The Minimal Phenomenal Experience questionnaire (MPE-92M): Towards a phenomenological profile of “pure awareness” experiences in meditators

Objective To develop a fine-grained phenomenological analysis of “pure awareness” experiences in meditators. Methods An online survey in five language versions (German, English, French, Spanish, Italian) collected data from January to March 2020. A total of 92 questionnaire items on a visual analogue scale were submitted to exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. Results Out of 3627 submitted responses, 1403 were usable. Participants had a median age of 52 years (range: 17–88) and were evenly split between men and women (48.5% vs 50.0%). The majority of meditators practiced regularly (77.3%), were free of diagnosed mental disorders (92.4%) and did not regularly use any psychoactive substances (84.0%). Vipassana (43.9%) followed by Zen (34.9%) were the most frequently practiced meditation techniques. German (63.4%) and English (31.4%) were by far the most frequent questionnaire languages. A solution with 12 factors explaining 44% of the total variance was deemed optimal under joint conceptual and statistical considerations. The factors were named “Time, Effort and Desire,” “Peace, Bliss and Silence,” “Self-Knowledge, Autonomous Cognizance and Insight,” “Wakeful Presence,” “Pure Awareness in Dream and Sleep,” “Luminosity,” “Thoughts and Feelings,” “Emptiness and Non-egoic Self-awareness,” “Sensory Perception in Body and Space,” “Touching World and Self,” “Mental Agency,” and “Witness Consciousness.” This factor structure fit the data moderately well. Conclusions We have previously posited a phenomenological prototype for the experience of “pure awareness” as it occurs in the context of meditation practice. Here we offer a tentative 12-factor model to describe its phenomenal character in a fine-grained way. The current findings are in line with an earlier study extracting semantic constraints for a working definition of minimal phenomenal experience.

The light and the bulb: The psychology and neurophysiology of mystical experience

Throughout history, people have described alterations of consciousness in which they experienced a sense of transcendence, being part of a much larger unity, sometimes encompassing the whole universe, or of being pure awareness. These experiences have been foundational for many religious and spiritual practices, albeit they have sometimes been treated as suspect or outright psycho- and or neuro-pathological. This chapter defines various aspects of the self, self-transcendence, and mystical experiences (ME), discusses the relation of ME with other constructs, its prevalence, psychological and demographic correlates, and its relation to mental health, reviews brain-imaging research on it, and concludes with a discussion of its ontological implications. By doing so, it seeks to give an overview of both enlightenment experiences, ‘the light,’ and the underlying neurophysiological processes, ‘the bulb’.

Minimal phenomenal experience

This is the first in a series of instalments aiming at a minimal model explanation for conscious experience, taking the phenomenal character of “pure consciousness” or “pure awareness” in meditation as its entry point. It develops the concept of “minimal phenomenal experience” (MPE) as a candidate for the simplest form of consciousness, substantiating it by extracting six semantic constraints from the existing literature and using sixteen phenomenological case-studies to incrementally flesh out the new working concept. One empirical hypothesis is that the phenomenological prototype of “pure awareness”, to which all such reports refer, really is the content of a predictive model, namely, a Bayesian representation of tonic alertness. On a more abstract conceptual level, it can be described as a model of an unpartitioned epistemic space.

Hinduism and Meditation

Meditation has been integral to Hindu and Buddhist tantric traditions, in particular involving visualization or visual contemplation, practiced as part of ritual and also in its own right in order to achieve the goals of liberation from the cycle of reincarnation and also to achieve pleasure or power in this and other worlds. Visual contemplation is particularly focused on the body envisioned as being pervaded by a vertical axis at a subtle level, along which are located different levels of experience associated with different levels of the hierarchical cosmos. Power is awakened through meditation that rises up through these levels up to the very highest realization. This visual contemplation is thought to be of the subtle body as the support of the soul that leaves the physical body at death. There is also meditation without visualization that emphasizes the flow of pure awareness. This essay examines these practices in the major Hindu tantric traditions focused on the deity Śiva with some reference to the traditions of the Goddess, Viṣṇu, and Buddhism. These traditions influence the later Yoga tradition and have been transformed in the modern West.

