--- title: "Spiritual Rationality, part 6 of 9" canonical: "https://spiritual-rationality.org" pages: 3 --- # Spiritual Rationality, part 6 of 9 {#top} *Part 6 of 9, complete edition — “Misc. Features of Spiritual Practices” through “Introspection (and some "Transformative Practice")”. Previous: https://spiritual-rationality.org/llms-full-5.txt. Next: https://spiritual-rationality.org/llms-full-7.txt. Whole edition in one file: https://spiritual-rationality.org/llms-full.txt. Index: https://spiritual-rationality.org/llms.txt* ## Notation {#notation} Source notation, not standard markdown: - `::gloss[…]` — definition of the heading above it. Invisible on the site; it is the hover card for links to that heading. Read as a definition. - `::gloss[…]{#id}` — defines a term holding its own anchor. `#id` is the link target; the block below is what it annotates. - `::nogloss` — heading deliberately has no definition. - `:::note[…]` / `:::info[…]` — callouts (MyST/Docusaurus admonitions). Footnotes are GFM. Heading anchors are GitHub-style slugs, written out as `{#id}` in the combined files. ## Contents {#contents} - [Misc. Features of Spiritual Practices](#practice-practices) - [Meditation](#practice-meditation) - [Introspection (and some "Transformative Practice")](#practice-introspection) --- # Misc. Features of Spiritual Practices {#practice-practices} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/practice/practices — also at `/md/practice/practices.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `practice-practices--`.* The below isn't even remotely trying to be comprehensive, but this is I think an important angle on some common features both in spiritual traditions and in human experience in general. ### "Practices"? {#practice-practices--practices} *Practice*, or especially *practices* evoke discrete activities performed deliberately, with time set aside for them specifically. Obviously I'm including that, but I'm using the word in a broader sense here, that's fairly common among at least Western meditators. Often practice includes attitudes and qualities of mind that can diffuse into other activities or non-activity or just-hanging-around. Even when pretty distinct, practice can also occur spontaneously, eg. countless reports of falling into meditative states during ordinary activity, or into prayer or devotion. ## Imaginal practice {#practice-practices--imaginal-practice} ::gloss[*Imaginal* practice refers to exploration of clusters of meaning and feeling, usually associated with internal sensations of visual imagery, touch, movement, and sound.] *Imaginal* practice as a concept I get through Rob Burbea, though he didn't originate it. Firstly, yes, *imaginal*, not *imaginary*, though there's certainly some overlap. Imaginal practice concerns exploration of and relationship with *images*. Images in this sense are patterns of [resonance](/md/practice/phenomenology-somatics.md#resonance) in relationship with, usually, internal images, as well as internal sensations of touch, movement, sound, etc. Images might be deliberately evoked, or organic or spontaneous. For example, with respect to sexual and romantic fantasy, a person might experience images in a variety of ways: - Spontaneous, sometimes intrusive reverie, of a past lover or a current crush - These can often be phenomenally intense and rich, not narrowly restrictected to *visual* imagery but including rich internal touch sensation, etc. etc. - Often these are extended and engrossing - Sex dreams - *Deliberately* evoked fantasy, in the context of masturbation - Most often this is consciously "controlled," though often control is nebulous, and sometimes such fantasies are experiences as playing out "on their own." - Brief flits of internal imagery and feeling - Extended extemporaneous romantic storytelling in one's mind, eg. often stereotypically done by teenage girls in our culture Again, these are often quite rich phenomenally, and despite the unfortunate name they usually aren't even *mostly* about visual imagery. Broadly speaking I would say imaginal practices involve an exploration of the resonances that a person's relational/affective attitudes define, most saliently in the absence of "real" (physical, enacted) experiences that would align with them. Imaginal qualities are often diffused into a broader set of practices, and may not be elicited deliberately in isolation. Eg., in a broad sense storytelling is usually concerned with *images*, certainly rather than purely linguistic, storytelling is about evoking images and their resonances. Even fairly technical discussion can include a kind of imaginal backdrop, eg. I see old discussions of transhumanism, even when they get pretty far in the weeds, as an expression of yearning, excitement, and anxiety, and an *imaginal* negotiation of those feelings. Imaginal practices from world traditions and independent practitioners are often much weirder. One common cluster of reports is of images "taking on a life of their own," where they have access to wisdom that the person feels they don't possess, or even that they have access to specific knowledge that a person did not have access to themselves. Eg., there are countless reports of people calling upon the memory of a beloved relative, and finding that the image speaks back with creativity and spontaneity which is felt not to be "invented" or "orchestrated." Similarly with many traditional religious practices of communing with spirits or deities, the entities in question are commonly reported as experienced as independent, spontaneous, and real. Many traditional spiritual systems will construe these experiences [metaphysically](/md/metaphysics.md) as real in the sense that those entities are actually independent, have their own experiences, persist outside of your practice, etc. etc. Some modern hippies (as did, [as it happens](/md/appendix/whose-buddha-historiography.md), some 19th century German philosophers) similarly claim that one can tap directly into a cosmic wisdom through these and other practices. I'm pretty confident these are all false, and I'll [talk about this again](/md/spiritual-truth/metaphysics-phenomenology-spirituality.md) later. One more cluster I'll mention briefly is known as "deity yoga" (not anything about physical postures, that's afaict mostly a modern innovation within "yoga"). Some of what's known as deity yoga is not so dissimilar from forms of prayer that will be familiar to Westerners. The more interesting forms include eg. Yidam practice in Tibetan Buddhism, and I believe there's some similar stuff in Hindu Tantra and some kinds of modern Western esotericism. In Yidam practice, the practitioner visualizes themselves *as* a deity, usually with an involved collection of symbols, but importantly feeling and seeing as the deity would. The [ways of seeing](/md/metaphysics/ways-of-seeing.md) of these deities are supposed to be bizarre or alien (Tibetan Bodhisattvas are quite weird), but advanced Yidam practitioners are meant to take on these ways of seeing in their more ordinary experience. I think this points to what the broader space of imaginal practice can be. I'll also mention here, imaginal practice isn't necessarily positive or pleasant, and many traditional and modern imaginal practices are quite the opposite, eg. literally imagining capital-h-Hell, or reflecting on and empathizing with the suffering of factory farmed animals. ## Prayer {#practice-practices--prayer} ::nogloss I would regard almost all prayer as different kinds of imaginal practice. In particular most prayer as taught in eg. Western Christianity is a framework for working with a particular set of images in a deliberate way. This kind of prayer usually involves a pattern of usually performative external