Awareness: the full story

  1. Introduction                 
  2. Foreground and Background   
  3. Supervisory Attention    
  4. Awareness monitors the peripheral data  
  5. Managing Distractions  
  6. Identifying the contents of the mind 
  7. The four categories of mental contents 
  8. Awareness of Action 
  9. Stopping thoughts 
  10. Noticing emotions and restraining impulses  
  11. Evaluating outcomes 
  12. Deep thought
  13. How to do an awareness meditation 
  14. The Spiritual Literature
  15. Psychological Mindfulness

1. INTRODUCTION

Focusing is a marvellous mental skill but it doesn’t operate alone. In demanding situations, it particularly needs the support of another skill that we call awareness, or self-observation or mindfulness. Let me illustrate how this works.

Focusing is a kind of deep, single-minded absorption into one activity. The actor forgets himself and becomes Hamlet. A singer becomes one with her song. The sportsman goes into a zone of effortless flow. This is the kind of deep focus that most meditators can only dream of. 

Yet no matter how passionately involved these people are, another part of their minds is standing back, coolly watching from the background. This watching, however, is not as passive as it might seem to be. It has a purpose. It appraises the action, moment-by-moment; it keeps a weather eye out for possible distractions; and it initiates the fine adjustments necessary for peak performance.  

The actor becomes Hamlet but he also watches the audience response, and adjusts his delivery accordingly. The singer may be a little sick, but she can give everything to a song while still monitoring her cold, and factoring in its effect on her vocal quality. The sportsman will notice if he’s too speedy, or about to seize up before a shot and correct himself. 

This watching faculty also handles potential distractions that may be off-stage. The sportsman may have had a row with his girlfriend that morning. The actor may be worried about his sick mother or a bad medical report. Those preoccupations don’t disappear completely in the heat of the moment, but a good performer know how to calculate for them.

This is the watching mind at work. Each of these people is both doing something and watching what they do. They are focused narrowly on the action, while also being broadly aware of the big picture.  

This ability to reflect on what we are doing, and on whatever is happening in the moment, goes by many names. It is commonly called awareness or self-observation or reflection. Scientists call it ‘higher order consciousness’, which means being aware of being aware. It is also called ‘metacognition’, which means being able to reflect on your thought processes. In psychology, it is introspection for the purpose of self-understanding.  In the religious literature, it is called the ‘watching mind’, or the ‘observer’ or  ‘mindfulness’ or even, with some exaggeration, ‘pure consciousness’. 

Some of these terms are not perfectly compatible with others. The mindfulness of a monk is not the same as the self-observation necessary for a musical or sporting performance. Nor is this surprising, since the purposes are quite different, and anything we do is determined by its goal. Nonetheless I will lump them all together under the general heading of awareness, or self-observation. 

There is one aspect common to them all, however. Awareness at every level is about identifying, evaluating and choosing a response to what is happening in the moment.  Awareness typically involves stopping and holding a particular thought or action in mind in order to assess it more accurately. This conscious perception enables us to override or correct an automatic reaction and make a deliberate, informed response instead. Awareness is thus the basis of thoughtful decision-making whenever that is necessary.   

Sometimes awareness is described as a passive, nonjudgemental state of mind, but this is a rather careless definition. All our actions are based on judgement, and the brain wouldn’t waste energy on a function that had no use. Awareness always involves discernment and evaluation in order to optimise a particular action or response, however small. That is its purpose.

2. FOREGROUND AND BACKGROUND

Meditation is all about how we direct our attention. We focus on the breath or the body but we soon find that it doesn’t happen in a void. Whenever we give priority to any one thing, we are still faintly aware of other sensations, thoughts and feelings in the background.  

We can never give 100% of our attention to any one thing, either in meditation or in life, and completely exclude the rest. Whether we want to or not, some proportion of our attention, maybe 20-30%, always has to notice the other things in our inner and outer environment. In fact, it would be counter-productive, dangerous and actually impossible to ignore them. This means that our attention is always distributed to some degree between the foreground and the background of the mind. Ideally, we give high quality, sustained attention to our chosen object in the foreground, and low-quality, as-required attention to everything else.  

When we meditate, we try to sharpen our ability to selectively focus on one thing. This has the effect of highlighting the division between foreground and background, between the object of attention and the peripheral data.  

The ability to focus is enormously important, but paying attention is also about how we process the peripheral data. In fact our ability to focus at all depends on how intelligently we handle that constant influx of information. Although most of it is trivial or irrelevant, we can’t utterly ignore it. Nor can we focus on any of it for long, since that would interrupt our primary focus. Nonetheless we still need to subtly process and respond to it in some way.   

It can be helpful here to make a distinction between ‘focusing’ and ‘noticing’. Although we may notice that there are birds or traffic outside, this is not the same as focusing on them. We know that we’re breathing, but we’re not focused on it. We can notice dozens of things simultaneously in the background, but we can only focus on, or give priority to, one thing at a time.

The simplest way to think of awareness is this: Focusing and awareness are the two poles of attention. When we direct our attention to one thing, we call it focusing. When we notice things coming and going in the background, we call it awareness. Focusing sees one thing deeply. It gets in close and engages the object. Awareness notices many things lightly and from a distance.   

Awareness is typically about objectivity.  Awareness implies a sense of self, an ‘I’, looking at an object from the outside, whether that be a thought, a sensation, a feeling or an action. It is a dualistic, self and other, perspective. This objectivity is the basis of making good choices. It is what enables us to stand back, evaluate what we see and compare options, even in an instant.   

