Last week, we looked at non-dual awareness – the self-luminous “pure light of awareness”, the fundamental consciousness beyond apparent separation in which all experience unfolds.
NYU’s Zoran Josipovic set out to investigate the neural correlates of non-dual awareness (NDA), recruiting an unstated number of Tibetan Buddhist meditators, although it looks as if there were 14 results plotted on the below graph.
Remember that the idea behind non-duality is that the apparent separation between subject and object doesn’t exist – so Josipovic theorised in a 2013 study that the effect of NDA meditation on connectivity patterns of intrinsic and extrinsic brain networks would be different, too, compared with subject- and object-only meditation.
The 14 expert meditators were monitored in three states: fixed awareness, such as focusing on the breath (FA), NDA and passive fixation, where they held their gaze steady at a point at the centre of a screen. The latter served as the best control condition the authors could settle on, given that their subjects’ prior meditation will probably have made permanent baseline changes.
The results suggested strongly that while shifting attention to the subjective or objective in meditation caused the opposite brain network to disengage, NDA meditation increased functional connectivity between them.
Josipovic wrote, “NDA meditation is different from FA and OM [open monitoring, such as body scanning] meditations in that it enables a state of mind in which extrinsic and intrinsic experiences are increasingly synergistic rather than competing.”
As ever, the low number of study subjects suggests caution in interpreting the results.
The paper goes on to discuss research under way into an area of the brain called the central precuneus region (CP), and the functional connectivity changes in its network nodes. (The finished results don’t appear to have been published.)
Josipovic was drawn to the region because its nodes span across both intrinsic and extrinsic networks, and the CP region has been found to be involved in spatial reference frames, episodic memory retrieval and self-related processing. The connectivity of the region to other intrinsic nodes “is indicative of the overall level of consciousness”, he says (although without saying what he means by “consciousness”).
Early results showed that CP connectivity was slightly higher during NDA meditation compared to a relaxed, restful state, making him wonder if this region was “significantly involved” with NDA.
Also intriguing: an increase in connectivity to a region associated with spatial cognition and projecting oneself into the future. This, he suggests, might form the reported NDA characteristic of “awareness being aware of itself”.
And a decrease in connectivity to a region associated with integrating spatial reference frames might form another common NDA characteristic of feeling the area you occupy expand outside your body, and sometimes even vanish.
“NDA is much more than a basic vigilance such as that encountered in proto or core consciousness,” Josipovic wrote. “It is a higher order awareness that appears to be inherently present as a potential in all of us.”
The idea of an outside world that’s really real may have arisen from evolution. As cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman argues – and I can’t recommend his book The Case Against Reality highly enough – humans have evolved to see a very small part of physical reality, and it’s presented as a multi-user interface, like icons on a desktop, that helps us navigate the world. But ultimately everything occurs inside our awareness.
Bonus clip
Unusual night-time companions.
Next week: lucid dreaming and spirituality.