While checking in, you may do a new activity called investigating and observing.
It's a development of the checking in technique that allows you to investigate some of the distinctions between attention and awareness.
To begin, take a moment to stop and focus your attention on your visual field.
- Shift your attention away from closer things and toward those that are further away.
- To keep your visual field fixed, try not to move your eyes too much—just change your focus.
- Observe how certain things are clearly viewed depending on where your eyes are focused, while others are out of focus and indistinct.
- Now move your eyes about and notice how things in the visual field's center are always crisp, while those in the periphery are less so.
Next, concentrate on a single item and notice how, as you study it more closely, other things in your visual area become less apparent.
- Compare how it feels to gaze at a tree vs a branch or a leaf, or a finger against a hand, for example.
- Take a new approach to these tasks. Develop a feeling of wonder, as if you're discovering the world for the first time.
- Much of what you see while looking at your visual field is due to the nature of vision and the eye's unique structure: it's a movable organ with a lens that can change focus.
- Hearing, on the other hand, is a whole other matter.
- The ear does not have the same versatility as the eye.
Despite the fact that these organs have distinct characteristics, they both function via attention and awareness. As a result, repeat the practice using your hearing sense.
- This enables you to distinguish which impacts are attributable to the organ's anatomy, such as eye vs. ear, and which are due to attention and peripheral awareness's various characteristics.
- Observe how the more you concentrate on one sound, the less clear other sounds become.
- Examine how the perception of local sounds varies as you listen for distant sounds, and how the perception of distant sounds changes when you listen for nearby sounds, and vice versa.
- Pay attention to a very faint sound before moving on to a stronger one.
You may also have an internal ringing, whining, or buzzing sound in your ears; pay attention to how your perception of exterior noises changes as you listen to internal ones, and vice versa.
- Next, listen to ambient noises to see if you can tell the difference between hearing and recognizing a sound.
- Take note of how the identifying process happens nearly instantly.
The source, direction, and your thoughts about what's out there in your surroundings are all part of a complex analytical process that leads to identification via inference and deduction.
- Other noises, which are more in the type of "noise," are not as readily identified and classified. Separately from recognizing sounds, practice hearing them.
- Start with the "noises," then go to sounds that are more readily recognized.
- When you have the opportunity, try to just “be” with a sound rather than analyzing it.
Discover the link between the sound that arises from stimulation of the sense organ, which is the real experience, and all the labels, ideas, and conclusions that the mind has tagged on.
- Rep the workout with different bodily sensations.
- This is comparable to the body scanning technique used in Stage 5 sitting.
- Temperature, pressure, touch, movement, and vibration are all modalities of experience that your attention may move, concentrate in on, expand, and differentiate.
- You may also investigate the feelings associated with the form, position, and placement of various bodily components, as well as the inner sense of the body as something stretched in space.
The distinctions between focus and peripheral awareness are highlighted in all of these sensory observations and studies.
- As you investigate these distinctions, you may be surprised to learn what really happens when your focus shifts from one subject to another.
- Take up Step-by-Step walking once again to discover the solution, but this time at a quicker, more automatic pace.
- Observe how various things come and go as objects of awareness, and how your attention changes naturally from one feeling to the next as they appear and go.
- Compare this to your eye movements while you walk, but don't worry about what's changing or attempt to figure out what's going on conceptually.
- Instead, allow direct observation and experience to lead to an intuitive understanding.
This last practice improves introspective awareness and attention control, as well as the habit of exploring without analyzing.
