Predictive Engagement and Awakening: A Neurophilosophical Essay on NEAS, Shamatha, and Vipassana

Meditation should be understood not as changing internal mental models but as transforming how a person participates in the world through embodied, affective, social, and existential engagement. The Neuro-Existential Architecture System (NEAS) proposes three modes of predictive engagement: prereflective transparency, where experience feels like self and affect; the Witnessing-Space, where mental events become observable phenomena; and the Logos-Vektor/Logos-Prior, which reshapes deeper existential orientations. Shamatha cultivates the Witnessing-Space, while Vipassana activates insight into impermanence, suffering, and non-self. The three marks of existence are contemplatively cultivated Logos-Priors, not metaphysical claims. Awakening is a fragile, recurrent recalibration of engagement, not a final attainment.

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Abstract

This essay introduces the Neuro-Existential Architecture System (NEAS) as a newly proposed neurophilosophical heuristic for interpreting Buddhist meditation in terms of predictive engagement. Moving beyond representationalist readings of predictive processing, it argues that meditation should not be understood primarily as the modification of internal models, but as a transformation of embodied, affectively weighted, socially embedded, and existentially oriented world-participation. NEAS seeks to contribute to a contemporary understanding of ancient contemplative wisdom practices by articulating how such practices may transform the relation between attention, affect, selfhood, meaning, and agency. The model distinguishes three functional modes of predictive engagement: prereflective transparency, in which experience is immediately identified with affective and self-related contents; the Witnessing-Space, in which thoughts, sensations, affects, and impulses become visible as phenomena within experience; and the Logos-Vektor/Logos-Prior, through which deeper existential orientations are reconfigured. On this basis, Shamatha is reconstructed as the cultivation of the Witnessing-Space, while Vipassana is interpreted as the activation of Level 2 through insight into impermanence, suffering, and non-self. The three marks of existence—anicca, dukkha, and anattā—are understood not as reifying metaphysical claims or literal neural priors, but as contemplatively cultivated Logos-Priors that transform how permanence, grasping, ownership, and selfhood are enacted. Finally, awakening is interpreted in secular and neurophenomenological terms as a fragile, recurrent, and non-appropriative recalibration of predictive engagement rather than as a stable possession, final attainment, or metaphysical state.