Contemplative Technologies: An Interview with Stuart Ray Sarbacker, PhD
Stuart Ray Sarbacker is an Associate Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Oregon State University. He specializes in the Comparative Study of Religion with a focus on Indic religion and philosophy. His work is centered on the relationships between the religious and philosophical traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, especially with respect to the practices of yoga and tantra. He is currently participating in a 3-year Luce Foundation funded program on religion and technology that is being administered by the Institute for Buddhist Studies in Berkeley, California. His project focuses on the ways in which the philosophical and ethical issues associated with self-transformation in Indian contemplative traditions mirror those arising from emergent technologies of human augmentation. He is a co-founder and former co-chair of the American Academy of Religion’s Yoga in Theory and Practice section, and has also served as the co-chair of the American Academy of Religion’s Mysticism section. In addition to his academic credentials, Professor Sarbacker is an active yoga practitioner and teacher, having trained extensively in contemporary yoga and meditation traditions in India and the United States.
You’ve discovered a possible connection between Patañjali’s Yogasūtra and Vasubandhu's Verses on the Treasury of Abhidharma, between two verses which both name osadhi or “herbs” as a source of supernormal abilities or siddhi. First, is there a difference between the siddhi described by Patañjali and Vasubandhu, and the ends toward which these abilities are to be utilized? Second, does this suggest a tradition of plant entheogen use connecting Classical Yoga to Sarvāstivāda Abhidharma?
The Yogasūtra of Patañjali (YS), and by extension the larger commentarial context of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra (PYS), indicates at 4.1 that extraordinary accomplishments (siddhi) emerge from at least five sources, namely birth (janma), herbs (oṣadhi), incantation (mantra), austerities (tapas), and contemplation (samādhi). In the Abhidharmakośa (AK) 7.53 and its explanation (bhāṣya), Vasubandhu provides a parallel list of five sources of extraordinary accomplishment, utilizing the cognate Sanskrit term ṛddhi (Pāli iddhi). The five sources listed in the Abhidharmakośabhāṣya (AKBh) include [meditative] cultivation (bhāvanā), [spontaneous] production (upapatti), incantation (mantra), and action (karma). These parallels were noted in the early 20th century by Louis de La Vallée Poussin and have been touched upon in a recent essay by Dominik Wujastyk published in an edited volume entitled Yoga in Transformation (2018). I am in the process of writing a paper that explores this connection in more detail, with particular attention to the larger contexts in which the parallels appear. An interesting facet to the discussion is that both texts discuss these accomplishments (siddhi/ṛddhi) in relationship to the notion of constructed minds (nirmāṇa-citta), with special attention to the karmic implications of the arising of particular types of powers through various means. Both Vasubandhu and Patañjali appear to view what arises out of meditation or [meditative] cultivation (dhyānaja, bhāvanāja) as being uniquely efficacious and having a morally neutral or “transethical” quality (see, for example, YS 4.6 and AK 7.53). Overall, it appears clear that the practice of meditation during this era—of what I like to call “Classical Yoga” and “Classical Śramaṇa” traditions—was situated within a larger context of psycho-experimentation that included a variety of different means and approaches, including the use of psychoactive substances. As I argue in my forthcoming book, Tracing the Path of Yoga: The History and Philosophy of Indian Mind-Body Discipline (forthcoming 2020), that this is consistent with a larger historical and philosophical thread of the use of psychoactive substances as an accessory to yogic practices extending from the earliest strata of Indian asceticism to the present. With respect what forms of siddhi are involved, the principal commentary to the YS refers the reader back to the third chapter of the text, which introduces a wide range of yogic powers, including flight (ākāśagamana), invisibility (antardhāna), mind-reading (paracittajñāna), and extraordinary sensory capacities such as the divine ear (divya-śrotra), among many others. In the AK, one of the general divisions of ṛddhi is between movement (gamana) and manifestation (nirmāṇa), i.e. between the ability to fly, etc., and the ability to manifest various objects or multiply oneself into various minds and bodies. There is clearly a great deal of overlap linguistically and conceptually between siddhi and ṛddhi.
