Sedlmeier Peter - The Psychology of Meditation: Varieties, Effects, Theories, and Perspectives

The present volume attempts nothing less than to give a state-of-the-art summary of what we currently know about the psychology of meditation. Of course, one volume cannot possibly summarize everything, and as an author I had to make some difficult choices, but the aim of this work is to give a representative overview of what psychological science has achieved so far in this area, as well as which problems are still around. One could say that the main point of the book is to prepare the reader for the suggestions for future research given in the last chapter.

There is much confusion in meditation research about what meditation is, how it is embedded in various practicing contexts, and why people meditate at all. Therefore, this book puts an emphasis on clarifying these questions in reviews the astonishingly few attempts at finding out why people begin to meditate at all and why they stay with it.

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The usual order of presentation in books on a given scientific topic is to begin with the theory part and then present and discuss the empirical evidence in light of the theories. This book does it the other way round, and there is a justification for that: So far, the bulk of meditation research has been conducted with little or no theoretical background. To be sure, there are theories of meditation, and they will be summarized in .

As mentioned above, all of this that is, a summary of the varieties, the effects, and the theories of meditation can be seen as a preparation for the last part of the book, presenting perspectives on meditation research (). For seasoned meditation researchers, it might be that not that much in the book will really be new. However, I am not aware of any other book that takes so many pains to prepare the argument that meditation research definitely needs to be improved regarding which, some suggestions will be offered here. Measured by the number of publications, meditation research is already a success story, but its real success hinges on how well we understand the psychology of meditation. Such a profound understanding, which would express itself in a good theory (or in several good theories), will certainly help to improve the practice of meditation. But it also has the potential to reach far beyond meditation research proper, to the enrichment of our understanding of consciousness and cognition.

Although this book officially has only one author, it is in fact the product of many peoples efforts who contributed in one way or another. As this is a book on meditation, I begin with my teacher AMA Samy, thanking him for all I learned from him. Many aspects of what is covered in this book only became much clearer to me (still with some room for improvement though) by discussing them with fellow meditators, meditation teachers, and researchers interested in meditation. Some of them deserve special mentions and thanks: Ven. Angulgamuwe Ariyananda, Britta Biedermann, Matthijs Cornelissen, William van Gordon, Carl Hooper, Caroline Jones, Sonali Marwaha, Ven. Nanasiri, Bhikkhuni Agga Nani, Veerachart Nimanong, Ulrich Ott, Ramakrishna Rao, and Ajahn Suphan. I owe much to my friend K. Srinivas who sadly passed away so prematurely. While I was on sabbatical at Pondicherry University, India, he, being a philosophy professor himself, opened the door to Indian philosophy for me. Without him, there would be no in this book (at least not as it looks now).