Attention framework or learning from babies

Everything in life can be simply, even trivially, described as
learning to use attention and
actually using attention.

A baby probably has the greatest effective attention of all human beings. It has no psychological hang-ups, no filters, no images of itself or others. Using all its senses, or paying attention to all of them [1], it builds up tons of data about its body and the world outside. It also learns to use that data in its relationships with other things or other humans. Intonations, dialects, vocabulary and emotional reactions of others are learned effortlessly without any biases.

Essentially, a baby's attention rests easily and moves equally easily as needed for its development. Until it is conditioned or trained or stopped from using its attention easily. Example? A baby playing with its poop :-D It learns very soon, perhaps immediately, not to do so from the resulting negative excitement and exhortation!

From a toddler on, a self-image appears, generally from the assessments of others as well as self-created. And images of others. All from attention outward and the resulting inward feelings or emotions. There is little systematic exposure to different situations or analysis.

It is not difficult to envisage simple training in inward attention.

First understand how attention is directed through simple observation directed at three "locations":

i) at the outside world,

ii) at the interface (sense and motor organs),

iii) at the inside.

Paying attention to the first two locations is needed to understand when something that seems to be inward or inside is actually arising from --representing-- something physically outside. Or the body itself. Thus, thoughts, emotions, memories, etc. about others physically separated from you all imply outward attention.

Training attention on the outside world

For training attention on the outside world, use this simple technique - look, listen, smell, taste, and touch without prejudice or bias or analysis, exactly like a baby.

Since vision is the most important sense for humans, simply look around, letting the eyes linger and drift easily, without analysis. This is actually mental training of attention, expressed physically. Without thinking, if possible. Then, close the eyes, and listen. Again let attention drift from sound to sound, to whatever comes up. Rest without bias, move without bias. Smells often cause visceral or instinctive and usually negative reactions. It is not easy to train a detached attention to smells. Similarly for taste and touch.

Training attention on the body

Then pay attention to the body, or to the sensing and acting instruments themselves. A full-body relaxation technique does the trick here.

Training attention on the inside world

 Lastly, pay attention inward. To thoughts, feelings, ideas, memories. Again, let things bubble up into conscious awareness instead of moving one's awareness around. This undirected/unwilled movement is important. That builds up the ability to look at --and accept-- oneself with ever-reducing subjective bias. This clarity is needed to see things as they are and not as they should be -- as one wants them to be.

(TRAINING ATTENTION AFTER HEARTFULNESS PRACTICES

In Heartfulness, we distinguish between one's heart and mind. The latter, no matter how blazingly quick, is still single-threaded in its thinking action. The heart, OTOH, is massively parallel and always present, but quite shallow. It feels and reacts or responds, but does not think. Thus, attention training here simply means attention upon the head and chest areas or volumes.

First, one has an inchoate awareness, a simple feeling, if you will. Next, with daily repetition of attention, comes habituation --getting used to the feeling-- followed by descriptive thoughts or words or verbalization.)

Initially, though, paying attention inward is troubled by memories - verbal and emotional - of past events and other people. The emotional aspect of memories may even cause physical reactions along with thoughts and feelings. Once such reactions, thoughts, and feelings no longer arise, attention rests effortlessly on inner silence and peace.

Finally, resting attention on different mental objects.

• From limited to unlimited.
• From little things to vast things.
• From colour to lack of colour. 

Then, on sounds, and their results internally.
If using technical sounds like mantras,
moving from
audible or mumbled repetitions to
mental repetition to
other inner things like the bhāva or the feeling or the presence arising from a mantra.

Please note that in Heartfulness meditation,
there is a direct jump of attention inward to the Divine presence within,
from the very beginning.

In sum, remedy the wrong training in inward attention
by following a simple logical sequence of
regularly moving the attention
from outside to body to inside.
And do so like a baby!

Now, how to use this trained attention?

Here are two significant uses:
i) evolving attention upon the mind and heart, and
ii) synchronising the heart and mind.

In the first, one's mental attention becomes lighter and faster, and
one's heart attention becomes more palpable or
one becomes more sensitive to one's heart.

Synchronising the heart and mind simply means learning to use both for solving problems or making decisions.

NOTES

[1] If allowed. A baby tries to examine something using all five senses, but is stopped from tasting or sniffing most of the time. It also tries to build up its motor skills simultaneously by grabbing or throwing things! A very active baby or child is considered naughty. The underlying issue is not giving a baby or toddler a safe, prepared, learning environment.

Superconscious inspiration or subconscious intuition

Simple ways to distinguish superconscious inspiration from subconscious/unconscious intuition. (Daaji's terms [1])

Both inspirations and intuitions may come during closed-eyes meditation or whenever the mind shuts down - through tiredness, accepting its inability to grasp something, switching to a subtler level, and so on. Sometimes though, an excited or hyperactive mind may also have creative ideas. Both occur outside the usual conscious mental processing and may be considered abnormal mental states.

But superconscious inspirations are beyond current and past human knowledge while subconscious or unconscious intuitions are beyond just my own conscious knowledge. A subtle implication is that once I have an inspiration, it becomes part of me, and thus part of my conscious, subconscious, or unconscious awareness.

Subconscious intuitions are mine, as in whatever I have built up in my life.

Unconscious intuitions are also from others - family, friends, and so on, encompassing all humanity. And if you accept past lives, from them as well.

How to distinguish inspiration and intuition

1. Inspiration:
   Anything completely new and original, especially a solution or idea not found in standard references, or even a different emotion/mental condition - superconscious inspiration
2. Intuition: 
1. Any solution or idea or emotion, perhaps new at the moment, but remembered later. Read, watched, otherwise experienced, but forgotten - subconscious intuition.
2. When later found in standard references or described and found elsewhere on researching - unconscious intuition.

Since verification by research is needed, one may not be sure whether it is inspiration or intuition at once.

Why does it matter?

A superconscious inspiration makes our consciousness subtler and inspires us positively, even transcendentally. Most, if not all, people would accept it is for the good of everybody.

A subconscious or unconscious intuition may be positive, negative, or neutral. Since it is based on past events, it need not be helpful. When used to remember technical solutions and positivity or past inspiration, dipping into the sub-/un-conscious is useful. For reinforcing past negativity and behaviour, it is not.

NOTES

[1] Daaji in Evolution of consciousness series

Meta, sat-kārya-vāda, and simple awareness

SUMMARY (TL;DR)

The mind is a reflexive entity, i.e., it can look at and analyse itself.

Yet, what if there are multiple levels in the mind, ranging from grossest to gross to subtle to subtlest?

To observe and analyse one level, attention has to reach a level subtler and also causal to that level. Or, awareness has to become subtler.

Reflexivity in this sense does not exist for the ātma since, by definition, it is pure (no impurities => zero distinct or separate parts), simple (or indivisible), and absolutely subtle.

This explains very simply why such a thing, the ātma, cannot become an object or observed.

META

"Meta" started out meaning "after". So meta-physics, which now connotes knowledge "above" or "about" (physical) knowledge, initially referred to Aristotelian books or texts that came after his texts on physics.

The currently popular connotation, with reference to a set of activities, means a more abstract level of activities describing or manipulating them. For example, counting or arithmetic, when abstracted becomes algebra. That is, 1-2-3-4 or 8-9-10-11 or even 10005, 10006, 10007, 10008, can all be expressed algebraically, and more generally, as n, n+1, n+2, n+3.

Why abstract or generalise? A variety of reasons. For easier manipulation. For coming up with a single solution to a similar set of problems. For concise representation of a pattern. For easier learning and teaching.

Layers of abstraction and generalization build over the years, followed by reduction of layers as people return to the underlying physical or actual data and find out simpler patterns and simpler representation.

This analysis may also be considered meta with respect to meta itself!

SAT-KĀRYA-VĀDA

sat-kārya-vāda is a simple idea with an overemphasis on subtle implications that has overwhelmed its simplicity. E.g., a clay pot. Going from physical cause to effect is from clay to clay pot. Looked at differently, a clay pot is imbued with clay even after it is made. Or clay is still present in a clay pot, though baked and no longer a ooey-gooey mass.

A subtler, though still obvious, implication is that all things made of clay contain clay. A not-so-obvious implication is that all clay things can be returned to their initial ooey-gooey state. Similarly for gold articles being meltable back into an unformed gold mass.

A subtler implication is that since all known clay vase forms came from clay, all forms of clay vases made till now, and those yet to be made, exist in clay. This, though, is obvious from the name "clay article" meaning made of clay.

(So far, so good, obvious and commonsensical.