Bhekāsana, or “frog posture” (from The Art of Vinyasa, by Richard Freeman and Mary Taylor).
Some have suggested a possible connection between shamanic accounts of shapeshifting, accessing the power of animals by assuming their form, and various animal-themed yoga postures such as Cobra or Scorpion. To the best of your knowledge, is there any evidence of such a direct influence of shamanic polymorphism on yoga poses?
With respect to the question of “shamanic” elements of yoga, one of the most interesting contexts to look at is the so-called “Keśin Hymn” of Ṛgveda 10.136. The verse references the use of a poison, or perhaps “agent,” (viṣa), and describes the long-haired one (keśin) or [silent] sage (muni) entering an ecstatic state and traveling with celestial beings (apsaras and gandharva) and beasts (mṛga). I agree with Karel Werner’s analysis that the Keśin is an important prototype for the yogin and yoginī, especially with respect to the attainment of various siddhi-s, and that it is a mistake for scholars to myopically focus, as they often have done, on liberating insight or cessation as the sine qua non of yogic practice.
As mentioned in my previous response, the notion of the [yogic] constructed mind (nirmāṇa-citta) as a form of extraordinary accomplishment (ṛddhi) is another key way in which the ability to manifest a range of different, including animal, forms appear as part of the yogic-meditative repertoire in Buddhism, and is particularly important with respect to Mahāyāna conceptions of Bodhisattvahood and Buddhahood. The doctrine of the Three Bodies (trikāya), namely of the truth-body (dharmakāya), enjoyment body (saṃbhogakāya), and manifestation body (nirmāṇakāya), presupposes that accomplished practitioners can manifest in a variety of forms, and that doing so is soteriologically efficacious (i.e. a vehicle for compassionate activity, especially the dissemination of liberating knowledge and the enhancement of faith).
There is evidence in the early Indian tradition, including in the Mahābhārata and Buddhist sources, of ascetic vows (vrata) that involved imitating various animals, such a bat, dog, or bull, which James Mallinson and others have shown manifest in certain types of practice (such as hanging upside down from trees). There is also a strong association established in the early period between theriomorphic [humanoid] serpents (nāga) and yogic-ascetic practice, as is evident in the association of Gautama Buddha with the Nāgarāja Mucilinda, of Parśvanātha with the Nāgarāja Dharaṇendra, and Patañjali with Nāgarāja Ādiśeṣa or Ananta. In the later Buddhist tradition this trope is illustrated in, among other contexts, the narratives of the Mahāsiddha Nāgārjuna (who receives secret teachings from the nāga-realm) and in the association between the nāga-s and yoga demonstrated by the Dalai Lama’s Lukhang (Nāga Temple) adjacent the Potala Palace in which the Tibetan yogic practices of trulkhor are illustrated). Ian Baker has done quite a bit of interesting work on the yogic disciplines represented in the Lukhang.
An ascetic practicing the “bat penance” (source image: Roots of Yoga, translated and edited by James Mallinson and Mark Singleton).
With respect to postural practice in yoga, one of the earliest descriptions of yogic poses is in the Pātañjalayogaśāstra, namely the Vyāsa- or Yogabhāṣya commentary, for YS verse 2.46, sthīrasukhamāsanam, “posture (āsana) should be stable (sthīra) and comfortable (sukha).” Though Patañjali does not name any specific forms of yogic posture, the Yogabhāṣya lists a series of postures, including lotus posture (padmāsana), hero posture (vīrāsana), prosperous posture (bhadrāsana), auspicious posture (svastikāsana), staff posture (daṇḍāsana), supported seat (sopāśraya), squatting (prayaṅka), sitting like a heron (krauñchaniṣadana), sitting like an elephant (hastiniṣadana), and sitting like a camel (uṣṭraniṣadana). These appear to be mostly, if not all, seated postures utilized for the practice of breath control (prāṇāyāma) and meditation (dhyāna). As “animal postures,” they appear to be characterized by the manner in which they resemble the ways that particular animals sit. I think this analogical use is characteristic of the postural traditions as they expand in the late medieval traditions of haṭhayoga and in the development of early modern forms of yoga. The scholars of the Haṭha Yoga project at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, including James Mallinson, Mark Singleton, and Jason Birch, have been doing especially useful work on this latter era. Mallinson and Singleton’s recent work, Roots of Yoga (2017), is a useful entry point into this conversation, as well as Jason Birch’s blog, The Luminescent.
