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+ | ====== Food for Awakening: The Role of Appropriate Attention (old ATI-edition) ====== | ||
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+ | Summary: | ||
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+ | The Buddha never used the word for "bare attention" | ||
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+ | The Pali term for attention is // | ||
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+ | For instance, if you focus on the breath in and of itself as your frame of reference, anupassana means keeping continual watch over the breath. Mindfulness means simply remembering to stick with it, keeping it in mind at all times; whereas alertness means knowing what the breath is doing and how well you're staying with it. Ardency is the effort to do all of this skillfully. When all these activities stay fully coordinated, | ||
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+ | To understand how appropriate attention functions in the context of this training, though, you first have to understand how attention ordinarily functions in an untrained mind. | ||
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+ | In the teaching on dependent co-arising — the Buddha' | ||
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+ | " | ||
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+ | These ignorant ways of seeing then condition the way we intentionally fabricate or manipulate bodily, verbal, and mental states. The breath is the primary means for fabricating bodily states, and practical experience shows that — in giving rise to feelings of comfort or discomfort — it has an impact on mental states as well. When colored by ignorance, even your breathing can act as a cause of suffering. As for verbal states, directed thought and evaluation are the means for fabricating words and sentences; whereas mental states are fabricated by feelings — pleasure, pain, neither-pleasure-nor-pain — and perceptions — the labels we apply to things. | ||
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+ | Sensory consciousness is colored by these fabrications. And then — based on the conditions of ignorance, fabrication, | ||
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+ | As if the preconditions for attention weren' | ||
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+ | All of these conditions, acting together under the influence of ignorance, are what ordinarily color every act of attention to any of the six senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, the tactile sense, and the sense of the mind that knows mental qualities and ideas. Even before we're aware of contact at the senses, conditions in the mind are primed to create suffering and stress from that contact. | ||
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+ | So how can attention be trained in the other direction? Obviously, it should be freed from the conditions of ignorance, but that doesn' | ||
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+ | So instead of being stripped from all conditions, attention requires this new set of conditions to make it appropriate. This is why the Buddha said that the factors of the path corresponding to understanding, | ||
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+ | Of these three factors of the path, right view comes first, for it's the direct antidote for the primary condition of ignorance. Right view is not simply knowledge //about// the four noble truths; it sees things //in terms of// those truths. In other words, for a person aiming at the end of suffering and stress, it points out the four salient factors to look for in any given moment. At the same time, it sees the tasks or duties appropriate to each factor: Stress is to be comprehended, | ||
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+ | As with the development of any skill, the path has its inevitable ups and downs. In other words, the practice is marked by alternating periods of ignorance and knowledge, with the knowledge gradually growing stronger and more refined. During these periods of knowledge, the act of attention is informed by an understanding of suffering and its causes. It is also motivated by intentions — expressed through the way you relate to your breath, your mental activity of directed thought and evaluation, and your perceptions and feelings — that aim at bringing suffering to an end. This combination of wise understanding and compassionate intention is what turns the act of attention from a cause of suffering into a strategy for health: a healing attention. This healing attention is called appropriate because it looks at things in ways appropriate for advancing the tasks of the noble truths, focusing on whichever task needs to be advanced at any particular moment. | ||
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+ | For instance, when attention needs to be focused on comprehending suffering, the role of appropriate attention is to view the aggregates — the components of our sense of self — in such a way as to induce dispassion for them. | ||
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+ | <div excerpt> | ||
+ | "A virtuous monk should attend in an appropriate way to the five clinging-aggregates as inconstant, stressful, a disease, a cancer, an arrow, painful, an affliction, alien, a dissolution, | ||
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+ | To attend to the aggregates in this way helps to advance the task of abandoning any craving for the aggregates that causes suffering. | ||
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+ | When attention needs to be focused on developing the path, the role of appropriate attention is to feed the factors for Awakening and to starve the five hindrances that stand in their way. Here is where appropriate attention applies to the practice of establishing mindfulness, | ||
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+ | The image of feeding and starving here is directly related to the insight into conditionality that formed the essential message of the Buddha' | ||
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+ | In its most sophisticated expression, though, the Buddha' | ||
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+ | The Food Discourse ([[en: | ||
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+ | -- Sensual desire is fed by inappropriate attention to the theme of beauty and starved by appropriate attention to the theme of unattractiveness. In other words, to starve sensual desire you turn your attention from the beautiful aspects of the desired object and focus instead on its unattractive side. | ||
+ | -- Ill will is fed by inappropriate attention to the theme of irritation and starved by appropriate attention to the mental release through good will, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity. In other words, you turn your attention from the irritating features that spark ill will and focus instead on how much more freedom the mind experiences when it can cultivate these sublime attitudes as its inner home. | ||
