Host Anna Sturla speaks with members of Dharma College: Robin Caton, director; Richard Dixey, faculty; and Joor Baruah, student. Located in downtown Berkeley, the school’s mission is to ignite personal and global transformation by helping people unlock the power of their minds.
TRANSCRIPT
Speaker 1:Method to the madness is next.
Speaker 2:[00:00:30] You're listening to method to the madness. Eight weekly public affairs show on k a l x Berkeley Celebrating Bay area innovators today. Producer Anna sterlite is speaking to members of the Dharma College community in downtown Berg.
Speaker 3:Welcome to method to the madness. Thank you. Thank you. Bring us here. Can you go down the line and introduce yourselves please? My name is [00:01:00] Robin Cayton and I'm the director of Dharma College. Hi, I'm Richard Dixie. I'm an instructor.
Speaker 4:Hi, my name is Julie Barilla and I am associated with them, my college as a volunteer and also as the longterm student.
Speaker 3:So could you please explain a little bit about the history of Dharma College? Dermot College was started in 2010, although we actually didn't launch our classes until the fall of 2012. We spent the first two years, um, uh, renovating the facility and [00:01:30] also training to teach, uh, the curriculum that we are now teaching. And, uh, the school was founded by a traditionally trained to Benton Lama named Tarthang toolkit. What was the inspiration for starting the college? The inspiration was this new book that he had written. It's a book called revelations of mind and a training on it. We began to see that it required its own audience. Why would a student go to Dharma College? [00:02:00] What's a typical student like? Okay,
Speaker 4:I'm a student, so I guess I'll share my experience. Um, so my background is I grew up in a corner in the Himalayas and in, in the border of India and China in a state called [inaudible]. And I grew up and I was pursuing my, my life and my career. I got an MBA and I was consulting in business, but at some point after working for 10 years or so, I felt like there was something missing in the nine to five life. So I wanted to look in words and I actually went and spent some time in a monastery and then in, [00:02:30] in the Himalayas and then got to know about this wonderful community out here. So for me, why I wanted to get involved with studying in drama college is because it is very open and eclectic. It welcomes people from all walks of life and all ages. So it's very, very diverse. And Berkeley is, as we all know, is that right? B is the best place to do kind of do an introspection at the mind and I think it helps the students specially focus, cutaway the destructions of what's going on in our day to day and look at what
Speaker 3:[00:03:00] really matters. How expensive is it to go there? It's very inexpensive because our classes are six week courses and people can take a single course or they can take multiple courses in each class costs $120 so it's basically $20 a week. It's very inexpensive. It's really about looking inward at the mine. So we have a structured set of classes that help point people in the right direction, but people do their own, their own [00:03:30] transformational work. So you're talking about the, the emphasis on Berkeley. And so what is a typical student like? What is it being part of the community here in Berkeley? I think we ought to share a bit more about what Donald Cottage does. The problem is you come to a university like Berkeley, there's a lot of information that's given to you, which is generated by the mind, but very rarely do you get information about how to use your own mind.
Speaker 3:And there's a huge difference between those two things. And of course you could argue that using your own mind isn't an academic topic, but [00:04:00] our own mind is all we've got. So if we never work out how to use it, how are we ever going to be successful? And there is often a very sad phenomenon that happens where people get very well educated, yet at the end of it, they don't really know what they're doing. And that's because they've never used their own mind. Now normally people only get to ask these sorts of questions when they're retired, often they've lived their whole life and then they go, what was life about as a bit sad? Isn't it that you get to the end of your life and ask that question? It will be good to know the answer to that question right at the very beginning.
Speaker 3:[00:04:30] So then you could live a meaningful life and not land up at the end guy. What was it for? However being is that, that's where we are. Most of the people who come to us are older and that's because they began to ask those questions that one would hope they would ask right at the very beginning. So of course we're very keen to at least have people exposed to this new way of thinking, which to ask the question, well, what, who am I? What am I asking for? What am I actually doing when I ask the question, who am I? What is that? And this sort of question [00:05:00] is never asked in academic circles. So that's one of the reasons why we're reaching out. This was actually a lecture at a talk on constitutional law and the constitutional convention of 1789. It was my husband who taught this and he is a constitutional law scholar and an attorney.
