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Meditation is more than either stress relief or enlightenment
Exploring the wider range of meditation is no longer reserved for the monasteries. The new science of meditation is just getting started.
Meditation has taken two divergent paths through the Western mind. For many, it’s a few quick, calming breaths, perhaps timed with a smartphone app, in search of a stress tonic that can soften anxiety’s edges. Along a less-traveled route, meditation remains what it long was: a deeply transformative pursuit, a devoted metamorphosis of the mind toward increasingly enlightened states.
But this bifurcated view of meditation as a relaxing practice for the masses and a life-changing practice for the committed few is deeply misleading. A spectrum runs between them, harboring experiences that are far more interesting and powerful than what the growing mindfulness industry advertises, and more accessible to average people than what tropes of arcane states like enlightenment suggest.
For the past two decades, the growing science of meditation has roughly followed the same split that ignores this middle path. Most research studies basic mindfulness as a health intervention in novice meditators, where modestly positive results have led to comparisons like exercise for the mind, or mental flossing. On the other end, researchers will occasionally strap EEG electrodes to the scalp of Tibetan monks, offering a glimpse inside the unusual brain activity of an advanced meditator.
A new band of researchers, however, is finding that you don’t need 10,000 hours in a monastery before meditation can upend your entire psychology — and yet, the current body of meditation research has had surprisingly little to say about this middle ground between stress relief and enlightenment.
As the number of meditating Americans has more than tripled in recent years, an onslaught of apps, books, and seminars helped mold the public image of meditation around the simpler and more sellable idea of mindfulness as a form of stress reduction. That image is paying off: The broader mindfulness industry was valued at $97.6 million in 2021 and is projected to triple in value by 2031.
Sacchet is part of a recent turn in meditation research that is putting the fuller, stranger range of meditative experiences under the scrutiny of laboratory conditions. Rather than evaluating meditation in the same way that we do therapy or drug trials, new theories from cognitive science (like predictive processing) along with new tools — such as machine learning models that read more deeply into neural activity than humans can alone — are shifting the science of meditation in the direction of grasping after the nature of the mind and the ways we might transform it for the better.
How mindfulness defined the first wave of contemplative studies
What we now call contemplative science is the interdisciplinary study of how practices like meditation, prayer, and psychedelic use affect the mind, brain, and body. Its American roots go back to at least the 1960s, when the inflow of Buddhist ideas enchanted a generation of, as the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg put it, “angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.” But it wasn’t just poets and hipsters; the likes of scientists and lawyers also started meditating.
The idea of meditation as a means of awakening flared up and then began fading out along with the counterculture itself. The hippies’ rejection of the soulless, sexless mainstream failed to build an alternative that could last, leaving their gusto for higher levels of consciousness adrift, sailing out to the cultural fringes. In the light of modern science, the quest for higher vibrations has come to appear essentially unserious — a New Age trope. But one of those scientists-turned-meditators, Jon Kabat-Zinn, had a vision for how to bring it back into the mainstream.
The next generation of contemplative science is here
Just as the mindfulness era began with the establishment of a university center, a contemplative science focused on psychological transformation is growing its own institutions.
Alongside new theories and technologies, ancient claims of unbelievable meditative states are being observed under the scrutiny of scientists in controlled settings for the first time. A few thousand years ago, the Mahāvedalla Sutta (a scripture of Theravada Buddhism) described one such state that advanced meditators could enter at will — nirodha samāpatti, or cessation attainment. Think of cessation, also scripturally described as the “non-occurrence of consciousness,” like voluntarily inducing the effects of general anesthesia. Consciousness switches off without a trace, while the basic homeostatic operations of the body — temperature, heartbeat, breathing — remain online.
The scripture says meditators can predetermine a length of time to “go under” merely by setting an intended duration, like an internally fashioned alarm clock. That duration is said to be able to stretch up to seven days, provided their body can last that long. After setting the intention, they settle into meditation, and the light of consciousness switches off. When it returns, meditators were said to emerge crisp and refreshed, with elevated senses of clarity and vitality (decidedly unlike the woozy return from anesthesia).
