December 21, 2021

Bare awareness practices always entail perceptual fabrication

Even bare awareness meditative practices are couched in interpretative frameworks which guide the practitioner’s experience.

Among proponents of contemporary mindfulness practices, it is a common trope that a meditative practitioner can learn to “sit without interpretation” of their experience. Often called “bare awareness,”1 some purport that this meditative skill allows us to see “reality as it is.” Finally, this is also used to justify that “meditation is a science of the mind.” McMahon (2008) covers this rhetoric extensively; Thompson (2020) explicitly calls this Buddhist exceptionalism.

However, given that many well-meaning practitioners and teachers purport these claims, perhaps its worth investigating if it has any merit, and how. Namely: Is it possible for us to sit with reality as it is? What would that even mean―experientially―for the types of sentient beings that we are? Does this connect with the ontological understanding of Buddhism, that we are interdependent beings all the way down?

I’m unsure if this thought could even answer the questions it poses. However, I’ve had some inklings on the matter.

As a previous English major, I rely heavily on text, interpretation, and critique. As a way to enter this conversation, let’s focus on Shapiro and colleagues’ (2006) seminal paper, “Mechanisms of mindfulness.” This is an early example of the speculative contemplative sciences, a specific attempt in the research literature to begin pinning down the psychological mechanisms at play in meditative practices.2 This paper highlights intention, attention, and awareness (IAA) as central components of (contemporary)3 mindfulness practices. This practice, in turn, leads to reperceiving, which denotes an individual’s ability to shift perspectives and subsequently disidentify with the contents of consciousness.

Within the study, the authors spend time discussing the many values of mindfulness practice. When discussing the “attitude” of practice, they write:

“We posit that persons can learn to attend to their own internal and external experiences, without evaluation or interpretation, and practice acceptance, kindness and openness even when what is occurring in the field of experience is contrary to deeply held wishes or expectations. However, it is essential to make the attitudinal quality of attention explicit. It is important for the practitioner to consciously commit, e.g. “may I bring kindness, curiosity, and openness to my awareness, may I infuse my awareness with . . .”“ (377).

The phrase “without evaluation or interpretation” is often-heard in the contemporary mindfulness space, and I see these sorts of comments as funnels into the larger “meditation as science of the mind” rhetoric. Even within this short paragraph, I wonder: Can I sit without interpretation while also cultivating a new interpretation? The new interpretation, of course, is loving-kindness and compassion, the “may I infuse my awareness with…” sentiment. Perhaps this is pedantic, yet I don’t see it as “sitting without expectations,” but rather “sitting without or replacing my usual interpretations.” Otherwise stated, contemporary mindfulness practices ask us to suspend habitual patterns of interpretation while simultaneously introducing other patterns of interpretation. This is apparent in reperceiving, or cognitive defusion,4 given that these concepts indicate shifts in an individual’s psychological ability to disidentify with, or distance their “self” from, thoughts and images and feelings as they arise.

As usual, Evan Thompson draws out the point beautifully. In Why I Am Not a Buddhist, he traces the origins of “bare attention”5 to Nyanaponika, a 20th century German convert to Ceylonese Buddhism. This monk argues that mindfulness allows the practitioner to access the mind as it is, through which it will be revealed that non-self is true. In questioning the veracity/coherence of this claim, Thompson he writes:

“How are these two ways of thinking about bare attention—as disinterested disclosure of how the mind truly is versus as shaping it according to a value standard—supposed to be related? They seem to be in tension. To disclose something requires not changing it as you disclose it. To shape the mind is to change it. How can bare attention reveal the mind if it also changes it?” (Why I Am Not a Buddhist, p.32)

What is “bare” about mindfulness?

I also wonder what “bare” indicates. It seems to me that, if awareness is always of something, our mind will always be subtly responding to it. I think this would even be the case if you attempted a “value-neutral” meditation, wherein you’re not explicitly asked to cultivate this quality, or detect that unwholesome quality. As questions: Isn’t awareness always “of” something—a thought, feeling, sensorimotor experience, etc.―in some fundamental way? Isn’t the meditative position itself something to be aware of? What, then, is the “bare-ness” of bare awareness?

