Know Thyself and its context

I am taking an online MOOC on mindfulness via Coursera. One of the questions to answer was:

• Purpose: to reveal and reflect on our existing opinions about the connections between mindfulness and Buddhism.
• Task: to challenge ourselves to consider our own views on the meaning of 'real mindfulness' and to explore our aspirations for this concept today.
• Respond: write a post that reflects upon your intuitive sense of the connection between mindfulness and Buddhism and also expresses your hopes and fears about this connection.

Here was my response:

• Any given approach - science or buddhism - has a set of presuppositions and assumptions about the nature of things. On top of that, as a particular practice evolves, it develops artifacts such as rituals, cultural norms, ....,  that create a distance between the original goals of the practice and its ongoing development as practiced by humans in human cultures with all their own biological, social, and psychological imperatives.
  
  My sense is that buddhism, science, ... are part of the evolutionary path of our species in particular. Each one adds to our journey, enriches and impoverishes. Rather than seeing an opposition in them, I see them as integral parts of our journey. Each lending depth, breadth, and insight to this universe's adventure to know itself.

A question that appeared:

• And what about insight to know oneself?

And my response to the question:

Excellent question. Language sometimes gets in the way of understanding what is going on. We have been on this journey to "know thyself" for a very long time - before all our codified philosophies and religions. One way to look at this is via integral theory:

• We have learned a lot about ourselves via reason and science - neuroscience, physiology, psychology, anthropology, sociology, ..... Some of the new discoveries in neuroscience are fascinating, e.g., Kahnemann and Tversky's discoveries of systematic errors in human reasoning. It is unclear to me that any level of introspection and meditation would have uncovered these aspects of ourselves. These insights come from an external view of what is going on with us, our minds, ...
• We have also learned a lot about our minds via introspective processes such as mindfulness and meditation. Mindfulness and meditation are a major vehicle in this journey. There is a depth and breadth to our interior landscape that an external view doesn't begin to capture.

Each perspective, internal and external, adds to our quest to know ourselves, get insight into our natures and the contexts in which that nature operates. One of the metaphors along these lines is that we are presented with a smorgasbord of avenues of self discovery. To isolate oneself to one dish on the smorgasbord table, seems to me, is needless impoverishment of our journey / experience / adventure / ....