Keepin it Real
Reification, Construal-level theory & Meditation
I find mindfulness tricky since I tend to make a mental shift, where I go from noticing sensory input to focusing on mental concepts. Actually feeling the sensation of my jeans touching my legs is noticing sensory input. Keeping track of the “placeholder concept” {jeans touching legs} without noticing any sensations marks a shift into the conceptual world. This is a kind of reification, where lived experience is turned into dead concepts in a bait-and-switch manoeuvre. It’s a great way to kill happiness and meditation.
Happiness gets killed by going from a happy state of mind to obsessively trying to preserve a mental concept called {happiness}. In the beginning, happiness springs forth, resting on a foundation of well-being and earnestness. As time goes by, doubts and tiredness creep in as one’s emotional state regresses to the mean. Noticing this, it’s easy to fall into the trap of unskillfully trying to “preserve happiness”. This fails since happiness can’t be preserved by clinging on to what was. Clinging on to what was only turns “being happy” into “having {happiness}”.
I tend to fall into a similar trap when I meditate. I start by sitting down, and occasionally I go into a deep meditative state. Then some part of me gets proud, thinking “I’m totally meditating right now, fuck yeah! I knew I’d make it”.
By thinking in terms of success/attainment/progress, I distance myself from the lived experience of meditating, which means that I go from meditating to trying to keep {success in meditation} going.
This is related to the awkwardly named “Construal-level theory”, also known as “near-far effects”. The theory divides relating to the world into two categories: one direct/near way, and one far/construal-level. When you start relating to the world in a “far” way, by interacting with concepts rather than lived experience, you start distancing yourself from said lived experience. As such, all the things under Far induce each other, while all the things under Near also induce each other.
Using this framework, mindfulness meditation is training the “near” mode. Far:y stuff will “hook you” out of the meditative mind space. This is a bit of a conundrum since I tend to do into a detached problem-solving mode whenever I get stuck, taking a step back and analyzing things properly. This is a great habit in a lot of situations, but I’m pretty sure it hampers my meditation since the far:y, distant approach turns meditating into having {a successful meditation}.
One way I’ve been approaching this is by putting meditation focus on something direct, like the pleasure of sitting, while ignoring any long-term goals of meditation (such as wisdom, better memory, better introspection etc). The main issue here is to avoid getting stuck preserving {pleasure}.
…
I’ll round off now since I’m headed for a session of neurofeedback meditation. The instructor will put sensors on my head to measure brain activity in the default mode network, and play music that’s inversely correlated with the activity level. Meaning higher music = less default mode network activity = deeper meditation.
One small distracting thing is that I can see “hear” listed on the “far” side of the image above. Does that mean that the sound feedback training is inherently far:y?
I’ll just have to remember that models aren’t reality and that there might be multiple kinds of listening. I’m reminded of an Alan Watts quote I picked up from a sample in an Ott song:
“Simply close your eyes and allow your ears to hear all sounds around you
Don't try to name or identify these sounds
Just hear them as you would listen to music
As when you hear a flute or a guitar
Don't bother about what it means
Your brain will take care of that by itself
Just let your eardrums respond as they will, to all vibrations now in the air”
This post is inspired by:
Brad Blanton’s “Radical Honesty”
Erich Fromm’s “To Have or to Be?”
John Vervaeke’s “Awakening from the meaning crisis”
Robin Hansson’s “Near-Far Summary”