Twelve Facets of Silence: What the Map of Pure Awareness Looks Like

One word behind which the whole world hides

When meditators try to describe their deepest states, they almost always run into the same difficulty. There seem to be enough words - “peace”, “clarity”, “emptiness”, “light”, “presence” - but each of them only catches the edge of experience. Like the blind men in the old parable touching an elephant, different traditions touch the same thing from different angles and give it different names: “pure consciousness,” “primordial mind,” “clear light,” “witness consciousness,” “Buddha nature.”

It is no coincidence that Thomas Metzinger put the metaphor of an elephant and the blind in the title of his 2024 book. Its meaning is double. On the one hand, yes, each describes only a part. On the other hand, if you collect enough descriptions and superimpose them on each other, the outline of the elephant will still appear. This is exactly what Metzinger and Alex Gamma tried to do: collect not two or three poetry reports, but thousands of structured ones, and see what the statistics show.

The result is a map fromtwelve dimensions. Not twelve “types of people” and not twelve “stages of enlightenment,” but twelve independent axes along which a particular experience of pure awareness can be located. This article is a guide to these axes. But before you follow them, it’s worth understanding where they come from, otherwise it’s easy to mistake a statistical model for revelation.

Where do the “factors” come from?

The MPE-92M questionnaire consists of 92 questions, each rated on a scale from zero to one hundred. A person remembers one specific episode of pure awareness and answers all the questions in relation to it: were there thoughts, did he feel the body, did he experience time, was there a sense of “I”, was there silence, was there a “shine”.

Ninety-two numbers per person, one and a half thousand people in the analysis - this is a large table. Factor analysis solves a simple problem: which questions “go together”? If people who give a high score to the question of silence almost always give a high score to both the question of peace and the question of integrity, then there is one hidden axis behind these three questions. It is called a factor.

It is important to immediately note three reservations that the authors themselves make, because without them it is easy to fall into exaggeration. First, twelve factors explain44%the spread of answers is less than half. More than half remains “behind the scenes”: individual differences, noise, shades that the model does not capture. Secondly, the solution allowscross loading: the same question can belong to several factors at once, and a “pure” structure, where each question is strictly in one place, fits poorly with these data. Thirdly, the authors honestly name the modelpreliminary: Whether it will be reproduced in new studies is unknown in advance.

This is not a weakness of the work. This is what neat science about an elusive subject looks like. The Twelve Factors are not a table of truths, but a working language: a convenient way to talk about what was previously described only in metaphors. Next, I will call the factors by their names from the article and explain what exactly is behind each.

Facet one: effort and time

The authors named the first factor"Time, effort and desire". He describes a state that cannot yet be called pure awareness in the full sense - it is, rather, the road to it. There is still a meditator, there is a goal, there is an effort: a person notices that he has been distracted, remembers why he sat down, and returns his attention to breathing. Metzinger calls this “dual mindfulness”—dual because it maintains a separation between the one meditating and the thing on which attention is directed.

And here is the subtle point that makes this factor so important: as long as there is effort, there is time. The subjective experience of duration, the “flow” of a moment, is a direct consequence of the fact that the psyche is busy with something, striving for something. Where effort is released, time tends to disappear. Therefore, questions about the experience of duration, about the passage of time, about the feeling of effort and the presence of desires were gathered into one cluster. This is alsomeditation as a process, and not the effortless state for which the process is started.

Facet two: peace, bliss, silence

Second factor -"Peace, bliss and silence"is probably the most recognizable face of meditation. Relaxation and lightness, deep boundless silence, a sense of integrity, absence of internal conflict. This also includes a subtle but distinct bliss, which one of the participants described with the unforgettable formula - “invisible smile.”

It is worth making a caveat here, which the authors also make: pure awarenessby itself- not an emotional state. But it is capable of triggering a whole spectrum of mostly light states: joy, existential relief, gratitude, impersonal love, reverence. In German there is an exact word for this -stilles Entzücken, “quiet delight.” Not wild euphoria, but a calm, undramatic glow of contentment.

And one more detail that explains a lot. This factornegativerelated to the first. The more effort, time and desire, the less peace, bliss and silence, and vice versa. The two faces turn out to be opposite ends of the same axis. We'll come back to this at the end because this is where all the geometry of the map is hidden.

