Category: epistemology

Why Everything You Know Might Be Wrong: Duality, Nonduality and Integration

An Introduction: Part 1 is here

Perhaps the biggest question in science is: What is the nature of human consciousness? This blog post doesn’t seek to resolve this issue but rather discusses known limitations in our models of consciousness and highlights the threats and opportunities of not knowing what consciousness is. Using the Scientific History of Mindfulness as a case study, this short article (and the subsequent series of postings) will illuminate a number of weaknesses in how the psychological sciences make sense of the world. In particular, the failure of psychology to recognise common mental processes essential to consciousness, such as nonduality. Not understanding how the mind works with duality/nonduality has been an extremely costly mistake in psychological research and practice. Limitations in current models of consciousness signpost potential problems in much of what we know about ourselves and those around us.

Put simply, consciousness is how you make sense of everything: awareness of yourself and the world around you. It’s what lets you think, feel, remember, and perceive. It includes your thoughts, emotions, sensations, and experiences. Each of us holds a different way of seeing the world. Think of consciousness as a self-generated prism through which we engage with everything. We share some perspectives with others around us, but each of us essentially has a unique view. If our view of the world is fundamentally distorted, it is because the prism through which we see the world is distorted. To many people, distortions can appear as truth, as objective reality, even when they are subjective. As individuals are also responsible for creating knowledge systems, such as psychology or physics, distortions in consciousness can bleed into ‘objective’ and ‘rational’ thinking.

The belief in science
The unseen relationship between science and belief

In common with all academic disciplines, psychology is based on a series of beliefs about the world that are relative and partial; we call these beliefs ontology. As such, psychology can only offer ‘truths’ based on the rules of psychology rather than actual lived experience (although the two can often coincide). Knowledge that might fall outside empirical psychology, such as beliefs, emotional reasoning, subconscious mental processes or direct human experience, is often inaccessible to experimental psychology. Therefore, if we take the rules of science as ‘truth’, anything that does not conform to scientific norms has to be ignored, devalued or translated into scientific terms.

The idea that experimental processes are limited or flawed would present major problems for industrialised societies. So perhaps it’s not surprising that many traditional knowledge systems and religious concepts are disregarded by Western science, not because they don’t work but because science cannot evaluate them. Techniques from Traditional Chinese Medicine, such as acupuncture, are sometimes adopted by Western clinicians because they are effective. However, the technology is given low status because science cannot understand their underlying theoretical frameworks. In this way, vast swathes of human knowledge and techniques are dismissed because science just doesn’t have the tools to evaluate them.

What happens when two knowledge systems collide?

When you look at the scientific history of mindfulness from a transdisciplinary perspective, several problematic issues are visible in the way scientists treat religious knowledge in general and Buddhist knowledge in particular. By transdisciplinary, I am referring to an academic approach whereby we use all relevant knowledge to better understand what’s actually going on around us. Sometimes, a contrast in how different knowledge systems treat a behaviour, such as meditation, reveals the strengths and weaknesses of the respective systems. In the West, there is a convention that Buddhism is a belief system and, by contrast, the psychological sciences are a form of objective knowledge. Psychology is based on a belief (ontology), as is Buddhism. Science tests its hypotheses through a rational evaluation process, as does Buddhism. However, psychology is a dualistic system that creates dichotomies and artificial divisions that facilitate simplistic ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ conclusions, even to complex questions. Buddhist ontology, particularly in the Mahayana and Vajrayana traditions, is nondual, meaning it resists simple dichotomisation in favour of more inclusive understandings of mind and matter. The use of mindfulness in Buddhism is rooted in a sense of cause and effect. Ironically, in psychology, mindfulness experiments often rely on correlations rather than causality to explain the benefits of the practice.

The Buddhist concepts underpinning mindfulness are typically ignored or rejected by scientists, in part because psychological sciences are embedded in dualistic ways of knowing, whereas Buddhism tends to the nondual. A major problem for psychology is that human consciousness engages with dual and nondual awareness as well as the integration of both. A challenge in investigating consciousness is that we have to use consciousness to evaluate itself. If the ontologies used as the basis for the psychological sciences are nondual the product of experiments can only produce nondual insights, offering only partial understanding into the human condition. Scientists and clinicians began using religious knowledge and methods in the 1950s because of the healing potential of nondual insights. Over time, Western forms of meditation and mindfulness have removed these nondual elements because they cannot be seen or evaluated by empirical investigation. Science has failed to recognise that something profound (although abstract to dualistic investigation) is likely present in religious forms of meditation.

Experimental methods need to be fit for purpose

A crisis in Western mindfulness research identified a lack of scientific progress, despite 50 years of experiments costing billions of dollars. Yet almost no credible research has been undertaken to try to understand why the project has been relatively unsuccessful. However, because of the status of psychology in Western materialist societies, the transformed (nondual) nature of mindfulness is accepted as ‘truth’; even though the ontology of the psychological sciences reflects neither Buddhist knowledge nor the human condition. Without accepting limitations in the theoretical framework of psychology, we can expect the problems seen in the mindfulness project to be repeated. There is also little hope that dualistic approaches will ever be able to make sense of a human consciousness, which is, in part, nondual.

This is introduction to a series of posts which discuss, using mindfulness as a case study, the role of dual and nondual awareness in understanding the world around us. For Part 1 in the series click here.

The crisis in mindfulness research: have we been asking the wrong questions?

