Forum; Cross-Cultural Communication with Doug Boyd

Peace be upon you. From the Longhorn Radio Network, the University of Texas at Austin, this is Forum. Really, to me, what it's going to take is a kind of personal empowerment up till now has been called paranormal and isn't. A kind of empowerment that has been referred to as shamanism or medicine in italics or spirituality or yoga or whatever is going to be needed. Doug Boyd, author, lecturer, and lifelong student of intercultural communication.

Originally, when I first began to be aware of what moved me and what I thought I cared about and was interested in, I defined it in terms of, I guess you could call it east-west bridge work or east-west communication. I lived in Asia, mostly in Korea for a period of about a decade. And I was interested in how people in the east looked at the west and what kinds of things they wanted to imitate or to acquire or to adapt or to try to live with. This is Olive Graham. Our guest on Forum today may be remembered by some of our listeners as the author of two important books in the 70s, each book featuring shamans or healers. Rolling Thunder and Swami, cult favorites published in 1974 and 1976, are two titles that reflect the interest Doug Boyd has in Native American and East Indian methods of healing

and meditation. Both detail his work and experiences with the title figures at the Meninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas. Doug Boyd's interest in cross-cultural communication does however precede that chapter in his life. In the 60s, he had embarked on an actual journey to the east that American culture was embracing in its own cosmic way at the same time. From his vantage point in the east, he was interested in what America sought from that culture in terms of what was truly indigenous to that part of the world and what should be valued and respected. Doug Boyd. I grew up in a family that had an interest in yoga and oriental philosophy and eastern thought and we studied sort of as a kid. It was part of just the family interest. I guess you could say comparative religion and so forth. I was aware of the fact that as a child in the United States, I had to be careful not to talk about ideas or traditions or beliefs or customs, whether I held them or not, even

talk about them that were just too weird for Westerners to hear. Then the word meditation was a very weird word some decades ago. As I was living in the far east and thought about how important it was for the east to be understood in the west and the west to be understood in the east. When I returned, I found that this already was happening. In fact, it was kind of striking to see that so many of the, I guess you'd call younger generation were more interested in the east than in the west in some ways, in that period of time, whereas in the east, the younger generation was more interested in the west than in the east. Doug Boyd cites the qualities of eastern culture that attracted the America of the 60s and addresses the question of whether or not these features were central to the eastern culture he came to know and appreciate.

It seems to me that the real authentic or the real significant qualities of eastern culture and eastern thought that the west was attracted to were those, how can I say, processes of inner spiritual development? I guess that's what a lot of people would call it, that's what would communicate with a lot of people. The difference in emphasis I think has to do with the difference in social factors or social qualities in the east and in the west. The emphasis in the west has been still more on individual attainment, individual acquisition of spiritual qualities or enlightenment or whatever. It may seem to a lot of westerners that that's the purpose of yoga and meditation and all the spiritual pursuits in the far east. But actually in the far east people are not so individually oriented and it doesn't have to be talked about or discussed, but its spiritual development is something that is a quality of spiritual development itself and not a quality of the individual.

It's sort of like a lot of great musicians in this country and in other countries as well, like to say that the music is played for the music. You just do the music, I mean it's the music that counts. You don't think of your great aptitude and facility at piano or violin or something as exactly as being a personal development, it is, but it's just a means, it's a service, it's a quality. It isn't as though one takes up violin or piano or something like that, just as a personal acquisition with the emphasis being on the development of the person rather than the playing of the music. I think that a lot of people in the east who still, and of course through ancient times, emphasized meditation and what we think of as inner work and spiritual attunement or something, were looking at to use the same analogy, were looking more at the music than

in the process of becoming a musician. In the West since emphasis has been so much on success and skills and personal attainment and so forth, I think people have used these kinds of things in a way that they thought might be the new kind of personal success for the Westerner, so it's a difference in emphasis. Underlying our quest in Eastern philosophies was a healing metaphor. Intercultural communicator Doug Boyd responds to the assertion of alleged insufficiencies in our society at the time. In this country, of course, people haven't participated, and this is changing now, but the culture that we had, our very materialist industrial age sort of culture, people hadn't participated that much in the healing process or even let's say the magic or the enchantment of what it is that healing is all about, in our culture people have been, not that medicine

hasn't developed very admirably in a lot of areas, the technological areas and the economics and so forth have made Western medicine an almost miraculous process of crisis intervention and so forth. But medicine has been, for the most part, in this country, a kind of materialistic reception, passive reception of whatever it is that those in medical authority tell us to do or to take or to eat or to swallow. So there hasn't been this beautiful, exciting process of self-healing and conscious participation in well-being. And as people traveled around more in communication and transportation have allowed people to see pretty more and more of other cultures and so forth, people have been attracted, I think, to healers in various cultures and to the ways in which they work. That certainly has been an emphasis of mine in the writings, I mean, both the Rolling

