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 Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
