Conceptual Meditation: The Basics

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This is a basic guide on how to get started with conceptual meditation and how to use your hands as a tool for deepening concentration. 

 

A chiropsalterium from Johannes Mauburnus'
Rosetum exercitiorum spiritualium et sacrarum
1496

It is a common myth that meditation is an "eastern" thing, imported to the west from Asia. What I call conceptual meditation is a way of meditating that was practiced both in the pagan ancient world and in medieval Christianity. While eastern meditation can often be roughly framed as intentionally non-conceptual, reaching for a mental quiet beyond thought, conceptual meditation uses thought as a vehicle to insight.

In this post I will give you the basic instructions on how to get started with conceptual meditation. The instructions will be aimed at total beginners and meditation adepts who want to learn a new technique alike. The practice I describe is my own idiosyncratic mix of techniques found in different medieval christian meditation manuals. For those who are interested I will give an overview over sources and further reading at the end of the article.

Choosing a topic

To get started with conceptual meditation you first need a topic. Eventually, you will be able to use anything that is remotely interesting to you as a topic for conceptual meditation, from emotional and psychological issues to math puzzles. But when you are starting out, not every topic is equally well suited.

Generally, a proper topic to choose should have at least four characteristics. It should be interesting, emotionally engaging, broad enough but not too broad. It should be interesting to make your meditation less exhausting, it should be emotionally engaging to make meditation a full experience and not a merely cognitive one, it should be broad so that you do not run out of stuff to think about after a short time, and it should not be too broad so that your meditation has a relatively clear structure. What topic exactly you choose is up to you and I will intentionally not given any recommendations. With time you will learn which kinds of topics work well and which do not. A final hint on what makes a good topic: Especially the inconvenient truths that you may not want to think about may turn out to be particularly rewarding meditation topics.

As with everything, to get good at conceptual meditation requires practice. I recommend to practice a few times a week at fixed times, or even better daily. But if you use the same topic at every session you will get bored quickly and your meditation will degrade. This problem occurred to ancient authors, too. Raimund Lulls, sometimes credited as the inventor of the idea of a computation machine, worked out an elaborate system for generating new meditation topics. A more straightforward solution is to designate specific days with specific general topics of meditation. For instance, Monday might be designated to topics related to your path in life, Tuesday might be all about philosophy and Thursday might be about your relationships to people important to you and so on.

How to sit

Once you have selected a topic there is just one more thing to get out of the way. How should one sit? For westerners the simplest answer is to just sit on a chair with a straight back with hands placed palms down on one's knees. But if you are used to eastern meditation, sitting cross-legged on a meditation cushion is equally fine. The only relevant variable here is that you should be so comfortable that you can sit for a while without being in pain (or more pain as necessary), but not so comfortable that you get tired. In fact, for any form of meditation, fighting the impulse to get tired and unfocused is the first lesson to be learned. This is why lying down for meditation is not a good idea.

Before you get started with the actual practice it is helpful to relax your body as much as possible while keeping your chosen posture. To do this effectively, let your attention wander across your body from head to feet, relaxing all the tension you find at every point. Later, while the main practice, you may from time to time check in with your body and relax all the tension that you find there. With all this out of the way, let us begin.

The hand as a map to the mind

The very basic idea of conceptual meditation is very simple. In "ordinary" meditation that is commonly practiced today one uses some meditation object like the breath or a mantra. One then tries sustaining one's attention on the meditation object by moving it back whenever one catches it wandering elsewhere. In this way one practices one's attention skills. Every time of moving one's attention back where one wants it to be one, so to speak, performs a mental push-up. Now conceptual meditation is just like ordinary meditation just that it uses a more abstract instead of a perceptual or auditory phenomenon as meditation object.

I am sure that at this point many readers will ask themselves: Isn't what you are describing just called thinking? Yes. Conceptual meditation is just a formal method for thinking about some topic deeply and with maximum focus. But when you actually practice it for a few times you will realize that you have never actually "thought" in quite the way I will teach you to. Done the right way conceptual meditation can have a number surprising effects, from altered states of consciousness and experiences of revelation and flow to a deep sense of peace and equanimity.

