Meditation – research as development

Abstract

Abstract. The article begins by registering the fact that meditation is extremely popular nowadays and surveying the current state of meditation research. The radical differences between normal and meditative consciousness call forth the question as to whether modern science and meditative practice must – in terms of their basic assumptions and empirical justification - be viewed as ultimately incompatible, or whether there is some theoretical framework in which they can be seen as structurally related. By way of an initial approach to this question, the extent to which the experience of meditation can be systematically described from a qualitative, cross-disciplinary perspective is explored. Whereas it is perfectly possible – within the span of the dynamic between the “profound meditation state” and the consciously employed “mental technique” - to give detailed descriptions of meditation processes in their own terms, there are still basic methodological refinements to be made in relation to the question posed above. Conceptual considerations on the communicability and structure of meditative experience open up wider possibilities for investigating it from a more intrinsic perspective. Here this is attempted on the basis of the structural phenomenology of cognition. The conceptual integration of two typical mental techniques (focused attention and open monitoring) brings into play a third descriptive dimension: that of the semantics of meditative experience in relation to the established framework within which the functioning of the human organism is currently understood. On this basis it becomes possible to derive meditative from normal consciousness. In conclusion, some light is thrown upon the role of meditation in professional skills development, using the teacher in the classroom situation as an example.

Keywords: rational/trans-rational approaches to validation, dimensions of meditative experience, deictic communication, pragmatism/semantics, fundamental structure of meditative experience, “anthropological” interpretation, fine-structure of teaching processes