Understanding attention and its role in constructing experience is vital to spiritual development. This is because attention is the primary mental mechanism of separation, of isolation, of division.
Attention acts as a contraction within the open field of awareness, something akin to the way a camera iris narrows down the open vista to the primary subject, seemingly separating certain aspects or features from the whole by mentally reducing innate spaciousness into some“thing” specific. And, simultaneous with the mental creation of the specific—which is another way of saying “the object”—is born its conceptual reflection—the subject, or the idea of “me.”
In other words, Reality is always a single fabric, but mind—via attention—makes imaginary wrinkles in that fabric and then further imagines those wrinkles to be “things,” or separate entities in-and-of themselves; and one such “thing” is “me.” That is to say, the usual subjective sense of being a separate, independently existing entity is actually just another mind-made “object” of attention.
Furthermore, once the first wrinkle is established, so to speak, the entire fabric itself seems to vanish, and the once-open world is seemingly reduced to a fluttering parade of endless wrinkles.
This is all to say that, if the mechanism of attention is completely relaxed and released, the seeming division of nondual reality into the endlessly conflicting diversity of duality will not occur. The Field remains in its open, natural state. This is because that openness, that wholeness, that fathomless boundlessness is the default state of Reality. Mind breaks that up—or seems to—with its conceptual gestures. It’s never actually broken up, of course; we just imagine that it is.
Object evokes subject. Subject evokes object. Attention elicits both.
All of that is mind-made.
But Awareness is prior to mind. Awareness is prior to attention. Awareness is prior to every “thing.”
Awareness is simply prior.
And fundamentally we are all simply Awareness.
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