Contemplative Science, page 2
If psychological flourishing emerges from mental health and balance, it must be understood with respect to specific types of mental imbalances to which normal people—often deemed relatively healthy—are commonly prone. A fundamental premise behind the following analysis is that mental distress is generally a symptom of mental imbalances, much as physical pain is a symptom of physical illness or injury.11 In the following sections, I shall set forth four kinds of mental imbalances—conative, attentional, cognitive, and affective—and for each one identify imbalances in terms of deficit, hyperactivity, and dysfunction.
Conative Imbalances
“Conation” is a valuable term, though not in common use, which refers to the faculties of desire and volition. Conative imbalances constitute ways in which our desires and intentions lead us away from psychological flourishing and into psychological distress. A conative deficit occurs when we experience an apathetic loss of desire for happiness and its causes and an unwillingness to alleviate our own and others’ suffering. This is commonly accompanied by a lack of imagination and a kind of stagnated complacency: we can’t imagine faring better, so we don’t try to do anything to achieve such well-being. Conative hyperactivity occurs when we fixate on obsessive desires that obscure the reality of the present. We are so caught up in fantasies about the future—about unfulfilled desires—that our senses are dulled as to what is happening here and now. In the process, we may also blind ourselves to the needs and desires of others. Finally, conative dysfunction sets in when we desire things that are not conducive to our own or others’ well-being, and don’t desire the things that do contribute to our own and others’ flourishing. It is crucial to recognize that individual psychological flourishing is not something that can be cultivated without any relation to others. We do not exist independently from others, so our well-being cannot arise independently of others either. We must take into account the well-being of those around us.
What kinds of goods (in the broadest sense, including both tangible and intangible things and qualities) are truly conducive to psychological flourishing? In his book The High Price of Materialism, psychologist Tim Kasser analyzes the relation between the materialistic values that so dominate today’s world and the well-being that we all seek. He concludes:12 Existing scientific research on the value of materialism yields clear and consistent findings. People who are highly focused on materialistic values have lower personal well-being and psychological health than those who believe that materialistic pursuits are relatively unimportant. These relationships have been documented in samples of people ranging from the wealthy to the poor, from teenagers to the elderly, and from Australians to South Koreans.
As noted earlier, Augustine pointed to the “love of things vain and noxious” as a kind of conative dysfunction, while the most profound, reality-based desire is the love of God, which is the desire for union with him. Nicholas of Cusa, a fifteenth-century cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, echoed this theme when he wrote, “Everyone . . . who is seeking seeks only the good and everyone who seeks the good and withdraws from you [God] withdraws from that which one is seeking.”13 Śāntideva expressed a similar theme from a nontheistic perspective: “Those seeking to escape from suffering hasten right toward their own misery. And with the very desire for happiness, out of delusion they destroy their own well-being as if it were their enemy.”14
Although there are many ways of restoring conative balance, a general approach is to remedy apathy with the recognition of the possibility of genuine happiness, remedy obsessive desire with the cultivation of contentment, and remedy mistaken desires with the recognition of the true causes of genuine happiness and of our vulnerability to suffering. Specific methods for counteracting conative imbalances have been developed in various psychological and contemplative traditions for individuals committed to secular, theistic, and nontheistic worldviews.
Attentional Imbalances
No one who suffers from severe attentional imbalances can be deemed psychologically healthy. An attentional deficit is characterized by the inability to focus on a chosen object. The mind becomes withdrawn and disengaged, even from its own internal processes. Attentional hyperactivity occurs when the mind is excessively aroused, resulting in compulsive distraction and fragmentation. And attention is dysfunctional when we focus on things in afflictive ways, not conducive to our own or others’ well-being. For example, a sex addict may attend to other people solely as sexual objects, and a salesperson may mentally engage with others only in terms of their willingness to buy a product. In such cases, the mind is prone to both attentional and conative imbalances, which often go hand in hand.
An attentional deficit corresponds closely to the Buddhist concept of laxity, and attentional hyperactivity correlates with excitation. These imbalances are remedied through the cultivation of mindfulness—the ability to sustain voluntary attention continuously upon a familiar object, without forgetfulness or distraction—and meta-attention—the ability to monitor the quality of the attention, swiftly recognizing whether it has succumbed to either excitation or laxity. Śāntideva emphasized the importance of developing attentional skills for psychological flourishing: “Upon developing zeal in that way, one should stabilize the mind in meditative concentration, since a person whose mind is distracted lives between the fangs of mental afflictions.”15
While Buddhist contemplatives have identified and learned to heal these imbalances of the attention, the same issues have been of great concern to all the contemplative traditions of the world. An Eastern Orthodox Christian contemplative writes, “Keeping watch over his heart, growing in self-awareness, the aspirant acquires nepsis (‘sobriety’ or ‘watchfulness’) and diakrisis (‘discernment’ or ‘discrimination,’ the power to distinguish between good and evil thoughts).”16 And Joseph Maréchal writes in a similar vein:There can be no contemplation without sustained attention, at least for a few moments; now attention acts on the psychological elements after the fashion of the poles of a magnet, which gather up iron filings into magnetic shapes. Perhaps the characteristic of contemplation is rather a deep orientation of the human being in an intuition or towards an intuition?17
Cognitive Imbalances
A person with a severe cognitive imbalance is radically out of touch with reality and is commonly diagnosed as suffering from some kind of psychosis. Normal people too are generally prone to cognitive imbalances, which lie at the root of much mental distress. Such imbalances are often deemed to be intrinsic to human nature, but this is an assumption that begs to be challenged by rigorous empirical inquiry.
