I don’t ever meditate, but I suspect I get a similar experience from staring out bus windows, or (in better weather) sitting under a tree. People can get a great “integrated” sense of consciousness in a variety of ways, but it looks like the key lies in taking the effort to process things more carefully and more mindfully. A lot of the time we feel we have “better” things to do.

But life is full of reflexive actions. Walking without noticing the pavement, the breeze, the symphony of odors of passers-by. Eating without smelling or tasting, just to fuel up. Watching without seeing: What is the color of the eyes of your favorite prime-time drama character? Listening without hearing, “What was that, dear?”

Meditation trains the mind to notice what we are doing, what we are feeling and thinking. Martial arts, preforming arts, science, and so on are other disciplines that do this. But as a means to an end and usually only for a small area of experience.

Our minds are composed of many busy partitions each with its own area of specialization and agenda. But our attention, our consciousness, our spirit is only aware of one train of experience at a time. Integrating the various sections of the mind is a goal of meditation.

Right mindfulness (often also termed Right meditation) involves bringing one’s awareness back (i.e. from the past or the future) into the present moment. By residing more frequently in the present moment, practitioners begin to see both inner and outer aspects of reality.

I fear that I too often live in the past or the future, and not often enough in the present. In short, I am often thinking about things different than the place and time I am then occupying.

I’ve never done any serious meditation, but I’m tempted to start. Even one of the world’s most skeptical skeptics (Sam Harris) is a big advocate:

The only claim I making with respect to meditation is that there are methods of training our powers of attention, such that we can come to observe the flow of our experience with astonishing clarity. And this can result in a range of insights that, for millennia, people have found both intellectually credible and personally transforming (mostly in the East). The primary insight being that the feeling we call “I”– the sense that we are the thinker of our thoughts, the experiencer of our experiencer — really disappears when looked for in a rigorous way. This is as empirically confirmable at looking for one’s optic blind spot . . . .

When I say that “consciousness remains vividly aware of the continuum of experience” after the feeling of “self” vanishes, I simply mean that nothing necessarily changes at the level of perception. If the birds are chirping, you will still be able to hear them. The difference is that rather than feeling like “you” are hearing “them” (subject and object), there will simply be the pure experience of hearing (without hearer and thing heard).

You can read this full interview at the Raving Atheist.