Thought on splitting up mind during meditation

[newChemist]

Hi there!
I am back with another question as is starting to become usual by this point.

One of my main goals for now is becoming proficient at the process of meditation. Yesterday I learned about the book "The Mind Iluminated" and quickly browsed through stage 2 as that is what I thought my biggest hurdle was for now and barely had any time before I went to bed. I tried to narrowly focus on my breath/nose breating. Of course, the usual mind-wandering took ahold of my frequently, but later in the meditation session, I experienced something rather odd and would like some feedback.

I got the idea to sort of quantify for how long I could keep my attention on my breath, so I would practically count the amount of breaths I could maintain focus. However, what I found odd is that I sort of started to be able to sort of split up my mind and do multiple processes at once, without really losing the capability to perform either task. I would describe it as if I was a single-core computer that could only dedicate itself to one process at at time, and then suddenly becoming a multi-core computer where, due the the existence of multiple cores, I could dedicate a part of my "conscious mind" (, which is a concept I almost fully lost all meaning of what that really is supposed to entail now), and dedicate a "core", or part of my mind, to deal with that problem on its own. So what would happen is that one part of my mind was busy with breathing and counting the breaths, whereas the second one would wander off and think about stupid stuff. So in order to combat that, I tried to dedicate the first part of my mind to just breathing and the second one to the counting. This seemed to help at first, but then I managed to metaphorically unlock a "third core" and somehow managed to do the breathing in one "core", the counting in the second "core" and the third part would be preoccupied with the nonsensical monkey-business.

The reason I am perceiving this as different from regular distractions is that despite being partially occupied by monkey business, I still was perfectly capable of breathing and keeping track of the number of breaths that had gone by.

This phenomenom of dedicating my consciousness to multiple distinct processes as if I were a duo- or triple-core computer is completely new to me, and have never experienced this human metaphor for real parallel computing. Does anyone have any cunning insights into this that I am lacking?

Despite still being able to count and breathe, I will still see this splitting-up-the-mind thing as a negative simply due to how meditation ought to narrowly focus the mind onto something hyperspecific instead of wandering around. However, as I said before, I have never experienced this and feel like this was an odd experience and therefore am curious what you all got to say about it.

happy new year in advance by the way!

 

[HoldAll]

Some author (can't find the book right now) recommends counting down the breath from 20 and it helped me in the beginning, so that's actually a good idea. However, I've never experienced such 'multi-tasking' as the one you describe myself… either I experience intrusive thoughts or I don't. I'm not a meditation teacher so the only advice I have for you is to give it time, see if that split disappears by itself.

There is a Zen concept called 'Radical Acceptance' which is more or less self-explanatory (which didn't prevent all kinds of self-help gurus to write whole books about it). It's a good antidote whenever you struggle with mind-wandering which of course is counter-productive because the more you struggle, the peskier those unwelcome thoughts get. So you Radically Accept that your mind is split, and if you're unable to Radically Accept it, you Radically Accept accept that, too. It's a balancing act: On the one hand, you're supposed to let go, on the other hand you are striving - hopefully not too violently - to enforce some discipline over your mental processes (Culadasa likens it to 'herding cats' in Fig. 14).

Like I said, give it time. Everybody's mind is unique, everybody hits different snags on the Path.

 

[Konsciencia]

You should just let the mind wander. Acknowledge those thoughts. Be the observer of your mind. And like HoldOn said. Give it time.

 

[newChemist]

I also found an explanation by the book called "The Mind Illuminated." Basically, among many other things, the book explains the way attention "moves" and that it does so in three ways,those being scanning, getting captured, and alternating. And alternating is essentially quickly focussing on one topic, then focussing on a second topic, after which you go back to the first one, et al. You quite practically alternate between the two essentially. But the tricky part is that according to the book, you don't experience your attention alternating, but more so "splitting up." This is the part I actually am referring to (page 71 in my pdf-reader):

"
The third type of spontaneous movement, alternating attention, is a subtler kind of scattered attention only apparant to a skilled meditator.
To be clear, everyone's attention alternates, whether they meditate or not. The difference is that the non-meditator doesn't experience his or her attention as alternating. Instead, there is the illusion of paying attention to two or more things simultaneously. What's actually happening is that the focus of attention is moving very quickly among several different objects, but staying with each one for about the same amount of time overall. It's the kind of attention we have when multitasking.
"

Maybe this can be of use too for someone V(>,>)V