Towards a yoga-based research methodology

Matthijs Cornelissen
last revision: 05 March 2024

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

section 1
introduction

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. The first type of research, research about yoga, works within the limits of existing science, and distills 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 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 an enormous amount of work of this type to be done.

But there is one issue that remains. Since the research projects don't use inner, psychological instruments that have been improved by the very best, expert psychological knowledge available to generate new psychological knowledge of the same special type, the spiral of quickly cumulative discovery we discussed in our short description of research in the hard sciences will still not come about. In other words, when we limit research on yoga and meditation to this first approach, without wondering how its ancient and modern protagonists actually arrive at their knowledge, we miss out on what is the most valuable contribution which the Indian tradition can make to science: its ability to study in an intellectually rigorous manner those aspects of life that are not primarily physical, that are not directly or fully available to the ordinary waking consciousness, and that can be accessed only by specialised 'inner' methods of enquiry.

It seems then very much worthwhile to explore the second option, and see whether yoga-based methods of enquiry, yoga-based 'rigorous subjectivity', can be used to help psychology to develop into a more powerful and effective science of the entire domain that can be studied with those methods.

In the previous chapter we discussed the basic proceses yoga uses to make its knowledge of the inner domain of psychology more incisive, precise and reliable, and more specifically, how it uses 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 their physical instruments. In this chapter we'll see how the knowledge systems of yoga and psychology can collaborate to make use of such 'yoga based research': how yoga-based 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.1 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, for example, 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, yoga2 and meditation are not taken up only for the sake of peace and happiness, but also, and often primarily, for the sake of knowledge.

One of the things that stand in the way of accepting yoga seriously as a method science can use to study consciousness and the subjective domain is that the very basic understanding of reality and knowledge that underlies science and yoga are quite different, but by themselves these philosophical problems are not unsurmountable. As I have tried to show in the chapters where we discussed the philosophical foundations of psychology, Sri Aurobindo has worked out a consciousness-centred understanding of reality that offers a solid foundation for yoga-based research in psychology and the human sciences, without getting in conflict with anything the hard sciences have found.

In the present chapter we will look from a more simple, pragmatic and operational perspective at the question how yoga and science as complimentary knowledge systems can collaborate to help humanity to develop more precise and reliable knowledge in the inner domain . To start, I'd like to show that on a down-to-earth, pragmatic, procedural level, the pursuits of knowledge in yoga and the hard sciences don't differ as much as one might think at first sight: 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