You must have a clear and defined self/ego before you can move beyond it. Once you have, you still operate with your ego. Transcending it doesn't mean destroying it. You don't want to destroy your ego.
qz.com/1307380/yoga-a
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If you want a real idea of how spurious most psychology research is, look no further than literally anything you know...
I'd be amazed, but I distinctly remember PhD teachers in uni with worse research premises than this. Really hard to take the field seriously sometimes.
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My friend who recently completed a psychology PhD, basically considers the entire field an omnishambles.
He left psych to work as a data analyst, and considers that marginally better - although significantly limited (as per meta-rationality)
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jesus christ... the conflation of ego and self in the article is staggering. and the data metrics are so nebulous. “omnishambles,” is dead accurate - Jung knew that the standard scientific method was woefully inadequate for study of the human mind, but everyone trudged on anyway.
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This is all leaving aside the point that they have no idea what the actual teachings are, at all.
Ego death is a child's dream or a cult guru's promise. Nobody even takes it seriously who isn't a kid, a moron or worse.
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"We will study this thing but have no idea what priors to establish, but somehow our research will turn out to reveal something useful."
O...k?
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yeah, there’s a nagging sense of “just go along with it” encoded in it all, to me.
behavioral/self-reporting stuff is crap, but there’s some useful things going on in *cognitive* psych at least, particularly method-of-levels - an application of perceptual control theory
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Useful things going on everywhere in psychology. The problem is the ridiculously low standard of research & bad scientific theory.
When it isn't fatuous crap like this, the research is often interesting and engaging. But for that, might as well read a novel. Needs *methodology*.
When the entire field suffers from such low standards, it's difficult to know whether or not to take anything seriously.
As seen e.g. with the recent Stanford debacle, falsifications are sparsely published, and peer review is a shitshow. That's still true today.
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all the good theory is already out there waiting to be accepted imo, but the problem is how disagreeable it is to the spirit of the times and the scientific-rational types, because it deals with necessarily unquantifiable things like *subjective reality* and *soul*
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Good theory? Maybe.
But there is much scientific work to be done to bridge current understanding to those concepts, and not much of it is being done.
Without that work, it ain't science in anything but the loosest sense.