States of Consciousness Beyond Waking, Dreaming and Sleeping: Perspectives from Research on Meditation Experiences

Abstract

AbstractThree categories of meditation practices have been proposed: focused attention meditations, which involve voluntary and sustained attention on a chosen object; open monitoring meditations, which involve non-reactive monitoring of moment-to-moment content of experience; and automatic self-transcending meditations, which are designed to transcend their own activity. While focused attention and open monitoring meditations explore the nature of individual cognitive, affective, and perceptual processes and experiences, automatic self-transcending meditations explore the state when conscious processing and experiences are transcended, a state called pure consciousness. This paper reports unique phenomenological and physiological patterns during the state of pure consciousness, as experienced during Transcendental Meditation (TM) practice, a meditation in the automatic self-transcending category. These data support the description of pure consciousness as a fourth state of consciousness with unique phenomenological and physiological correlates. This paper also discusses the Junction Point Model that integrates meditation experiences with the three ordinary states of waking, sleeping, and dreaming. The Junction Point Model is supported by EEG data and provides a structure to integrate ordinary experience during waking, sleeping, and dreaming with meditation experiences and so can serve as a foundation for investigating the full range of human consciousness.KeywordsDefault Mode NetworkMeditation PracticeMeditation ExperienceTranscendental MeditationMeditation TechniqueThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.