Toward a Science of Awakening: Our First Grantees

Introducing the first Toward a Science of Awakening grantee cohort

Introduction

In fall 2025, The Consciousness Foundation announced our first Request for Proposals as part of our Toward a Science of Awakening program. The awardees have now been selected, with projects slated to begin in September 2026.

What makes this grant unusual

This grant has some unusual elements to it. Rather than a standard “hub and spoke” model wherein the granting organization deploys funding and collects progress reports, we’ve added a metascience-informed collaboration layer onto the mechanism. Awardees committed, as a condition of receiving the funding, to sharing their data and results with one another during regular meetings over the project period. In order to encourage collaboration, The Consciousness Foundation will facilitate one in-person kickoff meeting attended by all Principal Investigators and Co-Investigators, following up with quarterly meetings on Zoom with the entire cohort for the duration of the project.

How the review process worked

The review process incorporated some standard and some non-traditional elements. This was a two-stage proposal process: an open letter of intent (LOI) stage, and a full proposal stage, by invitation. Of the 128 LOIs received, we invited 54 applicants to submit full proposals, and received 52 submissions.

The review process was conducted by a review committee of five professors (anonymous by request of one of the professors) with expertise in each methodological domain represented in the application pool. These professors were recruited at the LOI stage, with one more recruited at the full proposal stage to replace a reviewer who dropped out due to time constraints. Reviews were conducted asynchronously and each professor received a small honorarium for their time. Proposals were scored on three criteria: alignment with program objectives, significance, and feasibility, and total scores were computed as the geometric mean across the three subscores.

In order to prevent over-indexing on any one particular method or approach (imagine, for example, a hypothetical situation in which the top three scoring proposals were all using EEG to examine Centering Prayer), we did not simply fund the 14 highest-scoring proposals; rather we assembled a diverse set of 14 projects from the 24 highest scoring applications.

Summaries of the awardee cohort appear below, and watch this space for a detailed analysis of the field of applications, to be published in the coming weeks. In the meantime, if you haven’t read our LOI-stage report, check it out!

Toward A Science of Awakening:
Project Executive Summaries

Relational Awakening: Measuring Awakening-Related States in Guided Interpersonal Practice

Principal Investigator: Benjamin Baird, The University of Texas at Austin

Co-Investigator: Jose del R. Millan, The University of Texas at Austin

Practice Instructor: Paige Britt

Keywords: Relational awakening; Hyperscanning; EEG; Dyadic interaction

This project asks whether a brief guided interpersonal practice can produce measurable shifts in consciousness that resemble core features of what contemplative traditions often describe as “awakening.” Awakening is often described as a profound change in how a person experiences self, perception, connection, and freedom from suffering. Yet these experiences have been difficult to study scientifically because they are hard to evoke reliably in the laboratory and challenging to measure in rigorous, reproducible ways. Our study focuses on a live dyadic practice called relational awakening, in which an experienced guide helps another person shift into a more open, less bounded, and less conceptually driven mode of awareness. Participants often describe feeling more connected, less identified with their usual narrative sense of self, and more aware of a spacious or unified field of experience. Unlike many contemplative practices that require years of training, this approach may be able to evoke meaningful awakening-like shifts in a single session, even in people with no prior meditation experience. This makes it especially promising as a scientific model for studying awakening-related states under controlled conditions. To test this, we will recruit 30 meditation-naïve adults to complete two laboratory sessions: one with an expert relational awakening facilitator and one with a carefully matched comparison facilitator. During both sessions, we will record brain activity using dual EEG, along with physiological measures such as heart-rate variability, while also collecting detailed reports of participants’ experiences. Because participant and facilitator will be recorded simultaneously, we will be able to examine not only changes within the participant, but also whether moments of shared experience are accompanied by measurable neural or physiological synchrony between the two people. The goal is to identify the experiential, neural, physiological, and interpersonal markers of awakening-related state shifts, while also developing a rigorous and reusable framework for studying these phenomena in a brief, non-pharmacological, interpersonal setting. More broadly, this work could lower the barrier for other researchers to study awakening by providing a standardized protocol, shared measures, open materials, and a de-identified multimodal dataset. In the longer term, because relational awakening practices are brief and scalable, this work may also have relevance for clinical, educational, and community settings, including therapist training, interventions, and the development of technology-supported practices that evoke awakening-related shifts safely and accessibly.