action alongside internal motions, including eg. internal speech, deliberately arousing specific emotions, or much subtler moves. The role and attitudes of prayer can often be self-gratifying or transactional. However, many traditions teach prayer as a practice of "meeting" and entering into relationship with an [energy](/md/practice/phenomenology-somatics.md#energy) (more relevantly, see [re resonances](/md/practice/phenomenology-somatics.md#resonance)) or image, and this is the kind of attitude often reported from the most serious practitioners in these sorts of traditions. Such images are often reported to take on a shape that a person *doesn't* want, whether to make demands of them or to show things they flinch away from. To be clear, sometimes people can have a kind of masochistic or at least self-punitive attitude towards prayer, and in this sense prayer can be an upside-down kind of self-gratification, where a person will fairly consciously control or puppet the image to tell them what think they should hear. As with imaginal practice more broadly, most traditions construe these experiences metaphysically as "literally real," or something close enough. Agnostic of the metaphysics, or at least even in *my* metaphysics, there's a distinction that's important to track here, with respect to a. the resolution and detail of the image, b. its richness, and c. its flexibility or dynamism. In particular, I most *trust* (in some sense) reports of prayer which seem spontaneous, alive, sensitive, etc. as opposed to "scripted," stereotyped, etc.—even if I don't believe in the metaphysics in which they're presented. Note that many reports which I "buy" are thin or nebulous when it comes to any *visual* aspect, but which are very rich and dynamic relationally/emotionally/etc. ## Devotion {#practice-practices--devotion} ::nogloss The term *devotional practice* is used to refer to a broad collection of practices and models across traditions, broadly speaking oriented towards surrender and devotion to a figure, symbol, etc. Devotion is usually a large aspect of prayer, but the two are only partially overlapping. The central stereotype of devotional practice is the performance of gestures, affect, and utterances associated with fealty, reverence, or submission. These can often combine performance of both the "attraction" (love, admiration, etc.) type of status as well as the "aversion" (fear, anxious submission, etc.) type. Besides straightforward deities, commonly this involves veneration of spirits, ancestors, saints, etc. There are also subtler objects of devotion: while "original Buddhism" almost certainly contained Buddha-worship as a fundamental feature, some later schools innovated on this pattern to include devotion *to the path* as more fundamental than Buddha-worship. There are reports eg. from Orthodox Christianity and some Hindu schools of a kind of "devotion without an object." Imaginal practice and prayer as convergent features of religious traditions is mostly unsurprising to me, but it's somewhat confusing the extent to which devotion in particular is a *very common* feature in especially "world religions," though probably not a universal feature of world human spirituality. ## The Sacred {#practice-practices--the-sacred} ::gloss[*Sacred* describes something as set apart and special in a positive sense, often touching upon the highest value.] Again there's a broad cluster here, which perhaps doesn't form a natural kind. *Sacred* as an adjective narrowly describes something as set apart and special in a positive sense. Obviously, more generally, sacredness is connotatively and imaginally rich ([see above](#practice-practices--imaginal-practice)) within a given culture; in particular in English, 'sacred' is in a semantic field with 'holy' and 'mystical,' and also often brings up connotations of "magic" or "supernatural." The concept of *the sacred* refers to the domain generally of that which is held sacred. Some contemporary writers use this term as a neutral, generic concept to refer to patterns in human culture, *or* as a sacralized object itself, eg. one sometimes hears lines to the effect of "they are depraved who reject the sacred." There are a number of cultural patterns of "setting-apart" which I'm more or less inclined to call "sacred" or "a practice of sacredness." Most centrally, in my usage, sacredness distinguishes that which touches upon the highest value, or the nature of value—though I'll note it's unclear to what extent this is a coincidence of modern Western culture or not. One point which I'll toss in here is that it seems like the usual perception and depiction of the sacred that I find... perhaps across cultures, to the extent I've dug, munges at least 3 aspects which I would want to distinguish, namely: a. the socio-spiritual quality of set-apartness, b. the value of the set-apart object in and of itself, and c. the, uh, "cultural-symbolic extra-spiritual shininess" that they perceive *with* it. ## Hyperstition {#practice-practices--hyperstition} ::gloss[*Hyperstition* is a deliberate attempt to modify one's own beliefs, emotions, and perceptions.] *Hyperstition* refers to deliberate attempts to modify one's own beliefs, emotions, and perceptions. ## Magic {#practice-practices--magic} --- # Meditation {#practice-meditation} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/practice/meditation — also at `/md/practice/meditation.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `practice-meditation--`.* What the fuck is "meditation"? Geeze, what a mess. One particular source of confusion is that within a given school, they'll refer to some of their practices *as "meditation"*, which is fine enough, but this often makes it sound like that's what meditation is *in general*. I've often heard people say "but I was taught that meditation is xyz" rather than "but I was taught to meditate by doing xyz." This is obviously also separate from schools often teaching that other practices are fake, wrong, or bad. In Latin *meditātiō* meant "thinking" or "reflection"[^practice-meditation--wiktionary], in St. Ignatius's usage (writing in Spanish in the 16th century) it referred to practices of explicit "mental" reflection, presumably involving verbal thought, etc. I'm not clear on when it was first used to translate *jhāna* (*dhyāna*), which while also complicated as a term itself, was in any case used in Indian languages to refer to rather different practices. [^practice-meditation--wiktionary]: [Wiktionary](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/meditatio#Latin) This should be obvious, but people often forget: we're often working with practices and concepts from other cultures, which importantly literally use words from different languages! Two cultures might cut the world up very differently, especially for culturally specific practices, etc. etc. Another major source of confusion here is that each of a. the actual experiences, b. the actual doing of some practice, and c. whatever the *intended* target is, are not the same as the instructions that are given to students. In particular people often conflate whatever the practice instructions are, especially for basic preliminary instructions, with "what meditation is." This is also besides the fact that people are seldom actually achieving what they've been told—which sometimes isn't possible, and sometimes isn't even meant to be possible! (To be clear, you can obviously go off on your own and do whatever you want, but maybe what you arrive at isn't really helpfully called meditation, and in any case narrowly you might not be doing "meditation" as far as the tradition you started in is concerned.) In practice, in Buddhist monastic traditions, a student would almost always be working