[Bob MMember]

@michael – you are correct, I was referring to the four “Steps” in my post, above, not Stages. sorry, new to all the terminology this discipline.

I would add that another day or two of doing this is continues to reap rapid benefits. Although I have been meditating for 6-7 years, I am quite new to culadasa’s techniques, and so have been using the four-step method of getting into narrowly focused attention for only a short while. In general, I am finding the four steps a really effective technique to help ease into concentration at the start of a sit.

Also the exercise of cycling up and down two or three times relatively quickly through the four steps again at the end of a sit (and as a finish, backing out to step one, wide focus on the present) is really helping me.

I have been keeping eyes open in step one (even though my usual meditation place is fairly dimly lit) and closing eyes when I move to step two, so that the room and wider environment drop away more easily and attention swings into the body alone, reversing this of course when stepping back out.

[Bob MMember]

perhaps part of reconciling the various ideas put forward by posters in this thread is to recognise that a working definition of “conscious” and “subconscious” is a bit tricky. We may each having rather different understandings how how we use these terms. (Though I suspect we can all more easily agree what is “unconscious” 😉 )

One of the central challenges of shared learning and teaching of all this meditation stuff is that finding accurate words for all this mysterious stuff going on in our minds and bodies is awfully difficult, to say the least.

For me, I feel that am still in some sense “conscious” of stuff that is going on in Peripheral Awareness, though it is undoubtedly a quite different and weaker version of “consciousness” than what I have for mind objects that are solidly in the focus of Attention.

For my part, I tend to feel that definitionally, being “aware” of something is roughly the same of being in some sense “conscious” of it, but naturally others may use these words a bit differently.

Whatever words we may prefer, I suppose we can all agree that part of what meditation is doing, especially in these earlier Stages, is potentially changing the qualitative experience of stuff that is in the realm of Peripheral Awareness, giving us more familiarity and ability to navigate the distinctions between Peripheral Awareness and true Attention more confidently, in order to build the skill-set needed to achieve deeper and more profound benefits going forward.

[Bob MMember]

one technique I have recently been using is this:

At the end of a sit, where in the final 10-20 minutes I usually have achieved some fairly stable degree of focused attention on the breath at the nose or upper lip, and after my timer signals the end of a session, I then tag on a few minutes of stepping backwards and forwards through the four stages, with perhaps 30-60 seconds in each stage.

It generally feels much easier to navigate the transitions when between stages when recapitulated at the end of a sit. Though each stage may not be “perfectly” realised in these brief passages through each stage, it really seems to build familiarity with what each stage “feels like”.

For me, this seems to help when following a more gradual and careful stepping through the four stages in the first part of the following meditation session.

wonder if people here think this could be a useful thing to do. feels helpful to me for now.

[Bob MMember]

Hello All. New here, first post, would like to throw out a few thoughts of Peripheral Awareness vs Attention, and ask if the more experienced meditators/teachers here could comment on what parts of my conception seem valid or useful, what parts are maybe not so much.

Despite a few years of meditation experience, like others i initially had some trouble grasping the concept of a distinction between Peripheral Awareness and Attention.

I can of course readily recognise the stability, or lack thereof, of the object of that attention, and could also see that when I experience what seems like simultaneous attention objects, when viewed more closely, this is actually Alternating Attention. But I found it harder to recognise in my own mental world where are the borders and what is the subjective experience of “Peripheral Awareness”.

Seems hard to avoid this trap: While attending to one thing (hopefully the breath) I become vaguely aware of some other mental object which “might” be regarded as in “Peripheral Awareness”. But my mind is immediately tempted to examine this, to verify what it is and if indeed I am able to classify it as being in “Peripheral Awareness”. In the process, of course, it immediately becomes an object of Attention. I know, this is another of those irritating little circular mind habits of over-thinking things. But knowing this little fallacy still leaves me unsure of how to apprehend things that are not objects of Attention, but are still in some state called “Peripheral Awareness”.

Put more simply, what does this Peripheral Awareness feel like, how “Aware” of things in that state am I able to be whilst keeping them out of the beam of the torchlight of Attention?