Focusing is easy to understand. We usually know when we’re focused and when we’re not. There is no mystery here. Awareness is more sophisticated, more varied in its functions, and more deeply embedded in the homeostatic, self-regulatory processes of the body. It not only attends to the peripheral activity in the body and mind. It also supervises the act of focusing itself. Focusing is where the action happens, but awareness, whether fully conscious or not, is the power behind the throne.

3. SUPERVISORY ATTENTION       

Focusing is very powerful. It is the mental force that marshalls our resources, and initiates every action we take, big or small, but it does have a downside. It is a strong light with a narrow beam. On its own, it is prone to tunnel vision and impulsive responses.  Being singleminded, it lacks discrimination and perspective. It can get lost in detail and in the immediacy of the moment, and forget the bigger picture. 

Focusing needs to be sensitive to input from memory, emotion and bodily sensations to stay on track towards its goal. It needs the interaction of other brain functions to operate intelligently. The brain network that co-ordinates this is what psychologists call the ‘supervisory attention system’.  

Supervisory attention is a rather loose scientific concept. It embraces a variety of mental functions such as memory, judgement and foresight, but you can see what it is getting at. The act of focusing requires supervision. We can define focusing as ‘selective attention’ but it operates with the help of ‘supervisory attention’. When this supervisory support becomes fully conscious, we call it self-awareness or self-observation or reflection. This is what gives us the ability to stop, look and choose a response, rather than running on automatic pilot or acting impulsively.  

It may sound like a contradiction in terms, but our awareness is mostly subliminal, operating at or beyond the fringes of consciousness. Whatever we focus on throughout the day always takes the lion’s share of our attention. Awareness or supervisory attention however, does most of its work off-stage, behind the scenes, keeping the space clear for the main action. All day long, it monitors and evaluates the ever-changing input from the body, the mind and senses, the and makes feedback adjustments and corrections accordingly, in line with the bigger picture. Like a good servant, it is almost invisible.   

This on-going, regulatory work would be far too complicated for our conscious minds to manage, and nor is it necessary. Most of the day we don’t need to be particularly self-aware. We operate according to a vast suite of automatic and learnt responses that mostly function very well on their own. We become fully aware of what is happening only when those habitual responses are not up to the task.    

Supervisory attention is the brain’s radar. Whenever we do something, it watches out in case something more rewarding or problematic or conflicting arises. Only then does it make its presence felt. It weighs up the options, and directs our attention to what it regards as most important. In doing so, it often overrules our conscious attempt to focus.

We usually become fully aware only when we have to or want to. At its most basic, it is the brain telling us ‘Be careful! Watch out!’ Awareness is frequently a ‘Stop and look before you act’ mechanism, or ‘Watch what you’re doing in order to do it better’. Situations of novelty, danger or temptation are likely to trigger off awareness, overrule our automatic reflexes and force us to look deliberately at what is happening. Our awareness typically becomes heightened in situations that could go wrong; or in those with high potential for reward; or in those where clear thought or finesse are essential for success. 

To be more self-aware sharpens our understanding and fine-tunes our response, but it does comes at a price. Because we have to stop and look, if only for a nanosecond, it slows us down. It gives us accuracy but at the expense of speed. It also takes more mental energy, more actual glucose and oxygen in the brain, than ticking over on automatic.

Because of all this, it would be counterproductive to be fully alert when our automatic responses would do. We don’t need heightened awareness to put on a sock or to do the dishes. We would exhaust ourselves very quickly if we tried to live like this. Awareness is an higher-order, emergent function of the brain that has evolved out of our more routine mental processes. These work perfectly well most of the time, and we don’t need to micro-manage them. Too much awareness can even be pathological. Hypervigilance, perfectionism and an inability to relax are all signs of excessive awareness.

4. AWARENESS MONITORS THE PERIPHERAL DATA

Focusing effectively divides the world in two. The meditation object gets priority. It hogs centre stage, and everything else falls into the background, becoming peripheral data. In meditation, to focus means giving all one’s free attention to the breath or the body, while awareness, the complementary function, monitors the rest. 

There doesn’t need to be any conflict here. Focusing and awareness are both essential brain functions, and they can share metabolic resources in an amicable fashion. Ideally there should be about a 75-25% attentional split between them, depending on the degree of congestion in our minds on any day. Focusing is the bright light of selective attention, while awareness, or supervisory attention, works supportively in the background.

Focusing takes effort but it does make the rest of the brain remarkably quiet. When we focus on one thing, the electrical activity in brain regions unrelated to that task decreases significantly.  

This means that when we focus on the body we are still conscious of the room, outside sounds and residual thoughts. They haven’t been excluded completely, but their representations in the brain are only activated to the point of our knowing what they are. We notice their presence dispassionately, and our response is absolutely minimal.

This ‘just watching’ or ‘noticing with detachment’ is not completely inert. It still takes a fraction of our attention because it has a useful purpose. It orients us in space and keeps us in touch with changes in our inner and outer environments. It tells us where we are, and how we feel, and what else is happening. 

This ‘just watching’ has another subtle function. With no virtually involvement from the conscious mind, it monitors the data and abandons what is trivial or useless. It routinely evaluates the vast majority of that peripheral information as unworthy of further attention, just like the millions of other stimuli we encounter each day.

