July Guided Meditation - Perception Vs. Conception

For these three summer months, our monthly guided meditation and Thursday sitting group is continuing our exploration of Open Awareness meditation. In July, our practice will emphasize what Buddhist teacher Andy Karr refers to as the difference between “Perception” and “Conception.”

We start the exploration of spacious awareness in June: using the metaphor of the mind being like a monkey living in a one room house with six windows. This represents the five sensory windows as well as the sixth window of mental events (thought, imagery, narrative and so forth, as well as emotions, which are both sensory events and mental events simultaneously). Remember, even though the monkey represents a sometimes wild mind, we aren’t trying to punish the monkey in any way. The monkey is basically good and fully capable of an awakened life. We’re just trying to get them to settle down long enough to appreciate being themself, and to appreciate their world. We are also trying to find a way to be fully present (or somewhere along the spectrum of presence) and notice when we start telling a story about direct experience. We’re also deeply curious as to how that narrative-building can cause the monkey to bee misaligned with what’s happening in its world.

To work with this fine line between perception and conception, we meditate using all five senses as a fluid base for attention in the present moment. While doing this, we keep a subtle and keen interest in the relationship between a “direct” sensory experience of sight, sound, smell, taste and touch, on one hand, and the labelling of that experience as a generic concept by the mind. We are also interested in how labelling the experience sometimes catapults us into a related—or unrelated—story about what is being perceived.

This is part of the movement toward “Open Awareness” meditation. We will be working with this movement in the Thursday meditation group for paid substack subscribers over June, July and August.

Here’s an example of Perception Vs. Conception: