..续本文上一页的引导，如同其已经被科学唯物主义者所适用的那样，那么我们将几乎完全集中于意识的物理联系，而排斥对心理现象的观察。显然地，主流哲学、心理学以及神经系统科学已经信奉了后一种选择。这种方法有利有弊；我认为通过将微妙的内省融入对心智的科学研究，该方法可以被更好地补充、而非替代。

　　Developing a Telescope for the Mind

　　开发一台心智的望远镜

　　Philosophers have been debating the merits, limitations, and defects of introspection for centuries, but they do not seem to have refined our capacity for observing mental phenomena. We are as far as we ever were from developing a telescope for the mind. A thesis can in principle be proved or strongly argued, whereas a stance—such as a particular approach to scientific inquiry—can be adopted only by a sort of “Gestalt-switch.” And this is what I am proposing: a Gestalt-switch away from the common tendency to empirically and theoretically marginalize introspection to accepting the formidable challenge of enhancing introspection in ways that are unprecedented in the history of modern science. This implies a return to empiricism: taking the methods for making penetrating observations of all kinds of natural phenomena to be of the highest value, instead of assuming that the materialist ideology in its present formulation already provides a key to unlocking all the remaining mysteries of nature.

　　哲学家们已经就内省的价值、有限性以及缺陷辩论了几个世纪，但他们似乎没有改善我们观察心理现象的能力。我们距离开发一台心智的望远镜还很远。一般而言，一个论点能被证明或强有力地质疑，而一个立场——比如科学探究的一种特殊方法——只能被某种“格塔式转换”所接纳。这是我所提倡的：以在现代科学史中前所未有的方式，避开经验上和理论上排斥内省的普遍趋势、接受强化内省的巨大挑战的“格塔式转换”。这意味着经验主义的回归：获取了将对各种自然现象的敏锐观察形成最高价值的方法，以代替假设唯物主义意识形态以其现存的表述提供了开启自然界依然未解之谜的钥匙。

　　Scientific empiricists since Francis Bacon have generally confi ned their stance to observations of objective physical phenomena, whereas contemplative empiricists claim to have developed their faculty of mental perception to observe the space of the mind. To someone who has not utilized or refined this faculty, which the ancient Greeks called noeˉtos , contemplatives” experiential reports may sound like nothing more than speculation. The semiprivate language of highly trained contemplatives, like that of professional mathematicians, therefore becomes either unintelligible to or misinterpreted by laypeople.

　　自弗朗西斯Ÿ培根以来的科学经验主义者逐渐限制了观察客观物理现象的立场，而静观经验主义者宣称已经开发了观察心智宇宙的心理觉知的能力。对于那些没有使用或改善这种能力——古希腊称之为理念(noe-tos)——的人们而言，静观者的经验报告可能听上去像推测。因此，受过高度训练的静观者的半私密语言——如同专业数学家语言一样，对局外人而言是难以理解、或被误解的。

　　Over the past three millennia, contemplative traditions of varying degrees of sophistication have developed in the East and West, and one point on which they all seem to agree is the need to refine one”s attention skills in order to make reliable observations of mental phenomena. Specifi cally, the deeply habituated tendencies of mental agitation and dullness need to be overcome through the development of attentional stability and vividness. These skills may be strengthened in a separate set of mental exercises11 or in the very process of learning how to observe the mind. Both approaches have been explored in the Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist traditions of India, Southeast Asia, East Asia, and the Himalayan plateau. In the spirit of healthy, open-minded, scientific skepticism, the alleged discoveries of contemplatives in these traditions should be treated with the same attitude with which scientists respond to any other claim of discovery: see if you can replicate their findings in your own laboratory.

　　在过去的三千年中，不同复杂程度的静观传统在东西方发展，他们似乎都赞同的一点是，为了形成可靠的对心理现象的观察，需要改善一个人的注意力。具体地说，心理散乱与昏沉的深刻习以为常的倾向需要通过注意力恒定与清晰的改进来克服。这些技能在一系列独立的心理练习或学习如何观察心智的特定过程中可能得以加强。这两种方法已经在遍布于印度、东南亚、东亚和喜马拉雅山脉的印度教、佛教与道教传统中开发探索。在健全的、开明的、科学怀疑论的宗旨中，这些传统中的静观者所谓的发现应该与科学家对待其它任何宣称的发现持同样态度对待：看看你是否能在自己的实验室重现他们的发现。

　　For a minute fraction of the expense of building, maintaining, and operating the Hubble Space Telescope, contemplative observatories could be created for empirical research into the trainability of attention and the possibility of observing the space…

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