Matthew D. Sacchet

Meditation Research Program Select Publications

For the full preprint PDF please see our website and the preprint server:

meditation.mgh.harvard.edu

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May this work benefit many 🙏

So, are we ready to embrace interdisciplinary, science-based and more culturally appropriate frameworks that make these practices more inclusive and accessible—while also enabling the systematization and conceptual clarity needed to safeguard and advance the field of contemplative science?

Our hope is to give more people an opportunity to choose which particular goals they want to achieve in meditation, while potentially drawing from cultural heritages in a way that feels authentic and comfortable.

In this way, perhaps one day meditators will debate the finer points of training variables as well as the interaction with meditative skills, with the same vigor as athletes and training scientists do now.

a systematic method of engaging with mental training that cultivates profound states of well-being. We believe it can be both theoretically and practically useful to think of the most effective ways that these practices can be used to profoundly transform the mind.

This work is a step toward a future in which advanced meditation is not confined to spiritual or religious systems of meditative training, but can also be understood as this-worldly—

Benchmarked against a normative standard, this construct opens a promising path between structured training metrics and subjective markers of skill-based meditative proficiency.

can be meaningfully adapted to contemplative training. Among these, we propose a novel definition of training intensity: the graded phenomenal presence of specific meditative qualities, coupled with the minimization of counteractive qualities.

We first survey foundational principles of training science, such as programming and periodization, and then show how core training variables—volume, frequency, duration, density, and intensity—

In our latest paper, led by the brilliant Sebastian Ehmann @sebastianehmann.bsky.social together with Terje Sparby and Daniel M. Ingram @drdanielmingram.bsky.social, we address the need for an alternative framework to evaluate meditation as systematic training that shapes meditative development.

training science has long been dedicated to uncovering the principles and mechanisms that underlie training and its adaption. It thus potentially has a great deal to offer the emerging science of advanced meditation.

and some meditative endpoints involve profound epistemological or ontological shifts that have no clear counterpart in athletic or performance-based disciplines—

virtually no real dialogue has yet occurred between contemplative science and training and exercise science.

While meditative attainments are clearly more than just feats of self-centered inner endurance—

Can meditation be understood as systematic mental training?

Despite the obvious appeal of thinking of meditation training like a workout for the mind, as the gym is for muscles, and its wide usage across communities practicing and researching meditation...

Meditation Research Program Select Publications

meditation.mgh.harvard.edu

meditation.mgh.harvard.edu/files/Yang_2...

meditation.mgh.harvard.edu/files/Shinoz...

May this work benefit many 🙏

For those curious about the emerging empirical science of meditative endpoints and what has been called enlightenment, here are links to our website and latest studies:

What if this is the beginning of new possibilities for our consciousness, a powerful leap? Not a leap of faith this time, but informed by science, a leap of our own consciousness.

Even if not everyone reaches the deepest levels of meditation, knowing enlightenment is possible—and having science guide us part of the way—could give us a new source of meaning, resilience, strength, and purpose in challenging times.

Seen this way, the science of EC is a reminder, perhaps just in time, that the future of humanity may lie less in building ever smarter machines, and more in cultivating ever deeper modes of being fully human.

What if our ultimate humanity lies in our now-measurable ability to turn emptiness itself into a new lease on life—like advanced meditators in EC do?

our ability to relate without transaction, to release old attachments, to recognize our shared humanity, and to glimpse incredible mysteries that may remake our experience.

As AI improves at the tasks we once thought made humans special, the question becomes: what remains human? Our research at the Meditation Research Program points us away from mere information processing and toward new depths—

Why does this matter now? Because this emerging science suggests our deepest human capacities may not just be thinking, producing, or competing, but rather radical new possibilities out of nothingness.

This is followed by a striking psychological renewal with a clarity, peace, and joy that is challenging to capture using ordinary language. Until now, this might have sounded implausible. But state-of-the-art brain wave measurements and scanners tell a very different story.

really, the beginning of an empirical science of what we call meditative endpoints, including enlightenment, awakening, nirvana, and other phenomena—feels so timely. EC is a rare, radical state in which advanced meditators suspend their consciousness.

But there are real challenges to this narrative, and something else may be opening up.

This is why the emerging science of Extended Cessation (EC)—

Modern culture has long conditioned us to see ourselves as isolated, rational individuals chasing private, often materialistic happiness in a competitive world.

Right now, we are living through ecological, social, psychological, and technological ruptures—what some describe collectively as the ‘metacrisis’ or ‘polycrisis’. The stakes are so high that for many, it is unraveling the very stories we’ve told ourselves about who we are and what life is.

Rarely has it been seen as something modern scientists should take seriously, let alone as something we might study, verify, and learn from.

And now, strangely enough, modern science is starting to catch up.