The experience of absorption : comparison of the mental processes of meditation between emic yogic and etic neuroscientific perspectives on Ishvara Pranidhana meditation

textModernity has seen the exchange of ideas about cognition between western science and eastern meditation traditions. In particular, western ways of thinking about the natural world have infiltrated Indian theories of yoga. This intersection of ideas in the twentieth-century has resulted in a problematic trend to theorize yogic phenomena, including meditation, in scientific terms. These translations converge on explicating yogic processes within a context of advancing knowledge about the brain. This translational approach to bringing etic and emic perspectives together in the same framework results in interpretations of meditation that succumb to problems cognitive science faces at a broader level in theorizing cognition and mind-body interrelations. In this study, I take a different approach to bringing emic and etic perspectives together by placing a phenomenologically interpreted emic account of absorption (the meditative shift in consciousness) into dialogue with current scientific understandings of three central mental processes of meditation. Specifically, I analyze ways of conceptualizing attention, memory, and emotion, and their underlying mechanisms as posited in yoga and science, focusing on the problem of how each system interprets the reality of absorption. This comparison suggests a basic similarity between the two systems: theorizing cognition and meditative absorption in terms of embodiment. This finding emphasizes the dual nature of embodiment as both experiential and physical. Finally, I consider this dialogue from an embodied mind perspective, an emerging way of thinking about and theorizing the mind-body in cognitive science, because this perspective challenges longstanding theoretical problems in western understandings of how the mind works. This analysis suggests that theorizing meditation in these dual terms of embodiment potentially solves the reductive challenges of dualistic and materialist philosophy that have plagued both religious and naturalistic attempts to explain absorption. This interdisciplinary dialogue provides a framework with which to think more critically about translational and cross-disciplinary efforts that have previously confused the goals of yoga and science and their respective foci on practice and mechanisms. I conclude that bridging ideas in this dialogical way reveals a complementary perspective between phenomenological and biological ways of understanding the mind that both hinge on embodied cognition.Educational Psycholog

An investigation of multiple natural origins of religion

This study attempts to trace how religion could have originated in prehistory and antiquity, out of natural human and prehuman behaviour, without requiring the reality of the supernatural.Religion is here defined as beliefs, conceptions, practices and roles concerned with the putative supernatural. A variety of manifestations or elements of religious belief and practice can be identified. It is proposed that they have separate origins. Examples of religious elements are: life after death, ghosts, sacrifice, priests, shamans, gods, demons, .... It is argued that to try to reduce religion to one original element is a mistake. There may be no single origin. But the individual elements have origins, and plausible theories can account for each.Using theories and insights of previous workers, elaborated as necessary with information from a range of sciences, arguments are presented to account for five major foundational religious elements, thereby illustrating and partly fulfilling what is potentially a much wider programme. The elements covered are: (1) Animatism: numina, daemons; (2) Animism: ghosts, souls; (3) Another world: life after death; (4) Another world: heaven; (5) Religious specialists: shamans.Chapter 1 introduces the programme. Chapter 2 sets out definitions, philosophical principles and methodologyChapter 3 explores the specifically numinous quality which characterizes the supernatural in subjective experience. Chapter 4 describes brain structures and the neural substrate of experience. Chapter 5 proposes specific neurological hypotheses to account for certain types of numinous or `supernatural' experience.Chapter 6 deals with ape mentality, which may be presumed to characterize that of our remote ancestors, and identifies precursors of religious elements.Chapters 7 - 11 deal with the possibly separate origin of five major religious elements, as listed above.Chapter 12 summarizes the investigation, attempts to place the elements covered in sequence of their development in prehistory and antiquity, and expresses the limitations of the theory constructed

