Meditation – sort of

Meditation brings a lot of contentment to a lot of people, but it is not for me. Oh, I’ve tried it, but I can’t get around a feeling that I’d rather be doing things than sitting there musing on things. Introspection yields practically nothing for me.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t ponder on life, the Universe and all that as anyone who has ever read any of my pondering in this blog and elsewhere will know. In particular I have a fascination for numbers and mathematics. I’ve also wondered about most of the things that occur as topics in philosophy at one time or another.

These musings occur mostly when something triggers them, like a comment in a blog that I’m reading, or the title of the latest book on philosophy. Or even something as mundane as a lotto draw. Or washing up. Any of those can trigger a period of thought about some topic.

In case anyone is wondering, washing up can trigger thoughts about bubbles, or caustic curves, or music when two items of crockery produce a note when they touch during the process. Why, for example does an octave resonate in our minds.

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A note sounds remarkably like a note one octave above it, while sounding different to it. Two notes clash or alternatively resonate, and we call them consonant or dissonant. OK, part of the answer to that one is that if the ratio of the frequencies notes is simple, then the notes are consonant, whereas if the ratio of the frequencies is not simple, the notes are dissonant. However, it is not as simple as that.

Three notes for a chord and things get even more complex, and yet composers seem to intuitively know the rules and complexities and use and even bend them for their own purposes. One composer’s consonance is another composer’s assonance.

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Meditation seems to have benefits for many people, and some organisations have reported benefits from introducing meditation into the workplace. Presumably these benefits outweigh the cost of the time lost in meditation, otherwise it would be of little benefit to the organisation.

That’s the crux of the matter, really. Is the time spent in meditation worth the cost in time taken to meditate? Is it better to spend your time out in the open walking and observing the views, the plants and animals around you, or to stay in one spot and meditating on a flower or whatever? Of course, you can tramp the trails and meditate as some level as you go.

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A form of meditation is introspection, where the person who is meditating tries to examine his or her conscious thoughts or feelings. I’ve tried to do this many times and I find it frustrating. It is easy enough to gauge one’s mood and how one is feeling at a particular time, but I have never ever had a glimpse of any conscious thoughts.

Never have I observed my thoughts when I am thinking about something. For instance, I can imagine that I am staring at something green. I can gain no insight into what it means to be looking at something green. Try it yourself. Close your eyes and imagine a uniform greenness. I would say that you can think of greenness, and you can think of yourself thinking of greenness but you can’t think of yourself thinking of greenness at the same time that you are thinking of greenness.

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Similarly, we can think of ourselves winning the lotto and what we would do with the money, but we can’t, at the same time, think of ourselves thinking of winning the lotto. We can think about our thoughts, but only after we have thought them. We can’t think of the while they are happening.

Out thoughts don’t have to be about real things. There are people, usually mathematicians who try to visualise objects in four dimensions rather than the usual three. Actually, visualising three dimensional objects is hard enough. Try this. Imagine a flexible torus (doughnut shape). Imagine that you make a small puncture in it and pull the edges of the puncture over the torus.

In other words, try to turn it inside out. What shape do you get? The answer turns out to be another torus, but it is not easily visualised. In addition while you can imagine yourself visualising it, you can’t think about yourself visualising it while you are actually doing it. In other words, our consciousnesses seem to be single threaded.

Actually, if you could observe yourself thinking about something, you could presumably observe yourself observing yourself thinking about something, and so on. This would, in theory lead to an infinite layers of you observing yourself.

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Meditation on thoughts or deeds, as I understand it as a non-practitioner, then comes down to a focused concentration on thoughts that have already been thought, as it were, and I guess that meditation could bring one awareness of why one thought those thought or did that deed. This is no doubt beneficial as such meditation could identify things about thoughts and deeds that one could change, perhaps simply by making one aware of why one had those thoughts or did that deed.

For example, if you meditate about what you have done on a particular occasion you might form the conclusion that you should have done something different. When the situation arises next, you will have a considered analysis of what you did before and it may influence you to do something different.

Or you may conclude, during your meditation, that certain events led you into that situation, and you could then avoid those events, thereby avoiding the situation. For instance, you may conclude that rashness is an issue for you and that you should avoid rashness. Tying this to a mantra or key phrase could enable you to avoid rashness, by reminding you of your conclusion and enabling you through the mantra to avoid it. This of course depends on you being able to determine when you are about to do something rash and therefore trigger the mantra and the avoidance.

[I’m not too happy with this post. But let it stand for now. I’ll maybe revisit this later.]

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