Gary Weber

[skyblue]

I really like this guy. After reading his book Happiness Beyond Thought, I emailed him a few times and he always replied. He's very practical too.

www.happiness-beyond-thought.com/

[zendancer]

Skyblue: Thanks for the link to Gary's site. His information and advice is very clear.

[teetown]

Bumping up this old thread. Shawn (the forum owner) updated spiritualteachers.org with a favorable entry about Gary Weber. At first I was skeptical, because he is very serious about reconciling this non-dual business with modern cognitive and neuroscience. To me that seems like a futile endeavor, and makes me question whether the teacher is "awake" or whatever.

But I've been reading Gary's book today and I'm starting to think he might be onto something. If you do a Google search, you can find a pdf copy of his book, which it appears he posted himself on one of those sharing sites.

Anyone else have any thoughts on this guy?

[zendancer]

I read some of Gary's blogs this morning, and found several of them particularly interesting. He discusses "three kinds of thoughts" in one youtube video that distinguishes between the "default mode of self-referentiality" versus task-oriented thinking, and he has a great blog related to the depersonalization disorder we've discussed on the forum in the past. He also has links to some interesting videos related to non-duality. I think many people on this site with a scientific background or an interest in neuroscience would find his writings and links informative, to say the least.

[sighclone]

Gary is a friend of about six years. He has a business executive background, and a PhD in materials science, is very pragmatic. But his personal accounts of awakening are almost poetic -- an interesting combination. He is about as well-respected in the conventional professional community as anyone who says that "thinking stopped fifteen years ago" could be. He was a strong influence on me early on and remains very helpful. His blog is widely diversified. He is also fluent in Sanskrit and highly skilled at hatha and other forms of yoga. His primary teacher was Ramana Maharshi. He travels widely and speaks frequently, more as a pandit than a guru.

[teetown]

I'm surprised how comfortable Gary is with both sides of the coin, i.e. conventional science and non-duality. To me they seem at odds with each other.

On the other hand, I've often wondered if scientific "discovery" is just another creative exercise we engage in. If that's the case, then the possibilities he's suggesting about "selfing structures" in the brain, etc, could "exist" simply because he suggested them.

[zendancer]

From my POV science and non-duality are not remotely at odds. I simply think that most scientists have no reference for understanding what Bell's Theorem is pointing to. The "matter myth" is so deeply ingrained by the conditioning that scientists undergo that it's hard for them to get free of it, and thereby see the forest rather than the trees. Astronomers are never taught that when they look at distant galaxies, they are looking at themselves! Ha ha.

[zendancer]

Mar 30, 2014 17:33:05 GMT -5 sighclone said:

Gary is a friend of about six years. He has a business executive background, and a PhD in materials science, is very pragmatic. But his personal accounts of awakening are almost poetic -- an interesting combination. He is about as well-respected in the conventional professional community as anyone who says that "thinking stopped fifteen years ago" could be. He was a strong influence on me early on and remains very helpful. His blog is widely diversified. He is also fluent in Sanskrit and highly skilled at hatha and other forms of yoga. His primary teacher was Ramana Maharshi. He travels widely and speaks frequently, more as a pandit than a guru.

sighclone: if you have an email address for Gary, please send it to me via the Personal Message function. I couldn't find it on the net. Thanks.

[stardustpilgrim]

Hey all ........ From reading this thread I read Gary Weber's book Dancing Beyond Thought, Bhagavad Gita Verses and Dialogues On Awakening on Kindle and ordered his other book Happiness Beyond Thought (2007). I could recommend it to anyone interested in non-duality and anyone interested in how the mind/brain works. He gives some simple exercises that in just a few minutes you will probably learn more about your mind than you have in an equal amount of time, from anything else. As the following subject comes up continually, thought I'd share a quote. If I browse a book on non-duality and get, practice isn't necessary, it's probably even a hindrance, there is nothing you can do to get enlightened, I pretty-much stop there and put the book down. So......

The Case for Practicing in Awakening

There are some reputedly enlightened folk who have taught that there is nothing to be done as we are already enlightened. They further contend that all practice is meaningless and a diversion. Others say that practice is only useful to convince ourselves that we cannot get enlightened through practice. They believe that practice is done only so that we become so frustrated that we simply surrender our ego and its attempts, after which enlightenment just happens.

These viewpoints are reinforced by the lack of any apparent pattern or consistency to the situations in which enlightenment experiences occur. Some have been enlightened by walking across a park, others when they kicked a stone against a bamboo and others when they visited a house of prostitution. Still others were awakened when they stepped off a curb or when they were waiting for a bus. In the author's case it occurred while doing an a yoga posture that had been done thousands of times before. These unpredictable events which are clearly beyond any plausible cause and effect relationship are taken as proof of the impossibility of making enlightenment happen.

