Sam Harris’s “Pointing Out” Instruction: What It Means to Look for the Looker
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You’re in the middle of your daily meditation, focusing your attention on your breathing as precisely as you can. Now your guide breaks in to ask, “Does it feel like you’re paying attention from somewhere?” All the sudden, you’re no longer attending to your breath; you’re trying to parse the meaning of the question. Fortunately, your guide is ready with an attempt at clarification. “Does it seem as though you’re directing your attention from some location, perhaps behind your eyes, toward your breathing?”
This is the setup to the “Pointing Out” instruction that Sam Harris reveals in today’s “Featured Content” on his meditation app Waking Up, “Looking for What’s Looking,” is the one users tend to find the most difficult. For Harris himself, this exercise, which forms the core of Dzogchen practice, was what finally helped him break through his increasingly futile efforts to achieve selflessness through Vipassana alone. But for many users of his app, it seems, the instruction only brings about a state of confusion.
How the hell do you look for what’s looking? Your eyes, after all, are pointed forward, not backward. How are you supposed to look into your own brain?
Harris has provided clarification for this instruction, along with a few variations designed to come at it from a different angle, in several of his lessons and meditations. But, if you’re still having trouble breaking through the confusion, I’ve lighted on a way of conceptualizing it that helps me a great deal (though I still have a lot of practice to do to gain any proficiency). I pieced this understanding together two years after going through Waking Up’s introductory series of meditations, and after going almost a year without doing any significant practice. This is to say I had plenty of difficulty with the instruction myself and only came to understand it after much effort and perspective-taking.
The main insight I had is that meditation is at least as much about mindset as it is about concentration. At first, I thought the purpose of all that focusing on the breath was to train yourself to direct your attention at will as opposed to letting it get carried away with the plethora of distracting thoughts. Indeed, this ability to focus your attention minutely and for longer and longer periods of time is central to more advanced practices. But focusing on the breath does something else as well.
Attending to your breath requires that you focus on bodily sensations as opposed to abstract concepts and narratives. The post you’re reading now is all abstract concepts, so comprehending it demands you be in a mindset to experience time conceptually. One of the goals of meditating is to get you into a mindset to experience time sensuously. If you’ve been practicing for any length of time, you’ve probably noticed that focusing on your breath for a few minutes transforms the experience of having a thought. Harris is always encouraging us to reflect on this transformation, encouraging us to notice that “There’s only consciousness and its contents.”
So what does it feel like to have a thought? To answer that question, you have to separate yourself from the thought itself—i.e., no longer identify with it. With the thought emerging from the space carved out by your physical sensations, you can observe it as something apart from that space. This is important because in most of our waking life, whatever we’re thinking takes up the full space of our consciousness. Getting into a sensuous mindset puts the thought in the context of our bodily sensations. The thought itself may not change, but now we’re aware of the space in which the thought occurs. That space is consciousness.
Some of the mental health benefits of mindfulness derive from this contextualization of thought. If a thought or a narrative is causing you anxiety, for instance, you can meditate and see that what’s bothering you is indeed just a thought. That thought might be wrong. It may simply not be the best thought for capturing and responding to the stressful situation. It may even be arising merely as another actuation of a bad habit. At any rate, you aren’t being shot at (probably), you aren’t dying this moment (probably), so whatever you’re afraid of can most likely be dealt with in some way other than getting anxious. This insight is nearly impossible to arrive at when the anxiety-inducing thought is taking up all the available space in your mind.
Once I figured out this was what I was doing—or what was happening—while I was meditating, I gained a new understanding of the pointing-out instruction. How do you look for the looker? Well, you don’t “look” in a literal sense. You don’t use your eyes. Instead, you’re trying to find the sensation in your body that’s associated with the center from which you’re directing your attention. Rather than “looking,” try to sense where your attention is coming from. Is it really behind your eyes? Well, can you feel anything back there? It turns out you can’t. (At least, I can’t.)
What this boils down to is that any center or location for your consciousness is in fact conceptual. There’s no real sensory element to it. Try to feel or sense it, and you come up dry. It seems like you’re experiencing this centeredness all the time, though, because you’re so accustomed to thinking it’s in the place where you experience it. But that’s an illusion. There is no center. There’s only consciousness and its contents. And nowhere among those contents is a sensation of a “seat of attention” or the “you that is looking.”
So when Sam tells you to look for the looker, try scanning your body, primarily your head, for any sensation that would help you locate the source of your attention. The point is that you won’t find any. To the extent that you think you know where it is—it’s only because that’s where you’re accustomed to think of it as being.
Hope this helps.