Attention, Awareness, Mindfulness, Pure Consciousness – a clarification
Attention
Awareness
Mindfulness
Consciousness
magical words for me
Attention, Awareness, Mindfulness, Consciousness
Important words
Important, because those terms represent faculties and abilities of us human beings that are ultimately essential and important if we as individual people and we as the species want to grow and develop into a higher potential than we are presently are able to manifest.
Unfortunately it is the truth that our culture and educational system as it is now is not helping children to discover and develop those abilities and qualities.
And as young people and grownups we allow ourself to be constantly bombarded with a deluge of fragments of impulses and information without much context and consistency.
All our social media consumption is multiplying this effect with lasting consequences for our brain and nervous system.
So, I guess it does not come as a surprise that a short attention span is almost the norm with folks nowadays.
ADHD, Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder has become a buzzword for schoolteachers and a daily challenge in school classes since the 1970/80s and the treatment with Ritalin medication has been more than controversial.
But here I don’t wish to see the inability to pay attention as a disorder.
For me it rather is a fact of the untrained mind and undeveloped consciousness.
A friend of mine recently made joke and I found it pretty funny.
“I am too poor” he said: “to pay attention”.
A pretty neat play with words and I found that funny.
But it made me sad nevertheless, because he could have said:
“I am too busy to pay attention”, and it would mean something very different, it would probably describe how we go about our life day by day. Or at least many of us do.
Or: “My brain is too busy to pay attention.”
So, now: What is Attention? And what lets us “Pay Attention”?
ATTENTION
As I understand it, Attention and “paying attention” to some stimuli is a built in ability of our nervous system and our mind to react to certain stimuli and focus on it.
Already as a young baby we respond to stimuli – like a smiling face or a cooing voice – by turning to that person.
Obviously this kind of attention may be very short lived and last only until the next attractive stimuli arrives.
Later on as a kid we can hold attention for astonishing long times when we play with our favorite toy or paint a picture or such.
Our attention flows naturally with our interest or emotional engagement.
In school or later in life we might even learn to focus attention at will on tasks that we don’t particularly like, consciously overriding our tendencies to get distracted.
So, to say it in the way of a picture, in my understanding “Attention” is like the focus lens on a camera, helping us to concentrate and focus attention onto something specific at the exclusion of everything else that is around.
In Psychology, Attention is defined as:
“Attention is the ability to actively process specific information in the environment while tuning out other details. Attention is limited in terms of both capacity and duration”
I think that Attention plays a critical role in almost all aspects of our life.
And although it is a ability of our nervous system and brain/mind that functions mostly autonomous and automatic, it could benefit us very much if we would learn to become conscious of its function and if we could use it consciously and precisely to be. Effective in whatever we may do.
When I try to be more conscious of the workings of Attention, I notice that there are types of Attention that differ from each other:
– Selective Attention happens when I am able to choose and selectively attend to a certain thing, like reading a book, while consciously “tuning out” other things going on in the environment. I am aware that these things are happening but I keep them in the background, unfocussed.
– Sustained Attention, we may also call it the ability to concentrate.
Concentration is Hard Selective Attention, it consciously “keeps out” everything else that is not the area of our focus.
It is the ability to focus on one thing for a continuous period.
Generally speaking, Concentration needs a lot of our psychic/mental energy and can only be sustained for a limited amount of time.
– Alternating Attention, what we often call “Multitasking”.
It is the effortless shifting of attention between two or more things that have different cognitive demand on the brain/mind.
For example: driving and listening to radio; cooking and watching TV; Quarreling with your husband while mending his socks and such ; )
We all know that, right? But when I take a closer attention to the process of this kind of Attention, it becomes obvious that my brain actually is not really doing two or more things ate the same time, but it rather is attending to one thing and switching to the other thing(s) in rapid succession.
Brain imaging and neuroscience has proven this to be true.
– Focussed Attention, what sometimes is called “snapping to attention”, is out ability to respond rapidly to an external stimuli, which can be important in situations where something in the environment requires immediate attention and quick action.
For the most part, our ability to focus our attention on one thing while blocking out distracting factors seems to be something automatic.
Yet our ability to consciously and selectively focus our attention on a specific subject while dismissing other distractions can be be trained and consciously practiced with numerous benefits.
Later in this article I would like to point out some practical ways and methods to do that.
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Now, if I come back to the picture of Attention as functioning as the focal lens and focus mechanism of the camera, the question arises:
What is actually the thing that is focused?
My hypothesis ; )
It is Awareness
AWARENESS
Now it is getting really interesting, close to the core of our being.
What is that, that looks out from the eyes and reaches out thru all the other senses? And super-senses?
And is aware of all it perceives.
Can know and make sense of the data coming in.
And – in more advanced and developed stages – can be aware of the interior space of the psyche.
And then can become aware of Awareness itself.
I guess this state is called Awakening or Enlightenment.
And I am keenly interested in that – transpersonal state : )
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But it is not so easy to find out and understand what is what here.
In the whole history of Philosophy, Psychology as well as brain science, Awareness and Consciousness are what’s called “Hard Problems”.
Meaning, that they are hard to grasp and explain realities of our existence.
Even hard to define, which becomes clear when one studies what’s written about those “things”.
I am not a stickler for definitions, I rather go with the Mystics, the Vedic Sages and the Lamas of Tibetan Buddhism who have a deep experimental “insider” knowledge of those subtle realities of Self.
But to integrate that and balance it with my western-educated and conditioned logical and specific mind, I am making this effort.
In Psychology, Awareness is defined as:
Awareness: The perception or knowledge of something
Consciousness:
– The state of being conscious.
– Awareness of something either internal or external to itself
– The waking state
Awareness and Consciousness, to be aware and to be conscious is generally used almost interchangeable and it is almost comical for me that it is never asked:
What actually is Awareness itself?
