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On Phenomenology and Meditation

Michael FoglemanMichael Fogleman, learner, writer, meditator
7 upvotes by Rick Stevens, Quora User, Peter Lynch, Telmo Calle Beltrán, Ch'en Yong-Kang, (more)
I am very happy that I have had a reason to read Heidegger's Being and Time, and that our discussion here has been very fruitful. When I agreed to read it at the same time as Kent and co., it was because I was hoping to keep studying philosophy after graduating from college—not just for its own sake, but also to try to work towards a decision about what I want to do with my life.

At the time, I was thinking in dualistic terms: I would either study philosophy, or I would practice meditation. Of course, I had been able to do both of these things at school, but I thought my life would have to emphasize one or the other. In my worst moments, I feared they were entirely incompatible. In Salinger's short story, Teddy, Teddy's interlocutor reveals that Teddy has told a professor to stop teaching. Teddy explains that the professor is very good at meditating, and that his teaching and learning prevents him from progressing at meditation. (Salinger, as the recent press has highlighted, wanted his readers to become familiar with Vedanta. It remains to be seen whether Teddy is right that Vedanta isn't just a theory [if he hadn't been cut off, presumably, he would have added that reincarnation is "as much a part of...the universe as science's laws of physics"].)

At any rate, for several months, my loose criteria for determining which "path" to take has been to do a bit of both every day, and to see what sticks. On the side of philosophy, this has included reading and blogging about Being and Time, and, more recently, reading two books which are at least partially about phenomenology: Don Ihde's Experimental Phenomenology and David Abram's The Spell of the Sensuous. Ihde's book is an experiential introduction to the terminology and practice of phenomenology by way of "multi-stable visual phenomena," more commonly known as optical illusions. Abram's book is subtitled "Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World"; it covers an astounding array of topics, including tribal shamanism in Southeast Asia (where I'll be later this year!) and Husserl and Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology.

On the meditation side, I have been practicing every day, and I recently attended a one-week meditation retreat at the Center for Mindful Learning in Burlington, VT. I was a guest at the Center, as several practitioners are attending the first six-month residential meditation program that is based around Shinzen Young's Basic Mindfulness System. Shinzen posted about the program last December.

At the retreat, I had a chance to learn about and practice the Basic Mindfulness System, and it has since become the basis of my home practice. Throughout the week, I learned a lot of practical details about what home practice should look like. This is excellent, but I also found one unexpected realization: meditation is related to phenomenology!

One of the three basic mindulness training strategies in Shinzen's system is "Noting." These techniques are not unique to his system, but they are cleverly and systematically integrated. Shinzen compares their relationship to a periodic table: in its simplest form, the rows are Feel, See, and Hear, and the columns are In, Out, and Rest. (You can add Flow and Gone.) "Hear In," for example, is mental chatter; "See Rest" is either internal (the black screen, or equivalent thereof, that you see when you close your eyes) or external (the glazed glance that happens when you aren't looking at anything in particular—usually experienced when gazing absentmindedly, except in this case, you are gazing mindfully).

Soryu Forall, the head teacher at the Center for Mindful Learning, was giving a talk about the "options" one has when doing any of the noting techniques. When he mentioned that all of the noting techniques have physical direction—say, left, right, up, down, etc.—this reminded me of Ihde's phenomenological discussion of the visual field, and, more generally, a technical term Ihde establishes: invariants. As he works through the various possibilities in the optical phenomena (Necker cubes and their cousins turn out to have more than two appearances!), certain unvarying, structural features of these diagrams emerge. The more you recognize the features, the more you can take advantage of them in looking at new phenomena. You start to know what to look for, and the phenomena vary more quickly.

Incidentally, while Ihde's book did indeed work to clarify a lot of phenomenological jargon and dogma, it also clarified one of Heidegger's claims: that "Only as phenomenology, is ontology possible." Viewed through a Kantian lens, this claim seems absurd: only by giving an account of the appearances, can we give an account of the noumena, the things-in-themselves, which we cannot access, even through reason, and much less through appearances! Of course, Heidegger is not talking through a Kantian lens. If I understand him correctly, after having read Ihde, Heidegger means that if we examine variations in related phenomena, we can see what doesn't change; what doesn't change are structural features, which prove to be the conditions for the possibility of the wide variety of phenomena. For example, the existentialia are unvarying features of human existence.