Returning to the threefold analysis of mental imbalances, a cognitive deficit is characterized by the failure to perceive what is present in the five fields of sensory experience and in the mind. Insofar as we are out of touch with what is going on around us and within us, we are suffering from a cognitive deficit disorder. Cognitive hyperactivity sets in when we conflate our conceptual projections with actual perceptual experience—fail to distinguish between perceived realities and superimposed assumptions and fantasies. Psychotic people do this in extreme ways, while normal people are more discreet, but most of us are positioned on the same spectrum of cognitive hyperactivity, and it results in unnecessary mental suffering. Finally, cognitive dysfunction occurs when we misapprehend the way things are, through defects either in our physical senses or in our ability to interpret what is happening.
Overcoming such cognitive imbalance is a central theme in Buddhist practice, where one of the primary interventions is the cultivation of discerning mindfulness. The first challenge is to learn how to attend just to what is being presented to our senses and to inner awareness of our own mental processes. In this regard, the Buddha set forth the following ideal: “In the seen there is only the seen; in the heard, there is only the heard; in the sensed, there is only the sensed; in the mentally perceived, there is only the mentally perceived.”18 Elaborating on that theme, Buddhism gives detailed instructions on applying mindfulness to our own physical and mental presence in the world, with other beings, and with the inanimate environment. There is a rapidly growing mass of scientific research exploring the therapeutic effects of such mindfulness training, much of it inspired by the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn and his highly successful program of mindfulness-based stress reduction.
Affective Imbalances
Affective imbalances commonly occur as a result of conative, attentional, and cognitive imbalances, and they too can be viewed as being of three kinds. An affective deficit has the symptoms of emotional deadness within, and a sense of cold indifference toward others. Affective hyperactivity is characterized by alternating elation and depression, hope and fear, adulation and contempt, and obsessive craving and hostility. Affective dysfunction occurs when emotional responses are inappropriate to the circumstances at hand, such as taking delight in someone else’s misfortune. Psychologists and contemplatives the world over have devised a wide array of interventions to heal such imbalances, some of them applicable to society in general, others embedded in religious worldviews. One fourfold approach drawn from Buddhism has spiritual depth without any necessary ties to a particular belief system. The essence of this practice is to remedy craving with loving-kindness, remedy aloof indifference with compassion, remedy depression with empathetic joy, and remedy personal prejudice with equanimity.
The overall effect of the four above-mentioned mental imbalances is constant dissatisfaction, which is only temporarily and superficially alleviated by latching onto pleasant sensory and mental stimuli or by altering the brain with drugs. Having little faith in their own inner resources for genuine happiness, many people today become addicted to pleasurable stimuli or chemical suppressants of dissatisfaction, but as soon as these props are removed, the sense of well-being disappears. From the perspective of contemplative science, the primary, pragmatic purpose of psychology is to explore states of the psyche to identify which lead to the perpetuation of suffering and which to genuine happiness. Like shifting from the use of fossil fuels to solar power, we have the opportunity to wean ourselves away from obsessive reliance on pleasurable stimuli and to shift to the cultivation of exceptional mental health as the basis of happiness.
A fundamental hypothesis behind this pursuit is that in terms of human nature, our habitual state is afflicted and suffering, but our potential state is healthy and flourishing. Our minds are not intrinsically unbalanced, only habitually so, and with continued, skillful effort, the imbalances may be remedied, resulting in a state of well-being that is not contingent upon agreeable sensory, chemical, intellectual, or aesthetic stimuli. This is an area in which science and the contemplative traditions may all collaborate for the benefit of the entire world.
There is a profound complementarity between scientific and contemplative approaches to the study of the psyche. The behavioral sciences, psychology, and neuroscience have shed light on cognitive processes that have enabled us to survive, propagate, and experience hedonic well-being. Contemplative traditions show how we can find genuine happiness, or eudaimonic well-being, and explore the spiritual dimensions of our existence. Hedonic and eudaimonic well-being do not usually stand in opposition to each other. On the contrary, without hedonic well-being, including good health and sufficient food, clothing, and shelter, it is difficult, though not impossible, to develop eudaimonic well-being. Likewise, the more we cultivate genuine happiness that arises from within, the more we can appreciate the simple pleasures of life. While hedonic well-being may have no intrinsic or enduring value, it can aid in seeking a meaningful life, entailing the integrated pursuit of genuine happiness, truth, and virtue.
