Slips and what they tell us

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MEDITATION

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TEXTS FOR SUPPLEMENTARY READING

XI. Choose one personality and make up a short survey of his accomplishments and contribution to sociology.

Emile Durkheim, Vilfredo Pareto, Talcott Parsons, Herbert Spencer, Gabriel Tarde, Max Weber.

Meditation is a method of refocusing attention in order to enter inner consciousness. The aim of meditation can be the establishment of a relaxed, tranquil state of mind or the achievement of a heightened state of spirituality.

In one type of meditation, known as the path of concentration, the meditating person directs attention away from the external world, focusing on a specific object such as a short prayer, a mantra, a picture or a candle frame. The path of concentration is used in yoga, and transcendental meditation.

In another type of meditation, known as the path of mindfulness, the person focuses on observing the actions of the mind itself. Buddhism uses both approaches.

Meditation has always played a significant role in religion. In Eastern religions, meditation generally becomes part of a philosophy of life. Using meditation, the individual progresses systematically through different levels of consciousness, each seen as superior to normal waking consciousness. The highest goal of the meditator is to enter the state of consciousness in which experiences of self and world are subsumed within a more comprehensive perspective and personal goals lose all importance. In this state, the meditator’s consciousness has been absorbed into a consciousness of life that transcends individual existence.

In the West, meditation is often used pragmatically to produce a relaxed state that allows a person to handle stress more effectively. During meditation oxygen consumption drops, breathing and heart rate slow, blood pressure falls, and the skin becomes more resistant to electrical conduction.

WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS?

This word didn’t exist in English before the 17^th century, today we use “consciousness” in so many ways that it is difficult to settle on a satisfactory definition. For example, “consciousness” can mean being awake as opposed to being asleep.

It can mean being aware of something in the environment, as when you become conscious of someone’s presence. It can mean deliberately choosing a course of action as opposed to being driven by hidden motives, as when you make a conscious decision.

To William James (1892), it meant the unattended flow of perceptions, deliberate thoughts, memories, association, often called the “stream of consciousness”. In this stream, a succession of images and ideas rise almost involuntarily to the surface, where we become aware of them. Finally, the term “consciousness” can refer to alternations in its state – that is to changes in awareness produced through fantasy and daydreaming, sleeping and dreaming, meditation, and hypnosis.

Consciousness allows us to attend to stimuli and to act upon them. It enables us to exert some control over actions and to choose among possible ways of thinking and behaving. The definition of consciousness is all mental experiences, whether or not we are aware of them.

Not all languages have a word for consciousness, yet all languages have words for four separate phenomena related to consciousness.

1. wakefulness (as opposed to sleep);

2. bodily sensation such as pain;

3. perceptions obtained through hearing, sight and other senses;

4. deliberately, desiring and believing;

The collection of awareness that we call “consciousness” may also include varieties that depend on different psychological mechanisms.

When speaking we occasionally say something we did not intend. Sigmund Freud believed that speech errors, or slips of the tongue, result from anxiety – provoking unconscious thoughts that interfere with our speech processing. Accordingly, these errors are sometimes called Freudian slips. Was Freud correct in asserting that speech errors reflect unconscious motives, or do they result from some other, more strictly linguistic cause?

To test the Freudian hypothesis, investigators have attempted to induce slips of the tongue. In one study, men were asked to read aloud word pairs that were flashed on the screen. Those who were tested by an attractive, provocatively dressed woman tended to make such slips as “fast passion” for “past fashion” and “nice legs” for “lice negs”.

However, before concluding that Freud was essentially correct about the cause of speech errors, we might consider the fact that most speech errors are fairly mundane.

Speech errors can be classified in a variety of ways. If someone says: “Bake my bike” instead of “Take may bike”, the error is one of anticipation, the commonest form of slip. Other kinds of slips include perseverations, in which a sound is erroneously repeated (“pulled a pantrum” for “pulled a tantrum”) and reversals, in which sounds are exchanged (“food the peech” for “feed the pooch”).

In addition to varying by type, speech errors differ in the size of the speech unit that slips. Sometimes only a phoneme slips take place. Larger units include slips of morphemes, slips of words and syntactic slips. When embarrassing Freudian slips are analyzed along with other samples of speech errors according to categories like anticipations, perseverations, reversals and size of affected speech unit, then it seems that the processes leading to all kinds of errors are basically the same.

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