Early Buddhist meditation, as described in the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, can be understood as a practice that disrupts habitual, tacit patterns of experience to bring them into conscious awareness and intentional direction. This process helps monastics cultivate specific ways of being, training desires, aesthetic sensibilities, and interpretive categories to create an alternative habitus—a habitual, embodied way of being in the world. The chapter connects these ideas to phenomenology and cognitive science, which distinguish between conscious effort and habitual activity rooted in cultural context.
Meditation is often described as producing internal states that arise from diligent practice, but these practices only function within specific social and cultural contexts, and their effects vary across different settings. McMahan theorizes meditation as cultivating ways of being within particular social imaginaries, which are shaped by cultural repertoires of concepts, attitudes, social practices, ethical dispositions, institutions, power relations, identities, authority structures, and cosmic conceptions. This theory draws on studies of historical psychosomatic illnesses, which show that eras generate specific symptom pools. Recontextualizing meditation as a cultural practice highlights the need for humanistic study and shows that a totalizing neurophysiological explanation of meditation is impossible.