Printed in the Spring 2024 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Smoley, Richard "Three Minutes a Day: An Interview with Richard Dixey" Quest 112:2, pg 12-19
By Richard Smoley
Richard Dixey is a scientist and lifelong student of Asian philosophy. He runs the Light of Buddhadharma Foundation in India with his wife, Wangmo, the eldest daughter of the Tibetan lama Tarthang Tulku. He is a senior faculty member at Dharma College in Berkeley, California.
His new book, Three Minutes a Day: A Fourteen-Week Course to Learn Meditation and Transform Your Life (New World Library), claims that by following the practices in it for only three minutes a day for fourteen weeks, you can transform your meditative practice and your life.
I conducted a Zoom interview with Dixey about his new book. The full interview is available on YouTube-. Following is an edited version.
Richard Smoley: Could you explain a little bit about the book and how it connects readers with meditative practice?
Richard Dixey: To really understand what this book is about, it’s worth having a brief review of meditation, because most people have never meditated; they think it’s some mystical practice from the East.
To begin, the only things we will ever experience and can ever experience are the inputs from our five senses and our thoughts and imaginations: everything else is inferential. From these, we can infer an external world. We can also infer an internal world, but these too are inferences built upon these primary events.
Meditation is about directly addressing those inputs by looking at experience as experience. There is no other way of knowing anything. Meditation is about this fact of life, which is so fundamental that we miss it. It’s like looking through a window and not seeing the glass. We don’t see that the world we live in is actually a construct, an inference made from the five senses, thoughts, and imaginations.
We all suffer from reflexive reactivity, and this is the next reason why meditation is important. Reflexive reactivity is our capacity to react to events quickly. Unfortunately, because it’s reflexive, it tends to be unconscious, so we’re always reacting to events. In our cognitive processes, we’re actually constructing a map of the world. That map is what we make, we infer, from our five senses, thoughts, and imaginations, and that map is full of reflexive triggers.
Now we need these triggers, because the map is essentially protective. You could well say that what took a naked ape from the savannas of Africa to driving around in sports cars is precisely this mapping. This mapping enables us to learn from experience: when a bad thing happens, we remember it, and when it next occurs in our experience, we know what to do.
This map is reflexive. Unfortunately, it’s also paranoid. It’s really only interested in bad news. That’s why the newspapers are full of bad news. If you put on a newspaper a headline that says something went well, nobody cares. If you say something went badly, everybody wants to read about it. That’s because the mapmaker is protective. We are in a protective mechanism made by our cognitive apparatus, which is reflexively mapping the world.
Now this fact appears in our common language. We use the word recognition. We say, “I recognize you,” or “I recognize this.” When we say that, we mean our map has got a reference for something; we know what it is. Normally, it is associated with naming, so when we say, “I recognize that,” it means I have a name for it. When we walk around in our normal experience, everything’s got a name: that means we’re walking in a memory.
We are actually recognizing, re-cognizing, cognizing again, all the time.
If our mapmaking was totally accurate—if it didn’t have any coloring and it was absolutely the case that what we were mapping was out there—there’d be no issue. The problem is that our map comes from our memories: everything that ever happened to us—the circumstances of our birth, the country we’re born in, influences from the news—is all put into this map. So our experience is being conditioned. We are being colored by the map; consequently we end up in a world which is not the case. We are mapping the world inaccurately.
This is a cause of enormous problems for us and for everyone we meet, because they are mapping the world in exactly the same way. Two people meet, they have different maps, so they disagree. Or you get national maps, where communities of people in a country have a map together. Another country has a different map, and they fight. These are tremendously problematic consequences of a lack of understanding of our cognitive process.
The final element of this process is what’s happening in modernity, where we have increasingly sophisticated devices that capture our attention. They advert our attention, which is where the word advertising comes from. With the advent of mobile phones, people are carrying around sophisticated little computers that are designed to capture their attention. As a result, our attention is being taken this way and that, and we are stressed. We feel disempowered and disconnected from our experience, so we have an epidemic of alienation.
Mapmaking is not just a matter of names. It also has an element of, “I want that; I don’t want that.” “This is good. This is bad.” “This is something I should worry about.” All of these injunctions are in that map, so we’re being pulled this way and that, and as a result we can’t see clearly.
All of these issues are addressed by meditation, which is the fundamental life skill of seeing cognition prior to recognition.
How can you get to cognition prior to recognition? If you can break this automatic, reflexive, re-cognitive loop by seeing cognition prior to recognition, an entirely different experience emerges.
