Final Discussion with the Dalai Lama - Mind & Life Institute

Dialogue 2|Session 6

Overview

Jeremy Geffen presents the Tibetan medical view of illness, especially mental illness, through the framework of three interacting principles—rLung, mkhris-pa, and bad-kan, often inadequately translated as wind, bile, and phlegm. These represent broad functional or energetic systems associated roughly with regulation and nervous activity, breakdown and digestion, and nourishment and growth. The discussion then expands into whether future neuroscience might be able to alter thoughts, emotions, or personality through direct manipulation of the brain, with participants agreeing that mental states depend on complex, distributed brain activity while disagreeing about how precisely science might eventually be able to intervene.

The conversation broadens into philosophical questions about the nature of the self, consciousness, and what counts as real or knowable. The Dalai Lama presses the scientists on whether a person can be reduced to the brain and body, why compassion is directed toward a whole person rather than an isolated organ, and whether phenomena such as absence, change, or subjective experience can exist without being independently “findable.” Buddhist philosophy is described as distinguishing between directly evident phenomena, phenomena known by inference, and highly concealed phenomena known through testimony, while the scientists describe science as continually trying to move more phenomena into the categories accessible through observation and measurement. The group also compares Buddhist accounts of subtle states of awareness in waking, dreaming, deep sleep, meditation, and other bodily states with neuroscientific descriptions of brain activity, acknowledging both important terminological differences and areas of possible empirical research. The meeting closes by returning to mental illness, emphasizing that both psychological and physiological causes may interact, and by calling for more focused future collaboration between Buddhism and neuroscience. The Dalai Lama ends by stressing that scientists have a special responsibility to use their knowledge for humanity and that compassion and warm-heartedness remain essential regardless of unresolved philosophical questions about the self or consciousness.

Dialogue 2
6 sessions
October 6, 1989
Dharamsala, Himachal Pradesh, India
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Speakers

Antonio R. Damasio is Van Allen Professor and Head of the Department of Neurology, at the University of Iowa College of Medicine, and Adjunct Professor at the Salk Institute. He received both his MD and his doctorate from the University of Lisbon, and began his research in behavioral neuroscience with the late Norman Geschwind, Putnam Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School. He joined the faculty at the University of Iowa in 1976, where he has been Chief of the Division of Behavioral Neurology and Cognitive Neuroscience, and Director of the Alzheimer's Disease Research Center. Dr. Damasio's bibliography lists more than 200 titles, devoted to the understanding of the cerebral basis of vision, memory, and language, and the elucidation of diseases such as Alzheimer's. His new model of neural architecture subserving cognitive processes is being published this year in the journals of Neural Computation and Cognition. He is a member of the American Neurological Association, a Fellow of the American Academy of Neurology, and is a Past President of the Academy of Aphasia and of the Behavioral Neurology Society.

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Tenzin Gyatso, the14th Dalai Lama, is the leader of Tibetan Buddhism and a spiritual leader revered worldwide. He was born on July 6, 1935, in a small village called Taktser in northeastern Tibet. Born to a peasant family, he was recognized at the age of two, in accordance with Tibetan tradition, as the reincarnation of his predecessor, the 13th Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lamas are manifestations of the Buddha of Compassion, who choose to reincarnate for the purpose of serving human beings. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1989, he is universally respected as a spokesman for the compassionate and peaceful resolution of human conflict. He has traveled extensively, speaking on subjects including universal responsibility, love, compassion and kindness. Less well known is his intense personal interest in the sciences; he has said that if he were not a monk, he would have liked to be an engineer. As a youth in Lhasa it was he who was called on to fix broken machinery in the Potala Palace, be it a clock or a car. He has a vigorous interest in learning the newest developments in science, and brings to bear both a voice for the humanistic implications of the findings, and a high degree of intuitive methodological sophistication.

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Dr. Allan Hobson is interested in the relationship of mind and brain with special reference to conscious states, including dreaming. He studies human sleep and dreaming and performs experiments on animals in the Laboratory of Neurophysiobiology at the Harvard Medical School where he is a Professor of Psychiatry. He is the author of The Dreaming Brain (1988) and Sleep (1989). Не recently won the prestigious von Humboldt award ofthe Max PlanckSociety. He is a lucid dreamer.

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Jeremy Geffen, MD, FACP, is a board-certified medical oncologist, a leader in the field of integrative medicine, and the founder of Geffen Visions International, Inc. An inspiring writer, speaker, physician, and seminar leader, he is author of the highly acclaimed The Journey Through Cancer and The Seven Levels of Healing®, which help people to skillfully and effectively navigate the journey through cancer.

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Larry Squire received his Ph.D. in 1968 from the Department of Psychology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After postdoctoral training at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, he joined the faculty of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California School of Medicine, San Diego (UCSD). Currently, he is Professor of Psychiatry at USCD and Research Career Scientist at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in San Diego. His interests are in the organization of memory and its neurological foundations. He and his research group study neurological disorders of human memory and the anatomy of memory in monkeys. He has published 150 scientific articles and a book Memory and Brain. He is Secretary of the Society for Neuroscience and Editor of the journal Behavioural Neuroscience.

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Lewis L. Judd, M.D. has been the Director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), since January, 1988. He received his Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from the University of Utah and his medical degree with honors from UCLA. Prior to joining NIMH, Dr. Judd served 11 years as Professor and Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the UCSD School of Medicine, and as Chief of the Psychiatry Services at the UCSD Medical Center. Previously, he was member of the faculty and Director of Education in Child and Adolescent psychiatry at UCLA. Dr. Judd serves on the Scientific Council of the National Alliance for Research in Schizophrenia and Depression and is a member of numerous professional and scientific societies. He is a Fellow of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology and of the American Psychiatric Association, and he was recently elected to the Institute of Medicine (National Academy of Sciences). Dr. Judd has been a prolific contributor to the world’s scientific literature, and has served on editorial boards of scientific journals, including the American Journal of Psychiatry, Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, Psychiatry, and Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences. He also edited the recently published book The Basic Science Foundations of Clinical Psychiatry.

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Patricia SmithChurchland is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California San Diego. She received her Bachelor's degree (with Honors), at the University of British Colombia, a Master's degree at the University of Pittsburg, and a B.Phil at Oxford University. She taught at the University of Manitoba, becoming a full Professor there in 1983, following a year as visiting member, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University. She has received a conspicuous number of distinguished awards and fellowships, has been the past President of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, and is the author of Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind/Brain, published by MIT Press.

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Robert Livingston is Professor of Neurosciences Emeritus at UCSD. He received his undergraduate and medical degrees from Stanford University. Prior to founding the world's first Department of Neurosciences, the first department in the new School of Medicine at UCSD in 1965; he taught Neuropathology at Stanford, Neurophysiology at Yale, Psychiatry at Harvard, and Physiology and Anatomy at the UCLA Medical School. He also served as Executive Assistant to the President of the National Academy of Sciences and Chairman of the National Research Council; and as Scientific Director for both the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Blindness. Livingston has held research and teaching fellowships at the Université de Genève, Collège de France, Oxford University, Göteborg University, University of Hawaii, and University ofZürich. He is active in Physicians for Social Responsibility, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, and Beyond War. He participated in the founding of the Council for a Livable World, the Institute for Policy Studies and the Elmwood Institute.

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