Deeply understanding how mindfulness works

[ardacigin]

If you are hiking a mountain trail and take a tumble or get bitten by a snake, peripheral awareness has failed.

If you take a wrong turn and lose the trail, your attention has failed.

If you’ve ever mistaken sarcasm for praise (or vice versa), had a salesman’s enthusiasm cause you to overlook a serious problem, or become angry with someone who was trying to help you, you’ve experienced a failure of both.

Activities of the mind include things like thinking, listening, remembering, etc. Movements of attention are an activity of the mind, when attention is directed introspectively, that movement replaces all other activity and so it’s all you find. This is how you spend your life without mindfulness.

Likewise for overall states of the mind. Mental states are global phenomena, things like agitation, peacefulness, irritation, joy, etc. Attention always isolates some aspect of conscious awareness from the rest, so attention can’t observe mental states directly.

Try directing your attention to observe your mental state. Either you won’t be able to find anything, or else you will find a memory trace from peripheral awareness of what your mental state was before you looked. If attention finds the memory trace of a gross mental state like annoyance, it is immediately conceptualized as the thought, “I am annoyed”. This is not mindfulness.

All new sensory stimuli, thoughts, and feelings appear first in peripheral awareness where a preliminary evaluation determines which, if any of them, will actually become a focus of attention.

 Filtering out irrelevant information is one of the main functions of peripheral awareness, and attention depends upon peripheral awareness for the selection of appropriate objects.

This is why specific objects often seem to “pop out” of peripheral awareness to become objects of attention. And attention often “browses” the contents of peripheral awareness in search of something relevant or important to focus on as well.

Also, whenever your attention is honing in on something, peripheral awareness serves as a watchful alert system to detect anything new or unusual. If some rare or unexpected event is detected, peripheral awareness can disengage and reorient attention. Peripheral awareness allows you to use attention with maximum effectiveness. Without it, attention moves blindly, without guidance and oblivious to the unexpected.

Fortunately, not everything that happens needs to be analyzed, otherwise attention would quickly become overwhelmed. Many things, like brushing a fly away from your face, are dealt with entirely in peripheral awareness. And while attention is thorough, it’s also rather slow. Because information processing is not as extensive, peripheral awareness can respond much more quickly.

In situations that demand a swift reaction, such as a child running into the street in front of a car, peripheral awareness initiates rapid, automatic responses for which attention would be inadequate. If peripheral awareness fails, attention can’t take over these functions so these events are reacted to in a completely automatic way, without the benefit of conscious processing, or not at all.

From this brief overview, you can appreciate how interdependent attention and peripheral awareness really are. Mindfulness can be defined as an optimal interaction between, and even a merging together of attention and peripheral awareness.

More specifically, mindfulness involves a conscious experience that is more powerful, with the result that peripheral awareness is clearer and attention gets used in a more appropriate way: purposefully, in the present moment, and without becoming mired in judgment and projection.

The other problem in 'normal' non-meditator sober consciousness is that conscious awareness is a limited resource, so there will always be tradeoffs between attention and peripheral awareness.

In a relaxed state, awareness tends to open and the intensity of attention dissipates. Relax even more and attention increasingly fades, eventually leading to dullness. This is where balance shifts to a less than ideal state where more attentional focus and energy is required.

 On the other hand, when attention focuses intensely on an object, peripheral awareness of the background fades. Intensify your focus enough, and the context and guidance provided by peripheral awareness disappears completely.

This puts you in highly emotionally charged mental states and your understanding of truth, suffering or insight gets compromised. 

Try to understand and apply this dynamic in life. Don't wave away 'mindfulness' as something you already know. It has more depth and breadth than you think. Keep investigating your mind with curiosity.

Hope this helps

Much love,

 

 

[Cathal]

thanks that was a nice read for me

[ardacigin]

@catcat69123 You are welcome