One of the advantages of taking time off from work is that you can dive into your projects headfirst and spend whole days working on a specific subject. That’s why I’ve been concentrating on meditation for the past few weeks, not only practicing as much as I can, but also meditating-about-meditating, if that makes any sense. Hence the title of this article: What is meditation? How does it work? Why are people more and more interested in “mindfulness” and what role does meditation hold in our search for meaning? Here are some ideas.
How does attention work?
We’ve all heard the basic tenets of meditation, which come down to focus on your breath. The meditator is asked to only concentrate on his breathing, bringing his attention back to the breath when his mind wanders. This pretty simple process (which is hard to execute) is supposed to evoke mindfulness in the practitioner: the idea (which I won’t define here) of connectedness, inter-being, the sensation of being part of a bigger thing. But wait: how can focusing on my breath lead to a transcendent feeling of connection with the universe?
In order to understand this, we need to look at what happens when our mind pays attention to something. Alan Watts used to say that the ego was a problem-solving machine, like a radar pointing out at our environment, looking for obstacles. This is a perfect evolutionary tool if your goal is finding food or shelter, but when we turn the ego inwards, it keeps on acting like a radar: finding problems and underlying deficiencies, even when there are none.
This is what meditators are looking for when they meditate: to turn off the problem-finding mechanism and just be in the present. What is “the present”, though?
Psychologically speaking, attention is the detection of stimuli in the environment and the processing of these signals. However, attention and comprehension are more difficult than that, as the Gestalt school of psychology taught us.
Take reading, for example. We don’t “read” by simply identifying letters, putting them together and associating sounds to the order of the symbols. Watch any kid learning how to read and you’ll see there’s a huge difference between pronouncing the words and understanding what you read.
In Gestalt, what’s important isn’t picking up the individual cues, symbols or stimuli; it’s being able to put them together. If you’ve ever heard the phrase, “The whole is more than the sum of its parts”, that’s exactly Gestalt’s slogan: the totality and comprehension of the sentence is more than putting letters together to form words, words together to form sentences, and these to make paragraphs. In the image above, you can see a six-pointed star, even if it’s not there. Your mind, your attention, is completing the stimuli in the environment by adding a triangle.
What is meditation?
I think meditation is the most powerful psycho-technology we have at our disposal in order to transcend the immediate stimuli and reach the Gestalt form. Bizarrely, by concentrating on nothing, the framework that holds reality together crumbles and we come in touch with the cosmic time of reality.
Meditators are able to connect with Plato’s eidos: the pure form outside the cavern. The word “eidos” is frequently translated as “form”, “perfect form” or even “idea”; but this approach is cruelly myopic. Yes, “eidos” seems to have grammatical ties to the notion of “idea”, but “ideas” for our twenty-first century schizoid man are a very different thing than “ideas” for a post-Socratic Greek Gnostic.
For Plato, “eidos” is closer to the notion of Gestalt than to mind-picture representations you find in psychology. When he talks about the perfect chair outside the cavern, he’s not talking about “the best picture representation” of said chair: he’s referring to the totality of the concept, The Chair, that absolutely perfect, complete and integrated thing God created (he’s not thinking of a photo in an Ikea catalogue).
The Chair is the Gestalt of all chairs, an eidos outside time and space, even. That’s what meditators experience when they say they feel “awake” to reality: it’s this capacity to look at a chair in a phenomenological way, like Heidegger’s hammer. The monk doesn’t see a chair: he sees all the processes involved in making the chair, from the tree, to the wood, to the passionate work from a carpenter, and he also sees all the future possibilities of the chair. His perception of the chair is the same as Siddartha’s at the end of the novel by Herman Hesse: once he awakens, all his worries disappear and he explains he has understood that the present moment is eternal, because the future is already set and so is the past. Everything is balanced, so why worry?
How does meditation work?
The meditative mind allows the meditator to turn off their ego/problem solving capacity in order to access the transcendental order of things. What we are talking about is Kairos-Time: the sense of leaving Chronos-Time behind and elevating ourselves to a state of complete, total integration with Pythagoras’ Cosmos.
However, be warned: nobody stays in Samadhi for a long period of Chronos-time. Unless you’re living in a Buddhist monastery, the pressures of our Chronos-time society force the meditator back into the burnout society. I’ve talked to many people who tell me they feel frustrated with meditation, since they can’t “stay focused on their breath” for long periods of time. They seem to approach meditation as an Olympic athlete would: today, I was mindful for 2 minutes, let me go for 3 next time. This is not how meditation works!
We are searching for the fleeting seconds during which we turn our minds off. I can truthfully say, without exaggeration, that after almost 7 years meditating consistently, I’ve only been able to have one real breath of mindfulness. I’m not kidding, I remember as if it were yesterday: I was laying down, doing a pre-sleep meditation, and suddenly the space between my in-breath and out-breath… Disappeared. I don’t know how to explain it, but my lungs filled up with what felt like the purest oxygen in the world, my body exploded with life and, for just that one breath, I felt a total cosmic connection to the universe.
And that’s it. I never experienced that again but, since I’m conscious of cosmic, Kairos-time, I understand that half a second was an eternity. That’s extremely liberating, as well as being one of the purest experiences of life itself you can have… So give it a shot: take 15 minutes and go sit on the meditation cushion. You’ll be surprised at what you discover…
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