You are deep in the philosophical rabbit hole, andrew! My friend who did a 10 day meditation retreat told me that practically all they talk about is being "equanimous," which makes sense.
Being able to really feel the gap between each breath is a beautiful feeling. That's one of the more intense sides of meditation that I have accessed, although I would need to do more than 10 minute sessions to really sink into it.
Thanks for sharing, very interesting ideas you have :-)
This is an area I'm passionate about so time spent on it isn't a problem to me.
Here's the thing though and I concede this may be idiosyncratic: the experiences of meditation could be local to this planet so drawing universal conclusions from these experiences is quite problematic to my way of thinking. The consequence of this would be that the Buddhist religion is false within this context...
I find Kenny W's take on meditation to be a kind of fetishism in that he puts such value in its soteriological prowess; I don't see this position as justifiable as one could argue that meditation (and Buddhism) have been colossal failures within the context of historical flow and things like Climate Change's worst case scenario's; let alone the worldwide obsession with capitalism, money, power, etc....
One could argue that things are getting worse and worse and worse.....that is the context of what I'm getting at above.
Meditation as proof of God's non-existence is the biggest issue I have with this field. Meditation proves no such thing, IMO.....And I say this as one who has had many peak experiences with nondual states of consciousness.
I do get and am sympathetic to the affinities between certain scientific worldviews and Buddhist ontologies...