A Neurophenomenological Knowledge Graph for Contemplative States: Matching Brain Signals to What Practitioners Actually Experience

Summary

Meditation research often uses one word for many different practices, causing conflicting brain-scan results. This paper creates an open knowledge graph linking specific brain measurements to the experiences described by practitioners across six traditions: Samatha Jhana, Vipassana, Dzogchen Rigpa, devotional practices, Zen/Seon, and Jōdo Shinshū. It adds a third axis to the standard two-part model of consciousness, tracking movement toward nondual awareness.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Meditation research has a labeling problem. Studies often place very different mental practices under one broad word, such as mindfulness or meditation. This hides real differences in how each tradition trains attention and how each tradition understands the mind. As a result, EEG and brain scan studies often produce results that do not agree with each other. This paper builds a knowledge graph ontology, not just a descriptive table, that connects specific brain measurements to the actual experiences described by practitioners through a layered pipeline: practice, training objective, phenomenological operation, computational mechanism, predicted neural signature, observed EEG, observed fMRI, and evidence strength. We look at six traditions: Samatha Jhana, Vipassana, Dzogchen Rigpa, devotional and deity practices, Zen or Seon (hwadu investigation), and Jōdo Shinshū (nembutsu recitation). We also add a third axis to the usual two part model of consciousness, one that tracks how much a state has moved toward open, nondual awareness. This ontology is implemented as an actual knowledge graph, openly available in a public repository alongside this paper, so that its claims can be queried and checked rather than only read once. One finding deserves special attention. A study that directly compared six traditions in a single experiment found no meaningful difference in EEG power between the styles. This limits how confidently we can say these traditions produce distinct brain signatures. We conclude that meditation is not one single brain state, but the evidence for this claim is much stronger at the level of subjective experience and religious doctrine than at the level of raw brain signals. We point out exactly where more research is needed, especially for Zen / Seon and Jōdo Shinshū.