Interview with Guy Claxton
by Kathleen Gregory

Guy Claxton - along with Stephen Batchelor, Christopher Titmus and others - was one of the founding teachers of the Sharpham College of Buddhist Studies and Contemporary Inquiry in South Devon, England. He has degrees from both Cambridge and Oxford, is Visiting Professor of Learning Science at the University of Bristol and the author of many books including The Heart of Wisdom and Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind: Why Intelligence Increases When You Think Less. In 2000 he co-edited The Psychology of Awakening: Buddhism, Science and our Day-to-day Lives. In January this year he taught at the Buddhist Summer School in Melbourne where his workshops were enthusiastically attended. Ordinary Mind caught up with Guy during this visit.

KG: Guy, could we start with you saying something of your own journey or connection to Buddhism?

GC: It goes back to 1973, when I was finishing my Doctorate at Oxford, and was young and naively married. In the space of a month, I had my Ph.D. rejected and my marriage broke up. Up to that point, I had been bred to be a kind of clever boy. I look back now, with not total compassion, on the character that I was then. Clever, but I knew nothing whatsoever about the world of feelings. Having studied psychology, I knew nothing about people, about emotion, about affairs of the heart. This double whammy of failure really rocked me. They were so strong coming together, the emotional defenses that I had built up were pretty strong but they were no match for the maelstrom that I was in then. So I went to this marriage guidance counsellor, and she was great - a basic Rogerian - but she was lovely and she liked me, even in the middle of being a mess. Within the space of a couple of months, I began to surface from this slough of despondent confusion, but I also became fascinated with this whole process. This new, varied continent of human experience that was coming up, raw and wild.

I then embarked on several years of exploration into all kinds of wilder fringes of personal development. Lots of encounter groups, marathons, staying up all night and screaming. If anything zany came to town, I would be the first to sign up for it. I did EST training, I was doing a lot of that stuff, and fairly rapidly. Quite a lot of the group leaders - who I had become very friendly with and was extremely in awe of - started disappearing off to India. They came back with a funny name, wearing a necklace with some old guy's picture in it and wearing orange clothes. I thought, 'Oh dear, what a shame. This is far too far, several bridges too far for me'. To cut a long story short however, in the middle of one of these groups I found myself signing up to become a sanyassin, a follower of Rajneesh, which was my first step on the bridge from the psychological to the spiritual.

For the next eight years, I was a 'good' disciple, I used the name, I wore the colours and the mala, mostly carrying on with my job as a lecturer in education at the University of London, insisting that all my colleagues call me by my Swami name. Some of them did and some of them didn't. I again went through a lot of growth work, a lot of personal development work and started to get more and more into meditation through Rajneesh. I started doing long retreats. Then, in about 1984, I just began to drift away from all that, from the wildness of that scene. I did not have a falling out; I just had a falling away, which was very smooth and amicable. I found myself, after what felt like sort of the white water rafting period of my life, coming out into something broader and deeper which involved, then, quite a lot of exploration within the Buddhist field.

I was not a card-carrying Buddhist, but I was more and more drawn to Buddhism and to 'practice'. One of my friends said I became a real spiritual autograph hound. If anybody was in town - a Namkhai Norbu weekend workshop - I was there. I spent some time as a student of Sogyal Rinpoche, did quite a number of Zen retreats, but in the end found myself coming back to the simplicity of just basic vipassana practice. I began working more and more with teachers who had been trained in the forest monk tradition in Thailand and in Burma. They were able to present the practice in a way that I found very profound, but with less of the Buddhology around it.

That is where I am now. I do not know whether I count myself as a Buddhist, but I am profoundly grateful to the practice and to a secular version of the understanding of what that practice is about. A large part of that journey has been about trying to bring together that spiritual side of me with the side of me that is trained as a theoretical psychologist, as a cognitive scientist. It is about trying to find ways of engaging in that dialogue, to build those gentle bridges in order to discover in what ways those two sides can inform each other.

On the way, I also did some psychotherapy training, and did a bit of work as a psychotherapist, I think more as part of my own journey, rather than as a real commitment to that as a vocational path. I kind of dip in and out of that psychotherapeutic world. At the moment, I am more interested in trying to build a theoretical confluence of Western and Eastern concerns.

KG: In the realms of the psychological and the spiritual?

GC: Yes, but do not ask me for my position. I have not counted, but there are somewhere between four and thirty mutually inconsistent positions about the relationship between the psychological and the spiritual. These range all the way from, 'I don't think they have anything whatsoever to do with each other' to 'but they are completely parallel concerns, and it does no service to either of them to try and muddle them up', through to a much more differentiated set of interests concerned with how each fits into the other. I am particularly interested in what value psychological work can have within the context of spiritual practice, both for students and for teachers.

KG: Can you define what you mean by the psychological and by the spiritual? In what ways are you using those terms?

