Observe your Mindscape
Sit back and watch your objects of consciousness.
The New Mindscape #5–1
Our mind is usually swimming in a sea of objects of consciousness, and is not aware of how it’s influenced by thoughts, emotions, desires, and beliefs.
In previous essays, I talked about the implications of Laozi’s “uncarved block” — what if all the concepts, meanings and objects of consciousness that clutter and carve up our mind and our life, actually cover up a deeper and more profound meaning, our “true self”?
Then how can we break through the encrusted layers of ideas and thoughts, and thus gain insight into the ultimate reality?
Objects of consciousness include not only our consciousness of concrete things, but also abstract qualities, meanings, ideas and concepts.
All of these things fill up our mindscape, and are just as “real” in our lives as the outside world.
Although we spend most of our time learning about the outside world and how to change small parts of it, most of us know very little about our own inner mindscape, and even less about how to change it for the better.
One of the main concerns of religion is to transform our mindscape — to align it with what it describes as the invisible structure of the cosmos, and to populate our mindscape with experiences, concepts, symbols and beings that aim to connect us with the deeper meanings and powers of the cosmos.
And by transforming the mindscape, religion aims to transform the way we act in the world and change it.
For most people, this is an unconscious process — we gradually absorb cultural or religious elements into our mindscape through imitation, enculturation, and immersion in social environments, practices, and teachings.
But there also exist, in many religious traditions, practices and techniques that aim to lead us to become consciously aware of our thoughts, to purify ourselves of unhealthy thoughts and ideas, to become aware of deeper truths about oneself and about reality, and to construct what I would call a new mindscape.
Some of these practices are nowadays called “meditation”. “Meditation” is widespread in several religious traditions and it is becoming increasingly popular.
The word “meditation” has many meanings. At a basic level, meditation means to think and to spend time thinking deeply about something; to meditate on a passage, an idea; or to read something and to reflect about it. All of these activities mean “to meditate” at one level.
And there is another, more technical meaning of “meditation” which is now often used in English. This refers to disciplines to train the activity of the mind.
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of different techniques of meditation. But they are all concerned with training the mind and/or the body; cleaning the mindscape; or constructing a spiritual mindscape. How do your train your mind?
Meditation techniques often involve specific postures or movements of the body, or specific forms of breathing, or specific procedures for focusing the mind. For example, some methods involve sitting in a specific cross-legged position, or standing erect. You need to enact these postures and movements to gain certain insights into reality.
Meditation techniques often also make use of visualizations, which literally involve creating and focusing on an object of consciousness. For example, one meditation technique involves imagining, or visualising, a lotus flower opening and closing in your lower abdomen, following the rhythm of breathing in and out. The lotus is a common symbol in Asian religions; just as the pure white flower grows out of putrid mud, it evokes the idea of our pure soul rising out of the impurities and pollution of this world.
Because meditation is a form of mental training and exercise rather than a logical argument, it’s hard to talk about it. It’s like sports. You can’t say that you understand sports if you’ve only read about sports, or watched a football game once and a couple of swimming matches. You experience the reality of football quite differently if you’re playing the game, rather than just talking about it. Even if you’ve played only a few times, you’ll have a much greater insight on the game than if you’ve never played — but even then, how can that compare to someone who trains regularly?
Can you imagine someone saying, “Oh! I just practiced sports for the first time. I did sports for ten minutes the other day. And now I know what sports is. Sports is very good for me.” Or what if someone said, “I tried sports for ten minutes and it doesn’t work.”
First of all, there are so many different “sports”. The realities of swimming, football or wrestling are quite different from each other.
And secondly, any kind of sport requires a lot of training. Our mind is the same. The mind has many different functions and powers; likewise, there are many different methods that train different aspects of our mind and consciousness.
For example, an important foundation for many meditation techniques involves training the breath. At first, this is actually very hard, like any sport. It’s something that you train and learn to exercise. But after a long time of practice, it becomes quite natural and easy. At that point, you can easily enter a state of stillness and tranquility (rujing入靜), after only a few seconds if you are well trained. But it’s impossible if you have not trained. Actually, none of these meditation techniques can work without training. If your breath is not trained, it’s difficult to enter a state of deep relaxation.
There are many different types of meditation. One type of meditation is called “mindfulness”, which involves observing, moment by moment, the ideas, feelings, and mental states that come and go from our consciousness. It entails, in effect, standing back and watching what is going on in your mindscape.
Usually, our consciousness is completely captured by whatever comes to our mind at any particular moment — we are controlled by our feelings, perceptions, and ideas, without even being aware of it. Mindfulness meditation involves observing the mindscape with detachment — becoming aware of thoughts and feelings as they arise, then letting them go, without becoming attached to them or fighting against them.