But what if this is extended to organic products? Does every sort of organism exist in some general, undifferentiated, mass - or maybe soup - of organic matter? Or are there only certain organisms that can be produced, or better, that can evolve or manifest from that mass? How subtle should that mass be and how few elements need there be in that mass?

And an even more intriguing idea. What if all organic and inorganic things can manifest or evolve from a single mass? Isn't this the idea of the singularity underlying the Big Bang? Or that there were less than a handful of particles or energy fields then?)

This much as background.

REFLEXIVITY

Now, consider reflexivity. This is a "meta" activity in which one looks, analyses, judges, etc. oneself or one's actions or thoughts. Confusion about actions - what to do or say, or how to solve a problem, i.e., how to think - arises when reflexive (inward and circular or looping) activities are mixed up with actually doing the actions.

(Thus, one may decide what to do to achieve a goal. Then one must execute one's decision or plan. And after execution, check if the goal has been reached. Then, even if execution is not according to plan, reaching the goal may be enough, while how the goal was reached may not be important. If the goal is long-term, say many months or years, one may set interim goals, and stay on plan by checking every so often that they are being met.)

META and SAT-KĀRYA-VĀDA

What is the connection between meta and sat-kārya-vāda?

Consider algebra - it is at a subtler level of thinking than arithmetic. Thus meta. And if one does some assessment or monitoring or scoring of one's own arithmetic or algebraic activity, including thinking of oneself as the doer, that activity becomes both reflexive as well as meta.

Now, consider the idea that arithmetic does not evolve into algebra as a meta activity, but instead that algebraic patterns, or an algebraic level of thinking, is a necessary precursor to understanding arithmetic patterns. This somewhat convoluted and back-to-front idea can be associated with the sat-kārya-vāda notion that just as physical effects come from physical causes, so do non-physical or mental effects from mental causes.

Please note that in Sāṁkhya-Yoga, mind and mental are also material, and mental activity is not the same as conscious activity. Thus, mind, and even intellect and ego, may be considered mechanically and algorithmically.

Putting them together, there are levels of thinking or mental levels which go from grosser to subtler as one goes from the outer physical world to mental inner world. One level is subtler than another if it is the cause of the other. Or if the other level manifests from the first. Subtler or meta activity occurs when attention shifts from one actual material - though mental - level to its causal level. It seems reasonable to assume that attention can also jump to non-sequential, yet ancestral, causal levels, perhaps to even the subtlest root causal level.

SUBJECT-OBJECT AWARENESS  FOR ĀTMA

Two more points.

Consider this sentence: "I throw the ball". "I" is the subject, the ball is the object, and there is an action "throwing" by the subject "I"  upon the object. The awareness of subject, object, and action is a meta activity, and from the reasoning above, at a subtler level than the physical or mental activity. 

Now, if the highest or subtlest mental level or activity is reached, can there be any meta activity? An activity above the highest?

So all this reasoning was to get to a simple idea - there is no meta level for the higher self - ātma or puruṣa. Since, by definition, it is the subtlest level of a living being.

From an advaitic point of view, ātma (= brahman) is subtler than the mind. It cannot have awareness of itself as either subject or object as, being without parts or levels, there is no part or level to know another. And it just is, or there is only being, no doing.

From a Sāṁkhya-Yoga perspective, it is even simpler. All activity, including mental, physical, meta, etc. occurs in prakṛti. Puruṣa has no mental activity since it is eternally separate from prakṛti, even while illuminating its activities. And being partless and without levels like the ātma, again, there is no subject awareness.

Inner Freedom - structural definitions

"Structure" here means a mental counterpart of some physical storage or structure. Words like "veils" or "layers" have a physical meaning - as objects or parts. Complexities and impurities are other words usually used to describe changes or residues. But their physical connotations are less immediate and direct.

Below are two definitions of structures blocking jīvanmukti or inner freedom. Removing them and preventing their re-generation, much like treating a disease and building future immunity to its recurrence, result in mental freedom, or regaining the eternal that is overlain by the structures.

In Saṃskṛta, using Yoga and Rāja Yoga/Sahaj Mārg idioms:

1. prācīna saṁskāra bhoga
2. navīna   saṁskāra niruddha

In English, using Daaji's idioms:

1. Unwind/remove/clear old emotional residues and impressions
   
2. Prevent new emotional residues and impressions
   

In English using J. Krishnamurti's idioms (not a direct translation of Saṃskṛta phrases):

1. Relinquish existing self- and other- images
2. Prevent new self- and other- images