Frontiers in Psychology
July 8, 2020
Toby J. Woods, Jennifer Windt, Olivia Carter
25 citations
Expert texts on Shamatha, Transcendental, and Stillness Meditation describe silence/quietness as a key feature of contentless experiences—states where thoughts, perceptions, and mental images are absent. Using evidence synthesis, 135 expert texts were systematically selected and analyzed. Silence/quietness is closely linked to stillness, absence of concepts, mental activity/noise, thoughts, and disturbance. It may also reflect absence of non-auditory perceptions, mental images, and negative feelings, fitting a conception of complete calm. The texts do not clearly distinguish silence/quietness from other features like stillness. Connections between silence/quietness and other features vary in closeness, revealing fine distinctions and ambiguities that raise new research questions.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
May 24, 2022
Toby J. Woods, Jennifer Windt, Olivia Carter
17 citations
Meditation experiences often described as contentless—such as those in Shamatha, Transcendental, and Stillness Meditation—are not truly devoid of mental content. A review of 135 expert texts from these three traditions identified 65 features reported or implied across the practices, with most shared among all three. However, Shamatha involves substantially greater attentional stability and vividness. Numerous forms of content, including wakefulness, naturalness, calm, bliss/joy, and freedom, are present in these experiences. The findings challenge the classical view that such states are an identical pure consciousness, leaving it an open question whether they should be classed as such.
Mindfulness
June 1, 2023
Toby J. Woods, Jennifer Windt, Lydia Brown et al.
15 citations
People who practice Shamatha, Thai Forest, or Stillness Meditation typically report a highly positive experience of stillness or silence with little awareness of thoughts and perceptions, but with a high degree of abstract content such as calm and mental relaxation. Across the three traditions, robust differences emerged in reports of bliss/joy, wakefulness, absorptiveness, and depth. The experiences are contentless only in the sense of lacking obvious mental content like thoughts, not in being devoid of all content, challenging the classical view that such states are identical across traditions.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
June 2, 2022
Toby J. Woods, Jennifer Windt, Olivia Carter
13 citations
Contentless experience, or pure consciousness, is a state free of mental content like thoughts, perceptions, and imagery. Three meditation practices—Shamatha, Transcendental, and Stillness Meditation—are said to access this state, but the paths differ. A review of 135 expert texts reveals that Shamatha and Transcendental Meditation superficially require focusing on an object, while Stillness Meditation does not. However, a detailed analysis shows Shamatha is posturally closer to Stillness Meditation but differs in requiring greater attentional stability, vividness, focusing, less tolerance of mind-wandering, more monitoring, and deliberate control. Achieving contentless experience through Shamatha is slower, more difficult, and less frequent. These findings inform meditation taxonomies, consciousness research, neuroscience, clinical practice, and practitioners.
September 30, 2025
Toby J. Woods, Andrew W. Corcoran, Olivia Carter et al.
preprint
A 15-minute session of Stillness Meditation, which involves skillfully doing nothing, is calming, pleasant, and easy for meditation-naive adults, not aversive as earlier research suggested. In a randomized trial with 165 participants, those practicing Stillness Meditation reported the session as calm, pleasant, and easy, and showed increases in heart rate variability and interbeat interval from baseline. While focused attention led to higher self-reported calm than Stillness Meditation or an audiobook, there were no differences in easiness, pleasantness, or cardiac measures between groups. The findings validate Stillness Meditation as a tool for studying pure consciousness.