Thunder book and the Swami book dealt, I think, a lot with what I could call varieties of healers, of varieties of approaches toward the healing process or toward health and well-being. In the new book, mystics, magicians, and medicine people deals with a number of people, various cultures I represented there, all of whom, I think, in one sense could be called healers. In our program, our cross-cultural studies program, one of our major projects, at least projects that I'd been involved with for a long time, even predating the cross-cultural studies program, is one that we've called a cross-cultural empirical observation of healers and the healing process. The interesting thing about looking at healers in different cultures and making a cross-cultural comparison, is that you begin to be aware of a sort of sameness, or what we could be called common denominator, behind all the varieties of customs and customs that you see in the

different cultures. So behind a lot of various paraphernalian accoutrements, or ceremonies, or rituals, or processes, there are some principles. Behind all the varieties of healing and healing approaches, there must be some essential factor, there must be some essential principle that is responsible for what we call healing. That force must be the same if force it is in all cultures. In one sense, it makes more sense to look at rather not so much what is healing, but what is wellness. That's been, as you know, a new kind of, I guess we could say, new age term or concept along with concept of holistic health and healing, to look at wellness as being the quality that we're really focusing on, rather than illness. So it's kind of like, what is wellness? But we're talking about healing on not only a mental but a physical plane as well, can a culture heal itself, moving behind?

Okay, great. Yeah, yeah. Beautiful. I think that's what we're looking at right now. I think what's going on in the planet right now is, I hope, a move out of sort of individual new ageism with that individualistic emphasis we talked about before toward a kind of collective new ageism. I like to think that the principles that are found in holistic health concepts, let's say, are the same principles that need to be applied or need to be looked at in terms of their applicability to global affairs and to intercultural affairs and to world peace, which is, of course, doesn't exist right now, but at least it's a concept that is nice to be able to think about. So there's, to me, there is such a thing as what could be called collective self-regulation

because there is such a thing as collective self. So when we talk about self-regulation in the workshops and seminars, for example, we talk about what's called inside the skin, self-regulation, and outside the skin, self-regulation, a dramatic example of outside the skin, self-regulation would be the rain making, which I've discussed and talked about in several books. It looks funny to a lot of Westerners to think about people being able to make rain. While the individual doesn't make rain as if one person is asserting himself or herself to the point of forcing the atmosphere to acquiesce and submit to the well of the individual, that's not it at all. Rainmaking is a kind of collective self-regulation, but the rainmaker plays a role because the rainmaker learns how to participate in what could be called the collective well. And so in a sense, a culture is a self or can be a self, but it's a part like the cell in the body is a self, all these little selves make up a larger self, and a culture can

be a self, so can a family, so can a nation, but cultures also are not isolated selves like individuals are not isolated. They're part of a larger family or a larger collective. So there really can be, I think, it's a wonderful question and it isn't totally answered in terms of exactly how it's going to work. But I believe there really can be and needs to be a concept like collective self-healing. Are rolling thunder and Swami examples of that outer inner dichotomy you're talking about? Yeah, in a sense, there are different ways we can use those examples. Most of the, not all of them, and certainly I didn't write about all of them, but most of the Swami's that I've talked about, particularly Swami Rama, who traveled around and who spent some time in the East and who worked a lot with Westerners, and some of the medicine people

who've traveled about and who've talked to people in other cultures. Our examples, I think, of the planet's effort now to have a more cross-cultural, I guess you could say, communication, perhaps for the planet's own purpose, for the kind of integration that it's trying to have happen. Among Native Americans, originally, I mean in ancient times, the medicine person was more of a recluse, and there still are medicine people among various American Indian tribes. Other people don't generally see. They don't come out and around and so forth. So very often when a medicine person begins to travel and talk to people and work with other people, it's a different kind of medicine. They're still medicine people, but they're doing a different kind of medicine. They may use even some shamanistic principles and so forth, but a lot of the Native Americans like say, well, they're not the true medicine people because they're just the public medicine people. And there's something to that in a way.