closely with a teacher, and the instructions given from the teacher would change constantly depending on whatever was actually happening in their practice, in many traditions frequently completely throwing out or contradicting previous instructions. I know less about other traditions but this broad shape is common, where at minimum there isn't *one thing* called "meditation," (or whatever word, in whichever language) but there's a bunch of stuff, which may not have distinct names, and one's instructions and choices change in response to external and internal circumstances. Also, traditionally, at least in Buddhism, a student would likely have thousands of false starts, dead ends, etc. etc., before finding their feet, and even then they would probably overhaul their sense of what the thing *really is* several times over. Whatever they were taught as a novice, let alone what they *understood*, was likely quite different from what a "master" would be doing, even if they're still sitting quietly in a hall or in the forest. It's also interesting to note here that in the original Buddhist canon[^practice-meditation--canon], practices are described in surprisingly little detail, almost all explanations basically skipping from "a monk should sit at the foot of a tree" to "and then here's what happens in a particular deep meditative state" or "and here's a big list of themes you might reflect on." Also, the practices taught by extant schools in Asia either were heterodox when those schools were founded, or were reconstructed in the last ~150 years; I talk about this more [in an appendix](/md/appendix/whose-buddha-historiography.md). [^practice-meditation--canon]: In reference here of course to the Pali canon, but IIRC this is true of the corresponding parts of the Taisho Tripitaka (unfortunately "tripitaka" there includes another 2k years of books lol). Not sure about the versions the Tibetans have. There's a bunch of stuff in Christianity which we might call meditation—is that right? Does it really matter? Most of these practices have traditional names, and the ones *traditionally* called meditation we actually wouldn't likely call meditation in its modern usage. Others, eg. Hesychasm (sometimes translated as "the way of inner stillness,") are actually surprisingly close to traditional "meditative" practices from India and China, but to me it seems mostly irrelevant whether we call these meditation. Besides, a lot of modern usage of "meditation" in reference to Christianity seems to have basically taken the long way round, *by way of* Western pop versions of Eastern spirituality... which is fine, I suppose, but feels very "have your coastal progressive spirituality cake and eat it too." (And then of course, the same argument for Judaism, or Islam, or whatever.) I don't *really* care, and my friends and I don't even use the word 'meditation' that much, but still. My sense in general is that there's a bunch of practices, some are very similar and some very different, and it's usually more helpful either to call them by their traditional names *or* just generically as "spiritual practices," etc. *** For all of the subjects below, in a given context (as in, reading a given book or talking to a given teacher), I'd recommend distinguishing: a. which specific tradition we're talking about, b. what the instructions are, c. what the *ostensible* goal is, d. what other practitioners are actually doing with their mind/body, and e. what the reports are of "success" (often not the same as the goal). Generally, with each item below, it's good to assume that the word is used to mean a variety of different things by different people, and that almost none of them mean just one thing, in the broader jargon. To be clear, as well, my conception here is at least a bit nonstandard and opinionated. ## Mindfulness {#practice-meditation--mindfulness} With 'mindfulness', at minimum I'd want to distinguish: 1. Specific practices (or often more like aspects of practice) from traditional systems which are *translated* as 'mindfulness' 2. 'Mindfulness' in eg. Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) 3. 'Mindfulness' a la vague progressive health culture Briefly, these might be glossed (somewhat unfairly) as: 1. "Attentiveness, generically" 2. "[Body awareness](/md/practice/phenomenology-somatics.md) + equanimity, with a dash of dissociation" 3. "2., but watered down to be more amenable to suburban moms and bureaucracies"
Quite a bit more detail 1: 'Mindfulness' in this context derives from a translation of Pali *sati*, "recollection," from the late 19th century. In the canon, *sati* refers to something like a quality of attention to be developed, and as a major input to spiritual achievement and progress. The canon is much more concrete here than it often is, but still much less than modern teachers: broadly speaking *sati* is used to refer to a quality of attentiveness, likely with some quality of contiguity of memory in the recent past. IIRC 'mindfulness' (n., as opposed to 'mindful', adj.) was almost unattested in English at this point, with one or two examples from some Bible translations, but has obviously caught on like wildfire, though mostly since MBSR. I think this is a great translation, but I bring up the etymology to again stress that even if we know what a word means ordinarily *in English*, when it's used as a translation of a technical term, we should generally assume we *don't* know what it means. *Sati* probably also means something like "elicitation" or "reflection," eg. if we go by the *satipaṭṭhānas*[^practice-meditation--satipatthana], a lot of these don't make a ton of sense if *sati* just means, well, "mindfulness." [^practice-meditation--satipatthana]: [DN 22](https://www.dhammatalks.org/suttas/DN/DN22.html), trans. Thānissaro 2000. The introduction in the page linked in the same footnote[^practice-meditation--satipatthana] has a bit of context as well on the term having been reinterpreted in the West. 2: MBSR, as I understand, came about as an attempt by Jon Kabat-Zinn to make some subset of Buddhism that would be legible and inoffensive to mainstream American society in ~1980. "Mindfulness" in his usage doesn't map cleanly onto any traditional concepts, but broadly it's sort of a handful of satipatthanas, with an extra emphasis on equanimity, and not much of a path. Mostly probably helpful enough, but important to distinguish from *sati*, especially because a noticeable subset of eg. Americans now think that meditation == MBSR, which, oy. One thing I want to add here: "mindfulness meditation" as an expression would probably have made sense to the original compilers of the Buddhist canon, but is a strange construction if you're familiar with the canon. Besides, what's actually taught by that name would likely have seemed confused or maybe even mostly unrelated. IMO that's fine, you can just do new stuff, but if someone uses "mindfulness" in this way that means you're definitely not looking at an orthodox source, and likely you're looking at someone who isn't familiar with the orthodox primary sources at all. (I actually can't remember if the original MBSR materials used the term "mindfulness meditation", I think they didn't? I feel like that term is from a generation or two later and often means someting more like "just body scanning with a dollop of concentration.") 3: I'll just add that I've noticed that 'mindfulness' in the broader culture now often means "body awareness, maximally generically," or in many cases "any traditional spiritual practice, if sufficiently secularized and watered down" (eg. dance sometimes being referred to as a "mindfulness practice", or "mindfulness" in therapy curricula as a catch-all for spiritual practices taught to clients.)
