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When most people in the United States hear the word psychology, they imagine a discipline that began in Europe in the nineteenth century, moved through Freud and psychoanalysis, developed into behaviorism and cognitive psychology, and eventually became the modern profession of psychotherapy. That is the history taught in most Western psychology programs. It is not the history of psychology. It is the history of Western academic psychology.
Thousands of years before psychology became a university discipline in Europe, sophisticated psychological systems were already developed in India. Brahmanic yogic traditions investigated attention, consciousness, desire, perception, suffering, sensation, identity, and liberation from identity with as much rigor as any modern academic university. Period. Buddhist psychology later developed an extraordinarily detailed understanding of how the mind constructs suffering and perception, and how consciousness can be trained to become increasingly free from psychological patterns that maintain it. They did this through a profound psychological system, not a philosophy. Through a profound psychological system that allowed them to enter into precognitive pure consciousness states for hours upon days, called jhana or samadhi. They were able to access states that we are only now beginning to understand through psychedelic research.
This was one of the central arguments of my earlier work, The True Origins of Psychology and the Influence of Euro American Ethnocentrism. Western histories of psychology have routinely ignored non Western systems of psychological investigation because those cultures did not use the experimental methods later developed in Europe. Yet Buddhist psychology contains detailed models of perception, sensation, unconscious mental formations, identity, suffering, craving, aversion, attention, and the development of consciousness. It also contains highly detailed methods by which practitioners are expected to verify those theories through their own experience, as well as checking with other teachers who have also been practicing these methodologies in the same way as we do through supervision in Western psychology.
There is an important difference between much of modern Western psychology and the older psychology found in Buddhist traditions. Western psychology tends to begin with pathology. We identify depression, anxiety, post traumatic stress, obsessive thinking, personality disorders, attachment problems, and other difficulties. We then develop strategies intended to reduce symptoms and help people function more effectively.
Liberation psychology begins with a different question: What creates suffering in the first place, and can a human being become free from the psychological processes that continually recreate it?
Buddhist psychology (Which is Asian Psychology) did not organize itself primarily around diagnoses. It investigated the mechanics of suffering. It examined how sensation becomes perception, how perception becomes emotional reaction, how reactions become mental formations, how those formations become habits, and how we eventually identify these processes as ourselves. That is an extraordinarily sophisticated psychological understanding. It is also profoundly relevant to trauma.
Trauma does not exist only in the story of what happened. Trauma affects perception. A particular facial expression becomes dangerous. A tone of voice becomes dangerous. Intimacy becomes dangerous. Conflict becomes dangerous. Sometimes even serenity becomes dangerous because lowering one’s defenses once resulted in being hurt. The nervous system learns, and then the mind constructs an interpretation around what the nervous system has learned.
A central question in liberation psychology is whether we can become conscious enough to observe this process before becoming completely identified with it. That is where shamatha and vipashyana become important.
There is something historically strange about Western psychology’s relationship with Buddhism. For generations Buddhist psychological systems were relegated to the categories of religion and philosophy. At the same time, Western psychotherapy increasingly began borrowing their methods. Im not sure if western academics will ever even acknowledge how hypocritical this is.
In The True Origins of Psychology, I examined four particularly obvious examples, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy, and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. All four incorporate methods substantially influenced by Buddhist mindfulness and contemplative psychology.
Today we can identify many more Western psychological approaches that incorporate Buddhist derived mindfulness, acceptance, compassion, nonattachment, observing thought, decentering, and present moment awareness. Depending on how these interventions are categorized, there are now at least fourteen Western treatment approaches that have incorporated substantial elements of Buddhist psychological teaching.
Yet Western psychology often borrows the technique without fully acknowledging the psychology from which the technique came. Mindfulness becomes an intervention. Nonattachment becomes cognitive defusion. Observing thought becomes decentering. Compassion becomes compassion focused treatment. Meditation becomes stress reduction.
These adaptations may be enormously helpful. The problem is not adaptation. The problem occurs when the psychological system that produced these methods disappears from view and Western psychology begins treating them as though they became psychologically meaningful only after Western clinicians renamed them.
The original system was much larger. Mindfulness was not the destination. It was part of a technology of consciousness that is over 3000 years old.
One of the most important aspects of that system is shamatha vipashyana.
