- seCtIon tHRee: BoDY AnD WoRLD
Mantras are words, phrases, or sounds repeated either silently or out loud. When
thoughts arise, the meditator just returns attention to the mantra. Mantras are
used in Buddhism, Judaism, and Hindu yoga, including the well-known Om Mani
Padme Hum, which means ‘the jewel in the centre of the lotus’. In Christianity, the
early Desert Fathers used to repeat kyrie eleison (from the Greek for ‘Lord, have
mercy’) silently to help them achieve a state of ‘nowhereness and nomindness’
(West, 1987). The Cloud of Unknowing recommends clasping a word such as God
or love to your heart so that it never leaves, and beating with it upon the cloud and
the darkness, striking down thoughts of every kind, and driving them beneath
the cloud of forgetting, so as to find God and achieve complete self-forgetfulness
(14th century/2009, pp. 24–25).
TM is based on mantras, and new students are given a ‘personal’ mantra. In
fact, this is assigned merely on the basis of age, and probably the words do not
matter. Indeed, anything can be used as a focus of attention, and common ‘aids’
include candle flames, flowers, stones, or any small object. Some traditions use
mental images, which range from simple visions of light to the highly elaborate
sequences of visualisation taught in Tibetan Buddhism.
Finally, in Zen Buddhism, and in particular in the Rinzai school, practitioners con-
centrate on koans or hua tous. These are questions or short stories designed to
challenge the intellectual mind with paradox, polarity, and ambiguity, and force
it into a state of open inquiry. Some meditators use the same koan for a whole
lifetime, such as the question ‘Who am I?’, or the question ‘What is this?’ used in
Korean Zen (Batchelor, 2001; and see Concept 18.1 for other examples). Others
pass through a series of koans as they develop their understanding. Koans are
designed not to be answered but to be used.
How does this bewildering array of methods, all called ‘meditation’, help us to under-
stand consciousness? The effects of meditation on physical and mental health may be
relevant to this question, and we will come back to them in Chapter 13, but the impli-
cations can go deeper still. After long practice with any of these methods, meditators
claims that letting go gets easier, and thoughts and feelings that would previously
have been distracting become just more stuff appearing and disappearing without
response. Ultimately, in alert and mindful awareness, the differences between self and
other, mind and contents, simply drop away. This is known as realising nonduality.
Can this really be possible? The hard problem confronts us precisely because
of these same dualities. So the suggestion that it is possible to transcend them
should be of great interest indeed to a science of consciousness. Attention plays
a crucial role in this possible transcendence.ATTENTION, ATTENTION, ATTENTION
A man asked the fourteenth-century Zen master Ikkyu to write for him some max-
ims of the highest wisdom. Ikkyu wrote ‘Attention.’ Dissatisfied with this answer,
the man asked for more. He wrote ‘Attention. Attention.’ The man complained
that he saw nothing of much depth or subtlety in that. So Ikkyu wrote ‘Attention.
Attention. Attention.’ When the man angrily demanded to know what attention
means, Ikkyu gently answered ‘Attention means attention’ (Kapleau, 1980).‘Can I catch myself not
attending, without
attending?’
(koan on attention)