The tantric traditions of Śaivism and Buddhism provide another important point of intersection between the Indic traditions and polymorphism, again, principally in the form of theriomorphic human-animal hybrids. The Yoginī traditions that are so important in both Śaiva and Buddhist “Mother Tantras” (mātṛtantra) are filled with theriomorphic yoginī figures who are often wrathful and terrifying (ghora or raudra) in appearance, bearing animal attributes; likewise many of the male Buddhist tantric deities in the “Father Tantras” (pitṛtantra) are modeled after theriomorphic figurations of Śiva as the “Terrible One” (Bhairava), such as Vajrabhairava or Yamāntaka, a wrathful form of the Bodhisattva of wisdom, Mañjuśrī, who appears with a buffalo’s head and horns.
Your book, Samādhi, elaborates a long series of correspondences between related polarities: ecstatic vs. enstatic; numinous vs. cessative; cosmological-mythical vs. soteriological-ethical; peripheral vs. central; extrovertive vs. introvertive; ergotropic (“hyperarousal”) vs. trophotrophic (“hypoarousal”); siddhi (“mastery”) vs. bodhi (“awakening”); samāpatti (“attainment”) vs. nirodha (“cessation”); vipaśyanā vs. śamatha. What are the limits to such analogy, especially the analogy between ecstasy-enstasy and numinous-cessative?
Following Samādhi, I wrote a short piece entitled “The Numinous and Cessative in Modern Yoga” (2008) that condenses and clarifies my argument in the book and applies it to modern modes of yoga practice, and I would recommend that to anyone who wants to get a snapshot of the theoretical approach that I used. Writing that essay also allowed me to get a bit of a birds-eye perspective on the theoretical framework I had developed, and a few things struck me. The first was a sense that what I was striving for was a dynamic approach to understanding religious experience that was multifaceted and that gave due consideration to phenomenological and critical-historical approaches. I am still interested in this project, though some tweaking of my framework and additional precision in the use the terminology is warranted, I think. Another was that certain principles, such as the conflation of the attainment of extraordinary capacity and moral virtuosity, can be fruitfully applied to aspects of contemporary culture, such as athletics and politics, as well as to religious experience. I’ve written a bit about that issue, especially the moral implications of performance enhancement, in an academic essay on herbs (oṣadhi/auṣadhi) in yoga (available on my Academia.edu page) and in my co-authored book on yoga philosophy, The Eight Limbs of Yoga: A Handbook for Living Yoga Philosophy (2015).
A third thing that came out of my further reflection was more interest and enthusiasm in studying Rudolf Otto’s notions of the numinous (as opposed to Ninian Smart’s, which informed much of Samādhi), especially Otto’s notions of otherness (andere) and his notions of the dual nature of the numinous as an experience of awe-inspiring and terrifying mystery (mysterium tremendum et fascinans). On this note, I have found Buddhist cosmological theory to be a particularly elegant resource for thinking about the reconciliation of cosmological and psychological perspectives of “otherness,” both in scale and quality. I recently presented a paper on Buddhism and Transhumanism where I argued that technological augmentation of human embodiment, whether through engineering or augmenting humans or through uploading, is analogous to becoming like a deva or a brahmā in Buddhist cosmology. In other words, it represents an “otherness” of scale, distinct from the achievement of the noble states such as that of the Buddha, Pratyekabuddha, Bodhisattva, or Arhat, who are qualitatively different (i.e. have achieved some degree of awakening). Aśvaghoṣa, in his Buddhacarita, likens Siddhārtha’s life in the palace before his renunciation to that of deva-s in the heavens—a sort of “ivory tower” existence that is distant from the realities of saṃsāra and therefore not spiritually advantageous. This plays into the numinous-cessative distinction from Samādhi in the sense that becoming more spirit-like (numina, numinous) in itself is not necessarily the goal, but rather to diagnose the ills (duḥkha) of saṃsāra and to achieve liberation (vimukti) or cessation (nirodha). On the other hand, some deva-s and brahmā-s are viewed as virtuous and spiritually advanced, and rebirth into their realms, such as the akaniṣṭha heaven, is highly fortuitous. And this is not to mention the conceptions of Buddha-fields (buddhakṣetra), especially those characterized as being purified (pariśuddha), or “Pure Lands.”
