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.
Why RSSB was such a huge positive for India.
https://www.bitchute.com/video/29Rw0rEMIehg/
Posted by: sant64 | January 12, 2025 at 06:18 AM
@Sant64, this is a much better link on the Video.
https://odysee.com/@Minnesota-tan:5/Codex-Pajeet-II:4
The one you provided tries to trick you into some BS money scheme.
But no one who has never traveled India would ever believe this stuff. I’ve seen stuff that absolutely shocked my naive Wife, such as open holes in the Train toilets , and dumping on the tracks, let alone people crapping in public along side the roads. Some one asked Gurinder about that in a Q & A, and he said not to worry, because it’s good cheap fertilizer.
I then couldn’t help but wonder, if that was the cheap fertilizer used to fertilize the free food at the Lankars and Golden Sikh Temple We toured.
But, I think the most shocking thing we ever experienced was when our Driver of a private car we were traveling in, had his windows rolled down, while driving through a city ( I won’t mention which here) , where there were throngs of beggers pressing us for money. Our Driver seemed to ignore all of them, and was obviously used to them.
But the one that shocked my wife the most was when a young female, looking like in her Teens, came to our window holding a DEAD baby in one arm, with her other open hand out begging for money!! The baby was dead, because it had turned grey. Very sad. That image still haunts my wife. But I saw MUCH more, while alone with out her, that would have over loaded her brain circuits. After all, she doesn’t mediate, and has never been interested in Religeons or mysticism,
But, Egypt is very similar to India, especially in Cairo and Alexandria. The men wear full body dresses, with out under ware, and just squat and pee and poop where ever they feel like, in public, but just squatting like females, while lifting their dresses!
Such a contrast to China, Dubai, and Abu Dahbi.!
By the way, Sant64, as I am reading you more here, with your style of writing and interests,…I ‘think” I recognize one of your past identities. Do I have your permission to reveal my best guess, or should I refrain?
If I reveal it, and am correct, will you fess up, and admit it, or deny it, and tell me I’m FOS.haha
Jim Sutherland
Posted by: Jim Sutherland | January 12, 2025 at 07:33 AM
Thanks for a GREAT article, Brian. Lots to unpack there. I've only quickly glossed through it for now, will return later when I've time, bookmarked.
That last part we're kind of familiar with, thanks to your extensive coverage here of that guy's work, I forget his name ---- Indian guy I think, or maybe Sri Lankan, and I *think* his name starts with an S --- neurocientist, who in full detail explained the science of how exactly the mind creates our brain model, all of those "priors", et cetera. I recall that discussion, conducted over a good many blog posts, in some detail, but his name's slipped my mind.
...I signed in for Jarrow's course, as well. Following the link you've provided in your article, for which thanks, Brian.
Actually, now was not the best time to do this. Because I'm hugely rushed now, and chances are I'll simply gloss over the emails he'll now send, rather than engage with his material with the time and attention and respect that a deep dive into a subject like this deserves. On the other hand, there's so much of to-do piled up, that letting this go now and telling oneself one will return to it later, in practice usually means one ends up forgetting about it altogether in a while! This way, at least I'll get a rough idea what it's about : and since these are static emails, I can always return to them afterwards, emails already sitting in your inbox are a more compelling reminder than merely bookmarks and good intentions.
All of which stream-of-consciousness thoughts about my current schedule and my petty motivations, haha, are neither here nor there, are they. ...Short story, signed up, and am looking forward to checking out what he's got to offer.
Posted by: Appreciative Reader | January 12, 2025 at 07:55 PM
Yup, just quickly read through his introductory email, great stuff. Glad I signed up, rather than waiting for a more opportune moment, which would likely never have materialized. This looks like precursor to the kind of material that might be attended to in depth, but might also admit of a more cursory and rushed read, at least basis this intro thing of his.
Posted by: Appreciative Reader | January 12, 2025 at 08:11 PM
Always good to hear a balanced perspective on meditation. Particularly from the point of view where Jarrow talks about predictive processing and how our brains become ‘bogged down’ with information – may I say, much of which is the cause of many of our human and individual problems.
To quote Jarrow: - “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.”
Which is not to say that we don’t experience reality, it’s just that the reality our brains present to us is the information we need to navigate our environment. And if some of that information is in the form of stultifying archaic beliefs and models then the awareness of these can aid ‘liberation’.
Anyone interested in the predictive processing may be interested in reading Lisa Fieldman Barrett’s account of her research in her books: - ‘How Emotions Are Made’ and the more compact: - ‘Seven and a Half lessons About the Brain’.
