In any practice of cultivation – whether it be meditation, gongfu, qigong, internal alchemy or other esoteric/magical practices – you will tend to have a need to pay attention to some aspect of your being. It is a good idea to learn to stabilize this attention, however it can also be useful to investigate the context of it all even if it is not particularly stable at present.
For this, it is useful to get clear on definitions. When you pay attention to something, you become aware of that thing, so the word attention points to what the awareness is attending to. In other words, it is a way of directing awareness to become aware of something specific.
When you are paying attention to something, what you’re aware of will tend to have two basic areas. The first is the foreground, that which is in focus, which is pretty much whatever you are attending to (or a distraction that has pulled the attention). The second is the background, which is basically whatever is in the periphery.
Generally speaking, good practices will tend to direct the foreground of awareness towards something (let’s use the example of the breath for simplicity’s sake in this article), and leave the background periphery to be free: neither suppressed nor indulged. If you are paying attention to your breath, it is still likely that you will be aware of other bodily sensations, or environmental sounds, smells, or mental activity of all kinds. Generally speaking it is not necessary to mute this background peripheral activity, but neither do you want it to draw the foreground attention to anything going on there.
I want to specifically point at the mental activity now, as it is also useful to discuss where you are aware from. Most beginners will find themselves feeling as if they are aware from mental activity. There is a little commentator or stream of ideas that is talking about what you are aware of, and if we use our example of paying attention to the breath, it can seem as if you are paying attention from this thought stream.
This is not actually the case, but it is a rather convincing illusion that can appear. Where you are aware from is only ever the silent, undivided ground of being. As one of my favourite teachers Adyashanti would say, you’re looking for God with his own eyes. The silent part is the key here, the origin of awareness is not anything that can be perceived; it has no perceptual quality at all. It is not a sound, nor a feeling, nor an image, nor any other kind of mental process.
When it feels like you are aware from a stream of thoughts, what is actually happening is that you are still aware from the silent, undivided ground, but you are primarily aware of the thought stream, and that though stream in turn is attending to the object you were trying to attend to (in our example this would be the breath). The illusion is that you have confused what you are aware of with where you are aware from.
When this illusion is noticed, it becomes apparent that the stream of thoughts can only everbe something you are aware of, and if it feels like you are aware from there, then it simply means your direct awareness has shifted from attending to the breath and is now actually attending to the thoughts primarily, and the breath has become something secondary; filtered through the stream of thoughts.
It looks something like this:
Arrangement 1:
[silent origin]
—(attending to)—>
[breath]
Arrangement 2:
[silent origin]
— (attending to) —>
[thought stream]
— (filtered attendance based on thoughts) —>
[breath]
The key here is to notice the silent origin. If you do not have this, you are likely stuck in arrangement 2 without even realizing it. Once noticed, the fix is easy enough. Simply unhook awareness from the thought stream and release it back into direct contact with the breath (or whatever you were wanting to attend to). This obviously needs to be repeated a lot to become stabilized, but if you miss it you can spend a lifetime practicing with filtered attention, which always distorts reality. You can get a surprising amount done with this filter, and develop high order skills of all kinds. But you will still be making a very simple mistake of perception.
The silence of the origin is very apparent. It is the total absence of perceived phenomena, and so it’s simply not anything you are perceiving. It is also already present, so there’s nothing special you need to do to create it, but you do need to notice it. When direct silence meets any object of awareness, the object will tend to become more animated and move into a natural cycle. It can feel as if silence or emptiness were soaking into the things you are perceiving.
[Feature Photo by Stuart McAlister on Unsplash.]