In a previous article, I steelmanned a case to avoid ‘body-notions’ in guided meditation. My point there was that in most guided mediations, the instructor asks you to focus on a particular place in your body. Doing this prerequires that you conceive of your sensations as constrained to your physical form.
In body scans, for example, it is very easy to imagine your feet and their position, before investigating what you experience. These experiences become tied to your body, which is not what meditation seeks to achieve. In meditation, the goal is to ‘become aware of experience.’ Not to place that experience somewhere in space-time.
In this post I would like to elaborate on this idea with a simple drawing. Below, I schematically depict how I approached mediation when I started doing it.
You realise you have an awareness and then direct the attention of that awareness to a particular experience. Awareness, in this model, is a central point from which to perceive.
This is fundamentally contradictory to the whole idea of mindfulness. There, awareness is not something you can be aware of, but in this diagram, it is a point in space! A point from which to perceive the thing we are perceiving.
Sam Harris, of whom I did many 10-minute mediations in the Waking Up app tries to make you aware of this. In some meditations, he would suggest to “look for who is looking” or to “turn attention onto itself.”
While these instructions try to help the meditator ‘do it right,’ I think they are large counterproductive. When I’m trying to “look for who is looking” or to “turn attention onto itself,” this is what I try to do (yellow arrow):
I try to become aware of this point of awareness.
In Harris’s meditation, the expectation is that there will be ‘nothing to find’ and that from that, you will learn to simply be aware. I find this cumbersome and confusing, and I think there are more effective ways to achieve it.
One way is to better understand what awareness is by drawing it out. Contrasting the first image with the one below, for example, illustrates my case.
Awareness is the boundless space in which perception occurs. Sounds, thoughts, sights… they all appear within that space, but not in one paricular point.
When we direct our attention to any of these thoughts or sensation, we do not ‘narrow our attention’ toward them. Rather, we illuminate whichever space in awareness that they occupy.
Taking this understanding with us when we meditate enhances its foundation. I’m looking forward to sharing how this can also be engrained in our practice.