This is why awareness is so helpful. The subliminal noticing, judging and discarding keeps the mind clear of trivia, and frees up attentional resources for what we’ve chosen to focus on. 

Noticing peripheral data doesn’t interfere with the focusing so long as we process things no more than necessary. Awareness acts as a lookout. It filters out trivia. It works like a security guard, keeping out minor distractions. It generally functions like a good secretary, handling the calls the boss doesn’t need to deal with. Our ability to focus would be very mediocre if it didn’t have this supervisory support.

5. MANAGING DISTRACTIONS

Because focusing takes effort and because we so often get distracted, we tend to be pleased when we can stay on track, and annoyed when we are obliged to notice the peripheral input. This means that meditators tend to devalue awareness and regard the periphery as little more than a zone of potential distractions to be ignored as totally as possible. They feel they should be able to focus at will if they tried hard enough, like a commander in chief, but they soon find that just isn’t possible.  

The mind works more like a committee than an individual. We can’t directly control it from the top down. Its numerous functions work co-operatively through unpredictable, non-linear feedback mechanisms. 

This means that distractions occur for a good reason. Focusing, the apparent commander in chief, is far too one-eyed to manage the complexity of what the body and mind need to do at any time. The supervisory attention system monitors the big picture, and alerts us when it hits a problem that can’t be solved automatically. It then lifts that issue up into consciousness and dumps it on the stage.    

This is why, when we try to focus on the breath or the body, we are still visited by intrusive thoughts, sensations and emotions. It is the supervisory system, not our conscious mind, that has the primary role of allocating attention.  

This explains why we have so many random, peripheral thoughts during the day, and  why we have such difficulty focusing when we want to. Whenever the mind has nothing outwardly to do, it doesn’t just stop and rest. It reverts to what is called its ‘default network’. This subliminal stream of consciousness is forever reviewing what has recently happened or engaged its attention. Our awareness watches over this material and extracts problems, conflicts and options for us to mull over. 

A particular intrusive thought may need no more than a fleeting glance, but we shouldn’t try to ignore it completely. It typically takes only a second to stop a thought in its tracks, evaluate its importance and choose our response to it. We can then decide to either engage it or let it go. The primary response is simply to decide whether or not it deserves any more attention at all. 

When we meditate, the vast majority of peripheral thoughts can be abandoned on the spot. Any thought that really snags our attention, however, may need a few more seconds. Trying to suppress or ignore an unwanted thought or emotion doesn’t help us relax. It actually increases muscle tension and mental distractibility. This is why trying to think positively can actually increase, rather than decrease, stress. If we consciously acknowledge a troublesome thought, we can usually diminish our response to it and the inner conflict fades. The inner space becomes a little clearer. 

 Awareness also manages what I call ‘interference’. Often we meditate under the heavy weather of some durable mood or problem or physical pain. This may not distract us but its lingering presence drains our enthusiasm. To be aware means factoring in this energy drain without being overly annoyed by it, and persisting with the meditation anyway. Even when we don’t feel good, it is still valuable to relax and be calm.

Focusing calms the mind down but awareness tidies it up. The ideal state in any meditation is not when there are no distractions at all. It is when incoming stimuli are given just the right amount of attention they require, no more and no less. If a particular thought gets less attention than it needs, it may continue to niggle until it gets it. If it gets too much attention, it will proliferate and take over. In practice, when meditators  examine their thoughts, they usually find that most of them are nowhere near as important as they first seem to be. This screening of thoughts is called ‘interference management’ by brain scientists. 

The basic work of awareness, namely noticing, judging and choosing a response to peripheral stimuli, also tells us where we’re at. By the end of a meditation, we know what mood we’re in and how our bodies and minds feel. This total body-mind-emotion picture of who we are in the moment comes from the awareness aspect of the meditation, not the focusing. It comes from what we notice along the way.  Focusing enables us to relax, but without awareness we wouldn’t know what it felt like.

6. IDENTIFYING THE CONTENTS OF THE MIND

Self-observation and reflection are nothing new in world history. What makes meditation unique are two factors. The first is the emphasis on bodily relaxation and mental stillness, or good focus, as a precondition. The second is the consequent ability to isolate the individual contents of the mind, and to see and evaluate them in fine detail.

Meditation gives us a conscious but non-verbal sense of self, the feeling of a somatosensory ‘I’ grounded in the body. With this as a foundation, we no longer react impulsively to stimuli from either the inside or the outside. This confers a wonderful feeling of control and emotional restraint, plus a sense of objectivity towards whatever is happening in the moment, good or bad.  This is yet another reason why good body-awareness is so useful in meditation. It not only relaxes us profoundly. It makes it so much easier to examine a thought dispassionately, without getting lost in it.

When we do look inside, what are we likely to see? Henry James said the mind is never still or even remotely stable. He said it is like a stream of consciousness, with individual thoughts, sensations and feelings coming and going endlessly at random.

Meditation takes this perspective further by deliberately holding and examining individual stimuli. It is like slowing down the mental video to capture detail that would be otherwise be fuzzy or invisible. It takes the ‘Stop, look and evaluate’ function of awareness down to the atomic scale of individual thoughts and sensations.

