In this episode, John Peacock, Ph. D., speaks with Vita Pires, Ph. D., the Prison Mindfulness Institute executive director, about the intersections of ethics and critical thinking in mindfulness teaching.
Mindfulness teaching and ethics.
Mindfulness Inquiry, Critical thinking, and Socratic dialogue.
Ethics and dependent origination.
Ethics and character formation.
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John Peacock is an academic and a Buddhist practitioner of nearly fifty years. Trained initially in the Tibetan Gelugpa tradition in India, he subsequently spent time in Sri Lanka studying Theravada. After doing a doctorate in philosophy, he taught Buddhist and Western philosophy and then Buddhist Studies at the University of Bristol. He went on to be Associate Director of the Oxford Mindfulness Centre, co-direct the Master of Studies programme in MBCT(Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy) at Oxford University, and teach Buddhist psychology on the same course. John is now retired from academia and continues teaching meditation, as he has done for over thirty-five years. https://bodhi-college.org/presenters/17-john-peacock/
Podcast Transcript
Vita Pires 0:03
Hi everyone, it's Vita again. And I'm happy to be here today with John Peacock. Please see the link below for his bio and incredible body of experience. John, please tell us a little about your background.
John Peacock 0:20
My main focus has always been ethics. That's what I did academically. And that's what I did my doctoral thesis on. It's been my element or my approach to Buddhism and mindfulness practice, particularly in the latter end of my academic career because that's what I was doing. I was teaching professionals, basically Mindfulness at Oxford University, in the Masters of Studies degree that we had, and one of the things that often wasn't spoken about in mindfulness circles was ethics. You know, what was this meant to do? Besides, we were specifically teaching MBCT, mindfulness-based Cognitive therapy. What was it meant to do above and beyond the main goal? The main goal was to deal with clinical depression.
And the main goal of MBSR initially was to deal with chronic pain syndromes. And it was to say, Well, let's look a little bit deeper at this; let's see what, within the traditional point of view, Mindfulness was meant to do. Those things are very important. They're very important in the secular context, so for people who have chronic pain, how do you hold it, how do you work with it, when it's never going to go away? If you've got depression, and it's coming back again and again and again, how do you work with that? How do you learn to, in a sense, not react to every thought that comes up if it's a depressive thought, etc? And I'm saying yes, this is important. But we must look further to see the intention behind this practice we've taken into a secular world. My main interest has been ethics, which you probably gathered when you invited me to talk to you.
Vita Pires 2:28
Yesterday, you had a fascinating dialogue with James Shaheen for Tricycle. And you recently wrote an article about bringing politics, dharma, and current social issues into the Dharma Hall. I know that's been happening a lot in the US, but we talked earlier about the skill sets needed to come in and have dialogue that would not just turn it into a food flight, as James said.
John Peacock 3:00
This is the big danger, and what we're looking at in those instances is polarized opinions. When you get those, as you call it, food fights, they are known as polarized opinions. What we have to do is look into the opinions themselves. So there's got to be a willingness, there's got to be an openness to want to look at your opinion, there's no point in talking to somebody who's completely bigoted and is not prepared in some way to examine their thought processes around this. And I think the first thing that's required is, in Buddhist terms, Metta, usually translated as loving-kindness. From a scholastic point of view, it is an appalling translation; it means friendliness and goodwill. I feel that that is what we need; the primary element that, if you like, is the ground from which we operate is a sense of goodwill towards each other.
A sense of respect, working on holding people in respect, to listen to something that might feel abhorrent to you. And to listen to it respectfully, not just to want to get into that reactive tendency. And then to probe it. And equally to probe your thought processes. Most of us are full of opinions about all sorts of things. This is not knowledge. One of the things I think that starts to happen when we start to probe those is that we begin to discover how ungrounded many of those opinions are because we don't understand them. So we start with a simple opinion and end up with a bit of complexity or perhaps a degree of uncertainty about that so-called deeply held opinion, whatever it may be.
