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atanu

Member
Premium Member
Waking, Dreaming, Being by Evan Thompson

I have recently completed reading an excellent book on neuro-phenomenology, “Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy”. In author’s words “Whereas the Indian thinkers mapped consciousness and I-making in philosophical and phenomenological terms, I show how their insights can also help to advance the neuroscience of consciousness, by weaving together neuroscience and Indian philosophy in an exploration of wakefulness, falling asleep, dreaming, lucid dreaming, out-of-body experiences, deep and dreamless sleep, forms of meditative awareness, and the process of dying".

Evan Thompson is professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia. He writes about cognitive science, phenomenology, the philosophy of mind, and cross-cultural philosophy, especially Buddhist philosophy in dialogue with Western philosophy of mind and cognitive science. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Below I have summarised Evan’s findings, conclusions, and recommendations, mostly in his own words. I have done some minor re-organisation to bring together topic under sub-headings that are mine. The summary points from the book are bulleted/numbered for ease of further discussion if any. I have included a list of references/bibliography selected from the book's reference/bibliography sections for those who may wish to explore further. I have included a brief last post highlighting the points that may be discussed or debated. But readers may take up any other point that they deem debatable.

Summary of Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy

Consciousness and Experiential States as per Vedanta and Buddhism
  1. According to the Indian yogic traditions, which broadly constructed include Buddhism, consciousness is that which is luminous and has the capacity for knowing. “Luminous” means having the power to reveal, like a light.” Without consciousness, the world can’t appear to perception, the past can’t appear to memory, and the future can’t appear to hope or anticipation. Without consciousness, there’s no observation, and without observation, there are no data.
  2. “Knowing” means having the ability to apprehend whatever appears. “To say the world shows up or appears to us in these ways is to say that our consciousness reveals the world and apprehends it in these ways. The primary means or instruments by which consciousness accomplishes this are sense perception and conceptualization (we can’t apprehend what we see as a sunset unless we can conceptualize it as a sunset). An effect is how we experience some of these contents of awareness as “I” or “Me” or “Mine.” So, the Consciousness is that which is luminous, knowing, and reflexive — is self-appearing and pre-reflectively self-aware.
  3. To understand how we enact a self, therefore, we need to understand three things—the nature of awareness as distinct from its sensory and mental contents, the mind-body processes that produce these contents, and how some of these contents come to be experienced as the self.
  4. The Indian Hindu texts—dating from the sixth or seventh century B.C.E.—delineate three universal experiential states of the self—the waking state, the dream state, and the state of deep and dreamless sleep and a fourth linking pure awareness that runs through and knows all three states. Waking consciousness involves the operation of mind and senses and relates to the outer world and apprehends the physical body as the self. Dream consciousness involves the operation of the mind only and relates to mental images constructed from memories and apprehends the dream body as the self. In deep and dreamless sleep, consciousness rests in a dormant state not differentiated into subject and object.
  5. Whereas normal waking consciousness is ego-structured—we experience ourselves as bounded beings distinct from the outside world—this structure dissolves in the hypnagogic (pre-sleep) state. There’s no ego in the sense of an “I” who acts as a participant in a larger world, and there’s no larger world in which we feel immersed. Instead, there’s a play of images and sounds that holds consciousness spellbound.
  6. The ego structure of consciousness returns in the dream state. In the hypnagogic state, we look at images and they absorb us; in the dream state, we experience being in the dream world. Sometimes we experience it from an inside or first-person perspective; sometimes we see ourselves in it from an outside or third-person perspective. These two perspectives also occur in memory, where they’re known as “field memory” and “observer memory.” Yet even in the case of the observer perspective in a dream, we experience ourselves as a subject situated in relation to the dream world.
  7. This changes in a lucid dream. The defining feature of a lucid dream is being able to direct attention to the dreamlike quality of the state so that one can think about it as a dream. When this happens, the sense of self shifts, for one becomes aware of the self both as a dreamer—“I’m dreaming”—and as dreamed—“I’m flying in my dream.” Lucid dreamers can use eye movements to signal when they become lucid, and scientists can monitor what’s going on in the brain at the same time. In Tibetan Buddhism, “dream yoga” includes learning how to attain lucid dreams in order to practice meditation in the dream state. This kind of meditation is thought to help to recognize the basic nature of consciousness as pure awareness.
  8. Findings from sleep science that show that each state—the hypnagogic state, dreaming, and lucid dreaming—is associated with its own distinct kind of brain activity. The partnership between neuroscientists on one hand and meditators on the other has yielded extremely valuable data towards an understanding of human cognitive processes. There are, however, important critical differences between Western cognitive science and the Indian yogic philosophies, on the fundamental matter of definition of consciousness. For Western science, especially neuroscience and the rest of cognitive science, consciousness is a biological phenomenon wholly dependent on the brain. For Buddhism, especially Indo-Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, the fundamental nature of consciousness is not biological, and consciousness has an existence independent of the brain.
  9. Tibetan Buddhism presents a vivid account of the progressive breakdown of consciousness and the dissolution of the sense of self during the dying process. According to Tibetan Buddhism—as well as Yoga and Vedānta—great contemplatives can disengage from the sense of self as ego as they die. Resting in an experience of pure awareness, they can watch the dissolution of their everyday “I-Me-Mine” consciousness and witness their own death with equanimity.