Transformasi Paradigma Teologi Teosentris Menuju Antroposentris:Telaah atas Pemikiran Hasan Hanafi

Hassan Hanafi is one of the contemporary Islamic scholars who gives considerable attention to classical Islamic theology (kalam Islam). For him Islamic theology, such as the Ash’ari’s Kalam, cannot be proven scientifically also philosophically. Classical Islamic theology practically cannot be used as a view that can motivate the increasing of concrete actions in human life. This is caused by the compilation of classical Islamic theology tends not to be based on the pure awareness and the values of human actions. So that this creates a split between the theoretical faith into the practical faith of ummah. In turn, this conditions create the multiple moral attitudes or secretism of personality that makes Islamic society worse in poverty, oppression, backwardness and ignorance. For this problems, Hassan Hanafi offered a reconstruction that is to change a more grounded theological paradigm; that is from theocentric (God is the central of everything) to be anthropocentric (humanbeing is the central of everything). If the first paradigm sees world affairs as a matter of God, then the second paradigm sees world affairs as human affairs.

Mindfulness, learning, and the creative process

Based on a unique approach to creativity presented in a revolutionary new book, Deep Creativity, the authors introduce important, often-ignored processes and aspects of processes that are important to both learning and creativity. They focus on the qualities of thoughtfulness, which is complete receptivity to all possible ways of thinking, and sensationality, which is the experience of pure awareness devoid of all thought, as two aspects of mindfulness. They focus more on the underlying experience of mindfulness than on the use of mindfulness meditation methods and provide many ways for educators, parents, and community members to enhance learning and creativity. To stimulate thoughtfulness, the authors propose that students be given the opportunity to expand their receptivity to new ways of thinking through the practice of Repose, a simple technique that can be carried out virtually anywhere with minimal training. Sensationality can be heightened through immersion in free-form, non-competitive forms of play. Throughout this article, the authors offer specific strategies for integrating Repose and play into learning experiences and educational settings, including the exciting new concept of Centers for Creativity and Innovation in ways that increase learners’ productivity as well as their passion for learning.

Socrates as Midwife and Mediator: On the Political Dimensions of the Cratylus

This paper presents a reading of the political dimensions of Plato’s Cratylus. Following Sallis, I argue that Socrates’ claim that we can achieve a direct access to being unmediated by language is ironic. There is a comedic element to the attempt to transcend language in order to test the names given by the ‘lawgiver’ against a pure awareness of the nature of beings themselves. I show that this account of human life, as always mediated by logos, has a political dimension. Specifically, the paper argues that the mediation performed by Socrates in the dialogue is intended to get us to turn toward one another in the formation of communities of philosophical discourse.

Salienz und Pertinenz – Zur subjektiven Dialektalität remanenter Regionalismen des Mittelbairischen

As we know, speech perception and production are strongly influenced by sign-specific "socio-pragmatic indexicality" (cf. Purschke 2014), that is, by the mental conceptions (of meaning, style etc.) people associate with individual linguistic features. I assume that, in German-speaking areas, the "subjective (notion of the) dialectality" of a non-standard feature represents a basic form of socio-pragmatic indexicality and is closely connected to language variation and change, in that the more regionalisms are regarded as non-standard features, the more they vary synchronically and diachronically. Following Purschke (2014), I define the subjective dialectality of regionalisms as being based on their feature-specific "salience" and "pertinence", that is, on both the pure awareness and further evaluation of such features as non-standard variants. A discussion of theoretical issues is followed by the presentation of empirical data from a speech perception study (in the style of Herrgen/Schmidt 1985). Scale-based judgments by Northern, Central and Southern German listeners provide evidence about the subjective dialectality of 15 Bavarian regionalisms. They further reveal how subjective dialectality is related to listeners' origins and regional language competence. Comparing the subjective data with two Bavarian speakers' language use reveals the relation between subjective dialectality and synchronic variation in the analysed regionalisms.