I think many things are involved; one of the things I suggested in our little pre-talk was something like Socratic dialogue. It is very useful. Now, Socrates went around basically being an annoyance to the Athenians, for a long period of time, and he developed something which has become called the maieutic method. The maieutic method was meant to help people give birth to new ideas. So, by probing any idea, they called it doksa, in Greek, which was an opinion. It was a viewpoint; by probing that with and testing it to its extreme, you start to get different perspectives. You're open to the possibility, not of literally changing you, but to the possibility of being open to change.
Socratic dialogue isn't easy, but I think it's crucially important, something like it. We find this all over the Buddhist traditions. If you look through the history of Buddhism, you will find something approaching this, even down to how debaters conducted themselves in some of the big monastic universities in Tibet.
John Peacock 6:43
Madhyamika, particularly in the dialectical method that's often used. It's not quite the same, but you find that ability to want to probe ideas rather than say, well, that's the accepted view. That's the dogmatic viewpoint. And we operate from this. So you test them out. And I think this has to be true of any of our ideas; we have to test them out; we have to see whether they have any grounding to them. Is it just bigotry? Is it just dogma that we've accepted? I think that is an important part, and aligned with that, I think, is a degree of critical thinking. And there's not a lot of difference between these two.
So, we're looking at the logic of language. Listening to political statements on both sides of the Atlantic, I see a lack of logical precision in how people form their arguments. Yeah, apply that to yourself. We're not just using it on others; we're applying it to ourselves and the views that we bring. We might hold deeply opinionated views about X or Y. Bring your critical skills to start looking at them, seeing how they hold water, and seeing what contra hypotheticals you can bring.
Vita Pires 8:12
I have a degree in philosophy, but I have never taken a class on critical thinking. About 10 years ago, I took a course with Linda Eller and the Center for Critical Thinking. It was amazing. When you go through it mythologically, you learn all the various aspects of inference and how to apply them. However, with the Socratic dialogue, it would be great if people formed practice groups because I think you can only get it by practicing.
John Peacock 8:53
What you say about having done philosophy in the past is very interesting. What you do when you study philosophy, and I know because I taught philosophy for many years, is you give people a load of ideas. You give them new ideas or new perspectives coming from x philosopher. It might be Nietzsche or Schopenhauer or Hume or Kant, or whatever contemporary Anglo-American philosophers.
Vita Pires 9:27
Such as Zizek?
John Peacock 9:27
Zizek, who I mentioned in a previous article. What you get is the ideas fully formed. You don't see them in the process. Right? What is so remarkable about the Socratic and early Greek methods is that you've got a pure process. You haven't got ideas; Socrates is not putting forward ideas. And that's a really interesting move. It's listening to others and probing theirs, and when I say others, it's the other inside ourselves, as well. Hearing that is as important as probing somebody else's ideas. And it's philosophy in the process. And that's a purely ethical way of thinking. Yeah. We're moving into an openness rather than a closure.
Vita Pires 10:23
Some say, Oh, have a curious mind, investigate, have a curious mind, or have an open mind. And I think Okay, that's easy to say. But when you have to put yourself in a position of deep practice, attempting to do Socratic dialogue, it does develop the curious mind because there's a little structure to it.
John Peacock 10:51
What is important is being able to formulate the questions. That's the difficult bit. If you go to a philosophy class, we're just using that as an example, or any class on anything, you get given the answers. You know, Kant says this. And here's Kant's answer in the critique of dialectical reason. You get all the answers there. That's not what's going on here. It's saying let's search for the answers. Those answers are provisional, so they might not be satisfying. So we've got an openness. If we're talking about living, we've got a journey. And that's an essential facet of this process. It goes hand in hand with Mindfulness, which is a journey.
Vita Pires 11:53
We are in our 11th year of certifying mindless teachers, and we've noticed over the years that people get hung up on the Q&A. The minute somebody asks a question, they want to jump immediately into giving them the answer.
John Peacock 12:09
When I was working in Oxford, we trained highly skilled professionals, often psychiatrists, general practitioners in medicine, counselors and psychotherapists, and people like that. So they're all highly skilled people. The biggest problem they had in MBCT was the inquiry component. Now, the inquiry component was there. And I don't know how familiar you are with MBCT, unlike MBSR. But MBCT, the inquiring component, is an enormously important part of this because it's helping people to become interested in their own processes. The moment I tell them about their processes, as you're suggesting, with the I'll answer it, and I'll solve your problem for you, then you've stopped, in a sense, getting them interested in that.
