Sensing Space

Recently, while looking through a user forum about Dr Joe Dispenza's popular meditations, I noticed a lot of people were struggling with the concept of "space." When Dr Dispenza refers to space, he is referring to an aspect of our consciousness that is more precisely described as internal abstract spatial awareness. It's a part of consciousness that we don't usually think about, but it's critical to daily life.

Two Types of Spatial Awareness

The first type of spatial awareness is to do with external physical body awareness and the location and movement of your body in space. This is what multiple Olympic medal winning gymnast Simone Biles clearly has in abundance — awareness of how the body is positioned in space, how it is balanced, how it is moving. Technically this is called proprioception.

The second type of abstract spatial awareness is within our mind — a combination of abstract visualization and imagination. In this type, you can visualize three-dimensional spaces in your mind, perhaps manipulate them, move through them. These mental pictures sometimes replicate the external world, but often do not, being abstract concepts that don't necessarily describe something that exists physically.

What Has Proprioception Got to Do with Consciousness?

Advanced consciousness skills or deep meditation typical involves the second, internal, abstract type of spatial awareness — the skill to visualize either the body moving in space using mental spatial visualization and imagination, or to visualize other abstract concepts that involve space.

Why this is a key skill for advanced consciousness work, is that this second type of spatial awareness seems to calm our brain when we direct our attention to it. This is probably because visualizing abstract space occupies your attention very fully. It's pretty much impossible to think about anything else if you are visualizing something in three dimensions in your mind.

If a meditator has sufficient attention management skills to deliberately shift attention from concrete sensations to abstract spatial ideas, it can take you into very deep meditative states very quickly.

Everyone Remembers Their First Time

Once we have stabilized our attention by doing basic consciousness and attention management exercises, we may choose to learn the skill of disassociating with the sensations we have of our physical body. In effect, what this is doing in the brain is turning off the way proprioception keeps us grounded in the physical world.

People learning to meditate sometimes accidentally turn off proprioception and the experience can sometimes be quite scary. They typically report sensations of falling, spinning, floating, feeling lightheaded, or a distinct sensation of travelling through space at high speed. These sensations can feel very, very real.

Because of how unfamiliar and disorientating these experiences of spatial disassociation can be, it can be tempting to assign mystical stories and meaning: "I travelled to an alternate reality and talked with angels." In reality, these experiences of fear and spatial disorientation can be considered normal or expected results for a skilled meditator.

Exercise: Sensing Space

If you want a basic exercise to begin to improve your awareness of space, take a walk outside. As you walk, direct your attention to the size and dimension of things around you, rather than just what they are. Feel the three-dimensionality of the objects around you.

Then, direct your attention to the space between objects, instead of the space occupied by the object itself. Switch your attention between the space taken by objects, and the space between objects, spending about 30 seconds before switching. Lastly, if you are outside and the sky is clear, direct your attention to the space above you towards the sky. Don't just stop at the sky — go further, into space.