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.<\/p>\n
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!)<\/p>\n
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):<\/p>\n
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.”<\/p>\n
Christopher.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 … Continue reading