The problem of 'privileged access'

One of the arguments that is perhaps most often brought up against the possibility of rigorous subjectivity as a valid research option is the notion of 'privileged access'. The idea is that each human being can have only access to his or her own consciousness. In other words, when I do objective research on some aspect of the outside physical reality, others can check my work because my data reside in the shared physical universe, while when I do subjective research inside my own consciousness, my data are only accessible to my own isolated self. This may sound at first sight plausible enough, both as an assumption and as a definite and final condemnation of the whole enterprise of yoga-based research in the inner domain, but neither the conclusion, nor the assumption stands scrutiny. As we will see, 'privileged acces' is not as big an issue as it may seem at first sight, and that for three very different reasons.

The first reason is that the original assertion that consciousness is intrinsically private may not be as absolute as it may seem. In spite of the limited funds available for research in parapsychology, the scientific evidence for telepathy is probably more solid than for almost anything else in psychology. There is moreover an enormous mass of anecdotal data about ordinary people becoming aware at a distance of what their close friends or relations go through. Within the Indian tradition it is widely held that a guru who knows his own deeper self well, is in a better position to know what happens in the consciousness of his disciples than they are themselves, and many therapists would concur. This ability to know what goes on in someone else's mind is moreover considered a sensitivity that can be trained and is likely to develop spontaneously as and when one cleans up one's own consciousness.1

The second reason is that, the other way around, the outer reality may not be as fully independent and shared as it may look at first sight. Two people who have the same ‘standard’ quality eyesight can both look at the same tree from the same physical position or at the same time, but not both. And even if they could do both, they would still have their own perceptions of the tree. We assume that the tree exists independently of the two perceivers, while inner states and processes exist — like beauty — only ‘in the eye of the beholder", but is this true? Could it not be that the degree to which outer and inner realities are independently real and shared, differs much less than people with a modern ‘scientific’ education think? Would we have remotely the same idea about the relative reality of physical & emotional things if our eyes would not be sensitive to reflected light but to infrared radiation, or if we had no eyes at all but were capable of perfect empathy for the feelings of others? When two people share the same type of feeling, say gratitude, who is to tell whether gratitude is less or more independently real or shared than one particular type of tree? Could it not be that feelings, thoughts, images, attitudes, have an existence that is as 'independent' in the inner worlds as that of the physical things and processes in the outer world?

While these first two arguments may come across as somewhat philosophical and hypothetical, the third argument is purely practical and holds even if these first two are rejected. The third argument is that even if it were true that others cannot have access to what happens inside someone's consciousness, this would, by itself, not pose any serious problem for subjective research because science is not interested in what happens in one particular person's consciousness; what science is interested in are generic processes. The standard scientific procedure to corroborate someone's findings is to have someone else reproduce similar results by using similar instruments and processes in similar circumstances. So, if in psychology someone makes an assertion about certain processes that according to his subjective judgment have happened in his own consciousness, all that is required is that someone else can reproduce similar processes in his own consciousness. Whether the first and second person's consciousnesses are private or public does not come into the picture at all. There are many checks and counter checks in science but going back to someone else's raw data is not a major part of the routine. It is used only as last resort in case of serious doubts about research that can for some reason not be replicated, and it is possible only since computers keep permanent records of events. Till computers began to record instrumental results, all one could check were manually written laboratory notes, and those one can keep of inner as well as outer events. Whether what happens in our individual consciousness is private or not does not stand in the way of rigorous, scientific research.

Is pure consciousness possible?

Since we found that a state of ‘pure consciousness’ is crucial to study what happens in one's own mind without any personal bias or preference, the next question that then arises is whether such a state of pure consciousness is actually achievable. The very possibility of pure consciousness has been doubted on theoretical grounds by authors like Steven Katz (1978), who argue that all experience is socially mediated, and, somewhat unexpectedly, by Carl Jung who argues that all consciousness has to have an ego at its center. The arguments of Katz have been countered, I think effectively, by Robert K.C. Forman (1990, 1998), who shows on the one hand that the whole idea of the inner exercise is to empty the consciousness of all content, whether culturally mediated or not, and on the other that there is no good reason to presume that none of the many authors who describe the state of pure consciousness had actually experienced it. The objection by Jung is at closer scrutiny not a logical argument at all, but a mix of an unfounded prior assumption and an acknowledgement of the limited range of states of consciousness that he had personally experienced, or rather, as H.G. Coward (1985) suggests, that he allowed himself to have.

