# meditation and consciousness -can we experience experience as broken  ## Metadata - Author: [[davies]] - Full Title: meditation and consciousness -can we experience experience as broken - Category: #articles - Summary: insert summary - My notes: - Summary: The text discusses the relationship between meditation and consciousness, focusing on mindfulness practice within the Theravāda Buddhist tradition. It explores the idea that through meditation, individuals can experience the passing away of consciousness. The text also touches on debates between different philosophical views on the nature of consciousness and self. - URL: https://readwise.io/reader/document_raw_content/145398516 - Source File: meditation and consciousness -can we experience experience as broken by Davis.pdf ## LLM Chats ## NotebookLM ## LLM Audio ## Highlights > Perhaps the most central aim of mindfulness practice, as it is characterized in Theravāda Buddhist mindfulness meditation practices of Burma, is to become vividly aware of the moment to moment changes in subjective experience. This is referred to as the development of insight understanding (vipassana ñāna). In beginning stages of insight understanding, one is primarily aware of the moment-to-moment change of the contents of phenomenal consciousness, sensa- tions of heat changing to sensations of cool, experiences of hearing being followed by experi- ences of thinking (perhaps some thought triggered by the sound), and so on. To the degree meditators are paying attention, that is, cultivating mindfulness of these experiences, they are thus able to report on how experience changed; indeed this is how meditation teachers assess the development of students’ ability to pay mindful attention. In the terms of the recent analytic debates indicated above, then, experiences of heat, cool, and so on are “access conscious”—they are available for recall, report, and so on (Block 1995)—but they are nonetheless only access conscious in virtue of being phenomenally felt. What is important and efficacious for the aim of mindfulness practice is not a recognition that one was previously feeling heat in the body, and is now feeling coolness, or movement, or whatever other sensation. That kind of knowledge would require recall of and comparison with past moments. Instead, one sustains awareness of the texture and phenomenal feel of a sensation such as heat as that sensation fades and another takes its place; one is phenomenally conscious of what it is like as that sensation changes to a different one rather than (just) thinking about that change. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hqj6dac165tep5jqx91vyb47)) > More interesting philosophically is the further suggestion by meditation teachers and practitioners that as quietude of mind and discernment deepen over the course of dedicated 438 ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hqj6en4m9tc6hpj6jwd5af4c)) > cultivation of mindfulness, one develops a fine-grained experiential awareness not only of the inconstant, changing nature of the contents of phenomenal consciousness, but also the inconstant, changing nature of phenomenal consciousness itself, the vehicle of that phenomenal content. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hqj6f8a6sp802d314r17pehk))