The Issues of Attention and Awareness

Chris Marti wrote:

Maybe you're all of actor, director, and audience.

Yes. This is the mystery the human brain can't know the ultimate truth about, but we still keep trying to with spiritual practice anyway. This is also linked to our issue with suffering -we feel separate from some aspects of existence/experience and feel the need to do something to change things. So when we apply intent in order to manifest phenomena, it is either illusion that we are able to do this or we playfully pretend that we are in control.

This actually leads me to re-think the buddha quote: I only teach suffering and the end of suffering. Buddhism is commonly associated with the pursuit of spiritual truth, but knowing the ultimate truth about existence may not be requisite for freedom from suffering... maybe all you need to do is make your ego look at itself enough to get dissolved by the helplessness of ever attaining any real truth of the mystery. Then all you have left is natural acceptance of phenomena dependently co-arising with or without your participation, and no longer have energy for habitual utilization of mental conditioning that results in suffering. This does not have to mean cessation of the arising of negative mental/emotional phenomena; that will always be part of the movie- the awakened or even mindful person may just understand it enough to not fall out of their chair with a knee jerk reaction while watching it arise.

How about this: Allow yourself to be both caught up by and aware of the whirl of being actor, director, and audience of life. Integrate with the mystery and don't sweat the small stuff. Mindfulness, then, is not the cause of this, it is the effect, the natural state of mind without a confused ego in the way.

So back to your original question:
"My question is this: why is being present, or aware of being aware, given privileged status over other experiences? What's special about it?"

In my understanding, there is a special effect that "being aware of being aware" causes. Somehow it has the unpredictable ability to sometimes tip the hand of mystery and reveal insights about what we really are, or what we are not (an independently originated self). This can, by all reports, happen spontaneously without any dharma practice, but, also by all reports, seems to happen more likely when we bring attention to experience. To add to this (or contradict it) the experience of being unmindful and then becoming all of a sudden aware that you were being unaware of experience is just as beneficial (if not more) than striving for continuous mindfulness all day without interruption. There may be something special about paying attention to the moment were you start paying attention.

Note: I continually, day by day, know less and less about the dharma, so everything I write is theory not knowledge and will probably change tomorrow. Somehow this is my cutting edge at the moment

The core of it to me in terms of the path is the non-attachment, for lack of a better word.

Mindfulness helps you notice the attachment. You could be painfully tensed up due to "attachment" but if you were mindful you could notice you were tensing up and maybe let go of that.

I do lean on the dogma of really high quality mindfulness practice for a while. But I'd also say that once you've really learned that letting go part and you are untethered, then mindfulness becomes less important. You're going to be "okay" regardless. I think Ona said something similar.

As far as the whole thing doing itself, yeah. That's a real mind-fuck. But the body learns things, some things more useful or in the direction of less suffering than others.

If I may chime in here and have a little word-fun with this for the purpose of public entertainment,

"It's very hard to talk quantum in a language originally designed to tell other monkeys where the ripe fruit is." - Terry Pratchett

Or, as another english poet once wrote:

"I must, at the risk of appearing to digress, insist upon this distincton between philosophical and practical points of view." - Aleister Crowley



Seems like the field waking up to itself very often implies meat brains changing through hours on cushions with specific training methods. Here, prioritizing effective training of attention physiology seems to have some utility for the specific relative goal of changing these meat brains.

In the "progressive non-duality" way of describing things, it seems at fourth path all subject/object relations in experience are seen through, there are just sensations occuring. And sensations can't experience or otherwise influence each other, and that is now the baseline modus operandi of the particular meat brain involved. No more habitual delusion about that, we've done away with a perceiver, the "ground of being" nonsense and the equally ridiculous "pure awareness". Water consists of water molecules, experience consists of sensations. No ground of water or pure water that is in any way different from wetness. It's just water molecules. Wich, ultimately, is also just a conceptual shell, because water molecules also don't have inherent existence, etc. We could go down that linguistic road for quite a bit. White is a word describing impressions of things like sugar, wich we then characterize as being white. Round and round we go. Accordingly, we take our metaphorical water with a grain of salt. 

So, from that lofty and slightly salty fourth path perspective, or what I imagine it's gonna be, being mindful is just another pattern of experience not-being its not-self, not different in kind from, or ultimately preferable to, other sensate patterns or volitional formations. But it has not been that way in relative practice terms for that practitioner at, say, second path, in the thick of being a practitioner with a practice trying to prove to him/herself that s/he never existed in the first place. (Because that's his/her idea of a good time, you know.)

During that phase, there is still a strong inclination to contract into thoughts and volitions, and the more our second path yogi tastes a more expansive attentional vista, in wich all of these things appear and disappear without crowding each other out, the more preferable s/he will likely find this way of experiencing goingson, at the same time realizing the catch-22 of a this craving a that all over again. Sucks to be me. From a relative meat brain perspective, perception thresholds are still something to be pushed to where the dualities fall away and the concept of attention as something to be trained still has relative utility until that point. Why do you practice? Because it works. 

So for meat brains (or implied meat brains, however empty and dependently originating they may ultimately, ahem, be) that caught insight disease, the progression from being contracted into dualistic perception to fluxing attention shapes to phenomena just doing their thing seemingly needs to be worked trough in the relative, meat brain way of doing things. In the way of training to achieve a goal. At least in progressive non-duality models of awakening. And I'll go out in a limb here and say they all are, otherwise no relative action of dharma transmission and/or application of technique would ever be deemed neccessary. Methods or models of awakening that don't consider relative transmission neccessary tend to have a rather short-ish live span and very, very few followers. 

After all, this (expansive handwaving), according to the masters, is neither relative nor absolute, but both. And in that game, relative still does as relative is.