Buddhist meditation and psychology can learn from each other

My undergraduate major in college was psychology. I also started to practice daily meditation while in college. So for me, psychology and meditation always have been linked, though not always as closely as they are now.

I say this, because for thirty-five years my meditation had an otherworldly emphasis. After being initiated by an Indian guru, my goal was to meditate in a fashion that would enable my soul-consciousness to leave this worldly plane of existence behind and travel to higher regions of supernatural reality.

Yeah, right...

All that had very little to do with modern psychology. But for about twenty years, I've been meditating in a Buddhist'y fashion, though I don't consider myself a Buddhist. Following the breath. Mindfulness. Loving kindness. 

Those sorts of things are firmly within the realm of psychology. Which is why I printed out a 2002 talk by psychologist Eleanor Rosch, "What Buddhist Meditation has to Tell Psychology About the Mind." 
Download Buddhist meditation paper

I just came across the talk in a stack of magazines and other material that I hadn't looked at for a long time. Re-reading it this morning, I found interesting what Rosch had to say, even though it didn't really break any new ground for me. I'll share some excerpts, along with my comment on each excerpt in italics.  

One of the best-kept secrets of the last several centuries may be that some of what we classify as religious experience can make a fundamental contribution to scientific psychology. One hundred years ago William James suggested this radical idea in his classic The Varieties of Religious Experience, yet today mainstream psychology is no closer to considering the idea than it was in 1902.

Surely one root of this recalcitrance is the way in which the categories and imagery of our society envisage an otherworldly religion and a naturalistic psychology which are on different planes of existence altogether and cannot communicate with one another.

I believe that the Eastern traditions now arriving on our shore, particularly Buddhist thought and meditation, can bridge this divide and can reveal a quite new understanding of what the human mind and its knowing capacity actually are.

Agreed, by and large. Genuine Buddhism isn't otherworldly, though many people overlay Buddhist teachings with a heavy dose of religious supernaturalism, such as, for example, making the Buddha into a sort of god rather than an earthly teacher.

We all know the image of a human that is common in present psychology and cognitive science: the mind is seen as something isolated inside the body, peering tentatively out at a piecemeal and initially incomprehensible world, trying so hard to find simple predictive relationships between events so that it can survive. It stores the results of its experience in memory to form a coherent but inherently indirect and abstract representation of the world and of itself.

Ideas, emotions, actions, and consciousness have evolved to fulfill the only originating value which is to survive and reproduce in an evolutionarily successful manner in a world of limited reward and much threat.

Such a portrait is not alien to the Eastern traditions. In Buddhism it is somewhat analogous to samsara, the wheel of existence to which sentient beings are bound by their habits; in Hinduism it might be depicted as lower states of consciousness; and in Taoism it might be portrayed, with a smile, as the activities of the monkey in us.

All three Eastern traditions agree that in this habitual state of mind, we are mistaken about everything important — about who and what we are, what is real, and how to act. But this is not the only possible mode of knowing the world. And here we come to the central topic of this talk. There is an alternative way of knowing. And that alternative is seen as our original, natural, fundamental state, what we are right now, not any particular or special experience.

For simplicity in this talk let us call our more limited habitual mode of knowing consciousness and the alternative more basic, comprehensive, and wiser form of knowing awareness.

Interesting. I've always considered consciousness and awareness to be very similar, if not identical. After all, how could we be aware of something without consciousness? But I'm open to the distinction Rosch is making, as discussed below, even though I don't really comprehend it.

Were awareness available only to a few skilled and practiced religious athletes, it would be of little use either for daily life or for science. But it is said to be widely available, in fact closer to us than our own eyes.

The trick is that consciousness and awareness are not actually two separate things — and this is where talking about such matters becomes elusive — because all experience is actually made out of awareness. This is analogous to Plotinus’ “what sees is not our reason, but something prior and superior to our reason.” And Rumi reminds us: “We seldom hear the inner music / But we’re all dancing to it nevertheless.”

This point might be clarified, hopefully, by a computer analogy. The consciousness mode of knowing the world can be likened to a particular computer program running on a more basic operating system. In daily life and in cognitive science we mistake the limited consciousness program for the whole system.

We keep trying to study how the system works, but all we can see is the functioning of the program in which we are confined. Every attempt to see beyond or get out of the program, either in science or in religious striving, is frustrated because to try to get out, we are only using the operations of the program itself.

Such a possibility ought to give scientists of the mind some pause because it implies that the very techniques, rules, hypotheses, assumptions, tests, and suspicions designed to make the study of the mind objective are themselves but products of operations of that same program. So how do you ever get out; where’s the exit key?

There are a number of methods common, in varying degrees, to the world religions, but the specialty of Buddhism is to find awareness in the everyday experiences of consciousness itself, including all the senses, by means of cultivating intense mindfulness and intimacy with ongoing experience. That is what makes Buddhist practice particularly valuable as a link to psychology.

Here's why I part company with Rosch somewhat. I don't find her computer analogy persuasive, nor do I find it compatible with my understanding of Buddhist meditation. I don't believe that Buddhism makes a distinction between thoughts and feelings, abstraction and concreteness, or any other division between states of the brain/mind. 

The idea that there's an "exit key" strikes me as an add-on to Buddhist philosophy, which teaches that emptiness is form and form is emptiness. The duality that Rosch speaks of here, where "the program" is distinct from some form of non-programmed awareness, seems at odds not only with modern neuroscience but with ancient Buddhism.

Anyway, in her talk Rosch then discusses "some ways in which the wisdom of awareness shows up in the functioning of our minds in everyday life." She says that "consciousness is really awareness in disguise," a statement that I don't understand.

I invite you to read her entire talk and decide for yourself whether what she says makes sense to you. I don't find anything truly objectionable in what Rosch says. I just have trouble with grasping what she's really getting at, aside from the rather obvious fact that Buddhism and psychology both study the workings of the human mind and have something to learn from each other.

Here's a paragraph from her "Interdependence" section that's an example of how Rosch uses words in a fairly elegant way, but I still find it difficult to fathom her basic point.

An understanding of interdependence has clinical significance. It can provide people who suffer from guilt, depression, or anxiety with a vision of themselves as part of an interdependent network in which they need neither blame themselves nor feel powerless. In fact it may be that it is only when people are able to see the way in which they are not responsible for events that they can find the deeper level at which it is possible to take responsibility beyond concept and (depending upon the terminology of one’s religious affiliation) repent, forgive, relax, or have power over the phenomenal world. 

Comments

[umami]

My interpretation:

With the understanding of interdependence the little ego in the big universe realizes 1) it's less at fault for its own suffering, which removes emotional weight, and 2) its actions ripple through all and everything, taking on greater significance. Little turns big, big turns little.