Abstraction Consciousness: Abstraction

Abstraction is the deliberate mental ability to direct your attention away from your normal viewpoint of something, and instead sense that thing from the viewpoint of another person, spatial perspective, belief, identity, emotion or thought process.

Abstraction is a complex brain activity. Multiple brain regions are involved, as we bring together a number of different spatial, reasoning, imagination, and conceptual skills. The medial prefrontal cortex and temporoparietal junction are particularly involved in imagining and interpreting others’ mental states. This may include creating hypothetical scenarios about another person's internal state, motivations, or future reactions.

Additionally, emotional imagination engages the limbic system, particularly the amygdala, which processes emotional salience, and the insula, which integrates sensory and emotional information. Together, these systems allow us to simulate emotions and attribute them to others based on observed cues or our own creativity. 

For example, we might choose to deliberately feel the emotions of someone we hate in order to gain a new perspective on our relationship with them or understand the motivation behind their actions. This could be described as intentional empathy.  Or we might choose to view ourselves from the viewpoint of someone else, in order to gain insights on how we appear to them. Or we might choose to imagine ourselves as part of a different social group, identity or organization. These are all forms of abstraction.  

Abstraction is often both poorly described  and not perhaps the least understood consciousness sense, because it is mentally challenging and requires a high level of intention, attention, imagination and focus. Yet it is probably the most important sense of all if you want to really understand the mechanics of how deep mediation and transcendence works, and I’ll explain exactly why in a later chapter.

Abstraction is often combined with many other consciousness senses. For example, empathy occurs when we combine abstraction and emotion in order to perceive the emotions of others as if we were them. You literally experience what is happening as if your own body and mind were experiencing their emotion. In neuroscience, if we are sensing what someone else is feeling when they are present, some of what is occurring can be explained by what neuroscientists call ‘mirror neurons’.  A mirror neuron is a neuron that fires when we witness someone else in an emotional state, and they make us feel as if what we are observing is actually occurring to us. However, if we imagine what someone else is feeling without them being present, a much more complex process must occur. 

Compassion is a combination of emotion, abstraction and creation. When we experience compassion, as well as being aware of what others are experiencing emotionally, we deliberately create a feeling of warm understanding towards their experience in order to comfort or demonstrate our understanding and caring of their situation. 

If we combine abstraction with our sense of the spaces or objects outside of our physical body, we can explore what it might be like to be an object, another person, or the spaces between objects, people and your surroundings. If you’ve ever flinched while watching an accident in a live or televised sports event, or felt an urge to hit a ball back while watching baseball, you’ve probably engaged in a combination of interoception (your sense of the inside of your body), proprioception (your sense of balance) and abstraction, because you instinctively were experiencing an abstraction of what it was like to be someone else taking a physical action. 

Abstraction that engages our spatial sense will involve the posterior parietal cortex (PPC), a part of your brain that is used for spatial reasoning and the mental manipulation of objects as well as the superior parietal lobule, which plays a role in spatial orientation, and the primary visual cortex, which process the visual information required by spatial visualization.

If abstraction occurs spontaneously, the sense of separation from who and what we think we are can be quite dramatic. It can lead to major realizations or insights about our lives or our own actions, leaving us thoughtful and calm. Or it can be profoundly disconcerting, leaving us perturbed and agitated. 

When people undergo anesthesia for surgery, or when their heart stops because of an accident or heart attack, experiences of spontaneous spatial abstraction sometimes occur. These experiences often are described as ‘out of body experiences’, and can involve looking down on your own body, floating or being disconnected to one part or multiple parts of your body. The research on these experiences indicates that when near death, the brain has shut down awareness of some senses, while leaving other senses partially or fully active. Abstraction seems to be one of the senses that becomes highly activated, leading to the sense that we are out of our body. 

Alcohol and drugs also sometimes work to create a sense of abstraction. Socially, alcohol can help people feel more free in their behaviour, as if they were a different version of themselves for a while. Some senses may be sharpened, others may be dulled, depending on what substance you ingested. This selective dulling or sharpening of different senses can result in a range of emotions and reactions - anything from a welcome release of social anxiety common with a glass of wine, to euphoria, extreme relaxation or increased confidence with recreational drugs, and then terror or psychosis with psychedelic drugs. In some indigenous cultures, hallucinogens are taken as a rite of passage to adulthood because they strongly increase our sense of abstraction, resulting in a different way of viewing our relationship to ourselves, our ancestors, our connection with nature or our connection with humanity. 

Drugs can cause physical pain to reduce or disappear, proprioception to be impaired or possibly improved, and emotional inhibitions to reduce or become entirely absent. We might spontaneously experience things from a different viewpoint, leading us to feel intimately connected with the emotions or experiences of those around us. Those viewpoint shifts can be spiritually useful, amusing, confusing, disconcerting or terrifying. The problem with drugs and alcohol as tools in our spiritual development is that we are rarely in control of either the immediate process or the long term outcome. 

If we look at key shifts in the history of humanity, what we are really looking at is the invention of new and useful abstractions that allow people to perceive and understand the world from radically different viewpoints. The invention of spoken language was the first huge abstraction. With language, a particular grunt or sign came to mean something. That grunt, sound or sign was an abstract idea that became agreed to have a consistent meaning. With the abstraction of language, our ancestors could plan how to hunt animals, to cooperate, to agree and make basic plans about possible future shared action.