Speaker 3:So, uh, we were talking and he's done a lot of looking in historical research about the, you know, the convention, which was a very difficult, uh, it was a very hot summer [00:05:30] and it was a very, very difficult to bring together people to create our United States constitution, people who are entrenched in positions. We began to see that we could start to think about this question of how the constitution came together as a question of how the mind was working for these various people who had this task. And as we saw that, we began to see that we could use that as a prototype [00:06:00] or a kind of paradigm of how communication issues are entirely dependent on the positioning that people take, that their minds are taking internally. And so from that came this lecture, which was really very, very, very interesting. And that's the kind of thing that we'd like to see happen more and more.
Speaker 3:That as people begin to understand what's going on internally, they're able to understand [00:06:30] each other better and communicate better. People who begin incredibly far apart can move to a consensus position more easily. And you know, this is a show focused on bay area innovators. So what's unique about the bay area? Why here is famous, isn't it? It's famous for innovation, is famous for unusual ways of thinking is famous for people doing daring stuff. And so the bear has been like this for 30 40 years. This isn't a new phenomenon, the tool. Are there [00:07:00] any prerequisites necessary to be a part of the college? The only prerequisite is absolute curiosity about your own experience and a willingness to look inward and this is a courageous thing to do. I do have to emphasize that for most of us, immediately we begin to come up with reasons and explanations for everything we do and everything that's happened to us and those reasons and explanations always take the form [00:07:30] of some kind of blame.
Speaker 3:So we want to look at that question. What really is the source of our unhappiness? What really is the source of our dissatisfaction? Where really can we find the clarity that might clear up the confusion that most people face, not just once in a while when they have to make major decisions. But you could say daily when they have to decide should I wear the red one or the green one? [00:08:00] There are kinds of things that are going on in our minds. All of our minds, most of the time that we just simply don't admit to each other, we talk more freely about sex or we talk more freely about any other topic than how dysfunctional our inner life is. How confused how an organized disorganized it is and without being able to really [00:08:30] look, really take responsibility and really be willing to share with others and communicate.
Speaker 3:It's a one couldn't do this kind of work. So that's the only prerequisite. And what does the school's relationship to the Dalai Lama in particular work around, you know, narrow neuroscientists around meditation? None. We are not associated with the Dalai Lama. We have had from UC professor David Presti [00:09:00] has come to talk at a Dharma College, but we're not a school in which we're really so much interested in the neuroscience of experience as in the what the neuroscientists call in the philosophers call the quality of experience. That is to say how is it working? How is it for us, you know, we can get to the end of our lives and if we know very well that this nerve is hooking up to that nerve and this is what's happening and that's happening, it's not going to change one [00:09:30] bit. Our ability to decide what we want to do with our time on our professional life. It's not going to change our fear of impermanence and our fear of death. So we want to know experientially how it's all working. We don't spend a lot of time other than bringing in some interesting facts. Uh, we don't spend a lot of time analyzing meditation,
Speaker 4:but it is, it is also a platform for all kinds of people to come and talk about mine. So we have had people studying neuroscience. [00:10:00] We have had people, uh, students like myself in mid careers. And it's fantastic for students because I am associated with Berkeley School of Journalism in the investigative reporting program. I'm an associate for this year 2017 and I recently finished a very intense, a master's in documentary filmmaking in UC Santa Cruz. Now while I was doing that and I was, you know, working with undergrads, teaching as a assistant to the professors, I realized that we have these, this hangouts, [00:10:30] we hang out in a cafe or work we, we chit chat in the dorms but there is no yields space where you can actually keep the whole stress of studies, of, of just getting marks and grades and and thinking about careers and actually focusing on the mind. And I feel this beautiful building called Herma college right there in downtown Berkeley is a great place for students to come spend their time and, and meet all kinds of people and find the community. I feel like Berkeley is now my [00:11:00] new home and I found a community in this whole,
Speaker 5:Dominic college doesn't have a fixed syllabus. Students don't get a grade and we're not teaching. Everybody is the ultimate or authority to their own mind. But the problem is it's normally an unexamined mind and what we try to do is to encourage discussion and presentation around that very question, how do we come to the view of the world we have? Who are we in that view and how do we enact our beliefs and why do we [00:11:30] enact our beliefs? And these are fundamental questions that are addressed. So it's not that there's a right answer to those questions. Everyone is their own authority, but how rare is it to meet anyone who can truly answer those questions? And that seemed to, because our culture looks out with our culture, the western culture in particular is obsessed with the external world and we getting things done. And sadly even in neuroscience, where you these books about neuroscience and positive development, they can have 50 or 70 must do things every chapter, great [00:12:00] long list of things you've got to do in order to understand yourself. But very rarely do they actually say, well, just look at yourself and ask that question. And that is a key ability that we can all develop. We can all develop that ability to actually address our own perception and ask questions about it. And that's a very, very important skill to have.
