Contemplative Practices and Soteriological Epistemology:

­­Introduction

According to Odysseus Stone and Dan Zahavi’s view, recent articles like Michel Bitbol and Natalie Depraz’s conflate the therapeutic and soteriological orientation of mindfulness practices, which boils down to how we experience the world, with the philosophical orientation of Phenomenology that is specifically concerned with “the mind-world correlation and its theoretical implications.”^[1] Whatever similarities exist, they say, it would be more appropriate to compare Phenomenology not to modern mindfulness (as the most conspicuous example of Western contemplative practice) but Buddhist philosophy.^[2] Stone and Zahavi furthermore cite a whole cohort of authors they believe are guilty of this indiscretion, because they have treated the phenomenological method of epoché-reduction as either bracketing aside preoccupation with worldly affairs to attend to our subjective acts or bracketing our “theoretical baggage” to describe the objects of experience, reflecting a lax usage of the term “Phenomenology.”^[3] Accordingly, they argue against the idea that classical Phenomenology can be likened to a meditative technique like mindfulness, a practice of carefully attending to present-moment experience.^[4]

Yet, as I will go on to argue, soteriological traditions at large are no less concerned with the attainment of knowledge. Long-established practices, such as meditation, are held to lead not only to self-understanding but also to a direct understanding of the fundamental nature of reality itself—a knowing that is not first mediated by verbal schemes (that is, by the structuring influence of language itself), logical inference, or a posteriori conclusion drawn from objective observations.^[5] Since Stone and Zahavi defend the notion that canonical Phenomenology is concerned with the mind-world correlation and its implications for scientific theory, I therefore contend that contemplative practices are, in fact, commensurate with those aims. Pointing out there are ambiguities that currently exist in mindfulness literature does not invalidate the conclusion that phenomenological methodologies can be likened to a contemplative practice.

To make this argument, I draw upon my own experience in contemplative practice, having engaged in serious meditation practice for nearly two decades before I began my journey into academic philosophy—and indeed philosophical Phenomenology. I will also draw upon the experiential Phenomenology of Eugene Gendlin, his practices of Focusing and Thinking at the Edge (TAE) and the unique way he finds precise epistemic grounds for philosophical statements in “implicit” experience—that is to say, that we can attend to the felt dimension of knowing that functions in our verbal schemes and lived situations.^[6] Beyond the repurposed practices of modern mindfulness oriented toward Western therapeutic ends, I argue that mindfulness is a form of knowing that can be likened to prajñā or higher cognition (as it is sometimes translated), which traditional forms of contemplative practice like Buddhist mindfulness are said to cultivate.^[7] Deeply influenced by natural realism, modern Western thought maintains a hard conceptual division between internal experience and the external world. Yet, rooted in the Western philosophical tradition, Gendlin’s experiential Phenomenology demonstrates that prior to any such distinction, attending directly to the implicit dimension of experience not only recovers the contemplative element in Western philosophical thinking but also plays a direct role in the formation of clear concepts and scientifically amenable theories about the world.^[8] His approach, therefore, does not transgress Stone and Zahavi’s stipulation that philosophical Phenomenology should not be misconstrued as merely an exercise in describing the subjective qualities of lived experience.^[9]

I will summarize what Stone and Zahavi believe is problematic vis-à-vis the ambiguities in mindfulness discourse and its purported similarity to Phenomenology, outlining how they believe Phenomenology has been misconstrued as a result. I will then set out to recontextualize mindfulness, arguing there exists an unseen loss of context from soteriological traditions. I conclude that denying the contemplative element not only downplays its role in philosophical thinking but also forecloses prematurely the possibilities for acquiring knowledge. Indeed, given the roles that the implicit realm of experience plays in thinking itself, the contemplative element cannot but “carry forward” the phenomenological project.^[10]

The Problem with Modern Mindfulness

As Stone and Zahavi suggest, the most influential meeting point between contemplative practice and Phenomenology arose, arguably, from the “experiential turn” in the sciences of cognition.^[11] In an effort to move beyond the theoretical impasse of the hard problem of consciousness—which raises the question of how the subjective qualities of experience arise from physical brain processes—the experiential turn recognizes that the manifest fact of conscious experience inescapably entails the self-involvement of the observer as object of observation.^[12] Accordingly, since first-person experience is both the “subject” and “object” of observation, there can be no objective finding that stands entirely independent from experience itself. Consciousness, therefore, cannot be explained by cognitivist theories of brain functioning alone, because the approach presupposes objective knowledge of the world independent of observing subjects.^[13]

Exemplified by Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch’s seminal text The Embodied Mind, 4E cognition has emerged as the theoretical paradigm of the experiential turn, which resolved to take embodied first-person experience seriously.^[14] Notably, Varela’s landmark research initiative, neurophenomenology, calls for a disciplined first-person approach to the science of consciousness on the understanding that “lived experience is where we start and from where all must link back to, like a guiding thread.”^[15] The experiential turn has thus carved out a place for Phenomenology within the cognitive sciences; in particular, the work of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty stand as critical challenges to the cognitivist paradigm and its theoretical underpinnings. However, as Stone and Zahavi observe, The Embodied Mind argues that Buddhism not only shares in the same “noble goal of rigorously and faithfully investigating lived experience,” but also it has succeeded where Phenomenology has fallen short.^[16] It supplies us with detailed methodological instructions on phenomenological reflection, while Phenomenology is excessively laden with arcane theoretical impedimenta. Buddhist philosophy, therefore, has enjoyed the benefit of being grounded in the meditative practice of mindfulness in a way that Phenomenology can only aspire to.^[17]

Since the foregoing claim states that Buddhism, grounded in the meditative practice of mindfulness, shares in the phenomenological aim to investigate lived experience faithfully, The Embodied Mind makes the argument that phenomenologists like Husserl and Merleau-Ponty intuitively engaged in a natural kind of mindfulness: that it is only through such means that anyone “could ever have known about a normal mode of active involvement in the world in the first place.”^[18] In other words, so the claim runs, it is by virtue of the fact that their respective phenomenologies are akin to mindfulness that they arrived upon knowledge of the pervasively tacit belief in the world’s reality independent from one’s own experience, which Husserl refers to as the natural attitude.^[19] From this view, then, Husserl’s phenomenological method of epoché and reduction is routinely held to be comparable to the contemplative techniques of mindfulness.^[20] Paraphrasing Varela, Stone and Zahavi provide an explicit comparison from his work as an example: “Like mindfulness, the reduction entails ‘a sudden, transient suspension of beliefs about what is being examined, a putting in abeyance our habitual discourse about something, a bracketing of the pre-set structuring that constitutes the ubiquitous background of everyday life.’”^[21] Since such comparisons have gained wide acceptance, it is not uncommon to find that many scholars regard the “method of phenomenology [as] (or [as] analogous to) a kind of meditative practice or technique.”^[22] Herein lies the crux of their objection, contrary to the line of thought just discussed: meditative practices like mindfulness are neither necessary nor sufficient when it comes to the perspective of philosophical Phenomenology. The comparisons between mindfulness and Husserl’s method of epoché and reduction not only conflate the two but also have perpetuated certain ambiguities and misconceptions, losing sight of Phenomenology’s canonical raison d’être in the process. According to Stone and Zahavi, then, philosophical Phenomenology as inaugurated by Husserl cannot be likened to a contemplative practice like Buddhist-based mindfulness. Thus, the question is, what are these ambiguities, and from Stone and Zahavi’s view, in what way is philosophical Phenomenology different according to canonical tradition?