Shamatha is the cultivation of tranquility, serenity, stability, and concentration. Vipashyana means insight or clear seeing. These were originally practices that were meant to work together.
First the mind becomes still and silent. Then we investigate with the consciousness, separate from mental evaluations and past conditioning.
This sequence matters enormously in psychological trauma. When someone has experienced trauma, their attention can become organized around threat. The mind remembers, anticipates, evaluates, worries, interprets, compares, and scans. A person may spend an enormous amount of time thinking about what happened without becoming free from the processes that the event created.
Why did this happen? Why did I not protect myself? What if it happens again? Why am I still afraid? Why am I still angry? What is wrong with me?
The intellect can continue asking questions indefinitely. Sometimes those questions produce insight. Sometimes they become another form of rumination.
The shamatha approach begins somewhere else. Before asking the mind to return to the wound, we help the person discover that consciousness is separate from thought and evaluations and neutral like water. Its nature is actually serenity when it is separated from the habit of mental and emotional evaluations. This is not simply learning to relax. It is learning that awareness can remain present without continually following thought.
That experience can become a profound psychological tool.
This is one of the places where traditional Buddhist psychology and contemporary trauma therapy have something important to say to each other. Before opening the wound, develop somewhere safe from which to look at it.
The central difference between Western psychology and Eastern psychology, or liberation psychology, is the view of consciousness.
In the West, we tend to think of consciousness as arising from the brain. Thoughts, feelings, perception, identity, memory, and consciousness are generally described through neural activity, brain regions, neurotransmitters, and nervous system states. The dominant model assumes that consciousness is inseparable from the brain and that subjective experience is generated through biological processes.
If you go to Asia, it is within the language of Vietnamese, Khmer, Thai, Japanese, and others that, consciousness does not refer to the brain. This is very difficult for Americans to relate to or understand. They have created a cult to the brain. We could really call this the American cult of the brain, as most of Asia does not see the brain as the central architect of perception. They think of the heart as the driver and the brain as the engine.
Even in the word for mind in Japanese, there’s a reference to this. The way that other languages have single words describing knowing without thinking, such as in Khmer, Japanese, and Thai, shows a much more psychologically sophisticated understanding of consciousness.
Consciousness is separate from thoughts, feelings, and neurotransmitters in the East. In the West, we identify consciousness as the same thing as thinking, neurotransmitters in the body. These are huge fundamental differences we’re just beginning to understand and explore through studies on meditation and psychedelics.
One of the clearest examples of this difference can be found in language itself. In Japanese, the word 心, kokoro, is commonly translated into English as mind, but that translation is incomplete. Kokoro can encompass heart, mind, feeling, spirit, intention, and inner life. In Khmer, ចិត្ត, chet or cĕt, derived from the Indic citta, similarly carries meanings that can include mind, heart, consciousness, feeling, intention, will, and inner psychological state. Neither word maps cleanly onto the English word mind and differentiates also from the word for the brain organ.
As I have argued, “These definitions cannot be translated directly into English without losing an understanding. There is a much more nuanced understanding of mind as it is tied into consciousness than we have in English, where everything is very black and white, based on a 2,000 year old cultural influence of a Judeo Christian black and white history that informs the way we structure our perception to this day.”
This linguistic difference matters because language does more than label experience. Language helps organize the categories through which experience becomes intelligible. English commonly separates mind, heart, thought, emotion, consciousness, and body into relatively discrete concepts. Words such as kokoro and chet preserve relationships among these dimensions that English often divides. From the standpoint of liberation psychology, this is not a minor translation difficulty. It reveals a different psychological map of what a human being is.
In much of modern Western psychology, particularly in the United States, the word mind increasingly becomes associated with cognition and brain activity. Consciousness is then discussed through neurons, neurotransmitters, brain regions, and information processing. Within Buddhist and other Asian psychological traditions, consciousness is not so easily reduced to thought or to the biological mechanisms associated with thought. The very language available for speaking about inner experience reflects a less rigid division among consciousness, heart, knowing, feeling, intention, and awareness.
One of the big differences, though, between Eastern psychological methods that you find within Taoism, Buddhism, and Brahmanism is that they teach what are called objective states of consciousness. In the West, we think of all states of consciousness as subjective, whereas in Eastern psychological teachings, there are objective states of consciousness that are objective because they’re considered to be non-dual states of consciousness. They’re precognitive states of consciousness that do not involve the subjectivity of thought or imagery.
