# Corpus note — Vohryzek et al. (2025), "Whole-Brain Models of Minimal Phenomenal Experience: Approaching Criticality through Jhāna Meditation"

**Source:** Vohryzek, J., Lopez-Sola, E., Yang, W.F.Z., Sanz Perl, Y., Sparby, T., Ruffini, G., Deco, G., Sacchet, M.D. (2025). bioRxiv preprint, posted 2025-09-25. DOI: 10.1101/2025.09.25.678574. CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0. Sacchet lab (MGH/Harvard Meditation Research Program) + Deco group (UPF). Correspondence: jakub.vohryzek@upf.edu.
**Type:** Computational neuroscience — whole-brain (Hopf/Stuart-Landau) modeling of fMRI across the eight jhāna states, 14 advanced practitioners, 7T fMRI. Not a psychometric or staging paper; a mechanism paper about deep-absorption *states*.
**One-line relevance to Waypoint:** This is a *state* (fast-variable) paper about the very top of the Wheel (Unbinding/Enlightenment territory, 51+), not a *stage* (slow-variable) instrument. Its direct usefulness for inferring a 22–45 app user's position is low; its value is (a) a validated, teacher-anchored phenomenological ladder of the ACAM-J states with per-state milestone descriptors, (b) a strong seed of load-bearing citations for the psychometrics/neuroscience lanes, and (c) a methodological caution about state-vs-trait and about scoring absorption depth from first-person report.

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## 1. USABLE FOR STAGE ASSESSMENT

**Framing caveat up front.** The construct measured here is *depth within a single meditation sitting* (access concentration → J1…J8 → afterglow), self-reported in real time via button presses, in adept practitioners who can enter jhāna in a scanner. This is orthogonal to Waypoint's slow "wheel position." A person's *maximum reachable jhāna* is a plausible slow proxy for stage; a person's *jhāna during one session* is a phase/state signal. Treat everything below as either (a) milestone markers (has the practitioner ever accessed X?) or (b) phase descriptors, not as band scores.

Concrete, transcript-observable items this paper supplies:

- **The eight ACAM-J states as an ordered, phenomenologically-defined ladder** (from Sparby & Sacchet 2024, used operationally here). Form jhānas J1–J4, formless jhānas J5–J8; the "form/formless" split is a sharp qualitative boundary (perception of physical form and sensory objects vanishes/attenuates in formless). In a transcript, a practitioner locating themselves on this ladder — "I can get to boundless space but not past it," "the body dropped away," "sights and sounds dissolved" — is naming a milestone. Access concentration is the named entry gate ("access concentration," Brasington 2015).
  - **J1 (entry into first jhāna):** "deep absorption state characterized by intense bliss." Transcript signature: reports of sudden intense bliss/pleasure on stabilizing attention; a felt "click" into absorption from ordinary concentration.
  - **J4 (peak of form jhāna):** "dominated by equanimity." Transcript signature: profound stillness, non-reactive evenness, bliss having given way to imperturbable calm.
  - **J4→J5 (form→formless passage):** "perception of form (sights, sounds, body sensations) is thought to dissolve, leaving only 'boundless space'." Transcript signature: loss/dropping of body and sensory objects; boundless/infinite/empty/immeasurable space; profound equanimity (Brahm 2006; Brasington 2015).
  - **J5 (fifth jhāna / boundless space):** immersion in boundless space — infinite, empty, immeasurable — with profound equanimity.
  - **J6 (boundless consciousness):** "awareness aware of itself, vast and limitless" (this is the paper's phrasing for the sixth jhāna — a nondual-adjacent descriptor Waypoint's awareness pillar will care about).
  - **J7 (nothingness/voidness):** "an experiential absence that can evoke both peacefulness and, at times, subtle fear." Note the affective ambivalence — peace *and* subtle fear — a discriminator between healthy formless absorption and destabilization.
  - **J8 (neither perception nor non-perception):** "radical attenuation of experience that only the faintest trace of perception remains," hard to describe consistently. Transcript signature: reports that the experience is near-ineffable, only the faintest trace of anything.
  - **Beyond J8 — cessation/nirodha:** progression "may culminate in extended cessations, in which consciousness is said to 'turn off'" (Burbea 2014; Laukkonen 2023; Yang 2025). A "consciousness turned off / gap / discontinuity" claim is the top-of-ladder milestone.
- **Post-jhānic "afterglow" state** is an explicit, named part of the protocol sequence (access → J1–J8 → afterglow). Waypoint should recognize afterglow language as a distinct phase, not as steady-state stage.
- **The MPE core phenomenology** (from Metzinger 2020, 2024, "500+ reports"): "a state of presence with minimal phenomenal content, no egoic identification, and a distinctive quality of luminosity or 'knowing'." These four features — presence, minimal content, no ego-identification, luminosity/knowing — are a compact marker set for pure-awareness reports (relevant to the awareness pillar at the very top of the Wheel). *Pure awareness* is the paradigmatic MPE case.
- **"Letting go" / defabrication as the phenomenological throughline.** The progression is repeatedly described as a "progressive 'letting go'" of increasingly basic experiences in order (space, consciousness, nothingness…) — a "sequential disruption of hierarchical models," "defabrication" (Lopez-Sola 2025), release of rigid priors. Transcript signature of depth: language of releasing, letting go, dropping, dissolving of successively more fundamental layers — and crucially the *order* (form objects → space → consciousness → nothingness) is itself a depth ruler.
- **Insight-on-emergence.** Emerging from these states "is often associated with radical shifts in perception, or *insights*." So the actionable teaching signal may show up *after* the sit — a report of a perceptual/worldview shift following deep absorption is corroborating evidence of genuine depth (vs. mere relaxation).
- **Attention shifts sensorimotor→attentional with depth (mechanistic, but phenomenologically anchored):** ACAM-J is fundamentally an *attentional* practice; progression "naturally involves a shift from sensorimotor to attentional mechanisms, especially into the formless stages where body and form-related perceptions fade." Supports treating body-drop reports as a form/formless boundary marker.
- **Traditional interpretive stance (useful for calibrating what a report *means*):** jhānas are read variously as supports for insight, as sufficient for liberation on their own, or as interwoven with insight at each stage (Anālayo 2016; Burbea 2014). The Anupada Sutta (MN 111) quote models Sāriputta moving through the formless attainments and "emerging mindfully… regarded the past qualities that had ceased and changed" — i.e. the tradition's own gold-standard is *retrospective, mindful discernment of what arose and ceased*, a verification move (see §2).

