Kaj, first off, huge thank you for writing up all these posts on meditation. I don’t have time to read a lot of these books, but it’s good literature, so it’s perfect to get the summary from someone I can trust.
“Introspective awareness” sounds like the right object. Or, more specifically, it definitely feels like it’s describing my own experience. And my own, homegrown hypothesis was something like: consciousness is like an echo or picture-in-picture. We can get glimpses of “ourselves” because we can look at / load partial concepts of ourselves into the working memory.
Introspective awareness is its own type of mental object...
Wow, yes, yes, yes! My original fear with starting meditation was that it would remove certain experiences from my life. It felt like I’d lose something. And in the 7+ years I’ve done it, that just hasn’t happened. And now I have the precise language to describe it. That is exactly what happens for me: like, I can still see the suffering and all that, but it’s like it’s wrapped in a bubble, which still allows me to see the emotion/sensation exactly like I would before, but it loses the ability to instantly propagate its agenda to the rest of my system.
This kind of a process also teaches you to pay attention to patterns of cause and effect in your mind.
Yeah, I have seen this emphasized in various teachings, but I never actually practiced it. Probably some low hanging fruit here for me. I’ll try it out.
“first you resolve a lot of issues, but then you can get the ability to push down the rest” dynamic
One, I think the foremost goal for any type of meditation should be to learn to see what is there. (Just like with rationality.) So there’s no pushing or pulling or trying to change anything. And sometimes with bad feelings or headaches, I’ve noticed that simply paying attention to it (instead of flinching away) resolves it. It doesn’t make it “go away” or “block it”, it actually just unties the knot, so to speak.
Two, I think there are two orthogonal skills that get bucketed into “spiritual development.” One skill is insight (see MCTB for a good definition), but it’s basically the ability to see what’s going on in your mind. And that skill will eventually take you to enlightenment. The other skill is morality. And while some practices do empathize morality practice as well, I think in the classical western tradition (MCTB is a good example of this) we found paths to get to enlightenment without all other “unnecessary” stuff… like morality training. So you end up with people who are technically enlightened, but it doesn’t automatically make them good human beings. (I think this also resolves the confusion in one of the recent SSC posts.)
“Introspective awareness” sounds like the right object. Or, more specifically, it definitely feels like it’s describing my own experience. And my own, homegrown hypothesis was something like: consciousness is like an echo or picture-in-picture. We can get glimpses of “ourselves” because we can look at / load partial concepts of ourselves into the working memory.
Yeah, that sounds like it’s talking about the same thing. I also quite liked the way Mark Lippmann talks about “afterimages”, which seems to also be very closely related:
When you look, see, or notice something, there’s a very predictable pattern that then occurs. First, there is your contact with the actual sensory experience. This is very, very brief. Almost immediately, your mind moves to phase two.
In this phase, you are no longer paying attention to the actual sensory experience, but you are instead paying attention to a sort of “afterimage” of the experience. This is what your mind actually collects and takes away from the outside world, and this is what you actually think about, make sense of, and reason about. [...]
Another way to get a sense of afterimages is to generate a short sound or some other sensory experience and then ask how you know it happened. For example, snap your fingers. Ok. How do you know you just snapped your fingers? You remember you did, right?
Unless you wait too long, part of the experience of that memory is the afterimage of you snapping your fingers. And, there’s often a special property of afterimages that you can play with: You can access the afterimage to more fully replay the experience that led to the afterimage. A replay is not available for some experiences and you might lose the replay for the experience if you wait too long before accessing it. Finally, even if a replay isn’t available, the afterimage may still contain some detail that you can inspect.
So, being aware of and using afterimages is one way that you can inspect subtle phenomena, especially phenomena that goes by very fast.
When doing so, there are some caveats to be aware of.
First, it’s good to remember that the afterimage is not a perfect replica of the experience. It is a “tag” that the experience happened, that may contain or evoke some of the structure or phenomenology of the original experience. If you’re using afterimages to investigate experience, you have to make some effort to to separate out what the experience of the afterimage is versus what remains of the original experience.
Second, it’s important to note that afterimages will always have some conceptual contamination. Afterimages are part top down and part bottom up. That is, afterimages are partially composed of what you expect to see. That’s why you can be positive you just saw a bug skitter across the flow but when you look closely it was just some very suggestive dust caught in a draft. The afterimage is what your reflexes and emotions actually react to, and the afterimage is not the same thing as what was actually there. The way to partially get around this is to try to not have preconceptions and to try to take lots of careful observations of the phenomena.
Finally, there’s a subtler point, here. It seems to be the case that you may be able to “take” or “get” an afterimage only if you already have some inkling of what you’re looking for. That is, if you already have some hint of an idea or concept of what’s there. That doesn’t mean you have to have a name for the experience. And, it doesn’t mean that you’ve had to explicitly reflect, before, on some prior occasion, on having those sorts of experiences. I just means that somewhere in your mind there has to be some sort of… familiarity for the experience before you go looking or paying attention in general.
So, how do you get that initial experience, if you can only have the experience if you’ve had the experience? It seems to “bootstrap” slowly, by simply paying attention in the vicinity of what you’re looking for. You brain eventually, faintly discerns a pattern on the edge of experience, and you gain a creeping sense of familiarity that becomes clearer and clearer, until finally you can put your finger on it, haltingly describe it with great difficulty, and maybe finally name it as a thing or break it down into further parts.
Kaj, first off, huge thank you for writing up all these posts on meditation. I don’t have time to read a lot of these books, but it’s good literature, so it’s perfect to get the summary from someone I can trust.
“Introspective awareness” sounds like the right object. Or, more specifically, it definitely feels like it’s describing my own experience. And my own, homegrown hypothesis was something like: consciousness is like an echo or picture-in-picture. We can get glimpses of “ourselves” because we can look at / load partial concepts of ourselves into the working memory.
Wow, yes, yes, yes! My original fear with starting meditation was that it would remove certain experiences from my life. It felt like I’d lose something. And in the 7+ years I’ve done it, that just hasn’t happened. And now I have the precise language to describe it. That is exactly what happens for me: like, I can still see the suffering and all that, but it’s like it’s wrapped in a bubble, which still allows me to see the emotion/sensation exactly like I would before, but it loses the ability to instantly propagate its agenda to the rest of my system.
Yeah, I have seen this emphasized in various teachings, but I never actually practiced it. Probably some low hanging fruit here for me. I’ll try it out.
One, I think the foremost goal for any type of meditation should be to learn to see what is there. (Just like with rationality.) So there’s no pushing or pulling or trying to change anything. And sometimes with bad feelings or headaches, I’ve noticed that simply paying attention to it (instead of flinching away) resolves it. It doesn’t make it “go away” or “block it”, it actually just unties the knot, so to speak.
Two, I think there are two orthogonal skills that get bucketed into “spiritual development.” One skill is insight (see MCTB for a good definition), but it’s basically the ability to see what’s going on in your mind. And that skill will eventually take you to enlightenment. The other skill is morality. And while some practices do empathize morality practice as well, I think in the classical western tradition (MCTB is a good example of this) we found paths to get to enlightenment without all other “unnecessary” stuff… like morality training. So you end up with people who are technically enlightened, but it doesn’t automatically make them good human beings. (I think this also resolves the confusion in one of the recent SSC posts.)
Thank you very much for your kind words. :)
Yeah, that sounds like it’s talking about the same thing. I also quite liked the way Mark Lippmann talks about “afterimages”, which seems to also be very closely related: