Attention and Awareness

‘Noticing.’ ‘The observer.’ ‘Awareness watching awareness.’ ‘Individual consciousness of awareness.’  These expressions refer to the primary tool used in meditation, which for the sake of concision we can call attention.  In attempting to use this attention to step back and ‘notice,’ ‘observe,’ or ‘become conscious of’ awareness (identification as pure awareness representing the sine qua non of the search), the seeker may get caught in a frustrating feedback loop of subject-object recursion.  

But what exactly is attention and what is its relationship to awareness?  Are there two awarenesses—one in the background, impersonal and immutable; the other in the foreground, personal and mutable?  That’s often the way it’s felt to be until looked at (attended to) closely, when something in the sheer intensity of the looking might momentarily resolve the apparent split and allow illumination to occur. 

In the wake of such illumination, it may be recognized that attention is not a separate awareness, but simply the relative stillness or focus of thought.  And since awareness cannot be its own object, if we say we are attending to (or ‘noticing,’ or ‘individually conscious of’) awareness, it actually means we are focusing thought on the concept of awareness.  If this were not the case, it would be tantamount to taking attention as a second awareness—like a little penlight turned against a massive floodlight.  In fact, the only way that the atemporal, impersonal ‘subject’ of awareness can be made into an ‘object’ of search is precisely by focusing thought on it conceptually and calling that focused thought ‘noticing’ or ‘attending to’ or ‘being individually conscious of’ awareness.  

At the risk of poetic cliché, we can say that attention (or, indeed, anything) stands in relation to awareness as the light of the Moon stands in relation to the Sun.  Obviously, the Moon has no luminosity in itself.  Even if it can be so bright as to illuminate the night, all of its apparent light is borrowed from the Sun.  Thus, the focused or stilled thought of attention reflects the self-awareness of pure awareness, and only appears separate by a subtle trick of parallax effected by a seeming skew in the base of reference: from the apparent base of reference in thought, awareness appears refracted as twofold (or manifold); from the baseless base of reference beyond (or beneath or prior to) thought, it is realized as not-two.