To draw out the thinking: Let’s say that in an open monitoring practice (OM) you aren’t selecting the object of meditation: You are letting whatever arises in the mind to arise, not clinging nor averse to it. Yet this seems to still be a way to apprehend things as they are occurring in your experience, which subtly changes it―or drastically, as in a cessation event. Moreover, I agree that these practices lead to less “fabrication” (discussed below) in the moment, and that a practitioner’s ability to prune fabrication can improve over time. I also agree that meditative skill gained from OM practices also improves one’s ability to become aware of, sit with, and alter habitual movements of the mind that reach to incredibly subtle levels of emotion, attention, and perception. At least, that has been the case for me, especially on retreat.

Bare awareness, then, perhaps simply indicates “lessening levels of fabrication.” If that is the case, perhaps a “pruning awareness” or “pruning practice” sits better with me. This process, in other words, is not a “bare awareness” of “reality as it is.” Rather, it is a co-creation of experience through a mediated awareness, which itself is a thick soup that combines the individual, their body, the tradition and practice and conceptual frameworks with which they are meditating, and the social and physical environment.

The role of fabrication in bare awareness

In the (magnificently wonderful and disorientingly trippy) Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising, Rob Burbea draws out the many implications of Buddhist teachings on emptiness (śūnyatā). Specific to the thought here, he draws on the tradition’s rich philosophy of mind to argue that all experience is “fabricated” (saṃskṛta). In an early chapter, he provides an example to highlight the teaching: You have a friend in abject terror at the sight of a wolf. However, on closer inspection you discover that your friend is scared of a shadow that he himself is unknowingly casting on the wall. In thinking of ways to respond to your friend, Burbea argues that this scenario demonstrates “our involvement somehow in fabricating the illusion and the appearances of things.” He continues,

“In this scenario, although your friend may have been trying to ‘be with’ the wolf, ‘accept’ its presence, even remind himself of the impermanence of all things, at the deepest and most significant level ‘insight’ and ‘wisdom’ here must mean seeing that the wolf is a fabrication that he himself has been fabricating… Understanding this, there might then be the possibility that he could do something about it―stop it perhaps, or fabricate something else that doesn’t bring so much dukkha” (16).

On a gross level, many meditators understand how we make the wolf. Indeed, OM practices such as “bare awareness,” or what Burbea calls “staying at contact” (which seems preferable to me), allow us an effective means to disengage from our wolves, the pack of swirling thoughts and chains of reactivity in which we are so often engrossed. Yet this practice, in helping us shirk our normal ways of perceiving the world, can convince us we are seeing reality “as it is,” and viewing the world in a more “objective” light. According to Burbea, this still misses the point:

“…the delusion of inherent existence is woven right into perception and the way we experience things… Fundamental ignorance cannot be removed merely by removing thinking. No matter how simple, direct-seeming, clear, and thought-free our experience of things might be, if the subtle sense of inherent existence in that thing is not consciously overturned, [delusion] is still present” (213).

It is not whether we can get to a bare, unmediated experience of reality. We are always mediating reality through our very subjectivity, from our position in the world to the very structure of our sentient bodies.6 Rather, it is that some ways of perceiving and re-acting in the world are more helpful than others. If we understand this, we can use different spectacles (so to speak) to view situations and sensations in more liberating ways.

Rob Burbea was a phenomenally clear and compassionate Buddhist meditation teacher, not a clinical psychologist like those I’ve cited previously. I point to Burbea to highlight the Buddhist psychological perspective because so much of this perspective saturates the research literature. Shaprio and colleagues’ (2006) paper, like so many others in the psychological literature, cite Jon Kabat-Zinn’s seminal definition of mindfulness. As has been analyzed by many humanistic and critical thinkers, this definition is itself a decontextualized amalgamation of yogic and Buddhist meditative practices.7 In a way, the tradition from which psychology draws upon also serves to undercut its own position: namely, that an understanding of mindfulness as providing an unmediated access to experience (“bare awareness”) contradicts the perception-as-clinging-or-aversion approach of certain Buddhist psychological accounts (Dunne, 2015; see also Grabovac et al., 2011).

