Long-time meditator here. Two points: 1. There are some public figures in various traditions who will say things that approximate to ""I don't have conceptual thought anymore". But if you listen, they will clarify and qualify that statement.
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1 ct'd: These people - who come from various practice approaches/traditions - will usually specify that their resting/baseline psychological state is one close to pure sensory perception, w/o an inner "narrative"
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and with a lot of inner equipoise - so much, to the extent that they exercise some effortless choice about whether they choose to engage in conceptual thinking or not. Meditation, at a certain level, becomes a kind of mind and perception training.
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2. I have some attainments in this domain, and I'mma hazard a hypothesis about what might be happening. I think that meditation is also nervous-system training, cleaning, refactoring.
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I strongly suspect that there is some very fine-grained neuroplasticity happening that has very significant effects for the practitioner's subjective experience. And yet it happens on very fine grained levels where it is difficult to point to objective neurological correlates
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We've been doing fifty years of psychophysiology and then imaging (fMRI, etc) on meditators, but the studies aren't slam dunks because I suspect the neural re-ordering and re-connecting is happening on minute levels, that nonetheless make a *world of difference* on the inside
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i haven't gone super deep into this, im speaking because im interested in finding out more noticing most protocols are on TM and MBSR which don't have much structure. haven't seen disassembly studies either or assessment of meditative development. big opportunities us to build
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If you're into this stuff, check out Daniel Goleman's 1977 text "Varieties of Meditative Experience" (note the reference to William James). It was renamed for the second edition in the 80s.
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Replying to @Timber_22 @_StevenFan and
And a lot of sophisticated thinking was done in the 70s, 80s & 90s on these topics, even if the measurement tools were basic and very low resolution. A lot of wheel re-inventing gets done every five years as people discover meditation and wanna do science on & about it.
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yeah I get the sense I have a favorite entreatment from a scientist I know: go to the library and read the scholarship the psychology tools probably haven't evolved but I wonder if the depth to which they analyzed components of meditative systems has, i see 'no' right now
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I'm a massive fan of Paanskepp who I'm basing an exhaustive search of emotion landscape around, the books im reading right now are right in that period
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Oh hell yeah. I am also a giant Panksepp appreciator. He's freaking great, and I don't think he got a fair rap from one of his scientific rivals who was better at podcasts than him.
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"Nasty little Buddhist"
Seeking via neuroscience and psychology informed dharma.