Neuroscience and Psychology of Meditation in Everyday Life

by Dusana Dorjee

  Twenty-four hours of meditation practice

  Insight practices, just like the types of meditation we have discussed previously, can be readily embedded into everyday activities. In the morning, after waking up and developing motivation/intention for the day, a practitioner can spend a few minutes (engaging in an insight practice of their choice. For beginners to meditation, this might be contemplation on impermanence and the nature of suffering, targeting the development of intellectual insight. More advanced practitioners can spend some time in self-inquiry observing and questioning the nature of thoughts, emotions and sensations as these arise and dissolve back into deeper layers of consciousness. More experienced practitioners can spend time in experientially examining the self: where it is, where it comes from etc. The most advanced practitioners may use the time to connect with the state of pristine awareness and develop motivation to sustain that state throughout the day. The session can end with a dedication for the day to deepen the existential insight for the practitioner and a wish to sustain a certain level of existential insight during the day.

  Indeed, the main aim of introducing existential insight practices into the daily routine is to develop existential insight during brief formal sessions throughout the day and try to sustain the corresponding mode of existential awareness while engaging in active tasks. The latter is often the difficult aspect of the practice since engaging in everyday tasks requires our attention to be fully engaged with the tasks at hand, which limits the mind’s capacity for monitoring and sustaining a MEA we are developing. Here, just like with any skill, repeated practice is the key element. While at the beginning shifting towards a certain MEA (e.g., decentring as one of the initial steps) might be effortful, with practice it will become much less challenging. Hence with practice, shifting towards a certain MEA can actually become fast and effortless, requiring minimal attention and meta-awareness resources and thus not interfering with a task at hand.

  The gradual development of the ability to shift towards a certain MEA during daily activities can be considered in terms of the three layers of consciousness. Most of our daily activities require engagement at the ordinary level of consciousness whereas when we develop increasingly advanced levels of existential insight, we are shifting towards MEA associated with deeper levels of consciousness. As a result, we can perceive our experience at the level of the ordinary mind in daily activities as very different in comparison to our experience in a formal meditation session when our mind settles and we are able to access MEA associated with subtler levels of the ordinary mind or the surface level of the substrate consciousness. This sense of disconnection between MEA during daily activities and in formal practice can for some practitioners become a challenge and may prompt them to seek more time in retreat or, in the other extreme, they may abandon meditation practice. This is why integration of existential insight practices into everyday activities is particularly important.

  Shifting towards more advanced MEA can be prompted in various ways depending on the type of existential insight practice a meditator is learning, the propensities of the practitioner and the circumstances of daily activities. For example, practitioners developing existential insight through contemplations on impermanence or other topics can use reminders in the form of a word or a phrase which can prompt them to briefly shift towards a more advanced MEA. Practitioners developing experiential existential insight can simply remember the state from their morning practice and try to connect with it as a prompt of experiencing it briefly in the moment. For practitioners in the Buddhist context, the prompt might be a memory of their teacher or a visualization of a deity with the focus on the existential awareness qualities associated with that image.

  The speed of our everyday activities can become a particular practical obstacle to integrating increasingly advanced levels of MEA into our everyday life. This is because existential insight practices require a certain level of attentional stability and meta-awareness and if we are constantly bombarded by information we may not have enough cognitive capacity to employ in the insight practice. A reduction in distraction, slowing down and simplification of our lifestyle is required at any stage of the meditation training, but is a particular necessity when we are committed to developing focused meditative insight. This may require setting aside at least a brief time in the morning to develop existential insight and having brief formal existential insight practices throughout the day, perhaps at mid-morning, lunchtime, mid-afternoon and evening. These short formal practices can help sustain our focus on a particular MEA throughout the day and especially between the practices when we can combine moments of checking in and observing our mind with automatic shifting towards the MEA we are developing.

  Retreat environment can be particularly helpful in supporting existential insight by providing the conditions for settling our attention, meta-awareness and consequently the ordinary mind. This may enable us to go deeper in our existential insight practice and experience gradually more advanced shifts in MEA. However, for this experience not to become restricted to the retreat environment, it can be helpful to come out of the retreat gradually, by introducing increasingly more everyday activities into the day whilst sustaining the MEA developed in deep meditation practice. Shorter weekly retreat sessions of a few hours, a half-day or a day may also support the practitioner in going deeper in their practice and at the same time keep integrating the contemplative insight into everyday activities. The combination of retreat experience and everyday existential insight can help the existential insight experience not to become isolated and restricted to particular conditions.

  Integration of dream yoga practices can be especially helpful in this regard because it encourages the practitioner to check repeatedly during the day the dream-like quality of their experience. This in itself can become a prompt for a practitioner to shift to a more advanced MEA throughout the day. The practitioner would also develop a motivation to become lucid at night several times during the day. Briefly before going to sleep, the practitioner would do a brief formal practice in preparation for the dream yoga practice. In the Buddhist context, this can involve certain visualizations together with recitation of a particular mantra. Then once a practitioner becomes lucid in a dream, she can use the opportunity to test the nature of the dream reality and shift to a more advanced MEA. Most advanced practitioners can use this state to abide in the ground of substrate consciousness or pristine awareness. In the morning, the practitioner may try to recall the lucid dream experience before engaging in other activities, because this can interfere with recollecting the dream yoga experience. As with any meditation practice, a Buddhist practitioner would review the day of practice at the end of the day and dedicate any virtue and wholesome experience to attaining the highest level of existential balance and helping others on their path of existential insight.

