Meditation Is A Type of Technology, Like a Telescope or Microscope

Meditation is a popular subject that comes with many different connotations. For many, it is seen as a type of magical or esoteric tool that connects you with a supreme force of the universe.

However, according to The Mindful Geek: Secular Meditation for Smart Skeptics, meditation is simply a type of technology for your mind.

We often associate the word “technology” with machines and computers, but technology is any type of process, skill, or method that is designed to improve our lives and how we navigate through the world. In this sense, meditation is no more magical than a computer or cellphone.

Throughout the book, Michael Taft does an excellent job breaking down the basics of meditation in a realistic and practical way that doesn’t involve any type of religious or spiritual doctrine. It’s a technology that anyone can use without any supernatural belief.

Taft compares meditation to other types of technology – like a telescope or microscope – which are ultimately designed to extend our awareness toward sensations that we are otherwise unable to detect with the naked eye.

Just like a telescope can extend our sensory experience to distant stars and planets, or a microscope can extend our sensory experience to cells or atoms, meditation too can extend our sensory experience to our inner world of sensations, thoughts, and feelings.

Here Taft explains how meditation is an “awareness-extending” technology:

“Meditation is a kind of awareness-extending technology, like a telescope or a microscope. When you begin the practice of mindfulness, you are training your awareness on present-moment sensory experience. At first this will feel pretty normal. But after awhile, you’ll be able to greatly increase your ability to detect finer and finer qualities of sensation at ever smaller scales. Your brain just gets better at detecting the sensations in finer and finer areas of the body. This aspect of meditation is called ‘sensory clarity,’ where you use your awareness like a telescope or microscope to ‘see’ subtler sensory experiences. Sensory clarity takes awhile to develop and requires that you attempt to make ever-finer sensory distinctions in your meditation practice.”

Thinking of meditation as a type of technology helps to strip away the “magical” or “esoteric” connotations that often come with it. It’s not anything special, but it’s a technique for how to better use what our minds are already equipped to do.

The 3 main components of meditation

Meditation can be broken down into three main components that have nothing to do with magic or supernatural forces, but are simply different aspects of how our minds work.

These 3 components of meditation include:

• Concentration – Our ability to focus on one object of our awareness for an extended period of time (like the sensations of our breathing).
• Sensory Clarity – Our ability to detect subtle sensations in our body with greater and greater clarity (like noticing a small ache in your back that you hadn’t noticed before).
• Acceptance – Our ability to sense an experience without judging it as “good” or “bad,” but just noticing it as is (like focusing on the sensations of an emotion like fear, without wanting to ignore or run away from it).

This, in essence, is all that meditation consists of. It can seem almost too simple, yet being able to harness these three aspects of meditation can have life-changing effects.

The metaphor of meditation as a video screen

One great metaphor throughout the book is comparing meditation to a video screen. Thinking of meditation in this way can help give you a clearer idea of what it is each of these three components are in the human mind.

For example, imagine you are watching a movie on a big screen TV.

“Concentration” means you can direct your attention to any part of the screen you want without getting distracted. “Sensory clarity” is like switching the screen from low-resolution to high definition, giving you a clearer picture of what you’re viewing. And “Acceptance” is how the screen displays whatever signal it gets, without judging or controlling the content (not wanting to change the channel).

This metaphor can be very helpful for understanding meditation in a commonsense way. Most of us are familiar with how TVs work, so simply applying these same principles to meditation can give you more comfort and familiarity with how these 3 components of meditation work.

Because meditation is a technology of the mind, it helps to think of it in terms of other technologies to help de-mystify the process and not make it seem too esoteric or “out there.”

At its core, meditation is a very intuitive and easy-to-understand phenomenon, although it does take time and effort to improve at it and begin seeing its benefits.

What is the purpose of this technology?

The purpose of all technology is to improve our lives in a measurable way, so what are the benefits of meditation? What is the purpose of learning how to use this technology?

The book covers many different studies showing how meditation can improve focus, stress relief, emotional intelligence, and general well-being.

Overall, meditation is a process of self-discovery and self-awareness. It teaches your mind how to be more attuned to your bodily sensations – which are often designed to guide you and your behaviors in some way.

As Taft mentions in the book, the trouble is most of us don’t pay much attention to what our bodies are saying and how they are influenced by our momentary experiences.