Ihde wrote his book to introduce a wider range of people to phenomenology. He reminds his reader that Husserl hoped "that all the sciences could and should be reconstructed among phenomenological lines." His final chapter suggests way that established disciplines—the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the arts—could be considered, and develop more fully, along phenomenological lines.

Traditionally, the West and the East have been divided dualistically. Roughly considered, the West is the land of reason, philosophy, Abrahamic religion, science, and technology; the East is a land of meditation and mysticism. My personal division between philosophy and meditation is one instance of this broader division.

However, there are many people alive now who hope that the West and the East could synthesize. In his Tao of Physics, Fritjof Capra quotes Werner Heisenberg:

It is probably true quite generally that in the history of human thinking the most fruitful developments frequently take place at those points where two different lines of thought meet. These lines may have their roots in quite different parts of human culture, in different times or different cultural environments or different religious traditions: hence if they actually meet, that is, if they are at least so much related to each other that a real interaction can take place, then one may hope that new and interesting developments may follow.

This hope takes many forms, but one broad genre notes similarities between meditation and science. One frequent characterization portrays the Buddha as a kind of proto-scientist, and meditation practice as a scientific inquiry into oneself and one's nature. Under this view, in both science and meditation, experience trumps dogma when it comes to understanding the nature of reality.

There are substantial reasons to hope that science and meditation, even if presently distinct, could learn from one another. Here is a picture of the Dalai Lama with a neuroscientist, Richie Davidson:


Scientists have made good, initial progress into discovering how meditation affects our physical, emotional, and mental health. Meditators hope that this will continue to spread knowledge about, and ultimately the practice of meditation. On the futurologist side of things, people like Shinzen Young hope that neuroscientists will find a way to replicate the effects of meditation in a more rapid, accessible manner.

Then again, scientists and meditators might be suspicious of facile comparisons or even equations between the two practices. An alternative metaphor for the Buddha, and his significance as a symbol of meditation, might assuage these fears, while complementing the "Buddha as proto-scientist" vision. Although he was long before and far away from people like Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, the Buddha was a kind of proto-phenomenologist. A meditation practice can serve as a kind of phenomenological workshop, where we can examine the variations and invariants in our experience. As Kent says (somewhere on Quora), Meditation might just be the best way to examine Reality.

Here is a picture of the Dalai Lama with a philosopher and phenomenologist, Evan Thompson:

There is an evident contrast between this photo and the Davidson picture. In the Davidson picture, there is an evident rapport between the two men. Now, Thompson and the Dalai Lama look comfortable, and are working together—they are probably friendly, and may even be friends—but there isn’t that same visual connection in this photograph. I don’t mention this to comment on the two men’s relationship as such, but rather to show the contrast between the photos metaphorically—neuroscience and meditation vs. phenomenology and meditation—and to show its deeper significance with respect to the relationship between the West and the East with respect to meditation. We have great hopes for the relationship between neuroscience and meditation—couldn’t some similarly great (albeit distinct) benefit come from phenomenologists taking up meditation, and meditators taking up philosophy and phenomenology?

Of course, Thompson's presence at the Mind and Life conference where both photos were taken suggests that some work has already been done on this connection. Evan Thompson, and his teacher, Francisco Varela, have done work on contemplative neurophenomenology. Kent's teacher, Alfonso Verdu, did his dissertation on this connection, and Kent's book, continues this vein. And, as David Loy tells us in his book, Nonduality (which, unfortunately, I have only been able to peek at), Heidegger is reported to have been reading Zen master D. T. Suzuki's books when he proclaimed to a friend that "If I understand this man correctly, this is what I have been trying to say in all my writings"—although Loy reports that Heidegger's later works are more interesting with respect to nonduality. (As an aside, does anyone know which books of D. T. Suzuki Heidegger would have been reading?)

For myself, this series of events leaves me with more optimism about the relation between the intellect and experience, and that my study of philosophy (including the works mentioned to / alluded to above) can and will complement my practice of meditation.
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Michael Fogleman
Michael Fogleman
learner, writer, meditator