**Bottom line for the marker bank:** this paper contributes a high-resolution milestone ladder for the *top* of the Wheel (roughly Unbinding→Enlightenment, 51+), which the spec says will be rare in-app but must still be recognized. It contributes little to discriminating within 22–45. Its milestone descriptors (J1 bliss, J4 equanimity, form/formless body-drop, J7 void-with-subtle-fear, cessation) are directly usable as `milestone` markers of the `claimed|corroborated` type in the output object.

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## 2. METHODOLOGY WORTH COPYING

- **Real-time first-person state labels time-locked to data (button presses).** Practitioners signalled entry into each ACAM-J with button presses, yielding condition-specific data segments. Analogue for Waypoint: capture practitioner self-reports *time-stamped and segmented* rather than as free-floating narrative, so a claimed state can be aligned to telemetry (session phase, practice selection). This is the neurophenomenological move — pair first- and third-person streams (Varela 1996; Lutz 2025).
- **A validated, teacher-anchored classification as the operational backbone (Sparby & Sacchet 2024, ACAM-J).** They did not invent a staging scheme; they adopted a systematic, published definition/classification with "relatively well-defined phenomenological qualities" and used it as the spatial/temporal scaffold. Waypoint's parallel: anchor the marker bank in Surya's Wheel + a published cartography rather than ad hoc labels, and keep the scheme separable from the estimator.
- **Effect sizes over p-values, deliberately.** They report Cohen's d and explicitly refuse p-values/significance because model realizations can be inflated arbitrarily by generating more samples ("apparent statistical power could be inflated"). Directly relevant to Waypoint's small-N, synthetic-persona QA: report effect sizes / discrimination magnitudes, not significance inflated by how many synthetic dossiers you generate.
- **Distribution-based estimation with stability checks.** Forty independent model realizations / forty genetic-algorithm runs per condition → report *distributions* of parameters and assess stability across runs, not point estimates. Mirrors Waypoint's mandate to output posteriors + credible intervals, not scalars, and to check estimator stability.
- **Grouping fine parcels under theory-motivated priors (7 Yeo RSNs over 200 Schaefer parcels).** Rather than fit 200 free parameters, they imposed 7 network-level priors and fit one coefficient per network — dimensionality reduction via domain structure. Waypoint analogue: score against the four pillars (sensations/emotions/thoughts/awareness) as theory-motivated groupings rather than a flat bag of markers; the pillar structure is the prior.
- **Robustness by re-running on the "most minimal" subset (J7–J8) to check the headline holds.** They re-derived the key result restricting to the arguably-purest MPE states. Analogue: re-run estimator conclusions on the strongest-evidence subset of a dossier to confirm they don't depend on ambiguous items.
- **Non-linear trajectory analysis / transition detection.** They looked at *step-by-step* change between adjacent states and found the approach to criticality is non-linear with a few big "transition points" (Counting→J1, J3→J4, J4→J5) and smoother stretches between. Analogue for the longitudinal harness: model stage movement as punctuated (big reconfigurations at milestones, plateaus between) rather than smooth linear drift — consistent with the spec's HGF-style "revise slow latents only through persistent runs of error."
- **Retrospective mindful discernment as the tradition's verification protocol** (Anupada Sutta): emerging and *then* reviewing "what had ceased and changed." Transfers to probe design — ask practitioners to retrospectively discriminate what arose/passed, scoring the structure of the discrimination (lane-5 structure-scoring), not agreement.

