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Jon Kabat Zinn
at the University of Massachusetts Medical CenterAnother major program of research on meditation continues under the direction of Jon Kabat-Zinn in the Department of Medicine, Division of Prevantative and Behavioral Medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in Worcester, Massachusetts. Kabat-Zinn's program, primarily for patients with medical disorders, combines elements of Vipassana, a Theraveda form of Buddhist meditation from Burma, and Zen practices from Japanese Buddhism with Hatha yoga, a tradition from the Indian subcontinent, in a training regime identified as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). The Stress Reduction Clinic takes referrals from all services throughout the hospital and elsewhere and deals with a wide range of referred conditions, including hypertension, heart disease, cancer, chronic pain, irritable bowel syndrome, headaches, HIV and AIDS, as well as disorders of stress and anxiety.
Each patient is interviewed individually prior to enrollment in the program. The course includes eight weeks of classes, two two-and-a-half hour classes per week. Each class contains between twenty-five and forty members. Home study is required as well. Six days per week, with the help of audiotapes, patients practice meditation and yoga for forty-five minutes on their own. At week six, they attend an all-day seven-hour silent meditation. All participants in the six to eight concurrently running classes (approximately 240 people) participate in this silent weekend meditation retreat together. Following the program, each patient meets individually with the instructor. Three eight-week cycles of the course are held each year.
Patients are taught a basic regime of stretching and relaxation, plus different forms of seated meditation that they can continue to practice at home. They are also taught a method of body scanning, which entails following the path of the breath through different parts of the body as a guided visualization. In groups, they also discuss issues of formal meditation practice and ways to integrate what they learn there into their daily lives.
The program has enjoyed considerable success and notoriety. Kabat-Zinn has summarized his work in two popular trade books, Full Catastrophe Living (1990) and Wherever You Go, There You Are (1994). In 1993, the work of the clinic was prominently featured in the PBS series Healing and the Mind with Bill Moyers. In addition, over 100 centers in the US and abroad started by colleagues trained by Kabat-Zinn now conduct research as well as deliver clinical services. Beoynd this network, in Massachusetts alone, MBSR training is presently offered bilingually, in Spanish and English, in neighborhood health centers and taught to both inmates and staff as part of an ongoing prison project. Also, training programs are offered for first and second year medical students, corporate executives, and staff at local HMOs.
While Kabat-Zinn and his colleagues have undertaken extensive outcome studies of their program on meditation, recently they have moved into more basic research that tries to refine the identification of specific biological markers that show the effects of meditation on the body.[10] Currently, the key variable of their investigation has been melatonin, a hormone which is produced in the pineal gland and thought to be a scavenger against cancer cells, acting to inhibit cancer growth at certain intermediate stages of cell proliferation. Melatonin is known to be photosensitive and is produced in greatest quantities in the body at night. Kabat-Zinn and his colleagues suggest that ist is also pychosensitive, in other words, that psychosocial interventions can also increase its production. In a recent study employing graduates from their program, for instance, Massion, Teas, Hebert, Wertheimer, and Kabat-Zinn (1995) demonstrated a significant increase in melatonin levels among meditators. Because the oncology literature provides support for the concept of psychophysiological interactions in survival among cancer patients, the Worcester group suggested not only that melatonin might be a marker for other types of psychosocial interventions, but that meditation might be relevant in the treatment of certain types of cancer, especially of the breast and prostate.
Kabat-Zinn and his colleagues have several research projects on meditation currently underway that are in their preliminary stages and have not yet been published. One is the effect of guided meditation on psoriasis. Another, funded by the US Army, will look at the effects of behavioral interventions such as nutrition and meditation in patients suffering from early-stage breast cancer. In another experiment, just completed and not yet published, Kabat-Zinn joined colleagues A.O. Massion, J. Teas,. J.R. Hebert, and M.D. Wertheimer replicating their original findings and once again found a positive relationship between intensive meditation practice and increased melatonin levels.