A further huge abstraction occurred when spoken language started to be represented as scratched marks on clay tablets. The marks were not the spoken sounds, they were an abstract symbol that represented the sound of language. The power of this abstraction was momentous. Instead of valuable knowledge being recorded as stories told around the campfire, they could be chiselled into temple walls and crossed from one generation to the next. Rather than teach the knowledge directly, we just needed to teach how to read the abstraction called writing. Trading accelerated as basic contracts could be created that showed who owed who for goods that had been traded.

As your study of consciousness becomes more advanced, abstraction is an absolutely vital consciousness sense to practice and master. Our objective is to bring our abstract sense under our consciousness control. That is because if we wish to progress to advanced consciousness work, you will need to master shifting attention not only from attention from one consciousness sense to another, but the ability to shift attention to towards more and more abstract ideas.  This is complex brain activity, with many parts of the brain becoming involved. If we haven’t fully grasped the concept of abstraction or are struggling with understanding this consciousness sense, it is very likely that you will struggle to progress to more advanced consciousness work, such as the NeuroYou Protocols.

Exercise: Getting out of yourself 

Find a quiet place where you can sit comfortably for at least fifteen minutes without interruption. Begin by settling into your ordinary sense of self. Notice your body, your breathing, any emotions that are present, and any thoughts.

Notice the familiar sense that you are right here, behind your eyes, inside your body, experiencing the world from your usual point of view. Take a minute or two to become very clear about this default position. This is your baseline identity reference point, your idea of you.

Now bring to mind a simple recent interaction with another person. Choose something emotionally neutral at first, such as a conversation with a friend, a brief meeting, or passing someone in a store.

First, replay the interaction from your own normal viewpoint. See what you saw. Hear what you heard. Feel what you felt. Notice your own thoughts and emotional reactions.

Now, gently shift perspective. Imagine stepping out of your own viewpoint and into the other person’s. Look back at yourself as if you were them. What did you seem like from their perspective? How did your tone, posture, pace, or emotional energy appear? What might the other person have been thinking, feeling, or assuming about you at that moment?

Do not force certainty. This is not about being objectively correct. This is about training the consciousness skill of deliberately shifting your viewpoint. Remain in their viewpoint for several minutes, gently exploring. Notice what changes in your emotional response when you no longer occupy only your own perspective.  Did the meaning of the interaction shift? Does compassion increase? Does defensiveness soften? Did new interpretations become available?

Now expand the exercise spatially. Imagine the same interaction from above, as if observing both of you from a video camera on the ceiling. See the room, the distance between bodies. Observe gestures, movement, and timing.

This trains spatial abstraction alongside interpersonal abstraction. Now move one level higher. Examine the interaction from the viewpoint of the wider system that you both are part of. What larger context was present? What do you both share? What are your common goals? Are there any cultural assumptions or misunderstandings at play? Are there any status/power/dominance/submission dynamics going on? Do either or both of you feel scared or are hiding something or some way of being?

At this level, you are no longer only sensing people. You are sensing systems of meaning and identity. Stay with this expanded perspective for several minutes.

The deeper purpose here is to experience that your normal sense of self is only one possible viewpoint among many that you can take on within consciousness. As you finish the exercise, bring attention back to your own identity and ask gently:

Who do I become when I choose to perceive myself from another viewpoint?

Let the question remain open. It does not require an immediate answer. This question may be an emotional trigger for some people. Sometimes the answer is not verbal. It may appear as spaciousness, emotional release, vulnerability, calm, compassion, or a sense of freedom from your usual story.

The ability to use abstraction to move between viewpoints in consciousness is one of most powerful mechanisms you can master in your meditation practice. When we deliberately learn to move attention from one perspective to another, we weaken the rigid attachment to a single fixed identity and gain access to deeper forms of awareness.

When you are ready, slowly return to your normal sense of body, breath, and space. Take a moment before moving.

With repeated practice, abstraction becomes one of the most powerful consciousness skills available. It strengthens empathy, systems thinking, emotional regulation, compassion, and advanced meditative skill. Most importantly, it teaches that the self you usually experience is not the only possible viewpoint in consciousness from which you can observe reality. 

Self Reflection: Abstraction

• Have you ever deliberately trained your sense of abstraction? For example, sensing 3-D spaces, visualizing objects or machinery moving in your mind, or deliberately becoming aware of the experiences, emotions or thoughts of people from other cultures or social groups?

• How do you feel about empathy and compassion, which combine abstraction and feeling to sense clearly the emotions of others?

• Have you ever spontaneously become aware of people, emotions or events from a completely different abstract viewpoint? What were the circumstances? 

• Have you ever tried to deliberately imagine what it is like to be someone else? Someone of a different gender? Someone with a different skin color or ethnicity? Someone with a different background, education or socio-economic history?

• Are you normally ‘present’ in your own body, mind and emotions, or do you sometimes find yourself more connected with the emotions, experiences and beliefs of others than your own?

• Have you ever experienced shifts of identity, spatial sense or emotional connection due to drugs, alcohol or anesthesia?

Your PERSONAL Insights

Make notes in your journal about your relationship to your internal consciousness sense of imagination.