Transformative Practices
An Esalen Invitational Conference
November 28 - December 2, 1999

World as Tantric Adventure
Michael Murphy

1. The sheer availability of transformative practices. They have become truly global. We have reclaimed ancient traditions at the same time as new ones are being created. He has watched this process for fifty years. Certain parts will flower and then coast for a while. For example, in the fifties, on the heels of Alan Watts, Zen came through in a big wave.
2. Our understanding of internal psychodynamics has been evolving since Freud. The East never really had a language for this.
3. Modern medicine and physiology have led to many discoveries that bear upon our understanding of practices. For example, George Solomon postulates that every practice produces a new cocktail of peptides and molecules in the blood. There are more combinatorial possibilities than elementary particles in the known universe. Michael helped assemble the largest bibliography of scientific studies of meditation -- some 2000 studies, most of which were made possible by technology unavailable until now. There are changes in brain waves, autonomic regulation, saliva, etc.
4. We are more sophisticated than ever before about how culturally conditioned we are. As one example, studies of entrainment and gestures show how immigrants assimilate into a new world.
5. Discovery of evolution. When the sacred traditions arose, people didn't know about evolution. It was a great moment in history when the great chain of being was temporalized around 1800, culminating with Darwin's theory. This gives us new perspectives on life in general, including transformative practice.

Michael started to collect reports of unusual experiences and abilities as far back as the late 60's. He proposed to the Ford Foundation to do an inventory of ways that people grow. They isolated 200 major practices and more than 10,000 techniques in 1967. They guessed that a new technique was being invented once a week. Then, after writing Golf in the Kingdom, golfers began telling him of their extraordinary experiences on the golf course. With Rhea White, who is America's leading archivist in the field of parapsychology, he wrote the Psychic Side of Sport. They organized these experiences by descriptors, which led to almost 100 categories, which they eventually reduced to 25 groups. Next, he and Esalen began collecting an archive of 10,000 studies that is now housed at Stanford which looked for examples of extraordinary functioning. Margaret Livingston worked on this and went to Lourdes, where she struck up a relationship with the medical bureau, which keeps records of scientifically inexplicable cures at the famous shrine. All of this interest eventually led to The Future of the Body, a book that Michael sometimes calls a natural history of extraordinary functioning.

While organizing all of these materials, Michael recognized the usefulness of seeing them as extraordinary expressions of common human attributes: volition, cognition, perception, love, movement, kinesthetic sense, etc. He organized the experiences into twelve sets of attributes. We have inherited these in a more primitive form from higher vertebrates. Metanormal abilities hint that we might be on the cusp of evolving each attribute to a still-higher form. This relates to the siddhis in Hinduism. Haridas Chaudhuri made Michael a list just before he died. Swami Gitananda of Ireland made a similar list. Michael began to parallel these with the charisms of Catholic saints. The Catholic church is the only religion to put its saints on trial. Evidence is taken for and against proposed beatification. The promotor fidei plays the role of Devil's advocate and attempts to strike down any spurious claims. Over the course of these trials, many weird things have been acknowledged and named, leading to 30 recognized charisms. For example, bodily elongation started to be reported -- the body of the saint would elongate in one way or another, but this was not used as evidence for beatification.

For Michael, all of this work relates to Tantra. Tantra operates from the assumption that all of our common activities can become the engine or place of practice. Sex, eating, breathing, walking, sitting, even golfing can become the occasion for spiritual awakening. This provides a way to understand what is going on with the emergence of these supernormal attributes. The universe builds upon what went before to open up into something more. The attributes have been created by natural selection, but their further evolution demands education and practice. Evolution itself evolves. The mediating mechanism may change but the developmental line continues.

What does this categorization system give us? One benefit of a taxonomy is that it can give us a sense for what is missing. For example, Michael got to know Lee Evans, who was on a team acknowledged as the greatest sprint team in history. Their coach, Bud Winter, would hypnotize them and rehearse every stride. Among these sprinters, there was a phenomenon called "tipping," which referred to moving in a new way. The sprinters feel they are running in a way that they normally can't. Lee Evans said he was tipping when he set a world record that lasted for twenty years. Michael become curious about where else he might find this. Sure enough, he discovered the lungom walkers in Tibet, who could cover vast distances with a special kind of walking that seemed to be halfway to levitation. He than found a charism in Catholicism called ecstatic walking that is said to precede levitation. The search for these sorts of phenomena thus becomes pattern driven.

How does this bear upon transformative practice? If there is some profound impulse of the universe operating at all times in us to evolve further, maybe it wants to move on all fronts. Most of the time we repress these tendencies or only allow them in limited domains. Certain sports, like golf, remove the repression and allow in the siddhis. Michael's core thesis is that the siddhis are the limbs and organs of our budding supernature. They are expressions of what we could, or will, be.

Jeff commented on the comparative nature of Michael's inquiry and how new insights arise from putting things together that have been separate. What does the comparative method bring us that individual traditions alone can't do? Michael's view is that religions themselves are evolving. When we take all this cross-cultural work into purview, we are creating what in Buddhism is called a better "right view." We have to raise a broader sail to catch the winds of grace and develop more effective practices. Michael feels that practice is exploring into new terrain. A fixed idea of enlightenment can become an imprisoning notion.

Kaisa spoke to the shadow side of this comparative effort. When we have "wised up" about imbalances in traditions and moved towards balance, we might neglect the benefits of pushing practices to the maximum. It is at the edge that something happens and the mindset itself dissolves. Michael said that balance is fundamental for further growth and then at times we go to the edge. We have to risk everything at a certain point. Ramakrishna is an example of this. Participants agreed that this is a key issue in the study of transformative practices, the tension between balance and extremism. Don added that one of the major benefits to him personally of comparative study is that new methods illuminate deficiencies in previous techniques. Before this kind of comparative study was possible, we just had to live with the gaps. For example, he was schooled in Christian mysticism but embodiment practices helped fill in the gaps.

Richard reflected on Zen practice, which has little interest in siddhis, though practice increases their likelihood. The emphasis is on enlightenment, but there is also an emphasis on samadhis (temporary, highly concentrated states of awareness). Samadhis almost take the place of siddhis. He advised Michael to take a look at the parallels between siddhis and samadhis. For example, one could see samadhis as inward experiences and siddhis as the outer manifestation. Michael Mahoney commented that in his work with Olympic athletes, states of deep concentration are highly related to success, as are states of intense energy flow. Some athletes talk about allowing the energy of the crowd to be absorbed and channeled back.