Awareness not Attention

Been a while since I posted about meditation so, considering this is a blog primarily concerned with things meditation, I suppose I’d better.

I’ll begin with an interesting quote from the man himself, Gautama Buddha:

"Foolish, ignorant people indulge in careless lives, whereas a clever man guards his attention as his most precious possession.”

It’s interesting, because most people don’t consider their attention as particularly problematic. I, on the other hand, consider our hyperactive and uncontrollable attention to be at the root of all our problems.

And it is specifically the attention that is affected by practicing meditation.

So let’s go into that ….

There are two active aspects to mind. Attention and Awareness.

I’ll deal with Attention first.

Attention is the tool that we carve our life with, while awareness gives us the perspective and positioning we need in life, so we know how to use the tool of our attention well.

You are paying attention to these words right now. It’s a bit like a beam of light - information streams from whatever the attention is focused on, into your personal realm, where it is processed – and where decisions are made about whether it’s interesting or not. If not, then your attention will go somewhere else.

The attention can only do one thing at a time. Sometimes it may seem as if it’s doing many things – but in actuality it is simply switching from one thing to another.

For instance, if music is playing in the background, your attention will be switching from these words to the music and back. Being divided in this way, your comprehension of both will be half as vivid as if you had paid attention to only one.

And if you were eating lunch, while reading and listening to music, then your enjoyment would only be a third of what it could have been if you had have done one thing at a time.

As the mind only has so much energy, depending on how many things the attention is given to do, that energy is divided up like a pie – the more pieces, the smaller they are.

Added to which, the more things the attention has to switch between, the less coherent is the information.

The other thing is, attention uses up a lot of metabolic energy, because it creates so much machinating and thinking, and triggers so many body reactions.

Awareness on the other hand is effortless – it elicits no body reactions and no thinking.

Awareness doesn’t think – it knows.

If you touch only one thing with deep awareness, you touch everything.
- Thich Nhat Hanh

If anything is sacred in meditation and life, it is our awareness – it’s the most fundamental aspect of our sense of being alive – and the most important.

Our attention arises from our awareness, and darts about within its spread. In this, the awareness is a little like our private universe – the personal realm we carry around with us.

Our attention picks out tiny parts of what we are aware off, but it never has the breadth and depth of awareness.

For instance, as your attention busily connects with these words, your awareness takes care of everything else – positioning you in time and space. All around you, you are aware of things – the texture of the air on your skin, sounds, qualities of light, other people, the walls of the room, the chair you sit in, and so on.

And that awareness, on the other hand, is passive – because that is a pre-eminent quality of awareness – it is always passive.

The moment you are actively involved with anything, indicates your attention has now switched to it and connected it to the active aspects of mind.

But awareness does not create thoughts, it does not have opinions or views, and is relatively free from conditioning. Because awareness does not think, it also has no memory. You cannot remember what you have been aware of in the past … the only thing that remembers is the attention

For instance, you may be aware of a noise behind you as you read - the moment you start thinking about that noise, judging it and reacting to it, indicates that the active part of your mind, the attention, has now switched to it. You will now remember the noise.

If however, your attention had have remained on the reading, and not engaged with the noise, there would be no memory of it – the noise, that is.

For the instant that your attention is evaluating the noise, it is not engaged with what you are reading – until it switches back – or flickers between the noise and the words – in which case, it is, as I said before, a divided attention.

Other mental qualities that come from awareness are intuition (gut feelings) and insights, those rare and luminescent comprehensions that come instantly, leaving us gasping like fish as we search for the words to express it.

So then, what has this to do with meditation?

Well, most of our problems in life are directly related to our over-use of attention, and subsequent lack of awareness

There is never a problem with awareness per se – it simply ‘is’.

Ideally, a well balanced mind should have both attention and awareness in equal ammounts. We should be able to turn our attention on and off, resting in awareness when there is nothing to attend to.

But unfortunately, given the demands of survival in the frantic and technically complex world we’ve built, our attention has become much too strong, such that we put all our mental energy into our attention – and the perspective and insight of awareness are rarely felt.

From the time we’re born we’re told to ‘think about it!’ and ‘pay attention!’ At school, only our attention is exercised – information, argument, numbers, memory, rules, parameters, building, acquiring – all attention. We’re taught the technical construction and deconstruction of everything from building blocks to the surgical dismemberment of mice and frogs –again, all of it the use of our attention at the expense of awareness.

When are we taught to NOT pay attention? Never.

The only time we’re allowed to switch off our attention is when we go to sleep, and unfortunately, in the unconsciousness of sleep, awareness disappears as well.

