Practical Practice of Thisness

Consciousness × (Awareness ↔ Attention) = Lived Experience… or simply, Thisness.

OK… How can this formulation on meditation practice help me?

CONSCIOUSNESS means I’m here and having an experience.

ATTENTION is where my focus goes… a conversation, a memory, a fear, a craving, something somebody said yesterday, or some thought that showed up out of nowhere.

AWARENESS is NOTICING what’s happening… including where my attention has gone. That noticing matters.

When we’re operating with fear-based mind, attention can easily get pulled into everything that sucks. With addiction-mind, it can lock onto a craving, resentment, or a need for a quick fix NOW. With insecurity or a negative sense of self, attention gets trained to notice every mistake and every piece of evidence that seems to confirm, “I don’t want to deal with this,” or “I’m screwed!”

The problem isn’t that negative thoughts show up. Most appear automatically. The question is: What happens to my attention once they do?

If I don’t notice where my attention has gone, a fearful thought can become a ‘ruined’ day. A craving can look like a commanding solution. A mistake can become, “shit always goes wrong for me.”

Awareness gives me another possibility.

I can NOTICE: I’m stuck in fear right now."I’m treating this thought like a fact." I’m getting pulled into that old story about myself again.

And that little bit of noticing creates space.

A thought is not automatically a fact. A sensation/feeling is not automatically an instruction. An urge is not automatically something I have to obey.

We may not control what appears in consciousness… but we can become more skilled with where we’re pointing our attention.

That’s where THISNESS becomes practical.

Not escaping the moment… not stopping thought… not try ourselves into a pretzel, to win everybody over.

Just noticing what is here… and asking: Where does my attention need to go now? What’s a response rather than a re-action?

一We Are the Practice Itself

PS... to be nerdy about it...

Supposition: Consciousness is the field in which experience appears. Attention determines what within that field is foregrounded, while awareness recognizes both what is appearing and the movement of attention itself. Their reciprocal interaction constitutes lived experience.

Therefore: what we experience as reality is not consciousness alone, nor attention alone, but the dynamic relationship between awareness and attention within consciousness.

In Zen terms, this is Thisness: experience as it is actually occurring before conceptual interpretation, judgment, or narrative elaboration.