Having worked at this over the last couple of weeks of meditations, and also thought about it a lot off the cushion, I have worked up a little metaphor (a bit different from the peripheral/central vision metaphor) which seems to help me.

Think of a classroom called “Peripheral Awareness”, where each pupil is some mental object, fired up and eager for a chance to grab the mic and speak. (The mic, of course, defines Attention.)

These pupils are able to follow one strict rule – only one speaks at a time. However, they sometimes struggle, grabbing the mic back and forth in Alternating Attention. They are all trying, with varying degrees of aggressiveness, to grab their moment to force the one speaking to give up the mic. (Of course it doesn’t have to be wordy-speak; a visual-oriented pupil might gain the floor in order two load the projector of Attention with some mental image.)

Two key points come from this metaphor which I find useful. First, is the distinction between the pupils in the classroom, versus all the other millions of pupils elsewhere in the school, but not in the room. In order to even have a chance of speaking you gotta come in first. This then defines the scope of peripheral awareness – it is only those mind objects in some warmed up state, ready and willing to take control of attention.

Most in the room will typically give up and leave without ever speaking (thus move out of peripheral awareness). Meanwhile, others rush in, hoping to gain their chance to speak. They come usually in for two reasons. Perhaps some external sensory input has goaded a pupil outside the room to run in and seek a chance to speak. Alternatively, some other pupil(s) already inside may have decided that someone else outside ought to come in to try to speak, and so a message was sent out to wake them up and invite them in.

So the distinction of note here is that the only pupils who might get a chance to speak (to become objects of attention) are those who have first entered the classroom of Peripheral Awareness. There are only a few in there at a time, whereas there are millions of others milling around or sleeping outside. In other words, objects in Peripheral Awareness are distinguished by their differences from the countless more objects that are not trying to gain the spotlight of attention at a given moment.

The second point coming from this metaphor is perhaps more useful. In English, the action referred to by “being aware” of something demands an actor. This gets right at the concept of “self”, which is of course so central to most forms of meditation. Most people, if they entertain my little metaphor, would say that their conventional sense of self requires a teacher sitting quietly listing to the speaking pupil, and, (assuming the right mental skills) simultaneously “being aware of” the other pupils in the Peripheral Awareness classroom. (More or less the old “homunculus” or mind-within-the-mind model.)

Personally, I have not yet made enough progress with meditation so that my sense of self is profoundly and permanently destroyed or redefined, though I rather suspect something like that occurs further down the path. That said, I think any meditator who spends some decent time closely observing mental experience soon discovers, as I have, that the conventionally held view just doesn’t seem to fit. There’s just nothing identifiable like a dedicated listener – a teacher – sitting around anywhere.

Instead, at the risk of flogging my metaphor a bit hard, I feel as though the only listeners are none other than all the other pupils in the Peripheral Awareness classroom. They “listen” to whoever has the current command of attention, and at the same time they vie among one another to gain the mic, or perhaps to call in others, or they lose interest, give up and leave.

If they are collectively the true audience of Attention, then they also must be the ones who are either are (or ideally should be) “aware” of one another’s presence in this classroom. This seems to fit well with the book, where in the First Interlude it points out that Peripheral Awareness has more to do with relationships of objects to one another, to context.

So improving one’s Peripheral Awareness whilst meditating, is akin to fostering better communication among those pupils in the classroom (and also, perhaps communication back those those outside), even while politely avoiding being overly pushy for their chance to grab attention.

Of course, this way of thinking about it offers no solution to my frustrated desire to name and identify objects in Peripheral Awareness, as that seems to inherently require shining the light of Attention on them. On the other hand, having held this metaphor in mind while prepping for recent meditations, I am beginning to see how my Peripheral Awareness can get stronger, i.e., the classroom is becoming a bit more well-behaved and communicative. I am beginning to sense this even without needing to bring objects into attention.

I also suspect that a more orderly classroom will ultimately allow more pupil/objects to be in there at any given time, and remain mutually aware of one another. which I guess is part of improving mindfulness.

Hope this is helpful to others…

-b

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