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2026
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| Accès en ligne: | https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20316506 |
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| _version_ | 1866902011998371840 |
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| author | Rao, Sharada |
| author_facet | Rao, Sharada |
| contents | <p class="p1">https://orcid.org/<br>0009-0000-9969-0790</p> <p class="p1"> </p> <p class="p1">This essay is the work of thirteen years of inquiry by a contemplative practitioner</p> <p class="p1">who came to the question of the observer not as a theorist but as a seeker —</p> <p class="p1">driven there by a life that, more than once, brought her to the edge of its own</p> <p class="p1">continuance and found, at that edge, something that would not be the brink. It</p> <p class="p1">is written in conscious distinction from the author’s own prior body of work sur-</p> <p class="p1">veying the contemporary science and philosophy of consciousness, and from the</p> <p class="p1">formalisms — integrated information theory, universal-consciousness postulates,</p> <p class="p1">consciousness-field frameworks — through which the author once attempted to</p> <p class="p1">address the question from the outside. Those attempts, in time, were set aside.</p> <p class="p1">The observer, this essay holds, cannot finally be studied by methods designed to</p> <p class="p1">look past it; the inquiry has to be turned the other way.</p> <p class="p1">What follows is that turning. The essay reports, in the first person and at length,</p> <p class="p1">what was disclosed when sustained meditative practice was brought to its depths;</p> <p class="p1">it takes up Eugene Wigner’s question about the place of the observer in our ac-</p> <p class="p1">count of the real, not as a quantum-mechanical claim but as an unresolved philo-</p> <p class="p1">sophical seam; and it reads three Indian contemplative traditions — Vedic and Up-</p> <p class="p1">anishadic, Buddhist, and Jain — in their distinctness, as three differently weighted</p> <p class="p1">maps of the same observer. The work arrives, over its six movements, at a par-</p> <p class="p1">ticular and lived answer to the question with which it began — an answer the</p> <p class="p1">essay names but does not seek to demonstrate, because the form of answer it has</p> <p class="p1">reached is one the reader will only recognise by walking the inquiry themselves.</p> <p class="p1">Independent Researcher</p> <p class="p1">Preprint</p> <p class="p1">Keywords: consciousness, philosophy of mind, contemplative inquiry, phenomenology, </p> <p class="p1">Avasthā Traya, Turīya, Wigner, Vedanta, Buddhism,</p> <p class="p1">Jainism, first-person methods.</p> <p class="p1"> </p> <p class="p1"> </p> |
| format | Recurso digital |
| id | zenodo_https___doi_org_10_5281_zenodo_20316506 |
| institution | Zenodo |
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| publishDate | 2026 |
| publisher | Zenodo |
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| spellingShingle | The Precipice and the Path : A Contemplative Inquiry into the Observer Rao, Sharada <p class="p1">https://orcid.org/<br>0009-0000-9969-0790</p> <p class="p1"> </p> <p class="p1">This essay is the work of thirteen years of inquiry by a contemplative practitioner</p> <p class="p1">who came to the question of the observer not as a theorist but as a seeker —</p> <p class="p1">driven there by a life that, more than once, brought her to the edge of its own</p> <p class="p1">continuance and found, at that edge, something that would not be the brink. It</p> <p class="p1">is written in conscious distinction from the author’s own prior body of work sur-</p> <p class="p1">veying the contemporary science and philosophy of consciousness, and from the</p> <p class="p1">formalisms — integrated information theory, universal-consciousness postulates,</p> <p class="p1">consciousness-field frameworks — through which the author once attempted to</p> <p class="p1">address the question from the outside. Those attempts, in time, were set aside.</p> <p class="p1">The observer, this essay holds, cannot finally be studied by methods designed to</p> <p class="p1">look past it; the inquiry has to be turned the other way.</p> <p class="p1">What follows is that turning. The essay reports, in the first person and at length,</p> <p class="p1">what was disclosed when sustained meditative practice was brought to its depths;</p> <p class="p1">it takes up Eugene Wigner’s question about the place of the observer in our ac-</p> <p class="p1">count of the real, not as a quantum-mechanical claim but as an unresolved philo-</p> <p class="p1">sophical seam; and it reads three Indian contemplative traditions — Vedic and Up-</p> <p class="p1">anishadic, Buddhist, and Jain — in their distinctness, as three differently weighted</p> <p class="p1">maps of the same observer. The work arrives, over its six movements, at a par-</p> <p class="p1">ticular and lived answer to the question with which it began — an answer the</p> <p class="p1">essay names but does not seek to demonstrate, because the form of answer it has</p> <p class="p1">reached is one the reader will only recognise by walking the inquiry themselves.</p> <p class="p1">Independent Researcher</p> <p class="p1">Preprint</p> <p class="p1">Keywords: consciousness, philosophy of mind, contemplative inquiry, phenomenology, </p> <p class="p1">Avasthā Traya, Turīya, Wigner, Vedanta, Buddhism,</p> <p class="p1">Jainism, first-person methods.</p> <p class="p1"> </p> <p class="p1"> </p> |
| title | The Precipice and the Path : A Contemplative Inquiry into the Observer |
| url | https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20316506 |