The Hologram, Concentration and Gordon Hempton
March 16, 2025
8 min read
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{Body}
Your internal body map
Close your eyes for a moment and slowly open and close your fist…
(Yes, actually try it.)
Even though you can't see your hand, you have a clear sense of what it's doing, right? You can "see" it in your mind.
This internal representation of your body isn't just imagination — it's a sophisticated neural map that neuroscientists call the "cortical homunculus." That term is a mouthful, so let’s use a more intuitive term: The Hologram.
Think of your Hologram as a 3D model of your body that your brain maintains in real-time. It's like having an incredibly detailed avatar in a virtual reality game, except this avatar is your actual body.
This internal model is what allows you to scratch an itch without looking, catch a ball reflexively, or navigate a dark room without bumping into things.
Interestingly, most people experience themselves as viewing this Hologram from somewhere behind their eyes, usually near the third eye center. It's as if you're sitting in a control room in your head, operating your body like a sophisticated piece of machinery.
A crucial point about your Hologram: it's not a perfect representation of your body. In fact, it's quite distorted; more like a working model — what you think you look like rather than what you actually look like.
For a simple demonstration of this imperfection, close your eyes, spin around five times, and then — as slowly as possible — try to touch your finger to your nose. You'll likely miss by at least a millimeter or two (if not inches). Your Hologram's spatial map got a bit scrambled!*
Next week, we'll explore the significance of these blind/glitchy spots, and discover why certain parts of your Hologram remain in the shadows of your awareness.
** This disconnect between internal and physical reality can become increasingly intensified. As a more severe example, consider the increase in body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) cases among young people in recent years (now affecting about 1 in 50 people). Modernity is influencing how people perceive themselves at the root level — creating personal Holograms that bear little resemblance to objective reality.
{Mind}
Concentration vs. Focus
Last week we distinguished attention from focus. To summarize: Attention narrows reality whereas focus sharpens it.
But what about concentration and focus? Are they the same thing?
Nope. There are again important differences.
Remember last week’s microscope analogy: you choose a sample to analyze (the breath), zoom into it (apply attention), and adjust the lens for clarity (focus).
But now imagine that your microscope is hand-held, meaning you have to keep your arm extremely still in order not to disturb the image.
This steadiness of body is akin to concentration — it’s the skill of not moving from the thing you're focusing upon.
In other words, attention narrows reality, focus sharpens it, and concentration maintains it.
Without concentration, your perfectly focused attention becomes worthless. It’s like having perfect vision with constant tremors in your eyes — you only see clearly for fleeting moments before the image wobbles out of view again.
Oppositely, concentration without properly focused attention is merely fixation on the wrong target — like a scientist meticulously studying the wrong slide.
What makes concentration so challenging is that it requires absolute stillness amid the world’s perpetual movements — not just the physical squirming of your body, but the constant flickering of thoughts, sensations, and external stimuli all competing for your attention.
This challenge is precisely why many beginning meditators struggle. They might successfully direct their attention to the breath and even focus clearly on its qualities, but maintaining that awareness for more than a few seconds proves d*mn near impossible. The mind jumps, the attention shifts, and suddenly they're planning dinner three weeks from now.
In meditation, this triad works together in beautiful ways: attention filters the world, focus reveals its subtle qualities, and concentration maintains unbroken awareness despite the mind's relentless attempts to wander.
Practice with me below and stay tuned next week where we’ll contemplate the differences between “attention” and “mindfulness”.
{Soul}
Even if humanity developed the Universe’s quietest room — advanced technology by which all external sounds are erased — you would still be inundated by the subtle noises of your own ear drums ringing, heart thumping, and breath circulating.
In other words, because you cannot stop the Universe from fidgeting, perfect silence is literally impossible.
So what, then, are mystics and spiritual teachers referring to when they speak of “silence”?
They mean the Silence of a totally present mind.
In the same way that your room is not defined by the objects in it, but rather the empty space that contains them, Silence is not the absence of sounds but the spacious, present awareness beneath them. It is the mute medium that all noises must propagate through in order to be heard.
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