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Featured Consciousness Studies Article
Independent research in contemplative science.
A Naturalistic Account of Kundalini Practice, Interoception, and Contemplative Attention
Kevin Cann · Independent scholar
Abstract. Practitioners of kundalinī and haṭha yoga describe a central channel, the suṣumnā, along the body’s midline, together with a family of techniques for drawing attention to it. Classical sources treat this channel as an instructional and experiential map rather than a dissected structure. This paper reads those practices naturalistically and makes a two-part claim. First, midline-directed attention paired with slow breathing that lengthens the exhale engages autonomic and attentional systems whose effects can be measured: a parasympathetic shift, changes in cortical activity associated with sustained attention, the recruitment of interoceptive awareness, and, with repetition, the structural change that ordinary neuroplasticity produces. The practice raises the amplitude and reach of an integrative, body-anchored signal. Second, that signal generates candidates rather than certainties, and its value depends entirely on the discrimination trained on top of it; the strength with which an insight is felt is not evidence of its truth. The paper gives this calibration problem its own treatment, names the practitioner term for its failure mode, and uses autism as a worked example, since the autistic interoceptive profile of heightened subjective sensibility alongside unreliable objective accuracy is the same loud, miscalibrated condition the practice is built to train. It reviews the individual and interpersonal benefits that make such training worth study. The account does not require the channel to be anatomical, and it does not reduce the tradition to physiology. It closes by arguing that a naturalistic reading lets contemplative technique be examined and used without metaphysical commitment, and without the reductive posture that has damaged earlier scholarly encounters with Indian tradition.
Keywords: kundalini, sushumna, interoception, interoceptive sensibility, contemplative practice, contemplative neuroscience, midline attention, interhemispheric coordination, neuroplasticity, autism, subtle body, shambhavi mudra, calibration, cognitive diversity
Featured Consciousness Studies Article
Independent research in contemplative science.
A Naturalistic Account of the Personified Inner Figure, Predictive Processing, and the Worship-or-Absorption Fork
Kevin Cann · Independent scholar
Abstract. Across creative and contemplative history, people report an autonomous-feeling inner figure that speaks, guides, or supplies what the conscious mind did not produce: Socrates’ daimonion, Jung’s Philemon, Ramanujan’s goddess Namagiri, the poet’s muse. This paper reads that figure naturalistically and makes a two-part claim. First, the figure is produced by mechanisms already documented in the laboratory: the absorption and porosity Luhrmann describes, the felt presence Blanke induces by sensorimotor mismatch, and the precise prior Corlett shows can be heard as a voice. On this reading the figure is a personification, the interface through which a nonverbal, interoceptively-anchored integrative faculty, the same faculty treated in a companion paper on kundalini practice, becomes available to a verbal mind. Second, the figure’s value turns on a fork: whether the person worships it, granting it standing as a separate authority and suspending the discrimination any strong internal signal requires, or absorbs it, taking its output as candidate material and letting the personification fall away. Jung, who kept Philemon as a venerated autonomous other, is the case of worship; absorption is shown here to be the endpoint of a developmental arc rather than a single choice. The account treats the figure as examinable without committing to its literal existence and usable without surrendering to its authority. It works by methodological naturalism and takes no position on whether matter or consciousness is fundamental.
Keywords: personified inner figure, absorption, porosity, predictive processing, felt presence, voice-hearing, bicameral mind, daimonion, muse, Jung, Ramanujan, interoception, anomalous experience, trauma, individuation, methodological naturalism