GC: I have different answers to that, and I do not know which one I am committed to. There is a bit of me that is very sympathetic to the view that Ram Dass holds, for example, which says that psychological work is about repairing, developing and strengthening your ability to function in the world, to get your ego in good shape. That is fine, but it is absolutely part of what he sometimes pejoratively calls 'psychological body and fender repair work'. It is really essential, is to be respected, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with processes of dis-identification, or liberation. So I suppose if I have to make a forced distinction, which polarises things, I would say that at the psychological end we are talking about cumulative processes of change and at the spiritual end we are talking about dis-identification. '

The key notion for me is dis-identification. What does that mean? For me, it is something totally different from changing anything to do with the content of your life, your emotional life or your behaviour patterns. That process of dis-identification either does or does not happen, and there may or may not be the consequences of that in terms of shifts in the quality of your experience and the quality of your action. Often it seems to turn out that there is, but I think it is a mistake to put your focus on that when you are working within the spiritual frame of reference.

However, when you are working within the psychological frame of reference, that is absolutely what you are wanting. You want life to hurt less, you want your relationships to be better, or you want to be able to go home for Christmas and spend 48 hours with your mother without being driven to screaming pitch, or whatever it may be to somehow lay your ghosts to rest. I think spiritual work is about something much more generic than that and it often does not result in any movement towards what we conventionally would consider to be increased psychological health. I like that point of view. People sometimes pose the question, 'Is it possible to be enlightened and neurotic?' I say 'Yes!' While the quality of the neurosis probably changes, that is because it all just matters less, because that is not what you are about anymore.

KG: So there is a process of dis-identification in both frames of reference?

GC: That is where they begin to overlap. In certain kinds of psychological processes that kind of dis-identification does happen, you develop a kind of equanimity about your eccentricities and foibles. I remember a clinical psychologist telling me a story about a guy he was working with, whose problem was that he could not pee in public toilets. If he went out to a pub, or to the cinema or something, he just could not do it. The psychologist worked with him on this in a traditional desensitisation sort of way, but did not seem to be getting anywhere much. Then this guy disappeared. He ran into him again, about five years later and asked him how things were going with his problem. 'Oh ', he said, 'I still have that, I just don't worry about it anymore'. If you can just take practical precautions it is not a problem to be solved, it is just a condition that is part of the way that you live.

KG: Perhaps, in some ways, that is what the spiritual can bring to the psychological. Because it seems like the psychological position can really overemphasise something as a problem to be solved.

GC: Exactly. I think that is part of the problem. I am also very sympathetic to people like James Hillman, who are writing against the psychologisation of our culture for precisely that reason. The more we create a culture of counselling, post-traumatic stress disorders and so on, the more we are encouraging people to see a whole range of human foibles and inconveniences as pathologies which have technologies for fixing attached to them. Hillman says that when that gets beyond a certain point and becomes part of a lifestyle or worldview it is infantilising. It keeps us stuck, it keeps us childish, it keeps us not yet ready. He also argues that it is politically disempowering, something that the women's movement has struggled with, as you know. That tension between personal psychological work and the need to get out there, take a stand, be outraged, and so on.

KG: Could you tell us a little about Sharpham College?

GC: Sharpham is situated in a large old manor house in South Devon, the owner of which has now turned it over to a Trust. He and his wife and family were very interested in spiritual matters and Buddhist matters, and they housed a small Buddhist community there for about 12 or 14 years. It was a nonsectarian Buddhist community with no leader, no guru and no tradition that they were attached to. That community - small and idyllic as it was - ran into the shadow stuff, entrenched positions, personality conflicts and irresolvable this and that. Mediators were brought in to facilitate conversation but in the end it could not be sorted, so it was wound up.

Originally it was a kind of indefinite community; people would sign up for as long as they wanted. After it was wound up, the idea arose that it could be a place where people could go for a year - a fixed term - where they would be taking a year out of their lives. It is not like this would be their lives, but it could be a time for deep reflection and inquiry into the fundamental questions of life. Not necessarily people who were extremely experienced in meditation, or even well versed in the Dhamma, just people who felt that the Buddhist teachings spoke to them in terms of their questions and their trajectories through life.

Therefore, it was an attempt to present Buddhist teachings, together with strands of Western thought - scientific thought, post-modern thought, philosophical thought - as a way of feeding into that process; a way of giving them also a more holistic experience. This study component was bound together with community living, the practice and the stresses and the pressures of that were very much part of the process. There was a commitment to daily practice, a commitment to regular service in the community and a commitment to some kind of creative or productive work of their own as well. I think it was a fascinating experiment. It only involved about twelve people and ran in that form for three or four years. Then it seemed to become more difficult to find people who could take a year out like that. It is not easy.