There is an emerging scientifically-validated view on the necessity of practice that is gaining significant credibility. ..........In this work, experienced meditators have a very different mode of processing sensory inputs and generating and controlling mental states that untrained, inexperienced people. .........

...........Virtually all self-realized folk who proclaim that there is nothing that can be done in preparation for enlightenment, and who give adequate biographies, went through years of spiritual disciplines before the apparently serendipitous triggering event occurred. Isn't it more likely that there is a process that does modify the brain in a way that increases concentration and detachment and creates a different functional pattern? ....................

In response to questions about the necessity of effort in practice to gain enlightenment, Ramana Maharshi said, "No one succeeds without effort. Mind control is not one's birthright. The successful few owe their success to their perseverance". (pages 12, 14)

Weber makes the point that it takes thousands of hours (generally about 10,000 hours) to master any skill, the violin, chess, being an Olympic athlete, why should the process of becoming enlightened be any different?

[Deleted]

Gary Weber said this about his thoughts stopping:

“That was fourteen years ago,” says Weber. “I entered into a state of complete inner stillness. Except for a few stray thoughts first thing in the morning, and a few more when my blood sugar gets low, my mind is quiet. The old thought-track has never come back."

I find the blood sugar comment extremely interesting. As a parent I see huge effects from low blood sugar -- dwelling, mood, bickering, irritating/irritable. It's a wonder that we meditate early in the morning, prior to breakfast, or late at night given this handicap.

[Deleted]

Reading an article in Psychology Tomorrow featuring Gary Weber. The article "A Wandering Mind is An Unhappy Mind" is referenced -- published in Science -- as supporting the default mode network (DMN or DN) idea (constant self-referential thinking).

Our old friend Question would appreciate this, I think:

Contemplatives may recoil at the idea, but for Brewer, addressing suffering is the priority, a project science can help with. As proof-of-concept, Brewer has just published two studies [here and here] that show how meditators can watch live feedback from their brains inside the fMRI and use it to decrease their DMN activation in real-time. And he’s just received an NIH grant to study how this could work for non-meditators – more quickly, and hopefully, one day, more affordably. “The aim is to see if neurofeedback can give regular folks feedback on subtle aspects of their experience …stuff they wouldn’t notice otherwise,” he says.

Weber agrees, “Right now we can get folks off the street and within one or two runs in the Yale fMRI they can produce this deactivated state. The more glimpses the brain gets, the more time it spends there, the more it can stay there. It’s like riding a bike. With this technology you may not have to spend twenty-five years practicing like I did. It’s much more efficient.”

I'd like to get into sum o'dat action too!

[Deleted]

I liked this chart

from A Wandering Mind is An Unhappy Mind.

First, people’s minds wandered frequently, regardless of what they were doing. Mind wandering occurred in 46.9% of the samples and in at least 30% of the samples taken during every activity except making love. The frequency of mind wandering in our real-world sample was considerably higher than is typically seen in laboratory experiments. Surprisingly, the nature of people’s activities had only a modest impact on whether their minds wandered and had almost no impact on the pleasantness of the topics to which their minds wandered (12).

Second, multilevel regression revealed that people were less happy when their minds were wandering than when they were not [slope (b) = –8.79, P < 0.001], and this was true during all activities, including the least enjoyable. Although people’s minds were more likely to wander to pleasant topics (42.5% of samples) than to unpleasant topics (26.5% of samples) or neutral topics (31% of samples), people were no happier when thinking about pleasant topics than about their current activity (b = –0.52, not significant) and were considerably unhappier when thinking about neutral topics (b = –7.2, P < 0.001) or unpleasant topics (b = –23.9, P < 0.001) than about their current activity (Fig. 1, bottom). Although negative moods are known to cause mind wandering (13), time-lag analyses strongly suggested that mind wandering in our sample was generally the cause, and not merely the consequence, of unhappiness (12).

Third, what people were thinking was a better predictor of their happiness than was what they were doing. The nature of people’s activities explained 4.6% of the within-person variance in happiness and 3.2% of the between-person variance in happiness, but mind wandering explained 10.8% of within-person variance in happiness and 17.7% of between-person variance in happiness. The variance explained by mind wandering was largely independent of the variance explained by the nature of activities, suggesting that the two were independent influences on happiness.

In conclusion, a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost.

[Deleted]

"“When you let the “I” fall away, what happens is there is no one there to hold the other end of “I need you,” or “I want you” or “I love you.” I have no attachment to my family anymore – but my wife would say I’m a better husband for it, and my daughters that I’m a better father. I’m much more present than I used to be.”"