Stone and Zahavi raise the key issue that the comparison has amounted to the mistaken impression that the epoché-reduction either brackets our normal absorption in worldly affairs to attend to our subjective acts or it sets aside our “theoretical baggage” to describe the objects of perception.^[23] In other words, like mindfulness, it is primarily concerned with how we experience the world. Turning to the conceptual issues that plague mindfulness discourse, then, they rightly note that “mindfulness” is a contested term that can be broadly applied and that discussions on mindfulness do not make it clear if it refers to a state, a well-established trait, or something that we practice. In particular, many Buddhist scholars argue that the modern presentation of mindfulness does not accord well with its expositional roots, detailed in the Abhidharma canon of early Buddhism.^[24]

While the details of the forgoing issue run well beyond the scope of this paper, in essence it amounts to this: by repurposing mindfulness from its soteriological origins toward Western therapeutic ends, mindfulness is routinely described as a practice of nonjudgmental awareness centered in the present moment. One is then said to be placed in direct epistemic contact with the contents of experience, which functions therapeutically to liberate the practitioner from various forms of harmful conditioning.^[25] Typically, such sustained present-moment awareness is explained to involve focusing on an object of attention such as the breath, to which the practitioner returns when they notice they have become distracted, and progresses step by step to more complex objects like discursive thoughts. For some paths, mindfulness then culminates in “objectless meditation,” in which one dwells in choiceless awareness.^[26]

Here it is important to note, as Stone and Zahavi do, that secular mindfulness derives significantly from the neo-Theravāda revivalist movement of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries that swept through Myanmar and Sri Lanka and played an instrumental role in the rise of the Thai Forest tradition where Theravāda Buddhism is prominent.^[27] Whatever the merits of that movement were within the Theravāda tradition itself, neo-Theravāda formed in a crucible of historical forces as a response, in part, to the encroachment of the Western world.^[28] It emphasized rational thought, the practice of meditation, and rediscovery of canonical texts within a broad context of social reform, while deemphasizing “ritual, image worship, and ‘folk’ beliefs and practices.”^[29] Thus at the inception of modern mindfulness lies an interpretation of traditional Buddhist sources that is subject to controversy. For example, Stone and Zahavi cite Nyanaponika, a twentieth-century Theravādin monk, originally from Germany, who influenced a whole generation of mindfulness teachers.^[30] Nyanaponika describes mindfulness as the practice of bare attention—that is, an “unprejudiced receptivity” when attending to bare perceptual phenomena—an influential formulation that, as Stone and Zahavi note, reflects a modern neo-Theravāda reinterpretation, rather than a straightforward continuation of classical Buddhist sources.^[31]

Modern mindfulness thus seems to imply that the practice involves a kind of ethical neutrality because, troublingly, in the complete suspension of any form of evaluative judgment, nonjudgment, bare attention, and choiceless awareness appear to arrest the ability to distinguish between wholesome and unwholesome states of mind.^[32] Moreover, the prescription of nonjudgment also extends to perceptual objects, as Nyanaponika portrays mindfulness as an entirely nonjudgmental affair that eliminates all ascriptions that are alien to the bare appearance of objects as such in one’s perceptual field.^[33] Indeed, according to Nyanaponika, bare attention is a “scientific” form of observation because “it will show . . . the presentation of the comparatively bare sense data, and the subsequent phase of interpreting and evaluating them.”^[34] With this reading, if we take the foregoing at face value, modern explanations of mindfulness thus appear to entail the notion that mindful experience is some kind of “pure sense contact” with “bare perceptual objects” prior to any kind of thinking or memory; conceptual activity is not simply suspended but entirely subtracted.^[35]

Concomitantly, according to Stone and Zahavi, explanations of mindfulness as present-moment awareness routinely fail to distinguish between intentional object and intentional act. Thus, according to their view, different explanations of mindfulness often contradict each other, making it unclear what mindfulness practice actually entails: “Does mindfulness amount to a distinct type of (reflective or reflexive) self-presence or self-awareness, or does it rather afford a particular kind of presence of (or to) the experienced world?”^[36] They argue, for instance, that Nyanaponika sometimes uses “bare attention” to refer to a form of self-awareness or an awareness of one’s mental processes and at other times to refer to an awareness of perceived objects prior to all conceptualization.^[37] The same ambiguity pervades mindfulness literature at large; mindfulness is said to be “attention to the mind, body, and behavior,” yet at the same time traditional objects of mindfulness cover a whole gamut of mental, bodily, and external physical objects. Where Stone and Zahavi point out that modern mindfulness practices often involve things like Kabat-Zinn’s mindful raisin-eating exercise, designed to refine the senses by attending carefully to the qualitative experience, or help “get out of the head” to experience the world directly, traditional practice, as they put it, was instead about “renouncing the world.”^[38] Given the conceptual issues around bare attention and nonjudgmental awareness as well as the lack of distinction between intentional act and object, the upshot, then, from their view, is that there can be no clarity when it comes to comparing modern mindfulness with Phenomenology. Furthermore, Stone and Zahavi appear to suggest that where similar ambiguities are found in the discourse on Phenomenology itself, they can be traced to the experiential turn in which a cohort of authors, one way or another, wrongly liken classical Phenomenology to a meditative form of contemplative practice.^[39]

Phenomenology Compromised

As Stone and Zahavi argue, the foregoing ambiguities that characterize modern mindfulness literature are also evident within the discourse on Phenomenology itself, resulting in a widespread misconstrual of Phenomenology and Husserl’s method of epoché and reduction, which I will proceed to define in due course.^[40] Before doing so, however, I will first lay out the full extent of Stone and Zahavi’s complaints. Against that, I will then explain just what it is about canonical Phenomenology and the epoché-reduction they believe has slipped, perniciously, among the large cohort of scholars and researchers they cite.

The issue is one that Zahavi is particularly motivated to address: “It is even the case that there has been a recent outbreak of terminological hijacking. That is, some theorist will come up with an extraordinarily good term for something, and the next thing you know, other theorists are using that term to refer to something quite different.”^[41] While Zahavi and his coauthors argue their case across a number of articles, for present purposes the issue boils down to the claim that many philosophers, cognitive scientists, and psychologists have fallen into a lax usage of the term “phenomenology,” treating it synonymously with “phenomenality,” as if it were some property or attribute of mental states, or misconstruing Phenomenology as merely the descriptive investigation of lived experiences and their qualitative character.^[42] They point out, for example, that even the Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy describes the phenomenological epoché-reduction as a “‘radical, rigorous, and transformative technique’” that requires persistent application and meditation-like preparations such as stillness of body and mind and provisions against outside disturbances.^[43] A similar characterization is commonly intimated in Phenomenological Psychology, along with conflicting descriptions that either make inaccurate claims about the “phenomenological attitude” of Husserl’s method, suggesting that it is a “radical self-meditative process,” opening up the phenomena of the world to the researcher with a newfound sense of wonder, or in contrast to the natural attitude, focused as it is on the “objective world” of external objects like hammers and nails, that it involves turning “our attention to the subjective perspective as such,” meaning “bodily sensations, sense impressions, thoughts and feelings.”^[44] In other words, they have committed one or the other of the indiscretions identified; that the epoché-reduction means bracketing our theoretical baggage, setting it aside in order to reveal and describe worldly objects, or that it involves turning one’s attention away from worldly affairs to attend to our subjective acts.

On these misconceived readings, Husserl’s method is said to facilitate either a more immediate encounter with the world, or it is construed to mean opening to “the how” rather than “the what” of experience—a movement away from the objective world toward subjective experience. Thus, Stone and Zahavi claim, the same confusions that underlie the literature on modern mindfulness also run through much of the discourse on Phenomenology itself.^[45] In the confusion, therefore, an unwarranted conflation with mindfulness persists, assuming that the phenomenological epoché-reduction also involves a “nonjudgmental” attitude, described ambiguously either as attending directly to perceptual objects or establishing an openness to one’s subjective experience. And, furthermore, just like mindfulness, which preferences direct experience over abstract thinking, Phenomenology forgoes theoretical thought to return to “the things themselves.”^[46] If, however, an effort was made to clarify these ambiguities, such that we arrive at a more accurate picture of mindfulness and Phenomenology, would their claim that it is misguided to liken canonical Phenomenology to a meditative form of contemplative practice remain justified? Before answering that question, let us now turn to how Stone and Zahavi defend their position on philosophical Phenomenology and why they claim it is different.

