Doing yoga-based, consciousness-centred research — I

Matthijs Cornelissen
last revision: 04 January 2025

looking at science and yoga as complementary knowledge systems

This chapter may not be fully understandable
if one has not read the preceding chapter.

 

When we think of what yoga can contribute to scientific research, and especially to research in the field of 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 historically dead collection, and use the well-established research methods of mainstream psychology to confirm or reject existing knowledge. 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 there is one issue that remains. When we limit research on yoga and meditation to research about yoga, without wondering how its ancient and modern protagonists actually arrived at their knowledge, we miss out on the most valuable contribution they can make to science: their ability to study in an intellectually rigorous manner those aspects of life that are not primarily physical, that are not directly or fully available in the ordinary waking state, and that can be accessed much better by the specialised technology of consciousness and the sophisticated 'inner' methods and instruments of inquiry that yoga provides. In other words, we miss out on what biochemistry, physiology, pharmacology, and an enormous variety of high-tech physical methods, materials and instruments have contributed to the physical side of medical practice. And how much progres would modern medicine have made without them?

Because research about yoga doesn't use yoga to improve the methods and the instruments psychologists use for their research, it will not help psychology achieve a spiral of quickly cumulative progress. Or, to say it more generally, 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 we see in the hard sciences will not take place.

A spiral of quickly cumulative progress is only possible if the findings of a science are used to improve its observations and its interventions.2

It seems then very much worthwhile to explore the second option, and see whether yoga-based methods of inquiry, yoga-based 'rigorous subjectivity', and 'yoga-enhanced' inner instruments of knowledge can 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 '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.3 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, profound and many-sided forms of psychological knowledge and know-how.

 

Endnotes