This is extremely difficult to understand from within the dominant Western model because Western psychology generally assumes that experience must belong to a thinking subject. If thought, imagery, interpretation, and the ordinary sense of self become quiet, Western psychology often lacks a vocabulary for what remains. The contemplative traditions do not. They describe forms of awareness in which consciousness remains present while the usual cognitive machinery through which we interpret experience becomes increasingly silent. Jhana and samadhi are among the systematic methodologies used to enter and stabilize these states.
The disagreement, therefore, is not simply about meditation technique. It is a fundamental disagreement about the nature of consciousness itself.
Liberation psychology begins from the clear gnostic understanding that consciousness can be experienced prior to cognition, and that it is in fact our natural state, what is called Buddha, that when thought and imagery self-referencing and the subject-object division becomes sufficiently quiet, another form of knowing becomes available. Buddha means awakened consciousness and refers to this state.
This difference becomes particularly clear in advanced meditation.
Western culture frequently treats knowing and thinking as though they were almost synonymous. If I know something, I must be able to explain it, conceptualize it, compare it with something else, put it into language, or connect it with previously acquired information.
Liberation psychology contains another possibility: knowing without thinking.
In my thesis, I used the word consciousness to refer to pure or naked awareness distinct from the stream of conceptual thought. Anyone who has practiced meditation seriously knows how difficult this can be to explain to someone who has never experienced it.
A thought appears. Normally we immediately become involved with it. We evaluate it. We continue it. We argue with it. We associate it with another thought. We create an identity around it.
In concentration practice, something different begins happening. Awareness becomes stable enough that the thought can sometimes be perceived before the usual chain of identification unfolds.
That sounds paradoxical to the Western intellect because the intellect assumes that it is the one doing the knowing. From the perspective of liberation psychology, it is not.
Thought is something consciousness can observe.
That difference changes everything. You can learn to experience this as anyone can learn the ancient art of Jhana, which is the original purpose of meditation.
The ancient Brahmanic and Buddhist systems developed exceptionally refined methods for entering states in which the ordinary stream of thinking becomes increasingly quiet. These states were described through the language of jhana, dhyana, and samadhi. This is a lost art and is rarely taught in the west even after 60 years of mediation studies and yoga centers.
Samadhi refers broadly to concentration, gathering, or absorption. Jhana refers to progressively refined states of meditative absorption.
The point is not merely to become relaxed. The point is to develop consciousness to such a degree of stability that psychological phenomena can be investigated without the usual interference of continuous conceptual thought and mental/emotional evaluations.
In my earlier writing, I argued repeatedly that the Buddha’s psychological realizations cannot be adequately understood if we separate them from his practice of jhana. His insights were not presented simply as conclusions reached through intellectual speculation. They emerged from prolonged states of concentrated, silent awareness.
The practitioner was expected to verify the psychological understanding the pure naked awareness has a different way of learning and understanding than thinking. It has, we could say, a different kind of intelligence.
These are the eight jhanas, or states of samadhi, used in the system of shamatha vipashyana. Samadhi refers to absorption concentration into levels of silence of the mind, and the jhanas provide the concentration and serenity from which deeper psychological investigation becomes possible.
Trauma teaches the nervous system to react before the intellect has time to decide what is happening. A person hears a tone of voice and contracts. Someone moves toward them and they pull away. A relationship becomes intimate and suddenly they want to disappear. An old memory arises and the body reacts as though it were occurring now. The intellect often arrives afterward.
Jhana offers the possibility of developing enough internal quiet and equanimity that these processes can eventually be observed from another state of consciousness.
The sequence is essential. First, establish serenity. First, establish equanimity. First, learn that consciousness has somewhere else to stand. Then investigate.
Vipashyana, or clear seeing, is the methodology used to look at psychological material from within the stillness and silence of the mind. In shamatha vipashyana, the practitioner does not begin by immediately entering traumatic material. Shamatha and jhana establish the psychological resource first. Through samadhi, the practitioner develops a profound state of serenity, equanimity, and silence, and then from within that state brings the traumatic experience into awareness.
There is an important comparison here with contemporary Western trauma methodologies. In approaches such as EMDR or brainspotting, therapists will often first establish what is called a resource, perhaps a safe place, a calming image, a supportive relationship, or another internal experience the person can return to while working with traumatic material. The intention is important. We want the person to have somewhere psychologically safe from which to approach what happened.