The essence of their objection begins, first, with the allegation that the epoché-reduction has become reified as something fundamental to the method of Phenomenology. Having reified it, among those who have misinterpreted Phenomenology in the foregoing ways, there is a great tendency to read the epoché-reduction back into the bulk of Husserl’s early work and indeed classical Phenomenology at large.^[47] Classically speaking, when Husserl issued his canonical statement, “back to the things themselves,” the epoché-reduction was never mentioned. Likewise, as Stone and Zahavi note, it barely rates mention in the works of other classical phenomenologists like Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Heidegger.^[48] Reading back the epoché-reduction into such works has not only served to diminish the specific contribution that it makes in Husserl’s later work, but also Stone and Zahavi note that,

The claim that we need the epoché in order to divert our attention from the objects of experience towards experiential acts is mistaken not only in suggesting that the phenomenological attitude should involve such a reorientation, but also in proposing that something like the epoché should be needed for one.^[49]

At most, according to Stone and Zahavi, Husserl insists in his early work that we must attend carefully to phenomena and refrain from getting sidetracked by our theoretical prejudices.^[50] Phenomenology, then, is a specific attitude of philosophical thinking, quite different from the construction of some theoretical system or set of metaphysical propositions; that is, it is not a deductive or speculative exercise but a descriptive one that aims at intuiting essences, “disregarding the here and now of objects” to “focus on their essential features.”^[51] Just like others who have carefully studied inner experience, such as Franz Brentano or William James, in his early investigations Husserl gave sophisticated descriptions and analyses of intentional experiences without ever mentioning the specific method of epoché and reduction.^[52] Far from necessitating such a technique, Stone and Zahavi argue, Phenomenology does not need the “epoché in order to bracket any preconceived beliefs, opinions, or notions about the phenomenon being researched” and believing so amounts to conflating it with a more general rejection of speculative and explanatory formulae in favor of description.^[53]

Thus, having laid bare the problematic situation, they object to the misguided implication that the epoché-reduction merely highlights the importance of attending to phenomena as encountered in direct experience.^[54] That is, contrary to unexamined notions such as adopting a “nonjudgmental” attitude or “openness” to things, we come to their essential point, which is that there are pivotal philosophical reasons that they believe are being neglected, reasons that motivated Husserl when he introduced the epoché-reduction,

If philosophy is to address a number of fundamental epistemological and metaphysical questions in a sufficiently radical manner, it has to subject what Husserl calls the natural attitude to a critical examination. In the natural attitude, we take it for granted that the world we encounter in experience exists independently of us. But this natural realism cannot simply be presupposed if we want to do serious philosophy. What we need to do, according to Husserl, is to suspend our basic and deep-seated confidence in the mind-independent existence of that world.^[55]

Granting this to be the case, we are now better positioned to understand that, first, as Stone and Zahavi insist, the purpose of the epoché introduced by Husserl in his later work is to suspend our naive assent to worldly reality that is otherwise our most “natural” starting point, paying attention to “the how” and “as what” the objects of experience are given.^[56] Thus, in the application of Husserl’s epoché, the phenomenological attitude invoked focuses not on subjective acts alone—“whether those acts are taken to be located in a private inner sphere, or rather taken to be embodied, embedded, and extended”—but instead observes the way in which the world shows up for the observer.^[57] On this account, therefore, Phenomenology proper involves a twofold attention: on the experiencing in which objects are given, and objects precisely as they are experienced. In so doing, the intentional acts and experiential structures by which the appearance of objects are constituted are disclosed and analyzed.^[58] Next, the methodological element of reduction means engaging in a thoroughgoing analysis of the correlation between mind and world, turning back systematically from the natural attitude to its concrete foundation in the lived reality of subjective experience.^[59] Hence, quite unlike the perfunctory and confused image of Phenomenology that is now taken for granted, it is argued that canonical Phenomenology aims to arrive at precise knowledge of reality and objectivity—not just theories about the structure of subjectivity, nor some theory concerned with how we experience the world. That is to say, “the proper theme of Phenomenology is the mind-world dyad.”^[60]

According to Stone and Zahavi’s view, a wide cohort of philosophers, cognitive scientists, and psychological researchers have therefore perpetuated a grave misunderstanding of Phenomenology, particularly when making hasty comparisons between modern mindfulness and the epoché-reduction. It is on this point that Stone and Zahavi single out Bitbol and Depraz, given their respective comparisons of Buddhist-based mindfulness with Phenomenology, claiming that Phenomenology can be likened to a meditative form of contemplative practice.^[61] Although I will land in broad agreement with Bitbol and Depraz, I am not going to defend their claims specifically. Instead, I will discuss where I believe the ambiguities really lie, particularly with regard to the secular modern appropriation of mindfulness, replying to the question stated above: if certain ambiguities are rectified, is it still valid to claim that philosophical Phenomenology is entirely unlike a contemplative practice like mindfulness?

Recontextualizing Contemplative Practice

Where comparisons between mindfulness and Phenomenology are concerned, the issue in large part turns upon a major blind spot: an unseen loss of context in the secular modern uptake and appropriation of contemplative practices—of which Buddhist mindfulness has become the chief flag-bearer—from the soteriological traditions. This is a situation very much related to Husserl’s critical concern with the natural attitude and the revisionist tendency of mind that deeply inheres in it—that is, the theoretic attitude of scientific natural realism that has firmly established itself as the “unquestioned tradition” of our age, tacitly fortifying the natural attitude by strictly admitting only the results it produces.^[62]

I will, then, recontextualize the discussion to say that when considered from within their originating soteriological milieu, contemplative practices at large are not merely concerned with how we experience reality, as Stone and Zahavi impute; they are also no less concerned with knowledge of the world. Quite apart from metaphysical speculation or an objective analysis of empirical findings, contemplative paths have spoken of attaining direct knowledge of the fundamental nature of reality itself across different traditions East and West.^[63] As such, it could be said that traditions of contemplative practice are also epistemologies, ways of knowing. Only this knowledge is not to be found defined by concepts and language, but in line with Eugene Gendlin’s work—distinctively grounded in the Western philosophical tradition—living in and beyond them.^[64] Indeed, highlighting this fact serves not only to disabuse such presumptions about Buddhist meditation-based practices but also helps bring to light and resuscitate the contemplative spark that has always been native to the practice of philosophy in the West.^[65] The form of knowing that I will come to speak of, then, is not the kind routinely supposed where ordinary notions of cognition are concerned, as we will see. It is therefore something of a leap to claim that because there are ambiguities in the discussion of mindfulness, that contemplative methodologies are only concerned with how we experience the world and hence that philosophical Phenomenology cannot be likened to a form of contemplative practice. On the contrary, the contemplative element cannot but carry the phenomenological project forward.^[66]

Stone and Zahavi are quite right to claim mindfulness discourse suffers from certain ambiguities. They are also right insofar that it has occasioned many one-sided explanations of Phenomenology. In their view, Phenomenology does not share in the “noble goal of rigorously and faithfully investigating lived experience,” as claimed by The Embodied Mind.^[67] Rather, it is a philosophical enterprise that aims at direct analysis of the mind-world correlation and resultant implications for objectivity and scientific theory.^[68] Mindfulness, they argue, is a term too loosely applied, from “mindfully” savoring the taste of raisins to paying meditative attention upon the mind, body, and behavior.^[69] Moreover, despite claiming Phenomenology and mindfulness are kindred disciplines, Bitbol nevertheless states that modern mindfulness practice is primarily therapeutic.^[70] As such, it remains unclear whether mindfulness refers to awareness of intentional acts or objects, or if it is meant to mean a state, something one practices, or a long-term trait.^[71]

Although Stone and Zahavi do indeed identify ambiguities in the modern uptake of mindfulness, their objections also betray similar modern prejudices and confusion. Thus, here I would like to bring in the first element of recontextualization. Traditional Buddhist mindfulness—that is, sati or smṛti (Pāli and Sanskrit, respectively)—is a form of meditation. Meditation (or, indeed, contemplation) itself is a translation of the Sanskrit dhyāna.^[72] In the same way we cannot say one practices “being asleep,” strictly speaking dhyāna is not simply something practiced. Of course, when practicing the right observances one can “do” the falling asleep well (or not), yet at the same time to be asleep is to be in a certain state. Similarly, dhyāna is to be in a certain state, yet if one practices (the right observances), one can become more adept at being in it consistently. Indeed, in this context, with practice the consistency can be such that one begins to live in meditation. Experientially, then, one’s being, one’s acting, and the objects toward which one acts are no longer distinct in the customary sense that accompanies the natural attitude. In terms compatible with the phenomenological reduction, they are all at hand, potentially, to a thematized analysis in an unbroken awareness.