Recognizing the Ever-present Background experience-of-Being (EBB): A cross-cultural/tradition neurophenomenological study of awakening

Principal Investigator: Aviva Berkovich-Ohana, University of Haifa

Co-Investigator: Yair Dor-Ziderman, University of Haifa

Postdoctoral Researcher: Amir Freimann, University of Haifa

Keywords: Awakening, Cross-culture/tradition, EEG, Neurophenomenology, Machine learning

What does it mean to awaken? Across spiritual traditions, awakening is often described as a lasting shift in how people experience themselves and the world: less driven by passing thoughts and self-focused concerns, and more grounded in a deeper, stable background of awareness. This project studies that possibility scientifically. We call this background awareness the “Ever-present Background experience-of-Being,” or EBB. Based on early interviews with recognized spiritual practitioners, EBB describes a shift in which people no longer experience themselves as mainly identified with passing thoughts, feelings, and mental content. Instead, they report a more stable sense of presence, openness, unity, joy, and contact with an aspect of experience that is ever-present and unaffected by the storms of life. The project has two parts. First, we will interview 160 advanced practitioners from different traditions and cultures to examine whether this kind of experience has a common structure across backgrounds, or whether it takes different forms in different traditions. We want to identify which features are truly shared and which vary. This will help us build the first systematic cross-cultural map of awakening as a lived human experience. Second, we will invite 50 EBB-aware participants to take part in an EEG study in the laboratory. EEG is a safe method that records electrical activity from the scalp. Participants will be asked to enter different states of awareness, including ordinary breath awareness, self-focused experience, and EBB-like awareness. We will then examine whether these states show distinct patterns of brain activity, and whether EBB-like patterns also appear during ordinary rest. If they do, this would suggest that awakening is not only a temporary state, but also a more stable trait. This project is important for several reasons. Scientifically, it combines detailed first-person reports with brain measures, showing how neurophenomenology can be used to study subtle aspects of human experience in a rigorous way. It also helps move the study of awakening beyond vague, mystical or romantic language toward a more grounded, testable understanding. Practically, the findings may support future work in contemplative training, mental well-being, and possibly neurofeedback tools designed to help people recognize and stabilize beneficial states of awareness. More broadly, the project may offer a shared empirical language for discussing awakening across different traditions, cultures, and worldviews. By identifying both common patterns and meaningful differences between traditions and cultures, it may help create a bridge between scientific research and contemplative traditions, and support deeper dialogue about forms of awareness often described as transformative, compassionate, and life-changing. The project will produce a validated interview method, a cross-tradition experiential map of awakening, open EEG and phenomenological datasets, and scientific publications that other researchers can use to replicate, refine, and extend this work.

Tracking the unfolding of awakening among Buddhist and secular mindfulness meditators: a longitudinal study

Principal Investigator: Julieta Galante, Contemplative Studies Centre, University of Melbourne

Co-Investigator: Lillian Ward, Contemplative Studies Centre, University of Melbourne

Keywords: Meditation, mindfulness, longitudinal study, awakening, mixed methods

Millions of people worldwide now practise meditation, both in traditional Buddhist settings and through modern, secular mindfulness programs. Many people report that sustained meditation can lead to profound and lasting changes in how they experience themselves and the world—sometimes described as “awakening” or “enlightenment.” Despite widespread interest, science currently knows very little about how often these experiences occur, how they develop over time, or how they affect people’s lives, largely because most research relies on people looking back and reporting what they remember after the fact. This project will be the first large‑scale, long‑term study to track the unfolding of awakening‑related experiences as they happen, rather than relying on memory. We will follow up to 700 early‑stage meditators over three years, beginning in the first months of their practice, to better understand if, when, and how these deep changes emerge. Participants will come from secular mindfulness programs as well as two major Buddhist traditions (Theravada and Mahayana). By including both religious and non‑religious contexts, the study can compare how different practice environments shape people’s experiences. Participants will complete regular questionnaires about their wellbeing, emotions, attention, and meditation practice. A key innovation is that participants will also record short weekly audio diaries, speaking freely about their experiences in their own words. We will track changes in language, narrative style, and vocal patterns linked to emotion and self experience. This approach provides a sensitive window into subtle, gradual transformations that may be missed by questionnaires alone. In addition, where possible, we will gather perspectives from meditation teachers or close others to provide an external view of changes over time. Given how hard it is to define awakening, we will not rely on a single definition. Instead, we will use four complementary approaches: traditional definitions from within Buddhist lineages, people’s own personal understanding of awakening, and two scientific definitions aligned with the funder’s working definition, which focus on lasting changes in experience, wellbeing, and compassion. By combining multiple sources of evidence, the study aims to distinguish between fleeting or intense meditation experiences and more enduring transformations. The research has two main goals. First, it will estimate how often awakening‑related experiences occur, including when they tend to emerge, and how confident we can be in identifying them. Second, it will explore what predicts these experiences and what changes come before and after them, including shifts in emotional reactivity, attention, language use, and how people make sense of their lives. By providing the first prospective, real‑time evidence on awakening‑related processes, this project will lay essential groundwork for a scientific understanding of deep contemplative transformation. The findings will help practitioners, teachers, clinicians, and researchers better understand both the potential benefits and challenges of meditation, and what works for whom. In a world where meditation continues to grow in popularity, this research will support safer and more informed practice.

