You don’t feel all of your body all of the time. There are parts of your body that you never feel unless something is wrong, for example, right now you probably can’t feel the marrow in your bones, or the hippocampus in your brain, or the gallbladder in your abdomen.
What we do feel, we tend to feel as part of a whole. When, for example, we have a tingle in a spot on our forearm, our brain fills in the parts of the forearm that we are not feeling at that moment. This creates an illusion that we are aware of the whole arm.
This optical illusion shows how our brain fills in blank spaces with prior knowledge (in this case, of triangles), or sometimes with guesses.
In fact, there aren’t any triangles in this diagram. The brain makes an assumption that the black lines are continuous underneath a white triangle, but there is no white triangle. The shape is familiar enough that the brain is confident to imagine lines where there are none.
One meditation technique is to simply notice whatever sensory perceptions are available, that we become aware of, without filling in the blanks. It’s like computer-generated imagery using active-markers.
What we want to do with this meditation technique is to be aware of sensory data input without the imagery fill-in. Try to notice sensory data input without thinking about it in words or images; just the raw data. Not just visual or tactile data, either. Try and do this with all sensory data – hearing, tasting, smelling, interoception and proprioception.
Thought is also sensory data, which is tricky because, being words and images, thought data is the stuff we call stories. Stories ‘fill-in’ the gaps between data received from our other senses. Stories tend to be so captivating we often don’t notice that our attention has been hijacked, and we don’t usually stop to check that the fill-in is accurate, much less kind or necessary.
This is a practice for cultivating awareness of sensory data without creating a story, or, at least, without unknowingly creating a story. Unknowingly creating stories has implications for our thoughts, feelings and behaviors about and towards ourselves, other people, and our environment. These stories often lead to biases, prejudices and assumptions. This practice can be extrapolated to being aware of things as they are, in the moment, whatever it is that we are doing, wherever we are doing it, without unknowingly creating a story around it.