A review of mindfulness research in New Scientist highlighted long standing scientific problems; is it time for a new approach?

The crisis in mindfulness research: have we been asking the wrong questions?

How does science understand meditation
xvideTheo.com

Writing in New Scientist on June 5th Jo Marchant summarised the state of mindfulness research and practice. The investigation added some much-needed balance to the overview of medicalised mindfulness. The article confirmed the enduring presence of uncertainties in theoretical understandings and systemic methodological weaknesses. A discussion of the potentially harmful effects of meditation was especially welcome; most experienced meditation teachers know that practices can lead to beneficial or detrimental outcomes in practitioners.

However, the absence of greater historical insights left us with a snapshot rather than an overview of the current state of our scientific knowledge. For example, scientists have been criticising meditation experiments since the 1970s, but the weaknesses identified over 40 years ago can still be seen in contemporary research. The scientific study of meditation can be traced back at least 80 years; the first decades were relatively free of scientific uncertainty. By identifying the beginning of hesitancy in meditation research, we can better understand the current crisis in the science of mindfulness. Since 1975, an estimated 7,000 scientific papers investigating meditation have been published. The vast majority of this work has focussed on mindfulness, so should we be worried that we still don’t have a reliable scientific definition of it?

The evidence suggests that we (meditation scientists) have been trying to establish mindfulness’s psychological and clinical potential ahead of a stable understanding of what it is. We know from several strategic reviews that multiple ways of understanding mindfulness exist in the scientific literature. While each mindfulness experiment can offer us some new insights, findings are rarely confirmed through replication? When taking the long view of meditation research, medicalised mindfulness manifests within visible patterns of scientific progress. In its origins, medicalised meditation reflects a confluence between positivist and belief based knowledge systems. The current theoretical uncertainty in mindfulness research can be traced back to this convergence. If mindfulness has been developed as a bridge between spiritual and scientific understandings, do we have adequate ways of making sense of meditation as a human experience? The lack of stable definitions and replication suggests there are still significant gaps in our knowledge. The most pressing unanswered questions remain the most important, what is medicalised mindfulness, and how can we understand it?

Three limitations in our understanding of meditation and how to fix them

Scientists are challenging claims being made for the benefits of mindfulness. A project to fill in the gaps in our scientific knowledge is an urgent priority.

Limitations in the understanding of meditation and mindfulness
Lack of understanding is limiting the study of meditation

Scientists studying the benefits of mindfulness meditation are still coming to terms with  a systematic review entitled ‘Mind the hype: A critical evaluation and prescriptive agenda for research on mindfulness and meditation.‘1 The criticisms made in that study pose questions for the use of meditation in contemporary secular settings. This crisis of confidence is not linked to a lack of clinical potential; there are preliminary indications of meditation’s curative effects. The problems rest in the widespread absence of replicated evidence for many of the claims made for meditation technologies. The overview now emerging from the scientific study of meditation is the lack of a ‘big picture’. Psychological science has studied the impact of meditation extensively over the last seventy years, but further progress appears limited by three intractable problems.

The long term sustainability of clinical meditation is threatened by an inability to reflect its successes and failures in equal measure. While it is not uncommon to find pilot studies with small numbers of participants hyped in the media, established theoretical and methodological problems receive modest scholarly or scientific interest. This is not a minor nor recent problem; issues of scientific reliability have stalked meditation research since the middle decades of the twentieth century.

man sitting on rock in front of water fountain

Reviews of published meditation research frequently cite flaws in the methodologies used. For example, many studies find an effect; that when people meditate some measurable change takes place. However, this effect is often established in isolation without any control group. Or on many occasions, the control is a ‘waiting list’ of participants who receive no appropriate intervention or placebo, meaning all the experiment can show is that in one instance the meditation appeared to have a more substantial effect than nothing. As any neuroscientist or neuropsychologist can tell you, a repeated novel activity of almost any kind can lead to an effect, and if continued for long enough new brain function and structure will be observed.

But the failure to establish strong scientific evidence cannot be only put down to an absence of scientific introspection and methodological flaws. The lack of a coherent theoretical framework presents the biggest obstacle to meditation research. Put simply, despite thousands of published papers over recent decades; we still can’t quite settle on definitions of what secular meditations are and how they should work. Many meditation studies reference religious traditions alongside scientific papers with little explanation of how positivism and spirituality can share a common world view. Peer-reviewed studies which contain limitations continue to be cited in recent work, their influence extending well beyond experimental environments.

Scientists working in this field are likely to be familiar with these three areas of concern (lack of reflexivity, methodological and theoretical weaknesses). But elevating the standard of published research remains a challenge. The Van Dam et al. study makes several recommendations, which if adopted, could improve matters, but the critical challenges haven’t been addressed; we lack authoritative accounts of what meditation and mindfulness are. This overarching question is directly linked to the gaps in our knowledge of how meditation relocated to science, what processes were lost and gained. A more rigorous epistemological and ontological understanding of the science of meditation may be our best hope to deliver the stable conceptual foundations urgently needed in the contemplative sciences.

Notes

1 Van Dam, N. T., Van Vugt, M. K., Vago, D. R., Schmalzl, L., Saron, C. D., Olendzki, A., … & Fox, K. C. (2018). Mind the hype: A critical evaluation and prescriptive agenda for research on mindfulness and meditation. Perspectives on psychological science, 13(1), 36-61.