Meditation research has grown considerably, yet its clinical implications for advanced and long-term practitioners remain poorly understood. Meditation’s mental health implications extend beyond benefit, encompassing psychiatric risk, adverse experiences, and differentiating between meditative progress and psychopathology. This review synthesizes evidence on how advanced and long-term...
In a recent taxonomy of different philosophies of mind, Robert Lawrence Kuhn classified Rudolf Steiner's view as a mind-body dualism. We argue that this classification is incorrect. Rather, Steiner's view is trinitarian and represents a unification of monism and dualism. Hence, the trinitarian conception of the human being in Steiner not only challenges Kuhn's taxonomic placement of Steiner's...
This article proposes a definition of advanced meditation which in concise form is the states, stages, and endpoints that arise with the maturation and mastery of awareness skills. Advanced meditation involves experiential and structural mental changes, sometimes radical, to volition, affect, cognition, and self-related processing in the direction of effortlessness, intentional control,...
Despite rapidly growing interest in meditation, research has disproportionately emphasized short-term outcomes in novices and mindfulness-based practices, leaving advanced and long-term meditation largely unexplored. This review examines how sustained and skill-developed meditation practices positively shape well-being, interpersonal relationships, and emotion regulation. Following PRISMA...
While meditation has been increasingly associated with challenging and adverse experiences, especially in more advanced and high-density practices, little is known about how advanced practitioners experience, make sense of, and integrate non-ordinary experiences that may disrupt their sense of self, reality, embodiment, and meaning. Building on recent advances in the scientific study of...
Abstract Understanding how the sense of self can be attenuated or reconfigured without loss of consciousness remains a central challenge in contemporary consciousness science. We propose a multidimensional framework of graded self-attenuation, in which the self is conceptualized as a dynamic configuration of distributed neural processes. Within this framework, contemplative practice attenuates...
How should we understand the radical changes in bodily awareness that occur during advanced meditation? Existing approaches subsume these changes under frameworks of self-dissolution or operationalize them through interoceptive measures that assume ongoing bodily sensation. This paper argues for bracketing the self when studying bodily awareness in advanced concentrative absorption meditation...
Meditation research is increasingly moving beyond the study of health-related benefits toward the investigation of non-ordinary states of consciousness and ways of being that may arise through advanced meditative practice. Alongside potential benefits, however, intensive or advanced meditation has been associated with a higher incidence of meditation-related psychological adverse effects,...
Extended cessation (EC) is a rare, non-ordinary meditative endpoint characterized by a temporary absence of reportable phenomenal experience, followed by an extraordinary perceptual vividness, openness, equanimity and affective balance. EC thus offers a unique, non-pharmacological window into the brain dynamics underlying suspension of conscious experience and the subsequent psychological...
Background: Meditation has recently gained attention as a promising tool for enhancing psychedelic preparedness. This exploratory study builds on quantitative work by investigating how experienced meditators who use psychedelics understand meditation’s role in preparation and its influence on different aspects of the psychedelic experience. Methods: We conducted a reflexive thematic analysis of...
Mindfulness is increasingly recognized for its mental health benefits, with evidence supporting efficacy across clinical and non-clinical contexts. However, little research has explored deeper psychological and even existential transformations related to advanced meditation, which meditative traditions regard as essential to actualize the most profound states of well-being. Given the global...
Meditation, in particular advanced meditation, develops toward meditative endpoints (MEND), sometimes referred to metaphorically as awakening, enlightenment or salvation. A well-known instance of such an endpoint is called nibbāna (Pali) or nirvana (Sanskrit). Contemporary mindfulness teachers and diverse Buddhist traditions present differing views of nirvana. Some define nirvana as the...
Humans can experience a rich array of conscious experience, including highly stable, positive, and refined states of non-ordinary perception that can be elicited through advanced meditation. Here, we present the first group-level, ultra-high-field (7T) fMRI study of jhana advanced concentration absorption meditation (ACAM-J). We combined local (regional homogeneity), mesoscale (connectivity...
