If we momentarily pay attention to something about our own feelings, consciousness, and state of mind, then (I claim) our spatial attention is at that moment centered somewhere in our own bodies—more specifically, in modern western culture, it’s very often the head, but different cultures vary. Actually, that’s a sufficiently interesting topic that I’ll go on a tangent: here’s an excerpt from the book Impro by Keith Johnstone:
The placing of the personality in a particular part of the body is cultural. Most Europeans place themselves in the head, because they have been taught that they are the brain. In reality of course the brain can’t feel the concave of the skull, and if we believed with Lucretius that the brain was an organ for cooling the blood, we would place ourselves somewhere else. The Greeks and Romans were in the chest, the Japanese a hand’s breadth below the navel, Witla Indians in the whole body, and even outside it. We only imagine ourselves as ‘somewhere’.
Meditation teachers in the East have asked their students to practise placing the mind in different parts of the body, or in the Universe, as a means of inducing trance.… Michael Chekhov, a distinguished acting teacher…suggested that students should practise moving the mind around as an aid to character work. He suggested that they should invent ‘imaginary bodies’ and operate them from ‘imaginary centres’…
Johnstone continues from here, discussing at length how moving the implicit spatial location of introspection seems to go along with rebooting the personality and sense-of-self. Is there a connection to the space-referenced implementation of innate social drives that I’m hypothesizing in this post? I’m not sure—food for thought. Also possibly related: Julian Jaynes’s Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, and the phenomenon of hallucinated voices.
@WhatsTrueKittycat Potentially useful cogtech for both meditation and mental-proscenium-training.
@WhatsTrueKittycat Potentially useful cogtech for both meditation and mental-proscenium-training.