For example, you mentioned Swami Rama in Rolling Thunder as examples of the inner and outer dichotomy. It isn't a dichotomy so much as it is, again, an emphasis. It seems to me that a number of the particular skills and capacities that Swami Rama demonstrated for example, even in laboratory settings, I mean, he caused a lot of physiological changes to happen at will, which are normally thought of as being involuntary, physiological processes, such as raising and lowering his heart rate and his temperature. At one time, he raised the temperature on one side of his palm, five degrees while lowering the temperature on the other side of his palm, five degrees, causing a 10 degree differential. At one time, he caused his heart to stop pumping blood by increasing his heart rate to about 360 beats a minute. The heart record, as seen by many cardiologists, was done in a physiological laboratory. It's like if you went to hospital and had your heart record made, although there were a

lot more parallel measurements, monitoring, being made than usually happen at that time. But anybody looking at his heart record, so to speak, would say this patient probably had a heart attack. This is atrial flutter. He did that on purpose. He was asked how he would explain how he did it in case any of the investigators wanted to know his explanation, and he said they don't need my explanation, they can have whatever explanation they feel good about, but somehow they have to account for the facts. He was asked what is your explanation to yourself. He said, my heart is my toy, I can play with it if I want to. But he did a number of demonstrations, incidentally, the five degree temperature increase on one side of the palm and a 10 degree decrease, five degree decrease on the other. Those little points, whatever those little centers are in the switchboard of the brain that caused those signals to cause that difference, must be very close together in the brain.

They probably fit in the head of a pin. Of course, we don't have to exactly work with it that way, we don't have to go in there and touch it. But it must require a tremendous amount of discipline and practice to attain that. And he said this was harder in one sense to become able to do than the heart demonstration that he did. He did a number of demonstrations like that, but these were what we could say, the voluntary control of psychophysiological processes that are often thought to be involuntary. So in one sense, he was a good example of inside the skin cell for regulation and rolling thunder, I think, was a demonstrated many examples of outside the skin cell for regulation. In fact, one of the qualities to me of the American Indian way that's particularly notable and that all of us can learn something from is the quality of interaction with the rest

of nature. But the economy breaks down. It isn't inside and outside then. It isn't like here I am and then here's the space between me and the plants and the trees and the rest of nature. It's just nature. It's just the life that is here at this time in one sense, it's all one life. A lot of the traditional people, even to this day, those who are in a position and able to really follow the tradition, can hang out with nature. So to speak in such a way that the dichotomy of, this is myself and this is all the rest of life out there, breaks down and they really, it's even more than seeing themselves part of the flow. They really get beyond being even part of the flow to the point where there's just the flow of nature, there's just the life that is here. This to me has been particularly moving and astounding at experience for me to observe. One today in so many cases among native people.

What then does the healing have to fix? When does the healing kick in? When would it be necessary? The healing to me is going back to the way things actually are. This is why it does make sense to look at the concept of wellness rather than the concept of healing. Wellness is the state, wellness is the natural state. Anything other than the wellness is, in yogic terms, it's the illusion or the illusionary self. But from where we sit with our brain cells and our lower cells, there's actually something going on here. There's something wrong in a sense that needs to be set right. I think as a generalization, we can say that all healing is returning, is a rebalancing, is a getting back to the real, getting back from moving back again from the unreal toward the real.

And this is what balancing is in all its ramifications on all levels. Pursuing his interest in individuals who are very special people in terms of their spiritual orientation, Doug Boyd has included in his new book Mystics, Magicians and Medicine People, a cast of characters who may or may not have their own personal balance. One of the individuals in one of the chapters of this book was a person who had some astounding openings and capacities and awareness in some ways, that which some of our new agents might like to call paranormal to an unbelievable extent, almost. So much so that was kind of shocking to individuals who were around him, even from his own culture. And who had at the same time not a complete balance, not a complete fullness. One part of him knew who he was and another part didn't know who he was. These days, I think there are a lot of problems of orientation problems among a lot of individuals as a result of people living in an environment which doesn't totally match their inner awareness,

particularly as meditations and other methods of self-actualization and self-awareness begin to be promoted more and more in many societies. And some of this comes through drugs and whatever we may say about drug. And of course, there's the whole gamut, including those which have almost no benefits and just tremendous physiological damage. But in other words, for drugs, some of these cultures would be herbs. Yeah, but I mean, there are those psychotropic plants and so forth, which are AIDS. I do not believe that enlightenment and wisdom itself is intrinsic in the drug, per se. That's not what the drug thing is doing. And certainly, the availability of certain kinds of drugs and contemporary society has opened certain doors in people, doors into their own awareness.

