PACIFIC WORLD - The Institute of Buddhist Studies

18Pacific Worldsouls) was of course deeply incompatible with the emerging mechanicalview of the universe. After all, scientists couldn’t very well establishorderly physical laws in the objective world as long as there were immaterialspirits roving about, intervening at will in the affairs of man and nature.So, many natural philosophers of the late sixteenth century simply dismissedthem as illusions. Newton, on the other hand, who devoted muchof his time to developing his own theology, withdrew evil spirits from theobjective physical world and placed them inside the human mind in theform of mental disorders. God’s outer creation had now been cleansed ofthese contaminating influences, leaving only the inner being of mandefiled. It would take another two hundred years before Western psychoanalystswould have the nerve to begin the scientific exploration of thesedark inner realities.In short, the trajectory of Western science from the time of Copernicusto the modern day seems to have been influenced by medieval Christiancosmology. Just as hell was symbolized as being in the center of the earth,and heaven was in the outermost reaches of space, the inner, subjectiveworld of humankind was depicted as being the locus of evil, while theobjective world was free of such moral contamination. It hardly seems anaccident that the science that initiated the Scientific Revolution was astronomy,and it took a full three hundred years for the scientific disciplineof psychology to begin. And it was only in the closing years of the twentiethcentury that the scientific community began to regard consciousness as alegitimate subject of scientific inquiry.Why did it take psychology—which itself emerged only after manyscientists felt that they had already discovered all the principal laws of theuniverse—a century before it began to address the nature of consciousness?This was due in large part to the fifty-year domination of academicpsychology by behaviorism. In 1913, the American behaviorist John B.Watson declared that psychologists must avoid the use of all subjectiveterms such as sensation, perception, image, desire, purpose, and eventhinking and emotion as they are subjectively defined. And he attributedbelief in the very existence of consciousness to ancient superstitions andmagic. 10 Forty years later, B. F. Skinner echoed this theme by asserting thatmind as such does not exist at all, only dispositions for behavior. It tookanother decade before the futility of equating subjective mental processeswith “objective” behavioral dispositions became increasingly apparent tothe scientific community. The behaviorist approach did nothing to explainthe nature of the mind, let alone consciousness; it just reduced thesesubjective phenomena to a class of objective processes they could studywith the available tools of science.With the emergence of cognitive psychology during the 1960s, subjectiveexperience was once again allowed back into the realm of scientificresearch, but the role of introspection in exploring the mind was still