As Stone and Zahavi note, “mindfulness” is not the only, nor arguably even the best, translation of sati or smṛti.^[73] Drawing extensively from Dreyfus’s discussion on the true “semantic range” of the terms, they rightly point out that it also means “to remember” in the sense of “bearing in mind.”^[74] While not incorrect, it again instances the modern revisionist tendency, tacitly appropriating the sense that “bearing in mind” can be made into familiar conceptual territory. It is likened simply to a mental mnemonic employed in mindfulness to, for example, “remember the breath,” yet effaces the living depth that remembering can take on in practice: recovering, so to speak, a whole dimension of one’s being and remaining established in it through meditation.^[75] That is to say, remembering can be the self-disclosure of an ever-present dimension of experience, re-cognized quite literally as something forgotten, caught up as we normally are in the world of everyday things. It is thus not unlike Husserl’s recognition of forgetfulness that marks the natural attitude, such that, as Bitbol notes, the acts of the epoché and reduction are as if “against nature.”^[76]

It is thereby prima facie correct, as Stone and Zahavi contend, that commonplace descriptions of mindfulness as the practice of “bare attention” or “nonjudgmental” awareness of the “present moment” are not entirely accurate.^[77] Taken as practice instruction, such descriptions simply mean sustaining moment-to-moment attention, while systematically refraining from reacting habitually to arising phenomena, whether thoughts, feelings, or sensory events. In this sense, the procedure is not unlike a formalized application of the phenomenological injunction not to allow oneself to be sidetracked by preconceived prejudices. But problems do indeed arise if one intends or construes such descriptions to be metaphysical claims, as it appears influential commentators on modern mindfulness like Kabat-Zinn and Nyanaponika have done, in which “bare attention” is taken to mean cessation of all conceptual ascriptions that are alien to objects of perception.^[78] In so doing, the practice of mindfulness thus amounts to a “pure sense contact” with “bare sense data,” as if all conceptual activity is entirely subtracted.^[79]

Similarly, Bitbol argues that just like modern mindfulness, the epoché not only suspends the elaboration of judgments but also “semantic functioning” itself.^[80] All ascription of meaning that occurs in our mental and verbal activities, he says, ejects us from holding attention in the present: “Thus, by suspending any semantic function, both the epoché and mindfulness inactivate the usual rush of mental life towards the future, towards something else than what is flatly here.”^[81] Yet, as Stone and Zahavi object, if, in Bitbol’s comparison of the epoché to mindfulness meaning itself is entirely bracketed away, on this view no avenue exists for the epoché-reduction to functionally attain knowledge on the intentional structures of experience. The epoché is, rather, a move that facilitates critical reflection on the meanings that are vital to the life of intentionality itself, and as such, its constituting role in the mind-world dyad.^[82] If “bare attention” and “nonjudgment” is what mindfulness amounts to, there is something amiss when comparing it to Phenomenology. Furthermore, as noted earlier, if modern mindfulness really is just a matter of “bare attention” and “nonjudgment” concerned only with the “present moment,” then it seems to lack the ability to distinguish wholesome from unwholesome states of mind.^[83] However, there is an underlying issue both with the foregoing descriptions of mindfulness and Stone and Zahavi’s objection.

Indeed, the idea that in mindfulness we are subtracting conceptual activity, or that we are removing the “filter” of our beliefs and assumptions, such that there remains only “pure sense contact” with the “bare sense data” of perceptual objects, recapitulates all too easily the naturalist assumption that cognition is an ideal facsimile superadded to phenomena, perpetuating the notion that “subjective experience” is some interior counterpart, an internal replica that merely copies the objective world “out there.”^[84] It is little wonder, then, that Stone and Zahavi are motivated to defend Phenomenology proper, belaboring the point that it is precisely this form of natural realism that must be suspended, gleaning from such descriptions the idea that mindfulness practice is only concerned with how we experience the world.^[85]

On this decidedly naturalistic understanding of modern mindfulness, the epistemological conundrum of how “internal” cognition matches the “external” objects of perception is inadvertently re-created.^[86] It blindly conflates the fact that for there to be an ignition point for cognition at all—cognition must grasp something other than itself that exists before it begins—with presupposed knowledge of what that something is.^[87] That is, the naturalistic view cannot but presuppose an act of cognition. Whatever that realm is that stands before our cognition sets to work cannot be the product of cognition, as if concept formation were something predetermined by conceptual relations before any such relation is derived or symbolized.^[88] Such a realm, then, must be “quite untouched by the activity of thinking,” and therefore entirely free of all predication, admitting no distinction that derives already from knowledge—including subject and object, spatial location and point in time, cause and effect, or the perceptual notion of “pure sense contact” with “bare sense data”—because all such distinctions are already mediated by cognition.^[89] Since, however, the starting point for cognition can only be something that lies outside its activity, if experience were entirely devoid of this realm, the question of knowing anything at all would not arise.^[90] As Gendlin states, because distinctions do not “march by themselves,” all thoughts and distinctions thus point beyond their own formulation toward the living necessity for this realm implicit in experience—prior to and still after any distinction we make.^[91] In Bitbol’s discussion of suspended semantic function, then, practitioners of mindfulness who encounter the disconcerting experience of meaninglessness, are indeed at an intermediary stage.^[92] In contemplative practices, one suspends the reflexive mental habit of rote meaning-ascription, often tied up in the “desire for future horizons.”^[93] However, this does not eliminate all meaning altogether. In the felt experience of meaninglessness, re-cognition of this feeling as “mere feeling,” as Bitbol describes it,^[94] is not without meaning. It is indicative of a form of knowing quite unfamiliar to ordinary cognition, because it is not a thought-concept or the result of rational deliberation.

Thus, while it is possible in contemplative practice to lose all epistemic purchase in a “peak experience” or “peak state,” wherein all desire including the desire for knowledge dissolves, Bitbol also alludes to a new form of “participatory” knowledge that becomes accessible upon such existential openings.^[95] As Dreyfus writes, according to Nāgasena’s dialogue in The Questions of King Milinda, sati also entails the cultivation of sampajañña (saṃprajanya in Sanskrit), which he translates as “clear comprehension,” in other words, a precise form of awareness that is intimately related to a state of immediate discernment called saṃprajñā.^[96] In contemporary meditation research it is more commonly referred to as meta-awareness. The Sanskrit prajñā is an important term in Buddhism at large, denoting real wisdom, direct intuitive insight, or intelligence beyond ordinary conceptual deliberation. Bitbol describes prajñā as deep knowledge by acquaintance or a gnosis in which the soteriological dimension of knowledge is intrinsic to its epistemology.^[97] Crucially, prajñā cannot be understood as the mere reorganization of judgments, but a form of discernment that opens beyond the very framework within which judgements ordinarily operate. Yet, in their attempt to argue that mindfulness is not some nonjudgmental affair as modern descriptions would have it, Stone and Zahavi conclude that traditional Buddhist mindfulness simply replaces old judgments for a “new set of evaluations” according to “theoretically-informed discriminations.”^[98] In so doing, they effectively assimilate prajñā to the domain of rational judgement and conceptual evaluation. Their construal thus narrows the semantic range of the term and overlooks what is most significant in Buddhist usage: prajñā denotes a direct, nondiscursive insight, not a new framework of theoretical judgments. Stone and Zahavi therefore entirely miss the significance of that, implicit in all experience, to which saṃprajanya points. While, clearly, far from well understood in the Western appropriation of mindfulness practice, becoming directly acquainted with that—the doorway to the soteriological dimension of experience inherent to contemplative traditions at large—is, in fact, the therapeutic element that modern mindfulness attempts to achieve.

The issue is symptomatic of the Western uptake of Buddhism, where countless misunderstandings have arisen from the attempt to equate Sanskrit (or Pāli) terms with English words that inaccurately or only partly render their full scope of meaning: a symptom of the theoretic attitude of naturalism and its revisionist tendency of thought. There is, rather, a whole register of meanings that may operate in any given usage within their originating milieu. As such, one is usually better served by learning key terms and gradually absorbing their semantic depth. While Dreyfus’ “clear comprehension” or “meta-awareness” are serviceable translations—contrary to Stone and Zahavi—it must be emphasized that these terms cannot be reduced to a set of rational judgments in any sense normally familiar to modern thinking. Despite Bitbol’s discussion on complete meaning suspension, he nevertheless alludes to the fact that in “letting go” of the mind’s rote activity in full acceptance, a new form of knowing or “meta-feeling” arises in which one may see “the crucial issues of existence answered without words, and even without asking them.”^[99] Thus, although seldom used, another translation of prajñā could easily be higher cognition.

This sense of higher cognition finds a direct analogue in Gendlin’s notion of the felt sense.^[100] Like prajñā, it is neither the product of rational deliberation or rote thought, nor reducible to sense impression or emotion, but an implicit, pre-articulated understanding of our lived situations—one that may invite and orient articulation, yet is more demandingly precise than any articulated formulation that might follow, and never exhausted by them.^[101] In this respect, Gendlin provides a crucial corrective to accounts such as Stone and Zahavi’s: what they construe as the replacement of old judgements with a “new set of evaluations” is better understood as the unfolding of an experiential knowing that both precedes and grounds judgment altogether. To assimilate prajñā to the domain of rational evaluation is to overlook precisely this dimension of discernment, regarded by contemplative traditions as transformative, and, as we shall see in the next section, shown by Gendlin to be intrinsic to the very experience of meaning itself. Read in these terms, the significance of prajñā is neither the suspension nor reorganization of judgment, but the opening of a mode of knowing that issues directly from encounter, not calculation—precisely the epistemic register Bitbol has in view, and which discloses the soteriological depth of experience itself.

