Sitting v. moving meditation

Continuing this post, having done both kinds my anectodic report is that one can. But there are no studies on movement meditation to confirm it as yet. That's part of what Thompson is complaining about, and encouraging the scientific meditative researchers to start investigating.

Around 14:20 he said that research has show that perception is different when one initiates movement than when one is passively moved. He did not directly compare perception with movement to perception while completely still, so not sure of those differences.

At 18:20 he reiterates a point made elsewhere, that individual meta-cognition is an internalized form of social cognition, a point I used in the paper on collective enlightenment. He then brings in Vygotsky's work along this line, different than Piaget's. In our paper I also brought in Habermas' use of Mead in this regard. For reference, also see Edwards' 3-part series at Integral World on the depth of the exteriors. 

At 23:40 is an important point to my initial inquiry about comparing sitting and moving meditation: "If two cognitive systems include different cognitive practices, the two systems can have different cognitive properties, even when the neural network activations are the same." 

At 30:20 I was reminded about a discussion Bruce and I had about Latour's modes of existence related to parts of speech. Latour's prepositional mode could be considered both a part of speech and how the different parts of speech, or modes, interrelate. When discussing attention Thompson said that it has no specific location in the brain but is the whole embodied subject. Attention isn't a particular process or even a collection of processes, but a mode in which processes are related, sort of like Latour's prepostional mode. 


Finishing the talk he reiterates the need to extend scientific meditative research to the movement arts. From the above he seems to suggest that movement mediation, while perhaps activating the same brain areas, means something very different via its enaction than sitting meditation. So it is not the same meta-cognitive experience with the two forms.

Having done both kinds I find moving meditation activates and refines the spatial-temporal bodily image schema in a way that sitting meditation does not. In so doing it literally gives multiple views of objects within an immediate field of attention, thereby opening to multiple points of view rather than a fixed point of reference in sitting.

However the attention in sitting meditation, while opening to whatever arises, be it a sound or a thought, or even by focusing one one object, is still within a fixed center or perspective, this notion of a bare attention that theoretically has no center or ego reference. But that rests on an assumption that bare attention itself is beyond reference or perspective, while moving meditation's sort of bare attention makes no such assumption given its ever shifting physical perspective. It seems that sitting mediation is literally fixated while moving meditation is multi-perspectival with no fixed center.

Just some biased ruminations that are sure to fire up the sitters! Have at it.