The gold standard of awareness is that we can verbally describe what is happening in the moment. In early Buddhism, this is called ‘naming’ or ‘labelling’. The Buddha explained how to systematically develop this skill in a short text called The Four Foundations of Mindfulness. He describes awareness, or mindfulness, of the body as the foundation for awareness of emotions and then awareness of states of mind. All this in turn is the foundation for the clear, analytic thought that leads to enlightenment.

Nor is there anything mysterious about what the Buddha meant by awareness. It means being able to describe, or ‘name’ what is happening in the moment, be it an action, a sensation, an emotion or a thought. In the sutra he asks the monk to silently talk to himself and to use simple labels to clarify his mental experience. Like the good teacher that he was, he gave many examples of this. Here are a few of them quoted directly from the sutra.  

“When the monk takes a long breath, he knows ‘This is a long breath’. When he takes a short breath, he knows ‘This is a short breath.’ When he feels a pleasant sensation, he knows ‘This is a pleasant sensation.’When he feels an unpleasant sensation, he knows ‘This is an unpleasant sensation.’ When he is angry (or sad or confused or bored), he knows ‘This is anger etc’. When he is is calm (or energised or happy or indifferent), he knows ‘This is calm etc’.  In practice, the monk would just be saying just single words to himself, such as ‘long’ or ‘short’ or ‘pleasant’ or ‘sad’ or ‘calm’, as appropriate, as a way of accurately nailing those mental phenomena.   

The monk was not trying to immediately get rid of his anger or desire. He was simply trying to categorise it in words. That is what awareness means. If he did this repeatedly, the Buddha said he automatically would come to recognise when his desire was increasing and when it was fading, and also what caused it to come and go. He argued that this clear perception of causality would all of its own start to resolve the issue, and in fact, this is how awareness usually works. To see a problem clearly and in perspective is halfway towards its resolution.  Awareness starts at this very basic level of being able to identify a particular action, thought, sensation or emotion, as it is happening.

Language and categorising are powerful tools. They are at the evolutionary peak of brain development. Being able to describe to ourselves what is happening in our minds is the basic principle of what is called Higher Order Consciousness. It also explains why Cognitive Behaviour Therapy works so well. To be conscious of our thoughts helps to control them. To be aware of our impulses helps to restrain them. 

Language and categorising operate out of the rational left hemisphere of the brain. Through feedback mechanisms, they counteract both the more emotive right hemisphere, and also the limbic system in the centre of the brain where emotions are generated. This means that the deliberate use of language inhibits the emotional drive of troublesome thoughts and gives us more choice. This ‘stop and look before you act’ mechanism enables us to make the kinds of considered, balanced decisions that are the hallmarks of intelligence and maturity. Awareness is at the heart of good judgement, and it starts with being able to reflect on what is happening in the moment.

7. THE FOUR CATEGORIES OF MENTAL CONTENTS

To analyse the contents of the mind, it is useful to place them into categories. They fall quite easily into being either actions, thoughts, sensations or emotions. This division also makes good anatomical sense. Sensations are processed in the sensory cortex in the top, back and sides of the brain. Emotions are processed in the limbic system in the centre of the brain. Thoughts are processed in the prefrontal cortex in the front of the brain. And actions are initiated from the motor cortex, which is a strip across the top of the brain.  

Because the brain operates as a cooperative network of separate modules, it also makes sense to talk about our each having not one brain, but at least four. We all have a sensory brain, an emotional brain, a thinking brain and a motor, or physical action, brain, each with their particular location within the brain as a whole. We can also say there are four main brain functions, namely sensing, feeling, thinking and action.

These four brains all work seamlessly together for a common goal, namely some form of productive behaviour. The sensory brain takes in information. The emotional brain evaluates it. The thinking brain considers the options if necessary, and initiates action through the motor brain. 

Most of the time, we don’t need a high degree of self-observation. This means that although we are conscious when we do the shopping or answer the phone, we are not particularly self-aware. We are not reflecting on how we are doing it. We can easily upgrade the mind into full consciousness by asking ourselves “What is going on here?’ or  ‘How am I doing this?’ but we don’t usually stay in that zone for long. It would inhibit the natural flow of our daily activities if we did.  

As a result, we are often not as self-aware or thoughtful as we assume ourselves to be. We  also tend to be quite selective in our awareness, being sensitive to certain aspects of our behaviour and blind to others. Moreover, not all the four categories of action, thought, sensation and emotion are equally easy to identify. Action is the most recognisable. We can all identify what we are doing and how we are doing it, but thoughts are more complicated. Usually we can identify what we happen to be thinking about, but sometimes our thoughts are so confused that we can’t even do that.  

Body-sensations and emotions are far more difficult to detect. Our thoughts and actions tend to hog the stage of consciousness. All day long we focus primarily on what we are doing or on what we are thinking about. This marginalises our awareness of body-sensations and emotions, which are then are forced to do their work off-stage, making only occasional entries into consciousness. Most of us have only a limited ability to recognise the flux of emotion within us. In fact a stressed person with a runaway mind may have virtually no awareness of his body or his emotions, apart from knowing that he feels really bad.  

Awareness is often described as a simple function, like a mirror, that reflects any stimulus accurately. In fact it is nothing like that. We all specialise, giving priority over our lifetimes to whatever gives us the most satisfaction, and ignoring other possibilities so totally that we many not even know what are. 

For example, a sportman may cultivate an exceptionally high awareness of his body in motion. A musician may do the same but add on a conscious awareness of feeling. A writer or teacher or a highly sociable person may cultivate language skills (i.e. thinking) plus emotional sensitivity. A scientist may cultivate rational thought at the expense of everything else. 

