You may be reading this week’s newsletter on a phone or a tablet – maybe even a computer screen. There’s you, the subject, and the screen, the object.
But is that really the case, or is there something more fundamental at play? Something Bina Gupta, in his book The Disinterested Witness, calls “the pure element of awareness in all knowing [that] shines by its own light; it is self-luminous”?
Non-dual awareness (NDA) is at the core of many Eastern spiritual traditions. It argues there is a fundamental consciousness beyond the illusory distinction of subject and object, one in which experience itself unfolds.
You could call it a witness space.
NYU psychology department research associate Zoran Josipovic adds detail in an influential 2013 paper: “This background awareness appears in meditation to be unitary and unchanging – a cognisance that is in itself empty of content, yet clearly aware and blissful – whereas various sensory, affective and cognitive contents, and the various states of arousal appear to it as dynamic processes, or as a well-known metaphor states, like images in a mirror.”
More poetically, the 14th-century Tibetan scholar-yogi Longchen Rabjam described NDA as the “essence of awareness, empty, lucid, and free of elaborations” and “an infinitely spacious expanse… unchanging, without transition, spontaneously present, and uncompounded”.
Josipovic, co-founder of the Nonduality Institute, set himself the task of measuring the influence of NDA on intrinsic and extrinsic brain networks, which usually run counter to each other. The intrinsic network is thought to govern self-referential tasks such as planning, decision making and creativity, while the extrinsic responds to, as you’d expect, external stimuli, such as marauding zombies or a piano falling on your head (to pick two examples at random).
He runs through different approaches to meditation. Practices that seek to ‘go within’ by focusing on an internal, self-related aspect of existence boost activity in the intrinsic network. The conclusion that arises, that experience is dependent on mind, is sometimes extended to argue that the physical world is unreal and a construct of mind.
Then there’s the Buddhist tradition of focusing on the momentary nature of sensory experience, often beginning with the breath and moving to “open-ended, nonjudmental monitoring of whatever arises in one’s experience”, similar to a ‘flow’ state.
NDA meditations, Josipovic argues, transcend this duality in favour of a realisation of the unity at the heart of experience. They’re also effortless – instead of focus, they seek to remove the blocks to the innate awareness that is already there.
He explains, “It is akin to that of ceasing the effort of searching for one’s keys upon finding them in one’s pocket.”
In this, they’re also different from the nonjudgmental mindfulness meditation of following what’s in one’s experience without engaging with it, or holding the mind empty by force of concentration. NDA meditations are about context rather than experience.
Here are a couple of simple techniques to trigger NDA.
Josipovic, in a 2021 paper in Neuroscience of Consciousness, summarises the characteristics of NDA, which include radiance (“a cognitive property appearing as the clear transparent light by which it knows itself and phenomena present to it”), bliss (“silent contentment of being entirely complete in itself, with no sense of any lack or any need for anything outside of itself”) and unity (“nondual awareness is singular and homogenous, a unity of all its dimensions, not compounded or constructed from them or from anything else”).
He’s one of the few published researchers investigating this fascinating phenomenon.
Next week: what his fMRI scans on experienced Tibetan Buddhist meditators showed, and the area of the brain that might be the physical seat of NDA.