Closer to Free: A Psychologist, a Monk, and the Roots of the Mindfulness Revolution

A poor boy enters a Buddhist monastery in rural Tibet, and many years later serves as a debate examiner for the Dalai Lama’s advanced degree in Tibetan Buddhism. That monk, Geshe Sopa, escapes the brutal Chinese occupation of Tibet in 1959 and becomes a refugee in India. In 1962, the Dalai Lama sends Geshe Sopa to America as a chaperone for three young lamas who are to learn English.An American psychologist, Allyn Roberts, who is investigated by the FBI for being a conscientious objector during the Korean War, fights a legal battle in the early 1960s to become the first psychologist to practice independently in Wisconsin. At the same time, his wife is diagnosed with a rare genetic brain disorder. During that period, Allyn Roberts by chance meets Jeffrey Hopkins in a bar in Tahiti.When Geshe Sopa moves to Madison, Wisconsin in 1967 to teach in a pioneering Buddhist Studies program at the University of Wisconsin, he and Allyn Roberts quickly become friends, sharing an enthusiasm for the higher reaches of the human mind. Jeffrey Hopkins enters the doctoral program in Buddhist Studies in 1968, in order to study with Geshe Sopa. Allyn Roberts’ friendship with Geshe Sopa over several decades will have a profound influence on his life, and on his work as a psychologist. Jeffrey Hopkins will go on become a prominent scholar in Tibetan Buddhism, and the chief interpreter into English for the Dalia Lama from 1979 to 1989.These relationships, and the associated seminal events that take place in Madison, will prefigure a silent revolution in psychology based on the study of meditation by neuroscientists. The current explosion of interest in mindfulness meditation has deep, and largely unknown, roots in the farmlands of Wisconsin. Read more