ABSTRACT
Western investigators have begun to call for a more detailed phenomenology of the meditation experience in order to assess subjective changes during meditation more precisely: meditation as an altered state of consciousness. Since meditation is a technique purported to bring about strong subjective experiences in practitioners, experiences which involve radically new perceptions of their relationship with themselves, others, and the world around them, it becomes crucial to understand what goes on "internally." Several research studies which have focused primarily on the physiological and overt behavior changes resulting from meditation have found no differences between meditation and other self-regulation strategies. One approach to gaining information about subjective experiences during meditation involves only slight variations on the traditional scientific experiment in which the experimenter tries to gather information from the subjects. D. Van Nuys developed a simple technique for studying attention during the latter stages of meditation.
