I was debugging a recursive function last week, watching how each call transformed the input, when something clicked. The way my mind was observing thoughts felt exactly like taking derivatives—examining how consciousness changes in relation to whatever it's processing.
What if meditation is literally the calculus of awareness?
Think about the space in your coffee mug. Now think about the space in your bedroom. Different containers, but the space itself? Identical. Space doesn't change based on what holds it. You can't differentiate empty space—it's the same everywhere.
But here's where it gets weird: your mind isn't like space at all.
Try this experiment right now. Close your eyes and notice your thoughts. Watch how your mind changes when you think about your morning coffee versus your biggest fear. Your consciousness shifts, adapts, takes on the color of whatever you're thinking about.
Your mind only exists when it's paying attention to something. No object of awareness? No mind to speak of. This creates the classic split: the observer watching the observed, consciousness examining its own contents.
So where exactly is your mind? Point to it right now.
Is it in your brain? Your heart? Spread throughout your body? Try to locate your awareness the way you'd locate your elbow. What color is it? What shape? The more you look for consciousness itself, the more elusive it becomes.
Here's something most people don't realize: your mind and your sense of self are completely different things.
Your mind exists only in relationship—when you're remembering yesterday, planning tomorrow, or reacting to right now. Your sense of self is just mind's way of relating to the present moment. Take away the objects of awareness, and what's left?
Think of your mind like water in a glass. Pour it into a square container, and it becomes square. Pour it into a round one, and it becomes round. The water itself doesn't change—just its shape based on what contains it.
When your mind focuses on anger, it becomes colored by anger. Focus on love, and it takes on love's qualities. But the underlying awareness? That stays the same—clear and unchanged, like empty space.
Now here's where the math gets interesting.
If consciousness changes constantly as it relates to different objects, then maybe meditation is literally taking derivatives of mental states. We're examining how awareness changes in relation to what it's aware of.
But there's a problem: for differentiation to work, consciousness would need to be continuous. The rate of change has to be well-defined. Yet anyone who meditates knows that awareness jumps around. One moment you're calm, the next you're agitated. These aren't smooth transitions—they're discontinuous leaps.
For the math to work, consciousness would also need to be smooth. At each moment, there should be one and only one mental state. But that's not how minds actually work. We have conflicting emotions, multiple thoughts, layers of awareness all happening simultaneously.
But maybe that's the point. Maybe trying to analyze consciousness mathematically is missing the deeper truth that meditation reveals.
Think about this: what happens when you keep taking derivatives of a function until they equal zero? You've found the constant—the thing that doesn't change.
This might be where consciousness finally stops chasing objects and simply rests in itself. The observer becomes the observed. The derivative of pure awareness with respect to anything is zero, because awareness itself never changes.
Every moment creates the next moment. Everything flows in an unbroken chain of cause and effect. Nothing lasts, nothing stays the same. Yet somehow, these fleeting thoughts and emotions can completely hijack our attention.
That's why meditation matters. It's the only way to step outside the endless mental chatter and discover the freedom that was always there.
Here's another way to think about it: consciousness works like a functor in category theory. It maps objects from one category (phenomena) to another (awareness), while preserving the relationships between them. The structure of how things relate in the world gets mapped onto how they relate in consciousness.
So meditation becomes a form of differentiation—examining how consciousness changes as it encounters different phenomena. Each time you sit on the cushion, you're investigating the rate of change of awareness itself.
The goal? Finding where the derivative approaches zero. That's the still point—where consciousness stops depending on external objects and simply rests in its own nature.
This isn't just intellectual theorizing. It's direct investigation into how experience actually works. Through sustained attention, you start to differentiate between the space of awareness and whatever happens to be floating through it.
Liberation doesn't come from stopping change. It comes from recognizing the unchanging awareness within which all change occurs. That's the non-differentiable space of consciousness—the one constant in an ocean of variables.