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## 3. CAUTIONS

- **State, not trait.** Everything here is within-session absorption depth in already-adept meditators. It does not measure, and gives no instrument for, a practitioner's durable position on a developmental path. Do not import J1–J8 as Wheel bands; use them only as milestone/phase evidence at the top of the range.
- **Extreme, unrepresentative cohort.** N=14 (from 17; 3 removed), all advanced ACAM-J practitioners capable of entering formless jhāna in a 7T scanner. Nothing about 22–45 app users can be inferred from this population. The paper itself flags jhāna phenomenology "vary[s] considerably across traditions, teachers, and individual practitioners" (Sparby 2024).
- **The states-as-MPE mapping is an assumption, hedged repeatedly.** Formless ACAM-J (and J7–J8) are used *as candidates for* MPE; the authors say "taken here as candidates," "serious candidates," and note these "may encompass some non-minimal stages." Do not treat "formless jhāna = MPE = pure awareness" as settled.
- **Interpretive links are explicitly tentative.** The Visual-network / loss-of-object-perception link: "we remain cautious about this interpretation." The whole modeling layer is a mechanistic hypothesis (criticality/near-bifurcation), not a measured phenomenological quantity.
- **No p-values / no classical inference and tiny human N** — findings are effect-size and model-simulation based. Convergent, not confirmatory. Good discipline to copy, but means the neuroscience here is suggestive.
- **Nondual awareness is explicitly NOT a minimal state.** The paper (via Lopez-Sola 2025) distinguishes *nondual awareness* — awareness in the foreground, co-occurring with phenomenal content, "opacification" of the hierarchy — from *minimal/absorptive* MPE where content is stripped away. Waypoint must not collapse "nondual" and "absorption/cessation" into one depth axis; they are different modes. (Directly relevant to the spec's confusion pairs and to the awareness pillar.)
- **Absorption depth is not everyday capability.** "Such absorption states are clearly not compatible with everyday functioning, given the lack of representational content." A practitioner who can reach deep absorption on the cushion may show nothing of it in ordinary Wisdom conversation — argues for weighting behavioral/telemetry consistency, not just peak-experience claims.
- **No linguistic/behavioral markers are provided.** This is a neuroimaging/modeling paper; it offers phenomenological *descriptors* but no validated language-based scoring, no self-report scale, no discrimination of genuine vs. contaminated report. Marker-bank authors must supply that layer; the paper only supplies the target phenomenology.

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## 4. REFERENCES

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### LOAD-BEARING CITATIONS SHORTLIST (for Waypoint measuring/staging)

Ranked by usefulness to Waypoint's staging/marker/probe/safety work. These are the works this paper leans on for *what the states are and how to characterize practitioners* (as opposed to the modeling machinery, which is off-topic for Waypoint).