Beyond a metaphor: tracking the signatures of awakening across the sleep-wake cycle

Principal Investigator: Heleen Slagter, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Co-Investigators: Ruben Laukkonen, Flourishing Intelligence Program (FLIP), Centre for Eudaimonia & Human Flourishing, Linacre College, University of Oxford

Leila Salvesen, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Martin Gevonden, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Keywords: Awakening, sleep, arousal, physiology, EEG

What if “awakening” literally means being more awake? Across contemplative traditions, awakening refers not merely to being awake rather than asleep, but to a profound and enduring shift in the quality of conscious experience: a transformation marked by clarity, openness, and a reduced focus on the self. Despite centuries of detailed phenomenological description, science still lacks a concrete understanding of how awakening is supported by measurable, lasting changes in the brain and body. This project advances a bold, yet scientifically grounded proposal: awakening reflects a trait‑level recalibration of tonic arousal, the background physiological state that sustains wakefulness and governs our readiness to respond to the world, thereby shaping how experience unfolds moment by moment. While meditation research has often emphasized relaxation, emerging findings show that advanced contemplative practice can enhance baseline arousal and alter sleep architecture. Such changes point toward a deeper shift in how wakefulness itself is regulated. Our project directly examines this possibility. We propose that this shift arises through repeatedly cultivating meditative states in which tonic arousal, normally the contentless experiential background, is brought to the foreground of experience, yielding a direct sense of wakefulness and epistemic openness. Over time, this foregrounding may consolidate into a stable trait, altering arousal regulation not only during meditation but across the entire sleep-wake cycle. If so, awakening should leave discernible signatures in the brain and body, including during sleep, when behavior and attention cannot influence physiology. Sleep thus provides a unique window into enduring neurophysiological transformations that cannot be explained by effort, intention, or tradition-specific aspects. To test this, we will conduct an intensive, week‑long study using wearable EEG and autonomic monitoring in the home environment of advanced meditators. Participants recognized by their traditions as awakened will be compared to matched advanced meditators without such recognition. Across seven days and nights, we will record autonomic activity, resting‑state brain signals, sleep architecture, and subjective experience. This naturalistic, multimodal dataset will allow us to identify potential biomarkers of awakening, i.e., stable, reproducible physiological patterns that distinguish awakened from non‑awakened individuals. In parallel, we will develop a theoretical account of awakening grounded in predictive processing, a leading framework in cognitive neuroscience. From this perspective, the brain constantly generates predictions to interpret sensory input and guide action. Certain forms of meditation may temporarily reduce these predictions, revealing a background mode of awareness associated with tonic arousal itself. We propose that awakening reflects a durable shift toward inhabiting this mode: experience becomes less shaped by learned expectations, more anchored in the present, and less entangled with the sense of self and its related conceptual constructs. If successful, this project will (1) provide the first rigorous physiological characterization of awakening, (2) establish awakening as a measurable trait rather than a purely subjective claim, (3) generate open, scalable protocols for naturalistic sleep and arousal research, and (4) offer a mechanistic account of awakening that bridges contemplative traditions and contemporary neuroscience. Beyond scientific value, these insights may ultimately inform accessible contemplative interventions that leverage wakefulness‑promoting mechanisms for well‑being and mental resilience.

The landscape of awakening: Comparing phenomenology and interpretation across traditions

Principal Investigator: Michael Lifshitz, McGill University

Co-Investigator: Nathan Fisher, McGill University

Keywords: Phenomenology, comparison, interpretations of awakening, self changes, interview development

For some traditions, awakening describes an abiding insight into the illusory nature of self. For others, it refers to lucidly inhabiting the self as a real but constructed process. Still others understand the self as a genuine manifestation of a fundamental or divine ground of being. These differences are not merely doctrinal. They shape how teachers guide students and which kinds of experiences and behaviors practitioners value and cultivate, potentially altering the texture of awakening itself. Yet what remains unknown is whether these different ways of conceptualizing awakening produce genuinely different experiences of awakening or instead reflect alternative interpretations of a shared underlying transformation. Operationalizing awakening is complicated by the fact that reports of awakening typically conflate two levels of description: what actually changes in lived experience, and the interpretive models through which practitioners make sense of those changes. Our project addresses this fundamental challenge by developing two complementary semi-structured interview protocols to separately examine the experience of awakening and how it is conceptualized or interpreted by different traditions. The first interview will probe the phenomenology of awakening, asking how awakening changes the experience of self along key dimensions, including the sense of identification, bodily agency, narrative thought, and emotional tone. Based on leading approaches in empirical phenomenology, this interview will employ embodied prompts to shift practitioners outside of their usual conceptual frames and provide textured descriptions of their lived experience. The second interview will probe how practitioners interpret those changes in experience, mapping the doctrinal positions that shape how people conceptualize the ultimate fruits of practice. Does awakening require the complete dissolution of the self, or is it about inhabiting the self with more awareness of its constructed nature? Is the ultimate aim to transcend ordinary embodiment, or is the mark of true realization a human who engages wholly in the world? Do the actions of a realized person emerge from a spontaneous awakened source, or does personal responsibility persist in a changed form? These two interview protocols will be refined through expert consultation and piloting with Buddhist teachers and advanced practitioners. They will then be field-tested in a comparative study across two Buddhist communities, which will be selected specifically to reflect contrasting interpretations of the goals of awakening. Rather than mapping interpretive differences onto traditional divisions such as Theravāda, Zen, or Vajrayāna, we expect to find meaningful interpretive and experiential contrasts even within a single stream of Buddhism—communities that share practice lineages but diverge in how they understand what awakening ultimately entails. This research will deliver new methods and insights to support the broader science of awakening, providing a robust phenomenological foundation for future mechanistic and computational studies. The approach we develop can subsequently be expanded to larger samples and traditions beyond Buddhism to develop a richer cross-cultural map of the landscape of awakening. Beyond the academy, our findings promise to inform teachers and practitioners by encouraging a rigorous, self-reflective perspective on awakening that does justice to both the similarities and the variations in how it is experienced and conceptualized across traditions. We hope this will shift the broader discourse around awakening to one that is more pluralistic, empirically grounded, and conceptually precise.