That meditation is similar to mental training is a widely used analogy that seeks to capture thegrowth-oriented processes that unfold through the intentional performance of mental activities.However, despite its intuitive appeal, this notion remains conceptually underdeveloped. To ourknowledge, no interdisciplinary dialogue has been established with training science—a fielddedicated to the...
Advanced meditation offers a powerful lens for investigating consciousness and for understanding how sustained training may contribute to human flourishing. In the spirit of neurophenomenology, we combine first-person reports with model-free empirical analyses and formal whole-brain modeling to investigate the mechanisms underlying advanced meditative states and minimal phenomenal experience...
In some contemplative traditions, “extended cessation” (EC) refers to a state of advanced meditation in which the meditator intentionally suppresses their own consciousness and re-emerges with a profound sense of clarity and equanimity. Here, we present the first electrophysiological study of EC, in which five meditators underwent concurrent electroencephalography (EEG) and...
Extended cessation (EC), an advanced meditative state in which consciousness is volitionally suspended and later reset with immense mental clarity, equanimity, and peace, offers an endogenous model for investigating the mechanisms of consciousness. Using ultra-high-resolution 7T fMRI with dense within-subject sampling (N=3), we quantified whole-brain activity, functional and effective...
While there exists a large body of research on the possibility of measuring certain aspects of human development, what might be called inner development has mostly been neglected, in particular as it pertains to advanced meditation. A central aspect of this kind of development, which we call meditative development, is associated with access to bliss, peace, wisdom, and the reduction of...
Abstract Research on meditation and mindfulness in relation to challenging effects can be understood as consisting of at least two waves: The first wave focused on the efficacy of mindfulness and more broadly the clinically positive effects of meditation. The second wave mainly focused on increasing methodological rigor and uncovering underlying mechanisms. Research on the different kinds and...
Advanced meditation has been associated with long- and short-term psychological changes such as bliss, profound insight, and transformation of well-being. However, most advanced meditation neuroimaging analyses have implemented primarily spatially-localized approaches, focusing on discrete regional changes in activity rather than distributed dynamics. The present study uses a geometric...
The stages of insight (SoI) are a series of psychological realizations experienced through advanced investigative insight meditation (AIIM). SoI provide a powerful structured framework of AIIM for understanding and evaluating insight-based meditative development through changes in perception, experiences of self, cognition, and emotional processing. Yet, the neurophenomenology of SoI remains...
Advanced meditation consists of states and stages of practice that unfold with mastery and time. Dynamic functional connectivity (DFC) analysis of fMRI could identify brain states underlying advanced meditation. We conducted an intensive DFC case study of a meditator who completed 27 runs of jhāna advanced absorptive concentration meditation (ACAM-J), concurrently with 7-T fMRI and...
Using a combination of fMRI, EEG, and phenomenology ratings, we examined the neurophenomenology of advanced concentrative absorption meditation, namely jhanas (ACAM-J), in a practitioner with over 23,000 h of meditation practice. Our study shows that ACAM-J states induce reliable changes in conscious experience and that these experiences are related to neural activity. Using resting-state fMRI...
ReligionsJuly 18, 2024Terje Sparby, Philip Eilinghoff-Ehlers, Nuri Lewandovski et al.3 citations
This article explores the topic of meditation hindrances and breakthroughs. In the traditional literature, meditation hindrances are seen as phenomena counteracting meditative activity. However, hindrances are also seen as grounds for meditative growth and breakthroughs. In current meditation research, there is an effort to understand negative effects, sometimes referred to as challenging,...
The jhānas are series of advanced concentrative absorption meditative (ACAM) states brought about by meditation. While previously cultivated mostly in monastic settings, a series of modern meditation manuals both openly discuss the jhānas and describe how they may be attained by laypeople. Simultaneously, the phenomenological and neuroscientific investigation of the jhānas is advancing....