Abstract
Mindfulness interventions and meditation form a mental training towards deconditioning. This paper outlines the mental development during long term mindfulness meditation (vipassanā). It is intended to give researchers in the neurosciences and practitioners of mindfulness based interventions an idea of the phenomenological side of this form of meditation. Mindfulness acts as a separator between the perceived actor in us and the things we cognize and act upon. This makes us more flexible. At the same time our view of self will change: no longer is our ‘agency’ seen as a fixed ‘thing’ or ‘being’ that acts in the world, but as a process of sensory input, appraisal, thinking, acting, depending on various mental states.
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Notes
- 1.
Children sometimes play the following game. They repeat an ordinary word, like ‘yellow’, many times. After a while they loose the meaning of the word, there is just the sound. This phenomenon is called a ‘semantic fateague’. From the point of view of insight meditation a word has a sound and a meaning. When a word is repeated often, the sound and meaning are separated. Actually the child still knows very well what ‘yellow’ means.
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Barendregt, H. (2011). Mindfulness Meditation: Deconditioning and Changing View. In: Walach, H., Schmidt, S., Jonas, W. (eds) Neuroscience, Consciousness and Spirituality. Studies in Neuroscience, Consciousness and Spirituality, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2079-4_12
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