Opening up meditation for science

the development of a meditation classification system

Stefan Schmidt

pp. 137-152

in: Stefan Schmidt, Harald Walach (eds), Meditation, Berlin, Springer, 2014

Abstract

Defining meditation in order to conduct meditation research turns out to be close to impossible. This is, amongst others, related to the fact that the Western term "meditation" entails a wide range of different practices. From this perspective it does not make sense to use the term meditation or to perform research on such a generic concept without any further descriptions. So far contemplative science has taken a pragmatic approach towards this problem, mainly by referencing to certain spiritual traditions. More detailed descriptions of meditation practices are difficult to obtain since meditation is mainly about first person experiences and these experiences cannot be shared adequately. We try to overcome this problem here by developing a four dimensional modular descriptive system of meditation which draws only on behavioral and mental concepts of western psychology with the four dimensions (i) attention regulation, (ii) motivation (iii) attitude and (iv) practical context.