AKIKO FRISCHHUT

Abstract Recently, philosophers with an interest in consciousness have turned their attention towards ‘fringe states of consciousness’. Examples include dreams, trances, and meditative states. Teetering between wakefulness and non-consciousness, fringe states illuminate the limits and boundaries of consciousness. This paper aims to give a coherent conceptualization of deep meditative states, focussing in particular on phenomenal temporality during meditation. Advanced meditators overwhelmingly describe deep states of meditation as atemporal and timeless; however, they also report being continuously alert while meditating. I intend to give a coherent interpretation of this apparent contradiction. After introducing some candidate interpretations, I shall argue that during (deepest) meditation, the subject experiences ‘pure duration’ without temporal structure. This, I argue, explains best why meditators describe deep meditation as ongoing but timeless awareness. A central part of the paper will expand on an account of phenomenal duration without phenomenal succession. The conclusion points towards some further avenues of research.

We develop a theory about the metaphysics of time and modality that combines the conceptual resources devised in recent sympathetic work on ontological pluralism (the thesis that there are fundamentally distinct kinds of being) with the thought that what is past, future, and merely possible is less real than what is present and actual (albeit real enough to serve as truthmakers for statements about the past, future, and merely possible). However, we also show that despite being a coherent, distinctive, and prima facie appealing position, the theory succumbs to what we call the ‘‘problem of mixed ontological status’’. We conclude that the proponents of the theory can only evade these problems by developing ontological pluralism in a radically different way than it has been by its recent sympathizers.