What is meditation? Dunno honestly, though I think it's the sort of thing that you can never really know if you know it, like all words for personal subjective experiences. In any case, I've done some things called 'guided meditations' where some calm voice tells me to focus on certain things, my body, a spot on the wall, or something like that. The voice leads you along with the aim of good things.
It's all about at least the very experience of it, but also the positive lingering effects. Maybe I have it wrong and it's a whole modern Thing with a whole world of competing meanings and ways to be wrong, but I still think the term 'guided meditation' is what I mean when I talk about the following:
From my perspective, the homonculus can be a little tiny hairless guy in your head or a dimensionless point or coextensive with my whole body and all of these are fodder for reductio ad absurdums (side thought, are reductio ad absurdum arguments positive arguments for soi dissant absurdists?). Whatever it is, I still feel it watching and experiencing stuff and now those two words, watching and experiencing, converge or diverge depending.
The watching/experiencing bit is most often just stuff going on around me in the world that I can only turn off by closing my eyes or plugging my ears. But in the last 15 years or so it's been a lot of screen and speaker mediation, way more and I think too much.
Even a little screen can dominate. The way that the darkened theater curtains cease to exist to my little internal guy when absorbed in a movie, even the rest of the website disappears to him when watching an embedded video.
I've always thought the portrayal of 'subliminal messaging' as super quick flashes of words or images inserted surreptitiously into video as sort of corny or unrealistic, the sort of thing that just doesn't seem to work. (There's a whole psycholinguistic result cum methodology that employs this and I did some related experiments using it back in the day. The idea here, or phenomenon more accurately, is that given a task where you have to indicate whether a string of letters flashed before you on a screen is a word of English or not by pressing one of two keyboard buttons as fast as you can (you're shown 'blimp' say, or 'grost' say), you'll be quicker on the draw if a semantically related word is shown, so fast you couldn't consciously recognize it, first. You're faster to say 'yes, 'doctor' is a word of English' if the word 'nurse' is flashed on screen for a few milliseconds beforehand.
Make of that what you will. Maybe it's transparent evidence that the cartoon version of subliminal message actually works, or maybe it's evidence that very fragile weak effects, immaterial to the real world, arise out of this sort of priming. I personally don't think it's an especially weighty phenomenon practically, though probably helpful for investigating nuanced parsing stuff. I think the flashy version of subliminal messaging is schlocky paranoid scifi (fun, but fiction))
But continual corporate screens leading round-the-clock guided meditations are more impactful. It's not all bad I suppose. I dig Alan Rudoph, the Cocteau Twins, Nabokov and loads of others. But most is bad, harmful, and even sifting through the endless bargain bin that is mediated life now really sucks and fucks you up.
Books are cool cuz, as guided meditations, there's a little more need for active involvement. But the infantile masses clamor for audiobooks to passivize things more imo. And, god, have you seen what's going on at bookstores these days?!
Instead I daydream about a scenario where me and my family and friends entertain each other in person, in spurts, with folk everything, awkward and ours. Stories written only to be passed by hand or better yet orally retold. Joint painting, personal jingles. default ephemeral.
Obviously this is far from what we currently have, but why not have dreams and aspirations. Most things I write I don't post here.
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