Alan Wallace explains the role of mind in any empirical investigation of consciousness: “The primary instrument that all scientists have used to make any type of observation is the human mind…” However, like any scientific laboratory, one has to first clean, fine-tune, and calibrate the mind: “The untrained mind, which is prone to alternating agitation and dullness, is an unreliable and inadequate instrument for observing anything. To transform it into a suitable instrument for scientific exploration, the stability and vividness of the attention must be developed to a high degree.” This is the scientific importance of yoga, meditation, kundalini, tantra and other systems of achieving higher states of mind, and more evolved states of body, which may then be used to discover deeper layer of reality: “Over the past three millennia, the Indic traditions have developed rigorous methods for refining the attention, and then applying that attention to exploring the origins, nature, and role of consciousness in the natural world. The empirical and rational investigations and discoveries by such great Indian contemplatives as Gautama the Buddha profoundly challenge many of the assumptions of the modern West, particularly those of scientific materialism.”

The typical scientist doesn’t actually practise meditation herself. Rather, she invites experienced meditators to her laboratory, covers their heads with electrodes, asks them to meditate, and observes the resulting brain activities. That can teach us many interesting things about the brain, but if the aim is to understand the mind, we are missing some of the most important insights.

In sciences of observation, man observes and reasons experimentally, but he does not experiment; and in this sense we might say that a science of observation is a passive science. In sciences of experimentation, man observes, but in addition he acts on matter, analyzes its properties and to his own advantage brings about the appearance of phenomena which doubtless always occur according to natural laws, but in conditions which nature often has not yet achieved. With the help of these active experimental sciences, man becomes an inventor of phenomena, a real foreman of creation: and under this head we cannot set limits to the power that he may gain over nature through future progress in the experimental sciences.

An essential distinction exists between two stages in the process of advancing our knowledge of the laws of physical phenomena; the first stage consists in observing the relations of phenomena, whether of such as occur in the ordinary course of nature, or of such as are artificially produced in experimental investigations, and in expressing the relations so observed by propositions called formal laws. The second stage consists in reducing the formal laws of an entire class of phenomena to the form of a science; that is to say, in discovering the most simple system of principles, from which all the formal laws of the class of phenomena can be deduced as consequences.

It is only by making physical experiments that we can discover the intimate nature of matter and its potentialities. And it is only by making psychological and moral experiments that we can discover the intimate nature of mind and its potentialities. In the ordinary circumstances of average sensual life these potentialities of the mind remain latent and unmanifested. If we would realize them, we must fulfil certain conditions and obey certain rules, which experience has shown empirically to be valid.

We must therefore glean up our experiments in this science from a cautious observation of human life, and take them as they appear in the common course of the world, by men’s behaviour in company, in affairs, and in their pleasures. Where experiments of this kind are judiciously collected and compared, we may hope to establish on them a science, which will not be inferior in certainty, and will be much superior in utility to any other of human comprehension.

We must therefore glean up our experiments in this science from a cautious observation of human life, and take them as they appear in the common course of the world, by men's behaviour in company, in affairs, and in their pleasures. Where experiments of this kind are judiciously collected and compared, we may hope to establish on them a science, which will not be inferior in certainty, and will be much superior in utility to any other of human comprehension.

There are two ways in which a science develops; in response to problems which is itself creates, and in response to problems that are forced on it from the outside.

To investigate the essence of a natural phenomenon, three conditions are necessary: We must first study and know the phenomenon itself, from all sides; we must then determine in what relation it stands to other natural phenomena; and lastly, when we have ascertained all these relations, we have to solve the problem of measuring these relations and the laws of mutual dependence—that is, of expressing them in numbers. In the first period of chemistry, all the powers of men's minds were devoted to acquiring a knowledge of the properties of bodies; it was necessary to discover, observe, and ascertain their peculiarities. This is the alchemistical period. The second period embraces the determination of the mutual relations or connections of these properties; this is the period of phlogistic chemistry. In the third period, in which we now are, we ascertain by weight and measure and express in numbers the degree in which the properties of bodies are mutually dependent. The inductive sciences begin with the substance itself, then come just ideas, and lastly, mathematics are called in, and with the aid of numbers, complete the work.

We must start with scientific fundamentals, and that means with the data of experiments and not with assumed axioms predicated only upon the misleading nature of that which only superficially seems to be obvious. It is the consensus of great scientists that science is the attempt to set in order the facts of experience.

But psychology is passing into a less simple phase. Within a few years what one may call a microscopic psychology has arisen in Germany, carried on by experimental methods, asking of course every moment for introspective data, but eliminating their uncertainty by operating on a large scale and taking statistical means. This method taxes patience to the utmost, and could hardly have arisen in a country whose natives could be bored. Such Germans as Weber, Fechner, Vierordt, and Wundt obviously cannot ; and their success has brought into the field an array of younger experimental psychologists, bent on studying the elements of the mental life, dissecting them out from the gross results in which they are embedded, and as far as possible reducing them to quantitative scales. The simple and open method of attack having done what it can, the method of patience, starving out, and harassing to death is tried ; the Mind must submit to a regular siege, in which minute advantages gained night and day by the forces that hem her in must sum themselves up at last into her overthrow. There is little of the grand style about these new prism, pendulum, and chronograph-philosophers. They mean business, not chivalry. What generous divination, and that superiority in virtue which was thought by Cicero to give a man the best insight into nature, have failed to do, their spying and scraping, their deadly tenacity and almost diabolic cunning, will doubtless some day bring about.

No general description of the methods of experimental psychology would be instructive to one unfamiliar with the instances of their application, so we will waste no words upon the attempt.

And because this Experimental Science is wholly ignored by the general run of students, for that reason I can not convince people of its utility unless I show at the same time its excellence and its property. This science alone, then, knows how to test perfectly by experience what can be done by nature, what by the industry of art, what by imposture; what the incantations, conjurations, invocations, deprecations, sacrifices (which are magical devices) seek and dream of; and what is done in them, so that all falsity may be removed and that only the truth of art and nature be retained. This science alone teaches one to consider all the insanities of magicians, not that they may be confirmed but that they may be avoided, just as logic considers sophistical argument.

Natural phenomena undisturbed by man point the way to the realization of a new technique. One needs a keen sense of observation. We must understand Nature before we can adapt its way of working to our needs.

This process of self-discovery is scientific and the invariable rule of science has to be applied - experiment and observe. The experiment is to ask the question; the observation is to look at yourself and see what happens. Being a science the law cannot vary. Any apparent variation is in you: you will have stepped off the way of facts into conclusions. The sun is either shining or it is not. You do not have to conclude; you just look.