Jason: Well, the first question is, I have a hard time knowing if I’m noticing something. The difference between noticing and thinking is I understand thoughts arise. I get all of that. But the idea that sometimes you’ll say, or others will say, notice this. When I hear that, I tend to think I must be thinking about this thing that I’m noticing, which of course is not the point, I suppose. This is a very subtle thing, but it permeates everything, which is, what is it like just to notice and not to think about what you’re noticing?
One of the things I tend to do is concepts rush in and fill the blank space. So I’ll hear something and I’ll hear a bird, for example, or something. And I’ll just think to myself, that’s a bird. That’s probably a finch. I’ve seen that bird before. And I just start to fill it in versus just what is the sound like? So do you have any suggestions on essentially where to stop?
Sam: Yeah. Yeah. So there are really two stages to mindfulness here. So we’re talking about the practice of mindfulness generally, but it begins for almost everyone as a dualistic effort to pay closer and closer attention to the character of experience. And there’s a first increment of progress there and then a second one that I tend to emphasize a lot in waking up, which is the cutting through the illusion of the self, so that your mindfulness becomes what we call non-dualistic, where the subject-object divide seems to collapse. But in the first stage, mindfulness is characterized by noticing the difference between being lost in thought and paying attention to anything, whether that’s the breath or a sound or sensations elsewhere in the body or to the flow of thoughts themselves. And again, this can be dualistic or apparently dualistic in the sense that the sense of there being a subject can still be preserved. And you can have a very clear sense that as the subject, you’re no longer lost in thought, but now you’re paying attention to a sound, say. But the first stage of mindfulness is also characterized by getting past the conceptual overlay on sensory experience and noticing what seems more like the raw data of experience. So rather than hear a bird, you pay such close attention to the character of the sound, you’re no longer thinking bird, you’re just feeling the raw sensation on your eardrum, as it were. And it’s no longer out there, it’s right in here as part of the texture of consciousness. And that might seem harder to do with a bird sound initially, but I think you might get the sense of this if you press your two hands together and feel the sensation there of contact.
Now, most people who don’t know how to meditate, they don’t know anything about mindfulness, you ask them, well, what do you feel there? Well, they might say, well, I feel my two hands touching. But hands are a concept here. I mean, really the experience is of warmth and pressure and tingling and vibration. Those are the data. And it’s on the basis of those sensations that we map the concept of hand. And so mindfulness, even from the very beginning, is a process of trying to feel and see and hear past the concepts and make contact with the raw sensations. And whenever you notice that you’re thinking about the experience rather than just experiencing the experience, you come back to the raw data. And again, that kind of attention can extend to thoughts themselves.
You can notice the covert linguistic utterance of, oh, that must be a finch. And that’s just a voice in the head that you can notice arise and pass away. Or you might have some imagery of a bird or of your hands, depending on what you’re paying attention to. And so you can turn that same kind of careful noticing on the discursive conceptual layer as well. But in the beginning, certainly it’s more and more just paying attention to sensations like the breath and sounds and anything else that’s spontaneously arising in your body. I mean, the body itself is the first and primary foundation of mindfulness in the beginning.
Does that help? It does, actually. What it makes me think about is I’ve had some of those experiences with physical sensation in terms of the hands touching or you’re sitting on a chair or whatever. And you can’t quite discern the border between your two hands or your feet on the floor. It’s just sort of a pressure. And because there’s not a concept there, I guess there is, it’s like foot on the floor, but I’m able to get past that pretty easily. Sounds though are quite a bit more challenging for me in terms of like partially perhaps because they’re external. So something else made that. And so then I sort of connect the dots and go, oh, that’s a bird where it’s like, if my foot’s on the floor, I can actually directly, I know you can directly experience a sound, but I’m really directly experiencing a sort of a sensation that is physical that is easier for me to find that point that you’re making. And I also find that I’m curious about your take on this because I found it’s easier for me to meditate with my eyes open. That when I close my eyes, I find myself in my mind because it’s black and you’re sort of, you know, you kind of retreat or at least I shouldn’t say you, I kind of retreat into this sphere essentially of like your mind. And when your eyes are open, you’re looking out, you’re looking away in a sense, although I guess the argument would be you’re not really looking away because what’s the center and that whole thing which we can get into as well, but I’m looking upon and it distracts me. It distracts my mind in a really wonderful way. There’s also just more detail.