Advanced Meditation Alters Consciousness and Our Basic Sense of Self

An emerging science of advanced meditation could transform mental health and our understanding of consciousness

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/advanced-meditation-alters-consciousness-and-our-basic-sense-of-self/

Millions worldwide practice mindfulness meditation, not just for their mental health but as a means to enhance their general well-being, reduce stress and be more productive at work. The past decade has seen an extraordinary broadening of our understanding of the neuroscience underlying meditation; hundreds of clinical studies have highlighted its health benefits. Mindfulness is no longer a fringe activity but a mainstream health practice: the U.K.’s National Health Service has endorsed mindfulness-based therapy for depression. Mobile apps have brought meditation techniques to smartphones, enabling a new era in meditative practice.

The approach to research on meditation has been evolving in equal measure. Looking back, we can identify distinct “waves.” The first wave, from ap­­prox­imate­ly the mid-1990s into the early 2000s, assessed meditation’s clinical and therapeutic potential for treating a broad set of psychological and physical health concerns. The second wave, starting in the early 2000s, focused on mechanisms of mindfulness’s effectiveness, revealing why it yields benefits for mental health that are at times comparable to those achieved with pharmaceuticals. Meditation science is now entering a third wave, exploring what we call ad­­vanced meditation—deeper and more intense states and stages of practice that often require extended training and can be experienced through increasing mastery. University research programs are being established to study these altered mental states, similar to new academic endeavors to investigate the merits of psychedelic drugs for personal well-being and a variety of medical conditions.

In the media and in academia, meditation is often seen as a tool primarily for managing the stresses of modern life and work. But our research suggests it can be used for much more. Meditation can help people improve their psychological well-being, and it also can be a gateway to experiences that lead to deep psychological transformation.

People often come to meditation because of some kind of suffering. Others are drawn to it because they perceive a lack of meaning in the materialism of the modern world. Still others may feel a pull toward “something greater” when they realize that a self-absorbed pursuit of “happiness” has its limitations.

Meditation’s potential has been dem­onstrated by numerous contemplative, philosophical, religious and spiritual tra­ditions that teach it as a core element that can lead to enlightenment or salvation. Buddhism, Vedic and Hindu practices, Jewish kabbalism, Islamic Su­f­ism, and shamanism, among others, have all ex­­plored meditation in their traditions. Some of them have multimillennia-long histories and en­­compass experiences that include states of ecstasy, insights into the nature of the self and the world around us, the cultivation of empathy, and the pursuit of altruistic goals. Such experiences have also been reported to sometimes lead to a sense of transcendence.

The experiences and personal trans­formations that practitioners describe are thought to undergird entirely new psy­chological perspectives and ways of existing in the world. Ad­vanced medi­tation may help inspire people and provide deep insight and clarity about how to achieve meaning in life. It is not un­common, in fact, for individuals to reassess their careers or life goals after a meditation retreat and go on to pursue a path that is more fulfilling and more aligned with their deeper values and perspectives.

The term “advanced meditation” might evoke images of monks in robes, but these experiences are not limited to ascetics isolated from the rest of the world. Laypeople who lead secular lives can become practitioners of advanced medi­tation and achieve a sense of profound well-being. In the new and emerging science of this third wave, advanced meditation includes deeper states and stages of meditation that a person may pro­gress through with in­creasing mastery over time.

The study of advanced medi­tation exa­mines medi­­tative development—the un­folding of advanced meditative states and stages of practice. Then there is re­search on medi­tative endpoints, which represent the outcomes of advanced medi­tation. In Buddhist traditions, one outcome may be called enlightenment or awakening.

We believe that advanced meditation has potentially broad implications for people’s understanding of what it means to be human and for interventions for mental health and well-being, and it therefore deserves the attention of the scientific community. One of us (Sacchet) leads an effort at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School named the Meditation Research Program, established to develop a comprehensive multidisciplinary understanding of advanced meditation states and stages of practice related to well-being and clinical outcomes (meditative endpoints). We use a rich ­array of state-of-the-art scientific ap­proach­es. Our intention is to expand the program into a much larger research and educational effort and establish the first center dedicated to the study and training of advanced meditation.

Another research endeavor on ad­vanced meditation has been taking place at Brown University’s Mindfulness Center (led by Brewer). Scientists there have dis­covered signatures of brain activity during several forms of medi­tation that are used in Tibetan Buddhism that are able to produce feelings of timelessness and states of heightened awareness. Research on ad­vanced medi­tation is also taking place elsewhere and is expected to grow rapidly in

the coming years.

All of these investigations promise to help us find new ways to train people in advanced meditation. We envision de­vel­op­ing specific programs that leverage insights from the science of advanced meditation to directly train people with certain clinical diagnoses. These programs could offer new therapeutic avenues for treating persistent cycles of negative thoughts in patients with major de­pression or the chronic worrying that characterizes generalized anxiety dis­order. The idea is not just to manage symp­toms but to foster a sense of deep and pervasive well-being that affects all as­pects of a practitioner’s life.

Our findings are starting to inform models of how advanced meditation affects and changes the brain, paving the way for a more comprehensive grasp of these practices. In time, our research may lead to a new generation of mental health interventions that could be as simple as a set of verbal instructions or as techno­logically sophisticated as neurofeedback or brain stimulation.

In another study, conducted at the University of Massachusetts’s Center for Meditation, researchers employed EEG to investigate 30 advanced meditators using practices from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. Four advanced meditation states were characterized by self-transcendence, emptiness (a state of awareness beyond the mind’s constant word patter) and com­passion. This study, on which Brewer was the senior researcher, is important in part because these characteristics are associated with psychological well-being and are disrupted in people with certain mental illnesses. The results indicated that the density of EEG currents was lower during advanced meditation. This effect was strongest in brain regions involved in self-­referential processing (self-related mental activities) and executive-control regions. There is some evidence that advanced meditation practices may dampen self-­referential processes and reduce the mind’s focus on the self.

We found from this research that a deeper meditation state was associated with increases in high-frequency brain activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, precuneus and superior parietal lobule and with elevation of the beta-band brain wave in the insula. Together, these results provide initial evidence for specific electrophysiological markers relevant to advanced practices. These brain-activity signatures have particular relevance to non-self-referential states advanced meditators can attain, known as nondual states. This study is also notable because it is an example of research on advanced meditation informed by Tibetan Buddhism. It will be a crucial development for the field to compare advanced medi­tative states among diverse con­tem­plative traditions that historically have been separated geographically, culturally and philosophically.

Advanced meditation interventions could be integrated with established mindfulness-based techniques, novel meditation-based therapies, and in­no­vative technologies designed to mod­ulate specific neural networks through neurofeedback and brain stim­ulation. These methods may make it possible for people to have the experience of an ad­vanced meditative state without under­going extensive training.

Advanced meditation therefore holds significant and untapped opportunities to diminish suffering and help people flourish. It may even provide a gateway to entirely new ways of understanding our basic humanity.

As interest in meditation continues to grow, so does the potential to explore its full spectrum of possibilities for bettering the mental and physical health of individuals and society. Our work in the new wave of advanced meditation research is not just about coping with the stress of modern living. It could improve our understanding of and approach to the mind, mental health and well-being, allowing many people to lead a more fulfilled, compassionate and “en­lightened” life.