ABSTRACT
The terms "meditation" and "consciousness," and related words in other languages, have each been used in many different ways. Employing "meditation" and "mysticism" as organizing concepts, then, has two problematic effects. First, it obscures aspects that are philosophically interesting about specific ways of being and training one's mind. Secondly, it marks certain ways of being and training one's mind as exotic in ways that evidently serve as an implicit justification for their neglect by the mainstream of analytic philosophy. Miri Albahari, for one, has offered a novel and creative interpretation in which the descriptions found in the early Buddhist Pali suttas support a view on which the contents of consciousness that identify with are impermanent. But the witness consciousness which directly experiences these changing contents is impersonal and ownerless, and also ever-present and unbroken. Meditative experience of arising and passing in mindfulness practice might have implications for these debates about the metaphysics of consciousness.
