Meditation in the Pali Social Imaginary I
Rethinking Meditation September 14, 2023 David L. Mcmahan
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.