On Meditation: Controlling The Senses
In traditional yoga texts, it was somewhat common to conceive of attention as something like the consequence of our sense organs ‘reaching out’ into the world to grasp things (sights, sounds, etc.). This conception would characterize yoga/meditation as being a quest to (and/or result of) control one’s senses, the effect of which is something like not being taken in/up by the habitual self-movement of attending.
This practice of controlling or withdrawing one’s senses is not to suppress them or actively stop attention (whatever that might mean, perhaps invulnerability to what solicits us), but is simply to notice what the senses were already doing.
This often begins with focusing one’s attention (using any number of methods or meditation practices), which allows us to notice our habitual ways of reaching out or being absorbed in/with the world, (including—especially—the very impulse to ‘reach out’ or self-transcend). What changes is not whether one is engaged, but is rather the field in which one is engaged: fewer/quieter objects pulling/pushing/possessing attention. The many objects competing for attention—sounds, sights, tasks, thoughts, feelings, desires—give attention an external justification to respond, and we never have to notice the reaching itself. Focused on a single object (breath, mantra, etc.) in a controlled environment (quiet room, etc.) removes the external justification to respond and the movement can be seen transparently as the mind’s “own”, as self-generated or unprovoked movement/momentum.
Eventually, we begin to notice the things we instinctively avoid—including thoughts we don’t want to think and feelings we don’t want to feel. In meditation, we deliberately remove access to the dozens of ways we have to keep our attention occupied: email, scrolling, cleaning, eating, television, shopping, working; even spiritual practice can serve this function when it is pursued as the result of the desire for hiding from oneself and/or invulnerability. With these no longer in play, the discomfort is allowed to surface, including—perhaps especially—the discomfort that gave rise to the very desire to control one’s senses.
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