In “A Preliminary Study on Meditation and the Beginnings of Mahāyāna Buddhism,” Florin Deleanu claims that the relation between śamatha and vipaśyanā meditation has not always been one of perfect balance and harmony, as Buddhist tradition has portrayed it to be. He follows Lambert Schmithausen is naming “inclusivism” as the method by which the tension between śamatha and vipaśyanā has been harmonized: “the competing doctrine, or essential elements of it, are admitted but relegated to a subordinate position.” That is, śamatha was relegated to the role of an “ancillary or soteriologically irrelevant” practice. In Samādhi, you suggest that the attainment-cessation or numinous-cessative tension lies “beneath the surface” of Buddhist conceptions of śamatha-vipaśyanā. If “numinous-cessative” is analogous to “ecstatic-enstatic,” then does the tension between vipaśyanā and śamatha anticipate the tension in today’s Buddhist discourse between psychedelics and meditation? Is the potential harmony between psychedelics and mediation likely to be inclusivistic, with one or the other relegated to a subordinate role?
Another intriguing question! I have been reading Florin Deleanu’s work with considerable interest as well over the past few years. My overall understanding is that the relative emphasis on śamatha and vipaśyanā has been something that has undergone a process of considerable negotiation over time, continuing to/in the present. There have been some scholars, such as Tilmann Vetter and, more recently, Karen Arbel, that argue that the śamatha-vipaśyanā distinction is problematic and obscures the nature of early Buddhist practice in significant ways. My view, which is a bit more pragmatic in orientation, is that such terminology was developed, in part, as a discursive way of understanding the dynamic tension between the development of blissful, single-pointed concentration and the application of concentration as a vehicle for liberating insight. I think this notion is expressed in the Mahāyāna notion of “the joining of insight and calm,” śamathavipaśyanāyuganaddha, as an elaboration and extension of the understandings represented in the Nikāya literature. I think it is also useful to note that śamatha was understood as a resource for generating an inner joy and peace that was not dependent on external objects, i.e. a way to modulate emotions on a daily basis and address, therapeutically, particular mental afflictions and hindrances, as well as a basis for liberating insight. As I suggested in Samādhi, in a monastic and institutional context where scholarly knowledge and discursive activity is primary (and meditative praxis secondary, or non-existent), and where one does not need to establish one’s authority through demonstrating one’s charismatic power, it would not be surprising to see jhāna/dhyāna get relegated to secondary status. Perhaps there might even be a degree of “sour grapes” of critiquing practices that are not being sustained in the community as being unnecessary. It may also play into the distinction between urban and forest monastic communities, the latter of which has been typically seen as the locus of austerity and bhāvanā. The various types of attainment represented in Buddhism, including the “classical” three of the Buddha, Pratyekabuddha, and Śrāvaka, as well as that of the Āryabodhisattva, are all represented as inclusive of the mastery of dhyāna, bhāvanā, and/or śamatha, and not just the achievement of liberating insight. This is not to say that discursive knowledge is not viewed as efficacious in and of itself in Buddhism in some contexts—the Buddha’s first discourse, for example, is said to have led the ascetic Kauṇḍinya to an experience of awakening “on the spot.”
Source image: The Mirror of Yoga by Richard Freeman.
