Meditation and Modern Psychology
Robert Ornstein
Robert Ornstein
“Yogis stare at an object, dervishes repeat a phrase, Zen practitioners concentrate on the inexplicable questions such as ‘Show me your face before your father and mother met.’
What are they doing? Recycling the same information through the nervous system, and this has positive effects, if under control and well organized. It provides a respite from ongoing noise of the world and the insides of plans and worries. It is even used in relaxation.
But it also, as I have written here, leads to a different mode of perception.”
Robert Ornstein
Meditation and Modern Psychology
Meditation and Modern Psychology
Robert Ornstein
“I wrote this essay in 1970, when meditation was a curiosity, known only to a few tie-dyed people and, of course, The Beatles…this book now looks like a good basic introduction to the high-tech research that followed.”
—Robert Ornstein
“Man’s search for knowledge about himself,” writes Ornstein, “has been carried out in two modes, the empirical-experiential in the East, and the empirical-experimental in the West.” In this remarkable essay, originally published in A Psychology of Meditation, co-authored in 1970 with Claudio Naranjo, Ornstein examines meditation from both these perspectives: that of religions and philosophies such as Zen, Yoga, the Sufis and Christian mystics, and the perspective of modern psychology—what is happening neurophysiologically during and after meditation.
Looking at meditation from both points of view, he produces a modern scientific synthesis enabling us to appreciate and understand meditation as a tool which can lead to a mode of perception beyond our biological inheritance.
“This book is thoroughly worth buying, and reading with a pencil. We desperately need what the book is talking about and showing to be a real possibility. We can no longer ignore the impressive testimony to the nature of consciousness that is coming from a convergence of the mentalities of the East and the West. The freeing of consciousness is a most urgent need of our time.”
—Sebastian Moore, The Critic
“This book is the first scientific treatment of meditation that is really good. If you’re a meditator and want your worldview expanded, this will help. If you’re a scientist and want your worldview expanded, this will do it.”
—Charles T. Tart, The Last Whole Earth Catalog
