Denis Larrivee
Loyola University, USA
Biography
Abstract
Contemplative meditation reveals a latent capacity for personal integration that enhances mental health through relational and transcendent ordering. The role played by the brain and nervous system in assisting personal integration, however, is neglected in modern philosophy of science models of the nervous system. These models thereby introduce serious challenges to ethical practice that diminish the personal meaning of the human being. Personalist approaches to ethics and discoveries in empirical neuroscience, however, are together beginning to offer a synergistic view of integration that may help in revising these models and reinstating a more positive anthropological meaning of the individual as well as an improved understanding of existential psychotherapy. Psychotherapeutic analyses, historical reviews, and institutional experience, for example, all testify to a positive and direct relation between personal spirituality and the liberation and meaning endowed by it to mental health. In recognition of the significance of contemplative discipline for consolidating the neural architecture, the neural events facilitating enhanced mental well being have been extensively investigated. In the case of mindfulness meditation numerous studies have been conducted that reveal substantive effects on brain anatomy and function, leading the British Parliament in 2015 to issue its landmark report, A Mindful Nation. These show significant anatomical - major nerve tracts, for example, such as the corpus callosum, are significantly increased in size and myelination and physiological variation, these latter accompanied by distinct neural activity changes that are correlated with the duration and frequency of meditative practice. The extended intentional focus of contemplative meditation that has been acquired from the Christian legacy, and then evolved in its later development, implicates an even greater breadth of neural deployment that assists personal integration. They suggest, thereby, a scope of disciplinary consolidation that exceeds that of mindfulness and so likely activates a broader and corresponding range of integrative processes, that are, therefore, latent for implementation when exercised. This paper, accordingly, will emphasize these integrative and physical features of the neural architecture and their contribution to mental health.