Jun

Applications of Mindfulness Meditation in the Study of Human Consciousness

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Thinking can be further resolved into verbal and image components. Body sensation can be analyzed in terms of quality, spatial dimension and intensity level. All of these resolutions are made very rapidly in real time as events arise. This eventually becomes habitual and effortless continuing on ‘auto-pilot’ even during complex daily activities. Once you can tease out the basic components of sense experience, you can investigate relationships between them. This leads to a constellation of insights that are deep, general, and of great practical value. At the heart of it is the understanding of how mental images, internal conversation and body feelings interact to produce the sense of a percipient self. Even if you have never meditated, you may be able to get a taste of this by trying the following experiment.

I. Preliminary Steps (detecting components)

1. Go to a place where there are lots of sounds. Sit still and listen to the sounds.

2. Each time you hear a sound, monitor whether that sound does or does not trigger any mental image activity, however subtle.

3. Next, each time you hear a sound, monitor whether that sound does or not trigger any verbal mental activity, however subtle.

4. Finally, monitor whether each sound does or does not trigger any body feeling (smile when you hear a bird chirp, cringe when you hear a car backfire, etc.) Note: The phrase ‘however subtle’ is of pivotal importance in this exercise. A paradigm shift will occur only when the normally subliminal, wispy levels of image, talk and feel can be detected.

II. Main Procedure

Step 1: Focus exclusively on sound and your reactions to it, ignoring everything else.

Each time you hear a sound, determine which of the following logical possibilities occur.

1. The sound triggers a mental image.

2. The sound triggers internal talk.

3. The sound triggers body feeling

4. The sound triggers image and feeling.

5. The sound triggers talk and feeling

6. The sound triggers talk and image.

7. The sound triggers talk, image, and body feeling.

8. The sound triggers no image, talk, or body feeling.

Step 2: Develop a sensitivity to the perception of a ‘listener’ associated with each of these possible reactive states. You will find that it varies, being most pronounced in case 7 and utterly absent in case 8! Indeed, if case 8 were to persist for a while, the perception ‘I am the sound’ would arise.

Skilled mindfulness meditators can be of great value in consciousness research. They can provide clues to researchers as to what to look for in their investigations. They can serve as sensitive and eloquent subjects in experiments linking first person reports with third person data. But the most intriguing possibility relates to the perennial bête noire of functional imaging research— undesirable signal/noise ratios. Skilled mindfulness meditators habitually attend to what is relevant and ignore what is irrelevant. Therefore it is possible that for many types of experiences, their brains generate a physiological signature, which is significantly more well – defined than that of other humans. Of course, collaboration between the mindfulness tradition and cognitive sciences can be a two-way street. By knowing how the nervous system works, meditation teachers may be able to formulate categories and create techniques that are deeper and more natural then those now used.

For more details please visit: http://www.metta-physics.com

Metta-physics.com is bi-monthly magazine for Science and religion of mindful living. Religion and Spirituality, Living Mindfully, Newer Directions in Religion, Work, meditation, mindfulness christianity and religion, physics and god, islamic impressions and much more.

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