Default Mode Network and objectless awareness

 Objectless awareness practices from Buddhist (zazen, shikantaza, objectless shamatha), Christian apophatic (Centring Prayer, hesychasm), Kabbalist (hitbodedut, devekut, ayin meditation), Hindu (nirvikalpa samādhi), entheogenic (shamanic psilocybin, ayahuasca, and related dissociative traditions), and Sufi (muraqaba) traditions act as reconfigurations of attractor landscapes as dynamical systems within the Default Mode Network; resonating quasi-stable intrinsic 'harmonic' modes.

Mysticism is ubiquitous, and appears to manifest in very different ways. Often difficult to tell, because of the cryptic, esoteric language.I thing the commonly obscure.

Words like 'bliss', 'awe','ineffable' and 'numinous' tend to be used to include implications of divinity, but, since they are used to gesture towards (the brain states themselves are not easy for anybody to describe) the experience, and are used in describing experiences with psilocybin, they seem universal attempts to describe the same thing. I think the synæsthesia is one part of the reason they are indescribable or 'ineffable', without the synæsthesia present, it's impossible to remember it, only the after-echoes.

This is an hypothesis, or, rather, a starting point for discussion, on how these various traditions work through similar activation of DMN modes. It's how I'm trying to think it through, rather than an arrival at a destination.

What's interested me is three things:

The first is the convergence of different flavours of mysticism, which all seem to be describing very much the same thing - and all having difficulty describing it, because it is a very non-verbal experience.

The second is the operation and function of the Default Mode Network, the DMN, in the brain, and how it is related to various types of activity, and which neuroscience appears to be coming to grips with.

Thirdly, the fractal nature of our brains (many things, including our hearts, are also fractal), which means that its mode of operation includes fractal artefacts like strange-attractors that can lead to quasi-stable states.

My hypothesis comes from thinking about what I've read and how these three things are connected. Before this, the confluence of different mystical experiences was not a clear result of brain structure, which you'd expect it to be, so there weren't the tools to consider the mechanisms (despite pointers like, as I said Persinger’s 'god helmet', which created mystical states) might have worked by stimulating the DMN into one of these fractal attractor mode

 I didn't include the Jesuitical practices, because, St. Ignatius Loyola's "Spiritual Exercises" are very specifically object directed. However, in 'The Doors of Perception', Aldous Huxley suggested that festering wounds from self-flagellation might be their route to mystical experience, which makes sense, since you can get a similar experience simply from a very high fever.