What do you see when you look at your own mind?
What do you hear?
I have long been an avid student of the workings of my own mind. I find that I can’t help myself. Even when I want to (and I do have such moments), I simply can’t shut off the part of my mind that is constantly observing itself.
While some might dismiss such activity as solipsistic, I am convinced that the self-awareness such attention creates is the foundation for good mental health and for healthy relationships.
That’s certainly what the research on attachment tells us. The attachment literature calls the capacity of the mind to reflect on its own activity “self-reflective functioning,” and research has demonstrated that this capacity is critical if parents are to raise securely-attached children. It is also an essential component in building and sustaining healthy intimate relationships in adulthood.
Buddhists have known this for a long time, of course. In the Buddhist tradition this capacity has been cultivated through mindfulness meditation, in which the mind is trained to watch itself in action. Generally the way this works is like this. You sit and focus your attention on your breath, trying to bring full awareness to this simple experiential cycle: in, out, in out. What inevitably happens is that after a few seconds your mind wanders off…worrying about something you need to do or about things you’ve already done. The future, the past…anything but the present moment. A common instruction when this happens is to give your brain’s activity a name (“worrying,” “planning,” etc.) and then to gently and non-judgmentally bring your attention back to your breath. You do this again and again and again and over time your capacity to observe your own mind grows stronger and stronger. In the process, you have a million opportunities to study the peculiarities of your own particular mind.
Now this is where I’ve begun to get confused.
What most people seem to describe when they meditate is a mental process which, however non-linear, seems to be defined by a single strand of thought. Attention to the breath may be interrupted by a worried thought, which in turn leads to another thought, and then another. The result might be a confusing series of thoughts, but it seems to remain serial: one thought at a time.
What I’m finding as I move deeper into my own meditation practice is something different. When I listen to the activity of my own mind (and I use the word “listen” purposefully), what I hear is a soup of sounds, words and half-thoughts, out of which arises whatever coherent linear thoughts I happen to have. I have no idea whether this is a normal experience in meditation or a peculiarity of my own mind.
I know that people experience all sorts of rich, complex and subtle awarenesses during meditation. And it is obviously quite difficult to compare one person’s subjective experience to another’s, much less to create an experiential taxonomy of those experiences. In many ways, it’s not important. I know that my task is simply to observe my mental experience – whatever form it happens to take – with openness and acceptance.
Still, I find myself a little bothered by the workings of my mind. Because I experience this aural soup of thoughts and half-thoughts as a sort of clutter, white noise which at times makes it very difficult to focus on any one particular thing. I can’t help but wonder if it’s related to what some people with AD/HD describe: an inability to effectively filter out incoming stimuli (although in my case much of the stimuli seems to be internally-generated).
While I find this experience very difficult to describe to others, one thing I know for certain is that I experience this murky mental stew quite literally as sound. In fact, I believe that I may be able to replicate a version of the experience in sound and I am currently at work on a musical piece which attempts to do just that (watch for it soon on this site).
This brings me to Temple Grandin. Recently I read her wonderful book, Thinking in Pictures, in which she describes her particular experience of autism as one in which she experiences her thoughts as visual images. It was startling to me how much I identified with her experience, even though I myself am a consummately non-visual person. I cannot retain visual information to save my life. But I’ve begun to wonder whether I think in sound. The more I study my own mind, the more likely this seems. I “hear” my thoughts. In studying Chinese, I struggle mightily to learn the characters, but the tonality of speech echoes easily in my mind. And when I recall past conversations, what comes into my mind are the rhythms and tones of speech…the words fill themselves in on that sonic framework.
In some ways this is a good thing, in other ways it’s a drawback. I have, for instance, always been frustrated by the fact that I am such a slow reader. Recently I started attending to my experience while reading and I realized something: I cannot read without hearing the words I’m reading in my mind. As a result, I can’t read any faster than I could say the words aloud.
I’m fond of my mind. But sometimes it tries my patience.
While travelling in China last year, our group visited Shangli Ancient Town, a small village in western Sichuan Province in which many of the village’s beautiful old structures remain intact. The narrow streets were thronged with tourists – very few of them non-Chinese – and the town was ringed by rivers, over which stood beautiful stone foot bridges. (You can find another nice description of the town here.) As we approached the central plaza of the town, I was transfixed by a repetitive chanting song. I scouted around and found its source – a clutch of young boys sitting on the ground in the middle of the crowd, playing some sort of card game which involved slapping their cards on the ground at certain moments of the chant. I was able to capture a bit of it, which is what you hear here. I don’t have enough Chinese to make out the words they’re singing (which may well be in Sichuanese dialect anyway). One of the things I love about this recording is that at first it sounds like the boys are doing just a simple monotone chant…but as it continues a lovely melody emerges. And at least one of the group of boys seems to be a pretty good singer. I’ve cleaned up the recording just a bit, filtering it so as to bring out the voices and reduce the background noise.