Collectively, such theoretical arguments tend to get undone in due time by a growing collective experience, just as happened with the theories of the 19th century physicists who argued against the possibility of a 'horseless carriage' or a 'heavier than air aeroplane'. Their theoretical arguments were quietly forgotten once the first trains moved and the first planes flew. Just like the trains, aeroplanes and cellphones increase our faith in physics even if the science behind them is beyond us, in the inner domain too, acceptance comes when a certain critical mass is crossed so that even those who have no direct inner opening to the more sophisticated possibilities of yoga themselves, will begin to see that practices that have their origin in yoga-based research actually work. In India this happened by the practical support people received from those who are perceived as having a yoga-based higher consciousness. And one can, in fact, quite well argue that something similar is beginning to happen in Europe with hathayoga. All over Europe churches stand empty, while yoga studios thrive even in the remotest of villages.

What has the silent inner consciousness of the yogi to do with the ordinary mind?

A third objection against the use of pure consciousness as a research tool in psychology is that the process of withdrawal and becoming a pure witness involves serious changes to one's inner state, which makes it unfit to study the ordinary processes of the mind which are far from silent and pure. It is often held that as a consequence this is not a good method to see how the ordinary human nature really works by itself. The answer to this objection runs on similar lines as the answer to the problem of privileged access; here also it is useful to consider the way research in physics is organized. Physics hasn't achieved its amazing mastery over electromagnetism, for example, by focusing exclusively on the spontaneous, and complex manifestations of electricity and magnetism in nature. What science is interested in are, again, not the surface phenomena as such, but the underlying processes. So one studies electromagnetism by making use of the little one knows, to create a piece of equipment that shows how electromagnetic forces work in some entirely artificial and constrained circumstances. From the results, one gains some further knowledge and mastery, and on this basis one can construct two very different types of new things. One of them is to make things for use in the world outside the lab. These are the things that produce new questions (and the money to work on them). The other consists of more sophisticated laboratory instruments that can answer more complicated questions. In this fashion one gradually builds up an increasingly sophisticated and comprehensive instrumentation, mastery, and knowledge. With all that new knowledge, one can then come back to natural processes like lightning or the magnetism of the earth, or produce things that change the world, like aeroplanes, cellphones and internet-based computing. Progress in Yoga takes place in an essentially similar fashion: with the little one knows about oneself one tries to 'stand back' and watch oneself dispassionately. While doing this, one encounters various problems and in one's attempts to overcome them one learns more about one's own functioning, and so one slowly builds up an increasing clarity of inner perception and mastery over the subtle psychological processes that take place inside oneself. With that increasing inner clarity one can then look in more detail at oneself and help others — whether one-to-one or in the form of contributions to the shared knowledge base of humanity. As the process continues, one's insight, self-mastery and ability to help others as well as our collective knowledge gradually increase.

Yoga is too hard to use as a tool for psychological research.

A fourth objection one hears frequently is that reaching the state of a perfectly detached witness consciousness is not easy and that it would mean that doing research in psychology would only be for 'realised yogis'. There is some truth to this, but it is no reason to complain: physics and mathematics are not easy either.

Fortunately, it is not true that one can start doing meaningful yoga-based research only as a fully accomplished yogi. Useful research can start long before this. As each individual is at the same time unique and prototypal for a certain type of problems and possibilities, each individual has his or her own talents and difficulties to conquer, and as such a unique area of research cut out for him or herself, something special that is in harmony with the peculiarities of his or her svabhava and svadharma (one's soul-qualities and the law of one's individual being) as well as with the circumstance he or she lives in. And yet, because we are all connected, and because we are in so many ways built on similar plans, such individual findings will be of interest to at least some others. It is clear that spiritual giants like Sri Ramakrishna, Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, will produce more psychologically interesting knowledge than others, but even beginners may discover insights and techniques that are useful for others in search of psychological insight and mastery. Even if most of such beginners' work may be of use to only a few, or fill in only a tiny corner of the entire picture, all this inner labour together will add up in one way or another to our collective understanding of human nature. Again a process with obvious parallels in the hard sciences.