1. **Sparby & Sacchet (2024), "Systematic Definition and Classification of Jhāna" (*Mindfulness*)** — THE operational cartography behind this paper's J1–J8 ladder and the form/formless split. The single most important cite here for Waypoint's top-of-Wheel marker bank; a published, teacher-anchored staging scheme with per-state phenomenological criteria. Get it for lane 1/2.
2. **Metzinger (2024), *The elephant and the blind* (MIT Press, 500+ pure-awareness reports)** — the largest structured phenomenological corpus of MPE/pure-awareness reports; a mine for awareness-pillar markers and the presence/no-ego/luminosity descriptor set. Lane 2/6.
3. **Metzinger (2020), "Minimal phenomenal experience…" (*Philosophy and the Mind Sciences*)** — defines MPE, pure awareness, and *tonic alertness*; the conceptual anchor for the top awareness band. Lane 6.
4. **Sparby & Sacchet (2025), "Toward a Unified Model of Advanced Meditation, Human Development, Meditation Maps, Transtradition Metaphors" (*Mindfulness*)** — explicitly links advanced meditation to *human development* and cross-tradition *meditation maps* — closest in this list to Waypoint's own "map practitioners onto a developmental scale" problem. Lane 1.
5. **Laukkonen & Slagter (2021), "From many to (n) one" (*Neurosci & Biobehav Rev*)** — the FA/OM/ND continuum + predictive-mind framing; already a Waypoint seed-corpus paper; supplies the practice-type axis and epistemic-depth construct. Lanes 2/6.
6. **Laukkonen et al. (2023), "Cessations of consciousness / nirodha samāpatti" (*Prog. Brain Res.*)** — the cessation/"consciousness turns off" milestone at the very top of the ladder; defines the phenomenology of the discontinuity that is the highest-support-need marker. Lanes 1/4/6.
7. **Ingram (2018), *Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha*** — a pragmatic-dharma stage map (incl. jhāna descriptions and progress-of-insight); a practitioner-facing vocabulary source and a *reading-ahead contamination* risk to model explicitly. Lanes 1/5.
8. **Brasington (2015), *Right Concentration: A Practical Guide to the Jhanas*** — the practice-manual source for "access concentration" and the per-jhāna experiential descriptors used verbatim in this paper; a marker-phrasing source for what jhāna reports sound like. Lane 1.
9. **Burbea (2014), *Seeing That Frees*** — the emptiness/insight framing and the "letting go" of successive layers; grounds the awareness/thoughts-pillar language of progressive release and insight-on-emergence. Lane 1.
10. **Lopez-Sola et al. (2025), *An Algorithmic Agent Model of Pure Awareness and Minimal Experiences* (PsyArXiv)** — supplies the *nondual-vs-minimal* distinction (opacification vs stripping content) that Waypoint's confusion table needs, and "defabrication" as an ordered depth ruler. Lane 6.
11. **Yang et al. (2024), "Intensive whole-brain 7T MRI case study of volitional control… deep absorptive meditation" (*Cerebral Cortex*)** — the source dataset/protocol (button-press state labeling, access→J1–J8→afterglow sequence); the model for time-locking first-person state labels to data. Lane 3 (methodology).
12. **Anālayo (2016), "A brief criticism of the 'two paths to liberation' theory"** — cautions that absorption and insight relate in contested ways across lineages; a check against over-reading a single report as a fixed stage. Lane 1.
13. **Metzinger (2020) / Sacchet, Fava & Garland (2024), "Modulating self-referential processing… self-transcendence"** — frames self-transcendence/ego-dissolution as a clinically-relevant, measurable target; useful for the emotions/awareness-pillar markers and the safety lane's framing of destabilization. Lane 2/4.
14. **van Lutterveld et al. (2025), "Brain Criticality and Advanced Meditation 'Cessation' Events" (EEG case study)** — cessation events "mark the fruition of insight practice and involve profound transformations in awareness"; a marker that cessation is a *milestone*, plus a caution (single-case). Lanes 1/6.
15. **Atad et al. (2025), "Meditation and complexity: a review and synthesis" (*Neuroscience of Consciousness*)** — a recent synthesis of the entropy/complexity-across-meditation evidence; a good entry point to the field's measurement landscape and its current limits ("specific evidence for ACAM-J is still lacking"). Lane 2/3.

(The whole-brain-modeling machinery cites — Deco, Hopf/Stuart-Landau, Yeo 2011 parcellation, Schaefer 2018, criticality/Chialvo/Cocchi, psychedelic whole-brain models — are foundational to *this paper's method* but off-scope for Waypoint's language-based estimator; noted here as deliberately deprioritized, not overlooked.)