The specific technique I will show you here is a surprisingly effective one that I can trace back to the fifteenth century's Rosetum Exercitiorum Spiritualium, a then popular meditation manual by the Augustinian Johannes Mauburnus. It serves to help you give an internal structure to your practice. The basic idea is to split your meditation session into different clear parts that engage with different aspects of your topic. Then we associate different parts of our hand with the different aspects. During the meditation you just go through the aspects of the topic, touching the relevant part of your hand with your other hand or with the thumb of the same hand, depending on whether your hands lie in your lab or on your knees. I prefer the former. A meditation map based on one's hands was called a chiropsalterium in medieval times.

Why use a chiropsalterium? There are a number of reasons. First of all, the technique helps you memorize the steps of your meditation, thus increasing the amount of brain power you can spend on the actual topic. Secondly, the use of an external tool makes it harder to forget the part of your meditation you are engaging in. When you start mind-wandering it is easy to get back to practice because you know where you left off. Finally, when doing this regularly, you will condition your mind to associate certain aspects of a topic with certain movements thus deepening concentration even more.

Here is the bad part: You will have to memorize the association of aspects of a topic with parts of your hand. There is no way around that and I recommend that you have internalized the map so well that you have no trouble recalling it while the session. Writing the whole thing down may help, as in the image shown above.

Finally, the question of timing. Many meditation instructions will tell you exactly how long a meditation session should last. In the case of conceptual meditation this suggestion is not very helpful. Instead, you have finished the meditation when you have gone through all the steps. Just realize that when it takes you less than twenty-five minutes, say, then you probably should engage with the aspects in a little more detail.

Index finger: Preparation

We begin at the index finger at the outer finger limb, moving inward. Every one of your four fingers (except the thumb) will be associated with a phase of meditation separated into three more specific steps, associated with the finger limbs. Finally, we will end with three of your knuckles, which makes fifteen steps in total. The index finger is associated with a preparatory clearing of the mind.

I. Check in

The outer finger limb of your index finger is where you start. This limb is associated with a simple turning of your attention from the world to your own thoughts. What are you thinking about right now? What issues trouble you that could come in the way of meditation? When it seems you have a fairly comprehensive list you can move on to the next step.

II. Goal

You now move to the middle limb of your index finger. Whereas in the previous step you asked the question 'what am I thinking about?' you will now ask the question 'what should I be thinking about?'. Get a clear sense of what your chosen topic (the topic is always chosen before sitting down!) is. If the topic is very broad you may also want to think about what you want to emphasize in this particular session and what you may want to leave out.

III. Decision

The inner limb of your index finger is associated with a conscious decision to push away intruding thoughts and focus on the subject matter. The next halve an hour to an hour are dedicated entirely to your chosen topic.

Middle finger: Exploring motivation 

Your middle finger is dedicated to the exploration of your motivation that brings you to this practice and this topic in the first place. A friend of mine found a useful way of expressing what you are trying to do here: By exploring different aspects of your motivation you are, so to speak, getting different areas of your brain involved in the meditation process thus deepening the whole experience. We are trying to think with our whole minds.

I. Necessities

The outer limb of the middle finger is dedicated to contemplation of your motivation from the perspective of higher goals and external necessities. For topics connected to your daily life these may be ethical considerations. For more abstract philosophical topics this may mean calling to mind the relevance of the topic to the whole of philosophy or the philosophical tradition and so on.

II. Practical relevance

The middle limb is associated with the calling to mind of the practical relevance of the topic. If you are meditating on issues of your daily life this may consist in calling to mind what it may be like if the issue were resolved. But even very abstract topics usually have some practical relevance. Make it vivid what these are.

III. Aesthetics and feelings

Finally, the inner limb of your middle finger is dedicated to the aesthetic aspects of the topic. What are the images and vague feelings associated with the topic? If you are trying to work through some issue, you may also try to imagine what it would feel like to have resolved it. Also, it is often surprising that even in very abstract endeavors there are distinct images and symbolic associations showing up at this step. Make these conscious.

Ring finger: Main meditation

The ring finger is dedicated to the main meditation where you really think through the topic in detail. As the structure of the meditation is best dictated by the topic you may want to revise the structure in light of some topic as soon as you have gained some experience with conceptual meditation. What I present here is more like a generic suggestion for beginners rather than a rule carved in stone. It is natural that the ring finger will take longer to complete than the other ones.

I. Causes, conditions, reasons

Explore the topic under the aspect of reasons and causes that lead to it. For some psychological issue you may think about its underlying causes and its history. For a philosophical problem you may think about how exactly the problem arises from other assumptions.

