At our current point in the development of the field, experimental psychology has attained near exclusive dominance. It would take a concerted effort against the current for a student entering one of our university's psychology programs to emerge with a background in Freudian or Jungian analysis. There is good reason for this, for in the early half of the twentieth century, we experienced the effects of an institutionalized system of inward-oriented psychotherapy, and the end result was that the unrestrained and scientifically unfounded musings of Sigmund Freud took on the power to imprison people against their wills and subject them to viscous electroshock treatments and in some cases even lobotomies, despite little to no evidence of either practice's efficacy.
The purpose of this essay is not to try and affect some kind of regression back to this period in our history. Rather than looking at experiential psychology as it was previously put into practice, I seek to explore whether there is anything of value in the approach as a whole that cannot be found in it's research-oriented cousin, and whether there is a means of putting these advantages to use without repeating the mistakes of the twentieth century.
Before I can get into all that, however, the first task before me is to give clear demarcations on what falls under the terms experimental and experiential psychology. For the former this is relatively easy. A workable definition is: any cognitive discipline that seeks to come to an understanding of the human mind through either the observation of the organ which produces thinking (the brain) or the outcomes of research framed around the scientific-method and it's hypothesis-method-experiment-results approach.
A clear-cut understanding of what does and does not fit within the domain of experiential psychology, however, is a bit trickier, because there is a substantial amount of material written under disciplines that, in the West at least, are not normally classified as psychotherapy, but fit perfectly well beneath this standard. The best way to begin clarifying what does and does not fall within experiential psychology is to provide a definition for the term, so I will start by doing just that. Experiential psychology is the directing of cognition towards a greater understanding of itself and, from these inward appraisals, the nature of cognition as a whole. This definition is a little bit messy if you start trying to disassemble it, especially the phrase “directing of cognition”. To phrase it slightly differently, we could say “the human mind is capable of self-assessment, and many thinkers have sought to use these principles of self-assessment to understand not just basic thoughts and feelings, but the mechanics by which the mind operate. These thinkers are experiential psychologists.” This definition is even fuzzier than the first one, but were I to attempt to give an absolutely precise definition, it would take dozens of pages, and it would differ from the one William James' gives in “The Stream of Thought” only in a few key areas. We all, however, possess an intuitive understanding of how “my mind” is a separate entity from “your mind”, how each of these minds experiences states of “thinking” and “consciousness”, and that these thoughts can be directed towards things. This intuitive understanding will work fine for my purposes, and any attempt to go into further detail will only bog things down.
This definition, fuzzy though it may be, clearly goes well beyond the depth psychology of Freud and Jung, or even the broader field of early psychology as a whole. It includes a huge variety of systems of mental self-assessment that have arisen over the span of recorded history. All of it's subdivisions, however, share in common the approach of using the experience of subjective consciousness to examine itself, and from the basis of these examinations lead the subject or other human beings into superior states if consciousness.
The most obvious members of this school are the psychological theorists of the past who possessed an inward rather than outward focus. This includes the work of people like Freud and Jung, in addition to a great host of related thinkers who did not attain enough followers to merit a separate school of thought bearing their name: the functional psychology of William James, George Herbert Mead, and John Dewey; the historical psychology of Norman O. Brown; the biosocial psychology of Gardner Murphy; the Gestalt school; and the great many depth psychologists who don't neatly fit within the two main camps, to name just a small portion of it’s varied membership.
Beyond just thinkers explicitly labeled as psychologists, experiential psychology also includes work from the domain of philosophy. The most obvious members are Husserl and the phenomenologists, but much of existentialism, particularly the work of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, focuses not on external truths, be they scientific or metaphysical, but on how to condition the conscious mind to best engage with the external world.
Finally, and, as I will argue, most significantly, there are the contributions to experiential psychology wrought by the worlds religious traditions. This assertion is likely surprising to a great many readers, and unfortunately, in order to delve further into why I feel this way, we need to make one more clarification of the terms I will be using.
As with any system of classifying things that do not naturally lend themselves to classification, including the splitting of psychology field into experimental and experiential, my effort will unfortunately ignore the many shades of subtlety that characterize these longstanding intellectual traditions. These crass divisions, however, serve a didactic purpose by giving a clear a means of presenting a corpus far too broad for anyone to completely master, so long as we keep in mind that these divisions are only tools and not absolute truths.
With that caveat out of the way, one can look at the world’s religious traditions and see two major threads running through them. A Western reader whose understanding of what a religion is comes largely from the “big three” monotheistic traditions will no doubt be more familiar with what I will call the dogmatic component. These are the teachings that focus on either truths about the nature of the external world, typically truths which are not readily apparent to empirical observation, or guidelines for proper behavior. Like experimental psychology, these elements are focused on the world outside the subjective consciousness, but unlike modern science, they are typically founded on appeals to authority rather than replicable data. As far as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam go, this has come to be the dominant form of religious expression. It has become so pervasive in the Western consciousness that many people regard it as the entirety of the religious experience. For instance, if you were to ask a person on the street what the purpose of an ancient mythology was, the default answer is “to explain the things about the world they did not understand.” That, in the Greco-Roman tradition (by far the most familiar form of mythology to laymen), the strange, uninstructive, often bizarrely sexual tales vastly outnumber those that meet even the most liberal definition of didactic is never given much thought, likewise the almost deliberately anti-explanatory character of the ancient Mysteries.
The dominance of the dogmatic vein of thought in Western religion is neither absolute nor an essential characteristic of the tradition. Even today there are undercurrents in each of the three monotheistic religions that focus not any truth claims regarding what surrounds us, but on the understanding and modification of the conscious mind. This can be called the mystical component. While centuries of church rule have done much to crush the Gnostic, Cathar, Bogomil, and even the Manichean strains of thought in Christianity, both Islam and Judaism have been significantly more tolerant towards inward exploration in their adherents, as can be seen in the acceptance Kabbalah and Sufism, which prioritize understanding of the divine by means of the inward exploration over the understanding of the sacred through external means.
