Inter-subjectively exploring intersubjectivity in the French Alps

 In the last week, I had the good fortune to be part of Mind & Life Europe's ENCECON meeting. In this meeting, philosophers, neuroscientists, psychologists, meditators and more get together to discuss how we can study first-person experience and bring this full experience together with objective, third-person methods. This year's theme was "inter-subjectivity", which we explored through a series of meditation exercises, interviews and discussions. The interviews were not any interviews, but ==microphenomenological interviews, which is a method to explore experience in a very detailed way, trying to focus on the experience itself, leaving out our habitual theorizing. Another important characteristic of microphenomenological interviews is that they invite us to slow down, and repeatedly relive our past experience, so we become more aware of the details of these experiences, using more of our senses than we typically report on. What i found really interesting as a scientist was to observe the so-called evocation state, in which people show signs of being disengaged from the current context, something which we in the mind-wandering literature term "perceptual decoupling". The interviewees at this point slow down their speech, may close their eyes and sometimes repeat gestures from their past experience. What is challenging about this method, is that to explore a few minutes, or even less, of experience, you typically have an interview that lasts 30-60 minutes. At the same time, this is a state of pure contemplation--engaging in a reliving without judgment. Yet, this makes it very difficult to combine with other methods of research such as neuroimaging, because for most of these experiments, we need many repetitions of the same instance of experience. So, we had a lot of discussions about this.

What amazed me during this meeting is the profundity of the experiences that could be evoked by very simple meditations. On the first day, we were asked to simply bring to mind a person whom we felt grateful to. I kind of missed this instruction because I was so tired that I fell asleep during the meditation! On the second day, we sat next to one other person, and were asked to open ourselves up to the presence of the other person. It was fascinating to see how many people reported sensations of profound connection or even merging with the other person, as if they had a single body. On the third day, we were sitting together with the full group, and first we were asked to open ourselves up to the presence of the others, and then to hold each other's hands. In this moment, many people felt completely connected to the others, and lost a bit of their sense of self.

Many of our discussions revolved around the topics of how these practices helped to melt down the boundary between self and other. This was profoundly effected by the meditation practices we did, and of course by the fact we were staying together in a beautiful place in the French Alps. What this reminded me of is how helpful these simple practices could also be for reducing our destructive emotions, something that the next Lojong slogan talks about, which says "Train in the 3 difficulties". What this refers to is first the difficulty of becoming aware of your negative emotions, then secondly the difficulty of applying antidites to these negative emotions, and thirdly the difficulty of making the first two a habit so they change the way you are. Now when you are as profoundly connected as we were during the practices, the interesting thing is that negative emotions such as anger, jealousy and craving do not have even a chance to arise--they simply dissolve in the void. How wonderful would it be to do these practices together more often!

We also reflected on the role of the body in all this, because we found that touching each other's hands during the meditation practice had a profound effect. It dramatically amplified the feeling of having a single body with each other. Interestingly, this mirrors my findings from a dance experiment that I hope to write up soon, in which we found through working with dancers that the most powerful ways we can connect through movement is not by synchronizing our movement with another, but rather by moving as if we have a single body, or by engaging in a movement dialogue. So, it may be quite interesting to study more about how moving together can affect our thinking, and how such simple instructions ask bringing to mind the presence of others can do so. I am also curious whether we can use the perceptual decoupling state to better determine when microphenomenological interview information is reliable, and when it is less reliable (because people are not actually reliving their past experience, but rather theorizing about it). Finally, I am curious whether we can apply the experience of microphenomenology in zooming in on lived experience, and staying away from our theories about what's going on, to improve our societal discourses, which are so often stranded in these theories and stories, rather than simply being present with the facts. And the stories are what we know results in so many destructive emotions...