While right that ambiguities exist in mindfulness discourse, Stone and Zahavi are hampered by a similar case of missing context and hasty interpretation in their argument for their claim. Just like Phenomenology, contemplative traditions at large are no less concerned with cultivating knowledge. Nevertheless, Stone and Zahavi may still contend that despite what contemplative traditions claim, none of this changes the fact that contemplative practices are primarily concerned with how we experience the world. They are thus unlike philosophical Phenomenology and its aim to analyze the mind-world correlation in a way amenable to scientific theory. According to their view, therefore, contemplative practice is neither necessary nor sufficient to being a good phenomenological philosopher.

This, indeed, is the essence of their objection to Depraz’s detailed comparison of the epoché-reduction to Chögyam Trungpa’s idiosyncratic presentation of Shamatha-Vipashyana forms of meditation, couched within the Kagyü lineage of Tibetan Buddhism.^[102] While she claims that Trungpa’s description of the practice aligns closely with Husserl’s exhortation to “return to the things themselves,” Stone and Zahavi conclude that her comparison highlights differences rather than similarities. According to their view, this is so because her description and comparison of both promotes a one-sided awareness of intentional acts and hence a one-sided understanding of Phenomenology.^[103] While Stone and Zahavi’s criticism indeed holds in cases where the twofold nature of Husserl’s phenomenological attitude has been entirely overlooked by those who have assumed it focuses only on “sense impressions, thoughts and feelings,” neither Bitbol nor Depraz can be accused of making this error.^[104]

The work of both authors is situated within the experiential turn and Varela’s neurophenomenological approach, wherein concern for the “mind-world dyad” and detailed analyses of the correlations therein lies at the genetic root of neurophenomenology’s epistemic program. Contrary to Stone and Zahavi’s assertion that its goal to rigorously investigate lived experience stands at odds with canonical Phenomenology, the neurophenomenological approach enlarges the epistemic circle of Husserl’s reduction across an intersubjective community of researchers, to include a thematic awareness of objectivity in the cognitive sciences. As Varela states quite plainly, the point of neurophenomenology is not to conduct a scholastic exegesis of Husserl.^[105] Neither is the incorporation of Buddhist contemplative techniques intended to be something imposed upon the practice of Phenomenology, as Stone and Zahavi fear. Instead, the aim behind enriching the contemplative dimension of phenomenological inquiry is to realize Husserl’s aspiration of founding a new approach to science on experiential ground. To that end, neurophenomenology moves counter to scientific naturalism toward a “phenomenologization of nature,” such that the naturalist theoretic attitude may be led back to the experiential ground that is its originating starting point.^[106] It is inaccurate to impute, therefore, on the basis that the experiential turn makes a close comparison between contemplative practices and Phenomenology, that its descriptive research activities tacitly involve a metaphysical division between lived experience and the world.

Having addressed the apparent metaphysical picture elicited by the assumptions of “bare attention” and “pure sense contact”—an issue that Stone and Zahavi raise—I pointed to the living necessity for a realm implicit in experience, functioning in the kind of knowledge toward which contemplative practices aim, standing before explicit distinctions about the world are made. Drawing further from Gendlin, I will have more to say on this point. I will also address the objection that the experiential turn has read the epoché-reduction back into Husserl’s early philosophy.^[107] For now, having taken steps to clarify ambiguities and point out where Stone and Zahavi’s assessment has fallen short, it is worth noting that leaping from the claim that there are ambiguities in mindfulness discourse to the conclusion that Phenomenology cannot be likened to a meditative form of contemplative practice is not a consistent argument.

Gendlin’s Experiential Phenomenology

For Stone and Zahavi, in its misconstrued comparison to mindfulness, the experiential turn has treated the epoché-reduction as if it were a contemplative practice fundamental to phenomenological methodology—despite the fact that it was not part of Husserl’s early work, nor, they observe, substantially discussed in the works of other classical phenomenologists, like Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Heidegger.^[108] As such they contend one does not need the epoché to adopt the phenomenological attitude, nor does it necessarily involve such a reorientation from “the objects of experience towards experiential acts.”^[109] Only in Husserl’s later work is the epoché introduced for the specific philosophical reason of suspending our habitual confidence in a mind-independent reality.^[110] If, however, from the previous section, we take into account that contemplative practices like Buddhist mindfulness are no less concerned with knowledge, not only does this position seem to foreclose prematurely on the possibilities for knowledge commensurate with the aims of Phenomenology, but also it suggests that Husserl arrived upon the epoché as if it were an entirely separate affair.

As Stone and Zahavi quote, in Logical Investigations Husserl states in no uncertain terms that we cannot rest content with “mere words,” meanings that are remote from the “things themselves.”^[111] However, how does one move beyond the remote meaning of mere words, if not in some way neutralizing the sway they hold over our thinking? Turning to Gendlin for answer, he observes in Logical Investigations that Husserl finds that our use of language is guided by an experiential sense for meaning that “fills” the verbalized sound patterns we articulate and perceive (otherwise empty if we do not know the language).^[112] There is therefore an inherent connection between experience, language, and the situation in which we use it. Furthermore, words in themselves are already generalizations, though we do not merely use them in general, but rather in particular situations that supply the lived context for their meaning, which is always more intricate than verbal schemes alone.^[113] Husserl thus understood that no verbal scheme, or framework of concepts alone, can fully capture the world we experience.^[114] This notwithstanding, Husserl was met with an impasse seemingly impossible to surmount: he wished to examine and describe the essential structures of experience that constitute how the world shows up without imposing the conceptual patterning that “mere words” bring. Yet the activities of examining and verbally describing inherently entail conceptual patterns.^[115] Thus Gendlin asks: “Could he claim that his distinctions and organizing parameters were themselves “the” structure of experience?”^[116] Since other phenomenologists meeting the same difficulty set out the structures differently, clearly we cannot grant this claim, neither to Husserl nor the other phenomenologists.^[117] Nevertheless, when Husserl bracketed theoretical questions concerning existents in the phenomenological attitude, explicated later as the epoché, he finds what he would come to call “the whole ‘life-world’ implicit in experience,” precisely the domain of experience that supplies and “fills” the meanings we verbalize in situations.^[118]

As we saw in the previous section, thoughts and distinctions thus point beyond their own formulation toward an implicit realm of experience, always “there” prior to and still after any distinction we make, including the distinctions we draw about the nature of the world.^[119] Today, however, we are taught that the only theoretic attitude for critical and scientific thought is one in which we must distance ourselves from experienced phenomena to obtain an “objective” perspective, to reduce, measure, and explain empirically observable things.^[120] Given the manifest predominance of natural realism and its habitual form of thought, apart from a small handful of phenomenologists, expecting others to simply adopt “the phenomenological attitude” is not enough to bring this implicit realm to light for us—the need for explicating a methodological practice is therefore all the more vital. Not only is it important for the handle it can provide upon our own thinking and experiencing but also because the implicit realm of experience inherently involves the world. Phenomenological methods such as the epoché-reduction are thus every bit as contemplative in character, because they require us to be attentive to that which remains ever unformulated, yet “fills” every formulation we make. Stone and Zahavi’s claim that “if one is really interested in similarities between phenomenology and Buddhism, the right approach would on our view involve comparing phenomenology and Buddhist philosophy” oddly suggests that neither Phenomenology nor Buddhist philosophy are grounded in the experiential practices from which their formulations derive.^[121] Not only does the attempt to excise methodology from the discussion pretend that it is only legitimate to compare theoretical results—as if the formulations of phenomenological inquiry are wholly separable from its practices and procedures—but it also ignores that Stone and Zahavi are in effect discussing methodology.

