Meditation practices often involve sustaining attention on the body. Typically, attention is understood to enhance both neural resource allocation and the subjective salience of the attended target. However, in deep meditative states, practitioners sometimes report a dissolution of bodily boundaries, a phenomenon known in Pali as bha[Formula: see text]ga. This presents a paradox: why does...
The practice of meditation consists in allocating attention on sensory stimuli. As it is commonly known, attention allocation tends to increase both the cortical and the phenomenal response to the target. Yet, in deep contemplative states practitioners often report to feel a complete dissolution of body boundaries, i.e. the state of banga (in Pali). This phenomenon creates a tension with...
March 30, 2023Valeria Becattini, Anna Ciaunica
preprint
Deep contemplative states such as meditative states alter the subjective experience of being a self distinct from the world and others to a point that the individual may report ‘selfless’ states. In this paper, we propose a shift in focus on homeostatic bodily self-regulation underlying selfless experiences. We suggest that during reported phenomena of ‘self-loss’ or ‘pure consciousness’, the...