Once this background is understood, meditation is properly seen as a skill. It’s not religious per se. These are skillful means, which come about when you know how to meditate. You can pray. You can visualize. You can use your meditation skillfully. People conflate the basic mechanism of meditation with those skillful means, and they say, “Meditation’s religious,” or “It’s Buddhist”: they have labels for it. But it’s totally neutral. Meditation is merely the faculty of seeing cognition itself, and we have that capacity.
The first step in any meditation practice is to simplify the inputs of the five senses, thoughts, and imaginations. If you do that, you can become calm. But there is an important key in developing calmness. We are all taught to concentrate, and concentration is normally thought to be taking your attention and adverting it to a chosen object. The problem is, that kind of concentration is brittle. You hold your concentration on an object. Then a sound or thought happens, and you’re immediately adverting to whatever has disturbed you. You’re always trying to hold on to this brittle, concentrative focus.
But the old meditation masters understood that there are two phases to concentration. Concentration is not merely to advert attention; it is also to savor the object of attention. This second phase, this savoring, is an extremely important element of concentration.
The metaphor is simple enough. You lift a cup of coffee to your lips. That’s vitaka: adverting your concentration. You then savor the coffee: that’s called vicara: savoring.
Adverting the attention is what one does for the first week of my program. The next step is to follow a changing object. I suggest taking a bell. You strike it and follow the sound of the bell. That’s vitaka. And following, savoring the sound as the bell fades is vicara. Taking this input from the ear gate and following it into silence is to learn to be concentrated with no object of concentration at all, because the object fades.
Vicara, this savoring concentration, is not brittle: when something comes to disturb vicara, it just gets incorporated into vicara as a flavor. As a result one can move toward calmness.
Calmness is not having no thoughts; this is another huge misconception about meditation. Our cognitive apparatus is designed to run scenarios. It’s always mapping; it’s always making what-ifs for us. That’s its job. To say, stop thinking is nonsensical. You might as well say, stop breathing. It is a natural function. The key is to become nonreactive: we’re not always being pulled this way and that by whatever our sense inputs are saying. We gradually calm down to the point where we achieve clear seeing.
Clear seeing—the clarity of mind that comes from calmness—is called vipassana. Passana literally means seeing, and vi- means discriminating or clear. Vipassana is a fruit of calmness. It’s not a meditation on its own; it is a fruit of meditation.
If you are able to become calm, you will see clearly. It’s like having a glass of water with a bit of dust in it. If it’s all stirred up, you can’t see through it. Put it on a shelf—that is, become nonreactive—leave it on its own, and the water clears. Suddenly you see clearly now.
Seeing clearly brings us many benefits. It’s normally associated with the strange word wisdom, because someone who sees clearly is nonreactive to what is in front of them. They think, “I wonder what that is.” They then have the freedom to make inquiry without being automatically reactive. Often when you look a second time, you find alternatives you missed in your reactivity.
In our normal life, we are bombarded by injunctions coming from our own re-cognitive map. This makes us easily manipulated, because, unfortunately, recognition is entirely mechanical. That’s to say, if I can put an idea into you, you will recognize it, which is exactly how advertising works: you put something into someone’s mind; they recognize it and think it’s real. The same is true of political propaganda.
Meditation was designed initially for monks, and unsurprisingly, most meditation practices last for a long time, because monks are happily able to sit for an hour or two. That’s their day job; that’s what they do.
It isn’t necessary to sit that long to get this insight. The insight that separates cognition from recognition can be achieved in much shorter periods. I wrote this book to explain this. Then there are simple exercises that you do for three minutes a day for seven days; as long as you do them, you are going to know what I pointed out to you, because you’ll have that experience.
The whole process takes fourteen weeks. They build up to the point where anybody who does this practice for three minutes a day for fourteen weeks will know what meditation is. They will have the taste of it. Now they can either use that in their daily life—because it is extremely useful—or they can go further: they can develop skillful means in whatever area they like.
I think it’s tragic when religiously inclined people try to develop the skillful means that come from meditation without the meditation. They’re merely grasping at what they think they might achieve. We have big words like enlightenment and liberation, but if we don’t have this fundamental capacity, these things are just words.
This practice is really a preface for a life lived more fully, whether or not you’re religiously inclined. Perhaps you’re a businessperson who wants to be able to take time out during a busy day and see things a different way. Maybe you’re an artist who wants to become more creative. Maybe you’re a housewife, with your kids bugging you the whole time; you just want to be able to take time out.
This time out is not relaxation as people normally think of it: lying down and doing nothing. This is a very precise not doing, because it’s learning to not react. When you don’t react, you become clear. You don’t disappear at all.
