The Edge
Most of this site asks you to consider what people have reported from the inside.
This section asks a narrower question: what can be established from the outside, and what happens at the place where the instruments stop.
There is a widespread assumption that taking the contemplative traditions seriously means relaxing your standards of evidence. This section starts from the opposite premise. The traditions have survived several thousand years of scrutiny; they do not need protecting from a few decades more. What they need, what anyone needs, is for the questions to be asked properly, and that means being willing to lose.
So this section will lose, repeatedly and on the record. Where the evidence supports the ordinary explanation, it will say so. Where a famous case falls apart under investigation, it will say that too. Every piece here ends with a plain account of what it has not shown.
What's left after all of that is smaller than the enthusiasts claim and larger than the dismissers allow. That remainder is the edge: the boundary these two ways of knowing share, where each can see the other working and neither can cross.
No conclusions are offered here. The questions are better than the answers currently available, and pretending otherwise would cost more than it gained.
The edge of what instruments can currently reach. The edge two ways of knowing share, where empirical and contemplative inquiry press against each other. And the edge as the sharp part: this is where the project is most exposed to being wrong, and it says so.
How every piece here works
The strongest case against goes first, at full strength, and wins wherever it actually wins.
The losses are reported in public. Including corrections to our own side, by name.
What remains is called the residue, and stated flatly. Unexplained is not inexplicable, and a gap in one account is not evidence for any other.
Every piece ends with a Ledger: what it does not establish, written to be quotable by someone who disagrees with this site.
The Opening
The Inquiries
Each Inquiry takes one phenomenon with a real research literature and runs it through the method above, in five movements: the phenomenon, what the evidence shows, what it explains, what remains, and what the traditions said. Each ends with its Ledger.
How we got here
Three dispatches walked up to this door before it existed, and stopped.
“The awe comes first. The frameworks are what different temperaments do with the same original encounter.”
New to all of this? The Clearing is the other door into the same room. You don't need to believe anything to start. The Clearing →