Meditation Among
Professionals
Many professional people,
among them scientists and academics, practice meditation. For example,
Roger Walsh, who has both the M.D. and Ph.D. and works in the Department
of Psychiatry and Human Behavior in the College of Medicine at the U.C.
Irvine campus, is a committed student of Buddhist vipassana
("mindfulness") meditation and the spiritistically inspired A Course
in Miracles.1
Deane Shapiro also has
impressive academic credentials and was recipient of a Kellogg National
Fellowship to study meditation. He has served on the faculty of the
University of California and the Stanford University Medical School, and
he is president of the Institute for the Advancement of Human Behavior.
He is the author of Precision Nirvana: An Owner’s Manual for the Care
and Maintenance of the Mind, and an editor of Meditation:
Self-Regulation Strategy and Altered States of Consciousness.2
Together, Walsh and Shapiro
edited Meditation: Classic and Contemporary Perspectives.3 This
text has over 700 pages containing 60 chapters by 30 authors. It
includes almost all Eastern Asian systems now practiced in the West,
involving dozens of methods and techniques. Their bibliography is
extensive (over 600 items), including many articles relating to
empirical studies and interacting meditation with psychology,
psychiatry, biochemistry, psychophysiology, the neurosciences, and more.
Yet elsewhere Shapiro states
that "the most promising future meditation research may lie in the model
of a personal scientist, using ourselves as subjects—and combining the
precision of Western phenomenological science with the vision of Eastern
thought and practice."4 In part, he is referring to the field of
Transpersonal Psychology, the so-called "fourth" school of modern
psychology, behind psychoanalysis, behaviorism, and humanistic
psychology. According to Walsh, in "A Model for Viewing Meditation
Research," apparently the "large majority" of transpersonal
psychologists meditate. "The number of Westerners who have learned to
meditate now number several million, and surveys of transpersonal
psychologists suggest that the large majority are involved in some form
of this practice.... One of the long-held goals of transpersonal
psychology has been an integration of Western science and Eastern
practice."5
The research bibliography on
meditation compiled by Steven Donovan and Michael Murphy also
illustrates the large impact that meditation is having in our culture.
Murphy is a former psychologist and well-known cofounder of the New Age
Esalen Institute. The bibliography concerned research data on meditation
from 1931 to 1983 and contained 776 English language entries. This was
not a bibliography of the religious, philosophical, or
metaphysical literature on meditation; it dealt with scientific research
only.6
What does all this mean? It
means that Christians can no longer afford the luxury of being
uninformed about meditation. Because most people see meditation merely
as a form of relaxation, this has masked its true nature and sparked the
interest of researchers who would ordinarily avoid the occult. Clinical
psychologist Gordon Boals, who has taught at Princeton and Rutgers
universities, points out:
Viewing meditation as a
relaxation technique has had a number of consequences. One result has
been to make meditation seem more familiar and acceptable to the
Western public so that subjects are willing to learn and practice it
and researchers and psychotherapists are interested in experimenting
with it. Another outcome is that therapists have been able to find a
variety of ways of using it as a therapeutic technique. If meditation
is relaxation, it should serve as an antidote to anxiety.7
However, as we will see, New
Age and related meditation is far more than a relaxation technique and
its goals encompass far more than anxiety reduction.
Notes:
1 Roger Walsh, "A Model for
Viewing Meditation Research," The Journal of Transpersonal
Psychology, vol. 14, no. 1, 1982, pp. 69,81-82
2 Ibid.
3 Deane Shapiro, Roger
Walsh, ed., Meditation: Classic and Contemporary Perspectives
(New York: Aldine, 1979).
4 Roger N. Walsh, et. al.,
"Meditation: Aspects of Research and Practice," The Journal of
Transpersonal Psychology, vol. 10, no, 2, 1978, pp. 128-29.
5 Walsh, "A Model for
Viewing Meditation Research," p. 69.
6 Michael Murphy, Steven
Donovan, "A Bibliography of Meditation Theory and Research,
1931-1983," The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, vol. 14,
no. 2, 1983, pp. 181-229.
7 Gordon Boals, "Toward a
Cognitive Reconceptualization of Meditation," The Journal of
Transpersonal Psychology, vol. 10, no, 2, 1983, p. 146.