Speaker 3:What are your highlights so far? Accomplishments or personal highlights that you've experienced so far in the space? I think our accomplishments are to [00:12:30] have developed more than 20 courses and to have people of all ages and all walks of life. We now have an online course that I'm teaching Tuesday mornings. I've got someone in England, we have someone in San Diego of people all over the, I'm all over California and the bay area and we're looking at time. We're looking at mind in time. We have courses that are pointing in many, many different directions and depending upon a person's interest or what's being [00:13:00] offered that term, you can begin with practices that relate to your perception and expand your perception, your ability. We have a course coming up this next term starting next week that has to do with working with beauty and joy. I'm going to be teaching a course that has to do with the projection of self. It's called perspectives and boundaries. The limits of being me. We never really focused on the fact that the um, the inner [00:13:30] program of, I know this is a problem. It's not always helpful. It may be setting boundaries and limits on experience that keep us from our full creativity in our full even academic creativity. I think that's our, our greatest achievement is to have developed different ways of entering the space of mine so that whatever your particular interest is or whatever particularly intrigues you, you can, um, you can use that as the, as [00:14:00] the gateway.
Speaker 4:By the way, maybe we should announce that we also have an open house scheduled tomorrow at two o'clock 2:00 PM and the address is two two two two Harold Way Berkeley, California nine four seven zero four.
Speaker 3:It's between Allston and Kittridge in the downtown Berkeley. So we have the uh, Berkeley high school behind us. We have the public library on one side of us and we have the a y on the other side of us.
Speaker 5:You asked about our achievements. I think our achievements are our students. Actually [00:14:30] the people who come, you know, we've really been successful in transforming people's lives and now it's a big boast to say one of the things I always do at the beginning of every term cause we have classes of six is I say to people, what's happened for you? Why you come back basically. And we hear wonderful, wonderful expressions, um, where people say, you know, I had all of these longterm worries and I'm now able to see what they are. Now of course the issues that generate the worrier still there, but the worry itself is seen [00:15:00] that is transformative and they are giving people the ability to generate inner space. It's having that inner spaciousness where you still have the same life. You could still going to have the same issues in your life, but your ability to react to them is totally transformed if you understand your own reactions.
Speaker 5:And yet somehow with all of the knowledge in these libraries here, no one ever asked that. No one ever says, well how are you going to react to this? And that's really what we're about doing. And that's true. Whether it's a physical [00:15:30] problem, whether it's an emotional problem, whether it's a economic problem or indeed, whether it's a spiritual problem, it runs right across the gamut of human experience. This, who am I? Who am I actually representing by the statement I, what am I doing when I say I believe something? How come we're so wedded to these fixed positions and try to get into that and understand how we construct the world is really valuable. And so I've been delighted to see how transformed our students are [00:16:00] and they keep coming back.
Speaker 2:If you're just tuning in, you're listening to method to the madness, a weekly public affairs show on k a l x Berkeley Celebrating Bay area innovators today, producer and a stir luck is speaking to members of the Dharma College community in downtown Berkeley, Robin Cayton, Richard Dixie, [00:16:30] and George [inaudible]. What have been
Speaker 3:any challenges in the space? Well, our challenges is letting people know that we're here. I think more than anything, we have a small faculty, so another challenges. Being able to offer enough courses at times that enough times that we can attract busy people to come [00:17:00] to our program. Beyond that, it's really how do we make people aware that we're here. None of us have said yet, but I'm going to say straight out. Our program is not about meditation. It's not about long periods of sitting alone on a cushion. It's truly a wisdom path that is, it's about knowledge. It's about knowing and understanding. You can do the homework right in the middle of your everyday life. In fact, [00:17:30] that's really what's necessary, so you're not isolating yourself from life. That's one of the things that's so terrific about this way of working is that we're bringing awareness or you could say some people say mindfulness of mind. Mindfulness is a, is a big deal now, but it goes beyond mindfulness. It's kind of open awareness. It's kind of understanding of what is that knowing quality of mind itself. Where does knowing come from? What does it mean to know? When you say [00:18:00] to yourself, I know that what's going on inside? Somehow the challenge is how do we make people not see this as, oh, just another meditation school
Speaker 4:and we are a nonprofit institution so it's all volunteer driven. Like I volunteer my time, Robin and Richard volunteer their time to teach and run the program. We welcome help all kinds of help. I assume that you are trying to get a little bit younger demographic at this point in time. [00:18:30] How are you,