Yet science tells us that no brain function is capable of working well on its own. The mind is brilliant because of its immense interconnectivity, with every part talking to and arguing with every other part. Even the great scientist has no choice but to think with some input from his gut. 

Most of us could benefit from being more sensitive to the full spectrum what happens in our minds. Meditation particularly helps by shifting our usual emphasis away from thought and action back towards the body. This has the added benefit of heightening our awareness, and therefore our control, of the emotions that drive our behaviour.

Because we can switch into self-awareness in a flash, we commonly assume we are more aware than we actually are. There is, however, a simple way of checking. According to the Buddha, the gold standard of awareness is that we can verbally describe a particular action, thought, sensation or emotion, as it happens, and hold it in our minds to examine it. If we can’t do this ‘stop and look’ procedure confidently, we can’t really say that we are fully aware of something.

8. AWARENESS OF ACTION

It is easy to switch into present-moment awareness. When something important calls our attention, we just have to ask ‘What is this?’ and identify it. Since it is likely to be an action, a thought, an emotion or a sensation, we can refine the question to suit those categories. We can ask  ‘What am I doing?’ or ‘What is this thought?’ or ‘What is this emotion?’ or ’What is this sensation?’ Let’s look at the awareness of action first.

It is usually quite obvious what we are doing at any time. We may be walking, or working on the computer, or shopping, or doing housework, or reading the paper. We can easily name or identify these with single word labels such as ‘walking’ or ‘reading’ or ‘eating’. 

This perception invariably flows into an evaluation and a response. After the question “what am I doing?” comes another, namely “Is this worth doing? Yes or no?” When we stand back and consider the matter, it is usually perfectly obvious either way. 

This evaluation leads to the response. If the answer is ‘No’, we stop doing it. If the answer is ‘Yes’, a new question arises, namely ‘Can I do this better? Could I do it more efficiently or more comfortably?’  

Awareness is basically a ‘Stop and look before you act’ function, or ‘Watch what you do in order to do it better.’ It is about seeing the action more clearly in order to correct or optimise what we do. In fact, this is the usual meaning of the word ‘mindfulness’ as in the sense of ‘Be more mindful’. 

Awareness is often described as a disengaged, watching state of mind. In fact an act as simple as ‘just watching’ still involves stopping, evaluating and choosing a response. We can be quite sure that our brains will do this automatically for us, as they do all day long, if we don’t do it consciously.

9. STOPPING THOUGHTS

It is not hard to observe an action while we are in the middle of doing it.  We can’t say the same about our thoughts, however. They can be lightning fast and mercurial, and so numerous that they are almost impossible to track. Moreover this scattergun effect is made worse by stress, adrenaline and fatigue. 

This means that we can’t reflect on a thought while it is still running, as we can with an action. We have to deliberately stop it first. This is why meditation, with its heavy emphasis on bodily stillness and relaxation is so useful. A tense or restless body will always be agitated by the excitement of thought. If the body is calm, it is far less vulnerable. 

We can stop a thought in the usual way by naming it. We ask ‘What is this thought?’ or ‘What am I thinking about?’ and capture it in a single word label. This can be surprisingly difficult to do, since thoughts usually want to ramble on. I find that when I ask students to name a dominant thought, they are very likely to give me a open-ended potted history instead. Naming a thought, however, means restraining its natural momentum. It means putting it into a category, such as ‘work’ or ‘money’ or ‘Mary’.  To do this well, to really slow the thought down and hold it, usually takes more practice than we might expect.

An adjunct to naming is to get a mental image of the thought. If we are thinking about Mary, we could both name her and picture her. If we are thinking about work, we could say ‘work’ but also picture the desk. This picturing involves holding the image in a location just behind our eyes, or just in front of us, or somewhere in our spatial field. In fact, ‘holding the object in front of you’ is a metaphor that the Buddha used to describe this technique. 

To verbally identify or picture a thought has several effects. Firstly it stops its momentum and weakens the accompanying emotion. Secondly it objectifies the thought. We break the conversation we were having with it, and see it from the outside. Thirdly, it pigeon-holes a thought as belonging to a certain class or category. It’s ‘Yet another thought about Mary’. This makes it more generic and easier to evaluate in line with similar past experiences.  

People often describe this process of containing thoughts in images. They say that they package up the thought, or file it away, or put it on a list, or postpone it till later, or throw it in the trash, but the most common image involves its spatial location. They typically say that they push the thought away. They put it in the background, or into the past or future where it belongs. They create a space between their sense of self, grounded in their bodies, and the thought some distance away.  

When we’ve answered the question ‘What is this thought?’, the next question arises, namely ‘Is this worth thinking about right now? Yes or no?’ Once we are fully aware of a thought and its relative value, we can consciously choose our response. 

The most basic choice, and one that we can’t avoid making, is whether to give that thought more attention or or not. We could see it as ‘just another thought’, like a million others and trash it. If it is more important, we could postpone it till later, or process it a little more before dropping it. If the thought is particularly useful, we could even choose to stop meditating and think more deliberately about it. Although we commonly have an ideal of meditation as a thought-free zone, that is a fallacy. I suspect that everyone spends a little time thinking when they meditate. The point is to do it in a conscious,  controlled and voluntary fashion.   

