The statements above clearly show a lack of knowledge and experience with meditative practices. It also shows intolerance. As I proposed before, scientists can discover the origins and nature of consciousness and the Universe using field research. You have no evidence that my approach would not work because you lack the experience that I have with meditation. Your proposal is for science to continue in its failed reductionistic and materialistic approach. Centuries have passed and reducto-materialism has still left mankind with the same important questions that we've been asking since our beginning.TSGracchus wrote:So you think that flipping coins and checking the I Ching, or laying out Tarot cards, or astrology will substitute for science?
Meditation can calm the mind. But it has not produced scientific discovery.
But, by all means, ignore or discard the findings of "Western science" and consult the lint in your navel for answers.
""insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result."
Let us address some of your claims and show why science needs to adopt meditation as a means to knowledge.
Why should scientist use meditation?
You stated that meditation "only calms the mind" but you're incorrect. Science shows that meditation leads to higher states of consciousness, changes in brain structure, and to emotional well-being. Science needs to be able to deal with consciousness directly instead of relying on "correlates" of consciousness. Meditation just so happens to be an effective first-person approach to deal with consciousness directly. No one has had more first-person experience with all levels of consciousness than the Eastern religionists - some 2,500 years worth of experience. It's only reasonable that scientists collaborate with Buddhists, Hindus, etc. Many are starting to do just that so that should tell you something!!
How does meditation lead to knowledge?
The simple answer is that meditation leads to a state and experience of pure consciousness. In that state, you can explore and experience how consciousness in its most pure form works which of course opens the door to direct "knowledge".
------------Locke and Hume, believed that we could gain knowledge about the mind through a careful examination of inner experience. If it is true that meditation makes
available certain kinds of inner experience that would not otherwise be possible, then those forms of experience might possibly result in new knowledge.
At the same time, many contemporary researchers in psychology may object to relying on a method of introspection to learn about the mind. In the past, philosophers and armchair psychologists, relying on introspection, have arrived at widely varying conclusions; they have also missed basic facts about how minds work that can be established by simple experiments. Psychologists might argue that introspection simply allows people to project their hypotheses and presuppositions onto their experience and does not help us learn new truths about how the mind works. Only careful experiments, carried out with scienti�c rigor and from a third-person point of view, can reveal such truths.
Buddhists could reply by drawing a distinction between trained and untrained introspection. In most people, they could argue, the faculty of attention is weak and undeveloped, and, as a result, attempts at serious introspection will typically be overwhelmed by various forms of distraction. But those who, through meditation practice, reduce the intensity and frequency of distractions and gradually develop their capacity for attention are eventually able to look at mental phenomena and see them as they actually are.
Article quotations taken from Dr. Charles Goodman article, Buddhist Meditation Theory and Practice. http://www.academia.edu/36937894/Buddhi ... actice.pdf
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