From: "Jan Maslow" (jmaslow@jps.net)
To: scienceandspirit@sriaurobindocenter-la.com
Subject: Re: science and yoga
Date: Wed, 17 Aug 2005 21:08:32 -0400

Dear Post Aumers:

In January, 1990, when I moved from the East Village in New York City
(there were several thousand people who lived within a few blocks of my
apartment) to Carrollton, Georgia (rural South, population 7,000, 20
miles from the Alabama border) I figured my life was going to change. I
had spent 20 yeas as a professional musician in NY, and now I was
starting graduate study in psychology. 22 years earlier, Dr. Jim
Thomas, a professor at West Georgia, met with Abe Maslow up at Brandeis
University. He told them the psych department at this little college in
Georgia (where Newt Gingrich taught history, by the way), was tired of
teaching behaviorism, and wanted someone to help bring a more
humanistic orientation to the classes. Maslow recommended his student
Mike Aarons, who at the time was finishing up a dissertation at the
Sorbonne, working under Paul Ricoeur, a hermeneutic/existentialist
philosopher.

Actually, Mike had finished his formal studies in
Paris and at the time Jim Thomas was meeting with Maslow, Mike was
driving a taxi in his home town of Detroit. Needless to say, this
Jewish native of Michigan had never been below the Mason Dixon line.
For several years after he took over the West Georgia psych department,
rumors of satanic rituals and other heresies flitted through
Carrollton, as the natives didn't quite know what to do with these
psych students and professors who at the time were living on a commune,
'studying" together till all hours of the night.

Mike had
recruited some really brilliant professors, particularly a few from
Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, which for years has been the center
of phenomenological psychology. When I got there in 1990, Chris
Aanstoos and Bob Masek, phenomenological and existential psychologists
respectively, were still teaching their Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and
Van den Berg flavored brand of psychology. I studied Ricouer's "Freud
and Philosophy" with Mike my first semester, didn't take to Heidegger
at all (too clever!), kind of felt a kinship with Merleau-Ponty (his
writing reminded me of the music of Debussy) and was quite taken with
Van den Berg for awhile (a Dutch existential psychiatrist who wrote
about what now would be called the evolution of consciousness).

What
excited me the most about what I was learning at West Georgia was the
possibility of learning a different kind of research. Let me see if I
can describe this briefly:

Almost all scientific research is
considered "quantitative". To put it as simply as possible, it means
that whatever observations are made - whether it's the chemical make up
of a rock or the personality of a native of Niger, somewhere in the
course of the experiment you have to operationalize your observations -
that is, turn them into numbers. So in my dissertation experiment, the
pain levels of the subjects had to be expressed as numbers, their
levels of cognitive flexibility, the persistence of pain schemas - etc
etc - all ended up being expressed as numbers. Well, on the one hand,
the astonishing power of science - particularly physics - lies in this
mathematical formalism. The problem is that you lose a tremendous
amount of 'reality" when you reduce everything to numbers. It's like
electronic sampling of sounds - you might plot out 512 points on a
sound wave to create digital sound but you lose the infinite continuum
of analogue sound this way. Similarly, the number "8" indicating a
certain level of pain on a scale of 10 is something you can control and
manipulate but it leaves out just about everything about the actual
pain experience. (Rich - take note - "control and manipulate" - this
relates to your main concern about the positive and negative side of
current scientific methodology).

Well, the phenomenological
psychologists have been busy the last 30 or so years coming up with a
completely different research methodology, one which respects the
battle-cry of phenomenological philosopher Edmund Husserl: "back to the
things themselves!" - that is, back to experience.

Only, it
didn't quite turn out that way. I remember Chris Aanstoo's class on the
phenomenology of dreams. The first class it all sounded wonderful - we
were going to suspend our preconceptions about dream experience and
learn how to listen deeply to someone's dreams. What did this mean in
practice? We took careful notes of the dream, then the person was
quietly removed and a text was put in place. We analyzed the text,
compared texts of various different dreams, looked for "essential units
of experience", and somehow came up with a "theory" that helped us
understand the essential nature of the dream experience. I was never
quite sure how this differed from what a good literary critic might do,
except to say, without the pseudo-scientific rhetoric about "units of
experience", the literary critic got to use much more of her deeply
felt aesthetic intuition and probably ended up understanding far more
about dreams than the phenomenological psychologists.

My second
year in the program, when it was time to do a thesis, I still held out
some hope. Alone among the professors, Jim Burrell had developed what
he called the "experiential method", in which the investigator (or
"researcher") was allowed - in fact required - to participate. This
made sense to me - it made sense that in order to investigate a
psychological phenomenon, the researcher has to look at his own
experience - as Sri Aurobindo would say, he has to have "direct
contact' with the experience.

