R R Pages Research · History · Meaning

#3 Deep Study Pages / The Five Pillars

The Five Pillars

What meditation actually shows you about the structure of our inner experience.

Meditation is sometimes described as an escape from thought. It is closer to the opposite: it is the practice of staying still and quiet enough to actually see what is already there. This page describes what tends to surface when a person does that consistently, across very different traditions and centuries.

Begin Reading ↓

01 — Method

A Different Kind of Instrument

In the mechanical world we observe with physical instruments. Galileo needed a telescope because the unaided eye could not resolve the moons of Jupiter.

The inner world works the same way. We still need an instrument, but it is different, it is a form of meditation. Here we step back and watch what happens inside ourselves. It is not easy and takes practice. It also takes discipline, honesty and focused attention. This is not one of the other forms of meditation that seek goals related to relaxation and enlightenment.

The Focus is On Experience

Here this meditation is similar to what happens when scientists observe a scientific experiment.

During this type of meditation, we must step back and just carefully see what is happening. It takes experience to really clearly notice.

Beginners are often distracted by their thoughts, moods and feelings. These distractions can easily disrupt the process. The distractions need to be just observed too without reacting. At the end of the day, we can see what is going on and use this information to our advantage. For instance we can tell ourselves we are not our thoughts, just the mind is having thoughts. We can see that our soul is really who we are.

02 — Observation

The Four Lower Pillars Keep Showing Up

What I see, and many others, are five items. Different people may give them different names, but they are there. Let's examine these categories.

S

Senses

The outer world keeps arriving, uninvited and constant: a sound, a temperature, a flicker of light at the edge of the eye. Even with the eyes closed, we sense our body and the outer world.

E

Ego

We have a sense of what is mine, and who I am. The ego defines us, and defends our interests. We know our history and what belongs to us. We are ready to defend ourselves, looking for threats and allies.

E

Emotions

We can feel the energy flowing through our body. We have positive emotions, love and happiness, and negative emotions like fear and anger. There are hundreds of emotions, each with their own character and way of expressing themselves. If something is bothering us, we can release it by allowing it to appear and then dismiss it. Often emotions quickly come and go, even if we want to hold onto them.

M

Mind

The mind is sensed as an internal voice that seems to never stop talking. It keeps narrating, comparing, planning, and explaining, often about nothing in particular. We can train the mind to stop talking when it has nothing to say. When we can quiet the mind, it feels like we went on vacation.

03 — Discovery

The Soul

The soul is unique in that it usually should be in the background. After the mind, emotions, and the ego cannot solve a problem, the soul steps in quietly and sees the big picture. If we center ourselves in the soul, things seem to go much more smoothly. I believe the soul has access to the real God and the angels.

The soul has a different character than anything it observes. It does not surge and fade the way emotion does. It does not narrate the way the mind does. It does not defend the way the ego does. It simply watches. By the way, the word "soul" as used here, not the same soul definition that appears in religious environments and where sin is considered very important. We all make mistakes and that is how we learn. To help remember these five pillars, you can use the acronym "SEEMS." which corresponds to our Senses, Ego, Emotions, Mind and Soul.

In the diagram below we can see these items (the Senses, Ego, Mind and Emotions) centered around the Soul. If we study traditions as different as Buddhist vipassana, Christian contemplative prayer, and Stoic philosophy there is a lot of common ground, things we talk about with different names. Religion tends to have a lot of noise, but the information presented here is simple and it works for me. For me God is my friend, and helps me understand what to believe in and write these words.

Diagram of the command center, the four pillars, and the residue layer A central circle labeled Command Center, the soul, connects by four lines to four outer circles labeled Senses, Ego, Emotions, and Mind. Below a dashed boundary line labeled where direction ends, three upward arrows labeled Pain, Subconscious, and Memory rise toward the boundary without a direct line into the center, showing they are not directed by the command center. Senses Mind Emotions Ego Command Center (the soul) — BEYOND WHERE WE HAVE NO CONTROL— Pain Subconscious Memory

Four pillars report inward. The residue rises toward awareness, but along no spoke of its own.

04 — The Residue

Not Everything Reports to the Command Center

But there are things the will cannot directly control.

Pain

Pain is the clearest example. It seems to have a mind of its own. You cannot turn a toothache off and on. Pain arrives uninvited, demands your attention, and leaves when it is ready — not when you are. The soul can witness it. It cannot make it go away.