Facet three: knowledge that knows itself

Third factor -"Self-knowledge, autonomous cognition and insight"— takes us into truly strange territory. We are talking about the non-conceptual quality of “knowledge”: not knowledgeabout something, but knowledge as such, “significance”, clarity. Loading most heavily on this factor is the slightly dizzying question: “Did your experience have the quality of knowing yourself?”

Pay attention to the wording. Not “you knew about your experience,” but “the experience knew itself.” This is a description of reflexivity without a reflector - knowledge that is directed towards itself, but without any agent, without a sense of control, without an “I” that would appropriate this knowledge. In classical traditions there are terms for this - Tibetanrang rig ye shes, “self-knowing timeless awareness.” Metzinger carefully takes phenomenology and leaves metaphysics out of the equation: it doesn’t matter what it “really” is, what matters is that it isis experiencedand that this experience is reproducibly described by thousands of people.

Facet Four: Waking Presence

If the previous factor is about “knowledge,” then the fourth is"Waking Presence"— about “being here.” It brings together alertness, clear wakefulness and complete “dwelling” in the “here” and “now”, imbued with a sense of simple existence. The four strongest questions of this factor speak about one thing: the bodily-spatial experience of being awake in the present moment.

This factor confirms the very first of the “semantic restrictions” that Metzinger derived back in the theoretical work of 2020 -Wakefulness, wakefulness. Whatever disappears from experience, wakefulness remains. This is what distinguishes pure awareness from sleep or fainting: there is almost no content, but clarity is at its maximum.

Facet five: awareness in a dream

Fifth factor -"Pure Awareness in Sleep"- stands apart. It is about the experience of awareness in deep dreamless sleep and in the transitions between sleep and wakefulness. Traditions have known this state for a long time: “lucid dreamless sleep”, “witness sleep”. For science, this is a separate gold mine: if pure awareness can be captured both in meditation and in sleep, then, by comparing both cases, one can get closer to what for itminimum required. There are few reports on such conditions in the sample, but they exist, and the authors promise to look into them in more detail.

Facet six: luminosity

Sixth factor -"Luminosity"- about a quality that is most difficult to convey in words to a person who has not experienced it. This is a non-visual “shine”, “brightness”, “vibration” - and sometimes quite visual brightness, which is seen with eyes closed. In Buddhist texts it is the "clear light of primal awareness." Metzinger offers a more sober reading: "luminosity" may be a phenomenal expression of theability to know and experience- not light in the literal sense, but the experience of openness in which anything at all can be illuminated by consciousness.

The seventh facet: thoughts and feelings

Seventh factor -"Thoughts and Feelings"— honestly captures what romantic descriptions of meditation are usually silent about. Even experienced practitioners spontaneously experience thoughts, images, emotions, memories, and plans for the future in a “pure” episode. The quiet space of awareness is continually obscured by the noisy foreground of mental content. This factor, like the first, is positively related to the experience of time: where thoughts are, there is time. The presence of such a factor is a sign of the integrity of the research: it describes the real experiences of real people, and not an idealized picture.

The eighth facet: emptiness without emptiness

Eighth factor -"Emptiness and Unegoic Self-Awareness"— the authors call it the most interesting from a philosophical point of view, and it’s hard to argue with that. Here we are talking about "pure knowing" without a sense of self and without any object: an uncompressed, limitless, non-dual wakefulness without content, which is aware only of itself - and does so without a single marker of egoic self-awareness: without agency, without a sense of ownership, without autobiography, without reference to a point in space and time.

This is where the research produces the result that made it all worthwhile. In the psychometric data of a large sample appearsempirical evidence of non-egoic self-awareness- a state where there is knowledge of oneself, but there is no “I” that knows. For many participants, as the authors note, it is these aspects that express the “spiritual essence” of the experience directly. And for the philosophy of consciousness this is a challenge: many influential theories tacitly proceed from the fact that consciousness is always “someone else’s”, always with a first-personal perspective. Reports say that this is not a necessity, but a special case.

There is also honest self-criticism: the authors acknowledge that the strongest question of this factor may inadvertently confuse two different things - “emptiness” as the absence of content and “emptiness” as the spatial experience of empty space, vacuum. It's a subtle but important distinction, and it's good to have it spelled out.

The ninth facet: perception without comment

Ninth factor -"Sensory perception in body and space"- brings us back to earth again. It shows that pure awareness does not necessarily mean turning off the senses. Sensory qualities, sensations of movement, bodily experience may be present. Hence the most important conclusion about the word “pure” itself: purity here is not the absence of perception, but the absenceconceptual overlay. Seeing “what is” without mental commentary, without labels, without judgment about whether it “exists” or “does not exist.” Traditions call this “direct perception” and “suchness” - the indescribable uniqueness of each concrete impression, taken before any concept.