Cognitive-Behavioral Approaches in Psychology
In an important new development, academic psychologists in the tradition of cognitive behaviorism have launched experimental research programs in meditation. William Mikulas (1981) at the University of West Florida has pointed out that, when analyzed in detail, meditation practices can be broken down and understood in terms of traditional constructs in experimental psychology, such as vigilance, attention, and concentration. As well, the new trend in cognitive therapy applying principles of classical and operant conditioning in order to inhibit or facilitate both mental images and thought processes has brought experimental psychologists a step closer to the type of instruction typical of various Eastern meditative practices. The continuing obstacle is, according to Mikulas, that cognitive psychologists have overemphasized a mechanistic model of the mind as a computer instead of expanding their definition of behavior.
To rectify this situation, Mikulas has outlined a program to study what he called "Behaviors of the Mind" (mind, a decidedly unbehavioristic term, he defines as the subjective center or agent of mental activity). [11] Three such behavioral variables relevant to the study of meditation that he has studied are concentration, the ability to focus attention on an object for varying periods; mindfulness, a generalized state of alertness where the mind remains unfocused but is prepared to attend to any potential stimulus; and clinging, the tendency of the mind to attach to and to dwell on specific thoughts or objects.
Such constructs, Mikulas believes, can be operationalized as a way to understand meditation from a cognitive-behavioral perspective. Moreover, this addresses what is actually going on at a mental level in a much more sophisticated way than just studying physiological measures or a single experimental variable. [12]
Another cognitive-behaviorist, Jonathan C. Smith, at Roosevelt University in Chicago, has developed an extensive research program on meditation as part of his Stress Institute (J.C. Smith, 1975a, 1975b, 1975c, 1978, 1984a, 1984b, 1985, 1986a, 1986b, 1987, 1988, 1990, 1991, 1993). Thinking along lines similar to Mikulas, Smith had already begun his own research by conceiving meditation as just a special form of relaxation. Psychologists have numerous relaxation strategies available to them, including progressive muscle relaxation, yogic stretching, guided mental imagery, contemplation, a focus on the gross aspects of the body, and a more refined focus on subtle body functions. Yet another is meditation, which can be either focused, as in Transcendental Meditation or Benson's relaxation response, or open and unfocused, as in Zen practice or Buddhist mindfulness.
His empirical research, relying heavily on factor theory, has more recently caused Smith to revise his thinking about theories of relaxation. In a complete reversal, he now considers relaxation a subset of meditation (J.C. Smith et al., 1996). In the old Benson model (one that still largely prevails), relaxation was confined to measurements of reduced physiological arousal. Another explanation that has been most popular among traditional stress researchers, such as Davidson and Schwartz (1984, 1976), defines relaxation in terms of cognitive-somatic specificity, i.e., there are two kinds of relaxation, physical and mental, which require two different sets of techniques, physiological and psychological. Then there was Smith's approach which saw all types of relaxation as the refinement of cognitive skills involving passivity, receptivity, and focusing. As more research results came in, Smith then came to believe that, in addition to just cognitive skills, relaxation was most successful when it included supportive cognitive structures, such as those found in personal philosophies of life.
Now, his research has further indicated that relaxation is composed of four separate effects: 1) the initial evocation of the relaxation response, which is purely physiological (which accounts for only 5% of the variance of relaxation); 2) tension release, the combination of physiological relaxation plus positive thoughts and feelings (as when one describes oneself as limp, melted, soothed, peaceful, calm); 3) disengagement, which is an attentional effect, creating the sensation of being distant, detached, forgetful, and becoming less aware of the world; and 4) engagement, opening up to and becoming more aware of the world, but in a passive way.
He has further operationally refined engagement by defining it as an advanced level of relaxation, having four subcategories. The first is engaged awareness, feeling aware, clear, focused, strengthened, and energized. This can be attained through yoga and breathing. The second is engaged prayerfulness, being open not just to the world, but to a greater world, in the sense of feeling reverent, spiritual, or selfless. Meditation is the key to attainment here. Third is engaged joyfulness, meaning a rainbow of feelings (feeling simultaneously loving, thankful, inspired, warm, healed, and infinite.) (He suggests that joyfulness accounts for 40% of the variance of relaxation, and further, that while progressive relaxation does not evoke it, yoga, breathing, and meditation do). Finally, the final subcategory he defines as mystery, the experience of mystical feelings. He claims that initially he did not have enough subjects to measure this variable, that it was identified only by a small statistical effect, and that more study will be needed in the future to confirm it.
