Awareness Without a Sense of Self

People who practice meditation often report feeling “pure awareness” in which they say they experience consciousness itself. The state encompasses specific sensations and non-specific feelings, thoughts, and perceptions. Researchers say their findings will help explain “pure consciousness.” And work to generate a prototypical minimal model for human conscious perception.

Unveiling Pure Awareness and Consciousness: Sensations and Perceptions in Meditation

In meditation practice, practitioners may experience “pure consciousness,” where they achieve complete awareness of oneself. Furthermore, this state appears in various forms, involving specific sensations and accompanying perceptions, feelings, and thoughts.

These discoveries come from the most comprehensive survey ever conducted on meditators’ experiences of pure consciousness. Researchers have created an online questionnaire that includes more than a hundred questions and asked thousands of thoughtful people around the world to answer them.

The study is part of the international Phenomenal Phenomenal Experience (MPE) program led by Metzinger.

Researchers presented the online questionnaire in five languages—German, English, French, Spanish, and Italian—and about 3,600 meditators completed it by 2020. In addition to questions about participants, the survey gathered basic information like gender, age, and meditation techniques. The questionnaire had 92 questions about their knowledge of pure awareness.

Metzinger and Gamma received 1,400 fully completed questionnaires, which they used for factor analysis. They applied this statistical test to identify groups of questions that participants usually answered similarly.

This led researchers to identify twelve groups, which, in turn, helped them pinpoint twelve factors reflecting pure consciousness. Consequently, based on these factors, they are now able to develop a small model of human awareness.

The responses we received included personal reports suggesting that pure consciousness also occurs in other contexts, such as in times of accident and serious illness, at the threshold between sleep and being awake, or when immersed in play as a child.