In the East, however, this pattern of dogmatic dominance is flipped on its head. While there are a number of exceptions, such as Confucianism, Nichiren Buddhism, and the Mimamsa school of Hinduism, the far greater emphasis of Eastern thought is placed on the transformation of consciousness. I am not the first person to see the strong connection between these traditions and Western psychotherapy, especially in the manner the latter was practiced during the first half of the 20th century. To quote the opening chapter of Alan Watts’ “Psychotherapy East and West”:
If we look deeply into such ways of life as Buddhism and Taoism, Vedanta and Yoga, we do not find either philosophy and religion as these are understood in the West. We find something more nearly resembling psychotherapy. This may seem surprising, for we think of the latter as a form of science, somewhat practical and materialistic in attitude, and of the former as extremely esoteric religions concerned with regions of the spirit almost entirely out of this world. This is because the combination of our unfamiliarity with Eastern cultures and their sophistication gives them an aura of mystery into which we project fantasies of our own making. Yet the basic aim of these ways of life is something of quite astonishing simplicity, besides which all the complications of reincarnation and psychic powers, of superhuman mahatmas, and of schools for occult technology are a smoke screen in which the credulous inquirer can lose himself indefinitely. In fairness it should be added that the credulous inquirer may be Asian as well as Western, though the former has seldom the peculiarly highbrow credulity of the Western fancier of esotericism. The smoke is beginning to clear, but for a long time its density has hidden the really important contributions of the Eastern mind to psychological knowledge.
The main resemblance between Eastern ways of life and Western psychotherapy is in the concern of both with bringing about changes of consciousness, changes in our way of feeling our own existence and our relation to human society and the natural world.
In the opening to a lecture variously titled “Following the Middle Way” or simply “Middle Way”, Watts puts things more succinctly:
I want to start by reemphasizing the point that, what are called the religions of the East, the ones we are discussing: Hinduism, Buddhism, and Chinese Daoism, they don't involve that you believe in anything specific, and they don't involve any idea of obedience to commandments from above. And they don't involve any conformity to a specific ritual, although they do have rituals, but their rituals vary from country to country and from time to time. Their objective is always not ideas, not doctrines, but a method. A method for the transformation of consciousness. That is to say: for a transformation of your sensation of who you are.
This consciousness-first approach contrasts itself from the course of the Western intellectual tradition, which has by and large viewed the vagaries that separate how we actually perceive reality from it's idealized “true nature” as something that can be ignored. Essentially, so long as a person either verbalized their agreement with a certain thinker's stated positions or was capable of regurgitating relevant information in a classroom or occupational setting, this was enough to constitute belief and knowledge. The East, by contrast, has always recognized that there is a difference between the acknowledgment of the truth value of a particular statement and/or the wrote knowledge of it's existence and the psychological impact that came from truly embracing such a position down to the roots of one's thinking.
To give a concrete example: if I were to agree with the philosophical system put forth by David Hume, then I would also be accepting the notion that there is no way of making a valid inference concerning the truth of the statement “seven seconds from now the world will explode.”, even one of probability. However, Hume's disciples would never dream of making an effort towards the development of a consciousness that truly engages with the world under the assumption that, likely as not, it could be gone a moment from now. Were they to encounter a man who was deeply agitated for this very reason, they would almost certainly regard him as insane. We can see Hume’s aversion to adopting a state of consciousness that reflects his philosophical positions in this passage from his Enquiry:
I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, environed with the deepest darkness, and utterly deprived of the use of every member and faculty.
Most fortunately it happens, that since Reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, Nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends. And when, after three or four hours' amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.
This can be contrasted against the writings of Nāgārjuna, perhaps the most important figure in Buddhist philosophy save Gautama himself. The central issue of his Mūlamadhyamakakārikā concerns the concept of svabhāva, which, while possessing some similarities to the notions of substance found in Aristotle’s writings, i.e. the essential nature of a thing (i.e. the i.e. of a thing), it differs in a very significant way: thinkers in the Madhyamaka tradition regard the idea of a fixed essence as not only illusory, but also as an innate construction of human consciousness that must be overcome. The rational arguments for it’s nonexistence are put forth as a means to aid the mind in breaking from of it's faulty patterns of thinking, not simply to force it to recognize the truth value of a particular assertion. To quote Jan Westerhoff’s summation in “Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka”:
Even though I argue that understanding svabhāva as substance occupies the most important place in Nāgārjuna’s arguments, one would be ill advised to regard it simply as some variant of the concept of substance found in the Western philosophical tradition. This is because svabhāva has an important additional cognitive component which is completely absent from the concept of substance as it is usually conceived. The notion of svabhāva is regarded as a conceptual superimposition, as something automatically projected onto a world of objects that actually lack it [in other words, when staring out across your room, your mind, without any intervention of conscious thought, will project the idea “dresser” on a chance and constantly fluctuating arrangement of atoms that in fact has no permanent “dresser-essence” which can be taken as an essential characteristic of dressers. Rather, there is only a convenient but fundamentally inaccurate association between similar things that allows for easier navigation of the world]. Unlike the notion of substance, svabhāva is not just a theoretical concept of ontology but rather a cognitive default, an addition that the mind unwittingly makes when trying to make sense of the world. This cognitive understanding of svabhāva makes clear why Madhyamaka [Nagarjuna’s school of Buddhist philosophy] metaphysics (unlike metaphysics in the Western tradition) is not a purely theoretical enterprise but something that also has to be put into practice. If svabhāva is an automatic mistaken suiperimposition, we cannot just get rid of it by going through arguments attempting to show that svabhāva does not exist. We will also have to train ourselves out of the automatic habit of projecting svabhāva onto a world that lacks it.
Within Buddhist philosophy the recognition of a set of truths is merely a precursor to the extensive regimen of meditation and self discipline needed to effect a true change in understanding. In other words, the ultimate goal is the modification of consciousness, which makes it much more in line with what I have called experiential psychology than either philosophy or religion as they are usually understood in the west.
The question that naturally arises is whether these disciplines can truly affect the changes they seek to induce, given that the past century has seen research psychology unquestionably surpassing the Western branch of it’s experiential cousin in efficacy. In today's world, no unbiased observer would recommend that an individual in need of cognitive assistance seek out a Freudian analyst over a behaviorist, so why should the Eastern schools be any different?
As it happens, the very tools used by experimental psychology have, in recent decades, produced a massive body of evidence showing unequivocal benefits to the Eastern practice of meditation, with hundreds of studies indicating both substantial changes to the brain structure of long term meditation practitioners as well as noticeable improvements to certain brain functions in the course of even a few weeks of practice. I will provide a reasonable sampling of these studies alongside, to the extent of my ability, an accurate but layman friendly summation of their results, as an accompaniment to this essay for any who wish to verify these claims.
My imagined interlocutor may now be bringing up the argument that, in the same way the medicinal benefits of a particular plant, once verified by our rigorous testing procedures, will enter into the body of Western medicine, so too can meditation practice, stripped of it’s mystical and esoteric framework, be safely incorporated into a fully secular health regimen. However, this idea neglects that there are divides between the approaches of modern science and Buddhist psychotherapy that are at the moment unbridgeable. To believe that our command of the science of human thought has reached such a state of advancement that it can move as a mechanized division through spear wielding villages of other intellectual traditions is a hubris worthy of Greek tragedy. Our current understanding of neuroscience and modern psychology is nowhere near capable of fully subsuming all that is encompassed in the Eastern ways of liberation. To clarify this limitation I believe a few more examples would be appropriate.
