Some Excerpts about Awareness, Attention and Intention

Culadasa (John Yates); Matthew Immergut; Jeremy Graves. Mind Illuminated: A Complete Meditation Guide Integrating Buddhist Wisdom and Brain

 

Spontaneous introspective awareness is the “aha” moment when you suddenly realize there’s a disconnect between what you wanted to do (watch the breath) and what you’re actually doing.

 

In reality, all we’re “doing” in meditation is forming and holding specific conscious intentions— nothing more. In fact, while it may not be obvious, all our achievements originate from intentions.

 

Intention, provided it is correctly formulated and sustained, is what creates the causes and conditions for stable attention and mindfulness. Intentions repeatedly sustained over the course of many meditation sessions give rise to frequently repeated mental acts, which eventually become habits of the mind.

 

It’s important to realize attention and peripheral awareness are two different ways of “knowing” the world.  Each has its virtues as well as its shortcomings. Attention singles out some small part of the content of the field of conscious awareness from the rest in order to analyze and interpret it. On the other hand, peripheral awareness is more holistic, open, and inclusive, and provides the overall context for conscious experience. It has more to do with the relationships of objects to one another and to the whole. In this book, whenever the term awareness is used, it refers to peripheral awareness. It never means attention.

 

In meditation, we work with both attention and peripheral awareness to cultivate stable attention and mindfulness, the two main practice objectives of meditation.

 

Having mindfulness/sati actually means that you’re more fully conscious and alert than normal. As a result, our peripheral awareness is much stronger, and our attention is used with unprecedented precision and objectivity.

 

Attention turns all of its objects into concepts or abstract ideas— unless of course the object is already a concept or idea. Generally, attention translates our raw experience of the world into terms we can more easily understand, which we then organize into a picture of reality.

 

Peripheral awareness, on the other hand, works very differently. Instead of singling out one object for analysis, it involves a general awareness of everything our senses take in. Peripheral awareness is only minimally conceptual.

 

Peripheral awareness allows us to respond more effectively by giving us information about the background and context of our experience.

 

Peripheral awareness filters out unimportant information and “captures” the objects that deserve closer scrutiny by attention. This is why specific objects can seem to pop out of peripheral awareness to become the objects of attention.

 

Peripheral awareness takes care of many things without invoking attention, such as brushing a fly away from your face while you’re eating lunch.

 

Peripheral awareness is less “personal” and takes things in more objectively “as they are.” External objects, feeling states, and mental activities, rather than being identified with, appear in peripheral awareness as part of a bigger picture.

 

Strong peripheral awareness helps tone down the self-centered tendencies of attention, making perception more objective. But when peripheral awareness fades, the way we perceive things becomes self-centered and distorted.

 

The condition in which the mind “stands back” to observe its own state and activities is called metacognitive introspective awareness.  Attention, on the other hand, can’t observe activities of the mind because its movements and abstracting of information from awareness are activities of the mind. In other words, we can’t attend to attention.

 

Most people overuse attention because it’s under direct conscious control and peripheral awareness isn’t. Awareness arises automatically in response to external or internal stimuli, so it’s easy to neglect. Consistently neglecting peripheral awareness in favor of attention eventually stunts the faculty of awareness.

 

In meditation, where other distractions are minimized, we can learn to use peripheral awareness effectively, and become skilled at using attention and awareness together.

 

We lose mindfulness whenever our attention shifts rapidly back and forth between different objects, such as when multitasking.  Emotional stress causes the same thing to happen— we have so many worries and concerns competing for attention that we lose perspective.

 

The goal, therefore, is to increase the total power of consciousness available for both attention and awareness.

 

You simply do exercises where you practice sustaining close attention and strong peripheral awareness at the same time. This is the only way to make consciousness more powerful.

 

Having more conscious power means the quality of both attention and peripheral awareness improves. This transforms the interaction between them in a number of important ways: Peripheral awareness doesn’t fade when attention is very focused. Peripheral awareness does a better job of providing context and makes you more sensitive to how objects relate to each other, and to the whole. Peripheral awareness processes information more thoroughly, making it better at selecting appropriate objects for attention to focus on.

Attention is always directed towards the most important objects. Attention becomes clearer, more intense, and can analyze things more effectively.

Because peripheral awareness is more powerful, attention doesn’t get stuck in subjectivity and projection.

Perception is more objective, and has more of the “seeing things as they are” quality of awareness.