WeMind

I ABC:s program All in the Mind sändes nyligen avsnittet Dr Mindfulness: Science and the Meditation Boom. I en diskussion ledd av Natasha Mitchell redogör tre tidigare vetenskapsmän från respekterade institutioner för sin syn på mindfulness och dess plats i vetenskapen. Medverkande är:

• Psykolog James Carmody som är Assistant Professor of Medicine vid the University of Massachusetts Medical School ochg nu har praktiserat meditation och yoga i över 30 år. Nu leder han kliniska tester för att undersöka mindfulness och dess hälsokonsekvenser.
• Dr Philippe Goldin från the Department of Psychology at Stanford University. I flera år bodde han i Indien och studerade buddistisk filosofi, psykologi och meditation innan han tog sin PhD i klinisk psykologi.
• Ajahn Brahm är Spiritual Director of the Buddhist Society of Western Australia. På 60-talet innan han blev munk förelästa han i teoretisk fysik vid Cambridge University.

Ett intressant utdrag ur programmet kring vetenskap och meditation:
Natasha Mitchell: The Dalai Lama has described meditation as a contemplative science, an introspective science, and you’re a scientist, but do you think of meditation as a science?

James Carmody: Oh I do very much. I would describe meditation as a contemplative science. When you look back to the Buddhist roots, the Buddha taught this as a contemplative science. It jumps right off the page. You’re noticing your experience, noticing the consequences of actions with a particular kind of intention — When I do things with this intention, what happens, and what happens to me, what happens to other people? When I do it with this other kind of intention, what happens? — of noticing the results of your actions, noticing the results of your thoughts. It’s incredibly empirical.

Natasha Mitchell: Noticing isn’t the same as measuring though, and measurement equals being empirical. And it’s also a deeply internal subjective experience; science, by definition, isn’t really about subjectivity, it’s about objectivity.

James Carmody: This is an interesting question. It’s a ball of wax. But to come back to what you’re saying of internal experience, you’re saying it’s not scientific, but we are measuring it against something. So if I’m suffering now and I’m not suffering after a month or two months or two years of training in this, in some way I’m using memory to come back to some sort of criterion, if you like, of what it was like before, and I’ve noticed it’s changed. So in fact there is a kind of a measurement. But that’s not going to cut it when you come to a randomised clinical trial, so we’ve got to be able to find some other way now. How can we take this idiosyncratic, internal empirical study and transmit it, first of all, be able to teach other people to do it? And we’re trying to now find some way in which we can turn this into a numerical process, if you like.

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