In addition to his empirical research, Smith has also developed an applied program. Here, he demystifies meditation, takes it out of its Asian context, and packages it as a training course that covers all the generic forms one can find in both Eastern and Western contemplative traditions, making meditation accessible to the common reader.
The significance of work by such researchers should not be underestimated. Programs such as these, the new cognitive-behaviorists believe, have greater potential for connecting traditional systems of Asian psychology with basic science than the more experiential approaches of humanistic or transpersonal psychotherapy. At the same time, interest in the subject by cognitive-behaviorists indicates the extent to which meditation has penetrated into the mainstream of American academic psychology as a respectable research subject.
Health Psychology and Complementary Medicine
Another important development in the field of meditation research has been alternative or complementary medicine. The historical evolution of the alternative medicine movement in the United States is long and too detailed to go into here. However, the main point can still be made that beginning in the 1960s and '70s, with the emergence of humanistic and transpersonal psychology as major forces in the human potential movement, the clinical practice of psychology and medicine began to fuse with a more sophisticated understanding of spiritual growth affecting certain key areas of modern culture. Now, after more than thirty years of personal and scientific experimentation with encounter groups, sensitivity training, psychedelics, somatic body work, parapsychology, guided imagery, yoga and meditation, biofeedback, hypnosis, and the like, alternative, or what is now being called complementary, medicine has emerged as an important challenge to Western reductionistic approaches to healing. Western medical science radically separates mind and body; complementary medicine unites them. Western medical science focuses on the physical symptom; complementary medicine looks at the symptom in the context of the whole person. Western medical science presumes that it is science that heals the sick; complementary medicine presumes that it is our manipulations that harness the patient's own resources for self-healing.
Complementary medicine, first of all, is now being defined by a new generation of scientist-practitioners. Those who before were but the mere students of their subject matter have now become both advanced meditators and recognized scientists capable of carrying off sophisticated research. We remember the pioneering work of Arthur Deikman and Charles Tart, done twenty-five years ago. Then we listened to Herbert Benson and Robert Keith Wallace. Then, in the 1970s and 1980s we heard from Dan Goleman, Daniel Brown, Jack Engler, Roger Walsh, Dean Shapiro, Elmer Green, Alyce Green, Michael Maliszewski, and Michael West, Today, we read Charles Alexander, Robert Orme-Johnson, Richard Freidman, Mark Epistein, and James Spira. [13] The trend began as a study of meditation as an isolated practice, whereas it is now viewed in the much larger context of complementary medicine and one's overall sense of health and well-being.
Complementary medicine is complementary because it interfaces with scientific and medical reductionism. It not only advocates a combined approach to healing, but also points to the importance of holistic change. One does not merely take a pill and then return to the same lifestyle that contributed to the creation of the problem in the first place. The practice of meditation, as well as the pursuit of other forms of complementary medicine, means an alteration of basic attitudes, dramatic and positive lifestyle changes, and perhaps even radical overthrow of old, habitual ways of perceiving on the part of the person being healed.
Complementary medicine also reflects the major social revolution now going on at the interface between popular middle-class culture and the delivery of clinical services in the health care professions. A recent issue of the Sharper Image Catalog, for instance, advertises tapes, videos, and books by physician Dean Ornish of the University of California at San Francisco, who has pioneered in the treatment of heart disease using diet, meditation, and lifestyle change. [14] The Wall Street Journal and Forbes have carried articles on the therapeutic application of meditation in corporate management for stress reduction, new product development, and team building, while the November 1994 issue of Psychology Today indicated that meditation practice is at the heart of a contemporary spiritual awakening affecting not only pastoral counseling within traditional Christianity but also a large segment of the psychotherapeutic counter-culture.