If the ordinary egoic sense of consciousness evolved for environments where a constant hum of fight or flight mentality helped keep us alive, advanced meditation may offer a way of reprogramming some of these inherited tendencies that no longer serve us in our comparatively new evolutionary environments, like discarding clothes that no longer fit.
Advanced meditation for everyone?
“My hope is that ultimately, this work will contribute to bringing advanced meditation out of the monastery,” Sacchet said, describing its “incredible promise for moving beyond addressing mental health issues, toward helping people thrive.”
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Enlightenment Is Everything, Everywhere, All at Once
Our brains can shed their evolutionary restrictions, allowing us a fuller life.
Physics tells us that what we experience is not what reality is.
According to evolutionary biology, our brains evolved to help our ancestors survive and reproduce, but our brains can grow beyond that.
The core meditation experience is being unbounded by space and time, which rewires the brain to, over time, make that a constant experience.
Enlightenment can be physiologically characterized by an EEG pattern that shows evidence of being both unbounded and bounded by time and space.
Our Brains Construct Experience Different from Reality
Evolutionary biology says that our brains evolved a skewed and incomplete perception of reality that helped our ancestors survive and reproduce. Is it possible for our experience of reality to grow beyond the one we needed for survival and reproduction, to evolve to a higher, true perception of reality? A perception of reality in harmony with relativity theory and quantum theory? I will argue that the state of enlightenment, the state of mind extolled by the Buddha and the Vedas, is that higher, evolved state.
Meditation Rewires Our Brains to Experience Reality
According to Walter Stace, a scholar of mysticism, the core of meditation is the experience of being outside, or transcendent to, time and space, which he calls the experience of being “non-spatial and non-temporal.” According to Stace, the Buddhist concept of experiencing emptiness during meditation, or sunyata, is an experience of “no time, no space, no becoming.” Similarly, in Vedic philosophy, transcendental consciousness, which is a state achieved through the practice of Transcendental Meditation or other Vedic meditations, the individual's mind transcends all mental activity, thereby having the experience of being unbounded in time and space.
Time and Space are Constructs of Our Brains
Long-term meditators commonly report that they have the experience of “no time, no space, no becoming” and “being unbounded in time and space” during their meditations. Are these experiences of reality? Relativity theory and quantum theory say that in reality there is no time, no space, and no boundaries. The theory of relativity tells us that time is not absolute and can, and does, stop. It tells us that somehow, past, present, and future exist together, now, all at once. Einstein said the following about time: “the separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one,” and “the only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.”
Experiences of Enlightenment
Experiencing two contradictory things at the same time might seem confusing or unpleasant. The enlightened report that it is anything but that. They say enlightenment is what the Buddha and the Vedas said it would be. In his 2016 book, The Supreme Awakening: Experiences of Enlightenment Throughout Time—And How You Can Cultivate Them, Craig Pearson, Ph.D., interviewed a long-term meditator about his unfolding enlightenment.
“Pearson: How do you experience the past and the future now, the flow of time?
Meditator: I feel I’m outside of time. That is to say, the convention we call time has ceased to exist for me…time has no reality for me, as it had in the past…This is very refreshing…Living in the now is just simpler and easier. It requires less energy.”
In the 2002 study cited above, the authors quote one of their self-proclaimed enlightened subjects about their experience of reality.
“The flurry of waking activity comes and goes; the inertia of sleep comes and goes. Yet, throughout these changing values of waking and sleeping, there is a silent, unbounded continuum of awareness that is me; I am never lost to myself.”
Summary
In summary, relativity and quantum theory say that reality is being unbounded in time and space. Evolutionary biology has built into our brains the necessary experience of being bounded by time and space. The experience of both at the same time is part of what it is to be enlightened. Enlightenment is experiencing reality.
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