All that can happen is that doors open within the person or within the mind-fielder, within knowledge in general or within an individual's mind. However you want to look at it, doors open onto the knowledge, which is already there. The truth is already there. One of the statements we like to make in opening some of the seminars to the individuals to the people who are there is you already know all the teachings of all the saints and sages of all times and climes, but you just don't know you know it. Neither do I. Neither do we probably, and any of us exactly in this state, we don't have access to even all that we are as we're busy functioning in this level. We know now even that left brain activity, that is the so-called articulating part of the brain dominates just about everything else as long as it's active. It's often called left cortex tyranny by some of the new workers in the field, so it drowns out.

It upstages so much of what one is even on this level already aware of and could have access to, were it not for such tyranny, were it not for such oppression of the left brain. This even takes place among a lot of scientists, not all of them, but a lot of people are under the illusion that if you can't make a sentence about it, if your left cortex isn't aware of it so that it can articulate then it probably doesn't exist and it's probably not true. But I believe that in this society at this time there are a lot of catalysts to sort of spark awareness that doesn't quite totally come through or that doesn't come through all the way that people maybe have memories or inclinations or indications of some depths within themselves that they can't fully reconcile what's the society that they live in. We still have, for the most part, the society that we move about in. We have a kind of structured, mechanistic, materialistic and highly stressful and competitive

society here and it isn't exactly compatible with a lot of the inner sensitivities and awareness that a lot of people are opening in themselves. So what results is the possibility of problems in balance? What results is, I think in a lot of individuals, there's a lot of disorientation. This is particularly why I think it's important that from this time forward, enlightenment, spiritual development, yogic practice, meditation, inner work and so forth, not be an isolating individualistic kind of thing, but an interrelated supportive, helpful kind of thing so that people can get sort of do it together. We often hear the remark and often heard for years, you know, you have to get yourself together, you have to get it together. You know, people say, well, until I get my own act together, I can't help anybody else. But the thing is that you can't get your act together without help also. It really is a collective thing.

So I've enjoyed saying over the years, I think I first did that some years ago in an article in New Age magazine called The Roots of Violence. I said something like, we shall get our act together together or not at all. In all the traditional villages and clans of all societies and all traditional times. For example, the same industrial emphasis, the same technology, the same mechanistic sort of frenzy to develop all this stuff has brought us into, really, we've painted ourselves in a corner in some ways, brought us to a very precarious position. I mean, people talk about the rainforest and the ozone layer and the pollution, the air pollution, the water pollution and all this, what they call environmental ripoff, the overuse of resources that aren't going to be very readily replenished before they're gone. I mean, some people are saying we made destroy our planet or at least life on it as we know it.

And this that they blame is also the, at least a part of the means on this plane through which we can get it together on a planetary level. So in one sense, the same people are the same processes that brought us the crisis also are bringing us the opportunity. One teacher once said to me, all this technological development, which has spun off in so many different directions with all this gadgetry and all this merchandising of all this stuff, is really done only to provide the means of communication and transportation. These are the keywords so that the planet can get together and do the integrating kind of work that the planet is trying to do. Not only the whole of humanity, but the whole of life, but none of the real traditional people are anti-technology per se, they're just anti the misuse or anti the wrong emphasis. So to me, we're in a real neat position right now if we could and would do it. Our guest on forum has been Doug Boyd, author of Rolling Thunder and Swami.

His most recent publication is Mystics, Magicians and Medicine People. The views expressed on this program do not necessarily reflect the views of the University of Texas at Austin or this station. Technical producer for forum is Cliff Hargrove, production assistants, Christine Drawer and Byron E. Belt. I'm your producer and host, Olive Graham. Cassette copies of this program are available and may be purchased by writing forum cassettes. Longhorn Radio Network, communication building B, UT Austin, Austin, Texas, 78712. From the Center for Telecommunication Services, the University of Texas at Austin, this is The Longhorn Radio Network. Really to me what it's going to take is a kind of personal empowerment up till now has

been called paranormal and isn't. A kind of empowerment that has been referred to as shamanism or medicine and italics or spirituality or yoga or whatever is going to be needed. This week on forum, author Doug Boyd discusses intercultural communication.