In addition, there is clear evidence for the rising influence of complementary medicine within other traditional institutions of modern culture. One sign has been the recent founding of the Office of Alternative Medicine within the National Institutes of Health. The OAM, working on a small budget, has commissioned individual investigators to run clinical trials on alternative therapies such as meditation that can be used in conjunction with traditional scientific medical practice. They have also recently established a network of research centers throughout the United States targeting specific experimental problems in complementary medicine. [15] Another sign has been the launching of several new journals, the most successful of which has been Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine. [16] Edited by Larry Dossey and Jeanne Achterberg and sponsored by the American Association of Critical Care Nurses, Alternative Therapies regularly reports on advances in meditation research in the context of other approaches such as homeopathy, vitamin therapy, hypnosis, biofeedback, and psychoneuroimmunology.
The Qi Gong database
In addition to the inclusion of meditation in complementary forms of medicine in the United States, research on various forms of meditation is also occurring in other parts of the world. The Qi Gong database, a report on one aspect of meditative practice in China, is made available through the East-West Center for the Healing Arts in California and was assembled by a team of researchers led by Kenneth M. Sancier. [17] It contains some one thousand abstracts of unpublished papers delivered at a series of international conferences on Qi Gong and traditional Chinese medicine held since the late 1980s in China. Paradoxically, the Chinese Communist government wants to promote traditional Chinese medicine to the world at the same time that it severely restricts the ability of Chinese researchers to communicate freely with other investigators. The bibliography is therefore valuable as one of the only large scale sources of information available on the practice of Chinese meditation techniques related to Qi Gong; at the same time it suffers from a certain lack of oxygen because the material is presented in a contextual vacuum which presumes that traditional Chinese medicine is automatically testable by Western scientific methods.
Qi Gong is the traditional Chinese practice of meditation upon the chi, or life force, which is believed to continuously circulate throughout the body and which regulates the daily and seasonal functioning of the person in dynamic relation to the environment over the entire life cycle. The internal form of Qi Gong can be practiced as a seated meditation, while its external aspect may take the form of different movement disciplines. Qi Gong is the mother of tai chi, for instance, the most familiar style of Chinese health movement known to the West.
The database clearly indicates that there is a continuously growing body of information on the positive clinical application of Qi Gong therapy. [18] However, to really appreciate the information presented requires a detailed knowledge of the Taoist philosophy of yin and yang and the five elements, a knowledge of acupuncture, acquaintance with the philosophy behind the important Chinese works a such as the Book of Songs and the Book of Changes, and a knowledge of the major classics in traditional Chinese medicine. Western scientific medical practitioners will therefore find it difficult to assess the clinical significance of unpublished studies presented only as abstracts and based on an epistemological system so radically different from the Western analytic tradition that the very frame of reference used in of many of the discussions will to them remain incomprehensible. For the knowledgeable researcher, however, the hermetically sealed quality of the research at least gives an internal consistency to the one type of meditation studied.
Yoga Research in India
Scientific research on yoga and meditation appears to be going on all over India, but only a fraction of this work makes its way into the Western scientific and medical literature. An effort has recently been made by the Yoga Biomedical Trust, a non-profit research organization in Cambridge, England, founded in 1983 to collate more of this normally unavailable information on yoga and meditation. [19] Principally, their bibliographic references have come from yoga centers, private collections, specialist publishers, and researchers themselves, in addition to scientific conferences held periodically in India, the Indian social science literature, and the international medical research literature, which includes references normally unavailable to Western investigators.
In the Trust's primary publication, the Yoga Research Bibliography: Scientific Studies on Yoga and Meditation (1989), Monro, Ghosh, and Kalish present over 1000 citations ranging from essay-commentaries to clinical applications and pure empirical research. Again, however, as with the Qi Gong database, the Yoga Research Bibliography will be appreciated most by individuals trained in scientific research who also have an extensive knowledge of the classical texts in yoga and the philosophy behind the techniques, as well as a detailed experiential knowledge of specific yogic practices and their Sanskrit names. Again, the trend is clearly toward a mounting body of evidence showing the efficacious use of yoga techniques and Hindu meditation practice in specific disorders such as hypertension, diabetes, cancer, cholesterol regulation, alcoholism, anxiety disorders, asthma, pain control, and obesity. As compared to studies in the Chinese database, the level of scientific expertise in various experimental studies on yoga and meditation is quite sophisticated by Western standards. There is a much more subtle empirical demonstration of the relation of brain states to mental states in this yoga literature by Indian researchers than has yet to be demonstrated by non-Indian researchers.