(Continued)
 
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atanu

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Premium Member
The Neurophysicalist view of Consciousness and its Limitations

  1. According to this “neurophysicalist” view, neuroscience provides overwhelming evidence that every conscious experience is identical to some pattern of brain activity. But neuroscience itself doesn’t demonstrate this identity; rather, the identity is a metaphysical interpretation of what neuroscience does show, namely, the contingency or dependence of certain kinds of mental events on certain kinds of neuronal events. And causal manipulations, strictly speaking, go both ways. The brain is always embodied, and its functioning as a support for consciousness can’t be understood apart from its place in a relational system involving the rest of the body and the environment.
  2. Explaining consciousness in the sense of cognitive access doesn’t necessarily explain consciousness in the sense of subjective experience. The reason for making the distinction between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness is to allow for the possibility that you could be subliminally or implicitly conscious of something without being able to report and describe your experience. There is no reason to believe that the innate mind, the very essential luminous nature of awareness, has neural correlates because it is not physical. So while it can be agreed with neuroscience that gross mental events correlate with brain activity, on a more subtle level of consciousness, brain and mind are two separate entities. In this matter, Philosopher Ned Block calls attention to the “methodological puzzle”. In Block’s words: “how can we find out whether there can be conscious experience without the cognitive accessibility required for reporting conscious experience since any evidence would have to derive from reports that themselves derive from that cognitive access? Again, the scientific method gives us no access to consciousness that’s independent of consciousness. When we use the scientific method to investigate consciousness, we’re always necessarily using and relying on consciousness itself. Perceptual observation, which is necessarily first-personal, and the intersubjective confirmation of perceptual experience, which necessarily presupposes empathy or the recognition of others as having the same kinds of experiences as oneself, are the bedrock of experimental science. The upshot is that there’s no way to stand outside consciousness and look at it.
  3. Most neuroscientists and philosophers of mind today think of dreamless sleep as a blackout state in which consciousness fades or disappears completely. But none of the behavioural or physiological evidence from sleep science suffices to rule out there being a mode of consciousness in dreamless sleep.
  4. First, consciousness has a cognitive primacy that materialism fails to take into account. There’s no way to step outside consciousness and measure it against something else. Science cannot see anything independent from consciousness. Second, since consciousness has this kind of primacy, it makes no sense to try to reductively explain consciousness in terms of something that’s conceived to be essentially non-experiential, like fundamental physical phenomena. Furthermore, the experience cannot be explained as arising from non-experiential fundamental physics phenomena.
  5. Much of what Western science and philosophy would describe as unconscious might qualify as conscious, in the sense of involving subtle levels of phenomenal awareness that could be made accessible through meditative mental training. Yoga, Vedānta, and Buddhism assert that the subliminal consciousness present in dreamless sleep can become cognitively accessible through meditative mental training. There is neurological data to support the yogic teaching that subliminal witness consciousness persists in the deep sleep state.
  6. Hence the standard neuroscience way of defining consciousness as that which disappears in dreamless sleep needs to be revised.