10. NOTICING EMOTION AND RESTRAINING IMPULSES 

The Buddha recognised that our thoughts and perceptions are always accompanied by feeling. He said we always like or dislike any action, thought, sensation or emotion, however small, to some degree. Psychologists call this the ‘valence’, the positive or negative charge of any stimulus. This results in our unconscious tendency to either engage with it or withdraw from it, and it explains a lot of our impulsive behaviour.  

Perceptions always comes packaged up with an emotional assessment and a subtle, but noticeable, movement within the body.  In fact the physical reaction has often started milliseconds before the conscious perception. Researchers have also shown that if people find certain nonsense words unpleasant, they will respond with increased muscle tension and elevated cortisol, nonsense or not. There is no such thing as a pure, emotion-free, disembodied perception.  

Emotion is particularly useful to notice because it drives our inclinations to do this or that, all day long. We are often surprised by what we find ourselves doing. Why did I walk into that shop just now, or stop reading the paper, or snap at the checkout girl, or feel sorry for myself, or have a drink, or buy that, or open the fridge door, or get out of bed at just that moment? These are rarely considered, conscious decisions. These actions are usually prompted from within by some unseen emotion.  

We can become more conscious of an emotion or an impulse by asking the questions ‘What is this emotion?’ or ‘Why did I do that?’ Naming an emotion, when we can do it, is very useful, but they rarely fit into neat categories. Naming emotions doesn’t quite work as well as naming thoughts, which are already verbal by nature. Being more embedded in the body, they are not so easily captured in words.   

What matters more when we try to grasp an emotion is a bodily feeling of stillness and openness towards it. Good awareness has a very physical feeling, and when we get it, it ‘clicks’. When we sense an emotion objectively, it tends to disarm the muscular tension around it and we can feel our inner resistance to it fading. 

Meditation is very much about restraint, about slowing down, stopping and looking at what is happening. When we meditate, we stop moving and sit down. We stop thoughts and evaluate them. We restrain our emotional impulses and consider alternatives. This kind of self-reflective awareness of our thoughts and impulses is the basis of what psychologists call ‘emotional regulation’. 

11. EVALUATING OUTCOMES

So let’s summarise where we’ve got to.  Focusing remains the muscle man of the brain. All day long, it marshalls our thoughts and behaviour towards productive, physical action. Focusing streamlines our energy towards the hundreds of goals, big and small, that make up an ordinary life. 

To do this well, it needs guidance. Awareness, or supervisory attention, helps us make clear en-route judgements and decisions towards those many goals. It does so by identifying, evaluating and choosing responses to whatever is happening in the moment. It turns out that a sufficient degree of focus and self-awareness are essential for success in anything we do, while poor focus and a lack of awareness can be nothing short of disastrous.  

Let’s assume we are meditating for the purpose of relaxation and mental calm, but how can we tell if we are succeeding? If we couldn’t evaluate the outcomes or read the signs of progress, we would soon give up.   

 Fortunately, the mind does not forget what we are aiming for. Buried in the depths it holds a detailed template of that goal, a complex set of homeostatic set-points, based on past memories of how our bodies and minds feel when they are at peace. It compares what we are doing, moment by moment, against that template, so we have guidelines to adjust our behaviour towards. This is how awareness gives us our intuitive sense of what to do at any moment: it knows where we need to go.  

Awareness typically works as a troubleshooter. In fact, noticing what is not right, or so-called error-detection, may be its primary role. It notices in great detail what is out of balance, both consciously and below the surface. It is highly sensitive to inner conflicts and disturbances across the whole body-mind-emotion spectrum. Awareness is hardwired to pick up what is negative, since identifying problems is a key to restoring homeostatic balance. It particularly notices unnecessary muscular tension, runaway thoughts and disturbing moods, since these all have to be acknowledged to some degree before we can relax at all. As it recognises the divergence between where we are and what we are trying to achieve, it guides the adjustments.  

When the body and mind are relaxed and calm however, awareness shifts its attention to the positives. Ultimately the mind is a pleasure-seeking machine. Because the lovely states of mind are usually more subtle than the negatives, and tend to appear after those are largely resolved, they can easily be missed if our minds are at all sleepy or dull. 

If we stay alert however, our awareness will try to optimise the good results even further. It will reinforce beautiful states of mind such as deep stillness, inner silence, physical bliss, vision, sensory delight, mental clarity and control. In other words, awareness, with its deep global view of the body and mind, is always assessing what we do and orienting us towards the best possible outcome. It holds the goal in mind.

12. DEEP THOUGHT

Finally, why do we meditate at all?  Relaxation is good, but it is hardly an ultimate life goal. Mental stillness, focus, present-moment awareness and self-understanding are also good. This may sound counterintuitive, but to the Buddha, these were just the prerequisites. He said that the purpose of meditation is a kind of deep thought sometimes translated as ‘penetrative insight’. This just means being able to think clearly and at depth about what is important, so we can make crucial decisions about how to live. In psychology, this is roughly equivalent to what we call the ‘executive functions.’

We can agree with the Buddha that at least one purpose of meditation is to help us think better and act more consciously.  Where we will disagree with him is in our goals. The Buddha was a severe ascetic. His ideal was a life of extreme inactivity, detachment and mental stillness. It is hard for us nowadays to find anything attractive about this. Virtually no-one wants the Buddha’s kind of enlightenment any longer. If they did they would follow his not particularly difficult instructions. When we meditate, we will invariably use this skill in the service of a much richer, more varied and more active life. Our technique may be essentially the same as the Buddha’s but our goals are bound to be different.  