The International Meditation Bibliography, 1950-1982
The only work comparable to the present text is the International Meditation Bibliography, 1950-1982, authored by Howard Jarrell and commissioned by the American Theological Library Association. [20] Its linguistic breadth is somewhat larger, in that it contains articles in English, books in English and German, with some titles in French, Spanish, and Portuguese, and dissertations in both English and German. The total number of entries (just over 2,200) is also somewhat larger. There are 937 journal and magazine articles, all of which are briefly annotated, over 1000 books, 200 doctoral dissertations and master's theses, titles from 32 motion pictures and 93 recordings and a list of 32 societies and associations. In addition there is a title index, an author index, and a subject index.
The Transcendental Meditation people seem to have had more than a passing hand in creating it, as there is a eulogistic preface extolling the benefits of TM, although the editors may have been simply trying to reflect the fact that the majority of experimental studies reported up to 1983 involved TM techniques. The work also does not discriminate between trade literature and more scholarly, academic or scientific publications, but rather presents them all as part of the greater bibliography. The impression that gets reinforced, quite accurate in my historical opinion, is that in the United States, at least, the majority of interest in meditation has come from popular culture, rather than from the universities or the scientific establishment, which have remained largely reactive. [21]
The Historic Significance of Murphy and Donovan's Text
Murphy and Donovan have done the field of meditation research a valuable service on several fronts. Perhaps the most important of these has been to highlight the epistemological differences between those who meditate and those who do not as a crucial determinant of how and under what circumstances scientific research into this new subject can be conducted. They have also raised the issue of what a new science that takes meditation seriously might look like in the future. This issue is the same we have raised earlier: namely, how can the methods of science be applied to a subject whose full understanding may transform the very foundation upon which reductionistic science is based? Murphy and Donovan produced their first edition during a time when there was fast-growing and widespread cultural interest in the subject, but great resistance from the basic science community. They not only collated a vast wealth of information on scientific research when the subject of meditation was less acceptable than it is today, but they also emphasized the importance of meditation for understanding the larger issues of how we actualize our human potential. Now there has been a significant change in outlook and such issues are being taken more seriously by a younger generation of thoughtful leaders in modern culture. From an analysis of recent history, the Murphy and Donovan bibliography in its first edition contributed significantly toward advancing this discussion because it was a milestone that marked the current cultural revolution focusing on spirituality and higher consciousness. Two historical examples suggest this conclusion; the first was an episode that took place within the profession of psychology, while the second has occurred within the wider area of government-sponsored research in the medical sciences.
Psychologists Debate the Issues
Twenty years ago, the American Psychiatric Association recognized the need for controlled experimental research when it called for an in-depth study of different types of meditation and their positive effects on health (mentioning also that we should be investigating their potential "dangers"). [22] Then, just before the first edition of the Murphy and Donovan bibliography appeared in 1988, a significant exchange on the experimental evidence underlying certain claims about meditation took place in the pages of the American Psychologist, main organ of the American Psychological Association.
The controversy began in 1984 when David S. Holmes, a staunch behaviorist in the tradition of Pavlov, Watson, and Skinner, who was from the University of Kansas and who had studied a few Transcendental Meditation practitioners, challenged a large mass of previously published experimental literature by claiming that there was no evidence that meditation reduced somatic arousal (Holmes, 1984). Holmes came to this conclusion through a few studies of his own and through a review of the research literature. From this literature, however, he excluded consideration of all studies that were merely case reports and all those that involved subjects who had first acted as their own controls (within subjects designs) on the assumption that such research represented bad science. This left only studies which had used separate experimental and control groups. He then evaluated these remaining few and concluded that none showed meditation as producing a significant lowering of arousal different from simply resting.
