Han de Wit 0201
Question: Are there any theoretical similarities between your work in Contemplative Psychology and the work of Ken Wilber?
de Wit: I think in somewhat different terms than Wilber. Although I do find it valuable to draw the distinction between those three domains - known in the Buddhist tradition as Body, Speech and Mind, or Body, Communication and the Mental plane - I nevertheless think that they do not penetrate right to the heart of things. And that is because this so-called outer world that surrounds us is completely suffused by our human perspectives. We all know this phenomenon. Biologists have done a great deal of research on the subject, and so has anthropology: the way in which the outer world exists for people depends on how they experience it. We have little to do with the objective world, although that doesn’t mean that this objective world – the "Ding-an-sich" as Kant would call it - does not exist. But what we are actually dealing with is our own experience. And so this experience of our environment is both subjective and objective at the same time. In other words: objectively seen our experience is subjective, but subjectively seen we experience this reality as objective.
The two are thus very close together. And this is why research into how we give form to our experience of the outside world, through our minds, our hopes, fears and thoughts - in short, this inquiry into our mental patterns - is in fact also an inquiry into the world around us. So it would not be true to posit that we can separate the mental domain from the other two, and Wilber will of course also acknowledge this. The three belong together. But meditation is not merely an inquiry into your own mind. That would be too simple, because our mind is in everything, imbuing the total field of our experience. We are in fact looking at our mind. Philosophically speaking, this might sound rather idealistic, but that is not true either. There is without doubt an objective world out there. But the question is: how objective is it? That is the question which Buddhism seeks to answer. Buddhism acknowledges that the mind is fully involved in the way we experience things, but to what extent? That’s what we want to find out.