October Newsletter

A dive into micromastering pie making and an exploration of the range and scope of the ability of meditation to enhance intuition

A finger in every pie - A micromastery approach to Pie Making

Mastery of pie making has been something I wanted to enter into for a while and the opportunity at last came up. I am not intending to make this a big project, more one purely for pleasure, and something I can pick up when I get tired of the ‘grander’ ones I am pursuing to lead towards a higher degree of mastery.

I started with something that is quite unfamiliar and away from my normal interests. Ordinarily, I would be drawn to a steak and ale or classic pork pie but described here is a Spanish fish pie, a Tuna Empanada. This was a deliberate choice and as well as having links with developing intuition (which will be elaborated in next month’s newsletter), I wanted to loosen myself up a bit, widen my dietary horizons, etc. I was taking some extra risks in doing this, but the downsides were inconsequential. Failures would have just ended up in the compost.

There could be three entry tricks involved. Firstly, a recipe is being used, two recipes in fact, one for the pie, and one for the Sofrito, which is a big part of the filling. The pie recipe used a jar of ready made Sofrito and as I had the fresh ingredients to hand, I thought I would give it a go. I think that creating one’s own recipes could lead to much more variable results. It can come a bit later when one has some experience to draw on, or if one didn’t mind at all what the outcome is. Secondly, I decided to use ready made pastry from the supermarket. Pastry making will be saved for a later date with its own micro mastery approach. This approach of focusing on fewer parts means that the road to mastery could take longer, as skills are being picked up in series rather than in parallel and at some point, will need to be combined. In this instance, I feel no necessity for rapid learning. Thus, I am going to experiment with this pie for a while before moving on to a different one.

basic Sofrito ingredients and after slow frying

These approaches seemed to reduce the rub-pat barrier which I find the most difficult, that of co-ordinating several different processes at the same time! The Sofrito recipe (the simplest to be found) worked well. The method of slowly frying the ingredients rendered them down to a viscous paste which I assume I need for the filling. It did take about twenty-five minutes with stirring so I was glad to be able to do it on its own and leave it in the fridge overnight. It tasted good, with the sweetness from the tomatoes, red pepper and onions coming through and balanced out with the garlic. I could eat it spread on toast, which apparently is one way it is eaten and broadens its scope of use.

The final mix with added tuna, chopped olives, dried oregano and thyme, paprika and pepper, on the pastry base.

Background support – it was useful to have someone with much more expertise on hand who could tell when the pastry was properly cooked. The bottom of the pastry was a little damp, and the master has suggested experimenting with an egg wash or thinner pastry on the bottom.  One additional worry that was eliminated was the use of tinned tuna. It is in effect already cooked so one didn’t need to be concerned about the meat being fully cooked. In effect you are warming the contents.

The Payoff – it worked, was very tasty, spicy enough with the paprika. Also, it can be stored in the fridge for a day or so and eaten at room temperature which appeals to my batch cooking ethos. My wife, who is a vegetarian yet eats fish on occasion, could join in with this and it might make a somewhat different contribution to events in the village hall.

Repeatability and experimental possibilities

I can’t see this as something I would want to do weekly, perhaps once a month for a while as the skill level wasn’t too challenging to need frequent practice. The payoff would be enough motivation for that as well as the desire to explore the experimental possibilities. I can see experimenting with adding some other fish to the mixture, perhaps some sardines, mackerel or a small number of anchovies. Also using fresh herbs rather than dry. Then perhaps, move on to a different filling and at some point, try pastry making.

Allowing Intuition to Emerge Part 2

The last newsletter on intuition finished with some propositions to explore. The first was that discursive, conceptual and conscious thought could interfere with our awareness of more subtle ambient events. There was also the possible limited range of sensory inputs and sources that we might be attending to.

Starting with the second proposition, it could be worth considering the range of sensory inputs or impacts that we are currently aware of that is available. The number depends on how you categorise them, and some of the interoception is disputed (there is likely to be ‘cross talk’ or ‘mixing’). We have senses of; sight (light and colour), sound, smell, taste, touch, balance, proprioception (movement and joint perception), interoception (connected also with emotions and feelings) including possibly blood pressure, oxygen levels, glucose levels connected with hunger, osmotic pressure connected with thirst, and lung inflation.

The connection between the body and these senses is both unconscious and conscious, the balance between the two depending upon the sense, individual differences between people and circumstances at the time.