Posted by: Ron E. | January 13, 2025 at 02:42 AM
The specific goal of
RS is LOVE
Nothing else can faint the Mind
The RS method has little to do with
what Yogis & Rishis offer which is Unification with
lower Deities via harsh ascese during many lives
Pls remember when U loved the most
and multiply that by a Zillion
777
Posted by: 777 | January 13, 2025 at 07:42 AM
If u live in the USA and strange Fog appears
Seek a lab to analyse on the nano scale 3300 Zoom
Don t inhale
7
Posted by: 7 | January 13, 2025 at 07:47 AM
Sam Harris' mind is deconstructed, so I guess mindfulness meditation works as advertised. Either that or the bullet hit the teleprompter and Jordan Peterson does have user interface issues...and Hunter Biden having corpses in his basement is a tiny issue compared To Trump U. Either that, or decades of mindfulness and Dzochen has no effect whatever on tds.
Which I believe elicits a serious topic: Maybe it's time to give up on the notion that a-theistic meditation produces wisdom. It could well be that mindfulness meditation acts as a kind of brainwashing that gives people the illusion their biases are clear thinking. Or even sanity.
Posted by: sant64 | January 13, 2025 at 12:28 PM
Meditation can be some help just to calm one self and get centred again.
But if you get caught up in Religious garbage like Gurinder Singh Dhilion and Radha Soami Cult it can be hell not help.
As you repeat the evil meditative 5 names and concentrate on Gurinders evil ethereal form (kaal) you come to realise who he really is Lucifier the Light bearer that's why he gives you the names which include light devil to repeat.
That's a one way ticket to hell called Sachkand
Satan is the king of lies and for a good reason too
Don't follow a organisation which profits from you and gives you nothing in return let alone God.
Posted by: Trez | January 13, 2025 at 12:47 PM
Ah, Chandaria. Shamil Chandaria. That's the name I'd been struggling to remember, while posting my comment here the other day, even as I remembered both the fact of his presentation, and the content of it, as well as our extensive deliberations here about his work and its implications. The name popped up in today's installment of Jarrow's five-day meditation course material, delivered via email.
Posted by: Appreciative Reader | January 14, 2025 at 07:00 PM
Have now gone through a couple instalment of Jarrow’s course. Lovely, completely lovely.
Nothing really new here, so far. But of course, that’s only because we’ve already covered all this material here already; and also because “we” are more than just a bit familiar with the actual praxis of mediation. But it’s *great*, how Jarrow ties it all together!
And I completely love his fully detailed exposition, that is completely entirely free of the woo-woo and/or charlatanry that so often infests these matters, while at the same time fully examining every facet of meditation.
Thanks again, Brian, for bringing this up here. And I’m patting myself in the back as well, for electing to do this course despite being so crazily, impossibly rushed at this present time. This is material one can take a deep dive in, and engage with in full detail, if one has the bandwidth; but equally, even a quick 15-20 minutes’ worth of perusal per installment, which is all I could give it for now, is still immeasurably better than simply postponing it and then eventually forgetting about it, given how simply and how cogently it’s all structured --- particularly if, like I said, we already are aware of most of all of this, thanks to Brian’s blog posts, albeit in piecemeal fashion, as well as fully familiar with the actual nuts-and-bolts practice involved in all of all of this, basis one’s own personal experience. …And of course, I’m preserving the emails, so that I can return to them for a more detailed read later when the crazy-rushed thing goes away. …But even if that latter never happens, even so, this will still have been well worth it, completely so.
-------------------------
This is such an obvious area, that cries out for direct detailed research and understanding. Meditation, I mean to say, and everything that entails and implies.
Today, we either have people avoiding these things altogether, or maybe engaging with them only very cursorily; or else getting mired, sooner or later, in woo; or else, as we’ve seen right here recently, eventually branching off into self-serving charlatanry. This sort of completely clear-eyed, holistic coverage of the subject, completely free of woo-woo and charlatanry, that completely incorporates both the subjective and the objective --- that’s what I so love about Brian’s completely dispassionate, selfless labor of love, this here Churchless blog of his: and that’s what I’m seeing here as well, so far at any rate.
Yeah, I’m loving this brief course thing of Jarrow’s.
Posted by: Appreciative Reader | January 15, 2025 at 08:27 PM
Quick browse through the subsequent emails: Jhanas; and "supercharging" meditation with tech, as in direct stimulation of the brain, and psychedelics, etc.
While I did browse through these, but unlike the earlier installments, these two subjects, while I'm familiar with them, sure, but not enough about the details of them to absorb over a super-quick browse, particularly the latter. These two I absolutely must return to --- not someday, but as soon as I'm able to, as soon as time permits.
Very cool. Jarrow's course has fully lived up to the high expectations I'd had of it basis Brian's post and basis Jarrow's own prefatory messages.
Posted by: Appreciative Reader | January 17, 2025 at 11:07 AM