A central tenet of every branch of Buddhism is the concept of no-self, no-ego, or “no persistent identity”. While different traditions use different words, I believe the Theravāda term anattā, owing to its precision and clarity, is most useful for my current purpose. To give the most basic outline of this position, it asserts that everything we describe as a “self”, or with the terms “I”, “me”, or “mine”, is, in actuality just a fleeting aggregation of a handful of elements such as sense perception, volition, and awareness, each of which are in a constant state of flux. However, like svabhāva in the Madhyamaka tradition, this is not a concept that is designed to be simply intellectual accepted. Rather, Theravāda meditation practice seeks to induce massive alterations to the way the human consciousness experiences and understands itself*, that, alongside similar changes to the perception of impermanence and suffering, lead to the state of consciousness the Theravāda Buddhists call Nibbāna.
Now, Western science can indeed engage with these concepts in a number of meaningful ways. For example we can compare Buddhist claims of there being no single component of our self-identity that remains fixed to our modern understanding of the constant state of change and growth that our brains are in. We can examine and produce research that shows how the systems of meditation designed to halt the ego-identity bring about changes to the physical brain structure. However, what we cannot do is accurately map the full extent of the cognitive change that occurs as the sense of self is abandoned. In other words, if two people to show up in a lab, one who had wholly broken from what Theravāda Buddhist's call the fetters of identity view and conceit (sakkāya diṭṭhi and mano) and one who had not, we would have no means of stating, prior to any assessement of the two individuals, “these traits within the brain structure will be present with the person who has come to a state of anattā, and will not exist in the person who has not.”
But wait, you may be saying. Just because the Buddhist tradition has proven that it can induce some cognitive change does not mean that every claim that it makes should automatically be accepted as infallible. Can we truly know that the state of anattā exists? What about the fact that there is clearly some cognitive benefit to the kind of fundamentalist Christianity that denies evolution, man-made climate change, and whole swathes of our scientific achievement. Would I support everyone abandoning our technological advancements for the kind of biblical literalism endorsed by Calvin? While I will delve into the question of what circumstances it is and isn’t appropriate to accept the cognitive boons of a tradition over it’s obvious drawbacks in the coming paragraphs, for now it is worth noting that there is a significant difference between these traditions and that of Buddhism: the claims to heightened states of consciousness made by the Buddhists can be empirically verified by observing the difference in outward behavior between those who claimed to have approached or reached them and those who have not. This is best exemplified in the personage of Thích Quảng Đức.
In 1963, as an act of protest against the government of Ngô Đình Diệm’s Catholic government, the Mahāyāna Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức set himself ablaze in the streets of Saigon. This act is not just significant as a striking visual protest, though as far as acts of protest go few can equal it. It is also visceral proof of the efficacy Buddhism's core objective, which, as the Cula-Malunkyovada Sutta’s parable of the poisoned arrow indicates, is not any specific doctrinal position but the elimination of suffering. This does not mean the elimination of pain, and the distinction between the two is explained in great detail in the Sallatha Sutta, which contains Buddhism’s other famous arrow parable. Simply put, the Buddha asserted that by following the rigid and demanding disciplinary regimen of mediation and self control that he espoused, a person could reach a state of consciousness whereby, while still subject to the negative sensations that go hand in hand with existence, be they physical pain or emotions like greed and envy, one could experience these sensations without the deep rooted mechanisms of aversion and attraction that typically define our relationship to stimuli.
Now, I’d imagine everyone reading this has seen the famous picture of Thích Quảng Đức’s self immolation, but not nearly as many have seen the recording. If you have the stomach for it, the video can be found on YouTube, and, should you choose to watch it, you will be presented with powerful evidence for the Tathāgata’s claim that the suffering most people believe to be inextricably bound with physical pain is in fact something that can be overcome.
As it so happens, I have a deep personal acquaintance with Western medicine’s greatest achievement in the suppression of the suffering associated with physical pain: the opioid family of painkillers. I have seen many people descend to that liminal point between life and death where blue spiderwebs reach out from the lips and consciousness comes in brief bursts that quickly evaporate back into oblivion, and I can assure you that, so long as the person in question was, like Thích Quảng Đức, alert and aware of their surroundings, no matter how much morphine/heroin/oxycodone/etc was put into their system, were they doused in gasoline and set ablaze, the result would be a frenzy of agonized ululations and panicked flailing. Yet Thích Quảng Đức was able to hold his posture in a perfect lotus position: back straight, head upright, eyes fixed ahead of him. I do not believe that you will find a single medical professional who would claim that such a reaction is possible solely through the use of modern medicine. At best, one could sever all of the nerves that communicate pain to the brain, but as I said above, what we are seeking is an example of heightened resistance to suffering, not a lack of physical pain, which merely serves as a readily available metric that, unlike despair, hatred, etc, can be visually confirmed without the aid of instruments.
So, at least as far as Buddhism goes, we have a discipline of self-inducing cognitive change from within whose efficacy, at least as far as many schools of meditation go, has been proven by the tools of modern science. Yet these traditions employ metaphysical speculation that has either been disproved by our current understanding of the world, or else stretch the limits of a skeptical observer's credulity. What are we to do with this apparent contradiction?
The answer that many will suggest is exactly what has been occurring within the field of psychology over the past decade or so, a large scale secularization of those elements of Buddhist psychotherapy that have benefits that can be charted by our available instruments alongside the discarding of all that cannot. This approach, however, lifts science’s role from an investigative tool into a dogmatic vehicle in it’s own right. As I pointed out above, we do not have any means at our disposal to verify the link between the vast majority of the psychological changes induced by Buddhism, particularly the high level states like the jhānas or satori, and the corresponding physical changes within the brain. While there have been a number of indicators pointing to substantial differences between the minds of laymen and advanced practitioners of the Dharma, nobody of any scientific repute would claim that we are even close to being able to conclusively say “An extended period of practice in this Buddhist tradition produces these changes within the brain and these changes alone.” To use a metaphor from the Buddhist tradition, our current research into the matter is as grains of sand as compared with the teeming banks of the Ganges.
Until a wholly secularized program of practice can reliably produce minds as resilient as Thích Quảng Đức's or as compassionate, attentive, and free-floating-amidst-the-world's-turmoil as His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, we must regard the corpus of research into Buddhist liberation practice as merely indicators of their efficacy and not viable regimens in and of themselves. If, a few decades down the line, this changes, and we start seeing people emerge from the delightfully named William James Hall at Harvard with an equanimity that rivals the monastics, then a revaluation would be completely appropriate.
