Proprioception refers to “the body’s ability to sense movement, action and location.” Close your eyes and hold out your arm in a random position. Being able to precisely locate one’s arm in space with eyes closed is due to proprioceptive cells in our joints.
Older people often lose proprioceptive cells, which is a main reason why falls occur in seniors. That can be counteracted by doing balancing exercises daily—with eyes open.
The movement of thought in the brain has no proprioceptive cells, which is perhaps why we metaphorically fall as often as we do. We don’t sense when we’re off balance until it’s too late.
For most people, the phrase, “the movement of thought” is nonsensical. They assume the movement of thought is as much a given as “me and my thoughts.”
However, the phrase “me and my thoughts” is doubly redundant. There is no “me” separate from “my thoughts”; there’s only thought, which generates and sustains the program of the “me.”
In short, the “I” doesn’t have thoughts; thought fabricates an “I.” But the self is a very persistent illusion, which few people have completely extinguished, including yours truly.
Meditation as I understand it begins with the ending of the illusory, infinite regress of the observer. Most people believe that cannot happen.
For example, there’s a silly essay in the Guardian recently in which the writer, Michael Pollan, describes wearing an old-fashioned beeper on his belt that goes off at intervals to remind him to stop and pay attention to his thoughts.
Besides making a mockery of mindfulness, his basic premise is that we cannot “step out of the stream of consciousness in order to observe it from its banks,” because “the very act of sneaking up on our experience becomes part of the experience.”
That’s not only circular logic, but it upholds the unexamined idea that psychological separation, beginning with the observer, is a given. It is not.
Methodless meditation isn’t a matter of “stepping out of the stream of consciousness,” much less the absurdity of “sneaking up on our experience,” but of passively watching and remaining with the movement of the contents of one’s consciousness. Doing so allows awareness, unfiltered by the reactions of the observer and self, to quicken and deepen.
What is this observer that always appears to be separate from what is being observed, whether outside or inside one? And why does it have such a powerful hold on our minds and brains?
If one seriously but playfully questions this phenomenon while inclusively watching everything outside and inside oneself, one gains a tremendous insight into the observer.
One sees that it’s an ancient, subconscious trick of thought that allows humans to consciously extract “things” from the environment and manipulate them for use.
The problem is that early on people began believing the trick was real, and that things are actually separate. In recent decades, scientists have convinced people that we aren’t actually separate from nature, but psychologically, we still act as though the self and ego are real. It’s now called “agency.”
I was fortunate to dialogue with the late David Bohm, the physicist whom Einstein called his “spiritual son.” He pointed out that thought’s wrongful use, stemming from the fabrications of the “me” and “I,” are the source of man’s division and fragmentation. He proposed that there can be proprioception of thought, and that would keep it in its proper place.
It’s disturbing to realize that the “I” has no actuality. But we can accept and embrace disturbance, rather than avoid it. After all, up to a point disturbances prompt us to question things, and thereby remain alive and growing as human beings. It’s come down to that, or “numbing out” and joining the legions of walking dead.
So does thought proprioceptively perceive its own movement? No, there is another capacity of the brain, distinct (not separate) from thought and the mind as we know it—for choiceless awareness and non-directed attention.
Therefore proprioceptive awareness of thought’s movement is not by thought or through thought and the observer. It is simply the brain’s capacity for awareness of thought and emotion at a given moment in the same way it is aware of where one’s arm is when the eyes are closed.
That entails setting everything aside and taking 20 or 30 minutes, outdoors if possible, to simply observe and attend to what is.
Consciousness based on thought—that is, separation, symbol and memory—is all we’ve known as humans for tens of thousands of years. However there is consciousness not based on thought and filtered through self. It emerges when there is complete attention and stillness of mind.
Experiment with sitting still outdoors in a fairly quiet place and watching and listening to every sight and sound as they occur, and then let that same quality of choiceless awareness come to one’s thoughts and emotions as they arise. Without making it a goal, there’s an unforeseeable moment when the brain lets go of the continuity of thought.
Our chains are forged by the continuity of memory, self and time, which are the shackles of thought. Meditation without method or technique allows awareness to quicken, and attention to ignite and grow intense.
Attention, acting without volition or effort, is then like a laser—incinerating every thought as it arises without any smoke or ash, leaving nothing but stillness, silence and emptiness.
Meditation is the awakening of the state of insight, opening the door to the inviolable.
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