People often think that if they become nonreactive, they’re going to disappear. Quite the reverse: when you become nonreactive, you appear. You find for once that you are in the center of your being. You’re no longer being pulled this way and that. It is as if the emperor has taken the throne, and the vizier, the advisor that’s been telling you what to do, is sitting in its proper place. You have your capacity, your human potential, just from this extremely simple practice. And three minutes a day is all it takes.
Actually I made an app and gave it away with the book, so people can put this practice on their phones. It doesn’t have to be done in a shrine or a special room. It can be done anywhere, because our re-cognitive map is being triggered everywhere. As a result, meditation is the most portable life skill you can imagine. All you need is your cognition, and you can meditate.
This is where meditation begins and ends. It’s a liberation from our own cognition. We’re not being locked up by anyone else. Meditation opens the door to freedom in a fundamental way. That’s why I feel so strongly about it.
Smoley: Of course there are many different angles we could take on what you just said. Let’s start with vicara. Let us say that you are doing this particular practice—listening to and savoring the sound of a bell—and let’s say you live on an extremely noisy street. There are all sorts of truck sounds, kids screaming, stereos, and whatnot. So if I understand your point, when you’re doing this particular type of meditation, you’re also savoring those peripheral noises as part of experience. Is that more or less correct?
Dixey: All beginning meditators have to simplify the six gates (the five senses plus thought) to one, because we’re being so pulled around that we have to quieten it all down and get to one. So any beginning practice says, please try to quiet things down.
The beginning meditator wants to be in a quiet place and just concentrate on one gate, or sense.
Once you become used to savoring, you find you can open your eyes and ears and savor the entirety of the display. But that’s a much more expert level. That’s what you’re working towards.
This leads to an extremely interesting point about the term sense restraint. Sense restraint is mistranslated as closing down the senses so you hear nothing and see nothing. This is a total misunderstanding. Sense restraint is to restrain the reaction. You become nonreflexive. This is a life skill to give ourselves some space so that when there are car doors slamming and kids screaming, we’re not being pulled around by the map asking, “What’s this? What’s this?”
Once we do that, suddenly everything simplifies. And the vizier—the advisor who before vipassana was forcing us to react to everything—becomes a friend. This advisor may say, “I think it’s one of those things,” and you reply, “Yeah, maybe it is. But let’s have a look.” You get the ability to respond rather than react. That distinction is extremely important. A response is a considered reaction; a reaction is merely reflexive.
Unfortunately, because all of our reactions come from the past, we go round and round, repeating the same mistakes. This is where we get the appalling circularity that we see both in our own lives and in human history. As they say, history doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes, because it’s guided by the past. You can read the meditations of Marcus Aurelius, who was writing around AD 160: you could have met him yesterday. What he is saying about humanity is exactly what we are experiencing. That’s because there’s been a complete failure to address our reactivity. And this is the gift the Asian traditions give.
The fruit of meditation is really important; we just have to demystify it from the complexity of skillful means. I am not criticizing skillful means. I am all for people using the basic meditative skills of shamata [calmness] and vipassana to develop their psychic capacities. This is possible, but it’s not fundamental to meditation. Unfortunately, people put the cart before the horse and try to get those psychic capacities before they fully understand their own reactivity. The result is spiritual materialism: they try to grab the fruit before they have the means.
I think a corrective needs to be introduced: to explain what meditation is so that this basic skill can be separated from its ornaments. When we do, we suddenly realize that meditation is something that should be taught along with reading and writing.
As I said, it’s not anything religious, or anything at all; it doesn’t affect people’s religious positions. It’s completely compatible with science—indeed, scientific insight is now confirming what the meditators saw. Cognitive psychology is demonstrating that the medieval meditators were remarkably accurate in their self-observation. For example, meditation manuals from the third century point out that the citta consciousness flickers on and off. We now know that’s the case. Those people were accurately describing a fundamental physiological function.
But there’s another point. In the seventies, the philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote an amazing article called, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” It says you can gather all the bat physiologists, all the bat zoologists, all the bat anatomists—all the people who know about bats. You can write an encyclopedia about bats. But no matter how many books you write about bats, you are never going to know what it is to be a bat. What it is to be a bat is something only bats know.
In exactly the same way, you can go into a bookshop and see books upon books written by neurophysiologists and neuroanatomists saying, “What is it like to be happy? A hundred and one ways to be happy,” written by some boffin who’s got a degree in neurophysiology. This is utter nonsense. The only way you’re going to know what it is like to be you is to be you. It doesn’t matter how many brain maps we have or how many machines we have that measure brain function—none of them are going to tell you what it is like to be you. If you are a victim of reflexive reactivity, you will never find out what it’s like to be you, because you’re being pulled around by a map.
