Consciousness, self-consciousness, and meditation Wolfgang Fasching Published online: 19 April 2008 # Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2008 Abstract Many spiritual traditions employ certain mental techniques (meditation) which consist in inhibiting mental activity whilst nonetheless remaining fully conscious, which is supposed to lead to a realisation of one’ s own true nature prior to habitual self-substantialisation. In this paper I propose that this practice can be understood as a special means of becoming aware of consciousness itself as such. To explain this claim I conduct some phenomenologically oriented considerations about the nature of consciousness qua presence and the problem of self-presence of this presence. Keywords Consciousness . Self-consciousness . Meditation . Phenomenology . Mysticism Many spiritual traditions employ mental practices—usually called “meditation” in English 1 —which aim at leaving behind all “images”, all contents or objects of consciousness, whether external or internal, in order to produce a no longer object- directed state of mind. 2 This is unanimously seen as implying a letting go of one’ s own self (one’ s ego) as well. Paradoxically, however, it is precisely this “forgetting” of oneself that is held to lead to a comprehension of one’ s own true nature. In this paper I would like to present some considerations about the nature of consciousness Phenom Cogn Sci (2008) 7:463–483 DOI 10.1007/s11097-008-9090-6 1 With “meditation” I here refer exclusively to what David Fontana calls “nonideational meditation”, in contrast to “ideational meditation”, the latter meaning “that the meditator holds an idea or a group of ideas in the forefront of awareness, and uses them to stimulate a directed course of intellectual activity” (Fontana 2007, 154). 2 For an overview of this phenomenon across a wide variety of (predominantly, but not only, Asian) cultures, cf. e.g. Goleman 1978 (part II), Forman 1990 (part I), Shear 2006, Stace 1961. W. Fasching (*) Department of Philosophy, University of Vienna, Universitätsstraβe 7, Vienna 1010, Austria e-mail: w.fasching@univie.ac.at