Abstract Ancient Indian spiritual and philosophical approaches contain psychological theories of meditation that specify (a) what meditation is, (b) what its aim is and how it works, and (c) predictions about its effects. This chapter introduces two representative theories that date back more than two millennia, one derived from early Buddhism and the other from the classical Hindu thought...
Unknown to most Western psychologists, ancient Indian scriptures contain very rich, empirically derived psychological theories that are, however, intertwined with religious and philosophical content. This article represents our attempt to extract the psychological theory of cognition and consciousness from a prominent ancient Indian thought system: Samkhya-Yoga. We derive rather broad...