Speaker 3:I'm going to get these busy UC Berkeley and other bay area schools whose lives are very complicated, full of information and media. How are you going to get them interested in able to fit something like this in you do? The Buddha taught four noble truths and the first is the truth of suffering and suffering always does it. How do people come to any kind of transformative path and the answer is almost always because [00:19:00] they're uncomfortable. We simply want to say, if you are uncomfortable, come to Dharma college the time. It's not a huge amount of time. A class a week is an hour and a half of time and now that I'm teaching an online class, people can do do this even from their own dorm room. It's not a huge amount of time. What you need is the motivation and the motivation should be our own curiosity. That happens a lot when we get older, but our own [00:19:30] discomfort when we're younger, that is to say, what am I doing? Why am I here? Am I following the right goals? What do I really want to do? Am I premed because somebody told me in my family that I should go to medical school? Should I really be writing the great American novel? What about this relationship? How do I talk to people? All the ordinary concerns of young people, which we as human beings know very, very well is what drives people [00:20:00] to this kind of work. Sure. Yes. I'm curious, what attracted you being a young student to Dharma College?
Speaker 4:I think, I think it's the pursuit of trying to find meaning in what I, what I'm doing. Cause you're doing a lot Phil, making a move. Yeah. So, so, so it really helped me. And that's something which probably I'd love to share with the students who are listening is that, you know, sometimes we are lucky when we find our calling in the career that we want to pursue, but sometimes we have more than one interest and there are a lot of distractions and we go, [00:20:30] we have to course correct as we go along. So in my case, I felt like this time that I spent with them on my college studying really helped me look inward and I decided that, okay, I'm going to be a drop out of the corporate rat race and try to, um, um, uh, find bridge between pursuits that are spiritual, social, creative. That's why I thought documentary, you'd be a great, great medium to tell stories to connect people. And um, while I pursue that, I'm a, I also want to, uh, develop my spiritual learning. So [00:21:00] I feel like my college has helped me course-correct my career and given me a new direction and I, and I feel like it'll help out the students as well to converge. It's almost like looking into your own mind and doing self experiential self counseling.
Speaker 3:You see Dharma College in five years. Do you have goals? Is that something that a school like this does? Yes. That's a wonderful question. In five years I'd like to see Dharma College and not only with an expanded program [00:21:30] with a student base that includes college students, perhaps even high school age students as well as as of course older people coming to the end of their lives trying to make sense before we die. We need to, we need to clear some things out. We need to clean the mind. We need to live without regret and we need to die without regret. So in addition to an expanded program that covers all of that, I'd like to see us at the school [00:22:00] conducting conferences, having all sorts of guest speakers coming in and talking about, for instance, language formation in the mind and perception in the mind, which is what Dr. David Presti talked about when he came to Dharma College.
Speaker 3:But I'd also like to see people from Dharma College going out into the community. I'd like to see us starting a project that was local as well as global going into the Berkeley community? No, on [00:22:30] our very block we have homeless encampments, so if you had a tangible data project that you could do, take care of, that does make the, it makes you stand out. It one thing, it makes us stand out, but it's also what we're about. We're about people pursuing. What really matters to them is when jurors says meaning, that's what we mean by meaning sort of what matters, what's really important and if we could all clear the mind a little bit, we might be able to find that place. [00:23:00] We call it in the heart, but you might as well say in the belly from which our inspiration comes. Our ability to stick with something, our ability to find what matters and then pursue it.
Speaker 3:Richard and I are both dropouts from the corporate world. I also from the regulations, yes, because there's, it's so vapid out there. What about the financial end of that? You know, it's great to drop out if you can drop out. [00:23:30] But p a lot of people can't drop out. Well, Qantas an interesting word, you know, um, there are choices to be made and of course we all make different choices and we have different obligations and, but in our community there are people who have taken vows of poverty. There are people who are quite wealthy and haven't and still live on their own outside of the community and, and contribute what they can. So I think people, [00:24:00] people do it all different kinds of do this kind of work, all different kinds of ways. Sometimes you have someone else who supports you, but sometimes you do part time work, sometimes you do sporadic work, uh, when you can get it and then you don't work for a little while to do this kind of work.
