get that reward by giving a slightly agitated feeling that you an uncomfortable feeling, like I need to go do that. Otherwise, I'm not okay with the way things are. So that's the everyday level of craving. And then the micro level of craving is actually occurring in every moment, and you can start to see this for yourself in meditation. This is the craving that exists on a very small scale, but it's happening rapidly, and it's basically occurring all the time, and it creates the sense of self. And the way the body signals that is with feeling tone, feeling tone. So not a feeling like a mood, but a a literal a sensation. Okay, and this comes as positive, negative, or neutral. Traditionally, the the word for this is Vedna. So an example of this would be I mean, a very simple example is I need to move positions in my chair because there's a negative feeling tone, you know, somewhere on my butt. But then there's also, if you notice, like that need for the chocolate bar. I'm using chocolate as an example, by the way, because I'm highly addicted to dark chocolate. But if I slow down and I observe what comes before the craving in that moment of needing the chocolate, it's an uncomfortable feeling somewhere in my stomach or somewhere in my chest. It's some kind of physical sensation that comes up after the thought of chocolate and then causes this craving because it's like I need that feeling to go away. So that's why I go for the chocolate. But it can also be a positive feeling. So it could also be you saw someone attractive. At some point, by seeing someone attractive, there was a positive sensation. And then you go, I want more of that. You know, I want to be close to that person, I want to talk to that person. This could also happen in the form of advertising. So we see something that looks delicious on TV, and that's a creates this positive feeling, and then we want to go out and buy that thing. So then the question is, what comes before feeling tone? What is it that creates that positive or negative feeling to arise? And a lot of these, a lot of what I'm going through happens kind of simultaneously. So there's actually contact, feeling, and perception happen basically instantaneously. But what I'll for the purposes of sticking to the traditional links of dependent origination, which is what we're going through, it's contact, which is basically info from the five senses plus mind. So it could be a thought, but it could also be the five senses, the five external senses, you know, sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch. So this is basically all of the sensory data that's coming at us. Most of it's being ignored in any given moment, but whatever is most salient, which is often a thought, honestly, unless something has radically changed in your environment, then the mind latches onto this thing, it finds it pleasant or displeasant. So that's the feeling tone. Then after the feeling tone comes the craving, either wanting more of it or wanting to push it away. And then from the craving comes the agitation in the mind. So this is just a chain of causality. In Buddhism, it's called dependent origination. In neuroscience, it's called predictive processing. This is basically the leading theory of how the mind works. Because for the longest time, they thought that the mind was like a movie camera that was just passively recording the world. But as it turns out, as more recent neuroscience knowledge is showing us, the mind is actually creating the world in some sense. It's actively choosing what to pay attention to based on what is most salient for what previously would have helped us survive and reproduce. The way to think about this is that the mind is in every moment choosing what to pay attention to based on what would have previously helped us survive and reproduce. So it's got certain programs running that make it predisposed towards things that are flashy, bright, novel, changes in our environment or thoughts that trigger some kind of emotion that might have, you know, helped us survive and reproduce. And the point is that all mental events are conditioned based on previous memories, based on evolutionary psychology, like basically the genes we inherited from our parents, as well as epigenetics. And the point is there's a cause and condition for the agitation, like we talked about at the beginning. The problem, in other words, can be traced back to these series of causal relationships that are occurring in every moment in the mind to produce the agitation. And so understanding this will help us uh find the solution. And this was really considered to be the core teaching of the historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, right? He wasn't just some myth or legend. This was like a historical figure. You could think of him as the first psychologist, really. He was like that curious kid who just keeps asking why. Like, why does the, you know, why is the mind agitated? Okay, well, craving, but then why craving? Why craving, mom? You know, so he just kept tracing back this series of dependent arisings or reactivity in the mind. And these all play a role, right? Habits. Habits are basically what condition the beginning of the chain of causality has 12 links, and habits come after, which comes after craving. So by continually feeding this loop, we're feeding with habits, we're then conditioning the next arising, the next moment. So you eat the chocolate bar, your brain goes, That was good. I'm gonna do that again next time that I get the same triggers. And so this definitely plays a role in trauma as well and sense perceptions. So, one way to just contextualize all this, because I've been throwing out a few different terms. And the reason I do that is because I want to give different ways of understanding this process. But as a scientist, the way that's really helped me understand this is in terms of three programs that are essentially running the mind. Program A is phylogenetic, which is just a fancy way of saying that it's based on evolution, it's based on our evolved tendencies, our genes, basically, and as well as epigenetics. So this lays a very foundational framework at birth, come pre-programmed with a fear of the dark, because our ancestors for millions of years were living in an environment where predators had a much better sense of smell and seeing than they did during the nighttime. So they should fear the dark. This isn't to say that, you know, this is something we kind of outgrow as adults, but it's born into us, the fear of the dark. Um, we have a natural evolved tendency to like sweet and salty foods, because for millions of years, our ancestors, these