Hello and welcome.
I'm going to lead you in an exercise called Point,
Path,
And Field to distinguish the difference between attention and awareness.
This distinction between attention and awareness is critically important in meditation and in awakening.
And it's so basic and fundamental to our everyday experience as a human.
And yet most of us have never thought about what attention really is and how it might differ from the luminous awareness that's seemingly in the background of experience.
This exercise will help you experience this difference for yourself and become more familiar with awareness.
So let's begin with attention.
Attention is like an arrow from your mind to a focal object,
Like your finger.
So you can do this right now,
Holding up your finger in front of you,
And focus on the fingertip.
And notice that it feels like there's a you in your head looking at your finger and shining a light there.
This is the most ordinary way that most of us look at objects all throughout our day.
Now let's experience this fingertip in a different way from awareness.
So unhook from your thinking mind and allow a bubble of awareness to travel down your head and through your arm and into your finger,
Resting so that you feel the sensations of the finger from within the finger.
So this is experiencing a new type of knowing the finger from within,
Feeling the sensations,
Aliveness of the finger from within.
This is direct knowing of your finger from within.
Now expand this knowing slowly to be aware of your entire finger from within as a line from the base of your finger to the fingertip.
Just notice that you can expand this awareness within and feel the whole finger and notice how that feels.
You might feel and notice more sensations in your finger than the old way,
The so-called normal way that we look at an object from behind our eyes.
Now let's expand your awareness to be aware of the space around your finger and notice how that feels.
Notice that you can bring the space into the foreground and the feeling of the finger itself recedes into the background.
Can you feel any boundary between your finger and the space around it?
Notice that when awareness knows your finger from within,
It's not referring to a mental image of your finger,
But it's simply feeling the space and aliveness of the sensations of your finger with no clear boundary between finger and the surrounding space.
Now see if you can know the finger from space.
If you're not sure what this means,
That's fine.
Don't go back to the thinking mind to check if you're doing it right.
Just trust you understand and see what happens.
And as you're exploring knowing the finger from space,
See if you can find any edges or boundaries to this space.
Expand your awareness out to the wider field.
How far can awareness of space expand?
Do you find any edges or boundaries to this space?
Is it limited by the room?
Are there any limits at all?
Now slowly return your local awareness back to the finger itself,
Feeling the length of the finger from within,
And then back to the tip of the finger,
Knowing the tip of the finger from within.
And then just notice and reflect on your experience of attention versus awareness.
And I encourage you to practice this throughout your day.
You can use different objects in the room and play with the ideas of attention and awareness and see what you find.
I thank you so much for joining me in this experience.
I wish you unbound clarity,
Love,
And joy for your day.
Thank you.