Can reasoning dissolve the boundaries between self and others

Principal Investigator: Marieke van Vugt, University of Groningen

Keywords: analytical meditation, selflessness, EEG

Recent research has shown that advanced meditation practices can reduce the boundary between self and others, where the sense of self becomes more interdependent, rather than our intuitively independent sense of self. This is a feature of awakening according to the Buddhist tradition, and it is important because this interdependent sense of self makes it very natural to evoke compassion. The reduction of self-boundary has been found in earlier research to be associated with an increase in 27-Hz beta waves and Lempel-Ziv complexity. All of this work, however, has focused on individual meditation practices, whereas philosophical inquiry and logic play a very large role in Buddhist traditions as well. In this research, we will therefore seek to expand on the findings of self-boundary dissolution to see whether this aspect of awakening can also be found in this distinct Buddhist tradition. To do so, we will collaborate with Tibetan monks (possibly also nuns if they are available). Jointly, we will develop first a culturally-appropriate equivalent of self-boundary dissolution, likely based on their Vajrayana meditation. We will compare the self-boundary dissolution obtained in this way to the self-boundary dissolution arrived at through analytical meditation. We expect to find for both an increase in 27-Hz beta waves and Lempel-Ziv complexity, if this reflects indeed a general phenomenon. In the case we do not obtain this finding, we will explore, in collaboration with the monastics and Buddhist scholars what aspect of the tradition could explain this discrepancy. Apart from giving a better insight into this spiritual process, the project is also relevant to better understanding psychiatric problems in which the sense of self is disrupted such as schizophrenia.

Awakening or Salient Experiences? Testing the Effects of 5-MeO-DMT in Expert Meditators

Principal Investigator: Christopher Timmermann, University College London

Co-Investigator: Rosalind McAlpine, University College London

Keywords: Nondual recognition, 5-MeO-DMT, nyams, neurophenomenology, contemplative expertise

One of the oldest and most carefully preserved distinctions in Tibetan Buddhist contemplative science is the difference between an experience of awakening and an experience that merely resembles it. Traditions such as Mahāmudrā and Dzogchen describe ‘rigpa’ as the direct, stable recognition of the nature of awareness itself: not a dramatic or unusual state, but a clear seeing of what is always already the case. They also describe ‘nyams’: powerful, sometimes overwhelming experiences of bliss, luminosity, timelessness, or the dissolution of the sense of self, which arise during intensive practice and are explicitly understood not to constitute realisation. The entire pedagogical architecture of these traditions is organised around one central skill: learning to tell the difference. A practitioner who mistakes a vivid nyam for genuine recognition is, in the contemplative framework, moving in precisely the wrong direction. 5-MeO-DMT is a fast-acting psychedelic that reliably produces some of the most radical alterations in consciousness documented in humans. People who take it frequently report dissolution of the self, collapse of the boundary between subject and world, and a sense of encountering something boundless and fundamental. These reports bear striking similarities to accounts of awakening, and the compound is now being widely used in retreat settings, sometimes alongside meditation, on the assumption that it facilitates genuine spiritual transformation. That assumption has never been scientifically examined. Our group recently conducted the first direct empirical comparison of nondual meditation and 5-MeO-DMT in the same individual: an experienced Tibetan Buddhist lama with over fifteen years of intensive retreat practice. Using high-density EEG recordings and detailed phenomenological interviews conducted after each session, we found that low-dose 5-MeO-DMT and nondual meditation produce overlapping patterns of brain activity, confirmed by a machine learning analysis showing the two states share common neural features. This convergence is genuinely interesting. But it also revealed something equally important: despite the shared neural signature, only nondual meditation produced the phenomenological features the practitioner identified as genuine recognition of rigpa. The drug produced compelling experiences, but not, in his assessment, the real thing. Crucially, he was not meditating during the drug session. Whether actively practising nondual meditation during the acute effects of 5-MeO-DMT would change this picture remains completely unknown. This study is designed to answer that question. We will recruit twelve expert Dzogchen and Mahāmudrā practitioners: people who have completed intensive multi-year retreats, received formal instruction in the recognition of the nature of mind from qualified teachers, and developed the specific first-person skill of distinguishing rigpa from nyams in real time. This is a rare population, and their expertise is precisely what the question requires. No amount of neuroscientific sophistication can substitute for the testimony of someone trained to make this discrimination from the inside. Participants will attend a six-day residential retreat. On three separate days, following an identical protocol, they will practise nondual meditation with no substance, with a placebo, and with low-dose 5-MeO-DMT. We will record 64-channel EEG throughout each session and conduct structured phenomenological interviews afterwards. Follow-up assessments at three months will examine whether any shifts in recognition persist beyond the retreat. The study is designed to yield meaningful results in either direction. If 5-MeO-DMT facilitates genuine recognition in these practitioners, producing both the neural signature and the first-person phenomenology of rigpa, this would be the first controlled evidence that a pharmacological intervention can contribute to authentic contemplative transformation rather than simply producing a compelling imitation of it. If it does not, if even expert practitioners find that the drug produces powerful experiences they cannot verify as genuine recognition, this is equally important: it would demonstrate that surface phenomenological similarity between a psychedelic state and a meditative one does not imply contemplative equivalence, providing the field with a principled basis for making that distinction. The study will produce, as open resources for the wider research community, a validated framework for operationalising the distinction between awakening and transient altered states, including assessment instruments, interview methods, neural markers, and a fully annotated dataset. We will also develop and freely share a preparation and dosing protocol for combining psychedelics with advanced meditative practice, designed to be adapted for future scientific and clinical contexts.