  7. Neuroscientists often try to define consciousness as that which disappears in deep sleep. As neuroscientists, Giulio Tononi and Christof Koch write, “When you fall asleep … the level of consciousness decreases to the point that you become virtually unconscious—the degree to which you are conscious (of anything) becomes progressively less and less. Elsewhere Tononi writes: “Everybody knows what consciousness is: it is what vanishes every night when we fall into a dreamless sleep and reappears when we wake up or when we dream. Philosopher John Searle agrees: “Consciousness consists of inner, qualitative, subjective states and processes of sentience or awareness. Consciousness, so defined, begins when we wake in the morning from a dreamless sleep and continues until we fall asleep again, die, go into a coma, or otherwise become unconscious. Scientists conclude that the sleepers were aware of little or nothing at all prior to being woken up, and hence that slow-wave sleep is a state of reduced or absent consciousness.
  8. Another reason neuroscientists think that consciousness fades or ceases in deep sleep comes from comparing brain activity during slow-wave sleep with brain activity during waking consciousness. Marcello Massimini, Giulio Tononi, and their colleagues at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, studied how the brain responds to being stimulated by a brief pulse of electricity at a small and precisely chosen region when subjects are awake versus when they’re in deep sleep. During wakefulness, the pulse triggers a sustained EEG response that lasts for 300 milliseconds and is made up of rapidly changing waves that propagate in specific directions over long distances in the cortex. During deep sleep, however, although the initial response is stronger than during wakefulness, it remains localized to the stimulated brain region and lasts only 150 milliseconds. Tononi and his colleagues interpret these findings as showing that “effective connectivity”—the ability of neural systems to influence each other—breaks down in deep sleep.”
  9. The fact that you have no memory of some period of time doesn’t necessarily imply that you lacked all consciousness during that time. What is it about the loss of effective connectivity and large-scale integration that makes neuroscientists think that consciousness disappears in deep sleep? Why Tononi presupposes that the short EEG response indicates an absence of consciousness? Because, as per Tononi’s concept of ‘integrated information theory of consciousness', cognitive processes—selective attention, working memory, sequential thought, and action guidance—require the large-scale integration of brain activity that seems lacking in deep sleep.
  10. Integrated information theory, however, has serious limitation concerning the phenomenal consciousness. Philosopher Ned Block points out, the integrated information theory doesn’t distinguish between intelligence, in the sense of being able to solve complex problems by integrating multiple sources of information, and consciousness, in the sense of sentience or felt awareness (phenomenal consciousness). Since integrated information doesn’t seem sufficient for consciousness—let alone identical to it—its presence or absence shouldn’t be taken as the definitive mark of whether a state is conscious or not conscious. To be phenomenally conscious means to be in a state of felt awareness. To be access conscious means to be in a state where there is cognitive access to the contents of awareness. Although large-scale integration in the cortex is crucial for cognitively accessible conscious experience, it may not be crucial for every kind of phenomenal consciousness, for example, the kind of cognitively un-accessed consciousness without an object that Yoga and Vedānta believe happens in deep and dreamless sleep.

(Contd.)
 
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atanu

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Premium Member
Vedantic and Buddhist view of the phenomenology of Deep Sleep