Speaker 3:But there's many different ways of, and a lot of the, what we do do as a construct of what we think we should have or do. And so that's where it makes sense. And artists know this way very well in our society. They know [00:24:30] how hard it is to, to what they make. They make choices around that. Well, I'm really happy that you guys made it to this program. And again, tomorrow is your open house and your classes start next week and what is a website people can go to to find out more about this? Well it's www dot Dharma that's d h a r m a hyphen college.com. So it's Dharma Hyphen College Doc. And if people have any questions is are you easily accessible on that website? [00:25:00] Absolutely. The question about how to get the students out there, Robin has mentioned it, but I'll try to also say one sentence. I think it's very easy for students in Berkeley to come and attend or at least try out a few classes because we have six week courses. We have one or four workshops we have now the new online model of teaching. So I think there are a lot of different different ways. If the students come and meet Robin and I'm sure you know there could be a part that could be customized as well. And as we grow, we will [00:25:30] do more and more scheduling of classes that that works with Berkeley students
Speaker 5:being in a very strange time, we have this chasm of truth. I love Cole bears, Steven Kolb as Tom truthiness, people are looking for their own truth. Why is that? Because there is this absolute crisis going on where people find life meaningless and they want their own truth to be true. Even if it's not. This is tremendously alarming. Now, the solution to this isn't necessarily to tell them the [00:26:00] truth because what is the truth? At the end of the day, if you don't understand your own perception, you have no truth. You have facts, but they don't make any sense to you. Say you loud up, alienated from facts, and you adopt false news as your truth. This is a tragedy as a tragedy for our culture. It can only be addressed by people taking control of their own experience, and this is not something our culture stresses. Normally people only do this when they're psychologically unhappy because it's considered to be something [00:26:30] that unhappy people do, but actually all people should do it.
Speaker 5:Otherwise what will happen is things will happen and they won't go well and you won't know why. And that just leads to confusion. So we're addressing a key question and the question really is authenticity. What makes something authentically true? What makes something actually worth doing? And you know, we all adopt these ideas. I want to live a life that's valuable. I want to live a life that's going to get me somewhere, but without an understanding of our own belief structure and what makes that real, [00:27:00] we're never going to get anywhere with it. And one can see young people coming through this incredible university going off into the world with great dreams. Yet we all know 99.99% of them are going to land up at the end of their lives saying, well that was okay, but did I really go anywhere? And this is what's happening to our culture as such, you know, we're living in a period of incredible, unparalleled scientific discovery, tremendous economic wealth.
Speaker 5:And yet there is a crisis of truth. It's a bizarre problem. And Dying Dharma College is absolutely [00:27:30] addressing it head on. And arguably when you look at the schools of meditation that exist, they're not, they're talking about giving people a technique to escape reality. But what we really want to be doing is addressing reality. We're way more active than passive. We're actually trying to encourage direct inquiry and to encourage people to take control of their experience and really ask that question and not just be philosophical about it and try and be clever with concepts, but directly asked yourself that question. [00:28:00] And this is where you go beyond analysis into something much deeper.
Speaker 3:And also we want to see people stay in the world, not withdraw from the world, but absolutely stay in the world in whatever professional endeavor they want to do, but do so from an authentic position. Do so. Being able to ask the questions that really need to be asked within their professional endeavor, not the questions that everybody else is asking. So I better ask them to, or the questions where you only get funding. So I better [00:28:30] just ask the questions where, where someone's giving funding, but actually the questions that need to be asked for the world people get inspired. But it only lasts for a very short period of time. As soon as they come up against obstacles or challenges in the world, they lose their inspiration or they lose their self confidence or they lose their ability to understand how to work with whatever it is that's coming up as a challenge.
Speaker 3:[00:29:00] Challenges are, are, are constant in our universe. Other people, um, lack of money, lack of funding, annoying people, annoying sounds, everything. So how do you work with that? Not Against that. How do you not be in despair about our political situation, but consider it to be a major challenge that calls out the best of our creativity, not the worst of our [00:29:30] emotional life, which we already know. We know how to be angry. That's, there's not no trick to that. But what we don't know is how to turn that energy into something creatively successful and effective to actually change the world. That's different. You've been listening to method to the madness,
Speaker 2:a weekly public affairs show on k a l x Berkeley Celebrating Bay area innovators. [00:30:00] You can find all of our podcasts on iTunes university. Tune in next Friday at noon.
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