The article proposes that body-scan meditation, a practice of systematically attending to different parts of the body, can lead to a dissolution of bodily boundaries—a sense of the body's limits becoming less distinct. It uses predictive processing theory, which frames perception as the brain's active inference about sensory input, to explain how such meditation might reduce the precision of predictions about bodily states. By learning to attenuate or down-weight these predictions, practitioners may experience a blurring of the self-other boundary. The account integrates philosophical and neuroscientific perspectives to describe how meditative training can reshape the sense of bodily self.
Focused attention on the body, as in meditation, usually heightens sensation, but deep practice can paradoxically dissolve the sense of bodily boundaries—a phenomenon called bhaṅga. This paper resolves the paradox using the Predictive Processing framework, arguing that the body-scan technique, from Theravada Buddhism, enhances the precision of low-level predictions about somatosensory signals, which attenuates those signals and diminishes perception of the body's boundaries. The authors describe the technique, its phenomenological outcomes, and the attentional processes involved, concluding that this attenuation may contribute to well-being and offer therapeutic applications for conditions like addiction and emotional dysregulation.
Deep meditative states often involve reports of 'selfless' experiences, but the body's homeostatic self-regulation continues to operate, maintaining essential self-related information processing for survival. The term 'losing the self' is misleading; what is lost is a particular ordinary mental model of the self in relation to the body and world, not the embodied experience itself. The body remains a living self-organizing system, becoming sensorily attenuated and 'transparent' yet central. Enhanced connectedness with this transparent body may produce feelings of 'oceanic boundlessness' or an 'unlimited body.' The explicit feeling of a selfless mind is tacitly accompanied by an implicit feeling of an unlimited body. True self-loss only occurs with death.