Attention - grabbed, placed, or moved

Attention may be considered roughly as conscious awareness of something.

Normally, our attention flits around involuntarily because it is grabbed by a series of things. 

And generally grabbed by something outside - or even inside - the body due to incoming sensations. These sensations are due to energy of some kind, reflected or generated from things. This energy impinges on our sensors or sense organs. Attention grabbing may also be considered as attention triggering by sensations.

Attention can be placed on something inside or outside the body at will.

Some level of subtler thinking is involved, e.g., a multi-step process or a goal. As simple as getting up from a chair to answer a doorbell, to as complicated as completing a degree course.

Attention is generally a mix of being grabbed and being placed at will.

Attention seems to be discontinuous, moving from object to object. But awareness may be conscious - say at a particular level, sub-conscious - "below" that level, or super-conscious - "above" that level.

If attention then moves across these three levels, it seems sensible to imagine attention may be of sub-conscious or super-conscious awareness when it is not at a conscious level. If so, instead of discontinuous attention - attention applied for a while, left hanging or paused for another while, and then applied again to the same level - it is actually continuous, albeit across different levels. But that part or ability of attention which differentiates normal from sub- consciousness, and normal from super- consciousness, is missing. Missing to such an extent that it seems attention itself is missing.

Meditation by resting attention on something ungrabbable such as an infinite object results in expansion of awareness across the three levels. Per Daaji, this expands the boundaries of the conscious level of attention into the super-conscious and sub-conscious areas, thus reducing them a little.

Daaji has also raised the interesting idea that when one's attention goes further into the super-conscious, the present conscious level may become the subconscious.

Practically, meditation on something infinite with few to zero physical features improves one's ability to place one's attention on dry, abstract concepts.

In sum, attention keeps shifting from object to object, not only at the same level, but also across levels. Much of the time, the shift is involuntary - attention is grabbed. But one can also train one's attention to stay where one wants or move it around at will.