The form that it takes now is a three-month term, or semester, with courses which people can add together to accumulate into a year, if they wish. It still combines the different ingredients mentioned above. It is an ongoing experiment. I do not think that the College has yet found a novel, powerful, coherent educational model, which really integrates all the elements. However, I think it is there to be found and I do not know of any other place that does that. Naropa gets close to it and there are one or two other places around.

I think that the quest is an important one. I have particular interest in it because I am an educator. It is a quest for a model that really stays in the world and integrates intellectual study with practical work, with the world of relationships and with meditative practice. It is without any particular tradition or particular guru, which I think is one of the important ingredients. People do not go to Sharpham to submit to a higher authority, they really go there to struggle with their own questions and are fed in a whole variety of different ways.

For example, the way in which meditation and reflection fit together with study, is something that we need to think a lot more about. It certainly does not exist within orthodox Western education, nor I think is there an optimal model to be found in the traditional, say Tibetan, model. They base their education on developing these ritualised patterns of argumentation and mastery of vast bodies of canonical literature. For me, that does not quite hit the spot, as far as the modern mind is concerned. I am very interested in that and I am committed to the experiment that Sharpham is. It is changing and evolving and it is very exciting.

KG: Where and what are your teaching commitments?

GC: I do a whole lot of different things. At Sharpham, I teach things like the relationship of Western cognitive science and neuroscience, as well as understanding the problems and the practices of realisation and liberation. I still do quite a lot of teaching at the University, which is much more orthodox, in the field of education. I am also very interested in trying to develop models that can be used within ordinary schools, which provide a stronger empowerment for young people to engage confidently with all the complexities and uncertainties of modern life. I think that is what education should be in the 21st century. It is not about the transmission of bodies of knowledge, it is not even fundamentally about literacy and numeracy, although those tools are important, of course. It is about trying to develop people who have minds that are strong enough, and pliable enough, to engage intelligently with all the complex issues of crafting a satisfactory life for themselves.

Many people across the planet do not find themselves born into a community or culture or heritage that tells them largely how to be and who they are. I think there are versions of what Buddhism has to teach us that are of enormous importance. They need not necessarily be presented in a religious, spiritual, or even necessarily psychological language, but are very powerful things to say in an educational language. To be able to hang out with uncertainty, with difficulties of certain kinds, you need to have good research skills, with a small 'r' - skills of conversation, reaction, interrelationship as well as reading, and so on.

A large part of my teaching is trying to develop and disseminate ideas in languages that ordinary teachers, for example, can get. Ideas about how to shift the focus from seeing education as the transmission of content to seeing it as a kind of powerful apprenticeship in the art of living and learning throughout life. It is Buddhist inspired, although unless the occasion seems particularly auspicious, I will not move into that language. Nevertheless, talking about 'education for uncertainty' - is that not what Buddhism is largely about?

KG: What are your writing projects at the moment?

CG: I am currently writing a book on creativity. Again, it will be presented as a popular accessible psychology/science book but there will be, as there always is, a thinly disguised spiritual subtext. A longer term writing project that is bubbling about in my head at the moment, is a beautifully produced, lavishly illustrated and elegantly articulated book about the unconscious - all different views on the unconscious, from different cultures, from history, from psychopathology, from science and from spirituality. The unconscious is ripe for a good multidimensional treatment. I am collecting material for that at the moment.

I am also really interested in the ways that those threads fit together. One of the most productive works at the moment, is the way in which the scientific and neuroscientific understandings of the brain are giving us new ways of thinking about psychopathological conditions and processes. For example, there are now some quite intriguing brain-based models of repression, which, I think, give us a fresh language for articulating some of those processes. They may even give us the beginnings of fresh insights into how we might go about helping with those processes.

Another thing I am really interested in at the moment is the importance of being able to shift your state of mind, rather than trying to think your way through something. I know that in the average classroom, the way kids are learning has much more to do with the state of mind that they are in than with particular teaching techniques. Likewise in therapy, whether the client is making progress or not has a lot to do with their state of mind. To put it in a more fancy way, it has to do with the quality of their awareness.

I have a graduate student, who has just finished her Ph.D., looking at the way in which teaching little kids meditation processes helps them to remember. It just helps their memory. I am very interested in the practical side of this; the things that are coming out of psychotherapy that have a real-life, education value and validity. They are just really teachable, learnable tools for improving your own skill of living. Likewise with forms of meditation, whether you call them meditation or not, they have that real-world benefit. I am really interested in the secular, everyday, do-it-yourself value of technologies of consciousness that every man, woman and child in the street could benefit from knowing a bit about.

I am quite interested, as I said earlier, in taking what there is in the esoteric or spiritual domains and integrating that with what we know from psychotherapy, then turning it into 'handy, self-help tools for living'. The world needs it; kids in schools need it. We all need to know how to manage our stress or change our focus from what has become too constricted so that we are able to begin seeing more synoptically.

KG: Thank you very much.