Implicit-explicit gradient of nondual awareness or consciousness as such

Beyond the veil of duality-topographic reorganization model of meditation

Meditation can exert a profound impact on our mental life, with proficient practitioners often reporting an experience free of boundaries between a separate self and the environment, suggesting an explicit experience of "nondual awareness." What are the neural correlates of such experiences and how do they relate to the idea of nondual awareness itself? In order to unravel the effects that meditation has on the brain's spatial topography, we review functional magnetic resonance imaging brain findings from studies specific to an array of meditation types and meditator experience levels. We also review findings from studies that directly probe the interaction between meditation and the experience of the self. The main results are (i) decreased posterior default mode network (DMN) activity, (ii) increased central executive network (CEN) activity, (iii) decreased connectivity within posterior DMN as well as between posterior and anterior DMN, (iv) increased connectivity within the anterior DMN and CEN, and (v) significantly impacted connectivity between the DMN and CEN (likely a nonlinear phenomenon). Together, these suggest a profound organizational shift of the brain's spatial topography in advanced meditators-we therefore propose a topographic reorganization model of meditation (TRoM). One core component of the TRoM is that the topographic reorganization of DMN and CEN is related to a decrease in the mental-self-processing along with a synchronization with the more nondual layers of self-processing, notably interoceptive and exteroceptive-self-processing. This reorganization of the functionality of both brain and self-processing can result in the explicit experience of nondual awareness. In conclusion, this review provides insight into the profound neural effects of advanced meditation and proposes a result-driven unifying model (TRoM) aimed at identifying the inextricably tied objective (neural) and subjective (experiential) effects of meditation.

Reducing and deducing the structures of consciousness through meditation

According to many first-person accounts, consciousness comprises a subject-object structure involving a mental action or attitude starting from the “subjective pole” upon an object of experience. In recent years, many paradigms have been developed to manipulate and empirically investigate the object of consciousness. However, well-controlled investigation of subjective aspects of consciousness has been more challenging. One way, subjective aspects of consciousness are proposed to be studied is using meditation states that alter its subject-object structure. Most work to study consciousness in this way has been done using Buddhist meditation traditions and techniques. There is another meditation tradition that has been around for at least as long as early Buddhist traditions (if not longer) with the central goal of developing a fine-grained first-person understanding of consciousness and its constituents by its manipulation through meditation, namely the Tantric tradition of Yoga. However, due to the heavy reliance of Yogic traditions on the ancient Indian Samkhya philosophical system, their insights about consciousness have been more challenging to translate into contemporary research. Where such translation has been attempted, they have lacked accompanying phenomenological description of the procedures undertaken for making the precise subject-object manipulations as postulated. In this paper, I address these issues by first detailing how Tantric Yoga philosophy can be effectively translated as a systematic phenomenological account of consciousness spanning the entirety of the subject-object space divided into four “structures of consciousness” from subject to object. This follows from the work of the 20th century polymath and founder of the Tantric Yoga school of Ananda Marga, Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar, who expounded on the “cognitivization” of Samkhya philosophy. I then detail stepwise meditation procedures that make theoretical knowledge of these structures of consciousness a practical reality to a Tantric Yoga meditator in the first-person. This is achieved by entering meditative states through stepwise experiential reduction of the structures of consciousness from object to subject, as part of their meditative goal of “self-realization.” I end by briefly discussing the overlap of these putative meditation states with proposed states from other meditation traditions, and how these states could help advance an empirical study of consciousness.