How Psychology Misunderstood Mindfulness and What We Do Now

Part 2: Evolution, not Revolution

This is part 2; part 1 can be found here.

Part 1 describes the processes through which mindfulness has been converted from a religious to a scientifically validated practice. On this page, I outline the implications of treating religious and scientific knowledge as congruent. This ‘congruence’ is an ‘imaginary’, an illusion created where scientific communities abandon rational thinking in favour of other motivations. Once the imagined form of mindfulness is created, it can be absorbed into psychology. The evidence suggests that the psychological sciences may need to reevaluate their underlying theoretical frameworks and reconsider how non-scientific knowledge is treated, particularly concepts and techniques originating in religious traditions.

If science and religion, in general, have incompatible theoretical frameworks, how was Buddhist mindfulness ‘transformed’ into a Western medicalised practice? The reality is that a few scientists and clinicians simply claimed that religious meditation and psychology were complementary. They provided no evidence or scientific explanation to support this position. They also appeared to lack the knowledge and experience necessary to make reliable generalisations about religious thought and practice. By focusing on meditation methods, not the underlying cognitive processes, psychologists could not evaluate the innate value of the traditional approaches for health benefits. In this way, psychology appropriated and relocated meditation techniques they never understood.

Why is this important? Science can measure the physiological effects of meditation, such as how it affects heart rate and blood pressure. However, because of the uncertainty regarding the boundaries between belief and science, early meditation and mindfulness experiments rarely progressed beyond a preliminary stage. Further, some psychologists overreached themselves by claiming they understood the essence of Buddhist meditation. These errors were compounded because the wider scientific community accepted unevidenced claims about the congruence between belief and science. These problems mean that much of the £5bn invested in researching meditation and mindfulness added little meaningful scientific value. Secondly, the actual curative potential of traditional meditation has been ignored. Primarily because researchers focused on meditation methods rather than the underlying mental processes engaged with by traditional meditators.

Before 2000, many scientists believed that they ‘instinctively’ understood traditional meditation without needing any meaningful training or research. Perhaps being part of elite academic institutions allowed them to feel they had the right or ability to subordinate religious thought and practice to dualistic scientific understanding. In relocating mindfulness, they stripped it of its most important cognitive components. Still today, many Western forms of meditation lack mental processes such as compassion, intention, and other concepts central to traditional meditations. Even where scientists attempted to ‘evolve’ mindfulness into a more compassionate or focused practice, the meditation nearly always remained dualistic and, therefore, distant from its original form.

The fate of Western mindfulness, to have become a stripped-down dualistic version of a traditional practice, is not unusual. We have seen such approaches in relocating acupuncture, yoga and other traditional healing technologies. A subtle but observable pattern is documented in the History of Science of scientists reconfiguring nondual knowledge to sit within dualistic frameworks. As with mindfulness, this approach can lead to the original technique being misunderstood, mistranslated or distorted.

The problems evidenced in the ‘mindfulness revolution’ have complex causes, not least of which are decades of low-quality and often unreplicated research. However, the failure of scientists to recognise the presence of nondual thought and practice is also a significant concern. As a case study, mindfulness reveals a profound limitation in the psychological sciences and our understanding of the human mind. We experience life through a number of different mental states, including dual and nondual awareness. Science tends to privilege duality, which is adequate for most scientific disciplines but fails to fully explain human consciousness and experience. Duality became the default theoretical model for descriptions of human mental states, the ‘lingua franca’ of the psychological sciences. As such, non-dual concepts and practices are abstract to most psychologists and often considered superstitious or childlike. This worldview relies on evaluating nondual phenomena with dualistic instruments.

The presumption that dualistic approaches deliver ‘truth’ while nondual insights are irrelevant or inferior is possibly a continuation of the colonial mindset. Western ways of knowing are frequently assumed to be the ‘gold standard’ against which non-scientific thought and practice can be measured. There is little evidence that scientists thought Buddhist meditation methods were worth studying in their own right. Analysis indicates that the psychological sciences reduced Buddhist meditation to the terms they understood and could measure. In this way, the opportunity for scientists to identify different forms of consciousness, mental processes and health treatments in meditation was lost.

I’m sure many meditation scientists acted in good faith, but their inability to realise they were encountering different rather than inferior knowledge systems has been a costly mistake. This limitation was only possible because of a phenomenon called incommensurability. Incommensurability is the belief that one’s perspective of the world is an objective reality. The scientists first encountering Buddhist meditation may have been entirely unaware of nonduality. Presuming that their dualistic outsider view of Eastern religious practices was complete and informed. This is not simply an issue rooted in cultural misunderstandings; incommensurability likely limits encounters between science and Western spiritual practices. For example, the value of early esoteric Christian teachings was judged against the dualistic values of science and evaluated accordingly. Today, dualistic science is held to be the dominant knowledge system, and many alternative ways of understanding and experiencing the world have been subordinated without any systematic study or rational evaluation. There are almost no signs that the scientific community are aware of the potential value of non-scientific knowledge being lost.

This is part two of a six-part series. The Introduction is here.