Sounds as conveniently unfalsifibale as any more patent pseudoscience.
Your own eyes jump around all day, but you never notice. You do not notice, because your visual sense, fills the gaps, and even refills these gaps, with storys that make sense. "You frozze with fear" when the bike approached, instead of "My eyes filled the buffer to slow for my car".
Meditation is trying to break these cobbled together parts of the self-computer appart, trying to understand. Its a not very wise and not very calming endavour. After all the machine that should reassemble it, is the one that took it apart.
Also: saccades are very easy to notice if you just pay a little attention to them, just like noticing your tongue in your mouth or your nose in your vision. They're not a deep psychological enigma.
Are you claiming that sports exercises are unfalsifiable? Because the principle is the same, except that we're talking about the mind instead of physical fitness.
And before you look at my username, instead look no further than "Placebos". Why does a sugar pill named "morphine" work? Obviously, handing them a teaspoon of sugar does nothing, but when relabeled, works.
And most of the occult as well is of mind - either my own mind, or that of others. Science even has a semi-explanation with the holographic universe theory, which says that every particle is encoded with the information of everything, just at the simplest resolution. And if mind could be tuned so, could access everything within their own mind. (The old occult principle is 'As above, so below.')
But it's easy to paint things you either don't like or don't understand as "pseudoscience". Flat earth used to be science. Earth-centric orbits used to be science. Wearing masks full of herbs when dealing with plague victims used to be science.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-science-behind-b...
Doesn't sound unfalsifiable to me.
That does not make those results any less real.
Whatever you experience while meditating, other people won't be able to experience it, so it can't go in the "definitely real" pile. So the fact that it can't be studied scientifically definitely does make it less real, in the sense that your can't say that it's real with the same confidence, even when you're the one experiencing it.
Reflecting, I guess I'm questioning if the solipsist really believes all that which is put before their minds is really "experience", per se.
As sure as anything, Pyrrhonism is where it's at!
And part of a meditation practice is seeing how the reality of your experiences is more like the reality of a co strict and less like the reality ofm
But notice that this isn’t really private to a person.
How are we sure about external events like a ball falling down? Are they not processed by our minds and then expressed in language. A ball falling down is fairly standardized and accessible, but for other events there is a lot more background which is needed. But human experience and culture is filled with phenomena which require a much larger shared context - which is acquired after walking in a shared territory. Like long time explorers of the seas who can have a a conversation on far away lands.
Explaining many current physical concepts or how to interpret the experiments which are conducted at a non-superficial level requires years of training (leave alone research). Even someone who finishes high school algebra is at a rarefied stage compared to people thousands of years ago.
Getting a shared context in meditation related explorations might actually require much lesser time.
For similar reasons, negative stages itself have been meticulously documented in manuals like Visuddhimaga which are referenced in the books mentioned in the article.(fwiw, my 2 cents on the article - maybe instead of promoting intense concentration on sensory phenomena, love based practices like bhakti or metta might be a better popular practice).
A good counter argument is that in the physics example there are gradual stages in learning where at each stage you can test what you learn and match it with the world, not spend 15 years of education to get to QFT and then match with experience.
But that ladder is present even in the case of traditions which explore the mind.
We speak about mindfulness here but there is the same discussion and warnings about kundalini for example.
Obviously focusing (or not) on something and sitting for a long time will alter you state of consciousness to some degree like a trance. But are there real and objective dangers besides the rewiring of your brain?
This is certainly falsifiable. Just see if people doing more intensive meditation have more mental health issues.