II. Effects and consequences

Do the same for the effects and/or consequences of your meditation object.

III. Feelings and images 

Explore the emotional content of the topic. How does it effect you and what kinds of images and feelings came up in your meditation?

Pinky: Afterthoughts

Your pinky will be associated with what we may call afterthoughts of the main meditation.

I. Associations

What connections to other topics arise in the course of your meditation? You may have noticed that it is hard to separate thoughts neatly into different boxes. Meditation on freedom of the will may turn out to inseparable from meditation on the nature of ethical action, for instance. Thinking about your bad relation to your boss at work may evolve into contemplating your relation to authority generally. At this point of the meditation there is space to make these connections explicit. Often it makes sense to use these associations as topics for meditation at some later time. In this way meditative chains of association may naturally arise that lead deeper and deeper into some subject.

II. Doubts

This stage of the meditation gives space to lingering doubts about your thinking about the main subject so far. It is the point where our internal critic gets a fair hearing. This has two advantages. On the one hand, if we discover that there are good reasons do doubt our thinking on a subject, active reflection on our doubts may help to avoid deluding ourselves. On the other hand, if one's thinking on some subject turns out to be convincing even after working through one's doubts consciously then the final result will be all the more convincing.

III. Ethics/Will 

The third step here consists in a deliberate decision to reflect on what actions one should take in light of what has come to light in the course of meditation.

Knuckles: Ruminatio

The final phase of the meditation I want to show you is called ruminatio in Latin. It consists in a repetitive revision of the results of one's meditation. While new aspects about your chosen subject may spring to mind here too, this is not the main aim. Rather, the ruminato serves to ingrain the results of meditation deep in one's psyche. This of course will be especially important where a meditation is meant to lead to a permanent behavior change.

A simple way of giving some structure to this final phase of the practice is to revisit the essence of the motivation phase, the main phase and the afterthoughts while touching the knuckles of the associated fingers, i.e. middle finger, ring finger and pinky. I would recommend doing this at least twice. The ruminatio ends our conceptual meditation, though there are some ways to extend it that I will briefly touch on now.

Going even deeper

There are some techniques that connect to conceptual meditation that I would classify as 'advanced'. They require some experience with conceptual meditation to even get off the ground. This post is mainly meant as an introduction and so I will keep these suggestions short. I plan to elaborate on each of them in further posts.

First, as I have also written in a much earlier post, Bishop Hall gives some instructions on how to meditate on the feelings arising during conceptual meditation. In fact, for Hall, these are the whole point of meditation. Here is the main idea. Do conceptual meditation in the way I described. When you are done you may encounter what I sometimes call an "afterglow", a kind of euphoric sensation vaguely distributed within your body. Now you may use this afterglow as a new object for meditation and you might discover that your attention actually strengthen the sensation. This may even be developed into what is called Jhana practice in Buddhism.

Secondly, after the main meditation is done, Mauburnus suggests to investigate the thinker of thoughts. This kind of exercise is not unlike Buddhist non-dual practice.

Thirdly, traditionally, conceptual meditation has been used as an entry point for what is called contemplatio or contemplation. I can only give the vaguest suggestion here, but generally the idea is that once you are finished meditating you may find that your mind reaches a kind of natural stillness. The essence of contemplation is exploring this stillness. There is more, but I will leave you with these suggestions for now.

Keep a journal

One final and immensely useful suggestion: Keep a meditation journal where you briefly note the date, duration, content and result of every meditation session. In this way your meditations will become more coherent and you will find you can explore themes in a much more systematic manner.

Sources

The account of conceptual meditation given here was pieced together from a number of sources. The two primary ones are Bishop Hall's The Art of Divine Meditation and, as mentioned, Mauburnus' Rosetum Exercitiorum Spiritualium. The basic structure of meditation is, with some minor modifications taken from Hall, the idea of using a chiropsalterium I picked up from Mauburnus' work. The former is reprinted in what must be the most ugly book in my library or in a scholarly volume by Frank Livingston Huntley which contains some interesting historical information but is also quite expensive. The Rosetum has not been translated to English from the original Latin and I only know of a few short excerpts published in Ursula Mangoldt's Meditation und Kontemplation aus Christlicher Tradition in German. Those who are interested in the idea of contemplation should consult Miguel de Molinos' Spiritual Guide Which Disentangles the Soul.