Recently I came across two articles on the same subject -- how mindfulness is just the tip of the meditation iceberg, and how advanced meditation approaches can be described scientifically.
Here's the introductory passages from "Beyond Mindfulness" by Matthew Sacchet and Judson Brewer in the July/August issue of Scientific American.
Millions worldwide practice mindfulness meditation, not just for their mental health but as a means to enhance their general well-being, reduce stress and be more productive at work. The past decade has seen an extraordinary broadening of our understanding of the neuroscience underlying meditation; hundreds of clinical studies have highlighted its health benefits.
Mindfulness is no longer a fringe activity but a mainstream health practice: the U.K.’s National Health Service has endorsed mindfulness-based therapy for depression. Mobile apps have brought meditation techniques to smartphones, enabling a new era in meditative practice.
The approach to research on meditation has been evolving in equal measure. Looking back, we can identify distinct “waves.” The first wave, from approximately the mid-1990s into the early 2000s, assessed meditation’s clinical and therapeutic potential for treating a broad set of psychological and physical health concerns.
The second wave, starting in the early 2000s, focused on mechanisms of mindfulness’s effectiveness, revealing why it yields benefits for mental health that are at times comparable to those achieved with pharmaceuticals.
Meditation science is now entering a third wave, exploring what we call advanced meditation—deeper and more intense states and stages of practice that often require extended training and can be experienced through increasing mastery. University research programs are being established to study these altered mental states, similar to new academic endeavors to investigate the merits of psychedelic drugs for personal well-being and a variety of medical conditions.
More interesting to me, because the article is written in a more readable fashion and clearly summarizes what the above-mentioned third wave of meditation research consists of, is a January 8, 2025 Vox piece, Oshan Jarrow's "How Meditation Deconstructs Your Mind."
It's based on Vox's five-day course on deepening one's meditation practice, More to Meditation. Naturally I signed up for up. Here's some excerpts from the Vox article.
Over the last decade or two, the rise of mindfulness-related practices as a profitable industry has spread the most accessible forms of meditation — like short, guided stress-relief meditations, or gratitude journals — to millions of Americans.
Which is great — basic mindfulness practices that help us concentrate on the present are both relaxing and useful. But as psychotherapist Miles Neale, who coined the term “McMindfulness,” writes, if stress relief is all we take meditation to be, it’s “like using a rocket launcher to light a candle.” Some meditation practices can help ease the anxious edges of modern life. Others can change your mind forever.
One way to pursue happiness is to try and fill your experience with things that make you happy — loving relationships, prestige, kittens, whatever. Another is to change the way your mind generates experience in the first place. This is where more advanced meditation focuses. It operates on our deep mental habits so that well-being can more naturally arise in how we experience anything at all, kittens or not.
But the deeper terrain of meditation is often shrouded in hazy platitudes. You may hear that meditation is about “awakening,” “liberation,” or jubilantly realizing the inherent emptiness of all phenomena, at which point you’d be forgiven for tuning out. Descriptions of more advanced meditation often sound … weird, and therefore, inaccessible or irrelevant to most people.
Part of my hope for this course is to change that. Even if you don’t want to join a monastery (I do not), there’s still a huge range of more “advanced meditation” practices to explore that go beyond the mainstream basic mindfulness stuff. Some can feel like melting into “a laser beam of intense tingly pleasurably electricity,” and ultimately change the way you relate to pleasure, like the jhānas. Others, like non-dual practices (which I’ll get into later), can plunge you into strange modes of consciousness full of wonder and insight that you might never have known were there.
...In a pivotal 2021 paper by cognitive scientists Ruben Laukkonen and Heleen Slagter, that big picture — a model of how meditation affects the mind that can explain the effects of simple breathing practices and the most advanced transformations of consciousness alike — finally began coming together.
Let’s start with plain language. Think of meditation as having four stages of depth, each with a corresponding style of practice: focused attention, open-monitoring, non-dual, and cessation.
Near the surface,“focused attention” practices help settle the mind. By default, our minds are usually snow globes in constant frenzy. Our attention constantly jumps from one flittering speck to the next, and the storm of activity blocks our view of the whole sphere. By focusing attention on an object — the breath, repeating a mantra, the back of your thigh, how a movement feels in the body — we can train the mind to stop getting yanked around. With the mind settled on just one thing, it’s easier to see through the storm.
“Open-monitoring” practices help us get untangled from focusing on any particular thing happening in the mind, opening the aperture of our attention to notice the wider field of awareness that all those thoughts, feelings, and ideas all arise and fall within.
Once you’ve settled the mind and gotten acquainted with the more spacious awareness beneath it, “non-dual” practices help you shift your mental center of gravity so that you identify with that expansive field of awareness itself, rather than everything that arises within it, as we normally do. (I know this probably sounds weird, we’ll get more into it later. Some things in meditation are irreducibly weird, which is part of what makes me think it’s worth paying attention to.)
And finally, for practitioners with serious meditation chops, you can go one step deeper, where even the field of non-dual awareness disappears. If you sink deep enough into the mind, you’ll find that it just extinguishes, like a candle flame blown out by a sudden gust of wind. That can happen for seconds at a time, called nirodhas in Theravada Buddhism, or it can last for days at a time, called nirodha-sammapati, or cessation attainment.
Predictive processing says that we don’t experience the world as it is, but as we predict it to be. Our conscious experience is a construction of layered mental habits acquired through past experiences. We don’t see the world through our eye sockets; we don’t hear the world through our ear canals.
These all feed information into our brains, which conjure our experience of the world from scratch — like when we dream — only that in waking consciousness, they’re at least trying to match what they whip up in our experience to what might actually be going on in the world outside our skulls.
The building blocks for these conjured models of the world we experience — the predictive mind — are called “priors,” those beliefs or expectations based on the past. Priors run a spectrum from deep and ancestral to superficial and personal.
For example, say you ventured an opinion in front of your third grade class and everyone laughed. You might have formed a prior that assumes sharing your thoughts leads to ridicule. If that experience was particularly meaningful to you, it could embed deep in your predictive mind, shaping your behavior, and even perception of the world, for the rest of your life.
Similarly, our bodies know how to do some of their most basic functions — like maintaining body temperature around 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit — because we’ve inherited priors from our evolutionary history that holding our body in that range will keep us alive. According to predictive processing, consciousness is constructed via this hierarchy of priors like a house of cards.
With all that in place, science’s new meditation story can be put nice and short: Meditation deconstructs the predictive mind.
But hold on. It took billions of years for evolution to slowly, patiently build us these predictive minds. They’re one of the great marvels of biology. Why would we want to deconstruct them?
Well, evolution doesn’t care whether survival feels good. Conscious experience — as we know it — might be a really useful trick for adapting to our environments and achieving the goals that further life’s crusade against entropy and death. But natural selection cares about ensuring our bodies survive, not that we achieve happiness and well-being.
Which is why you often hear meditation teachers talking about “reprogramming” the mind. We don’t want to just leave the predictive mind in pieces. Again, it’s one of the most useful adaptations life on Earth has ever mustered. But in some departments, we might want to kindly thank evolution, while taking the reins and revising a bit of its work to make this whole business of living feel better.
Each step, from focused attention through to cessation, is a deeper deconstruction of the predictive mind. But “deconstructing” doesn’t mean, like, breaking it.
Instead, the key idea is “precision weighting,” which you can think of as the volume knob on each of the priors that make up your predictive mind. The higher the precision — or volume — assigned to something, the more focus your mind pays to it. The more your experience warps around it.
Deconstructing the mind is to progressively turn down the volume on each layer of stacked priors, releasing the grip they ordinarily hold on awareness. By definition, then, the deeper meditation goes, the stranger (as in, further from ordinary) the resulting experience will be.
Fascinating. And the five-day course, which comes via email, goes into all this in more depth than the Vox article does. In the second day's message (at least I think that's where I'm at currently), Jarow provides some suggestions for where to go to get more instruction in meditation.
I'm quite familiar with focused attention and open monitoring from my fifty-five years of daily meditation. Non-dual approaches, not so much, though in this regard Jarow mentions the book by Thomas Metzinger I wrote about extensively last year, The Elephant and the Blind.
He also mentioned a couple of online sources of instruction in non-dual awareness. One had a bunch of videos, the first of which was about 90 minutes long. I watched a few minutes of it, then decided I wasn't willing to devote that much time to the guided meditations.
I then checked out the Loch Kelly web site. I've heard Kelly speak on Sam Harris' Waking Up app and liked his style. Today I signed up for a 14 day free trial of his Glimpses app that I now have on my iPhone. Kelly says that short glimpses of nonduality can bring about a transformation of consciousness, though it takes longer to do this in those brief chunks than if you meditate for longer periods regularly.
The Cessation thing is intriguing, but at the moment it doesn't really appeal to me. The Scientific American article describes cessations by a single advanced meditator that were examined by the authors using EEG data. What they call "cessation" of consciousness isn't what the word sounds like, but more like a selfless state with echoes of mindfulness.