Entry into the ineffable

The ineffability of inner states is another often-cited argument against research in yoga, and it points at a genuine though not entirely intractable difficulty. The first thing to take into account is that ineffability is a relative term. At one extreme, one could argue that all experiences are 'inner' and as such ineffable: who is to say whether your experience of green is the same as mine? Doing so would, however, invalidate all experience-based sharing, so it is more practical to stick to the perhaps naïve idea that one can actually communicate with someone else about one's experiences to the — admittedly limited — extent the other recognizes them as similar to his or her own. The first occasion where the problem of ineffability then arises more seriously, comes when the other never had a similar experience. The crude, ablist, but archetypal example of this kind is the impossibility of fully explaining the experience of a person who can see colour to a person who is genetically colour blind. In a similar vein, it is argued, one cannot share an inner experience with someone who never had anything like it. There is no doubt some truth in this, but, as usual, the same problem arises in the hard sciences. I cannot verify in my experience the beauty or validity of a complex mathematical formula, nor the inner structure of a far-away galaxy. Besides this, there is a mitigating factor that can bridge the gap between the specialist and the lay person. People sometimes have a kind of pre-knowledge, a vague sense of what the real, all-out experience might be, long before they actually have it. People who would not be able to write one line of decent poetry can still enjoy reading it, and perfectly 'ordinary' people may still like to read mystical literature. They have not had the kind of experiences the mystic had, but still there is something in them that resonates when they read about these experiences. There are also certain experiences of which at least a shadow can be transferred by someone who had that experience to the mind of someone who has not actually had that experience. There are of course limits to the extent that this is possible, and there remains a gap between reading about a country, visiting it, and actually living there, and the gap increases if the 'other country' is not just another mix of known elements, but something of a radically different character. But then again: limiting our collective knowledge to what everybody can understand would negate all culture and all possibility of collective and individual progress.

Limitations on the side of the receiver are, however, not the only place where the problem of ineffability arises. A more difficult situation arises when the ineffability exists inside the person who has the experience that is to be conveyed. There is a weak and a strong form of this. In the weak form, the experience is difficult to describe due to lack of clarity on the side of experiencer. This can happen for example due to its complexity: describing an experience may simply take more time than can reasonably be expected to be available; or due to the fact that there are no commonly agreed terms for the sensations felt. The latter can be because the sensations don't occur commonly enough, but it may also happen simply because describing is not really needed. (Can you describe the difference in taste between a pear and a melon?) In many of these cases, but not always, someone more familiar with the inner state, or simply more capable as word-smith, can help the experiencer to find the right words to express the experience.

Beyond all this, there is the intellectually more intractable strong form of ineffability: the situation where the state itself is ineffable, not just in the weak sense of being hard to describe, but in the strong sense of a consciousness that has no content in any known sense-modality. There is then in a most literal sense nothing to describe, while yet the (sometimes highly) positive impact brought about by entering that special state indicates that it must have been a state of increased, not of diminished consciousness. Sri Aurobindo seems to indicate that this type of strong ineffability can, in certain cases, still be due to a simple lack of inner skill. This is the case for example when one is ‘blinded by too much light’ or when there is an undeveloped, unconscious stretch on the way into and out of that alternative state so that one cannot carry a concrete, expressible memory of the higher state down into one's ordinary state. As one's experience increases one can then learn to bring more and more back from the higher states till one can 'bring down' their essence so completely that one can actually be simultaneously in the higher state and in the ordinary consciousness, which obviously facilitates communicating about it.2

One could argue that with this, we have definitely left the terrain of science in favour of some vague, mystical heavens far beyond the shared reality, but as mentioned before, it would be an error to limit psychology to what is understandable by everyone. After all, astronomy would have got nowhere if it had limited itself to what the average lay person can see with his unaided eyes, and neither would have physics if it had limited itself to as much of mathematics as the average postgraduate remembers from primary school. If we consider it good for humanity if physicists are allowed to study the extreme limits of where the human intellect can reach, we have little reason to deny psychology the option of exploring the extreme limits of what human consciousness is capable of.
 

The fragility of inner experience

In many spriritual traditions it is held that one should not talk about one's experiences except with one's guru, and there is good reason to take this advice seriously. Inner experiences, especially those at the ‘cutting edge’ of one's developmental process, tend to be fragile and can easily get distorted or blocked by sharing them. This can happen when the listener doesn't understand the territory well and puts pressure on the student3 to make the experience fit into whatever he or she is willing to hear, and it can even happen through processes within the student: too much eagerness or fear, or in fact any grosser aspect of the student's surface nature can distort or block the new experience when expressed too early, even to oneself. One needs to be respectful and sensitive to what happens in the inner domain, and in order to protect what happens there from interference by stronger, more wel-established structures and forces, it is often good to give it time till the new development has become stable and well-settled. Only then can it be shared without runnig the risk of distortion.