A Mathematical Physics of Awakening

Principal Investigator: Ruben Laukkonen, Flourishing Intelligence Program (FLIP), Centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing, Linacre College, University of Oxford

Co-Investigators: Morten Kringelbach, Centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing, Linacre College, University of Oxford

Lars Sandved-Smith, Monash Centre for Consciousness and Contemplative Studies, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.

Keywords: free energy principle, emptiness, non-duality, mathematical physics, homotopy type theory

Contemplative traditions have long described awakening (the stable recognition of the structure of experience resulting in lasting improvements in well-being and a transformed relationship to self) as a natural capacity of the human mind. Modern neuroscience increasingly confirms that contemplative practice produces measurable changes in brain dynamics, but we still lack a formal theory of the mechanisms underpinning these changes. Without such a theory, we cannot predict who will benefit from practice, design more effective training, or understand the deeper implications of contemplative insight. Most importantly, without a rigorous account of awakening in contemporary scientific language, the possibility of profoundly and permanently improved well-being remains at the margins of mainstream awareness. This project aims to build that theory by connecting two powerful mathematical frameworks. The first is the Free Energy Principle (FEP), which describes how any self-organising system, from a cell to a brain, maintains itself by building an internal model of its world and minimising surprise. The FEP has already been used to model meditation, showing how practitioners develop increasingly refined models of their own cognitive processes—a recursive self-awareness that loosens rigid patterns of self-identification. The second framework is Modal Homotopy Type Theory (MHoTT), a branch of mathematics that derives the geometric foundations of modern physics from a small set of logical axioms. Rather than assuming the existence of space, time, and physical fields, MHoTT shows how these structures emerge from deeper relational principles. Remarkably, MHoTT’s foundational structures resonate with core Buddhist concepts: its starting point—a self-referential ‘primordial adjunction’—mirrors non-duality; its infinite relational structure mirrors emptiness; and its unfolding through chains of interdependent concepts mirrors dependent origination. Our central question is: can the mathematical structures underlying the FEP, the geometric space in which beliefs live and evolve, be derived from MHoTT, as the structures of physics have been? If so, the derivation itself becomes something a cognitive system could model. We could then ask a question that is currently intractable within the FEP alone: what happens when a mind models not just its beliefs, but the non-dual, relational foundations from which those beliefs arise? We pursue this in two phases. First, we investigate whether the FEP’s mathematical structures can be derived from MHoTT’s foundations, and formalise what it would mean for a cognitive system to represent them. Second, we build computer simulations comparing agents with and without this deeper self-knowledge, testing whether access to foundational structure produces qualitatively different (and potentially irreversible) changes in how the system organises itself. Because the FEP connects the mathematics of beliefs to the physics of neural activity, every prediction about belief dynamics automatically generates a prediction about brain dynamics, bridging theory and empirical testing. If successful, this work would provide a formal, empirically grounded account of awakening that mathematically characterises the transition in terms of how a system models itself and its world. Such an account could shift the cultural conversation; by making awakening scientifically describable it would help move the possibility of profoundly improved well-being into the mainstream of scientific understanding, inviting serious engagement from researchers, clinicians, and the public. The framework also has implications for mental health, artificial intelligence, and our broader understanding of what minds are and what they can become.