And so, as adults, we’re launched into a world which only speaks to our attention – work, media, advertising, building, acquiring and competition.

As such we have learnt to live in our attention – with all its thought loops, anxiousness short-termism, lack of breadth and vision, its rigid logic and lack of intuition.

We forget that true genius doesn’t exist in the attention – it comes from awareness - the mysterious aspects of mind.

Consider these two quotes:

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science ... The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.
- Albert Einstein

Brain researchers estimate that your unconscious database outweighs the conscious on an order exceeding ten million to one. This database is the source of your hidden, natural genius. In other words, a part of you is much smarter than you are. The wise people regularly consult that smarter part.
- Margaret Fuller

Our attention is entirely about conscious mind - about what we think we know. It works with and exists in the realm of the conscious – what we have learnt. It works with information and memory to repeat exactly what it has learnt from its past, over and over again.

When we are in attention we are in an anxious state, manipulating information from the past to try and fit the present.

Awareness on the other hand exists beneath language, numbers and conditioned structures. When we are in awareness things arise in the mind fully formed and effortless. And though we use our attention to turn it into thoughts so we can communicate it, still, in its orgins, all inspiration arises from awareness.

As I said before – awareness doesn’t think – it knows.

So, aside from questions of inspiration, why is our overactive attention a problem?

Well for a start it's intensely exhausting.

It’s okay when we’re young – we have the metabolic thrust to cope – but as we get older, the energy is just not there to keep up the frenetic amount of mental activity we have gotten used to.

This is because we never switch the attention off and let the mind sit in awareness. When the mind rests in this way it clears itself. Redundant information is filed into the unconscious as mind reorganizes itself.

But we rarely allow the mind to do this essential function. So the deeper mind never gets a rest. It never gets a chance to clear away the backlog of yesterdays information - it simply leaves it and piles more information in on top.

We don't notice the exhaustion, because like the frog in heating water,it comes over us so slowly we don't recognize it. It appears as rigidity, decreasing humor and emotional numbness.

Added to which, an attention as habitually energized as ours has learnt to be is very hard to control, which creates its own set of problems.

Such as:

Depression and anxiety – doctors see them as physiological illnesses, quite ignoring the fact that in their origins, they are both problems of the mind. I believe both of these illnesses are simply extreme forms of worry – in which the attention is so intense and so out of control that it cannot let go of certain closed loops of reactive thinking. There is no peace when the attention gets caught up in circular reactions.

Emotional reactiveness - we tend to get lost in our opinions, thoughts and emotional reactions – to the insane extent that we will fight each other over disagreements of world-view. This is caused by a lack of awareness, and an attention that is too intense. To use a cliché, our attention only sees the trees, the awareness sees the entire forest.
And much more – but I’m sure you get the idea

So where does meditation fit into this?

In meditation we practice a simple thing.

Whenever the hyperactive laser beam of attention fixes on something – a thought, a memory, a reaction, and itch - we practice letting go. Whatever arises – we watch the attention and make it let of of whatever it attaches to.

The thought or feeling might remain in our awareness, but so long as the attention is not stuck to it, it doesn’t matter. Awareness being what it is, things always disappear.

The more we practice this constant and persistent letting go (though it is very hard at first) the more the mind ‘softens’. That is, the attention loses intensity and begins to recede back into awareness. Awareness becomes more noticeable, and over time, the ore we practice and get used to this new state of mind, the more it seems 'normal'.

Mental balance begins to appear, first in the mind, then slowly filtering through our actions into our life. Energy that was previously allocated to the attention is reassigned to awareness, which becomes more vivid, brighter.

The way we comprehend things changes. Instead of thinking about things, as we used to in our attention-heavy head, now, with increased awareness, we find ourselves simply knowing. Not thinking – knowing.

And because awareness uses less energy, we feel calmer and more expansive. Giving comes easily because we feel more connected with the world around us – people, animals, situations. This enhances our mood, and so on ... you get the idea.

Meditation softens the attention and brightens the awareness – creating a mind that is able to comprehend without thinking - more able to see beyond its own sense of Self to the whole.

I’ll finish with another quote, this time from a wonderful Thai monk, and great teacher of meditation, Acharn Chah:

"Try to be mindful, and let things take their natural course. Then your mind will become still in any surroundings, like a clear forest pool. All kinds of wonderful, rare animals will come to drink at the pool, and you will clearly see the nature of all things. You will see many strange and wonderful things come and go, but you will be still. This is the happiness of the Buddha."