Is Meditation All in My Head?
On seeing with your eyes and having no head
Is It All in Your Head?
When you start out in meditation, most of that meditation will be guided.
It’s not the pure practice of anapana, but I think in the beginning it’s a useful tool because the voice and instructions can act as waypoints to keep your awareness tethered to the task at hand.
A common exercise in guided meditation is to focus on specific body parts and investigate the reality of their presence in consciousness.
Like, for example, focusing on the feeling of your hands or the sensations on your face, and then trying to increase the resolution by focusing in turn on individual parts — like the jaw and the top and back of your head, moving attention from one to the next and back again, until all become more present and vivid in consciousness.
Thoughts will undoubtedly arise when you do this — that’s just what they do — but having these ever-increasingly vivid sensations in mind to anchor yourself stops you from getting dragged off down the stream of thoughts.
The trick is to do more than just see their image in your mind — which, at least I find, is always represented as some fairly visual cloud of colour and chaos — but let go of that image and just notice the most basic sensations — temperature, movement, pain.
What I often notice about these sensations — the coldness or warmth of various patches of my skin — is that they have no real form.
All the sensations that collectively tell me I have hands do not take the form of hands.
The objects of consciousness are not well defined. They’re better described as temporary aberrations in the seemingly infinite space in your head — or, in mine at least.
Looking For Your Head
The useful part of an exercise like this is that it’s a good starting point for looking for what’s looking.
Because if this is all in my head, where am I in reference to all these aberrations?
Am I behind my face, above my jaw, below the top of my head or in front of the back of it?
Of course, the first, seemingly obvious answer is that if it’s all in my head, then I’m at the centre of it all.
But an honest and sufficiently extended observation of these sensations will reveal that they all seem to be “in front” of you — even those from the back of your physical head.
So then, in this analysis:
Your head is in front of you.
Let that sink in a little.
If your head seems to be the centre of consciousness, but when you really pay attention to the sensations that constitute that head, they all end up “in front” of you — as too may the feeling of it all being in front of you — then how can it all be in your head if your head is also in your head?
It’s all inside your head, or your head is inside it, and so what’s observing all this seemingly has no head.
(For some this may ring similar to Douglas Harding’s: On Having No Head)
This doesn’t stop at the head.
Everything is happening in consciousness — everything you’re aware of, at least.
Once you start paying attention to anything you can pay attention to — the sense of having a head, the sense of consciousness being located there, the sense of paying attention to that sense — you realise that everything is located in consciousness, but consciousness is not located anywhere.
There are no reference points for consciousness;
Everywhere is the centre and nowhere is.
Eyes Open
When I look for what’s looking, I can’t help but notice how my sense of being an observer is attached to the sensations that make up my eyes, even though this too is observable.
I’ve mentioned something similar to this before — the strangeness that is moving your eyes around to look at things in consciousness *[thoughts on thoughts]
So what happens when you keep your eyes open?
You don’t need to close your eyes to meditate.
That might seem a strange claim to you if you’re new to meditation and all you’ve seen in reference to it is people sitting cross-legged with their eyes closed.
But this is another exercise in some guided meditation practices.
The usual instructions are to just keep your eyes open and pay attention to what you see — easy enough.
But the real challenge is to relax the sense that this visual space you’re paying attention to is full of “objects”.
In reality, it’s not.
A Visual Diversion
There’s a reason we have two eyes.
What you see is the combination of two slightly different images — one from each eye.
We don’t notice this as if those images were two different ones laid out before us, but the sense that things are 3-dimensional — or close or far or of a particular shape — is effectively us subconsciously noticing that we’re getting an image from each.
You can test this out if you’re bored and want to look weird to all those in view:
Keep your head still
Focus on something in front of you and close or cover one eye
Then swap eyes.
Whatever you’re looking at will appear to move slightly towards the side of the closed eye, and the closer the thing is, the bigger the difference will be.
So really, what your eye (singular) sees is 2-dimensional, and by extension what your eyes (plural) see is also 2-dimensional.
To each eye the world is just a painting of light and colour — it’s just photons on the retina — and it’s the seemingly seamless combination of those paintings that turns them into a world, and our ideas that make objects out of those patches of paint.
How to See Clearly
One way to play with this sense is to focus on the “empty space” just in front of whatever is in view.
That empty space is definitely there, but it’s not really much to look at, so when you focus on it you get the sense that you’re not really looking at anything, you’re just seeing.
And that’s where you want to be:
Not giving attention to any specific thing so that you can keep your awareness wide — so that the whole space of awareness is filled with the shapes and colours of your visual field.
Eyes Wide Shut
Keeping your eyes open also has the benefit of reducing the tendency to fall asleep.
Not that I don’t get sleepy when I meditate with my eyes open, or that my attention doesn’t drift off, but it always seems much easier to notice the drifting when my eyes are open.
Unsurprisingly, with your eyes open, the drifting is easier to see. It can’t hide behind your eyelids, or in your imagination.
Strangely, though, when I’m meditating with my eyes open and I discover that I’m lost in thought, it feels as though I couldn’t “see”.
My eyes were open but I wasn’t looking — I wasn’t aware of my visual field while I was imagining some other reality.
It seems that those imaginings share the same space with everything else we see, and it all must compete for our attention.
I guess this is the visual analogue to the idea that being lost in thought is the same as being asleep.
Getting lost in thought with your eyes open is as bad as having them closed, or worse;
You can’t see when you’re lost in thought.
Seeing With Open Eyes
It’s a very different world with your eyes open.
And it’s a very different meditation experience.
It’s harder to feel like you’re meditating — whatever that means.
There’s so much information in an image that the other thoughts and feelings that might arise with your eyes closed can’t seem to compete with the more immediate sense of reality being screamed at you by your retinas.
There’s no confusing a sensation that seems visual for an actual visual image when the latter is presently so vivid.
But it is possible to take this vivid frame as an object in itself — as one of those strange shapes that float through consciousness when we try to focus on a thought or sensation.
And it’s possible to see it as it really is — to see that it’s not you; that you’re not inside your visual field, just as you’re not inside your head — it’s all just happening in conscious space.
That’s kind of the hope of meditation, or something you might strive for at least:
To not have to close your eyes to notice reality.
To be able to see what’s right in front of you, and to see it for what it is.
Seeing Yourself
Once, during an eyes-open meditation session, I was sitting where I could see myself in the mirror.
I wasn’t wearing my glasses so all I could see was a blurry image sitting on my bed 10 metres away.
Seeing myself like this — my reflection as a blurry image in the space of consciousness — was strangely similar to the way I see anything else in consciousness when I’ve got my eyes closed.
And in fact, it is no different — again, everything is happening in consciousness, including my sense of having a head, and of consciousness being located there.
If I look for my head in consciousness, all I can see is blurry feelings and the sense that I’m somewhere in front of me.
But all of that is in my head, and it’s just something to notice.
As is that.
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