We thus arrive again at the factor of self-transformation, a prerequisite, as it were, for one to arrive upon knowledge of the whole of reality in contemplative traditions. Since Phenomenology demands that the researcher relinquish their assumed position of uninvolved thinker-observer, the same thus holds for the phenomenologist—a move that runs completely counter to the prevailing scientific attitude.^[122] But, as Husserl himself reflects,

Perhaps it will even become manifest that the total phenomenological attitude and the epoché belonging to it are destined in essence to effect, at first, a complete personal transformation, comparable in the beginning to a religious conversion, which then, however, over and above this, bears within itself the significance of the greatest existential transformation which is assigned as a task to mankind as such.^[123]

Nevertheless, in philosophy it has long seemed impossible to think and say what is more than forms, distinctions, or verbal schemes.^[124] Since examining experience inherently involves conceptual formulation, the aforementioned impasse that confronted Husserl and Phenomenology at large still stands. Phenomena, Gendlin states, do not simply lie in wait “nicely sorted into essence-piles” for formulations to pick them out, yet neither can we say our formulations are constitutive of phenomena; both analytic and constructivist assumptions are far too general.^[125] Instead, he says, we can study the formulation process itself to explicate how, specifically, phenomena are affected by a given formulation and differently with another by carefully drawing out and elaborating what happens when we think with and about the roles of experiencing that obtain in the very thinking:^[126] “This philosophy is therefore constantly reflexive. It can say what it says only as what it talks about also functions in the very saying. And since it tells how the experiential side always exceeds the concepts, this also happens in the concepts right here.”^[127]

When we enter into how the “more-than-forms” functions, we can engage it deliberately, opening up fresh avenues for thinking that would otherwise not exist, unlocking “nothing less than a whole new power of human thinking.”^[128] In other words, we unlock nothing less than the higher cognition toward which prajñā points. This, of course, implies a methodology that indeed upends today’s predominant theoretic attitude, and thus a requisite process of transformation in one’s thinking. Not only does it affect the detached mode of observer-thinker characteristic of the natural sciences, but also the human and social sciences, where direct reference to experienced meanings is routinely hidden under clichéd labels, externally observed empirical findings, or theoretical constructs, losing all touch with the experiential basis of thinking.^[129] Where “anxiety” refers to initially experienced feelings, for instance, current scientific and social science methodologies reduce them to measurable responses, such as test performance and physiological markers, or theoretical constructs purporting to explain them, such as “repressed unconscious material.” This is not to reject the utility of such scientific approaches but to observe that all too quickly they dispense with the initial experiential referent, then substitute it for empirical generalizations and constructs.^[130]

Not surprisingly, then, the genesis for what would later become the method of Focusing arose from studying the interactions between psychologist and client, seeking to answer the question: “Why doesn’t therapy succeed more often? Why does it so often fail to make a real difference in people’s lives? In the rarer cases when it does succeed, what is it that those patients and therapists do? What is it that the majority fail to do?”^[131] Gendlin observed that successful cases were not differentiated by the psychologist’s theoretical framework or what the patient said. Rather, it was how the patient spoke, conveying a certain internal act that sought not to explain or rationalize, but, unbidden, engaged directly with a particular bodily felt awareness—in other words, a felt sense.^[132] Having identified the act, Gendlin found that it was so easy to recognize that even undergraduate students were able to tell the difference when played recordings of taped therapy sessions.^[133] Now a full-fledged method practiced by hundreds all over the world, Focusing systematically harnesses this act in practice, cultivating our ability to work with a felt sense in a healing mode of self-inquiry.^[134]

As explained in the last section, a felt sense is not a sense impression, thought, or emotion but a pre-articulated knowing that is always more than can be said or formulated. As a certain bodily felt awareness, when we enter into a felt sense, the body is not first a physiological structure but “in fact part of a gigantic system of here and other places, now and other times, you and other people, in fact the whole universe. This sense of being bodily alive in a vast system is the body as it is felt from the inside.”^[135] In more philosophical terms, having a felt sense is epistemically “realistic” because the lived body is already an interaction happening in (and with) the world; indeed, because it is already happening, we can say the lived body is the interaction through and through,^[136]

For example, it is air-coming-into-lungs-and-blood-cells. We can view this event as air (coming in), or as (a coming into) lungs and body cells. Either way it is one event, viewed as [environment] or as body. Here we are not calling it “environment” because it is all around, but because it participates within the life process. And, “body” is not just the lungs, but the lungs expanding. Air coming in and lungs expanding cannot be separate. The point is that we need not split between the lungs and air.^[137]

Since the lived body and world are not first two things, but one experienced situation prior to and still after any distinction we make—always more intricate and, thereby, precise than verbal schemes or conceptual formulae alone—a felt sense is concretely always a world-involving interaction and therefore right about something. “So, of course we can learn something about reality from it.”^[138]

Regarding the recognition that thinking itself is never without a felt sense, utilizing the skill of Focusing, Thinking at the Edge is a step-by-step practice that facilitates the conceptualization of something new in any field of research (for instance, a theoretical issue that may at first be inchoately felt yet stubbornly unsayable).^[139] Developed from Gendlin’s classes on theory construction at the University of Chicago in the 1970s, Thinking at the Edge is a process that can lead to the formation of novel concepts and fresh thinking on long-standing theoretical problems.^[140] Accordingly, when theoretical thinking is approached as a contemplatively oriented practice, profound methodological implications follow: we must learn to “read” the felt dimension of experienced embodiment no less carefully and closely as we have become accustomed to reading a text.^[141]

We thus find that Gendlin’s experiential philosophy neither precludes the necessity for self-transformation toward which therapeutic and soteriological practices aim, nor is it antithetical to Stone and Zahavi’s demand that phenomenological philosophy must provide us with clear concepts and scientifically amenable theory. In fact, beyond current understandings of mindfulness and Husserl’s phenomenological method of epoché-reduction, the unique approach of Gendlin’s felt sense methodologies provides a direct experiential handle upon the soteriological dimension of knowing and clearly demonstrates its epistemic functioning in the formation of precise conceptual knowledge about the world.

Conclusion

Traditions of contemplative practice and Phenomenology both aim at the attainment of knowledge beyond mere words. We see that thoughts and distinctions point beyond their own formulation toward a realm free of all predication, implicit in experience. We need not suppose, therefore, there exists a preestablished objective limit to the possibilities for knowledge. Contrary to Stone and Zahavi’s denial, Gendlin’s experiential Phenomenology and the felt sense methodologies he developed, demonstrate that when we re-cognize the contemplative element in the practice of philosophy, we can attend to this implicit realm and allow it to function directly in our experience of thinking and thus in the process of conceptual formulation. In this way, disclosing the soteriological dimension of knowing cannot but carry the phenomenological project forward, putting beyond question any concern about how a contemplative approach contributes to knowledge of objectivity and the world.^[142]

In the cognitive sciences, working from the naturalist standpoint of objective formalism and empirical findings to theorize about experience is familiar. Yet in Varela’s epistemic circulation between first- and third-person approaches, there remains a lacuna when it comes to the reciprocal direction: from first-person experience to the third-person frameworks of neurobiological data and formulation of theory.^[143] I will venture here to say that much of the seeming disagreement between Stone and Zahavi and defenders of the neurophenomenological program, such as Bitbol and Depraz, revolves around this lacuna.^[144] As alluded to in this paper, beyond mere descriptive reports, it is the problem of articulating first-person experience in a manner amenable to third-person frameworks, without thereby losing sight of the critical stance toward the natural attitude—intrinsic to Husserl’s phenomenological attitude and epoché-reduction—or of subsuming experience under its formulations. Where Stone and Zahavi have pointed an accusatory finger at the enthusiastic incorporation of mindfulness techniques, claiming it has diluted philosophical Phenomenology with its ambiguities and therapeutic orientation, Gendlin’s approach paves the way beyond such impasses. It neither contains experience within its conceptualizations nor attempts to reduce it to them—nor, furthermore, does it diminish the inferential precision that third-person frameworks can bring.^[145] Rather, harnessing the felt sense, we are equipped with the means to create a new kind of concepts that explicate the experiential side, such as “felt sense” and “implicit understanding,” while (re)generating theoretical frameworks that function in the wider intricacy of experience, further organizing the whole research situation in a process of experiential feedback that is self-refining.^[146] Fresh possibilities for knowledge therefore remain ever present.