It may be clear that the ‘fragility’ of inner observations has serious consequences for the possibility of recording and sharing inner processes as part of research. A minimum precaution is that one should write about one's inner explorations purely for oneself assuming nobody else will ever read it. While writing, one's only concern should be to be honest, open and faithful to the inner reality; what others might think and even one's own mental preferences and expectations should be kept at bay, and as far as one can manage, one should abstain from judgements and commentary.

When sharing, or preparing to share at a later stage, one has of course to consider how those with whom one wants to share will understand one's observations, but even then one schould prioritise the safety and integrity of the inner realities. An essential part of doing this well is to learn how to hold one's experiences and observations in one's consciousness independent of the verbal descriptions one gives to them.4

The power of inner experiences

The opposite issue is perhaps more immediately dangerous: it arises when the inner experience is more powerful than the outer nature can handle. Ancient texts warn that the vessel must be strong to hold the nectar safely, and, again, they were right. Our natures are extremely complex and the harmonious balance between the different parts can easily be broken when the energies that enter into it are too powerful.

Such ‘spiritual emergencies’ can arise for many different reasons. There can be an innate weakness, a half-forgotten trauma that gets trigggered, remnants of pride, ambition, sexual desire can rise up and abuse the new powers for their egotistic ends, the natural balance the person has achieved can break down due to drugs or too harshly executed spritual exercises. We need not go into detail here, but it is crucial to realise that psychological explorations are not without danger and proper care is crucial. "Doing yoga" has been described as repairing and upgrading your bike while racing around in a city. In the end we all need to find, and obey, our inner guide, but almost everybody needs in the beginning and long after also a good external guide to keep the journey safe.

In itself, the problem of safety is of course not specific to the inner domain: chemistry is also dangerous, and so are electricity and nuclear energy. But science, and in some sense our civilisation as a whole, is much less knowledgeable in the inner than in the outer domain.

Social repercussions

A third area that needs attention is that the inner domain is more value-laden than the outer domain, and that what is seen as happening inside people is taken more personally than what is seen as happening in the outside world. While people working in the same field may appreciate the precision and mental clarity with which the ‘inner researchers’ have done their work, the general public (and academics active in other fields) are likely to praise or blame the researchers for the content of what they find. For those who do their inner research on the side and already have a career that is independent of their inner work, a strictly maintained confidentiality and anonymity can solve this problem, while at the same time freeing them from any concern about the social acceptability or otherwise of what they find.5

For young researchers whose career is dependent on appreciation of their work by colleagues and seniors, anonimity can, however, be a problem. One solution could be to organise a community spanning one or more labs in which researchers share their findings with their guides and amongst themselves as far as they consider doing so sufficiently safe, while publishing at the same time articles about groups of research projects that are not necessarily done by the authors themselves. This way their academic article-writing skills can be assessed publically, and their 'advanced psychology' skills in-house. Similar protocols can be used for second and third person studies in which the anonymity makes it easier for the people who have done the inner work to report honestly without concern about how it will be perceived by the wider public. To make it work, the same systems can be put in place that medicine and psychology already use to safe-guard the confidentiality of their patient-data.

The benefits of sharing

For society to arrive at a complete picture of reality and for our collective progress sharing is clearly crucial, but even for the individual sharing need not always be a negative experience. It can be highly encouraging to meet people with similar experiences. Meeting others with similar experiences can give one the courage to accept and consolidate what one has found so that one can move on and take the next step. Sharing with someone who is more open and skilful with the inner realities than one is oneself, can help to see more, and more accurately, than one had managed on one's own. Realising how many different ways there are in which people experience and deal with the inner worlds can be liberating and open windows in directions one had not even thought of. Many Indian scriptures describe the importance of living in the household of a guru, and the early Buddhists, like many later traditions, stressed the importance of the sangha, the brotherhood of the monks, and for an integral transformation of one's nature, a congenial environment to try out new ways of working and relating to other people may well be considered crucial.