Giving Attention to the Circle of Awareness

Giving Attention to the Circle of Awareness

The connection between the two basic fundamentals of the individual mind – Awareness and attention – is a fascinating one.  Awareness is primary and attention secondary.  Awareness is the source from which attention springs and is something given: a compulsory, peremptory process that simply is.  Attention, however, can be switched from one thing to another, from one thought to another and this indicates that attention is the first function of the conscious mind.  Giving attention is a conscious process that the individual mind must perform to make it aware of any thing or any thought.  This is a seeming contradiction, but I can understand it better if I put it as follows.

Awareness – with a capital A – is an inadequate name for that wondrous, unfathomable essence of a human being – namely Mind.  It is the hidden core of the individual, given to her by the World-Mind.  To be a human being means being aware, like it or not.  We have no choice in the matter.  So, from this still source of Mind springs the bubbling stream of Consciousness, with its ability to give attention.  Attention to what?  Attention to the task of producing perceptions of ourselves and the world around us; keeping in mind that our perception of the world is the world.  This is now done on a subconscious level, but in the beginning it was a slow and conscious process – repeated a number of times that beggars the imagination – that produced a single cell and continued to produce all the billions of cells that make up the incredibly complex arrangement of them that now constitutes a human body.

At the present stage of human evolution attention is selective: that is we can turn our attention to whatever we choose.  Relating this to constructive conscious control, we choose to turn our attention to the use of the self – both mentally and physically – and attend to the how of doing anything, attend to the co-ordinated means of doing any task in our everyday interaction with the people and things around us.

Relating it to meditation, we choose to turn our attention away from the world and seek to attend to stopping our incessant thinking, our internal dialogue, in an attempt to find that undifferentiated Awareness that is our essence.

Awareness – Attention  – Perception – awareness.

This last awareness is, of course, that of the finished perception of the body and the environment produced by Consciousness and it is dependent on the ability of the individual mind to give attention to the reports from the six senses of sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell and proprioception.  We all experience varying degrees of awareness of our thoughts, our body and our environment.  It ranges from being very vague to being very clear.  The quality of awareness is, therefore, determined by the amount of attention we give to any thought and any thing.

This article was first published in Rock ‘N’ Ruminations by Daniel McGowan. You can download the PDF of this book for free here:  FREE DOWNLOAD