  1. From the Indian and Tibetan contemplative perspectives, the definition of consciousness as that which disappears in deep sleep is inaccurate. Although object-directed consciousness becomes progressively less and less as we move from waking or dreaming into a deep and dreamless sleep, awareness or sentience continues. For Yoga and Vedānta, whereas dreaming is a form of object-directed consciousness—the objects in dreams being mental images—dreamless sleep is a mode of consciousness without an object. Similarly, according to Tibetan Buddhism, deep sleep is a state of “subtle consciousness” without sensory or cognitive content, and it’s the basis upon which dreaming and waking consciousness arise. According to Yoga and Tibetan Buddhism subtle consciousness of deep sleep, qualitatively different from ordinary waking awareness, can’t be cognitively accessed and reported without a high degree of meditative mental training.
  2. Yoga and Vedānta mean by “deep sleep” is the sleep state where there are no sensory or mental objects of awareness, that is, no images and no thoughts. It’s a mode of consciousness without an object. And deep sleep is a mode of consciousness that is attainable consciously through meditation. In the waking state, the subject appears as the body and the object appears as what we perceive. In dreams, the subject appears as the dream ego or self-within-the-dream and the object as the dream world. In deep sleep, consciousness doesn’t differentiate this way between subject and object, knower and known. Instead, it rests as one quiescent “mass.” Consciousness withdraws into itself while its function of being directed toward external objects lies dormant. Yet this dormancy isn’t a total loss or oblivion of awareness; it’s a peaceful absorption that offers a foretaste of the lucid bliss belonging to the self-realized consciousness liberated from illusion. If there were no awareness at all in deep and dreamless sleep, then you couldn’t have the memory, “I slept well,” immediately upon waking up. In remembering you slept peacefully, you recall something from a deep sleep, so that state must have been a subtly conscious one.
  3. The Advaita Vedānta conclusion is that “I know primarily based on the basis of memory and not based on not inference, that I knew nothing in deep sleep”. In other words, I remember having not known anything. But memory is of something previously experienced, so the not-knowing must be experiential.
  4. To put the question in a more phenomenological way, how is it possible for you as a conscious subject to experience yourself as one and the same being who falls asleep, does not actively know anything while asleep, and emerges from sleep into waking life? The Vedānta view is that a retrospective inference across the gap of a complete absence of consciousness can’t suffice to make this kind of unified self-experience possible. Rather, you must have some kind of experiential acquaintance with dreamless sleep as a mode of your conscious being.
  5. So, according to Advaita Vedānta, consciousness witnesses the not-knowing, which is ignorance, which according to Vedānta, isn’t the mere nonexistence of knowledge; it’s an experience of not-knowing that “conceals” the true nature of things. Suppose one mistakes a shell on the beach for a coin. ignorance here involves non-apprehension—one does not see the shell as a shell—and misapprehension—one sees the shell as a coin. There is both ignorance of the real thing and the mistaken perception of it as something other than what it is. In Vedānta language, not-knowing “conceals” the shell by “superimposing” the illusion of a coin. In general, when one is ignorant of a thing, according to Vedānta, one’s awareness presents some appearance that conceals the nature or the existence of that thing. In non-lucid dreams, we don’t see the dream as a dream (non-apprehension of the dream), and we mistake our mental images for real things outside us (misapprehension of the dream as reality). In deep and dreamless sleep, we experience a kind of blankness or nothingness. In other words, deep sleep isn’t a nothingness of experience but rather an experience of nothingness. Non-apprehension is a kind of awareness. This kind of self-awareness is the self-luminous witness consciousness, not cognitive or bodily sense of ego or “I-Me-Mine.”
  6. If some terminology from contemporary Western philosophy of mind is projected onto Yoga and Vedānta, one can say that deep sleep counts as a “phenomenal” state or state of “phenomenal consciousness”—a state for which there’s something it’s like to be in that state. Yoga and Vedānta describe it as peaceful, one undifferentiated awareness not divided up into a feeling of being a subject aware of a distinct object, and blissfully unknowing.