So how is meditative thought different from our usual mental activity? Its tone is indicated by words such as reflection, contemplation, self-understanding and insight.  Here are a few pointers.  

Meditative thought doesn’t lose itself in the runaway momentum of our usual thinking. It is more detached and objective. It is quite slow and observant, and often the ‘thought’ being observed just stops. Meditative thought operates laterally rather than linearly. It tends to hold the issue in mind and notice the arising of associations, rather than chasing down a solution. When meditating, we can also stop a thought when it starts to run mechanically, or switch at will from one thought to another.   

Meditative thought also relies on a continuous, moment-to-moment, awareness of the body. This enables us to regard a thought objectively, from the standpoint of the body. It also guarantees that the thinking process is not purely verbal. It involve more conscious input from subtle body responses and emotions, and we are likely to think as much with images as with words. Because the body is more relaxed, the  intuitive, problem-solving faculty of sleep is closer to the surface. Meditative thought thus involves a more wholistic interplay of words, body-sensations, emotion and images. 

Finally, the answers, or what are called ‘insights’ typically tend to pop up or gradually emerge out of this interplay. They come from the total picture rather than being constructed systematically in words. 

To an undisciplined mind, this might sound like reverie or daydreaming. In fact a formal awareness meditation is far more precise and controlled. You still stay focused on what you are doing and resist distractions. You screen out peripheral data. You can describe what you are thinking about. You can choose which aspect of an issue to focus on and stop a train of thought when necessary. And you always have a fairly clear attunement to your body and emotional state.

13. HOW TO DO AN AWARENESS MEDITATION

The simplest way to learn is to use my set of guided meditation CDs on Awareness, but let me give you some ideas about how to start. 

Awareness has one great advantage over a formal sit-down meditation. We can do it in an instant anywhere, just by asking questions such as ‘What is happening here?’ or ‘What is this thought?’ Or  ‘What is this emotion?’ or  ‘What was that?’ Asking self-reflective questions like this is the very essence of higher order consciousness. If you asked yourself these kinds of questions 50 times a day for a few months, your awareness would increase exponentially without any need to sit down and meditate.

Awareness is also a marvellous formal practice, but I find people usually grow into it slowly over months or longer. Learning to relax comes first; then mental stillness and focus; and only then comes the full flowering of awareness. 

People usually get familiar with the subskills of awareness first. When people start to meditate, they soon realise they also have to monitor the peripheral data in some way. The skill of awareness starts here, by learning to ‘just watch’ or to ‘notice thoughts and sensations with detachment’.  

Over time, they get better at other aspects of awareness such as managing distractions, recognising what is happening in the moment, improving their ability to focus and evaluating outcomes.  

This is the point at which a true awareness meditation can begin. When people do Insight or Vipassana retreats, this is what they do. They still do all the basic work of any meditation. They calm their bodies and minds, disarm distractions and sharpen their mental quality. But they also takes the opportunity for intuitive thought. They give themselves more licence to analyse the contents of their minds, and investigate what is important to them.   

So how can we manage this as a skill? The simple answer is 50-50. All day long our attention is distributed between what we are focusing on and the peripheral data. The ideal distribution is about 75 to 25%, give or take 10% either way. We give high quality, sustained attention to what we are doing, and low quality, as-required attention to the rest.

In an awareness meditation, we go for a roughly 50-50 division instead. We still focus on the body, but give a lot more attention than usual to the peripheral data. We let ourselves investigate individual thoughts and feelings, but we still keep 50% of our attention in the body. It is like thinking through the body. In psychology, this concept is called ‘embodied cognition.’  

 Meditation can train us in relaxation, mental stillness and present-moment awareness. It can enable us to control thoughts; to restrain our impulses and use emotion to make good judgements. Above all, it helps us think clearly about what we personally find important. That alone would be sufficient reason to do it.

14: A FOOTNOTE ON THE SPIRITUAL LITERATURE  

Meditation comes from spiritual traditions whose values are very different from ours, and we intuitively know this. Hardly any Western meditator is sufficiently inspired to read the old Buddhist or Yogic texts, or to study in depth from a contemporary teacher. Meditators tend to freely adapt whatever feels helpful, which is how it should be, but this approach does comes with problems. 

If our knowledge of the tradition is slight, we will tend to inadvertently take on its values anyway. Even our do-it-yourself meditation is likely to be a watered down version of Buddhist or Yogic methods along with their limitations. Those Asian disciplines typically try to attain peace through perfect stillness and emotional detachment, and these traditional goals are still likely to influence us.  

The first problem is that meditation is a monastic tradition. The ideal remains that you should become a monk or a devotee and withdraw yourself as completely as possible from the world. Monks may seem to smile a lot, but there is a good case for arguing that traditional meditation values are narcissistic, life-denying, sexist and indifferent to the material well-being of others. Nor would the Buddha essentially disagree with this assessment. This means that a Western meditator has to either accomodate himself to those values, or ignore or abandon them, or put a more emotionally attractive spin on them. They don’t fit naturally at all with our modern lives.  

The second problem is that meditation has beliefs about the body and mind that are quite at odds with the Western scientific world view. These views are so deeply rooted, that this problem doesn’t automatically go away when is taught or explained by educated westerners. 