I suspect that many people will find such a suggestion unsatisfactory. There are no doubt those who will note that the path of the jhānas culminates in a deep link with something called a formless realm, and conclude that, since such a realm cannot be observed, the entire path is somehow faulty. However, this assumes that, like the Western scientist, the Theravāda monk’s objective was an understanding of the outside world. In fact, his goal from the start had been the inducement of inward change. The idea of a realm outside the reach of matter was not, as it has been for post-Nicene Christianity, the result of an attempt to come to an understanding of the external world, but a means of mastering the world within. For confirmation of this distinction in Buddhist doctrine, I again refer the reader to the Cula-Malunkyovada Sutta. The simple but perhaps frustrating reality is that the concepts one needs to accept in order to pursue the paths of yet-unequaled cognitive change and those that are needed to come to an accurate understanding of the world around us do not always line up with one another.
Seen thus, the idea of a formless realm is not a relic that can be easily discarded, nor can the pursuit of the state of mind known as the jhānas is stripped down for parts, as it is the product of a longstanding and deeply rigorous process of psychological experimentation focused towards a method of practice that leads the practitioner to a superior states of consciousness. The meditations on the formless realm are inextricably linked with the states of liberation that come from them, and the only true way to rid ourselves of their necessity is not to disprove their correspondence to the external world, but to discover a mechanism more effective at inducing the changes readily apparent in advanced practitioners of Theravāda Buddhism.
If then, there appear to be two separate worlds of thought, one that focuses on the world without and the correspondence to replicable experiments as the metric by which a given statement’s value is assessed while the other looks inward to the cognitive changes that a particular position or practice can induce, is there any way of bridging the two worlds? Are we stuck making a choice, as so many Westerners have, between being hard-thinking men and women of science who objectively look at the facts of the matter or inward searching mystics bent on breaking loose from the pesky constraints of reality? I believe the answer to be no, and I will spend the remainder of this essay exploring my attempt to reach a synthesis between the two.
In many ways, I believe the situation that we now find ourselves in bears much in common with the struggles faced by Prince Gautama after he abandoned the household life and entered the forest. According to the accounts of his life as they have been passed down to us, he gave up the hedonistic excess of his fathers palace with the intent of seeking liberation, only to discover in the forest mystics a harsh brand of asceticism that gave the outward impression of spiritual attainment but in fact did little to advance him towards his goal of a state of consciousness completely free from suffering. Thus, as he meditated under the Bodhi tree, he formulated a middle path that struck a balance between the mindless pursuit of pleasure on the one hand and the rigid rejection of the body on the other, calling this course the “Middle Path”.
I believe that any Westerner who earnestly seeks a goal comparable to Gautama’s (though likely less far-reaching) finds themselves in a similar dilemma. On the one hand they are faced with hundreds of systems of spirituality that have become so enamored with Watt's smoke screen of perceived mystique, esotericism, and novelty that they have taken to harvesting the twigs and tree bark while leaving the heartwood of mental liberation intact. People who then try to construct homes from this mess of chips and branches and are shocked when the rest of the world mocks their shoddy hovels. On the other hand we are presented with a system of thought that, despite it's outward claims to value evidence above all else, refuses to acknowledge the unfortunate reality that sometimes the rigid outlook of a purely mechanistic, Newtonian universe is not always the best means of inducing improvements mental health. Thus I propose what I call “the middle path of experiential psychology”. To explicate that path, in homage to the Lord of the Shakya clan, I present the reader with four axioms that I believe will offer an intermediary between the two extremes:
1) At the present moment, and for the foreseeable future, an approach to the human mind grounded entirely in neurology and experimental psychology cannot illuminate the more nuanced layers of human cognition.
To give a concrete example of what I mean, I would suggest that the reader turn towards their bookshelf, pick a particular book, and rest one’s eyes on it while paying attention to what transpires in their mind.
What you experience will likely be a subtle effect rather than something earth shattering, but careful attention should produce a certain awareness of what is transpiring within your mind. Assuming one has read the book in question, you will likely, though not necessarily, experience a vague recollection of what you underwent as you did so. This will probably be couched in simple sensations: a basic feeling of positive or negative, the faintest fringe of what insight, excitement, or boredom it offered, or perhaps a muted recollection of a single particularly striking section. If the book has not been read, what will arise is likely a concatenation of whatever factors led to its purchase alongside a host of sui generum: things like its reputation, the half-formed understanding of it’s basic plot, or even mundane things like the sibilance of the author’s name.
Now all this in and of itself is the product of an enormously complex chemical reaction within the brain. One so labyrinthine that, even if neuroscience continues advancing at its current rate, we would likely be unable to fully comprehend in the span of centuries. But there is far more going on than just the psychological associations of a single book. Consider how, even when focused on that one item, the books immediately to either side of it also reach out into the mind to a certain extent, presenting an even more muted variant of all that was described above, and so on in descending potency for everything present in the immediate visual field (save certain objects that may stand out, such as something new or out of place, which will naturally receive a greater share of attention).
Now let us suppose that there is a human being sitting in a laboratory on the other end of the planet, where a team of neuroscientists have developed a mechanism that gives them complete control over all facets of his brain that, at the present moment, are understood. Variables like the quantity of Dopamine antagonists currently bound to the receptors, hippocampal theta activity, and neuroplasticity. Do you suppose that, given perfect control over all this, the neurologists could induce that man, who had never seen your bookshelf, the exact cognitive experience you underwent when you looked upon it? Clearly not.
What could a neuroscientist do to a person hooked up to such a machine? Certainly there would be a great number of options at her disposal: through the manipulation of epinephrine and testosterone she could make you suddenly angry, while similar manipulations of oxytocin and serotonin could produce empathy and fellow-feeling. In terms of your perceptions, she could no doubt induce the kind of extreme distortions that something like lysergic acid brings about. However, could she suddenly shift the color or shape of a single object in your field of vision while leaving the rest intact? Could she induce within you, at the sight of some random stranger, the association with the precise memory of a kind and tender act by your mother towards your childhood self? More importantly, even with this total control, could she manufacture a state of consciousness that, to the extent possible in a brain evolutionarily wired for strife and conflict, was able to navigate the world free from the poisons of anxiety, despair, misery, torment, terror, hatred, dread, and so on?