Another way of seeing this is saying, “OK. I’m just going to stop the mapmaking and be me. I will vipassana me. I will suddenly see clearly what it’s like to be me.” That is the recovery of our humanity. It is not incompatible with science; it is complementary. Indeed, you’re a much better scientist if you know what it’s like to be you. You’re also a much better user of technology.
We live in a golden age of scientific discovery and technological development—the most productive period of human history—but at the same time we are teetering on the edge of the apocalypse because of this blindness about mapmaking. If we can only see cognition and then see recognition—the fact that we’re making a map—we can use the remarkable powers that our culture has developed for the good of all. And that is an instinctive reaction of human beings. Human beings are basically good. The problem is, we’re being led astray by mechanical, reflexive reactivity that is driving us over a cliff.
Smoley: Let’s go back to the six gates. Like the rest of us, the Tibetans posit five senses, but they also posit thought as a sense. Everything is coming in through these six gates. The minute you examine this, you start to realize how limited each of those gates is. Is there a way of expanding or transcending the apparent limits of the six gates?
Dixey: If you begin to engage with the cognition of the six gates rather than recognition, you find that your sensorium is really quite remarkable. It’s just that we react to it rather than engage with it. For example, the retina of the eye is so sensitive it can detect a single photon. Who knows what it might be capable of? Indeed, when you hang out with meditators, you see that they can have quite remarkable capacities.
I’m not a great psychic master. But if, for example, you sit and you listen without reacting and just explore what’s coming in through your ears, you hear things that normally you would ignore, because they’re not interesting to your reactive map. Suddenly your sensorium is growing.
Reality is what we engage with. I don’t care if a scientist tells me there are black holes. Of course it’s great, and maybe because of that knowledge we’ll get new technology, but it is an inference. It’s an idea that comes from his work and what he’s inferred. It isn’t real in the proper sense of that term. What is real is what is coming to me, and what is real is what is coming to you. There is no external reality, because that cannot be experienced.
The idea that the real is beyond experience is obviously incomprehensible. It would imply that we can’t know anything, because what is really is beyond our knowledge. That is the most extraordinary idea. Indeed, the person who wrote it down wouldn’t be real either, so it is a self-contradictory position.
Ultimately what is real is what comes to us. The key is to be able to engage with it. If we do, and we respond to our senses, we find remarkable capacities.
This is the function of art. A great artist, like Cézanne or Rembrandt or Vermeer, will record exactly what’s coming in and be able to put it down. When you look at these works of art, it’s as if they oblige you to stop the clock. You get a numinous feeling out of a great work of art. It’s the call of the cuckoo, saying, “Wake up! You guys are in a map. Wake up! Stop mapping! Come into the real world.”
Many of us long to have a more meaningful life. It’s right in front of us. When we learn to get a little closer into our sensorium, suddenly there’s a different world altogether. To me, that is a magical discovery, and it’s simple to achieve.
Smoley: I’m wondering what relation your teachings have to the Dzogchen lineage in Tibetan Buddhism.
Dixey: It is true that Dharma College’s curriculum comes from authentic sources, because I have the great good fortune to be married to Wangmo, who is the eldest daughter of Tarthang Tulku Rinpoche, one of the few remaining fully trained lamas in the Tibetan meditation system.
But these ideas are in all the Buddhist lineages. When you go back and read the earliest teachings of the Buddha, he’s always saying, “See. See.” He’s trying to get people to see.
I think it’s crazy that we’ve always got Buddhas sitting in meditation. That’s our Buddha: some guy sitting in meditation. But that isn’t what the Buddha did. Probably if he meditated at all, it was for minutes a day. He was continuously active, teaching the whole time. He kept company with the most average people. In fact, many of his students were courtesans. He wasn’t away in some monastery, sitting for eight hours a day, looking at a wall. That is absolutely not what the Buddha is recorded as having done.
This points to the fact that this is a fundamental insight that we can take anywhere. It isn’t a particular system. It’s a cultural jewel that we can use, and it gives something very valuable to contemporary conditions. It enables us to recover our humanity, but not by learning a set of rules about how to do the right thing. The way is to recover your humanity through recognizing and then resting prior to recognition in cognition itself. When that happens, your humanity blossoms. You’re no longer the reactive, difficult person you were before; you suddenly find yourself being kind and friendly and open-hearted, because that’s what human beings are. We don’t have to be taught to be nice. We are actually kind, and the kindness that people aspire to they already have. It’s just being covered over by a paranoia that comes from mapmaking.
It’s a great discovery to realize we’re basically kind. I read an amazing book called Humankind: A Hopeful History`, written by a Dutch physiologist called Rutger Bregman. It’s about the systematic falsification of psychological experiments made by physiologists to show that human beings are basically unkind.
