Back to: Consciousness Cartography: Mapping Non-Local States of Awareness
Module 1: Practices and Assessments
Practice: The Map Comparison Meditation
Overview
This module’s practice is different from the baseline mindfulness work of Module 0. Rather than simply observing your experience and recording it, you are now going to sit with specific maps in mind and use them as interpretive lenses. The practice has three phases: the sitting itself, the immediate post-sitting description, and the retrospective cartographic analysis.
The purpose is not to have the ‘right’ experience or to reach any particular state. The purpose is to develop what we might call cartographic fluency: the ability to describe the same experience using multiple different frameworks without losing the experience itself. This is a skill that will serve you throughout the course.
The Practice: Step by Step
Preparation (10 minutes before the sitting)
Before you sit, read through the brief summaries of three cartographic systems from this module. Choose systems that feel different from each other. A good combination might be the Buddhist jhāna framework, the Vedantic kosha system, and Monroe’s Focus levels. Do not try to memorize them. Simply let them percolate.
Set a timer for 30 minutes. Choose a posture and location you can sustain without significant physical discomfort. Have a notebook or journal within reach for the post-sitting writing.
The Sitting (30 minutes)
Spend the first 10 minutes settling: breathing, releasing physical tension, allowing the ordinary mental chatter to quiet on its own without forcing it. Do not try to achieve any particular state. Simply sit.
Spend the middle 10 minutes in open awareness: not focusing on any particular object, but allowing the field of awareness itself to be the object of attention. Notice what is present. Notice the quality of presence. Notice any shifts in the texture, tone, or depth of awareness as they arise on their own.
Spend the final 10 minutes in what might be called ‘the cartographic lens’ phase: while remaining in meditative awareness, gently ask yourself which map best describes where you are right now. Do not force a label. Simply hold the question lightly and notice what arises.
Immediate Post-Sitting Notes (15 minutes)
Immediately after the timer sounds, before doing anything else, write for 15 minutes about your experience. Do not organize or edit this writing. Let it be raw, honest, and specific. What happened? What did you notice? Where did the mind go? What shifted, if anything?
Cartographic Analysis (20-30 minutes, same day or next day)
After some time has passed, return to your notes and attempt to describe the same experience using three different cartographic vocabularies. This is not about fitting your experience into the maps. It is about using the maps as lenses and noticing what each lens makes visible and what it obscures.
Cartographic Analysis Prompts
- Using Buddhist vocabulary: Could any part of my experience be described as corresponding to the jhāna factors (applied thought, sustained thought, rapture, pleasure, equanimity, one-pointedness)? Was there any quality that felt like access concentration, or any factor that seemed to drop away as the sitting deepened?
- Using Vedantic vocabulary: Which kosha seemed most prominent during different phases of the sitting? Was the annamaya kosha (physical body awareness) more present at the beginning? Did the prāṇamaya kosha (breath, energy) become more noticeable as the body settled? Was there any moment that might be described as a ānandamaya quality (uncaused ease)?
- Using Monroe’s vocabulary: If you were to assign a rough Focus level to the different phases of the sitting, what would they be? Was there any moment that felt like Focus 10 (body asleep, mind aware)? Any sense of expanded perception or softened boundaries that might correspond to Focus 12?
Meta-reflection: Where did the maps help? Where did they introduce distortion or feel like they were forcing your experience into categories that did not quite fit? Was there anything in your experience that none of the three maps seemed to capture?
A Note on What You Are Looking For
Students sometimes worry that they are ‘doing it wrong’ because their experience during the sitting was ordinary, distracted, or anticlimactic. Please hear this clearly: there is no wrong sitting. A sitting in which you spent 25 minutes planning your weekend and 5 minutes noticing your breath is still a sitting that contains useful data. What was the quality of the distraction? What was the quality of the return to awareness? What kosha was most active during the planning? What might Monroe’s C-1 have to say about that state?
The cartographic skill we are developing is not the ability to reach dramatic states. It is the ability to describe any state with precision and discernment. That skill is equally available in an ordinary distracted sitting and in a profound one. It is, in fact, often more clearly practiced in the ordinary ones, because exotic states can be easier to pin to a label without examining the experience carefully.
Assessments
Assessment 1: The Comparative Cartography Essay
Choose two mapping systems from different traditions, one ancient and one modern, or two ancient systems from different cultural contexts. Identify three points of convergence between them and three points of genuine divergence. In your analysis, address the following question: What does this comparison reveal about the nature of consciousness itself?
This essay is not asking you to argue that the two systems are the same or that they are different. It is asking you to hold both simultaneously, report honestly on what you observe when you do, and draw whatever conclusions the evidence supports. The quality of your essay will be judged primarily on the quality and specificity of your comparative observation, and on the intellectual honesty of your analysis.
Assessment 2: Your Personal Consciousness Map (Visual Format Encouraged)
Create a visual map, using any medium you choose, paper, digital drawing, mind mapping software, collage, or any other format, of the consciousness states and territories you have personally experienced. This is not a test of artistic ability. It is a test of cartographic honesty.
Your map should include: the states you have encountered, however ordinary or extraordinary; some indication of how these states relate to each other (whether sequential, nested, parallel, or structured in some other way); and a brief written legend explaining what the map represents and what cartographic choices you made.
The best maps in this exercise are not the ones that look most like existing maps. They are the ones that most honestly represent the actual territory of the mapmaker’s experience. Do not make up territory you have not visited. Do not leave out territory because it seems too ordinary or too strange. Map what is actually there.
A Note on Intellectual Honesty in Cartography
One of the things we are practicing throughout this course is the discipline of reporting what is there rather than what we wish were there or what we think should be there. This applies equally to the comparative essay and to the personal map.
If your personal map shows mostly ordinary waking consciousness with occasional glimpses of something else, that is an honest map and a valuable one. If it shows a rich landscape of altered states, that is also an honest map and a valuable one. What we are not interested in is performance: either the performance of skepticism (dismissing your own non-ordinary experiences to appear scientifically credible) or the performance of spiritual sophistication (claiming more territory than you have explored).
The map you create in this module will be revisited at the end of the course. You will be able to see what changed, what expanded, and what was added. The honest baseline map is worth far more than an impressive one.