Note however that mindfulness, as described above, *doesn't* sound at all like "concentration" practices: ## Concentration {#practice-meditation--concentration} ::gloss["Concentration" is the western catch-all for *samatha*, *jhāna*, and *samādhi*, referring to practices and states of acuity and absorption, as well as some altered states.] In the context of western post-traditional meditation culture, "concentration" is used as a translation variously for all of *samatha* (*śamatha*), *jhāna* (*dhyāna*), and *samādhi*, as well as a generic bucket for similar practices originating outside of Buddhism[^practice-meditation--jhana]. I won't go into much detail about each of these, but mostly this is to say the schema in the canon doesn't line up with most modern conceptualizations, though the canon also doesn't line up with the models used in later schools of Buddhism. [^practice-meditation--jhana]: Traditionally, actually, jhana is regarded to have predated the Buddha, and that he was taught it and later refined/integrated it into a larger curriculum. Broadly speaking, so-called "concentration" practices are aiming to a. cultivate mindfulness (~in the first sense above), b. achieve meditative states of (relatively) high acuity and absorbption, and sometimes c. achieve intense or unusual altered states. This is a huge rabbit hole, but I'll just mention that often people think that "mindfulness" (in any of the three senses) is basically equivalent to concentration; I think this is false both as a claim about the traditional models, and as a claim about how people's meditation practice usually develops. My sense is that they're less strongly correlated than people often think, and people can sometimes get fairly far in one while the other remains weak. Instructions and reports, from across many traditions, often involve (among many others): - Persistent, deliberate application of attention - Cultivation of specific energies, to try to achieve specific states of mind (somewhat, [see below](#practice-meditation--energy-practices)) - Cultivation and exaggeration of various emotions or feelings, but often quite varied, eg. intense urgency, calmness and deep relaxation, anxiety, or intense pleasure - By the same token, purposeful diminution of undesirable energies or states - Note that in some schools this can be very "cool" or aloof, whereas other schools are energetic and even passionate. Contemporary western meditators often tend towards coolness and drowsiness. - Repetitive movement, dance, drumming, or recitation of a short text or single syllable I'll note here that I have an unusual perspective on concentration, which I'll discuss at some length in the [next chapter](/md/wayfinding.md). Among westerners, especially those new to meditation, concentration evokes something narrowly "mental" (whatever that means), often specifically evoking a sensation of pseudo-*visual* attention, pointing as though *from the eyes* to a point in the body, even when eg. "attending to sensations in the body" with the eyes closed. I go into the complexity here [in more detail](/md/spiritual-truth/metaphysics-phenomenology-spirituality.md) later; just briefly, meditation is often not like this! I was once told by a Zen monk, that he had been taught that "meditation is something you do *with the body*." [See also below](#practice-meditation--meditative-body-practices) re dynamic, *moving* body practices, used as meditation. (To be clear, this distinction varies somewhat in different extant traditions, and while eg. many of the practices described in the Pali canon align with this, it's not actually cut up this way, etc.) ## More on altered states {#practice-meditation--more-on-altered-states} As a broken record, I'll say again: "altered state" doesn't mean all that much, the term is used in varied enough ways that it's hard to say something consistent about the whole group, and it probably doesn't quite track a natural kind. In any case, yes, there's some broad swath of """states of consciousness""" (same problem with that term as well) which are familiar and within some range of ordinary experience, and there's, well, quite a bunch outside of that. Very briefly, some common features: - Altered or extremely intense experience of emotion - Bizarre combinations of emotion - Seeming ability to *directly* experience others' emotions - Note that with many of these, and this one especially saliently, many people report some variation of this at baseline, and are shocked that other people don't experience the world this way, etc. etc. (I'll also just note that these people still sometimes report states where this kind of empathy is much more intense than usual for them.) - Altered perception of normal phenomena: - Time moving extremely slowly or quickly - The world seeming to move under oneself while walking (rather than that one is moving) - The world, or individual objects seeming unreal, thin, or completely foreign - Perceiving the world (especially *seeing*) from outside one's body - Visions, sometimes hallucinations, - In some? reports, visions are described as "real" in a different way from ordinary experience, in any case I have the sense that people experiencing visions aren't quite "mistaken" about what's real in their physical surroundings, in the way that people having "hallucinations" might be. - FWIW I've also had experiences on psychedelics where I had stable physical-seeming visual hallucinations which I knew in the moment to be not real and was lucid about etc. This is to say I'm not sure what separates "hallucination" vs "vision" but they do seem pretty different, anyway. ## Purposeful modification of perception {#practice-meditation--purposeful-modification-of-perception} ::nogloss *See also: [ways of seeing](/md/metaphysics/ways-of-seeing.md) and [hyperstition](#practice-practices--hyperstition)*. There's some cluster here, though this is my least standard category on this page. With substantial overlap with the other categories, these involve either trying to elicit, cultivate, or attenuate specific patterns of perception, usually oriented towards a fairly concrete intended state. For example: - Seeing some or all objects (broadly construed) as disgusting, unreliable, or valueless - Seeing some or all objects as holy, shining, or perfect - Cultivating positive regard, compassion, etc. - Attending to objects in such a way as to cause the perception of that distinct object to fade or break up - This is sometimes called *deconstruction*, some schools call this *vipassanā* (*vipaśyanā*). More broadly these are usually regarded (within these traditions) as trying to either realize the "true" perception (not quite how it's presented, but obviously confused [in my view](/md/metaphysics/eternalism-nihilism.md)), cultivate a more wholesome perception, or lay the ground for [insight](/md/practice/mysticism-awakening.md).
Vipassana, deconstruction, and "the way things are" Just as an initial note, *vipassana* also means at least three things, in this case I mean both Burmese vipassana (and -esque) deconstruction, but also sort of adjacent deconstructive techniques across Buddhism, maybe peripherally in other traditions entirely, though I'm much less familiar. Unfortunately this sense isn't really orthodox, but sort of has the most cachet among those that use that term.[^practice-meditation--vipassana] [^practice-meditation--vipassana]: Ok so in fact Goenka calls anapanasati "*vipassanā*" which is pretty straightforwardly wrong, but yes, now that's actually the thing most people have heard of, if they know the word 'vipassana' at all. Boohoo, Mahasi Sayadaw wasn't a lot more orthodox either but I'm less annoyed by calling that stuff vipassana. Deconstructive practices in particular are usually explained as arriving at a perception that's "more real," and often as "the *only* real perception"—I'm confident this is basically wrong in principle. One point here Burbea harps on often, to say that the perception of some phenomenon *as empty* (in that metaphysics, something like, phenomenally constructed, and contingent on mind as a causal input) is also empty. I'd make a separate point that views with less fabrication can't be said to be "more real," any moreso than than atoms are more real than horses. Maybe this is right *except* for nirvana in most models, but this is such an obtuse definition of real that it's not that meaningful, and probably misleading. Blah blah, if I were awakened maybe my stance would be different. (Except, oy vey, oy vey.)
