We have been discussing the co-determination of pristine experience ↔ moments ↔ genuinely submitting to the constraints that the exploration of experience imposes. Chapter 2's discussion of bulimia showed that submitting to those constraints may be worth the required effort and may provide outside-the-box perspectives on vitally important matters.

All that presumes that pristine experience exists. However, there are many who believe that inner experience doesn't exist, or if it does exist it can't be apprehended or described in any scientifically useful way. There is good reason to be wary of introspective methods; the introspections on which nascent psychology was founded were a spectacular failure, leading to nearly a century in which introspection was effectively banned from orthodox psychology (the term “introspection” rarely appears in modern textbooks on psychological method except in the history-of-psychology chapter where it is criticized). As I have explained elsewhere (Monson & Hurlburt, 1993; Hurlburt & Schwitzgebel, 2007), I think the early introspections were interpreted incorrectly, so psychology's banning of introspective techniques was an over-generalization and an over-reaction. However, that history does suggest that skepticism about introspective techniques is justified, as long as by “skepticism” one means “suspending judgment” rather than being “unwilling to admit or accept what is offered as true.”

Chapter 3 sketched DES, a method (or approach, or instrument) for the exploration of pristine experience. The practitioner of DES, I claimed, can genuinely submit to the constraints that the endeavor to apprehend experience imposes.