Doing yoga-based, consciousness-centred research — I

Matthijs Cornelissen
last revision: 05 May 2025

looking at science and yoga as complementary knowledge systems

When we think of the integrtaion of Inian and Western apparoaches to Psychology, we can think of two entirely different types of research: psychological research about yoga. and yoga-based research about psychology, or to say it even more succinctly, research about yoga and research in yoga.1 The first type of research, research about yoga, works within the limits of existing science, and distils from the Indian tradition only those theories and techniques that science can assess by its own well established research methods. Following this approach, one can look, for example, at the various schools and sub-cultures that together make up the Indian tradition as a source of practical techniques to produce positive psychological or physical change. One can then administer such techniques to groups or individuals and test the result with the well-established research procedures of mainstream psychology. Similarly, one can, on a slightly more theoretical level, try to extract from the Indian tradition theories that are explicitly or tacitly present within Indian texts and practices, reformulate them in a terminology that is understandable and meaningful to contemporary psychology, derive hypotheses from them, and test these again with existing research procedures, whether quantitative or qualitative (Sedlmeier, 2011). Either way, we treat the psychological knowledge-base that the Indian tradition has created as a source of ideas, and then use the well-established research methods of mainstream psychology to confirm or reject those ideas. As a whole, this first approach is from a scientific standpoint non-problematic, and virtually all major research projects on meditation and yoga belong to this type (Murphy, 1997, Sedlmeier, 2022). There can be no doubt that such studies have their use and value, and given how much knowledge the Indian tradition has collected in the domain of psychology, there is still a large amount of work of this type to be done.

But if we limit ourselves to this type of research, we'll miss out on what may well be one of the most valuable contributions the Indian civilisation can make to science: the technology of consciousness and the sophisticated methods and instruments of inquiry that the Indian Knowledge Sytems have developed for the study of ourselves and the entire inner domain. And humanity desperately needs the "advanced psychology" the Indian knowledge systems have developed to help us, both individually and collectively, to become wise enough to handle the immense powers modern technology has put at our disposal.

As we saw in one of the introductory chapters, a spiral of quickly cumulative progress took off when science started to use the findings of science to improve the instruments it used for its observations and its interventions. The hard sciences have continued to do this with great success in the physical domain, and, interestingly, so the Indian knowledge systems did exactly the same in the higher ranges of spiritual emancipation. As for psychology, in certain areas of applied psychology it is part of standard practice for psychologists to work on themselves before they can responsibly work with others. It is widely recognisesd for example that people who want to do counselling, need to undergo an intensive period of counselling themselves, before they can be allowed to practice counselling others. But self-development is not part of psychological research, and there is no standardised way to feed the knowledge trainee-councellers gain during their training back into the system. Since mainstream psychology research depends on (physical) evidence and statistics, psychology researchers learn how to study literature, setup experiments and do the stats, but there is no need for them to learn first-hand how to know or change their own nature.

medicine but no feeder disciplines: lay observation; [qual special circumstances] good ideas from practicioners outside; no attempyts at professionalsiing introspection: the quality fo sellf-knowledge is nto a variable: in IP it is: the we'll get backto this but first ... 9b, 9c And as long as psychology doesn't use high quality inner, psychological knowledge and know-how as a method to improve the quality of psychological observation and thinking, the spiral of quickly cumulative discovery [p. 17] we see in the hard sciences will not take place.

It seems then very much worthwhile to explore the second option, and see whether consciousness-centred yoga-based methods of inquiry, yoga-based 'rigorous subjectivity', and 'yoga-enhanced' inner instruments of knowledge can not be used to help psychology to develop into a more powerful and effective science of the inner domain.

In the previous chapter, we discussed the basic processes yoga uses to make its knowledge of the inner domain more incisive, precise and reliable, and more specifically, how it uses and improves the human mind as a kind of 'inner instrument of knowledge' (antaḥkaraṇa) in a manner that is not that different from the way the physical sciences use and improve their physical instruments. In this chapter, we'll have a look at how the knowledge systems of yoga and psychology could collaborate to make use of such consciousness-centred and yoga-based research: how yoga-derived insights, techniques and inner gestures can be used to provide psychology with detailed and reliable knowledge on more subtle inner states, forces and processes than those it presently knows how to access. The idea of doing so is not new. In the very first issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies, for example, its editors argued that it should be possible to make use of the techniques developed in the various spiritual traditions to create more sophisticated forms of introspection.2 But, strange enough, this suggestion has hardly been followed up upon, not even in JCS itself. While there is a considerable amount of research in which yoga and meditation are used to provide some form of physical or psychological comfort or well-being, there is hardly any research in which they are used directly to provide psychological insight. This is remarkable because in the culture of origin, yoga and meditation are not taken up only for the sake of peace and happiness, but also, and often primarily, for the sake of knowledge.

So, in the present chapter we will look from a simple, pragmatic and operational perspective at the question how yoga and science can collaborate as complementary knowledge systems to help humanity to develop more precise and reliable knowledge in the inner domain. While they can look like each other's mirror images in terms of their basic understanding of reality, the pursuits of knowledge in yoga and the hard sciences don't differ much on a down-to-earth, pragmatic, procedural level: there are many similarities in the basic processes by which both systems safeguard the reliability and integrity of their different ways of acquiring knowledge, and the fundamental differences, which no doubt also exist, can actually be exploited to arrive at more comprehensive, integral understanding of reality.

 

Endnotes