Reperceiving bare awareness: Pruning and contact

As usual, I don’t think I have solidly answered any of my questions. I think bare awareness practice may be better understood as “a pruning awareness,” a pulling back of normal mental activity to cultivate something more focused on simpler sensations, to “stay at contact” in Burbea’s words.

Beyond that, I think there is much to admire in Shapiro and colleagues’ (2006) concept of reperceiving, as I think it connects deeply to the central claim of this thought: that bare awareness does, in fact, entail fabrication. Reperception, they argue, entails a shifted perspective of moment-by-moment experience which leads to four mechanisms of psychological change: self-regulation; clarification of values; flexibility in emotion, cognition, and behaviors, and; exposure. In other words, mindfulness practices allow us to fabricate a more “wholesome reality,” one which prioritizes certain emotions, values, behaviors, and experiences.

Next Learning

2024-09-28: I have uncovered a chapter in the Routledge Handbook on the Philosophy of Meditation (1st Edition) that explicitly addresses bare awareness/attention, and utilizes the tools of phenomenology: “Bare attention, dereification, and meta-awareness in mindfulness: A phenomenological critique” by Odysseus Stone and Dan Zahavi. It looks like they draw out the possible interpretations of “bareness,” which may extend my thoughts here.

References

Burbea, R. (2014). Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising. Hermes Amāra Publications.

Dunne, J. D. (2015). Buddhist styles of mindfulness: A heuristic approach. In Handbook of Mindfulness and Self-Regulation (pp. 251–270). Springer New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-2263-5_18

Grabovac, A. D., Lau, M. A., & Willett, B. R. (2011). Mechanisms of Mindfulness: A Buddhist Psychological Model. Mindfulness, 2(3), 154–166. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-011-0054-5

Lutz, A., Slagter, H. A., Dunne, J. D., & Davidson, R. J. (2008). Attention regulation and monitoring in meditation. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12(4), 163–169. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2008.01.005

McMahan, D. L. (2008). The Making of Buddhist Modernism. Oxford University Press.

McMahan, D. L., & Braun, E. (Eds.). (2017). Meditation, Buddhism, and Science. Oxford University Press.

Shapiro, S. L., Carlson, L. E., Astin, J. A., & Freedman, B. (2006). Mechanisms of mindfulness. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 62(3), 373–386. https://doi.org/10.1002/jclp.20237

Thompson, E. (2020). Why I Am Not a Buddhist. Yale University Press.

  1. These practices may be considered to be open-monitoring (OM) styles of practice. Lutz and colleagues (2008) defined OM practices as cultivating a metacognitive monitoring state which is objectless, non-selective, and non-reactive. In the authors words: “One aims to remain only in the monitoring state, attentive moment by moment to anything that occurs in experience without focusing on any explicit object. To reach this state, the practitioner gradually reduces the focus on an explicit object in focused attention meditations, and the monitoring faculty is correspondingly emphasized. Usually, there is also an increasing emphasis on cultivating a ‘reflexive’ awareness that grants one greater access to the rich features of each experience, such as the degree of phenomenal intensity, the emotional tone and the active cognitive schema”↩︎

  2. This isn’t to say that millennia of Buddhist theorizing doesn’t “count” in investigations of psychological mechanisms, just that this is a clinical psychology journal, not a religious studies space.↩︎

  3. Contemporary mindfulness follows Dunne’s (2015) categorization of mindfulness practices.↩︎

  4. Proposed by Stephen Hayes as a mechanism of change from mindfulness practices, which he infuses in his Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.↩︎

  5. Closely related in terminology—is it correct to assume that Shapiro is drawing from Nyanaponika’s definition?↩︎

  6. For an intriguing read, see Donald Hoffman’s “Evolutionary Argument Against Reality”.↩︎

  7. For an interesting exploration of Kabat-Zinn’s work and definition, see “Mindful but Not Religious” by Braun, in McMahan & Braun (2017). Meditation, Buddhism, and Science.↩︎

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