I think you may well be on to something with respect to the ways in which the use of psychoactive substances might be seen as a way of initiating experiences analogous to those evoked by śamatha. My own (limited) experience with dhyāna/jhāna and, perhaps more importantly, textual descriptions and personal reports of the experience contemporary meditators indicate that śamatha evokes intense experiences of bliss and light and a removal from ordinary awareness (cognitively-cosmologically) that seem akin, in some respects, to some psychedelic experiences. On the other hand, I think one of the foundational principles of psychedelic culture is the notion of pursuing experiences of under-conditioned, or even “unconditioned” experience—what Huxley conceived of as a reduction of the “filtering” of experience, which might be more akin to vipaśyanā and the development of the foundations of mindfulness (smṛtyupasthāna). Again, these two may fit together, in that the intensity of śamatha-like cognitive states evoked by psychedelics might facilitate a mode of seeing in which ordinary and habitual perceptual states are temporarily attenuated. The Johns Hopkins University Psilocybin project, for example, has led to the theorization of certain forms of “quantum change,” i.e. radical reconfiguration of mental/emotional life, as a result of the extraordinary experience of ego-loss or ego-death. An interesting twist on this is research into, in contrast, adverse effects of meditation—“Zen Sickness,” etc.—which gets at the possibility of meditation evoking very negative experiences, such as “bad trips” or psychotic reactions. This is part of the reason Johns Hopkins project screens its candidates carefully—and I think that selectivity should be kept in mind when thinking about the degree that the results are truly generalizable. On the other hand, they have utilized a subset of participants who are experienced meditators to provide some perspective on the intersection of meditation and psychedelics.
I think psychedelics have a powerful ability to generate faith or confidence (śraddhā) in the notion that there is a much larger story going on behind our ordinary experience, and, in this respect, it opens the door to consideration of Buddhist assertions regarding the illusory nature of conventional experience. The recent documentary film Journeys to the Edge of Consciousness does an excellent job of communicating—in part through animated dramatization of the experiences of Aldous Huxley, as mentioned earlier, and others—the “view-busting” potential of psychedelics.
As you are perhaps intimating with your last question, I am a bit more nuanced in my thinking now about the links between the ecstasis-enstasis and śamatha-vipaśyanā dynamics; in part because the ecstasis of śamatha is dependent on a withdrawal from sensory experience, i.e. enstasis, and there is definitely a “outwardness” to vipaśyanā (of insight into phenomena) that might likewise be considered as ecstasis. However, I still think that the philosophical framework around śamatha suggests the experience of emotive states and visionary experiences that are often framed as “ecstasy” in the study of religion, whereas vipaśyanā is typically framed as a more “sober” contemplation of the principles of anatmān, śūnyatā, etc., in some cases even being referred to as “bare” or “dry” modes of insight!
In Samādhi, you build upon the work of anthropologist I. M. Lewis and suggest a possible “dynamic relationship” between the status of a religious community within its larger society, as either peripheral or central, and the quality of that community’s experiences and practices, as either numinous or cessative. Your argument seems to be that, as the beliefs and practices of a fringe cult are integrated or recuperated into the mainstream, the cult’s practices become less numinous (i.e., aimed at the individual attainment of power) and more cessative (i.e., a “flowing” of this accrued power “out to the environment on both the psychological and social levels”). Is this assessment correct? If so, could a similar dynamic be at work today, in the mainstreaming of psychedelic, ecstatic experience? In other words, do groups such as Psychedelic Sangha, with our attempts to integrate entheogens and meditation, represent a larger trend toward the mainstreaming of psychedelic counterculture (the “psychedelic renaissance” of medicalization, decriminalization, etc.) and therefore a shift from a numinous mode to a cessative mode of experience?
