Meta-Consciousness
Thinking, Knowing your thinking, and not being distracted (or bored) by the sound of your own inner voice
Modern concepts of consciousness are often split into three components—bodily sensations, feelings, and narratives—but only the first two are available to novice mindful practitioners as objects to deepen awareness of the present moment. This is for good reason—most thoughts crystallize over all of consciousness—and those that form an inner dialogue further a sense of a talkative object and an attentive subject.
Even without this dualistic interaction, our stream of conscious narrative is normally unbelievably boring. As Sam Harris says about his own stream of consciousness walking out on stage for his discussion of his book Waking Up, a book about discovering the secular, non-dualistic nature of mind, “I catch myself in the following internal dialogue: “Oh, great, I see that they’ve put bottled water out on the table...” He goes on to say, “Who exactly am I telling that to and why is it remotely worth mentioning?” Our play-by-play dialogue is written by the worst hack narrator imaginable.
Can this be retrained? Our narrative mind is in our newest part of our brain, our neocortex, and is responsible for our ability to imagine ourselves in different futures, fantastic landscapes, and into mathematical and scientific conceptions of reality well beyond our intuitions... so it shouldn’t necessarily be so boring, or so unkempt?
I’m a novice and most of the time I must notice the narration and wait for it to end. It’s as distracting and mundane as advertised... but not always.
Recently I went with my soul brother, a man whose company I enjoy and whose understanding of live music is akin to my own, to a jam band concert that was first rate.
(An aside is necessary but certainly sufficient to understand my interaction with live jam band music. In my youth, I read a book by Hermann Hesse entitled The Glass Bead Game, and have ever since equated the monks interplay of music, mathematics, and a collective consciousness with the interaction between music, lyrical symbolism, the light show, and the audience’s participation that constitutes the scene at a jam band concert like Phish or The Trey Anastasio Band. In a similar vein to the participants in the Castalian Glass Bead Game, I consider concerts a sacred venue and am consciously geared up to ensure an optimal level of enchantment. ;) )
Like so many shows, we stand calmly waiting on the grade of an amphitheater. It’s cool. Men and women are gathered around. Conversations happen all around. I’m in a sea of people I do not know.
Yet, for the first time ever, I’m not self-conscious... I’m just conscious... and not just conscious, but lovingingly kind. I’m hoping that everyone has a good show. I wish everyone well. I wish that all in attendance are free from suffering and know the causes of suffering.
It’s a true wish. I make space for the crowd and am proud of them, proud that they have put joy and music and mystery before more worldly concerns, at least for this evening’s festivities.
Maybe to keep me company while my soul brother is away at the bathroom and greeting people he knows, maybe because of my true equanimity and grace to the other humans around me, my mind becomes really friendly. Like besties.
This metacognitive state is not distracting, it is not crystalizing over awareness (like is always the case), but is somehow a separate and still recognizable conscious entity. Initially the greeting is complimentary, indeed “our” shared state should be a place of process that promotes the betterment of all human kind. But then it gets really interesting, like your most interesting and introspective friend interesting...
There is a context, a subtext of grace, the positive-sum (glass bead) game. Complexity and label-less-ness is the start.
The demon of self-conscious chaos and paranoia creeps in, “you are alone and everyone is looking at you. NONE of these people is your friend.”
To which, initially the scramble involves a sad bit of capitalism, “yeah but, Elon Musk could fill the crowd with his friends and wouldn’t that be great...”
Before you realize, you are more creative than that. Indeed, each of these people is some bifurcation, some strange attractor, some near-parallel personage to people you have know.
Indeed, that there is a twenty-something Karen Skilstead, your First Grade teacher, mystically back in her prime, an adjacent identity but recognizably so... So Skilstead.
(If I’m two consciousness at once, why not that lady. Or that fellow. Indeed, how is it that we come about identity anyway, as we share our awareness windows, as we tap into the fundamental qualia nature of reality.)
My mind and I are friends. We reconstitute people we knew at times and ages where we didn’t. All of a sudden, this is a crowd of friends from parallel pasts, presents, and futures. We whirl and reconnect. There is nothing boring nor distractive, it’s life purely present. Imaginative yet illustrative. I’m comfortable, at home with my tribe and on a rise that I’ve stood post on—happily—in lives and identities across a cosmos complete with complex computations nearly identical and mystically different from this one.
And then the music starts. And we dance.
“Set the gear shift for the high gear of your soul. You’ve got to run like an antelope outta control.” -Phish