Taking the correlation between Buddhism and altered states of consciousness (ASC) as a breakthrough, we attempt to explore the science behind Buddhist meditation from a unique perspective.
Firstly, Samadhi is the most mysterious phenomenon in Buddhist meditation. From a psychological perspective, we argue that the essence of Samadhi is perception shutting down to activate a new mode of apperceiving, one totally different from the usual five sense mode of perception. That’s why one feels that everything in daily life disappears and he and the universe assimilate each other in Samadhi. Hallucinations also disappear in Samadhi because perception shuts down.
Secondly, enhanced awareness is an essential phenomena in ASC which is often neglected. It could be explained by a perception-filtering hypothesis in light of Henri Bergson’s innovative idea: In ordinary conditions, perception has a natural threshold for its sensitivity for the purpose of biological survival; but in ASC, awareness becomes more sensitive because the perception-filtering function gets weakened to allow the influx of more details, resulting in various unusual capabilities, one of which is Vipassana. That is to say, enhanced awareness makes the deep insight of the five aggregates possible, just like watching a slow-motion film. This would lead to the insight that no Self could be found in each aggregate, which is also known as enlightenment in Buddhism. That there is a fixed entity underlying all aggregates is just an illusion resulting from that all these happen so quickly in ordinary conditions.
Thirdly, besides Samadhi and enhanced awareness, hallucinations and paranormal phenomena are the other two essential phenomena in both Buddhist meditation and ASC. In a previous paper, we have proposed an original model to interpret hallucinations which are extremely miraculous and perplexing in ASC, and suggested that paranormal phenomena such as extrasensory perception are delusions that happen along with deep hallucinations.
Finally, to figure out the relationship among hallucinations, Samadhi and enhanced awareness, we introduce time dimension by putting forward that there are three stages in ASC (the weakening of self-control, the obliteration of self-control and the recovering of self-control) since the loss of self-control is the direct inducement for all kinds of ASC. Although enhanced awareness appears since the first stage, the simultaneous hallucinations may interfere with it, making Vipassana impossible in this stage. Samadhi and deep hallucinations both happen in the second stage and most past materials including The Tibetan Book of the Dead focus on how to get rid of deep hallucinations to achieve Samadhi in this stage. A close study of experiential descriptions of coming out of Samadhi demonstrates that, hallucinations would be temporally inhibited after Samadhi, making enhanced awareness work fine in the third stage.
Thus, the long-standing mystery of Buddhist tranquility and insight is brought to light: Enhanced awareness after Samadhi in ASC is the path toward liberation. Buddha didn’t attain enlightenment after achieving the fourth jhana and even the highest formless jhana, until he discovered this path six years later. What’s more, our discovery of the science behind Buddhist meditation would also be quite helpful to understand and interpret Buddha Dharma.