Titolo della tesi: Self-Boundary Dissolution: Micro-phenomenological and Psychometric Investigation of Yogic Contemplative Practice
Individual psychological well-being and self-representation are inherent parts of human society and the environment. Advances in psychological well-being improve the cohesion and co-operation within our communities, and collectively for the world. Meditation practice finds a resonance in our society. Meditation encompasses various contemplative practices based on philosophies, culture, and traditions across the world of past and present, showing positive effect on both psychological well-being and self-representation. In this thesis I attempt to investigate psychological well-being and the subjective experience of self-representation related to diminishing bodily consciousness, an aspect of self-boundary dissolution, with a focus on yogic meditation. The subject matter of this thesis is yoga, also called raja yoga or classical yoga of a particular tradition called Brahmakumaris Raja Yoga (BK yoga). While we aim to contribute to the investigation of psychological well-being based on the meditation experience related to non-embodied consciousness and self-boundary dissolution, our work is situated at the blur boundary of philosophy, psychology, phenomenology, and first-person method of analyzing the lived subjective experience, i.e., micro-phenomenology.
The participants of the study are 36 long-term BK Raja yoga meditators. We endeavor our research aiming to persist with two studies. The major focus is on studying the first-person experience of fading away and decreasing bodily consciousness, in terms of concrete factors like spatial location, bodylessness and attention as a modulation during yogic meditative experience employing micro-phenomenology. This research aims to understand the variation of dissolution of self -boundary in the investigation of pre-reflective attentional, affective, and sensorial aspects of concrete moments of experience to studying self-boundaries with long-term BK Raja yoga meditators. Second study aims to investigate quantitatively the relation between dispositional psychological wellbeing and decreasing bodily consciousness, in terms of nondual awareness.
The micro-phenomenological results showed how this method can be applied in meditation research for articulating the nuances, complexity, and analysis of analysis the first-person experience of self-boundary dissolution beyond the self-report descriptions. The correlational study showed that subjective well-being is related positively with an intrinsic trait of living in nonduality found in long-term meditators due to depth and expertise of their meditative life. For these reasons, nondual awareness can be considered foundational to the realization of the self-boundary dissolution and realizing the state of subjective well-being.