Towards greater value of the subjective
"It is worth considering that different understandings of mindfulness in
Western science vs. Buddhist psychology may reflect deep cultural differences
in the extent to which subjective experience is valued as a source of inquiry
within traditions. A surgeon in the US or Europe is not necessarily likely to
place great value upon the benefit to her surgical skill that may be gained
from being the subject of surgical procedures. Neither is she ordinarily
systematically trained toward greater sensitivity of her own immediate, inner
experience, nor that of her patients. Medical science has historically
emphasized intellectual knowledge and concrete experience as surgical
qualifications—not investigation of subjective inner life by the physician
during consultations or surgery. Behaviourist and other positivist movements in
psychology have similarly promoted the value of intellectual knowledge of
cognitive and behavioural states, and of the systematic techniques used to
alter them, often to the neglect of self-inquiry (Grossman 2010).
"An inclination to short-cut the self-experiential foundations of mindfulness
practice may, consequently, seem natural to many psychologists who may have
known little in the way of self-investigation in their studies. Exploration of
one’s own subjective experience even tends to play a minor role in the training
of many psychotherapists. Therefore, it may, in fact, be difficult for
psychologists—when first considering this unfamiliar way of approaching
experience—to fathom a type of understanding that does not exclusively or very
predominately rely upon the intellectual and conceptual (see Bush 2011). This
lack of experience is bound to have serious consequences for the understanding,
definition and transmission of mindfulness. Batchelor (1997) points out,
‘Experience cannot be accounted for by simply confining it to a conceptual
category. Its ultimate ambiguity is that it is simultaneously knowable and
unknowable. No matter how well we may know something, to witness its intrinsic
freedom impels the humble admission: I don’t really know it.’ In other words,
phenomenological understanding cannot solely rely upon intellectual knowledge
or upon popular contemporary scientific methods of assessment and
experimentation and the thinking behind them."
http://www.albany.edu/~me888931/Grossman%20&%20Van%20Dam%202011%20Contemporary%20Buddhism.pdf.
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