  7. The modern practice of yoga nidrā or “yogic sleep,” lends experiential support to the Vedic conception. Yoga Nidra uses breathing methods, concentration, visualization, attention to the body, and emptying the mind of images and thoughts in order to lead the waking mind into a unique state of lucid awareness at the borderland of waking and deep sleep.46 One long-term effect of this practice is said to be a deep sleep state that’s peaceful and refreshing. Another effect is said to be a greater ability to witness lucidly the sleeping process and to remember qualities of sleep upon awakening.
  8. The idea that deep sleep can be lucidly witnessed is central to the Tibetan Buddhist practice of sleep yoga. Deep sleep, can happen in more than one way. Besides ordinary deep sleep, there’s lucid deep sleep. Ordinary deep sleep is called the “sleep of ignorance”; awareness is void or blank and in total darkness. Lucid deep sleep is called “clear light sleep.” “It occurs when the body is sleeping but the practitioner is neither lost in darkness nor in dreams, but instead abides in pure awareness. Since we ordinarily identify with the gross levels of our consciousness—the five senses and the sixth mental sense—and these are shut down in deep sleep, deep sleep seems to the ordinary mind to be a state of unconsciousness. But a subtler level of pure awareness, which constitutes a “substrate” or “base consciousness” underlying sensory and mental consciousness, continues from moment to moment throughout waking, dreaming, and deep sleep. Lucid deep sleep affords an opportunity to experience directly pure awareness in its basic nature of clarity or luminosity—an experience that’s described, as it is in Yoga and Vedānta, as blissful.
  9. “Dzogchen Ponlop says:
    • The essence of deep sleep is, in fact, great luminosity, the true nature of mind. It is utterly bright and utterly vivid. It is a dense clarity, and because its clarity is so dense, it has a blinding effect on the confused mind. When we purify the ignorance of deep sleep, when we transcend that delusion and further penetrate the intense clarity, then we experience the clear, luminous nature of mind.
    • If we have not trained our mind through practice, then we faint and lose all awareness at this point. … If we have stabilized our mind and developed some insight into its nature, then we will recognize the arising in the next moment of the ultimate nature of mind. We will see its empty essence, its suchness, which is nothing other than the … ground luminosity.
  10. Tibetan Buddhists say that the bardo of dying corresponds closely to what happens when we fall asleep. At the moment of dropping off to sleep, blackness occurs, followed immediately by the emergence of the clear light or ground luminosity of pure awareness, which we fail to recognize unless we’ve trained our mind in dream and sleep yoga.
  11. Another Tibetan teacher, Sogyal Rinpoche says the following:
    • How many of us are aware of the changes in consciousness when we fall asleep? Or of the moment of sleep before dreams begin? How many of us are aware even when we dream that we are dreaming? Imagine, then, how difficult it will be to remain aware during the turmoil of the bardos of death.
    • How your mind is in the sleep and dream state indicates how your mind will be in the corresponding bardo states; for example, the way in which you react to dreams, nightmares, and difficulties now shows how you might react after you die.
  12. This is why the yoga of sleep and dream plays such an important part in the preparation for death. What a real practitioner seeks to do is to keep, unfailing and unbroken, his or her awareness of the nature of mind throughout day and night, and so use directly the different phases of sleep and dream to recognize and become familiar with what will happen in the bardos during and after death.
  13. Yoga and Vedānta, as well as Tibetan Buddhism, agree that deep sleep consciousness can become cognitively accessible through meditative mental training. One can directly experience the dissolution of consciousness and the arising of the clear light nature of awareness in meditation and sleep, and these experiences provide a basis for inferring that a similar, though much more intense, experience happens when one dies.
  14. Sleep yoga drives home the point that we can’t map the Indian and Tibetan yogic conceptions of deep and dreamless sleep using already established categories from sleep science. The first person subjective experiences of deep dreamless sleep person and lucid sleep are beyond the scope of the current scientific method. We can hardly assume that we know what the neural signatures of lucid awareness in deep sleep would look like.