Of course she could not. At best she could give a vague approximation of the most basic sensual components that attach themselves to human thinking (the nuanced state of aversion or attraction that one experienced), but as to the sweeping web of minor associations that is totally unique to each of us, such a reproduction would be impossible. Thus we must admit first and foremost the limitations faced by neuroscience and experimental psychology if we are to understand the benefits that can be obtained from alternate approaches.
2) The objectives of experiential and experimental psychology are fundamentally different.
I wish to be absolutely clear that I am not, as Descartes, asserting any kind of separate substance or entity, say a spirit or soul, that remains elusive to the grasp of experimental studies. What I am saying is that, per the first axiom, the gulf between what we experience in our consciousness and what we have come to understand about the world beyond it (including of the instruments that are responsible for producing our consciousness as seen from MRI scans and journal studies) are so divided that at not time in the immediate future can we expect anything to come along that will bridge them.
Experimental science, at it's core operates under the principle that the rigorous, controlled analysis of the outward behavior of things can produce deeper insights into their nature, while experiential psychology seeks to, in the best of cases, use what it's practitioners have empirically verified of their own subjective experience to devise a path of action that leads others to changes in their consciousness, often with little concern for well this course lines up with the world beyond individual thought.
Each of these disciplines has advantages and disadvantages, but to present things in the most general way possible, I would say that the greatest boon of Western science is the way that it's advancements stack upon itself, so that, unlike a Buddhist neophyte, a person who is entering university or going to a doctor's office does not have to start from the same position that Newton, Lavoisier, or Lister did, but can, with substantially less effort, reap the same understanding that his predecessors struggled to attain. This heightened understanding can then be transmitted even to people who have no knowledge whatsoever of the discipline in question, such as when a complex course of cancer medication is provided to a person with no medical background.
Conversely, experiential psychology's great boon relates to the inverse of this. The reality is that there are many things about your mind that no amount of effort by another human being can fix in you, and the same systems that allowed for such marvelous advances in medicine are woefully inadequate at dealing with the subjective element.
To give an example of how experiential psychology can produce modes of practice that are capable of a very different set of results than the Western approach, we can again turn to Theravada Buddhism, where there are a large number of comparatively minor meditation practices that have been crafted to meet individual circumstances, as compared to other Buddhist sects. Most of these obscure meditation techniques are designed to a specific problem hindering the mental development of a student. To Western eyes, likely the strangest of these practices is charnel ground meditation, which is designed to aid those with an aggrandized view of their own body's beauty. The student in question will enter a meditative state where the subject is a freshly deceased corpse, preferably an attractive one (in ancient India, people who could not afford burial were left out to the elements in fields known as charnel grounds). The practitioner would spend a week closely observing the process of decay that this once beautiful body undergoes while repeating to himself the words “I am not immune to death. This too will happen to my body.”
Now for obvious reasons, this is not a field of meditation that has received any scientific attention, but for the purposes of this example, let us say that it only achieves the desired effect of a greater perception of impermanence in the 1% of the population that possesses the greatest perception of their own beauty. Let us further ignore all the problems I brought up in the first axiom by assuming that we know an increased perception of impermanence produces discernible increases in gray matter concentrations within the left hippocampus.
If all of the above were true, and we were to set up an experiment with a null hypothesis of no hippocampal change, an alternative hypothesis that charnel ground meditation will produce observable increases in gray matter concentration in these regions, and a significance level of 0.05, then regardless of how many people we tested, we would never get results that broke the p value.
While the precise genesis of these more specialized meditation programs is not known to us, it seems likely that they were born from a relatively advanced Buddhist practitioner (whether it be the Tathāgata himself or one of his successors) noting certain flaws in individual students, and, upon dwelling on the manner in which he was able to overcome those same flaws within himself, he advised his student on a technique that he felt was best suited to rectifying the flaws in question.
If this approach was successful, the student in question would be more likely to rise in the monastic hierarchy, and, owing to his recognition of the success of the aforementioned meditation technique, he would be likely to pass the teaching down to his own students. Over time this process would naturally fine tune the systems of meditation, honing them down to the ones that were most likely to bring success at their stated goal.
We can see then, how easily a school of experiential psychology can deal with specific, individualized issues through the application of an advanced practitioner's intuition and years of empirical self-observation. Compare this to the manner in which experimental science would have to deal with a similar issue. Given that a study requires a large number of people, and cannot reliably be performed on a singular subject, in order for a course of treatment to come into existence, we would first need a reliable means of categorizing this condition. Since no journal of any repute would take the intuitive guesswork of a single authority as an acceptable means for establishing candidates for a study, we would need a firm methodology of classification, either through observable differences in the brains of people who suffer from the issue, or a DSM-like criteria of rigid symptoms that may also be present in people who do not suffer from the problem in question. From there the long process of formal research would advance, but if any of the difficulties I mentioned above manifested themselves, the entire endeavor would grind to a halt.
Another way to consider the difference between the two fields is to look at the schools of meditation that have received extensive scientific validation. While their efficacy has been established, the only reason this has occurred is because scientists thought to look towards the long-established practices of the East. Imagine if, instead, there had never been any experiential schools, or at the very least that none of them had developed the idea of meditation. Can you imagine a researcher who had the idea that maybe the regular practice of monitoring the breath or the thought stream in a dedicated, formal manner might lead to changes in brain structure? Even if she had a lucky hunch, can you imagine her actually getting funding for as large a study as the ones listed in my research section? If, by some miracle, she was able to do so, everything would hinge on this one study picking up on the changes we have already noted, wheras the fact that there was an established experiential tradition gave early researchers like Richard J. Davidson a greater tolerance threshold for a dearth of findings. Owing to the journal systems lack of representation for negative findings, we cannot be sure whether there were any earlier studies that were not as promising, but it is easy to imagine such a situation.
Additionally, these first studies compared advanced, long term practitioners to non-practitioners and short-term practitioners. Without the aid of people who had been practicing meditation for decades it would have been substantially harder to produce the kind of data that ultimately lead a number of neurologists to dedicate their careers to studying meditation, and it is highly unlikely that the research would have ever gotten off the ground.
None of this is an attempt to downplay the innumerable advances that modern science has made that have unquestionably improved the life of human beings across the world. These achievements are simply staggering. However, just because we have made tremendous advances in many facets of mental health in no way implies that our system is either infallible or totally superior to other methods. Yet, were I to suggest to an zealous follower of our Western way of life that a man living sometime around the fifth century B.C. was able to devise an approach to living that, in certain ways, remains unsurpassed to this day, then, as often as not, my interlocutor will immediately begin asking whether I “really believe that people living in ancient India who had contact with the Buddha's teachings were really better off with all their disease and lack of medicinal knowledge than we are today?”
