I am now thirty days into the fifty-day introductory daily meditation course on the Waking Up app and the results are fascinating. The app is the product of the neuroscientist, philosopher and public intellectual Sam Harris. Whilst I’m not really a fan of the ardent atheist line of his thinking, making use of the app has led to some intriguing experiences.
Meditation through Apps
There are a great many meditation apps available and a number that will do a decent job of teaching the basic principles of mindfulness. I have previously endorsed Calm when talking about becoming aware of your breathing and I know a few people who recommend Headspace. However, as Harris says, most apps present the practice as a kind of executive stress ball whereas meditation is more like the Large Hadron Collider. He continues;
‘The purpose of meditation isn’t merely to reduce stress or to make you feel better in the moment—it’s to make fundamental discoveries in the laboratory of your own mind.’
I am now just over halfway through the course and I feel that using the app has been revolutionary in my approach to meditation and mindfulness in general. The gentle instructions have built up regularity and structure into my practice which was missing before in a way that has developed my experience of the workings of my psyche. The ‘laboratory of the mind’ is a great metaphor, and generally, it’s been an inciteful process, although some of the experiments have left me a little weirded out.
Explaining the Ineffable
The experience I want to mention is hard to put into words but I will do my best to explain. Whilst keeping my eyes open during one mediation, and trying not to focus on the visual field in front of me, the instruction was to attempt to look back. This was to notice what I can only describe as the experiential identification of what element of consciousness is looking out. I was instantly hit by subsequent waves of a kind of mental whiteness which was like a rising mist inside my head. It was unexpected and almost surreal.
I was mainly surprised by how just directing perception and changing my focus could bring about pseudo-physical reactions in my awareness. That was something of a Eureka moment, I knew then that even though that particular result was not exactly desirable, there is a latent power in focusing on perception that must have some useful real-world application.
Final Thought
It’s possibly not for everyone, actually listening to the episodes puts my wife to sleep. However, as an advocate for bettering ourselves and learning new and open-minded ways of thinking, I would recommend giving the Waking Up app a go.
Meditation helped me enormously from age 15 to 45 through many of life’s challanges. I am glad that you have come to it and are also getting benefit from the practice of such a simple technique. I transferred to self hypnosis thereafter as I had sorted myself out and it was less of a disciplined way of life.