So - in early 1991, I designed the
following phenomenological/experiential experiment. I wanted to explore
the experience of maintaining unbroken awareness from the waking state
to the dream state. I also had to develop a hypothesis - so I composed
some music, and suggested that people who learned to focus intently on
the music would have an easier time sustaining awareness.

I
found 12 volunteers - 10 continued through the entire 6 month period of
the experiment. The first phase of the experiment, lasting about 3
months, was simply to learn to induce lucid dreaming. I gathered an
array of exercises, from Stephen Laberge, Paul Tholey and from the
Tibetan Buddhist tradition. I participated in all the exercises, doing
everything that the other participants did. In the beginning, only 4 of
the 12 had had lucid dreams; by the end of three months, everyone had
had at least one, and I think 7 or 8 were having more than one a week.
We practiced early morning awakening, visualizing ourselves fully
conscious in a dream. We practiced Tholey's technique of questioning
the nature of one's state - walking around during the day asking, "Am I

awake or dreaming'? I remember John O'Sullivan, who put a label from an
apple on his shoe, which somehow reminded him every time he looked down
at it to ask the dream/waking question.

John was very skeptical
about the possibility of lucid dreaming. One night, about 11 PM, he
came into the hospital where I was working part time as a mental health
tech. He was very excited. He told me that morning he had sat down to
breakfast to have some coffee. He looked at the coffee cup and thought
to himself, "You know, I'd really rather have orange juice this
morning". And the coffee turned to juice, and he said, out loud, right
there, "I'm dreaming, I'm dreaming, I've got to tell Don', I'm having a
lucid dream".

The second three months, as people's capacity for
lucidity increased, and their level of concentration increased as well,
we started focusing on remaining aware into the dream state. The main
technique was observing calmly the hypnagogic imagery that emerges as
the waking mind relaxes into dreaming. Virtually everyone in the music
group had at least one experience of maintaining awareness; nobody in
the control group had the experience, so my thesis was supported.

The
simple fact of the music working was analyzed quantitatively - that is,
it was reported simply in terms of numbers. What about the qualitative
- experiential - part?

The thing that interested me the most was
the experience of maintaining awareness. And I learned many things, but
one thing I thought was most interesting. In my prior experience of
maintaining awareness, it had always been a very pleasant experience,
getting caught up in the semi-hallucinogenic imagery and watching it
suddenly turn into a full 3D dream world.

But a number of the
subjects found it to be quite terrifying. As I looked over their
journals and vivid descriptions of experience, I saw that what was
happening was their focus was mainly on the experience of the waking
state crumbling, deconstructing before their eyes. And there was much
more detail to it, but moving on - what does this say about
phenomenological research?

I don't think there was anything I
learned in the experiment that I couldn't have learned from having a
good long conversation with one other individual who was exploring this
waking-dream transition. And I certainly didn't uncover any patterns,
laws, etc which could be used for future research. The whole
methodology by this time seemed to me to be rather tenuous at best,
superficial at worst. The quantitative "control and manipulate" methods
were extremely powerful but also extremely limited, cutting out vast
realms of reality, leaving only a cold fragment to be controlled and
manipulated. The qualitative methods on the other hand were open to
that whole aspect of reality the other methods left out, but ended up
providing very little real insight.

During my last year at West
Georgia, we had the good fortune of having Kaisa Puhakka as a professor
at our school. Kaisa had been a student of Tibetan Buddhism for many
years. She had a masters degree in Buddhist philosophy, had co-taught
Vedantic philosophy with Arvind Sharma (a brilliant scholar of
Hinduism), had gone on to get a doctorate in experimental psychology
then a post-doc in clinical psych. Kaisa and I had a number of talks
about how Tibetan Buddhist meditation practice had many features which
would be essential component to a truly rigorous phenomenological
research program (something quite beyond what Francisco Varela was
proposing with his "neurophenomenology").

I still think
something along those lines is necessary to bring about a truly
integral methodology. In the next letter, I'll talk about some of the
specific elements I think are needed. And I'll try to address Rich's
main theme (as I understand it) regarding the direction of science -
will there be a gnostic science or will science end up more and more
serving the gods of technical progress, greed and lust for power? I'll
try to address this along the same lines I've been writing - in terms
of the actual practice of science. When is quantitative research valid,
and when does it degenerative into mere "scientism"? I want to
particularly focus on the radical work of Alan Wallace: he addresses
the dark side of scientism in his "The Taboo of Subjectivity", and the
possibility of what we IY'ers are calling a "Gnostic science" in his
samatha project (if you google "samatha project" you can find a couple
of brilliant articles by Wallace describing the training of
contemplatives in intensive meditation and concentration practices for
the specific purpose of doing a new kind of scientific research).

- Don