(Contd.)
 
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atanu

Member
Premium Member
Neuroscience evidence for phenomenological nature of Deep Sleep
  1. Empirically, yoga and Vipassanā meditation practices seem to be associated with a host of changes to sleep physiology, so it’s not unreasonable to speculate that these meditation practices may also be associated with changes to other sleep-related phenomena, such as learning and memory consolidation, as well as health.
  2. Empirical evidence indicates that memory processes are highly active in slow-wave sleep. Evidence from psychology and neuroscience clearly shows that slow-wave sleep promotes the formation of stable memories of events that were consciously experienced earlier when awake. In an experiment, the subjects learned locations in a spatial memory task while being exposed to the scent of roses. The scent was presented again while the subjects were in slow-wave sleep that night. Compared to the control condition where the scent wasn’t presented again during sleep, the presentation during slow-wave sleep resulted in a significantly improved recall of the locations in the task on the following day. In addition, the presentation of the scent during sleep resulted in significant activation in the hippocampus, a subcortical structure is known to be crucial for the formation and recall of memories for experienced events. The study shows that the same neural networks in the hippocampus that are activated in the acquisition of new memories during waking life are reactivated in slow-wave sleep. These and other studies tell us that slow-wave sleep strengthens newly acquired memories and integrates them with older ones. Psychologists call this process “memory consolidation”.
  3. According to Yoga, deep sleep is a state where memories are put together from subtle and subliminal mental impressions. Active memory consolidation during slow-wave sleep is a neuroscience counterpart to the Yoga view.
  4. We can also find in neuroscience a counterpart to the Vedānta view that deep sleep contains the “seed” of dreaming and waking consciousness. The Advaita Vedānta philosophers Gauḍapāda and Śaṅkara describe deep sleep as the causal source of waking and dreaming consciousness. In the Vedānta framework, whereas consciousness identifies with the physical body as the self in the waking state and with the mental dream body as the self in the dream state, it identifies with a subtle “causal body” in deep and dreamless sleep. The idea that deep sleep is the ground for future experience has a strong analogue in neuroscience.
  5. That sleep actively promotes the ability to learn and acquire new memories in the waking state is well known. In addition, slow-wave sleep may strongly affect subsequent REM sleep, the sleep stage when dreaming is most likely to occur. Neuroscientist György Buzsáki, calls sleep the brain’s “default state. According to Buzsaki, sleep is a self-organized state—one that emerges spontaneously without being managed or directed from outside—to which the brain always naturally returns. On the one hand, waking experience influences the way we sleep and rest; on the other hand, “After each day’s experience … the brain falls back to the default pattern to rerun and intertwine the immediate and past experiences of the brain’s owner. Buzsáki proposes that the self-organized processes of sleep strongly affect how the waking brain responds to the outside world. The sleep disorder is usually taken to result from the daily environmental interactions of the waking brain, but as Buzsáki points out, the causation probably goes the other way too: the symptoms displayed by the waking brain may result from disruptions to the brain’s default state of sleep.
  6. Although the function of gamma oscillations in slow-wave sleep is unknown, they appear to support memory consolidation. Another speculative possibility is that these gamma oscillations also correlate with the presence of a subtle conscious awareness in deep sleep, and can be affected by practising sleep yoga. There is neuroscience evidence that long-term Mindfulness meditators, compared to non-meditators, had increased higher EEG gamma activity in a parietal-occipital region of the scalp during NREM sleep. Higher gamma activity in the meditators could reflect a capacity to maintain some level of awareness during sleep.
  7. There are corresponding data from the TM experience. Long-term TM practitioners showed a unique EEG pattern during slow-wave sleep, with theta and alpha activity present during stages 3 and 4, as well as decreased skeletal muscle activity as measured by the electromyography (EMG). This is interpreted as supporting the presence of a different kind of slow-wave sleep state in individuals who report witnessing of sleep.
  8. One study found that experienced practitioners of TM and other forms of yoga meditation showed significantly higher levels of the hormone melatonin, which regulates the sleep-wake cycle and is produced by the pineal gland, immediately following a nighttime period of meditation, compared to the same time after not meditating. Two other studies found that both experienced Theravada Vipassanā meditation practitioners and experienced practitioners of a yogic breathing method called Sudarshan Kriya Yoga showed a significantly larger amount of slow-wave sleep in their sleep cycles compared to the amount in control subjects of the same age across all age groups from thirty to sixty years old.


References
Giulio Tononi and Christof Koch, “The Neural Correlates of Consciousness: An Update,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1124 (2008): 239–261, at 242.

Giulio Tononi, “Consciousness as Integrated Information: A Provisional Manifesto,” Biological Bulletin 215 (2008): 216–242, at 216.”

John R. Searle, “Consciousness,” Annual Review of Neuroscience 23 (2000): 557–578, at 559.