  Existential insight practice from a long-term perspective

  As we have discussed in this chapter, long-term meditation practice is associated with increasingly more advanced levels of existential insight. These are linked to a progression of shifts in MEA, starting with deconstructing habitual patterns of thinking, sensing and affective feeling at the ordinary mind level. The more advanced MEA support existential insight into the construed nature of self in the substrate consciousness. At the most advanced level, the MEA is associated with existential insight into the nature of self and reality. It is essential for future research on meditation to carefully map the progression of MEA which might be conceptualized differently in different contemplative traditions. This understanding will also be instrumental in supporting applications of existential insight practices in well-being enhancement, and prevention and treatment of illness.

  From the broad view of existential insight practices presented in this chapter, the current therapeutic application of existential insight practices seems to be very limited. The development of therapeutic techniques which more fully embrace the progression of shifts in MEA towards increasing exis
tential well-being will also bring with itself many challenges. These include the need for a firm grounding in motivational/intentional contemplative training, attention training and development of wholesome emotional states before progressing onto more advanced existential insight practices. Current secular meditation-based programmes cannot provide such grounding, so we are left with the options to either develop such comprehensive meditation-based training in the secular context or enable long-term practitioners to connect with more advanced training in their respective contemplative traditions as part of supporting their well-being. Perhaps the latter option seems more viable at the current stage of meditation-based training development. Such an approach would require establishing links between health services and contemplative training providers and guidelines for their interactions as well as working with clients.

  Summary

  While the majority of previous research on meditation focused on mindfulness and practices cultivating loving kindness and compassion, our understanding of the effects of meditations developing existential insight is very limited. Chapter 6 provides an in-depth examination of this type of meditation, starting with an initial overview of insight practice categories and conceptualizations. Building on this discussion, the following section outlines practical aspects of cultivating existential insight as part of long-term meditation training. The potential of dream yoga in supporting the development of existential insight is also highlighted in this section. This is followed by an outline of neuroscience evidence relevant to existential insight practices which can be considered in four categories: attentional foundations of existential insight, changes in the default mode network (DMN), investigations of neural correlates of self-construal and psychophysiological studies of dream yoga. The discussion about existential insight practices is then placed into a broader framework of changes with long-term meditation practice, particularly in relation to shifts in modes of existential awareness (MEA) which determine our existential well-being. The theoretical discussion is finally applied in practical considerations about how to integrate practices cultivating existential insight into everyday life as part of daytime and night-time (dream yoga) meditation practice.

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  Chapter 7

  The state of existential balance

  The most advanced states of existential insight and corresponding shifts in modes of existential awareness (MEA) are virtually unexplored in the Western scientific literature. These shifts in MEA which are the culmination of long-term meditation practice are rarely discussed in current meditation research and accordingly are poorly understood. This is perhaps partially due to difficulty in translating the Buddhist conceptualizations of the most advanced MEA into terms of Western psychology and neuroscience. Looking deeper into this translational challenge, it appears that it might be at least partially due to the fact that Western psychology has been mostly pre-occupied with the investigation of the ordinary mind whereas the advanced shifts in MEA occur at deeper levels of consciousness. As a result, the Western science does not even have terms which could describe advanced MEA. In addition, the focus of Western research of the mind has been primarily on the disruptions in mental functioning rather than different levels of mental balance. So considerations about trainability and gradients of mental balance, particularly in the context of existential well-being, are a new subject in the Western psychological context.

  In contrast, Buddhist psychology has placed equal, if not greater, emphasis on nuanced states of mental balance rather than the afflictive states. Indeed, Buddhist literature and teachings contain elaborate descriptions of stages of accomplishment on the path of meditation training (Sanskrit: Bhūmis; Tibetan: byang chub sems dpai sa), which are likely ass
ociated with increasing progression of MEA. The Mahayana tradition describes 11 such stages whereas in the teachings of Dzogchen 16 stages are described. These stages are outlined not as examples of unachievable ideals; they specify states which have been repeatedly accomplished by long-term meditation practitioners over many centuries. The highest levels outline stages of exceptional well-being both in terms of self-regulation and existential well-being – states of existential balance. In this chapter we will examine some aspects of these advanced MEA and explore their implications for Western scientific understanding of well-being.

  What is the state of existential balance?

  Perhaps closest to the theories and concepts in Western psychology is the conceptualization of advanced MEA in terms of changes in three types of consciousness (see Chapter 6). These can be further subdivided into eight types of consciousness based on the work of the 19th-century Tibetan Buddhist master Mipham Rinpoche (1997). The first six of the eight types of consciousness can be considered as arising at the level of the ordinary mind. They include the eye consciousness, ear consciousness, nose consciousness, tongue consciousness and body consciousness, and roughly correspond to Western notions of the four senses together with proprioception. The sixth consciousness is called ‘mind consciousness’ and is the main type of consciousness employed in meditation training during contemplations, cultivation of mindfulness and meta-awareness and development of emotional qualities of loving kindness and compassion. These six types of consciousness are called ‘unstable’ types because they fluctuate, arise and dissolve at the level of the ordinary mind and are not always present.