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Topography: Establishing a discipline of research in science is bound to the invention of a topographical place (the laboratory) which provides the perspective for a set of procedures or gestures (the methods, the experiments). Once these two poles are articulated in their specificity, a new discipline of knowledge can be born. The last in line in the West was the invention of experimental psychology at the turn of the century. Let us now inverse this description, and point it inwards, as it were. Human beings in their embedded, situated life, the facto constitute a topographical place (the body, the self) where procedures and gestures can be carried to explore directly human experience itself (the quest). As in other laboratoria, the procedures followed shape and bring forth the content of what can and will become manifest.
Gestures: In the traditions of human wisdom (most notable Buddhism, Hinduism and Taoism) this portable, self-laboratorium is the place for human discovery and transformation. In Buddhism it has been cultivated and refined for centuries into the practice of sitting meditation (samatha-vipasyana). It is a self-laboratory also in the sense that the practices changes and transforms who the subject is taken to be, as if the laboratory space become a moving perspective. Fainter echoes of such widely distributed and cultivated portable laboratories arose three times independently in Europe at the turn of the century. First, this is partly what Freud inaugurated with the tradition of psychoanalysis. Second, in modern science, portable laboratories were introduced early in the century under the name of Introspectionism (Wurzburg school), taken to be the main road to understand the mind. Introspectionism however, became a road not taken in the West, and these portable laboratories were discarded in favor of the fixed laboratories of experimental psychology. Finally, in philosophy Husserl introduced the new lineage of Phenomenology based on the practice of reduction that seeks to consciousness and its constitution .
Do it: Become the laboratory by standing still, or sitting on the cushion provided. Proceed to do no-thing. Relax your posture and attitude, and observe, with a light touch, whatever comes into experience. That's the experiment. Note the specific manifestation of mind as if they were data. Repeat as many times as you can this gesture of full presence, of mindfulness. The laboratory is now portable and you may carry it with you wherever you go. Keep track of your findings!
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