THE ORIGINS OF THE PSYCHE
Contemporary cognitive scientists, confining their inquiries to behavior, brain activity, and the subjective reports of normal and subnormal people, have strongly held assumptions about the origins of the psyche: there is a widespread consensus that all mental processes are nothing more than functions or properties of the brain. And as long as scientific inquiry remains within those confines, it is unlikely that compelling evidence will emerge to seriously challenge that consensus. Scientific methods for studying the mind that are based on materialist assumptions will likely only reinforce them.
But Western philosophy and science did not always take such an attitude. Pythagoras (c. 570–c. 495 B.C.E.), the most famous of the pre-Socratic philosophers, who allegedly coined the term “philosophy,” founded a contemplative community in the south of Italy that was both religious and scientific, with a strong emphasis on mathematics. Its main purpose was the cultivation of holiness through the purification of the body and mind. In his view, the man who devotes himself to such purification is the “true philosopher,” one who “looks on” (theorein), and the greatest purification method of all is science.
Pythagoras is widely known for advocating a theory of metempsychosis, or reincarnation, according to which the soul is immortal and is reborn in both human and animal incarnations. This view was allegedly an empirical finding based on his own experience of recalling up to twenty of his own and others’ past lives. The oldest and the latest accounts of his life agree in representing Pythagoras as a wonder worker, and the Pythagorean Society became the chief scientific school of ancient Greece.
In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates addressed this issue by first commenting that according to the popular view, the soul is dispersed and destroyed at death.19 But the truth, he said, which is known only to those who have practiced philosophy, is far from that. The soul of the philosopher, having “practiced death” by shunning sensual craving and corporeal desires, “departs to a place which is, like itself, invisible, divine, immortal, and wise, where, on its arrival, happiness awaits it, and release from . . . all . . . human evils.”20 But the souls of those who have not practiced philosophy, being permeated by the corporeal, become wandering spirits after death, in a manner virtually identical to the Buddhist account of the intermediate state (antarābhava) following death and prior to the next rebirth. Eventually, Socrates declared, “through craving for the corporeal, which unceasingly pursues them, they are imprisoned once more in a body. And as you might expect, they are attached to the same sort of character or nature which they have developed during life.”21
Belief in metempsychosis was also common in early Christianity. Origen (185–254), widely viewed as the greatest Christian theologian after Paul and before Augustine, was strongly influenced by Pythagoras and Plato. Knowledge of God, he claimed, is natural to humanity and can be “recollected” and awakened by special disciplines. In this way, the soul can ascend to God in a long, steady journey from lifetime to lifetime. By means of contemplation (theoria), the soul advances in the knowledge (gnosis) of God, which transforms it until, as Plato had taught, it becomes divine. For Origen, like Pythagoras, there was no absolute divide between science and religion. The contemplative life may be subdivided into the contemplation of God and the contemplation of nature, and it has three stages: the active life (praktikê); the contemplation of nature, or “natural contemplation” (physikê); and contemplation in the strict sense, the vision of God, also termed “theology” (theologia), or “spiritual knowledge” (gnosis).22 This unifying vision of science and spirituality was later suppressed when Emperor Justinian wrote a series of anathemas against Origen’s writings. In the local synod of 543, he ordered the patriarch Mennas to call together all the bishops present in Constantinople and make them subscribe to the anathemas.
Despite the condemnation of Origen’s writings concerning the origins of the soul, the matter was far from settled. Augustine addressed the issue by proposing four hypotheses: 1) an individual’s soul derives from those of his or her parents; 2) individual souls are newly created from individual conditions at the time of conception; 3) souls exist elsewhere and are sent by God to inhabit human bodies; and 4) souls descend to the level of human existence by their own choice.23 Augustine maintained that all these hypotheses are compatible with the Christian faith. In the true spirit of philosophy, he declared, “It is fitting that no one of the four be affirmed without good reason.”24 While many Christians today have chosen the second—that individual souls are newly created from individual conditions at the time of conception—the empirical and logical grounds for this view are far from clear.
The origins of the psyche were largely ignored by scientists from the time of Copernicus until the rise of modern psychology. William James, who founded the first neuroscience laboratory in the United States at Harvard University, proposed three hypotheses to explain the origins of mental processes in relation to brain functions: 1) the brain produces thoughts, as an electric circuit produces light; 2) the brain releases, or permits, mental events, as the trigger of a crossbow releases an arrow by removing the obstacle that holds the string; and 3) the brain transmits thoughts, as light hits a prism, thereby transmitting a spectrum of colors.25 During his era and even today, all three of these hypotheses are consistent with everything that is scientifically known about mind-brain correlations. James, who believed in the third option, hypothesized:26 When finally a brain stops acting altogether, or decays, that special stream of consciousness which it subserved will vanish entirely from this natural world. But the sphere of being that supplied the consciousness would still be intact; and in that more real world with which, even whilst here, it was continuous, the consciousness might, in ways unknown to us, continue still.
