The science of awakening: how your brain constructs reality and what meditation reveals
A look at our fascinating conversation with Dr. Shamil Chandaria co-hosted by Adventures in Awareness on the bridge between science and contemplative wisdom when it comes to understanding the nature of reality. Shamil will be running a 4-week course on the topic starting July 10.
What if everything you think you're seeing, feeling, and experiencing right now is actually a sophisticated internal simulation created by your brain?
This isn't science fiction – it's cutting-edge neuroscience, and it has profound implications for understanding consciousness, meditation, and spiritual awakening.
In our talk with him last week, Dr. Shamil Chandaria presented a groundbreaking framework that bridges the gap between scientific understanding and contemplative wisdom. With 38 years of meditation experience and academic affiliations with Imperial College, Oxford, and Cambridge, Shamil offered a unique perspective on how modern neuroscience is finally catching up to what contemplatives have known for millennia.
A new slant on ‘awakening’
Amir Giles, the director of our sibling organisation Adventures in Awareness, said that a recent conversation with Shamil revealed an extraordinary development in consciousness research.
Scientific thinking is converging on a striking insight: "awakening" might not be just a metaphor. When we wake up in the morning, there's a measurable increase in cortical excitability and information distribution in the brain. Remarkably, spiritual awakenings seem to continue this same pattern – bringing greater levels of brightness, clarity, and lucidity into our lives.
The illusion of direct perception
We typically assume we're directly perceiving the world around us – that when we look at a tree, we're simply seeing what's there. But neuroscience reveals something far more extraordinary: we never actually see the raw data coming through our eyes.
"What's going on is that in fact, we are generating an internal construction, an internal simulation of what's going on," Shamil explained. "And then we're just using the data to change the knobs and dials of our simulation to minimize prediction error."
This understanding emerges from what's called predictive processing – a revolutionary model of how the brain works. Rather than passively receiving and processing sensory information, our brains are constantly generating predictions about what we expect to experience, then comparing these predictions with incoming data.
The brain as a prediction machine
The process works through what scientists call Bayesian inference – essentially, your brain is constantly asking: "What's the probability that I'm looking at a tree, given this sensory data?" But here's the fascinating twist: to answer this question, your brain flips the problem around, using what it already knows (your priors) combined with the likelihood of the data to construct your experience.
"We have this beautiful way of figuring out what's going on," Shamil noted, "and here is the real magic: what we actually see, what we're conscious of, is the output of the generative model. We never see the data."
This means your entire experienced reality – the room you're in, the sensations in your body, your thoughts and emotions – are all constructions generated by hierarchical models in your brain. As Shamil illustrated through a detailed diagram of brain processing levels:
Bottom layer: Basic sensations (vibrotactile, auditory, muscular)
Middle layers: Emotions, body mapping, faces, memories
Top layer: Concepts, reasoning, abstraction, language
The priors flow down from higher levels to lower ones, while prediction errors flow upward, creating our seamless experience of reality.
The neuroscience of Self
Perhaps most remarkably, this process extends to our sense of self. Your feeling of being a unified agent looking out at the world is itself a construction – what neuroscientists call a phenomenal self-model.
"We create a generative model with all of these details so that we can actually make sense of the world," Shamil explained. "Somehow I'm simulating myself, but not just simulating a sense of this avatar that's here, but also simulating the emotions in the avatar, but also simulating a kind of a narrative about myself."
This self-model includes:
A perspectival self (the sense of viewing from a particular location)
A narrative self (your ongoing story about who you are)
An agent self (the feeling of being the doer of actions)
A social self (how you relate to others)
What meditation reveals
This is where the science becomes profound for meditators. Traditional meditation practices work by systematically deconstructing these very same models that neuroscience has identified.
"The first kind of major family of meditation techniques is an attentional family," Shamil noted. "What we do is we generally tend to quieten everything that's going on here. How do we do that? Well, we might do that by paying attention to breath at my nose."
By allocating most of your attention to basic sensations (like breath), you starve the higher-level models of the bandwidth they need to operate. This is why, in deep meditation, your sense of having a body, thoughts, and even a self can fade away, leaving only pure awareness.
The space of awareness
When all these constructed experiences quiet down, what remains? Shamil described it as discovering "the entire space itself, the entire perceptual space, the space in which everything arises."
This space has remarkable qualities:
It's empty and boundless
It's timelessly present (even time arises within it)
It's inherently peaceful and equanimous
It has unlimited capacity to allow any experience
"This kind of luminous empty space has been called luminous. Why luminous? Because it's the space that lights up all arisings. It's that which can have the capacity to know."
Beyond personal awakening
The implications extend far beyond individual spiritual development. If this empty, aware space is the fundamental nature of consciousness, and if multiple beings can recognize this same awareness, what does this say about the nature of reality itself?
Shamil ventured into what he called "the mystical leap": "The mystical leap is in fact that the whole of reality is in fact one... There is just the universe going on and the universe is having multiple perspectives on itself."
The art of beautiful stories
But here's where things get even more interesting. Once you recognise that all experience – including spiritual insights – are constructions, what then? Shamil drew on the teachings of Rob Burbea, who spoke of "soulmaking" – the art of consciously creating beautiful experiences and meanings.
"Emptiness is the universal acid of the spiritual path," Shamil reflected. "But then what do you do from there? Well, you could make a story that there's no self. Or you could make a story that I am pure awareness... There is a way of recognizing and waking up within this and saying, 'Yes, but it's still a beautiful important world and let's not mess it up.'"
This leads to what Shamil calls the "existential situation" of being both infinite and finite – holding the absolute perspective while engaging meaningfully with relative reality.
Getting practical - meditation & awakening
For those interested in meditation and awakening, this framework offers several practical insights:
Understanding why meditation works: By seeing how attention allocation affects brain processing, you can practice more skillfully.
Recognizing the constructed nature of suffering: When you understand that your experience of problems is literally a brain construction, it becomes easier to work with difficult states.
Balancing awakening and engagement: Rather than escaping into blissful states, the goal becomes dancing skillfully between the absolute and relative dimensions of experience.
Developing discernment: Not all spiritual experiences or insights are equally valuable – some constructions are more beautiful, useful, and conducive to flourishing than others.
His practical advice was refreshingly simple: "Just meditate every single day. Don't miss a day through thick or thin, ups and downs... Just do it. Carry on."
Ready to dive deeper? Dr. Shamil Chandaria is offering a comprehensive 4-week course exploring these themes in much greater detail, including the science of liberation, how to work with priors, and practical approaches to awakening and soulmaking.
You can watch the full recording of the talk summarised here on the Adventures in Awareness YouTube page.
