Altered Traits

Sigmund Freud advised psychoanalysts to adopt an “even-hovering attention” while listening to their clients—but again, offered no method.

THE ACCELERATION
As early as the 1830s, Thoreau and Emerson, along with their fellow American Transcendentalists, flirted with these Eastern inner arts.

Meditation is a catch-all word for myriad varieties of contemplative practice, just as sports refers to a wide range of athletic activities. For both sports and meditation, the end results vary depending on what you actually do.

These reactions were typical of the opposition we faced from our department heads, who were still responding with knee-jerk negativity toward anything to do with consciousness—perhaps a mild form of PTSD after the notorious debacle involving Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert. Leary and Alpert had been very publicly ousted from our department in a brouhaha over letting Harvard undergrads experiment with psychedelics. This was some five years before we arrived, but the echoes lingered.

And when Richie told one of his Harvard professors that he
wanted to focus his dissertation on meditation, the blunt response came immediately: that would be a career-ending move.

Richie, with long hair and attire in keeping with the zeitgeist of Cambridge in those times—including a colorful woven sash that he wore as a belt—was startled when his professor said, “One clue to schizophrenia is the bizarre way a person dresses,” giving Richie a meaningful glance.

doctoral dissertations applied that advice by studying ways meditation could have cognitive and emotional payoffs.

desk, or via minutes-long meditation apps, exemplify this level.

The current vogues of mindfulness-at-your-

The even more widely accessible forms of meditation at Level 4 are, of necessity, the most watered-down, all the better to render them handy for the largest number of people