Neurophenomenology of Nondual Meditation: Neural and Experiential Markers of Temporal Awareness, Self, and Emotion

Principal Investigator: Antoine Lutz, INSERM, Lyon Neuroscience Research Center

Co-Investigator: Michael Sheehy, Contemplative Sciences Center at the University of Virginia

Keywords: Nondual awareness, Mahamudra, neurophenomenology, Continuous Flash suppression, Self

This project investigates a fundamental but largely unexplored question in cognitive science: can the impacts of the recognition of nondual awareness, which is described in contemplative traditions as a mode of experience without a clear separation between self and world, be measured objectively using neuroscience methods? While meditation research has made substantial progress in studying attention and emotion regulation, more advanced forms of practice, often referred to as nondual mindfulness or “nature of mind” practices, remain difficult to operationalize scientifically. These practices are reported to transform how experience unfolds over time, reduce emotional reactivity, and alter the sense of self. However, there are currently no validated experimental paradigms that can reliably capture these changes at the level of perceptual awareness. To address this gap, the present project combines a well-established visual neuroscience method, Continuous Flash Suppression (CFS), with electroencephalography (EEG) and detailed first-person reports. CFS allows researchers to control whether a visual stimulus reaches conscious awareness by presenting competing images to each eye. By measuring how quickly stimuli enter or disappear from awareness, this paradigm provides a window into the dynamics of conscious perception. Recent developments, including reverse-CFS, further allow dissociating processes related to access to awareness from those related to its persistence. The central hypothesis of this project is that nondual awareness alters the temporal dynamics of perception, particularly for stimuli that are emotionally salient or self-relevant. Specifically, we predict that during nondual states, perceptual representations will be less stabilized by affective or self-related biases, leading to reduced persistence or faster disappearance of such stimuli under CFS. These behavioral effects will be complemented by neural signatures measured with EEG, including steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEP), changes in oscillatory activity, and markers of large-scale brain integration. The study will compare experienced nondual meditation practitioners with matched control participants. Each participant will perform the CFS task under different mental states, including nondual awareness, and concentration. Alongside behavioral and neural data, participants will provide structured reports describing their subjective experience, allowing us to directly link first-person phenomenology with objective measures. The expected outcomes of this project are threefold. First, it will establish a novel and reusable experimental paradigm (CFS combined with EEG) to study advanced meditation states. Second, it will provide the first empirical evidence linking nondual meditation to measurable changes in perceptual and emotional processing. Third, it will contribute to broader theories of consciousness by testing whether fundamental aspects of experience, such as the sense of self and the flow of time, can be systematically modulated and quantified. More broadly, this work has potential implications beyond basic science. By identifying objective markers of nondual meditation, it may inform future clinical and well-being interventions aimed at reducing maladaptive self-focus and emotional reactivity. It also contributes to an emerging interdisciplinary effort to integrate contemplative traditions with modern neuroscience, offering a rigorous framework to study forms of human experience that have long been described but rarely measured.

When State Becomes Trait: Developmental & Neural Correlates of Integrated Awakening

Principal Investigator: Sara Lazar, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School

Co-Investigator: Tamas Madl, Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence; University of Vienna

Keywords: Integrated Self-Transcendence, Adult Development, Default Mode Network

Two central questions in contemplative science are what determines whether awakening experiences stabilize into enduring transformation versus remaining episodic, and whether these experiences in turn shape thoughts and behavior. The field lacks tools to measure the extent of integration into everyday meaning-making, as opposed to documenting that awakening experiences occurred or persisted. Theories of adult development put forth by Kegan and Cook-Greuter describe reliable, stage-like differences in how adults view and make meaning of experience. Our main hypothesis is that, in the context of awakening, Kegan’s later stages reflect the extent to which awakening experiences have stabilized into structural capacity — the ability to hold one’s own identity as object. Cook-Greuter’s model additionally captures whether that structural shift has been integrated into meaning making. Here we will test these hypotheses, and validate a novel behavioral metric, Integrated Self-Transcendence, that is derived from the Cook-Greuter model, but isolates the facet most relevant to awakening: integrated decentering and dereification. If successful, the project will help elucidate how awakening insights are transformed into enduring holistic maturity, and validate a behavioral metric of integration which can aid other contemplative researchers. We will also characterize neural correlates of integrated awakening and both models, providing novel insights into the awakening process.