Dzogchen Ponlop, Mind Beyond Death (Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion, 2006), 86; Dalai Lama, Sleeping, Dreaming, and Dying: An Exploration of Consciousness with the Dalai Lama (Boston: Wisdom, 1996), 40.

Tononi and Koch, “The Neural Correlates of Consciousness,” 243. See also Tore A. Nielsen, “A Review of Mentation in REM an NREM Sleep: ‘Covert’ REM Sleep as a Possible Reconciliation of Two Opposing Models,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23 (2000): 851–866.”

Swami Satyananda Saraswati, Yoga Nidra (Munger, Bihar, India: Yoga Publications Trust, 6th ed., 1998). For a historical examination of the term yoga nidrā, see André Couture, “The Problem of the Meaning of Yoganidrā’s Name,” Journal of Indian Philosophy 27 (1999): 35–47.

Padmasambhava, Natural Liberation: Padmasambhava’s Teachings on the Six Bardos, trans. B. Alan Wallace (Boston: Wisdom, 1998). For contemporary Tibetan presentations of sleep yoga, see

Chogyal Namkhai Norbu, Dream Yoga and the Practice of the Natural Light (Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion, 1992), 51–71; Dzogchen Ponlop, Mind Beyond Death (Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion, 2006), 65, 86–87; Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep (Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion, 1998), 143–184.

Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep, 146.”

Ned Block, “Comparing the Major Theories of Consciousness,” in Michael Gazzaniga, ed., The Cognitive Neurosciences IV (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 1111–1122.

Susanne Diekelmann and Jan Born, “The Memory Function of Sleep,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 11 (2010): 114–126, and Matthew P. Walker, “The Role of Sleep in Cognition and Emotion,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1156 (2009): 168–197.

Björn Rasch et al., “Odor Cues During Slow-Wave Sleep Prompt Declarative Memory Consolidation,” Science 315 (2007): 1426–1429. For Proust’s description, see Proust, The Way by Swann’s, 47–50.

Matthew A. Wilson and Bruce L. McNaughton, “Reactivation of Hippocampal Ensemble Memories During Sleep,” Science 265 (1994): 676–679; Daoyun Jun and Matthew A. Wilson, “Coordinated Memory Replay in the Visual Cortex and Hippocampus During Sleep,” Nature Neuroscience 10 (2007): 100–107.

Philippe Peigneux et al., “Are Spatial Memories Strengthened in the Human Hippocampus During Slow-Wave Sleep?” Neuron 44 (2004): 535–545.

Gauḍapāda’s commentary on the Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad and Śaṅkara’s commentary on Gauḍapāda’s in Swami Gambhirananda, trans., Eight Upanisads, Volume Two (Kolkata, India: Advaita Ashrama, 1958), 209. For discussion of “seed sleep,” see Gupta, The Disinterested Witness, 29–30; Sharma, Sleep as a State of Consciousness in Advaita Vedānta, 75, 91; and Andrew Fort, The Self and Its States: A States of Consciousness Doctrine in Advaita Vedānta (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1990), chapter 5.

Ursula Voss et al., “Lucid Dreaming: A State of Consciousness with Features of Both Waking Consciousness and Non-lucid Dreaming,” Sleep 32 (2009): 1191–1200, and my discussion of this study in chapter 4.

Alain Destexhe et al., “Are Corticothalamic ‘Up’ States Fragments of Wakefulness?” Trends in Neurosciences 30 (2007): 334–342.

Michel Le Van Quyen et al., “Large-Scale Microelectrode Recordings of High-Frequency Gamma Oscillations in Human Cortex During Sleep,” Journal of Neuroscience 30 (2010): 7770–7782.

James M. Krueger et al., “Sleep as a Fundamental Property of Neuronal Assemblies,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 9 (2008): 910–919.

Fabio Ferrarelli et al., “Experienced Mindfulness Meditators Exhibit Higher Parietal-Occipital EEG Gamma Activity During NREM Sleep,” PLoS ONE 8 (8): e73417. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0073417.

