Tag: science

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 Scientific History of Mindfulness: Unveiling the Paradox

The findings of a new four-year investigation provide comprehensive insights into how mindfulness developed and its current status. Despite significant scientific concerns, the research illustrates how mindfulness was promoted as an influential health and well-being intervention. The least known but most controversial aspect of the ‘mindfulness revolution’ is the reconfiguring of spiritual practices as tools for social and economic control.

The latest in-depth research explains why scientists and clinicians are rethinking the idea that mindfulness is a universal mental health treatment.

The most comprehensive scientific review of the popular Western form of mindfulness meditation, medicalised mindfulness, has just been completed. The Scientific History of Mindfulness (SHoM) describes the creation of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) in the late 1970s and charts the development of hundreds of Mindfulness-Based Interventions (MBIs) in the following decades. MBSR was part of a movement that sought to capture the health benefits of spiritual practices. Uniquely, MBSR was presented as a health intervention that ‘bridged’ scientific and religious knowledge. In 2004, Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) was endorsed for clinical use in the UK, increasing public and scientific confidence in medicalised meditation. By 2010, mindfulness stakeholders declared that a ‘mindfulness revolution’, which would profoundly impact society, was taking place.

Politicians and health policy agents enthusiastically promoted the benefits of mindfulness, particularly in the UK. The hype also bled into social policy, where in 2014, mindfulness was presented as a tool for social control and improved economic performance. Under the concept of ‘mental capital,’ the rollout of mindfulness in UK schools was made a priority.

“The idea that mindfulness training could help to boost workplace productivity, even if employee working conditions were eroded requires much more research and discussion. Using mindfulness to pacify workers to benefit employers or the wider economy challenges the trope that medicalised mindfulness was Buddhist.”

Dr Stephen Gene Morris

By 2018, many meditation scientists were criticising the experimental findings on which mindfulness’s success had been built. Over the decades, reviews of meditation experiments have frequently highlighted limitations in mindfulness research. However, a tendency among some scientists and policymakers to ignore negative scientific evidence established misunderstandings about mindfulness and the benefits it could bring to practitioners and consumers.

“This SHoM goes some way to explaining why, despite over forty years of clinical and scientific activity, costing billions of pounds, we have little certainity about what mindfulness is and how it mediates health and wellbeing.”

Dr Stephen Gene Morris

The SHoM describes how reducing Buddhist meditation methods to Western psychological interventions created ontological conflicts. These conflicts helped sustain paradoxical positions where experimental studies were regarded as both reliable and unreliable. This permitted mindfulness stakeholders to pick and choose the ‘science’ supporting the use and deployment of MBIs. Mindfulness became widely accepted after 2000 despite its known weaknesses, which is a significant concern for scientific and clinical communities and their funders. As a case study, the history of mindfulness offers evidence of substantial problems in how knowledge is created and disseminated in the psychological sciences. Further, the review highlights how overstating scientific findings based on preliminary research can lead to problems in other domains, such as health care and social policy.

A clear understanding of the mindfulness paradox and research crisis offers new perspectives on the Western understanding of meditation. There is a pressing need to reevaluate and rationalise mindfulness research, a problem that SHoM addresses directly. This careful transdisciplinary investigation has also highlighted systemic issues in the areas where scientific and non-scientific knowledge intersect. In particular, scientists and scholars have often explained religious thought and practice empirically, subordinating their actual nature and obscuring their curative potential.

“As a case study, medicalised mindfulness has evidenced a sometimes corrosive relationship between religion and science that reduces knowledge to a very narrow scientific perspective. Recent scholarship supports the need for a major review of the scientific treatment of non-scientific knowledge.

Dr Stephen Gene Morris

One obvious conclusion from the SHoM is that a failure to establish reliable scientific foundations has been very costly. Thousands of peer-reviewed papers repeated the same experimental limitations, and unreliable ‘scientific’ narratives about religion and meditation have entered popular discourses. Today, a significant effort by the contemplative science community is needed to restore the reputation of meditation research and establish meaningful boundaries between scientific and religious knowledge systems.

(If you’re looking to understand why science has failed to understand religion, click here. The Legacy of Mindfulness: Has Science Failed to Understand Buddhist Meditation?)

Notes:

1 The Scientific History of Mindfulness: 1938 to 2020

Morris, Stephen Gene (2024) The Scientific History of Mindfulness: 1938 to 2020. University of Kent,. (doi:10.22024/UniKent/01.02.106240) (KAR id:106240). https://kar.kent.ac.uk/106240/

2. Dr Stephen Gene Morris is a Consultant in Applied Neuropsychology and has spent over 25 years understanding knowledge at the intersections of science and belief. In June 2024, he completed this PhD thesis, funded by a Scholarship from the University of Kent.

3. The SHoM will be officially launched on the 30th of September 2024. Press releases and summaries of findings will be distributed to relevant media outlets. To register for an electronic copy of the press pack, complete the contact form here with ‘Press Pack’. To contact Stephen directly on matters linked to