Sometimes I try to imagine what it’s like to have an absolutely calm mind: a conscious like the sea, washing over an object of concentration, not preoccupied with itself or anything else. Of course, there have been moments like this. After all, I do have the ability to concentrate. But the nature of the beast is that you never notice. Once you take note that you’re concentrating fully and unselfconsciously on one thing, you’ve broken the spell: if you noticed that you were concentrating on one thing, that means you must have been concentrating on at least one other thing, the noticing. So the mark of flow or mindfulness is that once you notice it, it’s gone. Since you can’t observe the beast in its natural habitat, you must simulate it, either in the theater of memory or before the movie-projector of the imagination. But again, the nature of the thing is elusive: it seems that, by concentrating fully on one thing, we fail to commit to memory what never occurs to us in the moment, namely, the feeling of full concentration. So memories of this state are always vague at best: I remember the post-flow buzz, but not the preceding flow. Or I remember details of whatever it was I was concentrating on: it is as if the memory sees through thinking, as if thinking has become a perfectly clear and non-refractive glass through which we see our object of study, so clear, in fact, that it becomes invisible. This is, of course, an illusion, because although we might imagine that we’re seeing the object unaltered and unfiltered, the very act of seeing is a filter and an alteration; it’s impossible for our awareness of a thing to be that thing, because a sensation is not a book or a hand-wave or a smile; if it is a thing at all, it’s a thing of the mind, not whatever is external to it. (This actually suggests an intriguing thought experiment: could there be a brain that, through some mechanism, had an acute awareness of some subset of its neurons, and that this awareness was located in this specific subset, so that, in effect, the neuron-complex was the awareness of the neuron-complex? Does it even make sense to speak of awareness as being located in or identical to neurons? But I digress.)
Memory may be of little help, but the imagination is worse. We can’t imagine how a phenomenological experience would feel unless it is sufficiently close to one that we’ve already felt. Mary lives in a black and white world for her entire life, and there she learns all there is to learn about the science of color. Then she escapes and sees, for the first time, the color red. Does she learn anything new? Well, I’d say she learns how it feels to see the color red. In the same way we learn something new when we taste something that tastes like nothing we’ve tasted before — no matter how long we’ve been fantasizing about it, no matter how hard we try to imagine what the taste-experience might be like. The experience of a still but focused mind, then, seems inaccessible: we can’t remember it, we can’t observe it when it’s ongoing, and without relevant reference points, we can’t imagine it, either.
How is it, then, that I’m convinced it’s such a great state to be in? Why is it that I so crave and seek it?
Oct 9, 2010