A Neurophenomenological Knowledge Graph for Contemplative States: Matching Brain Signals to What Practitioners Actually Experience

Meditation research suffers from a labeling problem: different mental practices are grouped under broad terms like mindfulness, hiding real differences in attention training and views of the mind. This leads to inconsistent EEG and fMRI results. The authors build a knowledge graph ontology linking brain measurements to practitioners' experiences across six traditions (Samatha Jhana, Vipassana, Dzogchen Rigpa, devotional/deity practices, Zen/Seon hwadu investigation, and Jōdo Shinshū nembutsu recitation). They add a third axis to the standard two-part model of consciousness, tracking movement toward open, nondual awareness.

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Abstract

Meditation research has a labeling problem. Studies often place very different mental practices under one broad word, such as mindfulness or meditation. This hides real differences in how each tradition trains attention and how each tradition understands the mind. As a result, EEG and brain scan studies often produce results that do not agree with each other. This paper builds a knowledge graph ontology, not just a descriptive table, that connects specific brain measurements to the actual experiences described by practitioners through a layered pipeline: practice, training objective, phenomenological operation, computational mechanism, predicted neural signature, observed EEG, observed fMRI, and evidence strength. We look at six traditions: Samatha Jhana, Vipassana, Dzogchen Rigpa, devotional and deity practices, Zen or Seon (hwadu investigation), and Jōdo Shinshū (nembutsu recitation). We also add a third axis to the usual two part model of consciousness, one that tracks how much a state has moved toward open, nondual awareness. This ontology is implemented as an actual knowledge graph, openly available in a public repository alongside this paper, so that its claims can be queried and checked rather than only read once. One finding deserves special attention. A study that directly compared six traditions in a single experiment found no meaningful difference in EEG power between the styles. This limits how confidently we can say these traditions produce distinct brain signatures. We conclude that meditation is not one single brain state, but the evidence for this claim is much stronger at the level of subjective experience and religious doctrine than at the level of raw brain signals. We point out exactly where more research is needed, especially for Zen / Seon and Jōdo Shinshū.