(*See also about inquiry practices [below](#practice-meditation--misc-analysis-inquiry-etc), which often get lumped with vipassana, but don't belong here.*) ## "Meditative" body practices {#practice-meditation--meditative-body-practices} ::gloss[*Body practices* use the body as the site of meditation, from slow walking meditation to Tai chi and "yoga."] Many traditions make use of "body practices," broadly construed this could include everything from placid walking meditation to "martial arts", not *totally* far off from Hong Kong kung fu movie fantasy. Walking meditation, for example, is sometimes taught as very calm and slow, even so slow (perhaps one step every 5-10 seconds) as to be hypnotic and engrossing—easy to see as similar in quality to stereotyped seated meditation. Walking meditation is also sometimes taught as relatively casual, but still within a regimented meditative context; IIRC some traditions teach walking meditation as almost a march, complete with synced group chanting. Monasteries in many traditions structure physical activity and work as meditative, and sometimes work is exaggerated, prolonged, or totally constructed as an excuse for "meditative" movement. These can sometimes be arbitrarily slow and methodical, or physically intense and invigorating. More broadly are practices like Tai chi, Chi Gong, or Zhan Zhuang, which besides involving cultivation and sensitization to energy ([see below](#practice-meditation--energy-practices)), most directly consist of finely choreographed sequences of body positions and their transitions, or just statically sustaining difficult standing postures, in the case of Zhan Zhuang. These bleed into other body practices which I'm less inclined to call *meditation* per se, but which are contiguous with "meditative" practices phenomenologically, and both interesting and an important part of some traditional[^practice-meditation--yoga-traditional] systems of spiritual training. Central here is obviously Asana Yoga; there's a variety of more exotic practices in Tibetan traditions that I know a lot less about. Very commonly, many traditions include some simple forms of movement into their ceremonies, eg. prostrations, as well as using these sorts of movements as extended practices in their own right, eg. at one time in Zen it was not uncommon for a young monk optionally to perform 10,000 prostrations, perhaps over some weeks. [^practice-meditation--yoga-traditional]: I've found some conflicting evidence as to the historicity of Asana Yoga, and of the continuity of modern lineages of Haṭha Yoga (IIRC, from which extant schools of asana are largely supposed to derive) with historical traditions. My current sense is that modern asana systems are probably <150 years old, with a lot of innovation in the last 100, but that there *were* some intensive physical yogic practices in India historically *anyway*, and some at least in nominally the same lineages that modern asana schools are supposed to derive from.

~~I can't recall the sources, but relevant keywords here as trailheads will be "ashtanga yoga" and "hatha yoga pradipika."~~ *see below:*

*Edit 2026-01-28*: I did some more reading on this recently and the above is broadly correct based on claims in Mark Singleton, 2010, *Yoga Body*; and Elliott Goldberg, 2016, *The Path of Modern Yoga*. The tl;dr here is that almost all extant schools of Modern Postural Yoga (MPY) go through one teacher in the early 20th century, Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, who adapted some existing indigenous exercise practices (which were never part of any yoga school) along with more traditional haṭha yoga practices, probably inspired substantially by some western currents in physical culture at the time, and maybe borrowing pieces wholesale.

There's more context, and there were people earlier both modernizing haṭha and doing versions of Sūrya Nāmaskar, though not yet being called yoga, but Krishnamacharya was probably the main point of synthesis; the more important point is that MPY has not *nothing* to do with historical haṭha but is a major break from it, and directly informed by western competitors, in the context of Indian nationalism.

I haven't been able to get an answer on what energy practices Krishnamacharya was teaching, and how closely these correspond to historical practices, or same for say Ashtanga Vinyasa (founded by one of Krishnamacharya's top students)—this seems like the more important question, as far as I'm concerned if there's a direct lineage re the energy stuff I'm down to just call this totally legitimate innovation within the tradition. In any case a lot of anglophone MPY doesn't teach energy stuff much at all anyway, so this is all muddied. (Also this seems to different from Foxen's claim, which I haven't read carefully yet.)

*Edit 2025-12-05*: I haven't read most of this book yet but I recently found Anya Foxen, 2020, *Inhaling Spirit*, which is a history of western yoga, and which claims confidently that most of the physical techniques, posture sets, etc. in modern yoga schools are derived from a series of related western traditions, and were variously either dressed up in ancient Indian garb later, or were folded into existing yogic traditions/techniques but from a western lineage. Asana is... complicated enough as a community and a concept that I won't try to break it down here, besides that I don't feel I understand it, actually. Briefly, in many modern schools (read: Western, or at least something like "adapted under the influence of Western modernization"), asana practice again consists of a choreographed sequence of postures and transitions, in many cases uncomfortable, intense, or even psychologically demanding, combined with energy techniques which are intended to purify the system. Some western asana schools are also much slower, gentler, and incline more towards relaxation and ease. Asana is centrally at least a kind of mindfulness practice, ostensibly practitioners are maintaining attention on the body as they move through each pose. Indeed, the less westernized schools usually insist that asana is meant to require fine attention and [embodiment](/md/practice/phenomenology-somatics.md#embodiment) to *work*. Besides just "mindfulness," many more intensive Yoga practitioners report some kinds of altered states, energy releases, etc., like those reported in more advanced levels of stereotypical seated meditation. Many schools also teach asana as being used in tandem with meditation, understanding the two to be mutually dependent in a system of practice. Even in the traditions most centrally organized around silent, seated practice, movement practices are still seen as contiguous with the rest of intensive spiritual practice, eg. IIRC there are reports of sudden awakening experiences occuring while performing prostrations[^practice-meditation--prostrations]. [^practice-meditation--prostrations]: I mean, also while performing all sorts of normal activities as well. ## Energy practices {#practice-meditation--energy-practices} ::gloss[*Energy practices* cultivate, manipulate, and develop sensitivity to *energy*, often in order to clear or purify the *energy body*.] *See also about [energetic phenomenology](/md/practice/phenomenology-somatics.md#energy) in general*. Energy practices involve sensitization to, and cultivation and manipulation of *energy*. Again please see the section linked above for a detailed description of the concept of energy. I mentioned above a number of such practices (Tai chi, Chi Gong, Zhan Zhuang, secondarily Asana Yoga), but more with respect to their gross physical aspects. Very broadly these practices are understood in their traditions to work partially by the energetic effects of the purely physical parts of the practice, but more importantly by purposefully, directly moving or clearing energy, purifying the energy body. Some are gentle, slow, and very progressive, whereas others are sensationally loud, uncomfortable, and intense. This is a large and diverse group, but for example some common specific practices involve circulating energy in specific patterns while moving through some energetically "robust" sequence of postures, and using the energy to move through the pattern of movements. Some energy practices also occur seated, or just the same lying down. Energy practices in stillness often have similar phenomenology to those practiced with movement, and some practices are taught first in movement and then transition at higher levels of skill to being primarily about the movement of energy, agnostic of physical movement. Again some seated energy practices are described as intense, invigorating, and sometimes very uncomfortable; *sometimes* these might be obviously perceptible to an outside observer, eg. clenched muscles, shuddering, etc., but often a practitioner will be perfectly still besides the cycle of breath, while they experience energy which is firey, roiling, or chaotic. ## Misc: analysis, inquiry, etc. {#practice-meditation--misc-analysis-inquiry-etc} ::nogloss This section is a bit of a grab-bag, though the practices and qualities I'll mention here each rhyme with one another somewhat. What I'm calling "analytical" practices mostly includes practices involving analysis of either the active phenomenal contents of experience, or of the causal structures generating specific patterns in experience. These often are oriented towards what's known as "deconstruction," which broadly involves some combination of a. cultivating perceptions of objects and processes as made of parts, b. separating those parts in perception, and c. inclining towards the phenomenal dissolution or decay of those parts of of sensations altogether. Adjacent here are also what's known in some western meditator circles specifically as "insight"[^practice-meditation--insight-vipassana] practice, from what I understand this means something like, "cultivating specific [ways of seeing](/md/metaphysics/ways-of-seeing.md), either to cultivate flexibility of the mind with respect to perception in general, or to lay the ground for spiritual insight." [^practice-meditation--insight-vipassana]: My understanding is that in this context "insight" is meant as *calque* of *vipassanā*. Other translations I've seen of *vipassanā* with respect to the canon are IIRC "discrimination" and maybe? "seeing through" and "penetrating analysis." See also the dropdown in the section [above](#practice-meditation--purposeful-modification-of-perception) for some more on vipassana. Less common, but surprising relative to some stereotypes of meditation, are also so-called "logical meditations" in eg. Tibetan Buddhism, which attempt to achieve insight, altered states, or specific qualities of perception by use of ostensibly rigorous *logical* analysis, eg. of an object's ultimate metaphysical un-reality, etc. *Inquiry* practices are adjacent as well, which most generally involve posing a question, and sometimes either struggling actively with the question, or letting it percolate through the mind. The most stereotyped instance would be koans in Zen, usually presented as paradoxical (or sometimes seemingly nonsensical) puzzles or questions. As I understand, koans are meant to be "solved" by achieving specific altered states, as in, each koan implicitly defines a state which is meant to be achieved by the practitioner, and from which the question or problem can be easily "answered". Inquiry practice in the "percolate through the mind" sense is often presented as using states of concentration, or altered states otherwise, to ask a question in a way which is uniquely existentially bright and vivid. Commonly also these practices are claimed to afford or give access to kinds of intuition and intelligence generally not available by ordinary reflection and thought. Broadly speaking, this cluster is oriented towards what's known as [insight](/md/practice/paths.md#insight-openings-and-awakening) (unfortunately a different sense from "insight practice" above)—a term which ranges from "sudden understanding, in approximately the colloquial sense" to "gnosis of spiritual truth." ## Briefly on transformation, insight, and gnosis {#practice-meditation--briefly-on-transformation-insight-and-gnosis} *See also the following sections on [healing](/md/practice/healing.md) and [insight and awakening](/md/practice/mysticism-awakening.md)*. "Meditation" (and whatever similar practices) in most traditional systems is understood as oriented towards spiritual *insight* and *transformation*. This is taught and practiced under a variety of models, but most often is meant to be achieved either by gradual cultivation of positive qualities, *or* the attainment of gnosis by means of altered states. In the case of gnosis, personal transformation is usually explained to occur because of some combination of a. newly seeing behaviors or objects as undesirable, faulty, or worthless; b. newfound peace, joy, and compassion; and c. most centrally a fundamental reorientation to value and goodness. Some traditions are basically whole-hog on "ultimate gnosis" as the only spiritual goal, but most include some combination of discipline, positive cultivation, and provisional insight as vital features of "[the spiritual path](/md/practice/paths.md)." Some contemporary western teachers often teach modern healing practices in combination with, or as part and parcel of meditation practice. From what I can tell this is almost entirely a modern innovation, which I [discuss later](/md/practice/healing/other-models.md#content-in-traditional-systems). ## Misc other considerations {#practice-meditation--misc-other-considerations} ### Meditation and posture {#practice-meditation--meditation-and-posture} Probably the singular defining stereotype of meditation is a person seated cross legged (🧘!), and people are often pretty confused about how "meditation" either traditionally or in general relates to posture. Most traditions whose practices we call "meditation" do use cross-legged postures seated on the floor, but many or most of them also use a variety of other postures, including reclining. In the most orthodox[^practice-meditation--canon] Buddhist canon[^practice-meditation--agamas], there are strictly speaking four "postures": sitting, standing, walking, or lying down. See also above re [movement practices](#practice-meditation--meditative-body-practices). [^practice-meditation--agamas]: I didn't go check but this is the kind of thing that parallels really nicely in the Chinese Agama collection, so I'd be surprised if it weren't orthodox at least with respect to that *canon*, if not the extant traditions, and I'd guess the Tibetan canon(s?) also. Many contemporary western meditators conflate meditation with some notion of a practice of austere discipline, and in particular see bearing, and hopefully *transcending*, the discomfort of sitting upright on the floor for long periods, especially for westerners habituated to chairs and couches, as a display of virtue. I'd say here something like, I'm not gonna yuck your yum, but mostly I'm 👎 on this, and I also think this is quite a bit confusing matters, spiritually speaking. ### Meditation vs. prayer {#practice-meditation--meditation-vs-prayer} So, first off, *who cares*. In any case, most relevantly, there's quite a bit of overlap in the phenomenology of at least some reports, both from intermediate practitioners as well as in the extremes. Eg., there are reports of awakening that sound very similar, from practitioners doing canonical "meditation" practices, to those from others in completely unrelated traditions who describe their main practices as being those of "prayer" etc. A lot of this is contingent on whatever specific definitions we use, which again, *who cares*, though yes I did define prayer [in a certain way](#practice-practices--prayer) before. There are eg. some modern schools which teach this or that and call it "prayer," eg. IIRC some protestants (and maybe some catholics?) teach what they call "centering prayer," which is pretty straightforwardly just meditation. All good, as far as I'm concerned, tbc. The more interesting point here is that based on all the reports I've seen, it sure just seems like the space of possible states-of-mind is just large, and the space of possible spiritual practices is large. And so naturally you end up with lots of overlap between coincidental groupings, etc. --- # Introspection (and some "Transformative Practice") {#practice-introspection} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/practice/introspection — also at `/md/practice/introspection.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `practice-introspection--`.