This is, of course, a false dichotomy. There is no reason to believe that a disciple of the Buddha, or a third century Gnostic, or even a twentieth century Jungian, did not experience states of consciousness that were in some ways preferable to our own and in some ways were severely lacking, and to act as though you have to completely forsake one to accept the other without providing any reason for this view is fallacious thinking.
There is no doubt that a person living in ancient India, Alexandria, or China had to contend with a host of issues that medical science has obliterated. However, I would again point the reader to Thích Quảng Đức's triumphal conflagration. If a person can endure such obvious pain without any outwardly apparent symptom of suffering**, is there any reason to think they could not endure an amputation or the numerous unpleasant symptoms of an abolished diseases?
Yet I do not claim that because a small minority of Buddhist monks have achieved a freedom from suffering that far beyond a typical Westerner, that the Buddhadharma should be taken up to the neglect of our modern practices. In order to reach the state of consciousness he was in when he died, Thích Quảng Đức needed to undergo a simply brutal regiment of self discipline that took decades to reach fruition, and neither myself nor likely anyone reading this is likely willing to endure all that.
However, if instead of regarding each system as something that has to be either wholly taken up or wholly abandoned, we simply recognize that the devotees of each experience in their subjective consciousness boons that the followers of the other system do not, then we are prepared for the task of asking ourselves not “Which sect to I take up?”, but “What elements of each system of internal modification best meet the goals that I have set out to achieve?”
3) The fundamental differences between experiential and experimental psychology have produced divergent paths leading to differing ends. Owing to these differences, contradictions may arise, but each approach is maximized towards its chosen objectives.
In “The Enhancement of Visuospatial Processing Efficiency through Buddhist Deity Meditation”***, Maria Kozhevnikov and her colleagues explored the effects of a school of Tibetan meditation known as Deity Yoga, a tradition where one affixes concentration on one of the meditational deities believed to reside within the body. The monks were instructed to perform computerized mental-imagery tasks both before and after meditation and were compared against a control group practicing open monitoring (or open presence) meditation, which, alongside focused attention meditation, is the dominant division that modern meditation research has made between the many divergent schools.
To quote from the study:
The results indicate that all the groups performed at the same baseline level, but after meditation, Deity Yoga practitioners demonstrated a dramatic increase in performance on imagery tasks compared with the other groups. The results suggest that Deity meditation specifically trains one’s capacity to access heightened visuospatial processing resources, rather than generally improving visuospatial imagery abilities.
These results open up a fascinating field of questions. It is likely few, if any, of the people reading this believe that, were they to examine the southern channel branch of their heart, we would find “Ratnasambhava, in blissful union with Māmākī, yellow and radiant, holding a jewel and a bell”****, however, in order to successfully practice Deity meditation, a certain level of conviction in its premise is required (though how literal it has to be is a matter of some debate). Thus, were a person to desire the attainment of the states of consciousness induced by deity meditation*****, it is possible that belief in something that not only has no means of empirical or scientific verification, but also, in light of modern advancements, seems flat out ridiculous, would be required to take the shortest path to that state of mind.
This example is far from an isolated oddity. The Eastern traditions of experiential psychotherapy are rife with concepts that do not align modern science, but seem to be incredibly useful for advancing the practitioner to the desired mental states. An excellent example can be seen in the idea of Karma. Like the vast majority of modern Christianity's teachings, there is certainly a facet of this idea that exists to keep the less intellectually inclined members of society from wantonly destructive behavior, but it also has a more subtle component that, in a number of different manifestations, has found it's way into the program of nearly every Buddhist tradition. For many sects of the Mahāyāna, it is an indispensable tool for applying the doctrines of causality I touched on when discussing Nāgārjuna, so that the practitioner sees beyond the comparatively limited field of his own existence; in Theravāda Buddhism, it provides a counterweight against the concept of anattā to illustrate how, even though there is nothing permanent in the self, there is a continuous stream of cause and effect that binds us to what has come before; even Zen, that most irreverent branch of Buddhism, makes some use of the concept, as can be seen in Dogen's rather esoteric assertions on interdependent origination.
While I reiterate that the above is a crass oversimplification, and that there are other interpretations of the doctrine, such as the one put forth by Alan Watts, that presuppose a world composed entirely of, to use his own words, “the trip from the birthing ward to the crematorium”, but the vast majority of traditions assert some kind of supra-individual bond between beings, and while this idea flies in the face of scientific understanding, it's crucial position in Buddhist dharma provides strong evidence for the role it plays in attaining the states of consciousness Buddhists seek to reach.
Ultimately then, we have yet another unbridgeable gap, and, if we accept the notion that each approach can reach positions that the other cannot, e.g. that for a follower of the Buddha, a mastery of many Western scientific disciplines, and the command of the external world afforded by such an understanding, would require extensive modification to their ideology, while likewise a Westerner seeking to reach a state of consciousness that is detached from much of our human misery may well have to discard certain facets of what his society has achieved to maximize their results in that quest.
4) While conflicts may arise, it would be foolhardy for anyone seeking to pursue the path of experiential liberation to not make use of the many tools that Western science has provided him.
Stephan Hoeller once referred to America as a “spiritual supermarket” where one can go through the world's total extent religious ideology, picking and choosing to your taste. This idea perfectly illustrates both the advantages and dangers of the situation we find ourselves in.
Excepting a few special cases like ancient India and Alexandria, where a great many mystical traditions flourished at once, the typical person born into an earlier civilization had a very limited control over what courses of experiential practice were available to him. In some cases, such as most of Chinese history or the middle Islamic caliphates, there might be some dominant strain of practice (Daoism and Sufism) and a secondary system (Chan Buddhism and Kabbalism). In other cases, such as Protestant Europe or Soviet Russia, there would be not options available at all. However, in the vast majority of cases there would be a single mystical tradition that was heavily bound to one's own culture, and you, as a member of that culture, would be bound to it, regardless of it's efficacy. In our current age, however, there is nothing stopping us from objectively assessing all of these traditions and drawing from each it's greatest strengths while abandoning the coarse, malicious, or useless elements.
Nothing that is, save the cognitive deficiencies that block humanity from engaging the world with anything close to objectivity. In actuality, the end result of this spiritual freedom typically bears far more in common with Boris Yeltsin's baffled and awe-struck trip through a Texas supermarket than the savvy coupon clipping excursions we may imagine, as can be seen in the ridiculousness of the New Age movement and the hedonistic Frankensteins they build by haphazardly stitching together any idea that tickles their fancy. In order to resist our natural tendency to choose the sweet tasting poison of the New Age feelgoodery over the demanding practices of self discipline that bring about changes to human cognition, we must first accept that we are hampered by the cognitive biases before we can curb their effects.