Suppose you’re a scientist engaging in the observation of the world or the components of the material world outside of you. That involves a certain distance and detachment from the object observed in order to be able to observe it objectively and completely.
Usually, you can’t observe what’s going on in your mind, because you’re like a fish swimming in water. Your mind is thinking all the time, always running around, wandering and jumping here and there. It’s hard for the mind to focus on anything.
How can we possibly be conscious of these things that happen inside our own minds, because our consciousness is part of our minds? It is, in a sense, virtually impossible to engage in a detached observation of our minds. At the same time, we see the world with our minds — which are cluttered with so many different ideas, things, objects of consciousness. All these things are affecting our understanding of the world, as if we were wearing spectacles on which many different things have been painted, so that we can’t have a clear vision of anything in the world.
In mindfulness meditation, the purpose is to put yourself into a situation of observing everything that pops up in your mind — in a sense, to see what happens in your mindscape, and to see it with detachment. You can see these things coming and going. Through this kind of practice, gradually, the consciousness of your mindscape becomes more and more clear. And as a result of that, the consciousness of other things also becomes clearer.
A basic technique of mindfulness is to be aware of your perceptions, emotions and feelings, by naming them as soon as they appear to your consciousness. This can be done sitting, standing or even walking. Just name each thought or feeling quietly to yourself, as soon as it pops up.
Why should we name the object of consciousness as soon as it appears? The purpose is to make you detached from it, because when something comes to your mind, it controls your mind completely.
For example, when you think of a new iPhone, at that moment that thought dominates your mind. But by naming the thought, you step back from it. You say, ‘That’s a thought of an iPhone.’ By naming it, you detach yourself from it. And it becomes separate from you. You focus on it and become aware of the reality of it — by naming it, then it becomes separate from you, and then you let it go.
The following set of videos by the monk Yuttadhammo Bhikkhu, provide some simple instructions on mindfulness meditation as well as some basic guiding principles. He states that meditation is about more than attaining a peaceful state of mind. Just as medication (medicine) aims to cure the sicknesses of the body, meditation aims to cure the sicknesses of the mind: states of stress, worry, anger, addiction, delusion, conceit, arrogance, worry and fear.
These, he says, are “unnatural states of being”. By becoming aware of these states through mindfulness, they gradually lose their grip on our consciousness, and fade away. Meditation thus brings the body back to its natural state of clarity, peace and happiness.
The monk explains that mindfulness is to have “clear thoughts”:
“To clearly experience a phenomenon as it arises, to know it clearly, to see it for what it is, and to not be addicted, attached, or upset, or adverse to it. So simply know it and to experience it for what it is.”
Please watch these three videos, each of which is about 10 minutes long. And, after you watch them, I’d like you to try out the technique yourself. Find a quiet time and place, and just give it a try.
How to meditate 1: What is meditation:
How to meditate 2: Sitting meditation:
Questions on meditation: What should we see?
Academic references:
Farias, Miguel, David Brazier, and Mansur Lalljee. The Oxford handbook of meditation. Oxford University Press, 2021.
Walsh, R. (1983). Meditation Practice and Research. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 23(1), 18–50. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022167883231004
Raffone, A., Srinivasan, N. The exploration of meditation in the neuroscience of attention and consciousness. Cogn Process 11, 1–7 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-009-0354-z
Brandmeyer, Tracy, Arnaud Delorme, and Helané Wahbeh. “The neuroscience of meditation: classification, phenomenology, correlates, and mechanisms.” Progress in brain research 244 (2019): 1–29.
Kok, Bethany E., Christian E. Waugh, and Barbara L. Fredrickson. “Meditation and health: The search for mechanisms of action.” Social and Personality Psychology Compass 7, no. 1 (2013): 27–39.
Sedlmeier, P., Eberth, J., Schwarz, M., Zimmermann, D., Haarig, F., Jaeger, S., & Kunze, S. (2012). The psychological effects of meditation: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 138(6), 1139–1171. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0028168
Kreplin, U., Farias, M. & Brazil, I.A. The limited prosocial effects of meditation: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Sci Rep 8, 2403 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-20299-z
See the next essay, on Let go. You are nothing, and you are so much more.
See the previous series of essays, on The meaning of death, and what it tells us about life.
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This essay and the New Mindscape Medium series are brought to you by the University of Hong Kong’s Common Core Curriculum Course CCHU9014 Spirituality, Religion and Social Change, with the support of the Asian Religious Connections research cluster of the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