* Compared to the previous section on [meditation](#practice-meditation), I'd say introspection is quite a bit more illegible, mysterious, inscrutable, and idiosyncratic. For this reason I'll start with a methodological and ontological discussion, which will also serve to broaden the aperture of what introspection does or ought to include, and will run into discussions of specific mental motions, "techniques," etc. Apparently, there is experience, agnostic of a "mind" (and I [really am skeptical](/md/spiritual-truth/metaphysics-phenomenology-spirituality.md) of a lot of the intution that "mind" draws in), what we experience changes over time, and there are patterns to the "contents." Some of this is variously attributed to the procession of an external world, and some is usually attributed to some persistent generators of experience "on this side" of experience, again agnostic of the metaphysics of self or mind that a person uses[^practice-introspection--unusual-self]. [^practice-introspection--unusual-self]: To be fair actually, maybe not fully agnostic, as some people report some even more unusual metaphysics or phenomenology of self-and-world, eg. in altered states or as a result of [awakening](/md/practice/mysticism-awakening.md). And so, presumably, there's something to the effect of "states of mind" and "contents of experience," and, really more confusingly, there's something about *consciousness* or *attention*, or something. In any case, people often have beliefs and models about their experience, and can *"inspect"* their mind, and will report on all of this. Already we're in deep shit here. What's this consciousness thing? Is it about reflection? Why is reflection the thing that distinguishes experience? (Indeed, it seems like I can have experience without reflection... or wait, but how would I know? etc.) Qualia? Do we really have any idea what qualia are? I'm not taking this angle as a pointless stoner-thoughts jerkoff, but because I think stories about introspection, and especially those about what sorts of introspection [produce reliable knowledge](/md/spiritual-truth/gnosis-confabulation.md) or not, are profoundly laden with assumptions about its causal structure. Again, I'll discuss more about the variety of systems of [metaphysics applied to phenomenology](/md/spiritual-truth/metaphysics-phenomenology-spirituality.md), and their problems, later. However, I want to able to say really tightly, "ok, there is certainly a domain here, as best as I can be agnostic about its shape or inputs." ## Various reports of introspection {#practice-introspection--various-reports-of-introspection} The central, stereotypical notion of introspection in modern western culture involves something about "turning inwards" (often evoking closed eyes, with a stream of "mental imagery"), sometimes highlighting [somatics](/md/practice/phenomenology-somatics.md) in attention, and most often discursive thought which "inspects" or especially "analyzes" experience and memory. Common reports otherwise, of introspection (and related) in secular western culture: - Contemplation on one's memories, and especially coming up with explanations for the generators of one's emotions and behaviors - Often this is under a specific set of psychological theories, also often under direction of a therapist. - Often also, this is more like "trying to adjust or reframe perception and emotion, in order not to be disturbed by something." - "Journaling," which I might gloss for many cases as something like "telling stories to oneself, in writing, in a personal and emotive way' - Contemplation of emotions, whether active or elicited in response to memory Often introspection is sort of inscrutable and idiosyncratic, such that people can't really describe what it is they're doing when they "introspect," or at least the broader culture doesn't really have a vocabulary for it, and so people's descriptions end up bespoke and illegible. Most often people's intuitions about cognition revolve around the common phenomenology of deliberate application of *effort* to a question, or at least almost always "thought" is associated with a sensation that one's self is "doing" the thinking, in each moment. I'll note here that there are also fairly common reports of these qualities of *effort* and *doing* ceasing at times, or even ceasing altogether as part of [awakening](/md/practice/mysticism-awakening.md), usually along with claims that this phenomenology itself is also constructed or "fabricated" by the mind, and doesn't really track the underlying causal structure of thought and insight. This is a helpful place to start from to broaden the scope of "introspection." In particular, there's a fairly wide breadth of reports of experiences at least *adjacent* to, and pretty relevant to, introspection, which *don't* involve direct application of attention. First as an intuition pump: most people are familiar with the experience of working on a problem, whether a math problem, creative project, or interpersonal issue, really *working* on it consciously, not coming to a solution, and then having the answer come to them suddenly during some other activity, or especially upon waking. So the claim here is, "something something, the """mind""" is able to perform computation on subjects *outside of conscious attention*." There's fairly common reports here of various spiritual, meditative, or introspective practices producing some kind of, uh, *output*, without application of attention to the subject, and often immediately preceded by something unrelated, or by eg. meditation on the breath. Often also, these reports describe phenomena which result in internal changes, and which are available to attention, but are undirected and spontaneous. - Very commonly, [spiritual insight](/md/practice/paths.md#insight-openings-and-awakening) occurring suddenly, spontaneously, and again without application of attention to the contents of the insight. - Sometimes meditation teachers will describe eg. [concentration practices](#practice-meditation--concentration) as "laying the ground for insight to occur spontaneously." - "Dreamwork," ie. practices of both interpretation of dreams but more saliently here psychological *transformation* which occurs during dreams - [Energetic openings](/md/practice/phenomenology-somatics.md#energy) which settle and reconfigure the "body-mind," leading off powerful changes in behavior and perception, very often specifically described as not under conscious control or intervention - Sometimes these are even reported to *require* non-control to proceed. - These can be [sometimes sudden and sometimes very gradual](/md/practice/paths.md#gradualism-and-suddenism). Furthermore, often these are regarded as being unavailable to or separate from the "part of the mind" which uses verbal thought, meanwhile these reports usually describe a rich flow of intuition and *"knowing"* within the "body-mind". Introspection has a complicated relationship with movement, play, augmentation, self-modification, etc. Many practices aren't necessarily presented as "introspective" by that name, and include some messy combination of something like *modification*, and *observation* or *investigation*. We might want to restrict 'introspection' to "just observation," but boy golly, if ever there was a domain where observation muddied the objects being observed, this would be it. Below is some evocative palette of other common features of introspection and introspective practices: - Prompting and asking questions - Often "answering" these questions (so something like, "just answering as one would if asked directly"), but also often "waiting for an answer to come," very often reported as coming in feeling and images, rather than words - Reframing, deliberately telling stories, and eliciting or cultivating specific perceptions - (This is one of the central clusters within "transformative practice, but adjacent to introspection.") - Exploring personal [resonances](/md/practice/phenomenology-somatics.md#resonance) - Eg. of aesthetics, but also often [imaginal](#practice-practices--imaginal-practice), archetypal, maybe something like "relational-affective," etc. Stereotypically, many kinds of artistic practice are deeply introspective in this sense. - This will probably annoy someone here, but eg. dance is for many people intensely introspective, moving through patterns of somatic resonances etc. - [Prayer](#practice-practices--prayer) and communing with spirits, depending on how we conceive of them - So even for those who construe prayer as literally-communcating-with-a-literal-being, there's often a substantial quality of exploring relational-affective postures with various figures. For those who construe prayer in a ~materialist frame, which I mostly do, then even moreso this belongs here. - Exploration of just about everything described in the previous section on [somatic phenomenology](/md/practice/phenomenology-somatics.md) #### Partswork, briefly {#practice-introspection--partswork-briefly} ::gloss[*Partswork* refers to practices that work with *parts*, persistent subpersonalities with distinct or conflicting motivations.] *Partswork*, also *parts work*, refers to a cluster of practices oriented around working with *parts*, generally understood as something like "persistent subpersonalities with distinct or conflicting motivations." Partswork by that name originated with Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy, IIRC in the late 80's, but those concepts, and similar practices, have branched much further. The IFS model has a fairly tight schema of parts with relatively stereotyped relationships. IIRC later systems sometimes describe different or more granular schemas, but often do away with most of the details of the IFS model, describing more organic or nebulous dynamics of relationships between parts. Some derivative systems also describe parts as permeable and ephemeral, where IFS mostly sees them as relatively stably persistent, though capable of evolving. Reports from practitioners here centrally feature discovering structurally reinforcing patterns of internal emotional reaction between different parts. Stereotyped patterns here might be eg. one part which feels fearful, lazy, or alone, and another part which reacts to that, and berates "the person" (again, with varying phenomenology reported) or that part. Another stereotyped pattern reported would be eg. parts which hold clusters of emotion or sensation at bay, or which hold a certain social posture in order to "protect" other parts, or the person altogether. Most of the partswork reports describe that these patterns present initially introspectively opaquely, or often with no clear introspective access to (what they later regard as) the underlying dynamics, but only in terms of gross effects in behavior or motivation. While I think partswork is a very generative frame, and I myself, and lots of people I know, have gotten a lot of value out of it, it's very unclear to me to what extent it tightly tracks the """underlying structure of the mind,""" as opposed to the reported phenomenology being *constructed* to align with the framework, when someone practices under it. Along the same lines, it's also not clear if it's an invariant in human psychology in general, or an artifact of modern western culture.