How are we to know which of the paths available to us will lead to liberative states and which will bring us further into the great labyrinth of human misery? More often than not, the spiritual seeker ends up mired down in a morass of conflicting claims, and winds up so confused that they blindly follow the path of the first charismatic speaker who reaches out to them with unwavering devotion, and thus cults and extremist groups are born. There is, however, another option at our disposal. If we recognize that the ideological obedience these spiritual traditions seek to cultivate is nothing more than a mechanism for ensuring their continued spread, and instead seek to emulate the (often unrealized) detachment of modern science, where one holds to a complete willingness to abandon even the most sacred of convictions if there is sufficient evidence that they are not useful, then even if one's end goal is internal improvement and not external understanding, one can still be greatly served by the sciences and their methodology.
Thus we end up back at the question of how to best establish this synthesis, and whether we can reach a worldview that recognizes the limitations of our relatively infantile disciplines of neurology and research psychology while at the same time acknowledging the many problems that come with total alignment to religious traditions which lack perfect solutions to the problems of suffering or an exclusive concern for the creation of positive alterations to the state of human consciousness. In other words, we must ask if it is possible to walk into the supermarket and emerge with only those items that meet the nutritional needs of our body?
I certainly cannot make the claim to have reached the advanced states of psychological liberation that can be observed in many lifelong practitioners of the mystical traditions, never mind being able to do so without reliance on unnecessary and often counterproductive dogma. I cannot even claim a fraction of the equanimity possessed by a man like Thích Quảng Đức. Nevertheless, I wholeheartedly believe that if we are ever able to scrape off the layers of bullshit that have become encrusted on our spiritual traditions, it will be with the aid of the sciences.
For at least the immediate future, however, it will not be an absolute dependence. We must employ the sciences as navigational tools capable of leading us to an appropriate course, not as ab engine in itself. In four or five decades, it may be possible to only jump into spiritual practices that have been granted the seal of a respected psychologist, but that is not the case right now. If we lived in a time and place when neurologists could produce precise renderings of what the committed practice of each significant school of liberation does to the brain, and they possessed the understanding necessary to apply these patterns to the millions of variables that make one person's mind different from another's, so that they could, with a reasonable degree of certainty, provide a recommended course of practice that would minimize the suffering of a particular individual, then there would be no need to rely on our spiritual traditions, and I could close the essay as it stands.
Unfortunately, we are not there yet, and until we arrive there, those who aspire to bring about states of advanced mental change will have to make use of their empirical observations to find a course that works for them, faulty though they may be. I will give a personal example to help clarify how I think one might be able to go about doing this. However, I do so with the caveat that my relationship with Gnosticism is not presented as any kind of idealized course nor even as a path that should be replicated, but rather as a single very fallible human being's personal attempt to grapple with the issues I have laid out.
To begin with, it would probably help to give an overview of this fairly obscure tradition. Gnosticism may well have originated prior to Christianity's coming to prominence in the third century, from Jews that had grown wary of their God's supposed omnipotence in the wake of his failure to aid his chosen people during the First Jewish–Roman War, but it blossomed fullest in the aftermath of Jesus' rise in popularity among the gentiles, and all available documentation stems from its post-Christian period. While there are many different Gnostic sects, there are two major commonalities that link them into a single tradition. The first is the position that the God described by the Old Testament is a malicious (or at best ignorant and misguided) being, and the place we now find ourselves is a shoddily assembled replica of something far superior. The second, which is more important to my current purposes, is that Jesus of Nazareth was not the lone begotten son of the aforementioned God, but an enlightened figure offering us a means of breaking beyond his control via the inducement of gnosis, a Greek term for a variety of knowledge, often suddenly attained, that brings about changes in consciousness. This ideology, unlike that of the Christian sects that eventually won out and branched into the divisions we are familiar today, placed virtually no value in notions of faith and substantially less emphasis on a post-corporeal salvation. Instead, it focused on an immediate pathway to liberation from the oppression of this world, which could be attained in this very lifetime. As Jesus says in “The Gospel of Thomas”, Gnosticism’s most famous text:
If your leaders tell you ‘Look the kingdom is in heaven,’
Then the birds of heaven will precede you.
If they say to you, ‘It’s in the sea,’
Then the fish will precede you.
But the kingdom is inside you and it is outside you.
When you know yourselves, then you will be known,
And you will understand that you are children of the living father.
But if you do not know yourselves,
Then you dwell in poverty and are poverty.
Such teachings, naturally enough, were not just a threat against the emerging orthodoxy and their doctrines of a deferred kingdom, but an existential danger that needed to be met with every available weapon at their disposal, which ranged, depending on the Church’s corporeal power, from slanderous treatises to heresiological witch hunts. Yet the teachings were potent enough to survive as an undercurrent to traditional Christian thought up to the early middle ages, with Gnostic offshoots like the Manichaeans and Cathars sprouting up and attaining some degree of popularity before being violently repressed. However, by the late middle ages much had been done to squash out this movement, and so, until the discovery of the Nag Hammadi codices in Egypt in 1945, there had been precious little to go on save the accounts of it’s opposition.
Since that time, a small handful of disaffected traditional Christians, academics, and people interested in the expansion of consciousness have staged a very small revival of the sect, led in particular by the scholars Marvin Meyer and Elaine Pagels, and Bishop Stephan A. Hoeller of the Ecclesia Gnostica. However, owing to the fragmentary nature of even what has survived at Nag Hammadi, much guesswork has gone into restoring their practices, and, compared to other sects of experiential psychology, there is an exceedingly small number of Gnostic adherents.
Because of all this, there has quite naturally been no research into the psychological efficacy of Gnostic practices. Furthermore, even if there was a substantial interest in the tradition, it would be significantly harder to produce such research than it has been for meditation, for the latter lends itself quite well to the restraints of an MRI machine, while the Gnostic emphasis on deep, sudden insight and the psychological impact of ritual practices would is much harder to reproduce in laboratory conditions.
What was it then, that guided me personally to an interest in Gnosticism, if, as I admit, I can produce no evidence that their teachings can induce states if liberation? In short, the answer is personal empirical observation. The chance occurrences in my life happened to have arranged themselves in such a way that Gnosticism held a certain appeal, and from this appeal emerged detached interest, which, on the strength of a single extremely potent experience, transformed into a personal conviction in the value of this school or liberation.