+ | -- Sloth and torpor are fed by inappropriate attention to feelings of boredom, drowsiness, and sluggishness. It's starved by appropriate attention to any present potential for energy or effort. | ||
+ | -- Restlessness and anxiety are fed by inappropriate attention to any lack of stillness in the mind, and starved by appropriate attention to any mental stillness that is present. In other words, both potentials can be present at any time. It's simply a matter of how to ferret out, appreciate, and encourage the moments or areas of stillness. | ||
+ | -- Uncertainty is fed by inappropriate attention to topics that are abstract and conjectural, | ||
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+ | In short, each hindrance is starved by shifting both the focus and the quality of your attention. | ||
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+ | However, with the factors for Awakening — mindfulness, | ||
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+ | The one exception, however, is illuminating. The basis for the second factor for Awakening — analysis of mental qualities — is the presence of skillful and unskillful qualities in the mind. To pay appropriate attention to these qualities not only feeds the factor of analysis of mental qualities but also starves the hindrance of uncertainty, | ||
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+ | Of these factors, equanimity is the closest to what is sometimes described as bare attention or non-reactive awareness. But even equanimity is conditioned by views and intentions. For instance, the Buddha points out in [[en: | ||
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+ | In fact, equanimity has many levels, and a crucial insight on the higher level of practice is to see that even the equanimity of refined jhanic states — in which awareness and its object seem totally " | ||
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+ | The move from equanimity to non-fashioning is briefly described in a famous passage: | ||
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+ | On the surface, these instructions might seem to be describing bare attention, but a closer look shows that something more is going on. To begin with, the instructions come in two parts: advice on how to train attention, and a promise of the results that will come from training attention in that way. In other words, the training is still operating on the conditioned level of cause and effect. It's something to be done. This means it's shaped by an intention, which in turn is shaped by a view. The intention and view are informed by the " | ||
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+ | The need for right view would seem to be belied by the circumstances surrounding these instructions. After all, these are the first instructions Bahiya receives from the Buddha, and he attains Awakening immediately afterward, so they would appear to be complete in and of themselves. However, in the lead-up to this passage, Bahiya is portrayed as unusually heedful and motivated to practice. He already knows that Awakening is attained by doing, and the instructions come in response to his request for a teaching that will show him what to do //now// for his long-term welfare and happiness — a question that MN 135 identifies as the foundation for wisdom and discernment. So his attitude contains all the seeds for right view and right intention. Because he was wise — the Buddha later praised him as the foremost of his disciples in terms of the quickness of his discernment — he was able to bring those seeds to fruition immediately. | ||
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+ | A verse from [[en: | ||
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+ | <div excerpt> | ||
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+ | <div freeverse> | ||
+ | Not impassioned with forms | ||
+ | — seeing a form with mindfulness firm — | ||
+ | dispassioned in mind, | ||
+ | one knows | ||
+ | and doesn' | ||
+ | While one is seeing a form | ||
+ | — and even experiencing feeling — | ||
+ | it falls away and doesn' | ||
+ | Thus one fares mindfully. | ||
+ | Thus not amassing stress, | ||
+ | one is said to be | ||
+ | in the presence of Unbinding. | ||
+ | ]! | ||
+ | </ | ||
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+ | (Similarly with sounds, aromas, flavors, tactile sensations, and mental qualities or ideas.) | ||
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+ | Notice two words in this verse: // | ||
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+ | [[en: | ||
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+ | Some interpretations of the instructions to Bahiya identify the added factor as a metaphysical view about there being something behind the data of experience, but this sort of metaphysical view — even though it can form a basis for passion — is only one of many such bases. The belief that there is something out there that can be grasped and possessed can obviously form a condition for passion, but so can the belief that there' | ||
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+ | As [[en: | ||
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+ | But when discernment is sharp enough to see that even this equanimity is fabricated and conditioned, | ||
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+ | With the total fading of passion, the final intention to undercut passion can thus be dropped. When it's dropped — with no need to replace it with any other — nothing more is constructed. This brings a true opening to the Deathless, which lies beyond all conditions — even the conditions of right view, mindfulness, | ||
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+ | The extraordinary nature of this experience is indicated by the verse that concludes the discourse on Bahiya: | ||
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+ | <div freeverse> | ||
+ | Where water, earth, fire, & wind have no footing: | ||
+ | There the stars do not shine, | ||
+ | the sun is not visible, | ||
+ | the moon does not appear, | ||
+ | darkness is not found. | ||
+ | And when a sage, | ||
+ | a brahman through sagacity, | ||
+ | has known [this] for himself, | ||
+ | then from form & formless, | ||
+ | from bliss & pain, | ||
+ | he is freed. | ||
+ | ]! | ||
+ | </ | ||
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+ | When the awakened person emerges from this experience and resumes dealing with the conditions of time and space, it's with a totally new perspective. But even then, he/she still has use for appropriate attention. As Ven. Sariputta notes in [[en: | ||
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