When we discuss the loss of consciousness during advanced meditation cessation events, it is crucial to differentiate it from unconsciousness that is caused by anesthesia, coma (including medically induced coma), physical trauma such as head injuries, and naturally occurring events such as sleep. Unlike these states, cessation events in advanced meditation represent a peak meditative experience in which ordinary self-awareness and sensory processing are temporarily suspended.
...The lowest levels of alpha power and connectivity occurred immediately before and after cessation. The results of this study are consistent with the suggestion that this type of meditation diminishes hierarchical predictive processing—that is, the mind’s tendency to predict and rank self-related narratives and beliefs. The cessation process can ultimately result in the absence of consciousness and the emergence of a deeply present form of awareness and thought that accepts whatever arises, whether positive or negative.
I'm not impressed with NotebookLM or weird notions of oneness
I do my best to accept the diversity of opinions expressed by people who leave comments on this blog. Diversity is good. If we all believed in the same things, life would be super boring.
However, I'm also big on coherent conversations. While I understand that it is difficult to accomplish this via blog post comments, there's much more value in comments that can be understood by other people, as understanding is the foundation for agreements or disagreements.
Here's an example.
A few days ago I wrote "Some thoughts about what oneness is, and isn't." It wasn't one of my best blog posts. Adequate, but not more than that. I was hoping that someone else would have something wiser to say about oneness.
Because I've found that Osho Robbins, a regular commenter on this blog, often makes good sense, I did my best to understand what he was getting at in his comments on my oneness post. I failed. Here's quotes from his comments that seem to summarize his position on oneness.
I have not claimed the existence of ONENESS.
What I have done is shown that ONENESS cannot be known or experienced.
ONENESS is non-existent because it ticks all the boxes for a non-existent thing.
ONENESS has NO CHARACTERISTICS hence it does NOT exist.
OK. I can understand those statements. Oneness doesn't exist and, not surprisingly, it can't be known or experienced. What I can't understand is how Robbins says a whole lot of other stuff in his comments that apparently he considers to be related to nonexistent and unknowable oneness.
Look, over the years I've been fond of saying that existence exists, and wow, isn't that amazing, that there's something rather than nothing. I readily admit that in one sense, existence can't be known or experienced, since all we can know or experience are entities that exist.
So when I say that existence exists, I'm not claiming that existence is something that stands apart from what exists. This appears to be similar to Robbins' statement that oneness can't be known or experienced, just the unity of things that can be known or experienced.
However, the difference is that Robbins seems to have a lot of fondness for oneness that doesn't exist. He isn't expressing admiration for love and other manifestations of the unity that undergirds reality, as manifested in universal laws of nature, ecological interconnectedness, and such.
And that's what I don't get. His take on oneness isn't that it is beyond speech, reason, perception, and other human ways of knowing and communicating. That would put oneness in the sphere of Zen. Rather, it is that somehow we should care about oneness even though it doesn't exist in any fashion.
I can understand the appeal of mysticism, even though I've fallen away from embracing it. What I don't understand is talk about oneness that doesn't exist.
I also don't understand the appeal of NotebookLM, which is capable of fashioning "podcasts" from videos, recordings, or writings, creating two personalities from the thoughts communicated by a single person.
Previously I shared a NotebookLM podcast from Osho Robbins. Then Jim Sutherland, another regular commenter on this blog, emailed me about a NotebookLM podcast fashioned from reports of his about a 2017 visit to the Dera, the headquarters of Radha Soami Satsang Beas in India.
I listened to about a third of the 17 minute audio podcast. I guess I have a low tolerance for NotebookLM, because I found the artificial intelligence generated voices so irritating, I wished that Sutherland that simply shared a written version of what the podcast is about, rather than having those reports filtered through Notebook LM.
The way I see it, NotebookLM simply is regurgitating a communication that already exists in a podcast form. Nothing new is added by NotebookLM. It merely fashions a pseudo-dialogue between two AI generated "people," each of whom reflects the content of the original communication.
Sure, I can understand the appeal of having the NotebookLM personalities gush over the wisdom contained in something a person has created, be it a video, audio recording, or document. But for me, the listener/watcher of NotebookLM, I don't see what benefit there is in having the original communication fashioned into a "podcast" with the same content.
If I'm wrong about NotebookLM, I'll be pleased to be corrected. That's just how I see it at the moment.
Posted at 10:10 PM in Comments, Reality | Permalink | Comments (31)
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