Selfless Minds, Unlimited Bodies? Homeostatic Bodily Self-Regulation in Meditative Experiences

Humans are self-organising biological systems whose bodies constantly perform the humble yet essential, basic task of keeping track of self-related information processing to secure survival. Deep contemplative states such as meditation alter the subjective experience of being a self distinct from the world and other to a point that the individual may report ‘selfless’ states and body boundaries dissolution. But in which sense the ‘self’ is really lost during these radical experiences? In this paper I focus on somatosensory attenuation of bodily signals as a core mechanism underlying the phenomenon of ‘losing’ one’s sense of self in meditation. Specifically, I argue that somatosensory attenuation of bodily signals does not make the bodily self ‘disappear’ experientially. Rather, during the subjectively reported phenomena of ‘self-loss’, bodily sensory signals are self-attenuated, physiologically, and experientially processed in the background. Hence the term ‘losing’ the self or ‘selfless’ states may be misleading in describing these peculiar types of experiences reported during deep meditative states. What is ‘lost’, I claim, is a particular, ordinary way to explicitly, mentally model oneself in relation to the body and the world. Yet, the experience of being a living body, i.e. a self-organising organism is never ‘lost’ in this process. Rather it gets somatosensorily attenuated and tacitly experienced in the background, very much present and hence alive. Enhanced connectedness with one’s body may lead to feelings of ‘oceanic boundlessness’, a feeling that I propose to call here ‘unlimited body’. The proposal is that the explicit feeling of selfless minds may be tacitly accompanied by the implicit feeling of unlimited body, as two sides of the same coin. To put it provocatively: the only and unique occasion when one truly loses one’s self is when one’s body becomes a corpse (i.e. death).