[^practice-introspection--weird-invariant] I'll discuss this more re [metaphysics and phenomenology](/md/spiritual-truth/metaphysics-phenomenology-spirituality.md) and "[introspective epistemology](/md/spiritual-truth/gnosis-confabulation.md)." [^practice-introspection--weird-invariant]: Note that some hippy healer types claim that these kinds of models *are* particular to western culture, and that historical, uh, "traditional" cultures would largely never have had these kinds of problems. ## Introspection, thought, self-models, and "the unconscious" {#practice-introspection--introspection-thought-self-models-and-the-unconscious} ::nogloss Many of those examples are moreso of *transformative practices*, or at least the fruits of such practices, but they're very informative for making inferences about the structure of the mind, even if they're not quite centrally "introspection" per se. Along with this, it's helpful then to distinguish between, say, "internal exploration" and something like "propositional verbal modeling." So, often the image we have of introspection is of a process of primarily deliberative verbal reflection and contemplation, which ostensibly directly (?) produces knowledge about oneself—I want to widen a lot from this. A person, in general, has experiences throughout their life, and their ongoing internal and external reactions in life are a kind of elicitation of the structure and contents of the "mind." Variously, *existential impressions* are left by different experiences, and the content of these impressions are elicited in different contexts. What's only somewhat unusal about these kinds of weirder introspective practices is more just that they're deliberately internally elicited. Often, introspective practices will use language as a "handle" or "hook" into the mind, agnostic of, or playful with, the *truthfulness* of some utterance. Salient here would again be Gendlin's Focusing, which is a practice in which a person uses verbal prompts and verbal investigation to introspect, checked *against* their [resonances](/md/practice/phenomenology-somatics.md#resonance). A friend of mine also describes what he calls "existential trolling," which uses deliberately provocative or contentious prompts, to check for internal resistance or objection. Insofar as someone is concerned with producing accurate and truthful models, they can actually do that modeling in parallel, or even separately, from their main introspective practices, which can be much wackier[^practice-introspection--magick]. In general though, introspection (or *whatever*) is very often oriented towards change and catharsis, *or* a kind of "existential knowing," really agnostic of almost any epistemic claims about the structure of the mind. (There's still problems there, which [I'll discuss later](/md/spiritual-truth/wrong-practice.md).) In fact, robust introspective practices in the circles I run in very commonly will take many tacks at an individual question or issue, and triangulate what's going from the variety of conflicting or at least multifacted internal responses. So, these practices often have a flow of back and forth between the nominal "answers" which some technique elicits (whether explicitly in words, or otherwise), and one's sense of the underlying generators. [^practice-introspection--magick]: So the extreme here being the large cluster often called "magick," which I'd gloss, maybe unfairly, as something like "incantations using arbitrary systems of symbols, for resonance, personal transformation, and enacting agency" I'm harping on this point about introspection besides verbal "investigation" also to highlight what I think is confused in a variety of conceptions of "the unconscious," and how those relate to something like "introspective accessibility." So, saliently, often one person might have some emotional dynamic which they are aware of only in terms of its effects, but which they regard as "unconscious," where another person (or the same person, after some time) might say "no no, I recognize the same process in myself, and I have vivid introspective access, it's just not necessarily verbal." (And, for that matter, it's not always clear what "verbal introspective access" might have meant, anyway.) Often in particular this is substantially about developing fine internal sensitivity; again for more on this see the whole page on [somatic phenomenology](/md/practice/phenomenology-somatics.md) for descriptions of a lot of the relevant kind of sensitivity. Very relevant here also will be reports of [awakening](/md/practice/mysticism-awakening.md), which while not quite central to "introspection," are still clearly about insight into the structure of one's experience, though usually claimed as of experience in general. Part of the question I'm weaving in and out of here, which I'll [discuss more later](/md/spiritual-truth/gnosis-confabulation.md), is about what kinds of introspection produce useful or reliable knowledge. Often cultures, personalities, or systems of metaphysics that prefer verbal contemplation over other kinds of introspection, hold views approximately to the effect of "correct knowledge comes from careful modeling, hypothesizing, and experimentation, and 'direct knowing' is suspect." *It's a bit hard to address this broad group of objections, and any specific argument I make would likely sound like a strawman to anyone individually. Anyway, if you are at least sympathetic to the above depiction, maybe take this as gesticulating, and try to infer what my version of this argument would be for your specific case.* Firstly, I'd say this creates a bizarre separation with oneself. The unfair depiction, which I think really is accurate to some people, is shaped like "*I* am the part of the mind which performs the investigation, whereas the *rest* of my mind is the part I do investigation upon, and which is separate from *me*." More importantly, though, I'd say that introspection needs a kind of raw *contact*, and that verbal contemplation, especially upon memory, is really more like "theorizing," rather than properly *investigating* the domain. Again see [more discussion of this later](/md/spiritual-truth/gnosis-confabulation.md).
More on this point I think that some people take introspection to be bunk, because *most "introspection" they ever observe* is basically *confabulation*. So while in principle I might buy something like, "verbal contemplation, hypothesizing, and experimentation" as a model for understanding the mind (at least at some level), in practice the "sit and think about it" kinds of "introspection" often come very quickly to some kind of explanation... and then just stop there. The introspection-skeptical I think are often tracking this dynamic, and conclude, "nah bro, that's bs."
One last point here: introspection again sterotypically is something basically private, quiet, and which usually happens in stillness. Perhaps this isn't *centrally* "introspection", but broadly speaking I'd say that *enacting* one's values, or self-image, or whatever, is just the same contiguous with just "touching into them." So the examples I gave above re say dance are decent ones here, but more generally *embodying* one's values in the world is often both an expression of *and* part of an investigation into one's values. There are many reports of people being engages in a process of transformation and self-exploration over many years, some of which happens privately and quiety, and some of which happens very much in public, and yet with many revisions and turnings-over. (And also, not to reify "values" here, but this point is inclusive of identity, [mystical-transcendant wisdom](/md/practice/mysticism-awakening.md), wacky [somatic content](/md/practice/phenomenology-somatics.md), and everything else.)