**4. Contemplation of the self**

We have seen how contemplative experience through mindfulness meditation allows one to have an aesthetic experience of things in this world as a direct perception, grounded in the immediate and free of prejudice and of conceptual thought. Therefore, the mindful state brings us closer to an aesthetic experience by contemplating things just as they are, without staining them with our past experience or future expectations. However, this process is not simple, due to the changing nature of our minds and our tendency to evaluate and label everything around us as an adaptive function of making the world more predictable and manageable.

Mindfulness meditation is a form of mental training, in which practitioners learn to centre their attention on external and internal sensory stimuli, with a non-critical awareness that is centred on the present, with an attitude of compassion, interest, openness and kindness [21]. It can be divided into two essential methods: focused attention meditation and open monitoring meditation of the experience of the present moment [22]. The first requires mental training to focus on a particular object and thus achieve a state of relaxation and mental calm. The second involves first-person observation of the working of the mind itself. In open monitoring meditation, the meditator examines carefully the different aspects of his or her own existence and trains him or herself in gaining awareness of the immediate experience.

In this way, Buddhist practice is considered an ongoing investigation into reality, and specifically meditation teaches us to contemplate our perceptual processes with great precision, allowing us to avoid observing through our preconceived ideas of reality. The aim is to transcend the conceptual mind, which is understood as the tendency of the mind to focus with anticipation on any object, imposing a vision of reality that ends up getting confused with the experience itself. In contrast, the contemplative perception of reality allows us to access a real perception of ourselves and to abandon any preconceived notion about what we think we are [23].

Let us try, then, to explain how mindfulness meditation works, as regards contemplation of oneself. By observing ourselves internally, we generate the perception of a self that appears constant and static in time, creating the illusion of permanence. However, through meditative practice it is possible to observe with clarity the contents of our awareness and realise that such contents are constantly appearing and disappearing. In this way, little by little, the practitioner becomes unattached from a static sense of the self, experiencing it, instead as a series of mental events [24]. This process involves metacognitive awareness [25], that is, a form of subjective experience and executive monitoring, in which a nonconceptual perspective is assumed as a form of attention distributed to the contents of the conscious experience and the processes that this involves [26, 27], which allows the contents of the experience to be observable for the mediator. This allows one to assume a detached perspective on the contents of awareness, known as decentering [28]—a psychological capacity that allows us to realise the transitory nature and the impermanent character of the things that we perceive.

#### **4.1. Change in relation to our experience**

and attention. The continuous practice of these exercises enables the practitioner to let go of intellectualised methods of processing perceptual stimuli and to reduce the tendency to grasp reality in a preconceived fashion, stained by our prejudices and previous experience, allowing one to pay attention to internal and external phenomena precisely in the way that they are presented. Thus, we avoid our mind's inclination to see the world as the mental projection that we have of it. For Siegel [20], mindfulness brings with it the dissolution of the influence

Relevance is worth highlighting that nembutsu brings to beauty and aesthetic contemplation, especially to the beauty that can be found within the natural world. Examples of this include the first visualisations described in these exercises: the contemplation of the sun descending towards sunset, the contemplation of running water and the observation of the earth or of trees. Another example, used by Vargas to clarify the role of the aesthetic experience on the path to nirvȃna is that of the monk Hui-yūan (334–416), who considered the contemplation of the natural world and its beauty to have a central place in the search for nirvȃna. Han [18], himself, in Philosophy of Zen Buddhism, argues that, 'contemplating the landscape exhaustively does not mean to capture it completely. To grasp an object completely means to take total power over it. To the contrary, contemplating the landscape exhaustively means to sink oneself in it, separating one's view from oneself. He who contemplates does not have the landscape as an object that is outside of him. It would be more correct to say that he merges

We have seen how contemplative experience through mindfulness meditation allows one to have an aesthetic experience of things in this world as a direct perception, grounded in the immediate and free of prejudice and of conceptual thought. Therefore, the mindful state brings us closer to an aesthetic experience by contemplating things just as they are, without staining them with our past experience or future expectations. However, this process is not simple, due to the changing nature of our minds and our tendency to evaluate and label everything around us as an adaptive function of making the world more predictable and manageable.

Mindfulness meditation is a form of mental training, in which practitioners learn to centre their attention on external and internal sensory stimuli, with a non-critical awareness that is centred on the present, with an attitude of compassion, interest, openness and kindness [21]. It can be divided into two essential methods: focused attention meditation and open monitoring meditation of the experience of the present moment [22]. The first requires mental training to focus on a particular object and thus achieve a state of relaxation and mental calm. The second involves first-person observation of the working of the mind itself. In open monitoring meditation, the meditator examines carefully the different aspects of his or her own existence

In this way, Buddhist practice is considered an ongoing investigation into reality, and specifically meditation teaches us to contemplate our perceptual processes with great precision,

and trains him or herself in gaining awareness of the immediate experience.

of prior learning from the sensation of the present.

with the landscape'.

214 Perception of Beauty

**4. Contemplation of the self**

Upon beginning the practice of meditation, we realise how disconnected we are from our experience. We could be eating, but our mind is busy with what we have to do later on at work. This disassociation between awareness and experience is a regular habit amongst us and is what meditation attempts to change by facilitating a specific type of awareness, which consists in being aware of that which happens in the present moment [29]. This type of awareness also involves bodily awareness, one of the starting points of Buddhist teaching, which includes paying attention to breathing and bodily sensations. Thus, practitioners of mindfulness claim that the practice of paying attention to the present moment gives way to a greater awareness of bodily states and greater interoceptive perceptual clarity [30], which translates into a greater awareness of the organism's response to an emotional stimulus, leading to enhanced awareness of emotionality itself [31].

This process involves a change in the relationship that we establish with our bodily selves, learning to be aware of the process of perceiving and of the sensations associated with each experience. This implies that 'there is not an abstract knower of an experience that is separated from the experience itself' but instead one 'is at one with the experience' [31]. This form of being in the present brings with it a number of benefits, such as improving certain cognitive capacities [32, 33], including the memory of work [34, 35] and attentional processes [36, 37], as well as increasing the cognitive and emotional flexibility of individuals [38]. It also results in a strategy of emotional regulation [30], which demonstrates effectiveness in the reduction of symptomatology [39], and an increase in positive mood states [40] and in psychological well-being [41].
