#263 Physician & Patient - "Heal Thyself!" - Contemplative Science

     “In the case of contemplative traditions, the vector of inquiry and investigation up to now has been primarily inward directed, probing the domain of the mind. Yet until recently, interior experience was dismissed in some academic circles as merely ‘subjective,’ as opposed to ‘objective.’ Now it is getting a second look as an essential and valid phenomenological dimension of human experience and knowing. This more balanced view, reconfigured as first-person experience, is thanks in large measure to Francisco Valera. Since nothing in science to date actually explains the nature of our interior experience, it seems prudent to at least entertain the possibility that a systemic investigation of inner experience from the first-person perspective has its own valid parameters as an epistemology, and has the potential (especially coupled with third-person methodologies) to contribute profoundly to a balanced and collaborative investigation of what we call the mind and human experience, including the dilemmas of suffering, greed, aggression, delusion, and ignorance, the tyranny and dangers inherent in Socrates’s ‘unexamined life’ – the mind that, contrary to the appellation Homo sapiens sapiens, does not know itself. This is the very much alive and relevant arena of the contemplative traditions, what might be called their ‘laboratory domain.’
     Of course, it is a heuristic conceit and a gross generalization to speak of science as outer directed and the meditative traditions as inner directed. Many fields within science are concerned with studying the nature of mental phenomena, and contemplative wisdom does not make a distinction between outer and inner, recognizing that they are different aspects of a deeper, non-dual wholeness, and that the ultimate realization of any introspective process manifests in how one lives one’s life. Nevertheless, there has been at least the appearance of a predominantly outer-directed mind-set and mode of investigation on the part of science and an inward investigation on the part of the meditative traditions. The Mind and Life Dialogues are contributing to the examination and breaking down of such categories and a cross-fertilization of ways of knowing and viable research endeavors at the interfaces of these larger trends.”
        Kabat-Zinn J, Davidson RJ eds. The Mind’s Own Physician. A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama on the Healing Power of Meditation. New Harbinger Publications Inc, Oakland, California, 2011.

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