Isn't that true of human beings in general? A lot of the time, we look for an authoritarian answer rather than relying on the authority of our own experience. I think Mindfulness, in general, and with the right questions, is starting to validate our own experiences with things. So if it feels uncomfortable, why does it feel uncomfortable? So it's moving towards open questions where we begin to probe that experience a bit more.
And if it's opinions, as we were talking about earlier, let's see, why do I hold that opinion? And what grounds have I got? The facilitator's job in the MBCT program is to keep that inquiry going for as long as possible. It is not without excluding others in the group to get that person interested in their own experience because they might start and say What did you notice during that meditation practice? Not a lot. What do you mean by not a lot? Did you have any sensations in your body? Were there any thoughts running through your mind? Oh, yeah, I had that strange sensation in my body. Well, what was that about?
You always take them just slightly deeper than the surface. And that's what we're doing, perhaps on a political level, examining our premises, as I suggested last night when I was talking to James Shaheen.
So, all these skills are difficult to learn, but they are rewarding when we begin to do them. We all have a viewpoint. This is classic Buddhism. The eightfold path starts with an appropriate viewpoint. And what's so interesting about that for listeners perhaps not so familiar with that, it's not saying it's the right viewpoint, which is, again, the bad translation of this, the word Samar in Pali, in the original language of the early texts. The word Samar means more something like appropriate; what's the appropriate viewpoint to take at this?
So, we have multiple viewpoints, which can shift according to our situation and context. And so we're not talking about fixity and rigidity. The view that we have mostly, and we can feel this for ourselves, examine something that we hold strongly about, and we have strong opinions about whether this is wrong or right or whatever, examine that and feel how rigid that structure is. How claustrophobic it is. So again, in a slightly more Buddhist fashion, it creates spaciousness by opening it up. And the questions become, if you like, I'm going to use a very crude metaphor, but it's a bit like the can opener that begins to open up that tight, constricted space.
Vita Pires 16:34
Absolutely. I've been in this study group, I will give a little promo here for the Tricycle courses. I've been in the study group for three or four years, and we started watching Origins of Mindfulness with you and the other three great teachers. And we've watched that one three times; we go through it and go through and go through it. We're now doing the fourth time. And we learned something new every single time. But then we started doing the Dependent Origination one and the Spiral to Freedom one; these are all excellent courses; everybody should check them out on Tricycle. The dependent origination one gets me because people don't understand it, even though it seems simple. But for me, when I learned about this 40 years ago, it was one of the guiding principles: whenever I go into any of these problematic situations, like working with people who have entirely different value systems than me, I like to flash on that, like, Oh, my God, there's all these causes and conditions. I can't really know what they're manifesting in a moment, what's putting that all together, and it somehow just opens it up to like, Whoa, this, it just kind of mind-boggling when I flash on that.
John Peacock 17:51
Well, I don't know if we touched on it, and we may have just mentioned it, but there is a way for the whole ethics of dependence to arise. Again, it is that movement from closure to openness to see the conditions that give rise to the phenomena. As I suggested last night, when I was talking, none of us has sub-specie aeternitatis; we don't have a view from eternity. We have our view at this moment; as I sit in my room, unless I turn around, I don't see the back of it. I don't see what's there. And actually, we can never get that full viewpoint. There's always something more that we can be open to within this.
So it's a perfect antidote to the kind of dogmatism it says A causes B, and I know thats a fact. That's why I prefer to talk not in terms of causality but in terms of dependencies, that we have multiple levels of dependency that give rise to something. And it's unclear whether we can ever get that total picture about it. If you're familiar with your philosophy days, somebody called Thomas Nagel wrote What's it like to be a bat? You can't know!
Vita Pires 19:27
No, you can't know what it was like to be anybody or anything.