Toward a neural map of awakening: Long-term brain and self-process changes following transformative experience

Principal Investigator: Jonas Kaplan, University of Southern California

Co-Investigators: Rael Cahn, University of Southern California

Assal Habibi, University of Southern California

Shri Narayanan, University of Southern California

Keywords: psychedelics; meditation; mindfulness; fMRI

This project aims to better understand what people often describe as “awakening”—a lasting shift in how we experience ourselves, others, and the world. While science has made significant progress in studying short-term changes in consciousness—such as those produced by psychedelics—we still know very little about whether and how these experiences lead to long-term transformation. To address this gap, the study focuses on whether powerful experiences—specifically psilocybin-assisted therapy, with or without concurrent meditation training—produce lasting changes in the brain and in everyday experience. We conceptualize awakening as a measurable, enduring shift in how the brain organizes self-related thoughts and meaning-making over time. The research builds on an ongoing study in which participants received a facilitated high-dose (25mg) psilocybin therapy session, with half of them doing so midway through an eight-week meditation training program. This new project will follow up with these same individuals one year after psilocybin therapy to see what changes have persisted, both phenomenologically and neurophysiologically. We aim to identify reliable neural markers of long-term transformation of self- and narrative experience related to awakening experiences. Participants will return for a detailed reassessment that combines brain imaging (fMRI), brain activity recording (EEG), and questionnaires about their experiences. The brain scans will examine how networks involved in thinking about the self—especially the default mode network—have changed over time. Prior research suggests that both psychedelics and meditative practices alter this network’s functional activation, often reducing rigid patterns of self-focus and increasing agency and flexible thinking. We expect to find that, after one year, participants will show lasting changes in how these brain systems function. These may include reduced internal “stickiness” within self-focused networks, greater communication between different brain systems, and increased neural flexibility. We also expect that participants who received meditative training as scaffold for their psilocybin therapy will show stronger and more stable changes, suggesting that meditative training helps integrate and sustain the effects of the psychedelic experience. Importantly, the study also connects these brain changes to lived experience. Participants will report on aspects of their inner life that are often associated with awakening, such as reduced identification with habitual thought patterns, greater psychological flexibility, a stronger sense of connection and experiential warmth with others, and increased meaning or purpose. The goal is to determine whether specific patterns of brain activity reliably correspond to these long-term experiential changes. If successful, this work will contribute to creating a scientifically grounded framework for studying awakening as a lasting transformation. It could help bridge the gap between subjective experience and objective measurement, allowing researchers to study these phenomena more rigorously and consistently. Beyond basic science, the findings could have broad implications. Understanding how the brain supports lasting positive changes in perspective and well-being could inform treatments for mental health conditions such as depression and anxiety, which often involve rigid patterns of self-related thinking. More broadly, the project will generate open datasets and tools that other researchers can use, helping to build a cumulative science of transformative experience and awakening.

Operationalizing Awakening as Global Self-Transcendence: A Multimodal Study of Jhāna, Criticality, and Person–World Reorganization

Principal Investigator: John Vervaeke, University of Toronto

Co-Investigators: Jonas Mago, McGill University

Mark Miller, University of Toronto

Joshua Brahinsky, McGill University

Keywords: self-transcendence, meditation, neural criticality, active inference, jhāna

Awakening has long been described across contemplative traditions as a lasting transformation in how individuals relate to themselves and the world, marked by reduced self-focus, greater clarity, and enhanced well-being. Despite growing scientific interest in meditation and self-transcendence, there is currently no mechanistic framework that links these phenomenological reports to measurable neural and cognitive processes. This project addresses that gap by operationalizing awakening as a dynamical process that can be observed, modeled, and tested empirically. We ground our approach in the Entropy–Fluency (E–F) hypothesis, which proposes that self-transcendent experiences unfold in two phases: an initial destabilization of entrenched cognitive patterns, followed by reorganization into a more adaptive and fluent mode of functioning. We use advanced jhāna meditation as an experimental paradigm because it reliably induces deep states of absorption characterized by reduced self-referential processing, sensory attenuation, and increased clarity. The project combines a 30-day longitudinal design with a 10-day residential meditation retreat involving 30 advanced practitioners. We will collect multimodal data, including 32-channel EEG, peripheral physiology (heart rate variability, respiration, electrodermal activity), and fine-grained phenomenological reports using temporal experience tracing. In addition, participants will complete behavioral measures of cognitive flexibility before and after meditation sessions. Our central hypothesis is that neural dynamics approaching criticality—a regime between order and disorder that maximizes flexibility—will predict the degree of lasting experiential change following the retreat. Specifically, we test whether within-retreat neural signatures of increased signal diversity and reduced chaoticity correspond to shifts in phenomenology (e.g., increased clarity, equanimity) and whether these markers predict post-retreat changes in daily experience. In parallel, we will develop a computational model grounded in active inference that formalizes transitions from ordinary self-focused processing into absorbed and reorganized states. This model will generate explicit, testable predictions about the relationship between neural dynamics, phenomenological states, and long-term transformation, which we will evaluate against the empirical data. The project will produce a preregistered, openly shared dataset linking neural, physiological, and experiential dynamics across the full arc of a contemplative retreat. It will also deliver a validated phenomenological measurement protocol, predictive models of transformation, and an open-source computational framework. Together, these outputs aim to establish a scientifically rigorous foundation for studying awakening as a measurable, dynamical process.

