It seems to me from my own experience that learning to meditate is an extraordinarily difficult task. Most of my difficulties, I realize, lie within me. However, there is also a difficulty I find with writing and instruction about meditation: it tends to be stated in abstract terms, with too few concrete, detailed instances. Like most people, I need momentary details and abstract terms, the parts and the wholes. Here I review some of Virginia Woolf's writing, it is crammed with particular moments from her inner life.
Scholars have suggested that the self is made up of movement between experiencing and watching that experience. They begin by pointing to the learning of language: what seems to make all of the various human languages possible, as opposed to the instinctive vocabularies of other mammals, is what they call role-taking. Humans can see their own experience from outside, by imagining it from the point of view of another person. Human language in actual usage is almost always fragmented and incomplete, and most commonly used words have more than one meaning. For these reasons, it would be impossible to understand talk without role-taking.
Role-taking appears to occur at lightning speed, so fast that it disappears from consciousness at an early age. In modern societies, particularly, with their focus on individualism, there are ideological incentives for forgetting that one is role-taking. Each of us learns to consider ourselves a stand-alone individual, independent of what others think. "We live in the minds of others without knowing it." (Cooley 1922).
Children learn role-taking so early and so well that they forget they are doing it. The more adept they become, the quicker the movement back in forth, learning through practice to reduce silences in conversation to an unbelievably short time. Studies of recorded conversations (for example, Wilson and Zimmerman 1986) help us understand how the forgetting is possible.
The 1986 study analyzed adult dialogues nine minutes long in seven conversations (14 different people). In the segments recorded, the average length of silences varied from an average of .04 to .09 seconds. How can one possibly respond to the other's person comment in less than a tenth of a second?
Apparently one needs to begin to form a response well before the other person has stopped speaking. That is, humans are capable of multiprocessing, in this case, in four different channels: listening to the other's comment, imagining its meaning from the speaker's point of view, from own point of view and, forming a response to it. These four activities must occur virtually simultaneously.
In modern societies, at least, if one is to respond quickly enough, one must split one's attention into four parts. Learning to respond quickly probably takes years. Perhaps early in grammar school, most children have obtained sufficient speed. If a child takes too long to respond, undesirable interpretations may be put upon the wait. "What are you, stupid or something? ‟ or "Don't you believe me?" and so on.
Self and Ego
Acquiring a human self depends on role-taking: the ability to see one's self as another might, as well as from the inside. The problem with this process is that in order to be quickly responsive, a part of the self, the ego, becomes mechanized. How can one listen to a comment, imagine the others' point of view, decide one's own point of view, and produce a response but leaving a silence of less than a tenth of a second? It seems that such facility would require an internal mechanism that is automatic, using, for the most part, already semi-prepared responses, rather than an exact response that would perfectly fit the particular moment.
The idea of automatized responses in conversation suggests the use of hundreds or even thousands of stock words, phrases, or sentences. The reflexive, observing self is capable of providing a unique response to each unique situation. But such a response requires that one only listen, leading to a delay in response. The ego is a machine, composed largely of ready-made elements. Ego responses, therefore, are as much or more about the self as about the other or the situation.
An obvious example of a stock response would be "Well!" or "Uhh," to gain time. But since there is next to no time for the further response either, what usually occurs is also stock, perhaps a saying, or a favorite phrase, or phrases that he or she knows are the other's person favorites, or some more complex response that is still mostly constructed from the available stock.
Many responses are probably more complex than mere truisms, however. They could involve some on-the-spot construction, but still are partially tangential. Most of us seem to have "lines" we take with particular people and situations that persist, regardless of changes in the other person or situation. My father, for example, took an authoritarian line with my mother, brother and me, and we took a submissive line with him, even after my brother and I were out of his direct influence. Knowing what to expect from the other person, and from ourselves, even approximately, would be considerable help in keeping silences under a tenth of a second.
The ego can be envisioned as that part of the self that is mostly automated. The internal dialogue of the self is between the automated part and the part that can respond to situations de novo, the reflexive self. It appears that the ego is in charge almost all of the time, even during dreams. (Lucid dreams would be an exception). The difficulty that many people have with learning to meditate could be caused by the domination of the ego. Meditation involves restraining the ego to give the reflexive self more time. Effective meditation moves toward being able to observe own ego, as well as experiencing it.
Artists Observing Inner Experience.
Interior monologues are often found in novels, but they are seldom detailed enough to help us envision the working of the self. For example, George Eliot, the 19th century novelist, provided them for Gwendolyn Harleth, a character in Daniel Deronda. Although not elaborated, these monologues refer abstractly to inner process. Here are some examples from Gwendolyn's first conversation with Grandcourt, who she ultimately marries.
In their conversation, "she imagined various degrees and modes of opinion of herself that might be entertained by Grandcourt." Next, Gwendolyn, in her imagination, "made a brief graphic description of him [Grandcourt] to an indefinite hearer." The first excerpt implies that Gwendolyn took the role of Grandcourt in order to try out various versions of what he might think of her. The second implies that Gwendolyn took the role of some other person, an "indefinite hearer," in order to describe to that other person how she (Gwendolyn) saw Grandcourt (presumably his good looks and stately bearing).
A third and final example from Eliot's dialogue hints at the extensiveness of Gwendolyn's interior monologue. Gwendolyn, who is poor, loves riding horses; by this phase of her first conversation with Grandcourt, she is already thinking that she might marry him. When they are talking about Gwendolyn's love of riding horses, during a pause when waiting for Grandcourt to reply, she "had run through a whole hunting season with two chosen hunters to ride at will." If this moment had been treated by Woolf, she might have included all of the images that played through Gwendolyn's consciousness, second by second, for a whole page, rather than a single sentence. Eliot and other novelists provide glimpses of the inner life, but they are abstract and therefore brief.
In contrast, Virginia Woolf provided a model meditation in this sense: she seems to have observed the motions of her own ego in great detail. Of course, we can never be completely sure how much of her descriptions are factual, and how much imagined. But they at least offer concrete instances to help us better understand the nature of meditation, since they describe the particulars of a story like one that might happen to anyone.