John Peacock 19:32
And that's important from an ethical point of view. That's important. Again, I fleetingly mentioned somebody I find important in Western ethics, Emmanuel Levinas, whom I was very fortunate to meet when he was still alive. Emmanuel Levinas talks about the ethical relationship of residing in that face-to-face relationship. You and I are talking; that's an Ethical relationship. But what he's saying is I can never wholly know you. Even if I'm familiar or a really good friend, I can never wholly know you; you're an infinity that cannot be captured. And equally so for the subject or the other participants in the dialogue. They can never be totalized, is the word he uses. And it's a really interesting perspective because it says what we're dealing with is an infinite number of causes and conditions that have given rise to this phenomenon that we call the person sitting in front of us. What a fantastic perspective of wonder to look around you. And, you can take that out into the ordinary world, I feel he doesn't talk about this. But you can take that into the ordinary world and say, Wow, look at the conditions that must have given rise to this creature. This tree, this, whatever it is. It's a wonderful ethical perspective.
Vita Pires 21:04
Yeah, so thanks for coming back to ethics. Again, your focus.
John Peacock 21:09
It's a bit of an obsession.
Vita Pires 21:11
Many people don't even think about it, like Mindfulness teachers. I don't hear that talked about when putting out a course on ethics. It's sort of like dependent origination. I have four people that will commit to that.
John Peacock 21:25
We had precisely that in Oxford because we used to give some extra classes. And I remember Ruth Baer, a well-known person in mindfulness and empirical research. She and I were going to offer a course on ethics. And we had two people sign up for the course. It's partly because I think when people hear the word ethics, they hear rules.
Vita Pires 21:52
They hear the 10 commandments or something.
John Peacock 21:55
Yeah, exactly. They hear prescriptions. They hear those prescriptions and think, Well, do I need to be told what I need to do? Most of us have an aversion to that, you know, rightly or wrongly, we have an aversion to being told what to do. But I think, as I've said on other occasions, if we ever have the question just for ourselves, let's bracket ethics for a second; we have the question, how do I live? You're dealing with ethics. If you have that question, I think everybody does. That's the most fundamental question. Probably even more fundamental and certainly with the client group you're often working with in prisons, and that, What do I do, or What have I done?
Vita Pires 22:44
That's up in your face all the time.
John Peacock 22:47
Exactly. That's an ethical question. From there, you can start to inquire. For example, if I'm teaching a retreat, which I don't do as much as I used to do these days, but if I'm going on a teaching retreat, and you have the so-called precepts offered. Now, most of the ways that the precepts are offered for anybody on retreat, they will know they're usually just given us a list. Well, you don't do this. You don't, you know, you don't kill anything. You don't lie. You don't engage in sexual misconduct etc, etc. I won't go through the whole list. And they miss out on every important aspect of what those are about because it's saying, what does it mean to harm something? Again, translation work here. What did it mean to harm, not just kill? How do you hold yourself? What does it mean to, for example, engage in false speech? That's different from just saying don't lie. What is false speech? Is it the exaggeration, the embellishment that we give to something, the slightly distorted picture to get something to my advantage?
So, a lot of that, in most people's minds, wouldn't qualify as flat-out lying, we all do it. So, if I want to make a story slightly funnier, I distort it a little from how it occurred. We all engage in this, but we're looking at intentions. We're looking at communication, what we are trying to do with that piece of language, or whatever we're doing. And we can extend it out, and to cut a long story short, because I could go on about this. What we have in those five precepts is a set of questions. What does it mean, for example, the interesting one is the third precept, usually translated as don't engage in sexual misconduct. Well, the word that's used in Pali is Kama su, which means sensual misconduct. So it's sexual and sensual. And, for most people, sensual is the big one.
Vita Pires 25:23
Yeah, but eating is pretty big.
John Peacock 25:27
I used to joke about this when I was teaching retreats and saying that's usually the big one because you've nothing to do besides eating. Yeah. I'm saying that we have to overcome the image that ethics is about, a list of rules and demands. And I noticed when I looked through the thing that you sent me yesterday that it was interesting that when the Greek word ethos was defined and for me, one of the important things was missing. But the word ethosce. Also, amongst many of its meanings, most of the meanings that you put in that document were right. One of the important things for me is that it's about character. Ethos also means character. So in Aristotelian ethics, for example, our ethics are actually about character formation through the development of good behavior.
Vita Pires 26:38
You were talking about that prisoner's translation of the Dalai Lama. For everyone listening, some Texas prisoners translated the Dalai Lama's Ethics for New Millennium into a study guide.
John Peacock 26:53
Well, character is built; for example, you develop a character out of, say, defensiveness, you don't want to be hurt. So you develop a character that is quite defended. In other circumstances, you might develop a more open and generous character. And bringing back to the side of early Buddhism, also, within early Buddhism, it was said that what you continue to do repetitively, becomes the formation of you. What I mean by the formation of character is how to develop virtue in life, which will form your character.
Aristotle has his word for it, hamartia, which is sometimes you will hit the mark, a lot of the time, you won't. But in some senses, it's the intention to move towards that which you delineate for yourself, and there may be many of the things that you mentioned, such as respect and truthfulness. And we all fall, using Christian imagery, we all fall at some point. But it's that intention to do that which informs the character. If I intend to be aggressive because I'm frightened, I'm fearful, that will also form my character. And if I don't examine it, and this is where I think the Mindfulness comes in, if I don't examine it, if I don't allow it to be seen, then in a way, it's almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy that continues to unfold in that way, because it seems so familiar to me.
I'm saying this because I know a few people who work in prisons in both the UK and Ireland. And one of the things they say is that people think they can't be different. They think they can't change in that way. And I think the biggest hope that we can give anybody is you are constantly changing. That's the biggest in a practical sense. You're giving people the hope. Not in a holding out there as a possibility, but you're always changing. Now, you often change in small ways. And within the given parameters, let's widen the parameters and see if you can become more responsive rather than reactive. The reactive is usually linked to the known. The responsive is a movement and a step. It is quite scary, actually, for a lot of people into the unknown.
Vita Pires 29:48
This may be off-topic, but why do you think people are allergic to the term develop?
John Peacock 30:03
In a way, it's like importing something you're not. I suppose one of the big things in my background is an existentialist idea that you're manifesting what you already are. And that is your possibility. Your own possibilities, now, your own possibilities, you don't develop them; they're already there. In a sense, it's using slightly Buddhist imagery; there is a sense of uncovering them. What are your possibilities for different ways of living? Now, some of that is restricted by obviously sex, gender, race, and all these sorts of things. But, when we start to examine our possibilities, rather than develop ones that people tell us are good for us, we start to find that they're a lot bigger than we ever think.
Vita Pires 31:13
Regarding mindfulness teachers, what important advice could you give?
John Peacock 31:22
That's a big one! How do you become a better mindfulness teacher? Part of becoming a better mindfulness teacher is knowing your stuff. In a way, communicate to the people you're working with. You, yourself, are on a journey with them. I'm not teaching you something; I'm encouraging you to do something you already know. You just don't do it very frequently. That's all. I think that the classes I used to give when I was doing this much more professionally reassuringly told people that I was doing this with you. I'm not sitting here from a position of authority. As I teach or facilitate these practices, I am doing this with you. And it's really important to communicate that not by saying it but through your presence.
Vita Pires 32:45
People can tell.
John Peacock 32:49
Exactly. That's the important part. It's very useful for Dharma teachers to cut through some of the hubris that Dharma teachers often have. I'm not sitting up there as a perfect being. I'm sitting up here as a flawed human being interested in not being so flawed.
Vita Pires 33:12
Sometimes if they did that little bit more and revealed it when they Oops, oops, I shouldn't have said that or did something like that, that it would dissolve a little bit of that. Then, people are shocked when something untoward comes out.
John Peacock 33:28
Well, that's right. And, again, it's a fundamental, I'm sorry to say it, but it's a basic question of ethics, unless you've grounded yourself in that ethical thing, and it is ethical. For example, if you don't know, say I don't know; I am unfamiliar with that.
You heard me say last night concerning this stuff on restorative justice. I don't know about that. The only model I have, because I've worked and taught in South Africa quite a bit, is the model of reconciliation that they had in South Africa.The apartheid era.