Buddhism and Yoga believe in an extreme duality of body and mind. Their ultimate goal is a pure, transcendental consciousness that is independent of the body and death. This depersonalised mental state is effectively regarded as Nirvana or Liberation. It usually implies a belief in karma and reincarnation as well.   

In ordinary life this divine consciousness is seen to manifest as the Observer Mind or The Watcher, and this idea is often expressed in images. The mind seen as being inherently pure, like a mirror, divorced from what it reflects. Or it is seen as inherently empty, like the sky. As an Indian aphorism expresses it: ‘I am not my body. I am not my thoughts. I am not my emotions. I am the pure watching mind.’ In fact, this is a body-mind duality far more extreme than that of Descartes, who at least regarded rational thought as a function of the soul. Nowadays no scientist would take that kind of duality seriously at all.  

So does it matter? If we see meditation just as a search for inner stillness and peace, it probably doesn’t. Peace is hard to find and anything that works has its value.

However, if we want to develop the self-observant, self-aware aspects of meditation, it makes more sense to keep our feet on the ground, and to use of the best resources available to us. These have to include what psychology, science, rational thought, a western education and our own experience can tell us. These will give us a far more detailed and nuanced understanding of the mind than anything that a monk would tell us, and at bottom these two views are not compatible at all.

15. MINDFULNESS

Of course, westerners have been adapting meditation to a secular, non-celibate society for decades now with some success.  One of the most practical adaptions is mindfulness, and it comes in many variants. The most useful is that of ‘being mindful’ or ‘being present’ or ‘noticing what is happening as it happens’. It also means ‘paying attention to what you are doing’ in order to both do it better. Sometimes mindfulness has a hedonistic quality, namely ‘Take time to smell the roses. The present is all you’ve got’.

Yet mindfulness can still have the feeling and orientation of a monastic discipline. Since not even the best monks can sit still all day long, mindfulness was developed so they could focus on the sensory world during their ordinary daily activities. Its purpose was to stop their minds from drifting into fruitless thoughts about the past and future. It is often described quite strictly in terms of ‘when eating, just eat. When walking, just walk’.

For both Asian and Western monks, mindfulness was a way of guarding the mind moment-by-moment to ward off temptation or impure fantasies. It was seen as a way of withdrawing from engagement with the world into the safety of pure intellect.  

Mindfulness is frequently presented as having a therapeutic, anti-depressive value. This approach is derived from Buddhism and publicised by Eckhardt Tolle and others. It means paying careful attention to the sensory present to avoid useless thought and painful rumination over the past and future.  

Finally there is what is called ‘Psychological Mindfulness’. Its main spokesman is the American writer Jon Kabat-Zinn. In 1979, he developed his Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction program (MBSR) for people in chronic pain out of the Burmese Vipassana tradition. A Vipassana retreat typically runs for 10 days and is based on breath and bodyscan meditations. Kabat-Zinn adapted this format to an 8-week, non-residential program. This involves about 80 hours of practice, and it is the most structured meditation program now available to health professionals. 

Kabat-Zinn defines mindfulness as a state of ‘moment-to-moment, nonjudgmental awareness’. He and others typically gloss it as a state of acceptance, curiosity and compassion towards whatever happens. With minor variations, this definition has become industry standard in psychology.  

Psychological Mindfulness is based on a core of good meditation practice, which is why it works as well as it does. I am also sure that psychologists who use mindfulness, being practical people, will adapt it in ways that are useful.  The problem with Psychological Mindfulness comes with its definition as ‘non-judgmental’ awareness.  It may be useful for some people to be less judgmental or self-critical than they are, or to suspend or supress judgement temporarily so they can make a more rational assessment. However, it makes no sense to try to abandon judgement altogether. Making good judgements is essential for a good life. 

Judgment is an integral part of even the slightest perception or action. We can’t help but evaluate virtually everything we notice as either pleasant or unpleasant to some degree. It would be futile to try to weed this tendency out and disastrous if we could. All our higher mental functions are dependent on this ability to make discriminations.  

To refrain from judging altogether is to effectively say that nothing we do, think or perceive is more important than anything else. Alternatively, it means that nothing has any value, good or bad. It is even hard to imagine what a nonjudging state of mind could be like, other than complete docility, indifference or resignation. At best it is more of a spiritual ideal than an everyday reality.  

Not even Buddhism supports this view of mindfulness. A famous American monk, Thanissaro Bhikkhu, said recently “We often hear mindfulness described as a nonjudging state of mind, but that was not how the Buddha saw it”. This is quite damning, since Kabat-Zinn claims authority from Buddhism.

The Buddha, like all sensible people, took the judgement of right and wrong for granted. He saw what he called ‘right mindfulness’ as a tool for distinguishing good and bad thoughts, emotions and actions in order to lead a good life. He certainly not did want us to regard rage or lust with nonjudgmental acceptance and curiosity, as Kabat-Zinn suggests.

Mindfulness used to be a reasonably clear concept. It is about being able to describe what you are doing, thinking and feeling in the moment. Kabat-Zinn and his psychological colleagues have undermined it by conflating it with being nonjudgmental, accepting and compassionate. These fuzzy moral concepts sit awkwardly with the straightforward cognitive dynamics of awareness. Because of this muddle around the term ‘mindfulness’ in the psychological context, I always prefer to use the word ‘awareness’ instead.

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