Plutarch reading Plato: Interpretation and Mythmaking in the Early Empire

Plutarch of Chaeronea, an eminent figure among the Platonists of the early Roman Empire, built his philosophy by continuously drawing frameworks and models from Plato’s dialogues, both in his works dedicated solely to exegesis and his own lively philosophical dialogues. He both interprets Plato and adapts various models from the Platonic dialogues. Each philosopher was especially concerned with problems posed by myth, yet each also employed their own elaborate and imagistic narratives. In this study, I argue two main points. First, Plutarch’s treatment of mythic narratives, in their dangers and their potential uses, is carefully modelled after Plato. Both are concerned not only about the educational ramifications of stories for the young, but also the problem of how unreal images can lead the audience to reality. Plutarch nevertheless develops his myths, especially in the dialogues De sera numinis vindicta and De facie in orbe lunae, to fulfill similar functions as Plato’s, whether to emphasize a predominate ethical point in the rest of the dialogue, such as in the myth of Er, or to provide a teleological sketch for how the arrangement of the world might be good, such as in the Timaeus. Imagistic narratives such as these, for Plutarch as for Plato, do not transcend the reach of rational discourse, as much of the scholarship holds, however, but rather form likely accounts. Second, I argue that Plutarch constructs his own Platonic mythmaking as a distinctive kind of discourse that acts in parallel to dialectic interpretation. Whether interpreting traditional religious material, such as from the cults of Delphi and Isis, or explaining the complicated meanings of Plato’s Timaeus through appeal to the other dialogues, these dialectical discourses also yield likely accounts. Given the epistemic difficulties posed by both theology and physics, for different reasons, Plutarch cannot transcend beyond such accounts. The complementary use of these two modes of discourse, dialectical exegesis and imagistic mythmaking, illuminates some central workings of Plutarch’s Platonism

Plutarch reading Plato: Interpretation and Mythmaking in the Early Empire

Plutarch of Chaeronea, an eminent figure among the Platonists of the early Roman Empire, built his philosophy by continuously drawing frameworks and models from Plato’s dialogues, both in his works dedicated solely to exegesis and his own lively philosophical dialogues. He both interprets Plato and adapts various models from the Platonic dialogues. Each philosopher was especially concerned with problems posed by myth, yet each also employed their own elaborate and imagistic narratives. In this study, I argue two main points. First, Plutarch’s treatment of mythic narratives, in their dangers and their potential uses, is carefully modelled after Plato. Both are concerned not only about the educational ramifications of stories for the young, but also the problem of how unreal images can lead the audience to reality. Plutarch nevertheless develops his myths, especially in the dialogues De sera numinis vindicta and De facie in orbe lunae, to fulfill similar functions as Plato’s, whether to emphasize a predominate ethical point in the rest of the dialogue, such as in the myth of Er, or to provide a teleological sketch for how the arrangement of the world might be good, such as in the Timaeus. Imagistic narratives such as these, for Plutarch as for Plato, do not transcend the reach of rational discourse, as much of the scholarship holds, however, but rather form likely accounts. Second, I argue that Plutarch constructs his own Platonic mythmaking as a distinctive kind of discourse that acts in parallel to dialectic interpretation. Whether interpreting traditional religious material, such as from the cults of Delphi and Isis, or explaining the complicated meanings of Plato’s Timaeus through appeal to the other dialogues, these dialectical discourses also yield likely accounts. Given the epistemic difficulties posed by both theology and physics, for different reasons, Plutarch cannot transcend beyond such accounts. The complementary use of these two modes of discourse, dialectical exegesis and imagistic mythmaking, illuminates some central workings of Plutarch’s Platonism

Moral continuity: Gujurati kinship, women, children and rituals

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.This thesis is a study of Gujarati women and children living in the North London Borough of Harrow. It addresses the issues concerning women in the household, that include their relations with other kin and wider networks, caring for children, feeding, and protecting them from evil influences, and their key involvement in ritual practice. Men as husbands, fathers, uncles and grandfathers are also discussed. Children's involvement in ritual from birth, or even before, is addressed and the way they make sense of the world through multiple carers. Households were studied using the methods of participant observation and in-depth, taped, unstructured interviews. Different caste groups, religions and social classes were included in the study group, but the majority were Hindu, and a few Jain. Muslim households were excluded because they represented less than 10% of the Harrow population and would have made the study too broad. Data obtained from a three-month period of research in Ahmedabad, informed the Harrow data, but a direct comparison was not made. The theme of moral continuity emerged from the data as a central concern for Hindu and Jain households. This was linked to kinship ties, respect for elders, obligations, religious festivals and rituals. The joint household remains popular and many younger people are learning Gujarati, practising rituals and asking for arranged `introduction' marriages. Family `rules' which have been followed through many generations are followed in respect to festivals, life-cycle rituals of childhood, warding off the evil eye and what foods to eat. Childhood is a time of purity when children are thought to be close to the gods, requires special consideration, especially when it comes to food, and milk may be thought to be the safest option. Children live in a network of interdependency with other kin and through rituals participate in a world that respects the hierarchy of the household and wider Gujarati `community'. Western influences of toys, peers and the educational system are acknowledged at various points. In conclusion, a sense of being Gujarati is still held by individuals today in Britain. Continuity of moral codes is achieved through ritual practice, which is transformed over time, links with the ancestors and gives a sense of belonging to 'one of us'.This work was funded by the Florence Nightingale Foundation and the Mercers' Company