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What Buddhist Meditation has to Tell Psychology About the
Mind
Eleanor Rosch
Department of Psychology
University of California, Berkeley
Talk delivered at The American Psychological Association, August 23, 2002
One of the best kept secrets of the last several centuries may be that some
of what we classify as religious experience can make a fundamental contribution
to scientific psychology. One hundred years ago William James suggested this
radical idea in his classic The Varieties of Religious Experience, yet
today mainstream psychology is no closer to considering the idea than it was in
1902. Surely one root of this recalcitrance is the way in which the categories
and imagery of our society envisage an otherworldly religion and a naturalistic
psychology which are on different planes of existence altogether and cannot
communicate with one other. I believe that the Eastern traditions now arriving
on our shore, particularly Buddhist thought and meditation, can bridge this
divide and can reveal a quite new understanding of what the human mind and its
knowing capacity actually are.
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