The difficulty is that sometimes the resource does not hold. Even when a therapist has carefully helped someone establish a safe place, entering a profound trauma can overwhelm it. A person working with the memory of a rape, for example, may suddenly become flooded by the experience. The memory stops being something they are looking at and becomes something they are living inside again. The person can become reidentified with the trauma, physiologically and psychologically overwhelmed by it, and the resource that felt available only moments earlier may no longer feel accessible.
The experience of jhana is fundamentally different. The serenity created through jhana and samadhi is not simply an imagined safe place or a thought about safety. It is an extraordinarily profound state of consciousness. The serenity can be so deep that ordinary language does very little justice to the experience. From within that state, the practitioner can bring even extremely painful psychological material into awareness without becoming reidentified with it.
When a person learns how to go into jhana and can go into the formless jhanas, they can sit for five to six hours, even two to three days, without food, water, sleep, or bathroom, because they can transcend the normal pain or needs of the body. People that can go into deep jhana, such as forest monks in Thailand, can sit for many, many hours without food, water, or sleep, and this can commonly be seen, as I have seen living in Thailand. So this may sound extraordinary, but this is something that Americans seem to know little about because very few people actually understand how to practice jhana.
This is one of the central psychological functions of jhana in trauma work. A person can look at a profound sexual trauma, including rape, while remaining surrounded by the serenity and equanimity of samadhi. The traumatic experience is present within awareness, but the practitioner is not pulled back inside the identity and state of consciousness in which the trauma originally occurred. The silence of the mind remains. The serenity remains. The equanimity remains.
This allows trauma to be examined objectively in a way that is extraordinarily difficult when the ordinary thinking mind is active. The practitioner can look at what occurred, how consciousness became conditioned by the experience, how identity developed around it, and how fear, shame, aversion, or other psychological patterns arose from it. Yet the person is observing those processes from within a state in which they are no longer completely identified with them.
This is why the sequence of shamatha vipashyana is so important. We do not simply bring traumatic material into consciousness and hope that the person can remain regulated. First, through shamatha, concentration is developed. Through jhana and samadhi, profound serenity and equanimity become established. Then vipashyana uses that state of consciousness to examine the trauma.
The trauma is therefore not being examined from the same psychological position in which it was originally experienced. It is being examined from the stillness and silence of the mind, surrounded by the deep serenity that jhana provides.
That is the resource.
And within this methodology, the resource is not separate from the state of consciousness doing the observing. The serenity, equanimity, silence, and awareness of samadhi become the psychological ground from which the traumatic experience can be seen without becoming the self again.
This is one of the most important ways liberation psychology can contribute to modern trauma treatment. We often begin trauma work by going toward trauma. The ancient system suggests that sometimes we should begin somewhere else.
Begin by establishing serenity. Teach the mind that silence exists. Teach attention that it does not have to follow every thought. Teach the body what it is like to remain present without immediately preparing for danger. Develop enough stability that painful material does not occupy the entire field of consciousness. Then approach the trauma.
This does not mean avoiding trauma. It means developing the capacity necessary to encounter it.
There is an enormous difference between remembering trauma from within panic and observing traumatic conditioning from within profound equanimity.
Shamatha creates the foundation. Vipashyana uses that foundation to see.
One reason this ancient psychology may be easier for Westerners to reconsider today is the psychedelic renaissance.
Research with psilocybin and other psychedelics is forcing neuroscience to confront states of consciousness that do not fit comfortably inside ordinary waking cognition. Researchers are studying ego dissolution, changes in self boundaries, altered network organization, increased psychological flexibility, mystical experience, and forms of awareness that can be difficult to describe using ordinary conceptual language.
This does not mean jhana and psychedelics are the same experience. They are not.
But psychedelic research is making Western psychology more willing to consider a proposition contemplative traditions have investigated for thousands of years, ordinary waking thought is not the only meaningful state from which psychological insight can occur.
Brahmanic and Buddhist meditators did not need a molecule to discover this. They developed attentional technologies capable of producing profound alterations in consciousness through training.
Modern neuroscience is only beginning to develop adequate ways of studying these states.
Western psychotherapy frequently asks whether a person has fewer symptoms.
