Conceptualizing Cognitive Growth and Release: Integrating Adult Development into Contemplative Science

Abstract

Adult developmental theory has the potential to contribute across many fields. This paper, authored by two developmentalists and a neuroscientist studying meditators, argues that developmental models are increasingly needed as contemplative science enters a “third wave” concerned with advanced meditation including highly skilled practitioners, deep meditative states, and enduring transformations. This leading edge also overlaps with wisdom studies, spiritual and transpersonal inquiry, and trauma theory, exposing important conceptual tensions. We argue that these arise from a common assumption that cognitive complexity and spiritual clarity or psychological wholeness necessarily develop together along a single vertical axis of developmental “altitude.” To clarify and resolve these tensions, we propose a framework distinguishing two quasi-independent developmental movements: ascending structural growth, the cumulative and hierarchical construction of cognitive capacities, and descending structural release, the loosening, deconstruction, or seeing-through of cognitive structures. Release exposes constrained or inaccessible cognitive resources, enabling deconditioning, reintegration, healing, and/or insight. We apply this framework to problems including the fallibility of spiritual adepts; relationships among states, stages, and stable “vantage points”; requisite complexity and adverse effects of intensive contemplative practice; disputes over maps of contemplative attainment; and the legitimization of traditional and Indigenous knowledge. The framework offers a heuristic bridge among contemplative science, developmental psychology, and adjacent fields, while generating theoretically and empirically testable hypotheses about increasingly deep possibilities for human development.