were nutrients that were actually pretty rare on the African savannah, you know, where we were evolving for millions of years. And anything sweet, a fruit, basically, represented an immediate source of glucose. And salt was pretty rare, but again, it's a nutrient that we need. So these are all those are just three examples, but there are many, many of uh evolved predisposed tendencies that we have. And it's basically just program A is like a very general software program. It just says these are the things that helped your ancestors survive for millions of years. So you should pay attention to them. But program A doesn't know specifically what environment you will be in, which is one of the reasons that our Homo sapiens was actually so successful at surviving, was that we were so adaptable to new environments. So program B is ontogenetic, which is a fancy way of saying that it's our conditioning, it's a whole lifetime of learning new things. So, you know, we come as a baby very, very plastic, especially in those first five years. The brain is extremely plastic, adaptable, and it actually comes with too many neural connections that we then prune away as we learn what's useful in our environment. And this is basically everything that makes you unique in some sense. I mean, this is the conditioning is everything you learn from your parents, it's everything that you've ever experienced during your life. Your brain has been learning based on all that experience, what it should specifically pay attention to or how it should specifically crave. So, you know, all the commercials that we're fed, it's basically conditioning us so that the next time we see, you know, a Pringles can, we'll start to think, okay, Pringles equals salty crunchiness, which equals survival. So you can see this program B builds on program A. And the food companies are very smart, they know this, right? So that uh Pringles has a special team of engineers that you know are designing the perfect crunch because our ancestors actually loved insects, they were very nutritious. So that's why we like crunch, or that's one of the hypotheses. So, and then the perfect amount of salt. So, program B is again, it's all the conditioning, the social conditioning, the cultural conditioning that has molded our minds into what they are now. And then program C is basically mindfulness in some sense, it's having the metacognition, the ability to observe your own mind in action, and then based on that, to reprogram your mind in the way that you think is gonna make you happiest. So, program C is noticing how programs A and B work, it's noticing that chain of causality that we just talked about, and then it's making new decisions based on what you know is gonna lead to your happiness. An example would be like the traffic example, right? You get triggered. Now, why did you get triggered? You got triggered because you've been honked at before, you know, and you don't like that kind of behavior, that loud noise. It's in the past, it's happened before, so it created anger. That's program B is the kind of the conditioning part, right? You've you've been honked at before, you know what that means, you don't like it. But then even deeper, program A is getting activated because basically this is some kind of a threat, a threatening move that was made against you. And so, you know, in kind of the our tribal days where our brains were evolving for so long, this was maybe a threat to your status. It was an insult. And so you had to activate these like angry hormones in order to prepare to fight this person and show them that you were a better, you know, member of the tribe or whatever it was. So programs A and B have been activated in traffic, and now you're you're uncomfortable, you're angry, you want to honk back. But using program C, you notice this pattern playing out and you say, I'm instead of reacting, because I know that's not gonna lead to anything good, it's not gonna make me feel satisfied. I'm just gonna let this process go. I'm gonna I'm gonna bring my attention back to my breath or back to my body, and I'm just gonna let that process go and not gonna feed into the programs A and B because that is no longer useful, right? That is not leading to my well-being. So this actually does create neuroplastic changes in your brain. Those networks that fired when someone honked at you will not be as active the next time it happens, and eventually it will cause no reaction in you if you continually use program C to make a wise decision using mindfulness. And this is mind training. So there's like two aspects to this: there's the formal practice where we sit down and cultivate this ability for self-directed neuroplasticity, for mindfulness. And then there's the everyday process of bringing this into your daily life, noticing how the mind's attention is moving, noticing what's triggering and agitating it and letting go of those things. There's a few resources I wanted to mention for further practice. There's dhammasuka.org. They offer free online retreats. If you want to do one next year, I would sign up really early because they just book full. And they're they're offering those basically at cost. It's really cheap. It's like $30 a day. And there's Sutta Vada Foundation, which has a bunch of resources there, guided meditations and stuff. And then I created a meditation app called FitMind. And there's specifically the Deep Path module, which will teach you to get into the jhanas and it will teach some of the science behind all this. I highly recommend these online retreats for Dhamma Suka if you want to like master this practice. And like I said, those are free.

Speaker 1 · 17:35We do have some of Karuna's practices in our members area under the FitMind section. The app has, I think, double or probably more than that. So I do encourage people to check out the FitMind app. And just to make a plug, I think your podcast is one of the best podcasts out there. Thank you. And you can find it through the website. But the world's top teachers are on there. It's really impressive. And Kruna does a great job of interviewing people. So just want to make a plug for that podcast. Karuna, thank you so much for your time today. Really appreciate your presentation. You're in the thick of the master's degree in applied neuroscience, and really appreciate how you're relating your training at Damasuka with your applied neuroscience work, with your work with FitMind and your mindfulness training. Really appreciate the generosity that you've shown to our community from within the community. So really appreciate you. Thank you, everybody. Take good care. I'll see you again soon.