'Righteous hatred' is in the same category as 'righteous cancer' or 'righteous tuberculosis'. All of them are absurd concepts. - B. Alan Wallace

James was well aware of the importance of developing such sustained, voluntary attention, but he acknowledged that he did not know how to achieve this task .

With the advent of the Protestant Reformation and the Scientific Revolution, the gradual decline of Christian contemplative inquiry into the nature of consciousness rapidly accelerated. Given the Protestant emphasis on the Augustinian theme of the essential iniquity of the human soul, and man's utter inability to achieve salvation or know God except by faith, there was no longer any theological incentive for such inquiry. Salvation was emphatically presented as an undeserved gift from the Creator.

In short, the trajectory of Western science from the time of Copernicus to the modern day seems to have been influenced by medieval Christian cosmology. Just as hell was symbolized as being in the center of the earth, and heaven was in the outermost reaches of space, the inner, the subjective world of man was depicted as being the locus of evil, while the objective world was free of such moral contamination… And it was only in the closing years of the twentieth century that the scientific community began to regard consciousness as a legitimate subject of scientific inquiry. Why did it take psychology -- which itself emerged only after many scientists felt that they had already discovered all the principal laws of the universe -- a century before it began to address the nature of consciousness?