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The Meditative Approach to Awaken Selfless Insight-Wisdom

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Meditation – Neuroscientific Approaches and Philosophical Implications

Part of the book series: Studies in Neuroscience, Consciousness and Spirituality ((SNCS,volume 2))

Abstract

This chapter reviews, first, the two complementary categories of meditation: concentrative meditation and receptive meditation. In this context, it then considers the representations and responses of the upper (dorsal) and lower (ventral) attention systems. The potentially reciprocal nature of the responses of the medial fronto-parietal regions vs. those of these two lateral attention systems is emphasized, because they are relevant to the mechanisms that could prompt an unexpected sensory stimulus to trigger the “peak” experience of awakening (J. kensho). In the model proposed, the reticular nucleus is assigned a key role in inhibiting the adjacent dorsal tier of thalamic nuclei. This disruption of the normal coherence of thalamo-cortical oscillations could, simultaneously, diminish Self-relational processing and liberate other-relational (allocentric) processing.

The further I go, the better I see that it takes a great deal of

work to succeed in rendering what I want to render: ‘instaneity’.

Claude Monet (1840–1926)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Please regard SONARR as serving solely as an acronym of temporary convenience. It is simply a metaphor pointing to different levels, useful solely in the context of these pages on selfless meditation.

  2. 2.

    Self is capitalized throughout simply to suggest that its operations create many large problems.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Colorado Denver School of Medicine, Columbia, Missouri, USA

    James H. Austin M.D. (Emeritus Professor of Neurology)

Authors
  1. James H. Austin M.D.
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Correspondence to James H. Austin M.D. .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychosomatic Medicine and Psychotherapy, University Medical Center Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany

    Stefan Schmidt

  2. Institute for Transcultural Health Scien, European Universtiy Viadrina, Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany

    Harald Walach

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Austin, J.H. (2014). The Meditative Approach to Awaken Selfless Insight-Wisdom. In: Schmidt, S., Walach, H. (eds) Meditation – Neuroscientific Approaches and Philosophical Implications. Studies in Neuroscience, Consciousness and Spirituality, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01634-4_3

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