Zen Buddhism

[emjay]

My personal view of meditation is that it differs from simple mindfulness.  Mindfulness in ordinary activities does little to restructure the way our brains process information.  In ordinary consciousness, the different centers of thought in our brain compete for overall attention, firing off largely unrestricted.  My view is that in intense meditation, the brain is learning to focus activity in a few select portions of the brain.  It is a form of training our mind how to do that.  Once the skill is acquired through intense meditation, it can be harnessed in less rigorous circumstances.  Mindfulness to me is like meditation lite -- it can alter the way the brain processes things for that short time period, but does little to retrain the mind overall. (in my opinion)  So in my view there is a reason for the rigors of practice which are not met by simply trying to live mindfully.

The way I think of it is that what we call "consciousness" is a specific kind of complex experience: consciousness of consciousness. The neural correlate would presumably be the pre-frontal lobes, monitoring various other areas of the brain. 

My experience of meditation is that when I get out of the well-worn connections that I spend most of my time in, I can see that there's a great deal going on in my mind that goes unnoticed by this meta-consciousness or self-consciousness. I'm experiencing it, but the nature of the experience is too simple to form thoughts like, "I'm experiencing such and such." It's like you said--different centers of thought in the brain competing for overall attention, without any kind of logical or rational oversight. It's a messy, winner-take-all process. 

I'm guessing meditation is a way of forming new connections between the pre-frontal lobes and other areas of the brain, allowing you to be more selective in your decision making processes.

And then there's a whole other aspect to meditation, where you get really fine-grained and analyze things like how the mind constructs our experience of space. Once you see how some of our most basic and seemingly nonanalyzable concepts and intuitions are metal constructs that break down into smaller components, I don't think you can help but be skeptical of metaphysics that rests on a priori reason.

I think you're really onto something there and it just got me thinking - apologies if this is just in effect rephrasing what you've already said, which I think it might be - what if there isn't that much of a difference between what we'd usually term subconscious and conscious? Maybe it's all 'available' to consciousness in theory but in practice the subconscious level stuff is essentially buried under much more prominent conscious level stuff... that the conscious level stuff is what rises to the top in this 'messy, winner-take-all process'. So where meditation both improves concentration and the ability to notice subtle differences in things... as where mindfulness is about noticing things you never usually pay any attention to, it could metaphorically pick through the canopy to the little plants on the forest floor... i.e. notice what is usually subconscious. Because I'm sure I've read somewhere that accomplished meditators can gain control of usually subconscious processes like the heart rate and I was also thinking about the fact that my sister was ill recently with an iron deficiency and in the weeks prior to going to the doctor she made several drastic changes to her diet for no particular reason other than a gut feel - cutting out caffeine and then even decaf tea, and then once she had been to the doctor the recommendations were exactly the same as what she had done - that caffeine inhibits iron absorption and also that the tannin in tea does the same even if it's decaffeinated. I think that was an example of subconscious intuition based on the chemical needs of her body. So I was just thinking that those sorts of subtle chemical needs don't usually make it to consciousness in anything other than a vague, indirect way... such as craving bananas if you need potassium etc... but perhaps if anything is serious enough it will find a way to reach the canopy of consciousness, so that it is a candidate for focus selection by what you suggest is the pre-frontal lobe. In other words perhaps all is equal theoretically for attention and therefore that our usual distinction between conscious and subconscious is only incidental rather than a strict separation between two different types of processes.