The religious or spiritual value of contemplative practices and psychedelic use is not inherent in the experiences themselves but depends on how they transform consciousness. Drawing on a nonreductive, nondualist Buddhist account, the author argues that changes in subjective experience are only provisional goals; the ultimate aim is cultivating liberating and compassionate relations. Recent neuroscientific studies combining first-person and third-person methods challenge individualist conceptions of autonomy, highlight the importance of group practice, and show that mindfulness techniques stripped of their dharmic context are inadequate.
Reductive physicalism has succeeded in producing technological advances and material control, but it has failed to solve the hard problem of consciousness, exposing humanity to existential and ethical risks as the attention economy and artificial intelligence restructure human presence. Using Buddhist concepts of causality and agency, this paper proposes a nondualist, nonreductionist theory of consciousness and evolutionary dynamics. It aims to open an ethically productive middle path for critically rethinking the Fourth Industrial Revolution and positively reconfiguring human–technology–world relations.