Meditative experience and the plasticity of self-experience

Abstract

Some meditative experiences are reported to involve a change in the meditator’s sense of self. For instance, some practitioners of body-scan meditation report a felt dissolution of bodily boundaries and a corresponding change in their bodily sense of self. In “pure-consciousness-events” some subjects report a sense of self as pure consciousness, while others report a loss of the sense of self. This chapter uses recent philosophical and empirical work on the phenomenal self and the variability of self-experience to explore possible connections with particular types of meditative experience. In particular, this chapter differentiates minimal subjectivity from the more complex and plastic phenomena of self-identification, self-location, and a strong first-person perspective. The chapter discusses how certain reported meditative experiences transform key aspects of phenomenal self-experience, such as phenomenal (dis-)identification with the body, agency, spatial location, and the phenomenal field. Lastly, the chapter discusses philosophical implications for the study of consciousness, the self, and meditation.