The meditation you are practicing is not Buddhist, though, because Buddhist meditation is supposed to lead you to wisdom, to full understanding of the Dharma, of The Truth. Don’t believe me? Go check out some writing from people from the Insight Meditation Society (or just peruse their glossary at http://www.dharma.org/ims/mr_glossary.html, look for Dharma, for example).

And I completely agree with both of you: Meditation can help us understand the workings of our own mind (or how it doesn’t work sometimes). Is that objective? I would say not. And, Bryan, to your question: I don’t think there is a way to measure the degree of accuracy of understanding gained through meditation because it is not objective. How you understand your mind is subjective. How you experience physical pain, for example, is subjective. Yes, there are pain scales but those are not valid across individuals (i.e., a “4″ on my scale is not necessarily higher than a “3″ on yours). Or, to go back to the other thread of discussion here, how you experience belief is subjective: you were a true believer, by your own standards. There are no objective “true believer” standards (as much as fundamentalists would like there to be). And as Ron pointed out, science is not after The Truth either. Although that does not put meditation and science in the same boat unless you’re starting to publish your insights gained through meditation in a peer reviewed journal. And then we get back to not being able to measure this: you can learn about how your mind works but that might not be how my mind works (not in the neurological sense now but in the sense of what thoughts get us stuck, what our favorite stories are, etc, all the stuff that you find out about your mind when you start observing it).

So, I think as long as we use meditation to watch our mind, not to gain any sorts of truths (especially not The Truth), it can be a very useful tool.

Does this all make sense or is this all deluded crap? Hey, I don’t want to fall into my own trap, ya know: Don’t believe everything you think!

The whole irony, as I see it, of my argument is that it actually supports some of the arguments of Buddhism: Our thoughts can delude us. We might believe in a story of reality that is utterly untrue. That’s stuff you can read in writing by Buddhists. However, I don’t agree with them that there is a way beyond this. I don’t think we can ever reach a completely objective state and see The Truth (for one thing, there is no such thing). We can become more cautious but we still might end up going down the wrong track.

First, thanks for the additional references. After reading the article by Meera Nanda, whose perspective I take it you share, I think I better understand your view. To the extent that you’re objecting to claims of “mystical knowledge” acquired through meditation, I completely agree with you. The insight I’m saying I’ve gained through meditation isn’t mystical in the least. I’m not claiming that meditation helped me understand the ultimate nature of the universe, or brought me otherwise inaccessible knowledge about the external world, or enabled me to “see” that the universe is permeated by a universal consciousness. I’m simply saying that I am convinced that the particular form of meditation I practiced increased my insight into the operation of my mind — specifically, it enabled me to observe a causal interplay of thought and emotion, and to become more aware of the operation of this interplay in my daily life.

Of course, that leaves unanswered the question of how one would establish that this insight, as I describe it, is “accurate” or “true”. You write: “You are right: introspection and meditation are not the same. But I would argue that findings on introspection are applicable to meditation as well because there is no way that you can be an objective observer to the workings of your mind no matter what technique you’re using (just like a physicist still influences whatever she observes during an experiment). Whatever you learn through those observations will be colored by your beliefs, views, etc.”

Can you give examples of experimental observations you would accept as demonstrating that the kind of insight I described above (regarding the operation of my mind) is “accurate” or “true”? I have trouble seeing how the degree of accuracy of such an understanding could be established through objective measurement.