In one case, there was a group of kids who were left on a desert island. We were told that they would turn into a terrifying Lord of the Flies world, in which there were leaders and people being beaten up. That’s totally false. When these kids, who had been washed up on a desert island, were discovered, they had made a school for themselves. They had a completely egalitarian society.
It is a complete fabrication—this idea that when humans aren’t being controlled, they’ll turn into savages. It’s absolutely the reverse. When we’re not controlled, we turn into human beings who are nice and kind and cooperative.
We are being sold a dummy, a dud, by people who wish to control us—advertisers, whether they’re political or economic. The key is to learn how to recover our humanity in the face of this onslaught. That’s what meditation is for.
Smoley: I can’t resist asking you about your father-in-law, Tarthang Tulku, who is certainly one of the most dynamic and creative Tibetan lamas to come to the West. He’s also been among the most reclusive, so few people have seen or interacted with him for a very long time. What are your impressions of him on a day-to-day, personal basis?
Dixey: He’s a phenomenon. During the first period of his career in America, from 1968 to 1976, he was teaching very actively.
Then he was so appalled by the destruction of the monasteries and Tibetan culture and the plight of the Tibetan refugees in India that he decided to dedicate his efforts to printing books and giving them back the libraries they’d lost. He now has personally edited over 3,000 Tibetan texts, which are the basic syllabus that the monks learn, and he’s been responsible for the printing and distribution of over 7 million copies. He has dedicated himself almost completely to doing this. It was a necessity. I am sure that in a happier age, he would have taught exclusively, but there was an emergency.
The Buddhist commentarial literature is larger than all the texts of the world’s other religions combined: about 12 million original titles. It’s vast, and the Tibetan system is very much based on study, contemplation, and practice. You must study, then you contemplate, then you practice. So it’s very important for them to have these books.
He felt this culture was going to die if he didn’t do something, and he was in America with the means. Because American society is remarkably productive, a very small group of people printed 7 million books. People can’t believe it, and that’s what he dedicates his time to.
But when you spend time with him, he’s always saying to you, “Who is looking? Who is actually reacting here?” He is always wanting to inquire if you are in cognition or recognition. He’s interested in knowing what your state is.
He’s also pretty certain that merely translating Tibetan traditions into English is going to cause problems, because the technical language that was developed for shamata and vipassana doesn’t translate readily into Western languages; we need a special language to translate it. So he began to write books in plain English.
The main book that we teach at Dharma College is called Revelations of Mind: A New Way of Understanding the Human Mind. It is a 400-page book about cognition and recognition without a single Tibetan, Sanskrit, Pali, or Buddhist word in it, because he feels strongly that we need to bring these ideas into our own culture and express them in our own way. Although he’s very traditional in his activities toward his own culture, he’s written thirty-seven books for contemporary, Western, educated audiences, and they are all in plain English; they’re not Buddhist books at all.
He’s a truly magical being, without question. Of course I have the great good fortune to meet him sometimes, but he is busy: he’s eighty-nine, and he’s still working twelve-hour days. He is a nonstop producer. He has single-handedly rebuilt the monastic libraries through India and the Himalayas. There isn’t a Buddhist library you can go to in the heartland of Buddhism that doesn’t contain many of the books he’s printed.
Smoley: Many people have wondered whether extraordinary capacities developed through meditative practices can be used for evil. What do you have to say to that?
Dixey: Of course anything can be used for evil. Evil is the misuse of human skills. The theistic religious traditions are nearly always couched in terms of good and evil. There are all kinds of explanations for evil; sometimes it’s a fallen angel. That’s not true of the Asian traditions at all. The Asian traditions believe in fundamental human goodness. Obviously there are seriously bad people out there who are doing bad things. Is this a fundamental trait, or is this something that’s been learnt? What would happen if somehow we wiped the recognitive map clean?
If we’re in a recognitive map the whole time, we may have bad experiences that cause us to end up wishing to control others for evil ends. Does that make us basically evil? I would strongly question that. To me, the problem is the unconscious, reflexive reactivity which causes this kind of behavior.
To me, the key is to learn the difference. All I can do is speak for myself. I am not a dictator. I don’t run an evil regime, so I can’t say what it’s like to be one of these guys. All I know for myself is that my bad behavior, the things I have been embarrassed to have done, have got less and less as I have become less reactive. If the theory of evil was correct, as I became less “controlled,” I would become nastier and nastier, but actually I’m becoming a nicer person by becoming less reactive.
If you deeply engage with these practices, you will become better at everything. You will also become a calmer, kinder, and more compassionate person.