In addition to “growing up”, this blog is also about “waking up.” One of the connections between growing up and waking up is the role of awareness practices.

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Awareness Practices

While awareness is present at any stage–and faith traditions have practices appropriate for those at conventional stages–awareness practices are much more common at postconventional stages:¹ “The ready-to-transform leader starts developing new relationships. She may also explore new forms of spiritual practice or new forms of centering and self-expression, such as playing a musical instrument or doing tai chi.”² A wide range of practices cultivate awareness; the following are just examples:

• centering prayer
• Dzogchen
• gratitude prayer
• Gurdjieff Work
• Mahayana meditation
• playing a musical instrument
• 气功 / Qìgōng (chi gung)
• relaxation response
• Rudolph Steiner’s imaginative cognition, inspiration and intuition
• shamanic drumming
• 太极 / Tàijí (Tai Chi)
• Transcedental Meditation
• vipassana or insight
• yoga
• Zen

These practices can come from a variety of traditions:

• Buddhist
• Gurdjieffian
• Hassidic
• Hindu
• Jesuit
• Quaker
• Sufi
• Taoist

Practices to focus attention include esoteric, religious, and secular techniques.³

Categories for awareness practices can illustrate their differences and similarities. Based upon findings in cognitive science and clinical psychology, awareness practices cluster in four categories:⁴

• constructive practices cultivate virtuous qualities, like loving-kindness;
• attentional practices focus on training aspects of attention, including two types:⁵
  • focused attention practices which build concentration, and
  • open monitoring practices which heighten awareness of the moment; and
• deconstructive practices use self-observation to pierce the nature of experience.

I briefly define these below.

Constructive Practices

First, constructive practices are:⁵

a family of meditation practices that allow one to cultivate, nurture, or strengthen cognitive and affective patterns that foster well-being. Practices in this family may aim to promote healthy interpersonal dynamics, to strengthen a commitment to ethical values, or to nurture habits of perception that lead to enhanced well-being. Perspective taking and cognitive reappraisal are important mechanisms in this style of meditation.

Attentional Practices

Attentional practices vary in the object of attention. Focused attention practices choose an object for awareness. For example, in “mindfulness of breath,” the chosen object is localized sensations caused by respiration. Open monitoring practices drop the explicit object, and instead monitor the quality of attention itself. Thus there are two related types of attentional practice:⁶

Flowcharts can illustrate these differences.

Deconstructive Practices

The fourth category, deconstructive practices, are defined by deconstruction, insight, and self-inquiry:⁵

Deconstructive family: a family of meditation practices that uses self-inquiry to foster insight into the processes of perception, emotion, and cognition. Deconstructive meditation practices may be oriented toward the objects of consciousness or toward consciousness itself.

Insight: a shift in consciousness that is often sudden and involves a feeling of knowing, understanding, or perceiving something that had previously eluded one’s grasp. In deconstructive meditation practices, insight is often elicited through self-inquiry and pertains to specific self-related psychological processes that inform well-being.

Self-inquiry: the investigation of the dynamics and nature of conscious experience, particularly in relation to thoughts, feelings, and perceptions that pertain to one’s sense of self. Self-inquiry may be an important mechanism in deconstructive meditations due to its role in facilitating insight.

Practice Comparison

These four categories enable comparing and contrasting religious and secular awareness practices.

There’s a caveat for this comparison:¹⁷

I based most of the summaries that follow on published sources rather than on my personal investigation. They may, therefore, seem incomplete or imprecise to a person on any of these paths. Each path is a living tradition that presents itself differently to each person according to his needs and circumstances.

Awareness States

Awareness and Religion

An outgrowth of all such techniques (awareness practices) is the experiencing of nonordinary states of awareness.³ The mystical literature describes these states in ways that appear more compatible with philosophies like Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism than with religions like Christianity, Judaism, and Islam:¹⁸

Jewish, Christian, and Muslim mystics have… contemplative insights [that] are not exemplary of their faith. Rather, they are anomalies that Western mystics have always struggled to understand and to honor, often at considerable personal risk.

The relationship between awareness practices like meditation, and religion, is a consequently complex one:¹

Historically, the meditation practices associated with Western religions (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam) are not well known by the general public, and the vast majority of people who belong to these religions do not have meditation practices that cultivate present-centered awareness. In the popular mind, meditation is more closely associated with Eastern religions like Buddhism, Hinduism and Taoism. However, the great majority of Asians who identify with these religions do not have regular meditation practices either. Further, many of those who practice Eastern forms of meditation are not members of the religions in which these practices first appeared.

States

As with awareness practices, categories for awareness states can illustrate their differences and similarities. Robert K.C. Forman sees in the mystical literature a sequence of (sometimes permanent) states of transcognitive awareness:¹⁹

1. Pure Consciousness Event: Ultimately one may become utterly silent inside, as though in a gap between thoughts, where one becomes completely perception- and thought-free. One neither thinks nor perceives any mental or sensory content. Yet, despite this suspension of content, one emerges from such events confident that one had remained awake inside, fully conscious…. The pure consciousness even may be defined as a wakeful but contentless (non-intentional) consciousness.
2. Dualistic Mystical State: The first [long-term shift in epistemological structure] is an experience of a permanent interior stillness, even while engaged in thought and activity–one remains aware of one’s own awareness while simultaneously remaining conscious of thoughts, sensations and actions. Because of its phenomenological dualism–a heightened cognizance of awareness itself plus a consciousness of thoughts and objects–I call it the dualistic mystical state.
3. Unitive Mystical State (UMS): The second shift is described as a perceived unity of one’s own awareness per se with the objects around one, an immediate sense of a quasi-physical unity between self, objects and other people…. [I]n the UMS… the sense of being in contact with the expansive emptiness that extends beyond the self, never fades away, whether one is in nature or in the city, whether the eyes are open or closed, and whether one is a Zen Buddhist, a Jew or a Christian.

These three categories enable comparing and contrasting religious awareness states.

These nonordinary states of awareness–pure consciousness event, dualistic mystical state, and unitive mystical state–are the “waking up” topic of this blog.

Notes