Notes

1. Michel Bitbol, “Consciousness, Being and Life: Phenomenological Approaches to Mindfulness,” Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 50, no. 2 (2019): 127–161; Natalie Depraz, “Epoché in Light of Samatha-Vipassanā Meditation,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 26, nos. 7–8 (2019): 49–69; and Odysseus Stone and Dan Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 28, nos. 3–4 (2021): 158–185, 180. ↑
2. Since its widespread popularization, Westernized adaptations of mindfulness have become the locus of discourse where the intersection of science and contemplative practice is concerned. It is therefore understandable that Stone and Zahavi have focused their criticism on it exclusively. Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 180. ↑
3. Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 158–159. ↑
4. Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 159. ↑
5. Miri Albahari, “The Mystic and the Metaphysician: Clarifying the Role of Meditation in the Search for Ultimate Reality,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 26, nos. 7–8 (2019): 12–36, 13–16. ↑
6. Eugene T. Gendlin, Focusing (Rider, 2003); Eugene T, Gendlin, “Introduction to Thinking at the Edge,” The Folio 19, no. 1 (2004): 1–8; and Eugene T. Gendlin, “What Are the Grounds of Explication? A Basic Problem in Linguistic Analysis and in Phenomenology,” in Saying What We Mean: Implicit Precision and the Responsive Order: Selected Works, ed. Edward S. Casey and Donata Schoeller (Northwestern University Press, 2018), 22–45, 44–45. ↑
7. Georges Dreyfus, “Is Mindfulness Present-Centred and Non-Judgmental? A Discussion of the Cognitive Dimensions of Mindfulness,” in Mindfulness: Diverse Perspectives on Its Meanings, Origins and Applications, ed. J. Mark G. Williams and Jon Kabat-Zinn (Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013), 41–54, 50. ↑
8. Gendlin, Focusing, 2. ↑
9. Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 166. ↑
10. Eugene T. Gendlin, “A Direct Referent Can Bring Something New,” in Saying What We Mean: Implicit Precision and the Responsive Order: Selected Works, edited by Edward S. Casey and Donata Schoeller (Northwestern University Press, 2018), 138–150, 138. ↑
11. Sebastjan Vörös, “The Uroboros of Consciousness: Between the Naturalisation of Phenomenology and the Phenomenologisation of Nature,” Constructivist Foundations 10, no. 1 (2014): 96–104, 97; Donata Schoeller and Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir, “Embodied Critical Thinking: The Experiential Turn and Its Transformative Aspects,” philoSOPHIA 9, no. 1 (2019): 92–109, 92. ↑
12. David J. Chalmers, “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 2, no. 3 (1995): 200–219; and Natalie Depraz et al., eds., On Becoming Aware: A Pragmatics of Experiencing (J. Benjamins, 2003), 80. ↑
13. Ashok Zaman, “Breaking Into the Circle: A Philosophical Justification for a First-Person Approach to the Science of Consciousness” (master’s thesis, Macquarie University, 2023). ↑
14. Francisco J. Varela et al., The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (MIT Press, 1991). Citing the first edition. 4EA cognition refers to: embodied, enacted, embedded, extended, and affective cognition. Although 4EA cognition broke with the computational origins of cognitivism, apart from a small cohort of researchers committed to the experiential turn, it has been largely subsumed back into the computational paradigm. See Anthony Chemero, Radical Embodied Cognitive Science (MIT Press, 2009), 27. ↑
15. Francisco J. Varela, “Neurophenomenology: A Methodological Remedy for the Hard Problem,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 3, no. 4 (1996): 330–349, 334. ↑
16. Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 166. ↑
17. Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 166; Varela et al., Embodied Mind, 27–28. ↑
18. More accurately, traditional mindfulness is just one of many different forms of contemplative practice both within Buddhism and across other traditions. As noted by Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 166, and in Embodied Mind, mindfulness as commonly understood in the West—particularly given the influence of figures such as Nyanaponika and Jon Kabat-Zinn—derives primarily from the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century neo-Theravādin revivalist traditions. I will briefly discuss this later. See also Varela et al., Embodied Mind, 31–32. ↑
19. Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 171. ↑
20. After laying out Stone and Zahavi’s position, I describe the method of epoché and reduction in the next section. ↑
21. Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 166–167; Varela, “Neurophenomenology,” 337. ↑
22. Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 166–167. ↑
23. Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 165. ↑
24. Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 159–161. ↑
25. Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 160, citing Scott R. Bishop et al., “Mindfulness: A Proposed Operational Definition,” Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice 11, no. 3 (2004): 230–241; Antoine Lutz et al., “Investigating the Phenomenological Matrix of Mindfulness-Related Practices from a Neurocognitive Perspective,” American Psychologist 70, no. 7 (2015): 632–658; Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation for Everyday Life (Piatkus, 1994). ↑
26. Cf. Jon Kabat-Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living: How to Cope with Stress, Pain and Illness Using Mindfulness (Piatkus, 2013), 151; Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 161. ↑
27. Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 162; Varela et al., Embodied Mind, xxiii. ↑
28. David L. McMahan, The Making of Buddhist Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2008), 27–28. ↑
29. McMahan, Making of Buddhist Modernism, 7. ↑
30. Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 162. ↑
31. McMahan, Making of Buddhist Modernism, 206, quoting Nyanaponika. ↑
32. Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 164. ↑
33. Nyanaponika, The Heart of Buddhist Meditation: A Handbook of Mental Training Based on the Buddha’s Way of Mindfulness (Buddhist Publication Society, 2005), 27–28. The first edition was published in 1962; Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 163–165. ↑
34. Nyanaponika, Heart of Buddhist Meditation, 31; emphasis added. ↑
35. Cf. Kabat-Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living, 510–511; cf. Nyanaponika, Heart of Buddhist Meditation, 28; Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 163. In footnote 7 of Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 163, they cite the 2005 edition of Kabat-Zinn’s Full Catastrophe Living on this point. I could not obtain this edition, nor could I find any clear correspondence to the pages cited. Since the point being made here is quite pivotal, I have cited the 2013 edition with what I believe indicates Stone and Zahavi’s claims. ↑
36. Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 163. ↑
37. Cf. Nyanaponika, Heart of Buddhist Meditation, 30–31; Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 163. ↑
38. Kabat-Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living, 85; Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 164. ↑
39. Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 159, 167–168. ↑
40. Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 167–168. ↑
41. Gallagher and Zahavi, Phenomenological Mind, 15. See also Dan Zahavi, “Getting It Quite Wrong: Van Manen and Smith on Phenomenology,” Qualitative Health Research 29, no. 6 (2019): 900–907; Dan Zahavi, “Applied Phenomenology: Why It Is Safe to Ignore the Epoché,” Continental Philosophy Review 54, no. 2 (2021): 259–273; Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, The Phenomenological Mind (Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2021). ↑
42. Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 158–159. ↑
43. Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 167. ↑
44. Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 167. ↑
45. Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 168, 170. ↑
46. Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, Volume I, ed. Dermot Moran, trans. J. N. Findlay (Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2001), 168; Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 168. ↑
47. Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 169–172. ↑
48. Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 169–172. ↑
49. Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 171. ↑
50. Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 169. ↑
51. Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 169. ↑
52. Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 171. ↑
53. Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 171. ↑
54. Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 171. ↑
55. Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 171, citing Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, trans. F. Kirsten (Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), 61. ↑
56. Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 172. ↑
57. Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 172. ↑
58. Husserl, Logical Investigations, Volume I, 275; Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 172. ↑
59. Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 173. Referred to as the “Lifeworld.” ↑
60. Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 173. ↑
61. Bitbol, “Consciousness, Being and Life”; Depraz, “Epoché in Light.” ↑
62. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Northwestern University Press, 1970), 47–48; original emphasis. ↑
63. Albahari, “Mystic and the Metaphysician,” 13–16. ↑
64. Eugene T. Gendlin, “Thinking Beyond Patterns: Body, Language, and Situations,” in The Presence of Feeling in Thought, ed. Bernard den Ouden and Marcia Moen (Peter Lang, 1992). ↑