Trajectories of Awakening: An intensive longitudinal approach

Principal Investigator: Andrew Heathcote, University of Amsterdam, University of Western Australia, University of Newcastle, Australia

Co-Investigator: Todd Braver, Washington University

Additional Co-Investigators: Bill Hart, Creative Practitioner; Jack Shukman, The Way

Keywords: causes of awakening, intensive longitudinal behaviour, intensive longitudinal neuroscience, cognitive control

The pathway to awakening is an extended journey travelled by countless seekers since ancient times. We will provide the first rigorous, longitudinal, large-scale scientific investigation of this journey, studying the diverse trajectories of individuals traveling an identical path via “The Way” digital meditation application, which has the explicit goal of promoting awakening. The Way has grown precipitously since its launch two years ago, with a world-wide community of almost 50,000 active users. Practitioners follow a single-track, standardized training program that repeatedly cycles through four “zones” emphasizing mindfulness, connectedness, flow, and awakening across 965 meditation sessions that are hierarchically structured. These critical features of The Way result in an intrinsic form of standardization of experience and progress across practitioners, which has clear advantages for scientific investigation, providing regular milestones that can be used for both longitudinal and cross-participant comparisons. Additionally, The Way’s structured sequence is ideal for predicting progress and transition points in skill development. Leveraging this structure, we will generate a rich set of multivariate time series data that can be analyzed with advanced multiple time-scale hierarchical Bayesian cognitive modeling methods pioneered by our team. Our objective is to use this behavioral data to identify key causal factors as well as the temporal dynamics associated with distinct stages of awakening, focusing on primary sources of state- and trait-related variation. Further, we include a comparison group of practitioners undergoing contemplative training aimed at transcendence via the Unified Mindfulness (UM) system. UM has also grown steadily to over 50,000 members world-wide, and is related to The Way through their common Buddhist foundations, but provides an important comparison population, in that it takes a qualitatively different approach to training, relying on group coaching rather than a standardized digital app. Additionally, we will acquire intensive longitudinal multi-modal neuroscience measures, including 7T fMRI and EEG, from a small subset of participants from both communities. Through frequently repeated assessments during and beyond the funding period we will study meaningful shifts in subjective experience, psychological flourishing, and cognitive and brain functioning, while making the fruits of ongoing data collection openly available for others to study. This project will dramatically advance scientific understanding of awakening by charting its trajectory within a naturalistic modern context.

Mapping awakening as a phase transition in self and social regulation

Principal Investigator: Prejaas Tewarie, University of Laval

Co-Investigator: Steven Laureys, University of Laval

Keywords: Awakening, meditation, hyperscanning, EEG, OPM-MEG

People who have meditated for many years often describe a moment when something fundamental shifts. It is not simply that they become calmer or better at doing things. Something far more profound occurs: the sense of being a separate person, a “me” at the center of experience, dissolves. Emotions such as sadness or joy still arise, but they are no longer resisted or held onto. Kindness toward others emerges naturally, not as a deliberate effort, but because the boundary between self and other feels thinner or even absent. Across traditions, this shift is often referred to as awakening. What is striking is that people from very different cultures and traditions describe this transformation in remarkably similar ways, even when they have never met or practiced together. This suggests that awakening is not a vague mystical idea but a phenomenon that can be observed, described, and potentially measured. Decades of research show that meditation can change the brain. Still, a deeper question remains largely unexplored: is awakening a distinct shift in brain function, a qualitative change in how the brain operates, much like water reaching its boiling point, or is it simply the result of gradual training over time? And what happens in the brains of two awakened individuals when they sit together and interact? The current research aims to investigate these inquiries through measurements of brain activity of Tibetan Buddhist meditators when they are not doing anything specific, meditation practice, and during their dialogue with others. Data collection is being conducted from monasteries in Nepal and India, as well as in a laboratory setting in the United Kingdom. The research team will use established questionnaires to measure participants’ experiences of cognitive changes, emotional transformations, and various awakening-related experiences. Our research aims to assess whether brain activity shows distinct patterns in people who have achieved awakening and whether these patterns become most apparent during social interactions between two awake individuals. No previous study has examined the neural dynamics of two awakened individuals in real time. If awakening truly alters how people experience themselves and others, we should detect this in patterns of interactions between two brains. Meditators often report increased stability and spontaneous compassion. This project will attempt to measure these qualities directly for the first time. Why does this matter? If awakening corresponds to a measurable change in the brain, it becomes accessible to scientific inquiry, opening avenues for targeted interventions and broader understanding. This has significant implications: It could redefine reducing suffering from a therapeutic goal to an identifiable neural transformation. Such clarity may inform new approaches in mental health, education, and well-being, offering concrete pathways to cultivate beneficial qualities. Although this project will not answer all questions about awakening, it will lay the groundwork by developing validated tools for studying awakening scientifically. That foundation will allow future research to explore the nature of suffering, compassion, and human flourishing, questions that matter to all of us.