This episode explores crucial questions that emerge when we think of meditation as a knowledge practice. How is it different from understanding meditation simply from a psychological perspective? What happens when we take a spiritual worldview and contemplative practices such as we find in Buddhism out of context, and interpret them within the Western paradigm of science and faith, without taking the research claims seriously? What is required to consider meditation as a research practice that could lead to results which could expand normal scientific understanding? How is imaginative contemplative practice, a method in the School for Spiritual Science, understood in this context? These are some of the questions that are taken up with reference to Evan Thompson, B. Alan Wallace and Arthur Zajonc.

References:

Rudolf Steiner. A Way of Self-Knowledge

Evan Thompson. Why I Am Not a Buddhist

B. Alan Wallace. Choosing Reality: A Buddhist View of Physics and the Mind

Arthur Zajonc. Meditation as Contemplative Inquiry: When Knowing Becomes Love.

———. The New Physics and Cosmology: Dialogues with the Dalai Lama.

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