It could be worth some consideration of whether you feel that you overemphasise some senses over others and whether they may need some rebalancing, and this is addressed in part below.

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Perception depends upon sensory inputs and the sensation of inputs but goes beyond that. To begin to explore the propositions, we need to look at how we process the sensory input.

There is a generally accepted provisional model of how this is done and while the scientific evidence for some of the detail might be thin, it does accord with our day-to-day experience of dealing with ambiguous sensory inputs. The model says that there is something in the environment that provides sensory data. This enters the body and mind through a recognition system that feeds the information forward.

Alongside this, there is a generative layer that is making iterative predictions or guesses about the data and comparing it to prior experience held as memory. This is an active process that continues until the distance between the prediction and the prior learning is minimised. The generative layer is seen as ‘dominant’ in a sense in that it can prevent the raw sensory data from moving forward to the conscious mind when it has ‘made its mind up’. The model postulates layers of prior models which are hierarchical in the sense that the higher layers are given more weighting in the process.

Whilst the generative process is multi-sensory, at present the conclusion seems to be that the basic senses, including interoception/somatosensory systems are at the bottom of the hierarchy. Above that lies emotions and feelings, above that expectancy, motion, passive viewing, above that, memory, maths, deception(!) and at the top, reasoning, naming, concepts, language, and imagination. So, we have some evidence from research that supports the first proposition that higher level cognitive processes can inhibit awareness and can do so unconsciously as well as consciously.

A suggestion for ‘allowing intuition’ that can often be found is the practice of meditation. It seems to be presented quite often as ‘the solution’. The aim here is to scope out the boundaries of the possible contribution of meditation and subsequent newsletters will look at some other suggestions and expand on the micro-mastery approach that is introduced here.

It is worth bearing in mind that scientific findings on meditation are often aggregated effects, and they might not be apparent for everybody or in every circumstance or on their own, hence you will see the terms ‘can’ or ‘may’. Also, the term meditation also covers a broad range of techniques and is often a term used loosely (alongside mindfulness) for both a practice and a dispositional end state or trait that follows from the practice.

The ‘attentional family’ of meditative practices where the object of attention can be both narrow and broad and internally or externally directed has been found to have the following possible effects:

·      It can increase the weighting of the mind on the sensory data and decrease attention to the ‘higher’ level generative data. This can lead to an increase in ability to attend to the ‘here and now’. This is useful in certain contexts particularly when learning or if a mind needs rebalancing in that way. So, in theory, this aspect has the potential to enhance intuition development by allowing one to observe closely, to be more open to and aware of environmental cues and attention to detail. A question that comes to mind is, is this a global effect that operates continuously or is it something that may need to be ‘switched on’ at appropriate times?

·      As an aspect of this down weighting, it can develop a non-judgemental attitude to one’s thoughts and experiences. These are seen as fleeting phenomena and not the ‘real self’. There is a ‘quieting’ of the mind and general and persistent calming affects. Increased emotional regulation may be a result – more room between stimulus and response.

Both these effects could decrease the emotional interference on intuition that was noted in last month’s newsletter.

·      Linked to the above effect, it can lead to a change in perspective of the self. (Deconstructive or non- dual meditation also focusses on this, with ‘non-dual awareness’ and the development of ‘pure awareness’ itself as an aim.)

If it allows for the development of a more appropriate sense of self (as a higher-level generative concept), in the right contexts, this could be useful for intuitive responses.

·      It can lead to an increase in the ability to consciously direct and switch attention both between objects and between broad or focussed attention. It can lead to an increase in awareness of one’s attentional habits and where one’s attention is directed to. There may be potential to develop intuition from this and this will be elaborated on in the following discussion.

One will find many examples of different types of meditation on offer and some which claim to directly enhance intuition. Some caution may be warranted as there are downsides to any approach and some of the ‘providers’ don’t always seem to be aware of them, despite them being noted in more detailed descriptions from the fuller traditions. The downsides may include unusual sense experiences and an alteration of one’s sense of consciousness. These can be unsettling, or if pleasant, objects of obsession. The forms, competency and social aspects of the practice can become sanctified and temporary provisional verbal/conceptual formulations can become rigid.

Sometimes meditation needs to be accompanied by other minimal balancing factors to avoid these downsides. This can sometimes be as simple as drawing attention to the downsides, providing information (such as, that formulations are often temporary contemplative manoeuvres), and avoiding certain aspects or performing other practices alongside. Going through the bullet points above will illustrate some of these downsides and ‘antidotes.’

