Reducing and deducing the structures of consciousness through meditation

Abstract

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.

Reduced processing of afforded actions while observing mental content as ongoing mental phenomena

“…Contemplative traditional literature has long suggested that long-term practice of meditation may enable cultivation of unique phenomenological states and prominently one where meditators can cultivate a radical meta-perspective towards mental activity where it appears within consciousness simply as "ongoing phenomena" 4,7,9 . This has been labelled among other things as de-reification, or the process of not reifying mental contents (i.e., not experiencing them as something having a fully objective reality) 4 .…”

“…Long-term mental training through meditation has been proposed to promote a distinct phenomenological way of consciously experiencing the world, where a meditator can cultivate a meta-perspective on mental contents, as ongoing phenomena constituted within consciousness. This has been labelled decentring 1 , cognitive defusion 2 , mindful attention 3 , dereification 4 , or opacification 5 , and phenomenological 6 or experiential 7 reduction. For example, dereification -i.e., "... the degree to which thoughts, feelings, and perceptions are phenomenally interpreted as mental processes rather than as accurate depictions of reality" -is viewed as a key process associated with mindfulness meditation 4 .…”

“…A classical signature associated with physical actions is desynchronisation of the µ rhythm (8-12 Hz) over somatomotor cortices [24][25][26] . Much like its occipital counterpart, alpha (7)(8)(9)(10)(11)(12)(13), µ is a suppressive rhythm. It is strong in the absence of somatomotor activity and desynchronises when one engages in such activity.…”

An evidence-based critical review of the mind-brain identity theory

“…Metzinger, instead, conjectures that it could be related to some neurological representational model realized in some brain region with some specific physical properties or neural signatures and correlates that have yet to be discovered Metzinger, 2020 . While Katyal argues that the phenomenology of nondual meditative states suggests that a purely non-representational conscious state–that is, a ‘transcendental’ state beyond conscious experience– may transcend any such neural signatures altogether ( Katyal, 2022 ).…”

Towards an Active Inference Account of Deep Meditative Deconstruction

“…We will use 'meditative defabrication' to refer to the Buddhist process specifically, and 'meditative deconstruction' to refer to the AIF interpretation of that process.2 As a consequence we do not discuss the ample literature on the cultivation of the capacity to deconstruct via meditation, under such terms as decentring(Bernstein et al, 2015), cognitive defusion(Fletcher and Hayes, 2005), dereification(Lutz et al, 2015), opacification(Metzinger, 2003) phenomenal reduction(Varela, 1996) and experiential reduction(Katyal, 2022).…”