The Subconscious

The subconscious or unconscious stores learned patterns, and runs in the background. It holds emotional associations, and filters information. It operates largely outside of conscious awareness. A reaction arrives before you had any say in it — a sudden dread at an ordinary sound, an old memory triggered by someone's voice, an urge that already made up its mind before you did. You can watch it happen but you did not choose it.

Memory

Memory is the brain's ability to hold information. Long term memory is a deep storage system. Working memory is what you are actively holding right now. It is small and temporary. Sensory is the briefest, a fraction of a second. Explicit memory is what we use to recall facts and events. Implicit memory remembers how to do things. It can surface on its own, often when you least want it to. You can stop a line of thinking. You cannot decide to forget a face or a painful year. Memory comes and goes on its own schedule, whether you want it to or not.

Sleep

Sleep is a brain-driven cycle of two alternating phases — deep NREM sleep, which restores the body, and REM sleep, where vivid dreaming occurs and emotional processing happens. Throughout the night the brain consolidates memories, flushes out metabolic waste, and regulates hormones — none of which you're aware of. Far from simple rest, sleep is when much of the mind's most essential maintenance gets done. It is not under our direct control, but we can make ourselves stay awake if we need to. It affects all parts of the brain.

05 — Placement

Where the Residue Lives

If you do not use meditation and just observe you can run into problems. Direct regular understanding of your own inner world is harder than it sounds, for several reasons. First, the act of observing your own thoughts tends to change them — you can't look inward without disturbing what you're looking at. On top of that, most of what the mind does is subconscious, so you only ever see the results, never the process behind them.

When you try to put inner experience into words, something gets lost, because language is a poor fit for feelings and impressions that don't naturally come in sentences. The mind also has a strong instinct to protect your self-image, which means uncomfortable truths tend to get quietly edited out before you're even aware of them. And since you're using your own mind to study your own mind, there's no outside viewpoint to check yourself against. It's a little like trying to see your own eyes without a mirror — the very thing you're trying to examine is the thing you're examining with.

This is most of why the inner world has historically been so hard to map cleanly. The four pillars look orderly because they are, for the most part, available to direction. The residue looks chaotic because it isn't, and the two get tangled together in ordinary experience long before anyone sits down and tries to sort them out. So meditation is required so that you're not disturbing yourself while you are observing.So even with meditation, there is some fog.

06 — What's Next

How to Observe Beyond the Pillars

If you want to explore yourself, go beyond generalities and say why you are anxious, or a little depressed, you could go to the therapist or talk to a friend. It is very hard to see your blind spots. Other people can see you more objectively than you can see yourself, which is why honest relationships, therapy, and genuine feedback from people who aren't trying to flatter you are so valuable. You get an outside mirror that you can't provide for yourself.

Practices like meditation work differently — instead of thinking harder about your inner world, you learn to quietly observe it without immediately reacting or narrating. Over time this builds a kind of familiarity with your own mental patterns that ordinary reflection doesn't produce.

Writing also helps. Putting experience into words, even imperfectly, forces a level of clarity that vague internal musing doesn't require. Many people discover what they actually think or feel only in the act of writing it down.

Time and repetition matter too. A single moment of self-reflection is easy to distort, but patterns observed across months and years are harder to dismiss. Noticing that you react the same way in the same situations, over and over, tells you something true even if you can't fully explain it.

What none of these fully solve is the fundamental problem — that you're always working from the inside. The fog doesn't completely lift. But it can thin considerably, and that's worth something. Most of what we call wisdom is probably just hard-won familiarity with your own particular blind spots.

07 — Notes

Sources & Further Reading

  1. 01 Jon Kabat-Zinn — founder of the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in 1979, which brought sustained, secular attention practice into mainstream clinical use.
  2. 02 Theravada Buddhist vipassana literature — the long tradition of "insight" meditation describing the observation of mind and body as separate, changing processes rather than a fixed self.
  3. 03 Christian contemplative prayer — the hesychast and centering-prayer traditions, which independently describe a quiet, watching center beneath ordinary thought and feeling.
  4. 04 Stoic practice — the discipline the Stoics called prosoché, or attention, aimed at noticing one's own impressions and reactions before being carried away by them.
  5. 05 Michael A. Singer, The Untethered Soul — a direct influence on this site's framing of the observing self, cited elsewhere in the Deepermind Deep Study Pages.