METAREALITY
Attention has the ability to contract and expand.
I can narrow and hold my focus on an object and
stop the propensity of attention to keep moving.
Or, I can allow my attention to follow the flow of
movement from one moment to the next, illuminating and bringing new content into awareness.
Attention can expand to hold many
different levels of experience simultaneously.
We are multidimensional perceivers with a multilayered point of view, one where attention is active
in discerning each layer and able to target experience within each layer. This capacity is central to
meditation practice and is instrumental in allowing shifts in consciousness.
Attention can join with any inner or
outer sense modality, and magnify
its function.
Most of us have had the experience of listening to
music while we stare off into space or float off into
thoughts and pictures evoked by the music. In this
instance, attention moves between hearing, seeing and our inner sight. Each time it moves and
lands on one of these modes of perception, it magnifies that modality, giving it greater acuity and focus. Often, we move from seeing, hearing, feeling,
touching, smelling, thinking, sensing or imagining
with such ease that, without being consciously focused on any one particular sense modality, we
only experience a continuous stream of consciousness. Yet when we bring our full attention to any
one state, that particular one jumps out and becomes foreground and the other senses fall to the
background with less intensity.
Attention can make things appear
or disappear.
The statement “What you give your attention to,
is” embodies this particular magic. By focusing my
70 | NEW CONSCIOUSNESS REVIEW
Without giving our
attention to past
or future thought
projections, we find
ourselves resting in the
present moment.
attention, I can make things appear or disappear
in the moment. I can be in thought one moment,
then shift my focus and give my attention to the
person sitting next to me. They can say something
that pulls me back into thought, and they disappear, replaced by an inner narrative, until I hear
them asking for my attention again. This happens
all the time as our attention moves and refocuses
moment to moment.
We all have the experience of being so focused in
what we are doing that the activity replaces the
self-consciousness we normally carry into each
moment. The actor disappears into the action. We
become one with the activity. We don’t realize we
have disappeared until we notice that our sense of
being the perceiver has returned.
Attention can create time or timelessness.
This bit of profound magic is shows us that attention is instrumental in the creation of linear
time. Without giving our attention to past or future thought projections, we find ourselves resting
in the present moment. From this vantage point,
time is a mental construct. As we learn to become
more conscious with our use of attention, we gain
greater control over our state of being, particularly
when it comes to falling in and out of time.
The more we move into higher states and away
from everyday consciousness, the sense of step-