That is an intriguing hypothesis, and I would have to agree that Lewis’s work might well be useful for understanding these transformations of psychedelic culture. I have thought a lot lately about Leary’s invitation to “turn on, tune in, and drop out” and the history of the psychedelic counterculture in light of contemporary transformations in the mainstream of the United States, particularly in the therapeutic context. In Oregon, we have the 2020 Psilocybin Service Initiative, which is envisioned as setting up a framework for the legal use of Psilocybin by trained facilitators, which would serve as an excellent example of “centralization” of psychedelic culture. In addition to the institutionalization process, the focus on the therapeutic use—aiming to reduce harm, or suffering—links these contemporary cultures to the ethos of cessation, i.e. to overcoming mental afflictions, some of which clearly are cyclical in nature (PTSD, for example). On the other hand, I think there is good evidence to suggest that the most powerful and transformative therapeutic experiences (again, what the Johns Hopkins people call “quantum change”) seems to be linked to how profound the subject’s experience is—i.e. whether it is seen by the subject as a powerful quasi-religious, if not mystical experience. There’s a great essay on this topic by Ron Cole-Turner entitled “Spiritual Enhancement” in a volume edited by Mercer and Trothen, Religion and Transhumanism: The Unknown Future of Human Enhancement (2015). I would also suggest that these processes might be cyclical, as well, in that the 60’s countercultural revolution came on the heels of a couple of decades of therapeutically (and in some cases militarily) driven research on psychedelics. Leary and Alpert were working on psilocybin at Harvard before their untimely exit and subsequent launch into countercultural superstardom. I think, however, that the current generation of advocates and researchers are much more circumspect about the potential for a backlash against psychedelics and have been far more strategic. There is, of course, still the possibility that there will be a broad upsurge in interest in religion and spirituality arising out of the adoption of psychedelics in therapeutic contexts. I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up with a generation of new religious studies and philosophy majors at our universities akin to the late 60’s and early-to-mid 70’s! From what I have seen in Oregon, there is also an increasing perception in the psychedelic community of the need for post-psychedelic integrative work, including both the ability to deal with experiences therapeutically and to understand experiences of ecstasy and transcendence through referencing both traditional and non-traditional religious frames.
Poster for the historic Human Be-In at Golden Gate Park, Jan. 14, 1967. (Art by Stanley Mouse, photograph by Casey Sonnabend.)
You attended the Awakened Futures Summit in San Francisco, in May 2019. What topics or presentations most excited you? Have any of these topics or presentations influenced your recent thought and work?
On the topic of psychedelics, I was really struck by several of the speakers’ appeals to the need for reflection on the linkages and differences between recreational, therapeutic, and religious uses of psychoactive substances. Janis Phelps, the Director of the Center for Psychedelic Therapies and Research at the California Institute of Integral Studies, spoke about how “best practices” for psychedelic therapy were not only a resource for clinical settings, but a foundation for responding to issues emerging from decriminalization and subsequent recreational use. In other words, she argued that it is a good thing to have knowledgeable and experienced professionals available for the inevitable adverse reactions that are going to happen in unsupervised recreational contexts. Several of the presenters spoke on issues that related to the fluidity of the boundaries between recreational, therapeutic, and spiritual or religious use, and numerous presenters and audience members were dedicated and experienced psychedelic guides with great enthusiasm for traditional training and methods. There was also quite a bit of discussion of the ways in which corporate America is looking at the therapeutic use of psychedelics as a potential growth market, with speakers such as author Jamie Wheal sounding the alarm as to the potential dangers of an “industrial” approach to psychedelics. Last, but not least, considerable time was spent on various emerging contemplative technologies, such as Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TCMS) and Transdermal Electrical Stimulation (TCES), as either tools to augment or replace meditative practices. Perhaps most intriguing were suggestions for the convergence of meditation practice, contemplative technologies, and psychedelics. Though there was very little explicit discussion of Transhumanism, there was quite a bit of techno-utopianism expressed, typically following a recognition of the challenges we face in achieving social and environmental justice in an era of unmitigated crisis.
Shameless product placement: an early-model (circa 2015) Muse Meditation Headband EEG system.
One last point that might be of interest is that I often found myself thinking about the ways in which the community at Awakened Futures, formally under the aegis of “Consciousness Hacking,” has a quasi-religious character to it. It reminded me a bit of Robert Geraci’s thesis that Transhumanism is the “religion of modernity,” offering many of the same potential goods—freedom from suffering and immortality—that have been offered by historical religions. I’m also inclined to think the concept of “biohacking” provides a reflexive conceptual framework for thinking about Indian priestly asceticism and the Śramaṇa traditions with all of their various techniques for achieving extraordinary modes of thought and action (as per the discussion of siddhi/ṛddhi above). In this respect, I see an interesting continuity between the past and present of psychedelics and contemplative practice.
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