Liberation psychology asks something larger.
How much does fear control consciousness? How much does desire control consciousness? How automatically do thoughts become identity? How quickly does sensation become judgment? How often does the past become the present without our recognizing it? Can consciousness observe these processes without immediately becoming them?
The goal is not merely to replace one thought with another thought. It is to become less identified with the machinery that produces suffering.
That does not make Western psychotherapy unnecessary. There is enormous value in contemporary trauma therapy, attachment work, somatic psychology, psychodynamic therapy, cognitive therapies, and other Western approaches.
But Western psychology becomes richer when it stops pretending that it invented the psychological investigation of suffering.
It did not.
Buddhists have been mapping consciousness for more than 2,500 years. Brahmanic practitioners were exploring profound states of concentration even before Buddhism emerged. Taoist systems developed their own sophisticated investigations of consciousness, perception, embodiment, energy, and liberation. We forgot that while we were bleeding people to death only just a hundred years ago and still calling it medicine; Asians had accupunture and sterilization technique. They had real medicine.
These traditions also created elaborate methods for investigating attention, perception, sensation, craving, aversion, consciousness, identity, and suffering.
Western psychology largely classified these systems as religion or philosophy.
Then it borrowed from them.
Now it is beginning to research them.
Perhaps the next step is simply to acknowledge what they actually are.
Psychology.
A different psychology, certainly.
A psychology developed within a different cultural understanding of consciousness.
A psychology that does not assume that intellect is the highest form of knowing.
A psychology that does not automatically locate consciousness inside the brain.
A psychology in which direct experience can reveal aspects of the mind that intellectual analysis cannot reach.
A psychology whose stated goal is to recognize serenity as a fundamental quality of our original self.
Trauma can leave a person believing that vigilance is necessary for survival. Keep thinking. Keep scanning. Keep remembering. Keep preparing. Do not let your guard down.
Shamatha introduces another possibility.
Become still. Develop serenity. Discover that awareness continues even when thought becomes quiet.
Samadhi deepens that experience. Jhana stabilizes it. Then vipashyana turns that consciousness toward the psychological wound.
Not from panic. Not from intellectual argument. Not from the identity that has already decided what the trauma means.
From greater silence. From greater equanimity.
From a state in which the person can begin seeing sensation as sensation, thought as thought, fear as fear, memory as memory, and identity as something constructed rather than something permanently fixed.
That is the movement from shamatha to vipashyana.
Serenity first.
Then clear seeing.
Then the possibility of liberation from psychological patterns that may have organized a life for decades.
The methodology is more than 2,500 years old.
Western psychology is not discovering it.
We are finally beginning to recognize that it was psychology all along.
Robert Espiau is a clinician and former Buddhist monk with more than 30 years of experience practicing and teaching jhana -Samadhi states and contemplative psychology. His work brings together decades of direct training in shamatha, vipashyana, and samadhi with contemporary psychological practice.
He offers jhana based work as an alternative approach to trauma therapy for people interested in developing the depth of concentration, serenity, and equanimity necessary to examine psychological trauma from within a profoundly different state of consciousness.
The intention is not simply to teach relaxation or mindfulness. It is to help people learn the deeper shamatha vipashyana methodology, beginning with the cultivation of serenity and samadhi and eventually using that stability to approach psychological material without becoming reidentified with it.
This work reflects a psychological methodology that predates Western academic psychology by more than 2,500 years and treats consciousness itself as the instrument through which psychological suffering can be investigated.
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Buddhaghosa. (1991). The path of purification: Visuddhimagga (B. Ñāṇamoli, Trans.). Buddhist Publication Society.
Espiau, R. (2024). The true origins of psychology and the influence of Euro American ethnocentrism [Unpublished manuscript].
Heller, L., & LaPierre, A. (2012). Healing developmental trauma: How early trauma affects self regulation, self image, and the capacity for relationship. North Atlantic Books.
Kim, U., Yang, K. S., & Hwang, K. K. (Eds.). (2006). Indigenous and cultural psychology: Understanding people in context. Springer.
Wallace, B. A. (2006). The attention revolution: Unlocking the power of the focused mind. Wisdom Publications.
Wynne, A. (2007). The origin of Buddhist meditation. Routledge.
All client scenarios in this article are used by permission, and identifying details have been changed or anonymized to protect confidentiality.