Ursula Voss et al., “Lucid Dreaming: A State of Consciousness with Features of Both Waking Consciousness and Non-lucid Dreaming,” Sleep 32 (2009): 1191–1200.

L. I. Mason et al., “Electrophysiological Correlates of Higher States of Consciousness During Sleep in Long-Term Practitioners of the Transcendental Meditation Program,” Sleep 20 (1997): 102–110.

Ravindra P. Nagendra et al., “Meditation and Its Regulatory Role on Sleep”, ” Frontiers in Neurology 3 (2012) Article 54: 1–3.

Gregory A. Tooley et al., “Acute Increases in Night-Time Plasma Melatonin Levels Following a Period of Meditation,” Biological Psychology 53 (2000): 69–78.

Sathiamma Sulekha et al., “Evaluation of Sleep Architecture in Practitioners of Sudarshan Kriya Yoga and Vipassana Meditation,” Sleep and Biological Rhythms 4 (2006): 207–214; Ravindra Pattanashetty et al., “Practitioners of Vipassana Meditation Exhibit Enhanced Slow Wave Sleep and REM Sleep States Across Different Age Groups,” Sleep and Biological Rhythms 8 (2010): 34–41.​

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atanu

Member
Premium Member
The bulleted summary in the previous posts is only a very little part of the outstanding book of Evan Thompson. His book seems to ooze a peaceful coolness that usually characterises many senior meditators. I have no hesitation to recommend a full read of the book to those who love to read.

The author, in my opinion, builds a solid case for greater integration between current day neuroscience and the knowledge of phenomenal consciousness alterations in states of waking, hypnagogic, dreaming -- non-lucid and lucid, sleeping -- non-lucid and lucid. In authors own words “Whereas the Indian thinkers mapped consciousness and I-making in philosophical and phenomenological terms, I show how their insights can also help to advance the neuroscience of consciousness, by weaving together neuroscience and Indian philosophy in an exploration of wakefulness, falling asleep, dreaming, lucid dreaming, out-of-body experiences, deep and dreamless sleep, forms of meditative awareness, and the process of dying".

The author favours the Vedantic and Buddhist definition of consciousness as that which illumines and knows in contrast to the commonly held view in scientific circles that consciousness is that which disappears in deep sleep. In the former case, the deep sleep state is considered a pure consciousness-luminous state. Yoga and Vedānta, as well as Tibetan Buddhism, agree that deep sleep consciousness can become cognitively accessible through meditative mental training. The Yogic and Buddhist meditative practices are designed for attainment of these pure states in full consciousness, eventually as preparation towards death.

The neurological data has shown that expert meditators exercise significant volitional control over their brain states and physiologies. The 'neurophysicalist' paradigm cannot explain the 'mental causation' exhibited in many of these studies involving expert meditators. The author, while acknowledging the paucity of neurological data of deep sleep vis-a-vis data of meditative states, however, has presented evidence that 'memory consolidation' is a feature of deep sleep. The author has also referenced several studies that indicate entirely different kinds of EEG responses in expert meditators who claim to witness their own dream or deep sleep-like states.

According to Evan Thompson, sleep yoga drives home the point that we can’t map the Indian and Tibetan yogic conceptions of deep and dreamless sleep using already established categories from sleep science. The first person subjective experiences of deep dreamless sleep person and lucid sleep are beyond the scope of the current scientific method. We can hardly assume that we know what the neural signatures of lucid awareness in deep sleep would look like. The author thus suggests "What the Indian conception of deep sleep and the limited neuroscience support suggest that we need a finer taxonomy of sleep states—a taxonomy that’s not just physiological but also phenomenological."

I invite readers for their observations and comments.

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atanu

Member
Premium Member
One year back, I read this astounding book and prepared a summary, which although a bit lengthy, covers all the points of the book. The author does a brilliant job demonstrating that the data from neuroscience research supports much of the Advaita Vedanta and Buddhist understanding.

I do not expect anyone to read my summary. I am bumping the post for the sake of information, hoping that one or two readers may go on to read the original book, which is an astounding work on philosophy.
 
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