So it's good to do that. It's very ethical as a teacher to say, I don't know. I will find out and gather as much information as possible about that. I won't become an expert, but whatever. That must be the foundation for it. And to answer your question, what advice would I have to pass on? Doing those things, I suggested, fundamentally grounds yourself in an ethical way of being. I don't know what it's like in the States. But one of the big problems I used to have with students and highly professional people, a lot of the time, was impostor syndrome.
Vita Pires 35:12
I've developed a curriculum, and people have gone worldwide to teach it. And so they often ask me, " What do you do in this situation? What do you do? I tell him a few times, and then I finally stop telling him; it doesn't matter what I do because you'll have to go in there and meet the person and do whatever you do. You know, you'll get the feedback.
John Peacock 35:35
Yeah, The one thing we have a big problem within the West is that people bring this to Buddhism and all domains of life. They bring it certainly to Mindfulness. And I think that delineated the good teacher from the competent teacher. The good teacher wasn't reliant on technique. And when you hear those questions such as what should I do in X situation, what you're asking for is what technique do I use in the situation? Rather than how do I respond. And that responsiveness is entirely down to your understanding and how you contextually see that thing.
In the absence of that, technique is useful. But we can't rely wholly on it; it becomes a little inauthentic after a while because every time I perceive X, I do Y. And it might not be appropriate in that context at all. So you're developing along as well, as facilitating teaching, you're developing those skills of responsiveness. And that's what you were saying; what do you do? Well, it's up to you to decide what you do.
Vita Pires 36:55
So, I'd like you to say something a little bit, because many people come to us, and they want to be mindfulness teachers because they're very enthusiastic about Mindfulness. They've listened to some apps, read a couple of books, practice something on these apps, and then want to be a mindfulness teacher. So they don't get that Mindfulness has a bigger context than just whatever they're doing.
John Peacock 37:24
It does have a very, very big context. Because as you say, it's a team player sport, if you want to put it in those terms. In other words, it comes with a whole load of other stuff. I have thought about this for a long time. What is it that delineates or distinguishes Mindfulness from attention? For example, that's a classic one because a lot of what people think is mindfulness is purely attention.
Now, attention is a variable in Buddhist psychology, an ethically variable factor. I can place my attention on something unwholesome or unskillful equally as much as I can place it on something skillful. Mindfulness is often defined as something that is always skillful. How does that come about? If it's not attention, which I can place anywhere, I can put it on the most obnoxious things and put it on the really good things in life. What is it that delineates it? I’ve thought hard about this. It seems to me that others might have a different view, but it seems to me that mindfulness cares about its object. So it holds whatever the object, no matter how mundane the object is, no matter how mundane that thought is, in a sense, with a caring gaze.
We can elevate it into a big language later on, saying it's more compassionate. But for some people, that doesn't work as language. On a basic level, the moment I start to pay attention, mindfully, to a thought process and not automatically jump into judging it, good or bad, it doesn't matter. But just hold it and see it, then it somehow cares for it. Now, that, for me, is the distinguishing feature of Mindfulness. And it's not simple staring, as you rightly say; you can stare at your thought processes for the rest of your life, and it won't change you one iota. I'm often fond of saying that if you're just developing attention in these situations, you get a better view of the mess.
Vita Pires 40:05
I've often been in juvie hall and gotten this question several times. And they do it in a jokey way. So, I've heard Mindfulness will make me a better sniper. What you said about It Cares, I think it'd be much more to the point.
John Peacock
That's a big distinguishing feature. Because, again, I've heard endlessly from people, that as a mindfulness practitioner, I can become a better whatever it is, maybe a sniper—equally, something which is unskillful and unwholesome. And what we're saying is no, you become good with your attention. I can hone my attention skills to become a sniper or whatever. It may be a good burglar.
John Peacock 40:54
But that's not Mindfulness. As we know, that's not Mindfulness. Mindfulness is that in a way, I don't want to get too religious about this, but it's almost in a sense of reverence to the object you're looking at. If the object is you, it's really important.
Vita Pires 41:10
Absolutely. Well, thank you, John. This is a great conversation, and I hope it inspires more dialogue on this topic. Thank you for taking the time to talk today.
John Peacock 41:26
Thank you.
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