The Mind Illuminated Series: Meditating without a contracted feeling of attention

I was talking with a student about their meditation practice. They were describing using attention versus awareness and they felt that in order to maintain the focus of attention there has to be a felt sense of contraction. That the fact of using attention causes a contraction in experience. I suggested that this doesn't have to be the case, that there can be a highly focused attention without the feeling of being contracted if awareness is leaned into and most of the conscious power goes into awareness. Let us experientially explore this. Place a small object in your dominant hand and make a fist around it. For me, it is my right hand.

This fisted holding represents attention. How long do you think you can maintain this fist...for an hour? For many of us, this is probably how it felt when we first started meditating...maybe it still does! It feels like it takes a decent amount of concentrated effort to maintain focus on the object.

Now take your fist and gently support it and hold it in the palm of your non dominant hand. Maybe you find you don't have to hold the object so tightly in the dominant hand with this added support. The second nondominant hand represents awareness. Really allow your dominant hand to relax fully and see that the object remains secure in your hand without any felt sense of contraction (or as little as is possible). How long do you think you could hold onto the object now...longer than an hour? This is what it can feel like when we start to bring awareness, like we do with TMI (The Mind Illuminated), into the equation. We learn as we progress through the stages of TMI to use awareness more to support our efforts with attentional focus. This is how Culadasa translated the Pali word 'sati' (most often translated as mindfulness) in TMI...as the optimal balance of attention and awareness. (He later settled on sati as awareness and samadhi as attention. The practice and establishment of sati would still involve this optimal balance.)

Lets push this metaphor a little further. Let's redo the experiment above but place the object in your nondominant hand (for me it's my left hand) and hold or support your nondominant hand with your dominant hand. This is what we eventually want to achieve with our meditation. We want awareness to be dominant and support or hold attention. Initially when we start meditating most of us overuse attention and have an underdeveloped awareness. As we practice TMI the emphasis starts to shift. When we first started with TMI most of us had a skewed knowing towards attention. We would maybe use 90% attention and 10% awareness. As we go through the stages in TMI we start to shift that balance and wind up using more awareness vs attention...maybe 70/30, 80/20 or even 90/10. Not only does it shift in this way but the dominance shifts towards awareness. Eventually it feels like you are looking from awareness and no longer looking from or experiencing from attention. Even your sense of identity can shift out of attention and into awareness.

BTW If you feel that you are over-efforting and maybe even suffering from headaches when you meditate for an extended period of time, this exploration may help shed some light on what could be happening. See if shifting towards an awareness dominant way of knowing alleviates the headaches that may have their basis in over-efforting with attention.

In this wonderful RSA, Ian McGilchrist explores this idea in a more mundane physicalist context using the hemispheres of the brain. We can say the left brain is attentional based and the right brain is awareness based.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pvr_gubcWUk

Once we shift to an awareness based dominance, it is easier to become awakened. According to Jeffrey Martin's research, approximately 70% of people wake up from awareness based techniques. For what that awakening looks like with awareness, see my two talks, "The Layers of Awake Awareness" and "Identity and the Layers," on my Spiritual Mentorship page.

Here is a 9 minute guided meditation exploring attention and awareness.