The Less Dust the More Trust Participating in the Shamatha Project, Meditation and Science

Adeline van Waning’s book The less dust, the more trust is a unique journey into mindfulness and awareness, into consciousness and the essence of what it is to be human. She tells the story of her participation in The Shamatha Project retreat (2007), embracing three months of concentration-calm meditations and scientific research into what happens to mind, thought and emotions, in a group of persons practicing Buddhist meditation for many hours a day. She addresses the current research outcomes of this unique ongoing project, and adds more recent considerations.
The book is written from a contemplative and scientific point of view, and includes many personal elements about life during the Shamatha Project retreat. The author shares her reflections with many diary fragments about what she experienced, thought and felt. Every chapter offers a guided meditation in a way that the reader can ‘join in being on retreat,’ for a direct experience into the themes the author addresses. The book makes meditation a very real and interesting activity, and shows that it - far from being an escape - provides a key to getting more familiarity with and control over one's emotions and thoughts, and to leading a more fulfilling life.
The author discusses important elements of Buddhist meditation like observing one's thoughts and emotions without getting involved in them, and tells her first-hand experiences. When increasingly she could let go of habitual attachment to self, she could feel that not she did things but that things happened through her, resulting in experiences of spaciousness and openness, with feelings of subtle lightness and joy. She noticed how sometimes there was the sense of transcending her physical senses and yet experiencing everything around her more clearly. She achieved a sense of freedom, of not being bound by beliefs, convictions and expectations. Also, she describes a heightened sense of presence in the world. The author addresses a sense of ‘breaking the barriers of anxiety,’ getting in touch with a deeper trust, beyond the ‘dust’ of attachments and conditionings. She tells with great honesty about the obstacles she encountered during the project retreat: how the meditations sometimes led to doubts, frustrations, and how she dealt with them. Underlying the upheavals in her mind, as she notices, increasingly there was a gentle joy.
As a professional psychiatrist Adeline van Waning is able to clearly outline some differences and similarities between Western psychology and Buddhist psychology. In later chapters the book presents insights and experiences from the wisest of Tibetan masters, with views that offer concrete advice for Western readers. These presentations increase the accessibility of Buddhist meditation for the Western mind.
The book is a tour the force that explains many aspects of Buddhist meditation and the benefits of shamatha for the mind, both in a theoretical and in a practical way. The less dust, the more trust can be helpful for anyone who practices a type of Buddhist meditation, and will appeal to the most critical and scientifically-minded readers.

Review van Ilse N. Bulhof, Prof.dr, Filosofie
'The Shamatha Project: a scientific study of the influence of meditative practices on participants' physical and mental wellbeing. It was scientific research, but not ‘science as usual,’ for important new dimensions were added. The project included a close study of the lived experiences of the participants. Their 'subjective' first person experiences were taken into account as an important source, to be included in 'objective' scientific research. Natural science, psychology and first person direct experience in close interaction. The author of this book, Adeline van Waning - having both a scientific background and a longstanding experience in meditation - used her position as a participant for carefully documenting her experiences in the various shamatha meditations, the felt-sense of the day to day effects on her body-mind. How with the lessening of ego-concerns (the dust) her trust in ‘just being’ and surrender to the unfolding process increased. With their deep commitment to the project, their intense meditation practice, their (silent) contacts with each other, and their receptivity to the overall guidance by the co-organizer in the project, B. Alan Wallace PhD - the participants were not a group of passive research objects. Far from it, as the case of Van Waning shows, they were active co-creators of what was developing.
In reading this fascinating book a new vision of science dawns on the reader: might doing science be more like co-creating new situations by subjects rather than collecting more and more facts about objects?'

Review van Ilse N. Bulhof, Prof.dr, Filosofie
'The Shamatha Project: a scientific study of the influence of meditative practices on participants' physical and mental wellbeing. It was scientific research, but not ‘science as usual,’ for important new dimensions were added. The project included a close study of the lived experiences of the participants. Their 'subjective' first person experiences were taken into account as an important source, to be included in 'objective' scientific research. Natural science, psychology and first person direct experience in close interaction. The author of this book, Adeline van Waning - having both a scientific background and a longstanding experience in meditation - used her position as a participant for carefully documenting her experiences in the various shamatha meditations, the felt-sense of the day to day effects on her body-mind. How with the lessening of ego-concerns (the dust) her trust in ‘just being’ and surrender to the unfolding process increased. With their deep commitment to the project, their intense meditation practice, their (silent) contacts with each other, and their receptivity to the overall guidance by the co-organizer in the project, B. Alan Wallace PhD - the participants were not a group of passive research objects. Far from it, as the case of Van Waning shows, they were active co-creators of what was developing.
In reading this fascinating book a new vision of science dawns on the reader: might doing science be more like co-creating new situations by subjects rather than collecting more and more facts about objects?'