·      This increasing weighting on the sensory input is interesting, because as we have seen in last month’s newsletter, you still need to have unconscious prior generative data and models to emerge as intuition. Better observation of reality may well lead to an improvement in this over time. However, one may also need to engage with guidance to aid in the construction of these ‘better’ mental generative models. Where is guidance to come from?

·      The quieting of the mind and persistent calming effects, though useful to perception and awareness, are also an example of pleasant sense experiences that can become a distraction.

·      An appropriate sense of self is recognised by practical wisdom traditions as being a useful component. And it is highly likely that we have a long-crafted model of ourselves that is not very real and that needs adjusting, as it can down weight sensory input.

However, there can also be confusion over the meaning of descriptions of states such as ‘no self’, ‘self as illusion’ and ‘emptiness’ that are used in some meditations. Some meditators can experience feelings of distressing dissociation that can resemble aspects of schizophrenia or psychopathy, where their awareness is removed from their bodily awareness. This appears to particularly happen to meditators who meditate repeatedly for long periods and perhaps without the accompanying background support of the full meditative tradition.

This may be avoided by simply not meditating too much and following the simple understanding that emptiness refers specifically to the ‘emptiness’ of our conceptualisations or imagined nature of things as they seem to us rather than the reality of the things themselves - they are temporary points for contemplation. It is not that there is nothing there. Similarly, ‘no self’ refers simply to an understanding that our self is not as integrated as we think it is. A practical model to start with, if meditating or not, that many find useful, is to start distinguishing between many selves (including a narrative self) and an experiencing or observing self.

·      Practical wisdom traditions would find the improved attention directing and detaching abilities useful in developing mental flexibility. In their view, certain modes and objects of attention can become habitual without the process being conscious. Attention can become ‘frozen’ or ‘locked’ onto specific objects, preconceptions, assumptions, preoccupations, and irrelevancies which can all be solid barriers to learning and obstructing the development and operation of our ‘inner voice’. Hence for most people, they would emphasise developing the awareness of where one’s attention is, and ability to switch it – that is, to both extend and remove it efficiently, and to give the necessary amount and quality of attention to any experience. Again, after becoming discerning of one’s objects and habits of attention, what guidance on what to direct this attention to consciously, might be needed to develop reappraisal and wider perspectives?

My interest is in the parsimonious or just sufficient approach of some practical wisdom traditions where techniques and exercises are the minimal needed. This includes being able to access them for short periods when needed in daily life.  There is good evidence that such an approach to meditation has the benefits outlined above. I have no idea whether there is ‘more’ benefit from meditating for prolonged periods of time as it is something I have not experienced. It may well have in specific circumstances, rather than as a default approach, and it may well be something some people will want to explore.

To quote from Robert, a short mnemonic for micromastering different aspects of practical wisdom is that ‘It would need to be repeatable, small, rather humble or unpretentious and a testbed for experimentation.’

If one was interested in using such an approach to meditation, a starting point could be a light practice of attention focussing and/or attention switching meditation and see if it has these effects for you. You do have to give it a fair hearing – it may take several weeks of 10 minutes a day to begin to become aware of the effects. There are simple exercises to practice extending and switching attention available in the public domain as well as simple ‘attentional family’ meditation exercises. All of these can be practised with a light touch micro-mastery experimental approach. These exercises can involve attention directed to specific objects or sensory inputs, a global awareness of all stimuli, and to both interoception and exteroception. Which you emphasise could depend upon your personal traits and gives some scope for experimentation. If you are a person who spends a lot of time ‘in your head’ or have a lot of stimulus independent thoughts which mismatch what you are doing, it may be more beneficial to direct the exercises to outwards. If you are someone who doesn’t pay much attention to your interoception (you plough on through your bodily signals) you might benefit from focusing on directing attention to it. Over time one could become sensitive to where you are on the interoception – exteroception continuum in a particular context and shift the practise accordingly and eventually the awareness in real time.

An increase in bodily awareness may allow the practitioner to be more alert to their unconscious responses to stimuli being expressed bodily and could in this way help develop intuitive responses. This aspect will be examined in some more detail in the next newsletter.

If nothing else, you will at least probably gain the well documented health and psychological benefits of this ‘mindful’ meditation!