Ep. 9 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Insight

In this episode of "Awakening from the Meaning Crisis," Dr. John Vervaeke delves deeper into mindfulness, building upon the previous discussion of Siddhartha's awakening. He critiques the feature list approach to studying mindfulness, advocating instead for understanding its structural-functional organization. Through an experiment involving touch and awareness, Vervaeke explores Polanyi's concept of attention as a dynamic process of transparency and opacity shifting, involving subsidiary and focal awareness. He introduces a schema illustrating how attention scales up and down between features and gestalts, linking these concepts to Vipassana meditation and contemplative practices. Vervaeke explains how these practices can lead to mystical experiences like the Pure Consciousness Event and resonant at-one-ment, ultimately aiming for a state of non-duality (prajna) that fosters comprehensive insight and addresses existential distress. He connects these experiences to the broader pursuit of altered states of consciousness and their potential for radical transformative experiences, drawing on historical and scientific evidence to support the link between awakening, meaning, and wisdom.