Towards a Cross-cultural and Non-Cognitivist Cognitive Scientific Study of Meditation - The Dark Nights of the Soul in Abrahamic Traditions

The cognitive science of religion (CSR) has to date been dominated by evolutionary approaches to religion built on a cognitivist, computational understandings of the mind. Even as cognitive science has, since the late 1990s, begun to move away from such frameworks, CSR has yet to evolve accordingly. The cognitive scientific study of meditation (CSM) was introduced in the early 1990s from a non-cognitivist perspective, namely embodied and enactive cognition, however this subfield has been compromised by key tenets of Buddhist modernism like Buddhist exceptionalism and the idea that Buddhist meditation is itself a science of the mind. This paper will seek to address this lacuna in CSR and evade these shortcomings of the subfield of CSM by sketching out an enactive approach to the study of contemporary Abrahamic contemplative practice in North America.