Continued Spiritual Path

Hypotheses about the growing and waking of a spiritual seeker can enable systems thinking about awareness practices and states, using a causal loop diagram as a tool. After considering the function of sacred literature, purification and humility, and constructive practices, what follows is to examine the function of the remaining awareness practices, attentional and deconstructive.

Preparation Summary

The following practices have similarities:

• sacred literature,
• purification and humility, and
• constructive practices.

Their similarity is in their potential functions:

• increasing wisdom: providing or strengthening wisdom; and
• decreasing defenses: via renouncing or submitting, reducing investment in, and defense of “me.”

Consequently a causal loop diagram can more simply label this “preparation.”

Awareness Practice Functions

After considering constructive practices, the remaining practices are attentional (focused attention and open monitoring) and deconstructive practices.

Constructive and Focused Attention Practices

There is an element of focused attention that indirectly strengthens attentional mechanisms even in constructive practices like lovingkindness meditation and Centering Prayer.¹ As an example of the latter, one form meditation by Franciscan nuns involves internal repetition of a particular phrase, for example from the Bible.² However, attentional practices like focused attention strengthen attentional mechanisms more directly.

Attentional Mechanisms

Attentional practices (focused attention and open monitoring) strengthen the ability to initiate and sustain “meta-awareness,” a heightened awareness of the processes of consciousness, including the processes of thinking, feeling, and perceiving.³ These processes can include second-order⁴ meta-awareness, i.e., awareness of awareness or “witness consciousness.”⁵

Meta-awareness enables regulation of the scope and stability of attention, and the presence of meta-awareness distinguishes the attentional stability achieved through these forms of meditation from other forms of absorption, such as the stable attentiveness that occurs when one is engaged in an engrossing conversation or playing an interesting game.¹ Three skills are involved in attention regulation:⁶

1. monitor to remain vigilant to distractions, without losing focus;
2. disengage from distractions without further involvement; and
3. (focused attention only) redirect focus promptly to the chosen object.

Progress is measured in part by decreasing effort to sustain focus until it becomes “effortless”:⁷ fewer distractions, greater ability to notice mind-wandering, etc. introduce a trait change.⁶ Attention develops from a mind that cannot focus for more than a few seconds to “sublime stability and vividness that can be sustained for hours” (for the “Olympic athletes” of meditation).⁸

In the absence of meta-awareness, we become experientially “fused” with what experience. Experiential fusion is an automatic process whereby one becomes absorbed in the contents of consciousness, leading to a diminished capacity to monitor or regulate psychological processes.¹

Just as focused attention has some similarities with constructive practices, so also does open monitoring have similarities to deconstructive practices. There is a difference of focus, between meta-awareness and self-inquiry.¹

Photo by Cameron Fong on Scopio

Deconstructive Practice Mechanisms

Meta-awareness sets the stage for self-inquiry–an investigation of the dynamics and nature of conscious experience–and allows for the stabilization of the insight it generates. Insights that would be fragile and fleeting are systematically stabilized and integrated.

Deconstructive practices use self-inquiry in relation to thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. They thereby foster 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. This is often insight into the processes of perception, emotion, and cognition, but there are three subgroups of deconstructive practices:¹

1. Object-oriented insight practices use self-inquiry to investigate the objects of consciousness. This may involve, for example, investigating physical sensations and noting how they are constantly changing.
2. Subject-oriented insight practices involve inquiries into the nature of thought, perception, and other cognitive and affective processes. In this style of practice one may, for instance, dissect thoughts and emotions into their component parts.
3. Non-dual-oriented practices are designed to elicit an experiential shift into a mode of experiencing in which the cognitive structures of self/other and subject/object are no longer the dominant mode of experience. These practices often emphasize the importance of releasing attempts to control, direct, or alter the mind in any way and also serve to undo the reification of a witnessing ‘observer’ that is separate from the objects of awareness.

Attentional and Deconstructive Functions

Attentional practices strengthen meta-awareness, which stabilize the insights fostered by deconstructive practices–insights into the nature of objects, subjects, or subject/object nonduality. In relation to the self, this insight could enable ego transcendence. Here “ego transcendence” refers to ego as a representation of self, the sense of “I,” ego-as-representation. This is in contrast to the ego development, a strengthening of the functional aspects of the ego–reality testing, mediation between inner and outer, and synthesis or integrate–ego-as-process.⁹ Ego transcendence could come through insight into illusions about the isolation, reality, and unity of the ego as representation.

Research Ideas

Each of the hypothesized influences can be tested. Some examples are the following:

• Preparation increases wisdom. Ego development¹⁰ could be longitudinally measured in practitioners.¹¹
• Attentional practice strengthens meta-awareness. Current research shows meditation increases attention, interoception and sensory processing, and associated brain areas. This fosters the ability to control mental triggers.¹²
• Deconstructive practice fosters insight that reduces inhibitors to mystical states. Similarly, phenomenal reports of mystical states in long-term practitioners could be investigated.¹³

Notes