Facet tenth: touching the world and yourself

Tenth factor -"Touching the world and yourself"- the most unexpected. He describes pure awareness as an abstract formtouch. One of the images that was offered to participants was the sensation when the right hand touches the left and you are both touching and being the one being touched. Hence the strange, but surprisingly stable descriptors: “velvety”, “density”, “fullness” - always in a non-tactile sense. Sometimes this touch is globalized: awareness is experienced as a field that permeates the body and all things and living beings. An interesting detail: this factor is statistically associated with "Luminosity", although phenomenologically there is no obvious connection between "glow" and "touch" - perhaps there is something common in the brain substrate behind this. Maybe. This is a hypothesis, not a fact.

Facet eleven: subtle “I”

Eleventh factor -"Mental Agency"— about the thinnest remnants of the ego. Not a rude “I want, I do”, but a barely noticeable one: the awareness that “I am meditating now,” the experience ofpossibilitiescontrol attention, a sense of agency even where no real control is already taking place. This brings us back to the “dual mindfulness” of the first factor: the egoic presence has not yet dissolved, it has only become more transparent and quieter.

Edge Twelve: Witness

Twelfth factor -"Consciousness-witness"— brings into the project a classical concept from Advaita Vedanta,sākṣin. The witness is that which makes all knowledge possible, but cannot itself become an object of knowledge, and that which is self-luminous. Phenomenologically, this is a global experience:the whole setexperience is experienced as being observed by something that is not at all an “observer” in the ordinary sense, but a timeless, completely impersonal knowing presence. The world seems to be reflected in infinite, non-choosing, non-conceptual knowledge.

Map geometry: one main axis

Now that all twelve facets have been named, we can see what is more important than any of them individually - how they are connected to each other.

The most beautiful pattern in the data is this. The first factor is “Time, effort and desire” -negativeassociated with the second (“Peace, bliss and silence”) and with the eighth (“Emptiness and non-egoic self-awareness”). ANDpositively- with the seventh (“Thoughts and Feelings”) and the ninth (“Perception”).

Put this together and a spectrum emerges. At one end there is effort, time, desire, duality: I try, I return attention, there is me and there is a goal. On the other is effortless, timeless, non-dual absorption, where only awareness remains, knowing itself. Meditative practice in this optics is not a set of achievements, butaxis movement: from doing to non-doing, from time to timelessness, from the “I who meditates” to knowledge without a knower.

This is why you should not read the twelve factors as a ladder with twelve steps. It is rather twelve coordinates in space, where each specific experience is a point, and practice is a trajectory. The same person finds himself in different points of this space on different days.

What this card doesn't say

It’s worth drawing the line again, at the end. All that was discussed wasphenomenology: First person accounts of what is being experienced. The questionnaire does not look into the brain. It doesn’t measure neurons, it doesn’t prove mechanisms, it doesn’t make judgments about “normal.” When confident statements about “suppression of the default brain system” or “critical states of neural networks” begin to be heard around MPE, it is useful to remember: this is a separate layer of conversation, where there are much more hypotheses than established facts, and where the correct formulation is almost always “thisMay beassociated with...”, not “the brain does this.” Analysis of this layer is in a separate project note: “04 - Neuroscience and theories - reliable and speculative.”

And one more thing: twelve factors are aboutepisode, and not about a person. A high score on "Void" does not make you "more enlightened", and a low score on "Luminance" does not make you "lagging." The map describes an experience, not a hierarchy of people. As soon as this tool is used for self-assessment "higher - lower", it ceases to be a map and becomes a ruler for vanity.

What's next

We walked along all twelve facets of silence and saw their main axis. Further, the series reveals individual lines in more detail: how it was possible to measure the indescribable, what “knowledge without a knower” is from the philosophical side, what is honestly known about the brain, and how to take the questionnaire on yourself without turning it into self-esteem. Map of materials - in the “Plan of a series of articles”.

The Twelve Facets are not the final truth about pure awareness. This is the first honest drawing of an elephant, made after a thousand touches. And he already shows that what traditions have called “indescribable” for centuries is quite amenable to careful, respectful, sober description - if you collect enough voices and do not rush to conclusions.