What is the “stuff” that we call Consciousness?
I really don’t believe that this is all just a neurological functioning of our brain cells, neural networks and such.
Or perceptions and reactions to stimuli from “outside” or “inside”.
But before I get too meta-physical and “out there” about it ; ) I want to go a little deeper into the nitty gritty of what psychology can say about Awareness.
And also look very precisely and “consciously” into my own inner experience of Awareness:
I can distinguish three different types of awareness:
– Peripheral awareness
– Sensory awareness
– Self-awareness
Although they can co-exist, go on simultaneously and inform one another, they are distinct forms of awareness.
Peripheral Awareness goes on all the time, mainly subconsciously, as the ability of the brain/mind to take in constant information about what’s going on around me. And by “around me” I don’t just mean in my physical environment but in “the whole of my world”.
I may be vaguely aware of this information but I am not consciously focussing on any aspect of it – until it seems necessary or until I choose to.
Sensory Awareness chooses any part of the information provided by Peripheral Aware and gives Attention to it, the focal lens is zooming in, usually thru one of my senses. It is conscious attention that allows me then to understand a certain thing or experience, to gain knowledge of it, to relate to it and respond to it in certain ways.
Self Awareness: While Peripheral Awareness is more about what I am vaguely and generally aware of my environment, my world and Sensory Awareness focusses on specific aspects provided thru my senses, Self Awareness is telling me about what’s going on in my “inner world” my Psyche, telling me about my values, agendas, conditionings, fears and hopes and how all of that relates to the information I receive from my environment about a specific situation.
And it allows me to understand how all those subtle inner realities motivate and shape my specific creation to this situation.
While Peripheral Awareness and Sensory Awareness are practically working autonomously as the result of our evolution, the Self Awareness is something we have to learn and to train and to practice.
I think that’s an important next step in the development of our species. Individually and collectively we need to become aware of our innermost motivations and drives in order to be able to choose consciously and to choose wisely our words and re-actions and actions.
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Now, beyond what can be read in Psychology books and studies there is an immensely wider field of Subtle Awareness that will be discovered and integrated one day (I am sure):
Extra-sensual Awareness, the Awareness and Knowledge that comes from “places” beyond the outer world, beyond our five senses, the Direct Knowing that is not a function of cognitive processing of information that happens in our brain.
I am talking about Awareness of information coming by way of Intuition, Telepathy, Psychometry, Remote Viewing, Clairvoyance, Precognition or Retro-cognition, Past Life Recall, Channeling and so on.
Talking about Utopia, here it is to be found ; )
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Some specifics about the evolution from SELF-AWARENESS to META-AWARENESS, to the appearance of the WITNESS SELF and finally >> AWARENESS of AWARENESS ITSELF: PURE CONSCIOUSNESS
To put this into simple words that make sense is not that easy since it is a very individual series of slow successive processes. Probably different for each person who travels this path of inner growth in Self Awareness.
For me it looks like this:
As I said before, Self-Awareness focuses on the development of Awareness of what is going on in my own inner world.
A highly developed Self-Awareness can lead to the emergence and consolidation of a Witnessing Self that is not entangled in the contents of the Awareness.
By the term Meta-awareness I mean that it is then possible of taking Awareness Itself as the object of Attention.
This is a fundamental shift for one Stage of Consciousness to the next higher level (or Stage).
And in my understanding this is something like a quantum leap in the spiritual development of a person.
From being first entangled and more or less subconsciously driven by the inner processes – lets call them ego-processes – where I am not able to review, re-evaluate and change the drives inside my psyche but “just be them”.
We might remember certain rather dramatic episodes of or life where life feels like a speedy train with a steam-locomotive relentless driving it.
We may feel like the victim of our own inner self.
And then – by becoming more and more conscious of certain aspects of what is going on inside – Self Awareness – these processes become available for reflection and I can start to consciously deal with them.
Choice and direction becomes possible.
I am becoming the captain of my ship, so to say.
Development of Self-Awareness seems to be a stage-like process.
– The first phase is to notice that emotional, instinctive and cognitive processes are going on in my consciousness in response to outer situations.
– By patient and careful Attention to those processes, i start to develop an increasingly clear and differentiated perception of the characteristics of the contents of my Inner Awareness, of the processes involved with those feelings, thoughts, values, desires, impulses, aso.
With steady practice of this “Inner Alertness and Attention”, a kind of witness develops, the Witness Self.
In the tradition of Vipassana Meditation, this is called the Witness Consciousness.
Witness Consciousness is essentially Awareness that is not entangled in the contents of Awareness.
In meditation I am completely aware what appears on the “inner TV screen of my Awareness”, I notice and acknowledge it in every detail, but I am not necessarily following or be driven by it.
I can still choose to engage with those desires, thoughts, feelings and impulses that are there, but now from a position of freedom and choice. I can either act on them or let them go.
I am not sure if I can adequately express here what a big difference this makes.
In the practice of Vipassana Meditation this it practiced “on the cushion” so to say.
In Mindfulness Practice, this is practiced in daily life, in all situations that life brings to me.
Maybe life has not changed much because life can be messy sometimes. But my position to it has fundamentally changed.
And this feels wonderful. And also – over time – has wonderful effects.
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The next stage of this inner development and spiritual growth – the “Awareness of Awareness itself” is taking place successively and naturally in meditation.
It can not be forced or accomplished by will.
It happens when the Inner Awareness, the inner space has become still enough, congruent enough, so my Awareness turns around – so to say – and turns the focus towards itself.
How this happens, I can not say in words. But it does.
And then “I have arrived at the “center of it all”.
The I AM
But that – lets put it like that – is a story for another day 😀
ps: If you have any specific questions, feel free to contact me >> [email protected]