Many years ago, I was invited to visit a psychology class to speak about Buddhist meditation. The class was taught by a senior professor, a respected scholar who had studied the mind for decades and had published many peer-reviewed articles in the leading journals in his field.

Toward the end of my presentation, I offered instructions for cultivating mindfulness, the core practice of Buddhist meditation. Sit upright on a cushion or in a chair. Become aware of the rhythms of your breathing. Silently accompany your inhalation with the word “in,” your exhalation with the word “out.” After a few minutes, direct your attention successively to your body, noting its sensations wherever they’re occurring; to your feelings, whether positive, negative, or neutral; to your state of mind, whether calm or agitated, patient or impatient, noting any changes; and last, to your thoughts, allowing them to arise, abide, and pass away. Be fully present for these physical and mental phenomena, bringing an interested, non-judgmental awareness to all of them. Practice this discipline for a week and see what you discover.

A few weeks later, I learned that the professor had been intrigued by my presentation and had chosen to try the practice himself. And what he found astounded him. As he sat in stillness, following his breathing, he discovered that his well-trained, well-stocked mind was a jumble of random phenomena: impressions, perceptions, memories, fantasies, future scenarios, and thoughts that popped up from who knows where. He experienced what in Buddhism is called “waterfall mind”: a stream—or torrent—of consciousness in which concepts, feelings, judgments, images, perceptions, and sundry other mental phenomena were tumbling forward. His inner life, in short, was less orderly and far more unruly than he had imagined.

“How could this have happened?” I asked myself at the time. How could a learned professor know so much about the mind and so little about his own inner life? How could a scholar who understood, in depth, what Sigmund Freud called the psychopathology of everyday life, what Karl Jung called the collective unconscious, and what Karen Horney called the real and idealized self, have remained so innocent of his own inner experience?

Thirty years on, as I revisit those questions, I suspect the answer is that the professor approached the object of his study from the outside, as scientists do. He had been trained in an objective, third-person view of the mind. He had learned to identify and catalog psychological disorders and to analyze their causes. He had accumulated a store of knowledge about the conscious and unconscious workings of the brain and their profound impact on attitudes and behaviors. But what had been left out of his training was the subjective, first-person view: how to “turn the light inward,” as Zen master Eihei Dogen advised, and to experience first-hand the ways in which our bodies, feelings, and states of mind affect our thoughts, speech, conduct, and general outlook.

Without question, the objective, third-person perspective of Western psychology has yielded deep insights into the human psyche. For those suffering from anxiety, depression, PTSD, and other afflictions, knowledge gleaned from empirical observation, longitudinal studies, and laboratory experiments has provided a solid foundation for treatment and relief. But, as shown by pioneering studies conducted at MIT, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and elsewhere, in which the brain waves of seasoned meditative practitioners have been monitored by neuroscientists equipped with state-of-the-art technology, Western neuroscientists and Eastern meditative practitioners have much to learn from each other.

In his book The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality (Harmony, 2005), Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama, puts it this way:

 In the emerging science of consciousness and the investigation of the mind . . . Buddhism and cognitive science take different approaches. Cognitive science addresses this study primarily on the basis of neurobiological structures and the biochemical functions of the brain, while Buddhist investigation of consciousness operates primarily from what could be called a first-person perspective. A dialogue between the two could open up a new way of investigating consciousness. . . . When rigorous third-person investigation is combined with rigorous first-person investigation, we can hope to have a more comprehensive method of studying consciousness.

What the Dalai Lama is envisioning is, in part, a bridging of the yawning gap between two cultures, two ways of seeing, two very different modes of inquiry. But he is also envisaging—and with the support of the Mind and Life Institute, which he helped to originate in 1987, has done much to promote—an active partnership between Western scientists and Eastern contemplatives, who may be sharply divided by language, training, and cultural backgrounds but are united in the service  of a common purpose: to probe the unsolved mystery of human consciousness and thereby alleviate conditioned suffering.

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Image: Brainbow Hippocampus in Blue and Gold. Greg Dunn Neuro Art. http://www.gregadunn.com.

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