A year and a half later, the editors of the American Psychologist devoted an entire section of their June 1985 issue to criticisms of Holmes' article, including responses from Holmes.
John Suler from Rider College maintained that on purely methodological grounds Holmes had invoked a fairy tale definition of psychology as an exact science in order to discount studies on meditation, and that Holmes had limited himself to studies on TM which were not generalizable to other types of meditation (Suler, 1985).
Michael West, from the University of Sheffield, England, researcher, practitioner, and author of a well known text on meditation, believed that Holmes did not look carefully enough at the research literature so that his conclusions were overgeneralized and unwarranted (West, 1985). Needed instead, West maintained, was a more complex discussion of evidence and more double-blind, randomly assigned experiments controlling for expectation and group differences. He believed that someone also needed to undertake longitudinal studies of meditators and a big picture needed to be constructed that included case reports and within subject designs.
Deane Shapiro, clinical psychologist, meditation practitioner, and researcher at the University of California, Irvine, who has been one of the key pioneers in the field, waded in and concluded that Holmes had not looked at all the literature, that what he had looked at he had completely misinterpreted, and that conclusions drawn from Holmes' experiments using laboratory subjects were not automatically generalizable to clinical populations anyway.
Ignoring Suler and West, Holmes replied only to Shapiro, since in all likelihood he saw him as the more formidable opponent (Holmes, 1985a). He asserted on grounds of scientific rigor that Shapiro's own review of the meditation literature, which Holmes himself had originally ignored, contained numerous errors. Further, he clearly stated that Shapiro did not know how to conduct or analyze scientific research.
Harvard cardiologist Herbert Benson and SUNY psychologist Robert Freidman, practitioners, teachers, and researchers of the relaxation response, then joined the chorus of voices. Benson and Freidman's point was that the relaxation response was common to all forms of relaxation, including rest and meditation, so that Holmes' distinction of meditation from rest was purely artificial (Benson and Freidman, 1985). Further, the trophotrophic response as a complex of opposite physiological reactions to the fight-flight reflex had been established in physiology since the time of Hess (et al., 1947; Hess, 1953)—for which Hess had received the Nobel Prize—and the relaxation response had been experimentally established in the medial literature as an extension of Hess's work. Benson and Freidman then pointed out other numerous errors in Holmes' work, suggesting not only that Holmes did not know his basic physiology, but also that he did not know how to conduct and interpret a scientific experiment.
Holmes (1985b) responded by implying in his opening paragraph that Benson and his colleagues did not know anything about meditation, physiology, or science, and then proceeded with an essay of some 3,000 words to deliver a barrage of rhetoric about what constitutes legitimate data in reductionistic science and what were the criteria for legitimate designs of various experiments in psychology, meanwhile having nothing much to say about meditation per se.
The final word was given in another issue of the American Psychologist a year later. This last comment that the editors permitted on Holmes was delivered by Jonathan C. Smith, cognitive-behaviorist and meditation and stress researcher from Roosevelt University (J.C. Smith, 1986a). Smith, theoretically in a reductionistic camp closer to Holmes than anyone else who had responded, maintained that the recent studies by Holmes on meditation and Roberts on biofeedback (see Roberts, 1985) that claimed no evidence for a reduction of somatic arousal were based on outdated assumptions concerning the nature of relaxation. Psychology had actually progressed from a 1950s definition of overt observable behavior as simply stimulus-response connections to a more sophisticated picture demonstrating control of mental and physiological operations. According to Smith's own model, both stress and relaxation were complex cognitive and interactive responses. Simply comparing meditation, biofeedback, and other relaxation techniques to each other is not sufficient; one must get at the extent to which each technique enhances the subject's skill at deploying attention in a focused, passive, and receptive way. Even so, Smith suspected we would then find that genuine relaxation is not necessarily always associated with changes in arousal. [23]
This exchange tells us that within psychology as an academic experimental discipline there has been significant movement from reductionistic modeling that does not even acknowledge the reality of consciousness—the position of the radical behaviorists who controlled much of the methodological dialogue in the discipline since J. B. Watson's infamous proclamation of 1913—to at least a consideration of those aspects of meditation that can be operationalized. It further suggests that scientists who are also practitioners are not only more active in cross-disciplinary research, but by the 1980s were ready to engage in discussions with their more reductionistic colleagues on issues of method and interpretation. Subsequently, history has shown that the discussion has not only moved out into the wider field of medical science, but continues to develop in the direction set not by the reductionists but by the scientist-practitioners of meditation.
