If the ordinary egoic sense of consciousness evolved for environments where a constant hum of fight or flight mentality helped keep us alive, advanced meditation may offer a way of reprogramming some of these inherited tendencies that no longer serve us in our comparatively new evolutionary environments, like discarding clothes that no longer fit.
“There was this initial focus on meditation as attention and emotional regulation practices,” said Ruben Laukkonen, an assistant professor at Southern Cross University. “But over time, there’s been a recognition that in contemplative traditions, that’s not really the goal. These are side effects. When you talk to people who really take this stuff seriously, you find that there’s these layers of experience that unfold that are much deeper.”
In a 2021 paper, Laukkonen and his colleague Heleen Slagter suggested that one way to think about the depth of meditation is the degree to which the mind is engaged in abstractions or conceptual thought. They describe meditation as a process of deconstructing engrained habits of mind “until all conceptual processing falls away, unveiling a state of pure awareness.”
The idea of meditation as a means of awakening flared up and then began fading out along with the counterculture itself. The hippies’ rejection of the soulless, sexless mainstream failed to build an alternative that could last, leaving their gusto for higher levels of consciousness adrift, sailing out to the cultural fringes
Kabat-Zinn authored a few studies on MBSR in the 1980s, but it wasn’t until the early 2000s that mindfulness research really took off. At the 2005 Society for Neuroscience annual meeting, the Dalai Lama told a crowd of 14,000 conference participants that Buddhism and cognitive science share deep similarities. “I believe a close cooperation between these two investigative traditions can truly contribute toward expanding the human understanding of the complex world of inner subjective experience that we call the mind,” he said.
Daniel Ingram, a former emergency room physician and author of Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, cautioned, “there’s basically a long, slow trainwreck happening between people getting into these experiences and the clinical mainstream just not understanding them.”
While very rare, these can range from anxiety spikes to psychotic breaks. Young told a meditation student about “falling into the Pit of the Void,” one of the ways Buddhist tradition describes how intense experiences can go wrong. Until the professor of psychiatry Willoughby Britton’s research on adverse meditation experiences, or “dark nights of the soul” (later rebranded as the varieties of contemplative experience study), there was little clinical support for those suffering from negative meditation experiences.
Exploring the wider range of meditation is no longer reserved for the monasteries. The new science of meditation is just getting started.
By Oshan Jarow Aug 22, 2023 Vox
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