Mindfulness & the Categories of Sensory Experience

This is how I like to classify basic sensory experience.

When I have People learn mindfulness techniques. I have them note their experience based on these categories. This system was designed with 2 goals in mind. One is that it would tend to lead to insights in meditators because they can see how these different sensory systems interrelate so that's sort of a pragmatic.

Point of view that it's convenient for People, having a hard experiences when they track their sensory events. The other goal was to create a system based on contrasts that would be convenient for study with what's called fMRI that's functional magnetic resonance image Ng? When you

Study the Neural Corlette of experience with fMRI. You can't actually image and experience that you can do is image to contrast ING states. So I gave a lot of consideration as to what would be the most useful contrasts both in terms of image studying that scientists might want to do and in terms of what's likely to?

Bring about insight experiences for the meditators who are being studied by those scientists so with those 2 goals in mind, I created this system. I call it the basic states.

The.

Right left gives you a contrast between a more object if side of experience versus a more subjective side of experience for example. There are external physical sounds in the world, but there's also the internal sound of your self talk, sometimes when external sound expands internal talk might go away, and you can watching that contrast, you can see some interesting interactions.

So this would be in an auditory domain. I'll get these guys in a minute analogously. There are external sites in the world. But there's also the internal visual experience of your mental images when you're thinking of People places physical objects. When you have memory plan fantasy or your eyes are closed, and you think about where you are or how your body appears.

You're having visual thoughts so image is the more subjective side and the external sites are the more object of side of visual experience.

Then there is somatic experience In other words, body experience I.

Believe that it's very important that People.

Develop the ability to detect when their body has emotional type sensations. When a person experiences. Anger fear sadness embarrassment impatience disgust interest joy. Love gratitude humor smile and so forth.

There are usually body sensations, distinctive body sensations associated with that, so the real juice of emotional experience I would claim is not so much in the internal talk and mental image. Although that of course, is important. But it's the emotional type sensations that give the strong valence or coloration or power to emotional experiences.

So I think it's good that we have a word in English. That means body sensation. That seems emotional to a given individual at a given time. There is no such word that has that meaning in English. Neither is there any such word in any language that I'm familiar with so arbitrarily assigned the word feel to mean affect if so, Miss Thesia that would be a very fancy way of saying.

Emotional body sensations affect if is Latin phrase, meaning emotional so much. Thesia is body sensation body experience. So I use feel for that and that would represent a somewhat subjective side of the body relative to touch, which is.

Everything else all the other ordinary experiences in the body itches and aches pressures and pains sleepy sensations or ordinary breathing ordinary pulse. That kind of thing is more of an it if you have pain take that as a touch if the pain causes. Anger fear sadness those reactions. Those body sensations. I would call feel and in point of fact feel image talk.

Represent a reactive system, they can react to.

Touch sight sound there also a proactive system. They can go off on their own and spin memory plan fantasy and so forth you have a fundamental contrast between auditory visual and somatic.

And then across here, you have a somewhat more object if side and a somewhat more subjective side.

Now 1/3 level of contrast is between the ordinary sensory activity.

Touch sight sound field image talk and corresponding restful states for example, when you're focusing on external sound it might happen that there's not any sound. That's an interesting experience that's a restful state and you can note that as silence.

What's even more interesting is if you happen to be focusing on internal talk and it goes away well. I have a term for that experience I call that quiet.

So.

You have some restful states here.

If you don't have any images you can be aware of mental blank.

Or even if you have images there's a way that I teach People to focus on a background of blank.

You can defocus your external site your eyes are still open, but you just sort of letting light in.

And that's a restful state corresponding to external site that's used by many different People summer I for example, used to intentionally solve focus their eyes in practicing martial arts, so that's another restful state. The contrast with site. I call that light and then contest resting with touches the physical relaxation of the body and contrasting with feel is its absence, which I call?

Emotional piece so this gives us a contrast between.

Somatic visual auditory.

A contrast between

Subjective reactive proactive versus objective experience and then a contrast between ordinary experience and corresponding pleasant restful states.

So these are the basic States and I build different mindfulness systems based on the states.