To start at the start, I was fortunate enough, more or less by dumb luck, to have found myself pledging one of the very very few fraternities that has truly retained some sense of the strong ritualism that was, back in the nineteenth century, a defining characteristic of these organizations. It is beyond the scope of this essay to provide an overview of how truly transformative rituals effect a symbolic death of the practitioner before leading into a subsequent rebirth, or why this cannot be done without a sense that something is at stake (hence the efficacy of many tribal initiation rituals deemed by moderns to be pointlessly dangerous while the practices of the Catholic Church remain stagnant and moribund); nor does it serve my purpose to delve too long into how the practices of collegiate hazing can, if approached with the mindset of inducing a potent ritualistic effect rather than the aggrandizement of a few alcoholic's already-overblown egos, be yolked quite readily to these purposes. It suffices to say only that I had discovered the transformative authentic ritual can effect on the mind, and furthermore, that I did so in a wholly secular setting, yet still experienced something that was powerful enough to induce substantial changes in my consciousness. Though, if you are interested in learning more of the matter, I would recommend the writings of Eliade.
My old college fraternity, however, was not a Gnostic training ground, so this alone is not enough for me to stand by the tradition's efficacy. Especially since many other sects, particularly African and Native American traditions, place an equal emphasis on these transformative ritual. This experience did, however, lay a psychological groundwork within my mind. Thus, upon the chance discovery of an ancient, largely defeated religious tradition (by way Cormac McCarthy's western epic Blood Meridian, and from there The Teaching Company's Gnosticism course), I was primed me to accept the possibility that there might be something of value within it.
Now, in the intervening years between college, and today, things went, to put it mildly, downhill. Prior to February 2017 I had spent five years in active heroin addiction alternating between sober houses, living out of my car, my old bedroom in my parent's house, and occasionally even the woods. I had begun teaching myself meditation while still self-identifying as a nihilist because I had discovered that I could use the practice to better control my mind during extreme bouts of withdrawal, thereby preventing myself from engaging in the kind of reckless, desperate, and ill-conceived criminal behavior so often seen among addicts, buying me the time and mental clarity to think up more clever ways of scamming money.
Regardless of how clever you are, eventually all heroin addicts who are not filthy rich find their way into the correctional system, and it was during such a visit that, as I lay detoxing cold turkey on my bunk, I underwent a powerful mystical experience that functioned as the axis on which I hoisted my life out from the mire it had descended into, and the experience manifested itself within the Gnostic framework.
I know that “manifested itself within the Gnostic framework” is unconscionably vague, but this essay is already far too long to delve into the intricacies of what happened at the Hartford Correctional Center, though if you are curious I treat the matter in detail in my essay “God in the Shitty Monitor Speaker”. The more important issue is the question of what can be made of such an experience. As I have stated ad nauseam, there are no shortage of mystical traditions that document experiences which bear much in common with what I underwent, so why is it that Gnosticism should be held in any special light?
The answer is that it should not. Owing to the great plethora of documented mystical experience across the major sects, it would be foolish for you to take a single piece of anecdotal evidence from a writer you have never met as grounds for making such an extreme decision as the adoption of a religious practice. Yet such evidence is one of the most significant metrics used by people who find their way into the branch of experiential psychology labeled by the West as religious. On the other hand, just because, at this particular point in history, there is no evidence one way or the other regarding Gnosticism’s psychological efficacy, this does not mean that I, a person who has empirically observed the transformative power of these experiences, should try to downplay what has occurred within my mind. Thus, someone interested in the process of inducing psychological change from within is faced with thousands of testimonies by people who have underwent mystical experience, and no means of gauging whether any particular claim is true, nor whether any particular system for inducing these states of consciousness is more capable than the others.
I believe that the sheer mass of these testimonies should push even the most incredulous reader to accept that schools of mysticism are capable of producing lasting psychological change, but that is about as far as this anecdotal evidence can take them. Thus, despite having undergone such a profound experience within the Gnostic framework, were a person to come to me asking what school of practice they themselves should take up, I would refer them to Buddhism, for there is indeed a large body of research that provides indisputable evidence that it's practices work towards their stated goals.
This research does not absolve one of the difficult responsibilities of choosing a sect that is right for one's own personal needs, for there would need to be a hundred times the research we now possess before we could start making claims that Vipassanā Meditation can universally outperform Zazen, or Deity Meditation is flatly superior to Samādhi. Nor does the current scientific literature imply that an aspiring practitioner of experiential psychology should exclusively focus on meditation, though such an approach is not necessarily wholly inadvisable either. Like it or not, the mystical traditions have always gone hand in hand with a deeply personal self-assessment, and one of the great historical functions of Gurus, Sheikhs, and sages has been in individually examining a student and offering personalized guidance, and in the age of the spiritual supermarket, this remains perhaps their great asset.
Each of us who wishes to take advantage of these ways of liberation must come to an honest understanding of our own needs and abilities, examine the demands and offerings of the wide range of experiential sects, and then, using the scientific research that is available to us that confirms or disproves the efficacy of these practices as a means of countering the all too human desire to go with what feels good in the moment or whoever makes the grandest promises, we must choose to the best of our abilities. If, twenty years from now, there is enough research confirming that a combination of Vedanta meditation and Native American initiation ceremonies can outperform Gnosticism in it's ability to bring about sudden mystical awareness, then it would be my duty as one who wishes to delve within my mind to discard their teachings. This is the middle path of experiential psychology.
* I am aware of the ridiculousness of using the word self to describe a state that is explicitly free of such conceptions, but, linguistic limitations being what they are, you will have to live with it. These limitations do not just apply to English, and both Theravāda and Mahāyāna scriptures (Such as the Śūrangama Sūtra) spend time dealing with the problem of using language that presumes a permanent, consistent self to describe a changing stream of thoughts and movements that happens to be bunched together under the word I for convenience.
** There is of course the question of how much the outward symptoms of suffering reflect the inward state, but, at the very least, there is substantial support for the idea that these visible manifestations are the best indicators of inward distress, especially from the animal rights movement, and even if you do not believe this, it is ludicrous to suggest that the staggering level of pain endured by Đức was something that could be entirely done by gritting one's teeth and powering through.
*** “The Enhancement of Visuospatial Processing Efficiency through Buddhist Deity Meditation”. Maria Kozhevnikov, Olga Louchakova, Zoran Josipovic, and Michael A. Motes. Psychological Science, 2009. http://nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/mkozhevnlab/wp-content/uploads/pdfs/Kozhevnikov_etal_meditation_2009.pdf
**** ”The Tibetan Book of the Dead”. Translated by Gyurme Dorje, Edited by Graham Coleman with Thupten Jinpa. Viking, 2005
***** Remember, the study in question focused on only one metric of the practice, so it is not beyond the realm of possibility that there are many more mental boons specific to Diety Meditation
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