65. I will not dwell specifically on this fact here, but it nonetheless deserves detailed exposition. Although largely overshadowed by contemporary approaches to philosophy, from Parmenides to twentieth-century figures such as Simone Weil and Pierre Hadot, a contemplative vein runs through Western philosophy. As Adam Robbert (“The Side View: Hadot and Sloterdijk on the Practice of Philosophy,” Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 13, no. 1 [2017]: 1–14, 2) discusses, for Hadot the Greeks exemplify the notion of philosophy as askēsis, or self-transformative practice. Knowledge was not something received “ready-made” but kindled through individual effort. Gendlin remarks, “Yes, as in ancient times, philosophy now comes with practices” (Gendlin, “Introduction to Thinking,” 2). ↑
66. Gendlin, “Direct Referent,” 138. ↑
67. Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 166. ↑
68. Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 173–174. ↑
69. Kabat-Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living, 85; Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 164. ↑
70. Bitbol, “Consciousness, Being and Life,” 6. ↑
71. Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 160. ↑
72. Dhyāna is jhāna in Buddhist Pāli terminology, a term well known among Western Buddhists, but refers more specifically to “concentration.” Yet in common usage “meditation” is often used as an umbrella term that refers to both. Within the Hindu-yogic milieu, one-pointed concentration is dhāranā. In practice dhāranā and dhyāna are often interlinked and form the sixth and seventh elements in the eightfold system of yoga presented in Patañjali’s Yogaśāstra (see James Mallinson and Mark Singleton, Roots of Yoga [Penguin Books, 2017], 282–290). I am thus using dhyāna here to broaden the contextual scope from out of its Western-appropriated, Buddhist-centric cul-de-sac. ↑
73. Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 161–162. ↑
74. Dreyfus, “Is Mindfulness Present-Centred,” 45. ↑
75. Dreyfus, “Is Mindfulness Present-Centred,” 45–46, touches upon this issue, speaking of retention, very much consonant with my use of “remaining established.” In my view, unfortunately, he also exhibits the same revisionist tendency, reducing the sense to merely the “holding of information.” ↑
76. Bitbol, “Consciousness, Being and Life,” 15–16. ↑
77. Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 161–162. ↑
78. Kabat-Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living, 510–511; Nyanaponika, Heart of Buddhist Meditation, 27–31. ↑
79. Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 163. ↑
80. Bitbol, “Consciousness, Being and Life,” 11. ↑
81. Bitbol, “Consciousness, Being and Life,” 12. ↑
82. Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 177. ↑
83. Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 164. ↑
84. Cf. Bitbol, “Consciousness, Being and Life,” 12; Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 177. ↑
85. Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 171. ↑
86. Ronald H. Brady, “How We Make Sense of the World: A Study in Rudolf Steiner’s Epistemological Work,” in Truth and Knowledge: Prelude to a Philosophy of Freedom, by Rudolf Steiner, trans. Rita Stebbing and Frederick Armine (Keryx, 2017), 15. ↑
87. Brady, “How We Make,” 15; Rudolf Steiner, Truth and Knowledge: Prelude to a Philosophy of Freedom, trans. Rita Stebbing and Frederick Armine (Keryx, 2017), 116. ↑
88. Eugene T. Gendlin, Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning: A Philosophical and Psychological Approach to the Subjective (Northwestern University Press, 1997), 146. ↑
89. Steiner, Truth and Knowledge, 116. ↑
90. Steiner, Truth and Knowledge, 120. ↑
91. Gendlin, “Thinking Beyond Patterns,” 25; Eugene T. Gendlin, “A Changed Ground for Precise Cognition,” in Thinking Thinking: Practicing Radical Reflection, ed. Donata Schoeller and Vera Saller (Karl Alber, 2016), 53; Zaman, “Breaking into the Circle,” 36. ↑
92. Bitbol, “Consciousness, Being and Life,” 13. ↑
93. Bitbol, “Consciousness, Being and Life,” 13. ↑
94. Bitbol, “Consciousness, Being and Life,” 13. ↑
95. Bitbol, “Consciousness, Being and Life,” 5. ↑
96. Dreyfus, “Is Mindfulness Present-Centred,” 50; James B. Apple, “Mindfulness and Vigilance in Tsong-Kha-Pa’s Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment,” in Buddhist Foundations of Mindfulness, ed. Edo Shonin et al., Mindfulness in Behavioral Health (Springer International Publishing, 2015), 245–266. ↑
97. Bitbol, “Consciousness, Being and Life,” 20. ↑
98. Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 161–162. ↑
99. Bitbol, “Consciousness, Being and Life,” 12–13. ↑
100. Gendlin, Focusing, 10. ↑
101. Eugene T. Gendlin, “What First and Third Person Processes Really Are,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 16, nos. 10–11 (2009): 332–362, 332–333. ↑
102. Depraz, “Epoché in Light.” To be clear, samatha and vipassanā do not originate from the Kagyü lineage—only this description does, changed and adapted by Chögyam Trungpa. Samatha and vipassanā are prevalent across many Buddhist traditions. Generally, they are cultivated in tandem. Samatha refers to a practice of calming and stabilizing the mind in concentration, and vipassanā, meditative insight into the true nature of reality. Where Depraz likens Trungpa’s version of samatha to mindfulness, in other traditions samatha does not mean mindfulness, but “concentration.” Like endnote 74, samatha is generally closer to the one-pointed practice of dhāranā in Hindu-yogic traditions. ↑
103. Depraz, “Epoché in Light,” 50–51; Husserl, Logical Investigations, Volume I, 168; Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 179. ↑
104. Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 167. ↑
105. Varela, “Neurophenomenology,” 335. ↑
106. Vörös, “Uroboros of Consciousness,” 96; Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences, 171; Varela, “Neurophenomenology,” 334. ↑
107. Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 169–172. ↑
108. Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 169. ↑
109. Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 171. ↑
110. Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 171–173. ↑
111. Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 171; Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, Volume I, 168. ↑
112. Eugene T. Gendlin, “Experiential Phenomenology,” in Saying What We Mean: Implicit Precision and the Responsive Order: Selected Works, ed. Edward S. Casey and Donata Schoeller (Northwestern University Press, 2018), 46–79, 50. Gendlin cited the German edition: Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 3rd ed., vol. 3 (Niemeyer, 1921–1922). It can be found in Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, Volume II, ed. Dermot Moran, trans. J. N. Findlay (Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2001), 201–206. ↑
113. Eugene T. Gendlin, “Crossing and Dipping: Some Terms for Approaching the Interface Between Natural Understanding and Logical Formulation,” Minds and Machines 5, no. 4 (1995): 547–560, 554–555; Zaman, “Breaking into the Circle,” 36. ↑
114. Gendlin, “Experiential Phenomenology,” 50. ↑
115. Gendlin, “Experiential Phenomenology,” 51. ↑
116. Gendlin, “Experiential Phenomenology,” 51. ↑
117. Gendlin, “Experiential Phenomenology,” 51. ↑
118. Gendlin, “Experiential Phenomenology,” 50. ↑
119. Gendlin, “Changed Ground,” 53; Zaman, “Breaking into the Circle,” 36. ↑
120. Donata Schoeller and Neil Dunaetz, “Thinking Emergence as Interaffecting: Approaching and Contextualizing Eugene Gendlin’s Process Model,” Continental Philosophy Review 51, no. 1 (2018): 123–140, 129. ↑
121. Stone and Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” 180. ↑
122. Michel Bitbol, “The Tangled Dialectic of Body and Consciousness: A Metaphysical Counterpart of Radical Neurophenomenology,” Constructivist Foundations 16, no. 2 (2021): 141–151, 142. ↑
123. Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences, 137. ↑
124. Gendlin, “Thinking Beyond Patterns,” 22. ↑
125. Eugene T. Gendlin, “Two Phenomenologists Do Not Disagree,” in Saying What We Mean: Implicit Precision and the Responsive Order: Selected Works, ed. Edward S. Casey and Donata Schoeller (Northwestern University Press, 2018), 5–21, 8. ↑
126. Gendlin, “Two Phenomenologists Do,” 8. ↑
127. Gendlin, Experiencing and the Creation, xi. ↑
128. Gendlin, Experiencing and the Creation, xii. ↑
129. Gendlin, Experiencing and the Creation, 49–50. ↑
130. Gendlin, Experiencing and the Creation, 48–50. ↑
131. Gendlin, Focusing, 4. ↑
132. Gendlin, Focusing, 4–10. ↑
133. Gendlin, Focusing, 3. ↑
134. See The International Focusing Institute, www.focusing.org. ↑
135. Gendlin, Focusing, 77. ↑
136. Eugene T. Gendlin, “The Primacy of the Body, Not the Primacy of Perception,” Man and World 25, nos. 3–4 (1992): 341–353, 351. ↑
137. Eugene T. Gendlin, A Process Model (Northwestern University Press, 2018), 4. ↑
138. Gendlin, “Primacy of the Body,” 351. ↑
139. Gendlin, “Introduction to Thinking.” ↑
140. Gendlin, “Introduction to Thinking.” ↑
141. Schoeller and Thorgeirsdottir, “Embodied Critical Thinking,” 92. ↑
142. Gendlin, “Direct Referent,” 138. ↑
143. Zaman, “Breaking into the Circle,” 56. ↑
144. It should be mentioned that while I was finishing this paper, the heated exchange has continued. See, for example: Odysseus Stone and Dan Zahavi, “Mindless Obfuscation,” in The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Mindfulness, ed. Susi Ferrarello and Christos Hadjioannou (Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2023), 502–507; and Natalie Depraz et al., “Mindful Clarification: Why It Is Necessary to Reply Once Again to Stone and Zahavi,” in The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Mindfulness, ed. Susi Ferrarello and Christos Hadjioannou (Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2023), 508–512. ↑
145. Zaman, “Breaking into the Circle,” 55. ↑
146. Gendlin, “Crossing and Dipping;” Zaman, “Breaking Into the Circle,” 55.↑

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