One of the key benefits of meditation (and paying more attention to our bodily sensations) is that it improves our emotional intelligence. Emotions play a huge role in how we think, act, and make choices in our daily lives – and they are often experienced as subtle body sensations that are outside of our awareness.

“This is an obvious problem, and is one of the unconscious things that meditation can help by bringing into conscious awareness. When you use meditation to become more aware of what you’re feeling, the unconscious or semi-unconscious flavors of emotional experience begin to come into focus. Your own motivations and drives become clearer. Not just in a conceptual way, but in a way you can physically detect, moment by moment, throughout your day. This is the essence of emotional intelligence, and it’s life changing.”

When you meditate on your body and mind, it teaches you more about the inner workings of the self. You learn more about your own impulses, preferences, and tendencies – and this can be very useful knowledge to help guide your life.

Many say the goal of meditation is “enlightenment,” but this esoteric goal can often blind us to what meditation is really about and the small insights it can provide to us on a daily basis.

“Not all insights are huge or significant, however. For example, did you notice anything at all about yourself or your experience that you hadn’t noticed before? Many people in their first meditation come into direct contact with the fact that they have a hard time sitting still. That is an insight. Or you may have noticed that your mind was constantly spinning the whole time. That’s another insight. You may have noticed that you have an awful pain in your back you hadn’t felt previously. You guessed it: another insight.”

Simple insights like recognizing the restlessness of your body and mind are in-themselves very powerful lessons that can come out of meditation.

Our minds are always craving stimulation and novelty, and it’s inherently difficult for the body and mind to just sit still – especially in our busy culture of constant productivity, entertainment, and consumerism.

In today’s world, we don’t often give ourselves the time to just “sit back” and analyze our bodies and minds, so by engaging in this process we become more familiar with the everyday processes that are going on inside us.

Taft lets his readers know that the goal of meditation isn’t about “clearing your mind” completely – which is a difficult, if not impossible goal – but to give us more awareness of how our bodies and minds actually work (even when they are filled up with thoughts, feelings, and sensations).

If you are attuned to your body, you can notice feelings of anger, sadness, or fear as they are bubbling up, and that can give you much more control over these emotional reactions before they get out of control.

This can have a tremendously empowering effect on all areas of our lives, whether it’s how we talk to others in a heated argument or how we choose to respond to a mistake at work.

Experiencing a tree as a tree

Anything that you experience in your life can become an object of meditation.

One of the most common objects of meditation is following your breathing. Another common form of meditation includes a “body scan” meditation where you scan your body and make note of any sensations you feel starting with your feet and moving your way up to your face.

Everything you experience can be considered a part of your consciousness, including experiences that start from outside your mind and body (like observing an external object, such as a flower or a tree).

One interesting passage in The Mindful Geek: Secular Meditation for Smart Skeptics asks, “When was the last time you actually encountered a tree as a tree?”

“When was the last time you actually encountered a tree as a tree? It’s possible to see a tree as a sensory phenomenon: the rich texture and scent of the bark, the luscious colors of the leaves, the sound it makes as the wind passes through it, and so on. This is the sensory experience of a tree. Yet most of us pass dozens or hundreds of trees a day, and we notice none of these features. We barely encounter trees as sensory experiences at all. Instead, we simply reduce all this sensory richness into a single word, ‘tree,’ and leave it at that. The word tree functions as a concept, or symbol – a mental shorthand that allows us to shortcut having to actually encounter the tree.”

Often when we navigate through the world, we reduce our sensory experiences to concepts and abstractions. This is a very useful function of the human mind since it helps save us mental energy.

If we always encountered a tree as something new and novel, we’d constantly be distracted by our overwhelming sensory experiences. The mind needs to reduce things to concepts so that we can save our mental energy toward things in our environment that actually require our focus and attention.

However, the goal of meditation is to experience our senses as directly as possible, without muddling them with this conceptual thinking.

For this reason, it can very interesting to take the time to sit back and really pay attention to our everyday experiences – whether it’s something visual like a tree, or a sound like car traffic, or even the smell of coffee.

While these experiences can seem very ordinary and mundane, they are great objects to practice meditating on and improving your overall awareness of yourself and your surroundings.

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