Hi there,

Last week, as part of the Rewiring your Reality course, Shamil Chandaria gave an insightful neuroscience perspective on what we know about awakening. I've shared some thoughts about this below. 

Next Tues 29th of July, Christof Koch joins Bernardo Kastrup to discuss one of the leading scientific theories of consciousness: Integrated Information Theory. 

Christof is a celebrated neuroscientist, famous for instigating the modern search for the neural correlates of consciousness, together with Francis Crick (who won the Nobel for co-discovering the structure of DNA.)

Bernardo gave an intro to IIT which you can see here: 

You can join the event with Christof on Tues 29th July here,  or as part of the membership programme With Reality in Mind. 

Emptiness, Defabrication and Meditation

Last week, as part of the Rewiring your Reality course, Shamil gave a thorough neuroscience perspective on what we know about awakening. I really appreciated his inquisitive and nondogmatic approach. It is a unique combination of scientific inquiry, practical insight, and humility in the face of all that is yet to be discovered.

The talk included an overview of the different kinds of meditation, the reasons to do them, and how this maps onto the neuroscience we explored the previous week - for example, how perception is a matter of ‘precision weighting.’

Some meditations will stabilise attention, some will cultivate new states, whilst others will support insight, most importantly, the insight into how phenomena are ‘empty’ of inherent existence. Uniquely, Shamil makes a distinction between emptiness and defabrication - meditations in which attention becomes so stable that they lead to increasingly “minimal phenomenal experience”. 

Although emptiness and defabrication overlap and support each other, the distinction is meaningful. 

This is because of his emphasis on emptiness as the quintessential spiritual insight. Shamil proposes that spiritual understanding and 'technology’ has now evolved to the point where extreme states of cessation (the complete dissolution of any phenomena or awareness whatsoever) are no longer required for deep insight into emptiness.

This continues the trend we're setting here, to be inspired by the past but not enslaved to it. Nevertheless, it was exciting was to see how ancient maps for the phenomenology of experience and awakening map onto the modern neuroscientific lens we explored last week. A good reminder that we're not reinventing a wheel, but refining and developing it.

If this sounds interesting, you can still join the course. You'll get recordings of all sessions, and there are two more live sessions, one of them today!

We've also got events coming up in September on Bohm dialogue, with Richard Lang and with James Cooke - and I'll write to you about those very soon!

With appreciation,

Amir