Abstract
Meditation as a scientific first-person investigative tool has been discussed for decades, but remains largely a mere idea. One reason may be lack of relevant theory. Maps of mind developed by meditation traditions could prove helpful. The map used by orthodox Indian traditions, for example, identifies six phenomenologically distinct levels (senses, discursive thinking, discriminative intellect, pure individuality and pure consciousness/emptiness). This map, if valid, would have implications for many fields. It would indicate, for example, that the introspective awareness of major philosophers such as Descartes, Hume and Kant was open to particular levels and not others, and suggest why each favored particular theories and found particular problems unresolvable. Identification of physiological correlates of the levels could provide evidence for the map’s validity. Significant correlates of the deepest level already appear to be identified. Research relevant to other levels has been conducted. Identifying correlates of all the levels would provide an objective way to evaluate many mind-related questions. It would also provide an objective, tradition-invariant way to identify individuals capable of sustaining attention at specific levels and using meditation to investigate diverse levels-related topics. Meditation research faces strong questions of appearances of bias.
A consortium, including researchers associated with competing traditions and non-associated researchers, overseeing replications and meta-analyses could respond to these questions directly.
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Notes
- 1.
Compare, for example, The Bhagavad Gita, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (1974), p. 412.
- 2.
Compare, for example, Zen (Austin 1998, p. 474):
[inner] space becomes the object of consciousness, followed by an awareness of objectless infinity, and then by absorption into a void which has ‘nothingness’ as its object. Finally…there evolves ‘neither perception, nor nonperception.
and Tibetan Buddhism(Wallace 1999, pp. 182 and 186):
One’s consciousness is now left in an absence of appearances … as if one’s mind has become indivisible with space … [and, later the more advanced state of] the ultimate nature of awareness, free of all conceptual meditation and structuring, transcending even the concepts of existence and non-existence.
- 3.
Yoga takes the experience we are calling pure “ego” or “individuality” to display the existence of a substantial, continuing, individual self. Buddhist texts also describe this experience of individual awareness in the midst of vast emptiness. But in contrast to Yoga, they emphatically reject the idea that this is evidence of a continuing individual substantial self, an idea which they take to be an illusion akin to, but much deeper (and more problematic) than that of physical things as abiding substances, rather than collections of phenomena. Advaita Vedanta embraces Yoga on the whole. But, like Buddhism and unlike Yoga, it holds that the idea of individual substantial self is ultimately illusory. To make the situation even more complex, both Advaita and Far-Eastern Mahayana, but not Theravada, go on to assert the existence of absolute, eternal “Self” (distinguished from the “illusory” commonsense “self”) experienceable in enlightenment. Such examples make it clear that recognition of the level (iv) experience naturally identified as the core of individual awareness is independent of, and should not be identified with, any of these traditions’ competing ontological theories about the “reality” of “self.”
- 4.
Compare, for example, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (1974, p. 312).
- 5.
- 6.
They led, for example, directly to the empirical notion of causality as empirically identifiable patterns of events, now generally taken for granted by philosophers of scientists and scientists alike as freed from traditional (and commonsensical) “metaphysical” connotations.
- 7.
One can unpack the logic involved here a little further as follows: Logically speaking, any empirical quality or “special designation” (by the usual definitions of “empirical” and “special”) can in principle (if not in actual fact) be either present or absent from a person’s experience. So no matter what empirical quality or “special designation” one might choose, it is logically possible for one to have an experience where that quality or “special designation” is absent. So since one has to be present at all of one’s experiences, no such quality can be an adequate marker for the presence of one’s ego or self. More can be said, of course, to unpack the relationships of this somewhat formal argument both to the distinction between actual and possible experiences and to our commonsense intuitions about the ego as experiencer. See, for example, Shear (1990, Chap. 4, pp. 93–99 and 104–106).
- 8.
We can note that the sections on the “transcendental unity of apperception”—that is the “I”—were only sections of the Critique of Pure Reason that Kant felt constrained to rewrite substantially between the first and second editions.
- 9.
This surmise, reflecting passages from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, would appear to be reinforced by paradoxes of “will” and accounts of sublime positive affect central to Kant’s later ethics and aesthetics as well.
- 10.
My thanks to philosopher Neil Sims for noting the importance of taking this point into consideration.
- 11.
The present analysis will focus exclusively on the potential usefulness of physiological correlates. The reasons for this are purely methodological, and should not be taken to reflect a preference for a physicalist metaphysics. Behavioral markers can also be scientifically useful in levels-related research. See also note 14 below.
- 12.
The point under discussion here is only the identification of these correlates of the level (vi) experience, not their putative relationship to other features of awareness. We can note nevertheless that low frequency rhythms such as alpha (and theta) appear to reflect top-down information processing, in contrast to high frequency rhythms (beta2 and gamma) associated with bottom-up processing of the contents of experience (Razumnikova 2007). If we take pure contentless consciousness as the “top” locus of “top-down” processing—as meditation traditions regularly do—then it should be no surprise that alpha might turn out to be associated with this experience. Frontal alpha coherence is also associated with cortical excitability, and has been postulated to underlie inner wakefulness (Travis et al. 2010).
- 13.
Any bodily awareness would, of course, be incompatible with empirically contentless level (vi) experience.
- 14.
This analysis is purely methodological, and depends only on the hypothesis of the existence of strong natural correlations between subjective experiences and objective nervous system states, taken for granted by modern science and many Eastern meditation traditions alike. As such it is intended to be independent of metaphysical theories and preferences about such things as materialism, idealism, non-dualism, the directionality and/or existence of mind-body causality, etc.
- 15.
I would like to thank both David Orme-Johnson and Fred Travis for their critical feedback on this and the preceding section, and their help in selecting research references.
- 16.
Noted scholar and head of the Dalai Lama’s government in exile.
- 17.
- 18.
For related research suggested by a Buddhist map, for example, see Shear (2007).
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Shear, J. (2014). Meditation as First-Person Methodology: Real Promise—and Problems. In: Schmidt, S., Walach, H. (eds) Meditation – Neuroscientific Approaches and Philosophical Implications. Studies in Neuroscience, Consciousness and Spirituality, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01634-4_4
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