I meditated paying with an openness to seeing into the phenomenon of ‘attention.’ It was really interesting how unnerving it was to shine a light on this part of mental life that works in the wings, usually.
First I was amazed at how my attention jumped about all over the body, in quantum leaps – that is, it turned up here and there, without a passage in between. After a short period of this practice it became clear that to tolerate this inquiry I’d have to tolerate not-knowing. Past that barrier, there was the sense of loss of self-knowing (even though I was clearly knowing myself in the dynamic of actual experience!)
Then, after about half an hour, a most amazing thing presented itself: at the time I was investigating if the ‘attender’ actually existed independently or was a co-arising with the attended-to. (The ‘attender’ is my version of the ‘witness’ I believe, because it gave coherence to arisings.) I was also puzzling over how attention could establish itself as ‘here’ and the ‘attended-to’ over there. What was joining them in the process of one process of attention, so to speak? What’s the medium that links them? Then suddenly, I experienced that the attention wasn’t ‘over here’ at all, but somehow each event seemed to be a lighting-up of knowing from within it. It was mildly scary, because it seemed that ‘I’ would be redundant, if all attending/knowing is already ‘in’ the arisings. All ‘me-centred’ reality fades away. Tonight I read these words of Rinpoche’s, and have an inkling of why it was spooky (unfamiliar):
The witness establishes for us, “Here I am” and “This is true; this is real.” And, “..the witness affirms at the outset the substantiality of the present moment.”
Christopher.
Hi Christopher. It’s nice to read your posts and the sense of meditative presence they invoke. Your exploration of how the attendee and attended-to aren’t necessarily so separated from one another, reminded me of my response to a sentence in a previous week’s reading: “It (experience) is the variations in the transmission accessible to our present consciousness.” (DTS 98). I found in this sentence a thought-provoking alternative to the paradox of trying to cram all of experience into a single instant of time (the present): Our consciousness itself could be active at this moment but free to draw upon the whole of time. There would be a connection, even an absence of separation, between the window (consciousness) and the scene surveyed (experience through time). Perhaps the attention of the witness and the experience being attended to, which you were exploring, could have this kind of relationship? –Michael
Dear Christopher:
What an insight. Thank you for sharing this (Withnessing and Attention). I am going to see if experientially I can feel this, knowing with in the arising.
Regards,
Soudabeh