Governmental Research and Medical Science
More recently, in this regard, an assessment of meditation has emerged in several statements made by investigating agencies of the United States government. Between 1988 and 1991, the National Research Council, in a project commissioned by the Army Research Institute, issued a series of findings on the assessment of techniques believed to enhance human performance. [24] These included, among numerous other topics, such approaches as self-help groups, subliminal tapes, and meditation. The overall conclusion of the investigators regarding the effect of meditation was widely disseminated in the public press as the official position of the NRC. Their assessment of the available scientific research led them to the conclusion that meditation seems to be no more effective than established relaxation techniques; and it was therefore unwarranted to attribute any special effects to meditation alone.
More than this, however, the overall tone of the entire research endeavor was negative and skeptical to begin with. Numerous criticisms emerged afterward of misinterpretation of data and false conclusions even from established experimentalists. As well, the analysis of the experimental literature on meditation was undertaken by two psychologists who had no expertise in the area of meditation research, although, somewhat ludicrously, they attempted to launch a definition and explanation of what they considered to be the different types of meditation/ They compared a few specific studies that had no basis for factual comparison according to the experimental standards they themselves had set, and they based their overall analysis of all experimental studies undertaken on meditation by reading a single outdated summary that had been commissioned some years earlier from a single researcher. To underscore the fact that their conclusions were based on a philosophical bias rather than basic research, they even included an epistemological coda admitting that to be the case. [25]
In October 1995, a more positive and forceful recommendation was made in a joint statement issued by agencies within the National Institutes of Health. The recommendation was based on the outcome of a major technology assessment conference that attempted to integrate behavioral and relaxation approaches into the treatment of chronic pain and insomnia. [26] One of the major interventions considered was that of meditation. The sponsoring agencies for this conference included The Office of Medical Applications of Research and the newly founded Office of Alternative Medicine. These groups were then backed by co-sponsoring agencies that included the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute of Dental Research, the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, the National Institute on Aging, The National Cancer Institute, the National Institute of Nursing Research, the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, and the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases. Combining meditation under the same heading as autogenic training and progressive muscle relaxation, and determining that these were deep rather then merely brief methods of standard relaxation therapy, the conference members concluded that "the evidence is strong for the effectiveness of this class of techniques in reducing chronic pain in a variety of medical conditions." [27] They recommended the commitment of funds to research trials that tested these combined forms of therapy and the integration of alternative medicine with traditional scientific medical practice.
Here again we have the classic differentiation between the attitudes of laboratory versus clinical researchers. Basic researchers believe that they are doing the real science and only what comes out of the laboratory should be applied to clinical situations. Clinicians, on the other hand, faced with the real live complexity of human problems, maintain that most of what comes out of basic science is done to prove some theory, while what they say they really need is data on concrete, workable interventions for immediate life situations. While there is a revolution now going on in the neurosciences affecting how basic scientists communicate with one another, a completely different revolution is going on at the level of clinical services, one that has deep roots in values and attitudes, lifestyle choices the patient alone can make, alternative forms of healing, and an appeal to the spiritual dimension of human experience. Consequently, the National Research Council has had its say on the scientific validity of studying meditation, which has now been superseded by the more recent conclusions of the National Institutes of Health.
As this brief overview indicates, in their first edition, Murphy and Donovan gave us a summary of meditation research that anticipated, among other trends, the rising influence of psychology in general medicine, the increasingly important role of beliefs and values in the healing process, the possibility of a new dialogue emerging between science and religion framed in terms of spiritual experience, and the potential impact that different models of consciousness might have on our understanding of character development. Presciently, as the current update suggests, these still seem to be rising trends for the future.