Meditation at the Edge: A Neurophenomenological Metamodel of Conditioned Selfing, Emergent Disclosure, and Perspectival Flexibility

Abstract

Contemplative neuroscience has differentiated focused-attention, open-monitoring, constructive, and deconstructive practices, yet it still lacks an integrated account of how embodied events become self-defining, how the organization underlying them becomes experientially accessible, and how another mode of situated participation becomes possible. This article introduces Meditation at the Edge and develops the Neuro-Existential Architecture System (NEAS) as a heuristic neurophenomenological metamodel of conditioned selfing, emergent disclosure, and enactive perspectival flexibility. NEAS distinguishes prereflective perspectival enactment at Level 0, stabilized disclosure and experiential differentiation within the Level-1 Witnessing-Space, and contextual inquiry, parallactic reorientation, and enacted direction through the Level-2 Logos-Prior and Logos-Vector. Drawing selectively on sati, samatha, vipassanā, dependent arising, and the five aggregates, the model differentiates a pattern-forming edge, at which an event becomes affectively significant, motivationally directed, appropriated through grasping, and enacted as a self-perspective, from a disclosive edge, at which this ordinarily transparent organization begins to manifest as conditioned and perspectivally structured. The recurrent pattern “I am not enough” illustrates how bodily contraction, unpleasant feeling tone, anticipated rejection, self-attribution, and withdrawal readiness can coalesce into an apparently self-evident reality. The model proposes that contemplative transformation does not consist primarily in replacing a negative belief with a positive one. It occurs when a dominant perspective becomes partially accessible as a situated organization, another embodied and interpretive standpoint becomes available, and a different continuation can be tested through action. The proposed outcome is enactive perspectival flexibility. NEAS generates empirically tractable distinctions among disclosive sensitivity, disclosive proximity, experiential differentiation, parallactic reorientation, alternative enactment, and enacted updating. Within this framework, processual awakening denotes the recurrent existential significance of becoming less completely absorbed in a perspective rather than attaining a final state beyond conditioning.