There are two modes of experience, which we could call attention and awareness.
Attention is a little like the fovea (the centre of the visual field): it can only include one thing at a time, but it’s highly detailed, whereas awareness is a little like peripheral vision: it creates a general impression and includes a huge amount of information all at once.
Attention is very familiar to most people; everybody knows what it feels like. We usually pay attention in order to understand or use the things we’re attending to. When we use attention to know things, they appear static, decontextualised, fixed, defined. Attention is more narrow, focused, conceptual, and goal-oriented. You’re paying attention to these words right now!
Awareness, on the other hand, is open, spacious, holistic, and non-conceptual.
We are aware of the forest we’re walking in, and that it’s beautiful, without needing to pay attention to precisely what individual features make us feel precisely which moment to moment feelings. Indeed if we were to scan with attention to try to pin down where the beauty is coming from, we’d probably lose a sense of that ineffable sacredness and just get stuck in thoughts or analysis.
Things can arise in consciousness and be known through attention or awareness; they are different modes of knowing.
When hearing about this distinction, attention seems so sure and clear, and awareness feels indistinct and uncertain. It can seem less certain whether we’re actually knowing with awareness at all because we think that knowing only counts if we do it with attention. People often try to pay attention to awareness to make it clearer, which is like trying to look directly at your peripheral vision to see more clearly what it’s like; it misses the point that these are two different kinds of knowing.
But let go of any effort for a moment; let go of trying to conceptually understand, pay attention to, use, make sense of, or make clearer the contents of awareness. Right now, as your attention is on these words, you are still effortlessly aware of other things. In fact your awareness is replete, with the sounds around you, where you are, your degree of comfort, degree of contentment, your active goals, your energetic and emotional state, if anything around you requires a response, and all kinds of other stuff. Awareness provides a holistic sense of how we are, and the context within which attention can be recruited to what’s relevant.
Attention and awareness are both always present, but one can dominate - and for most of us it’s usually attention that dominates! For example, if we’re walking in a forest, there’s a lot of potential beauty in that experience, but if we’re strongly attention-dominated; lost in thought, or paying close attention to something in particular, we may lose the openness to that sense of beauty.
Why is this relevant to metta practice?
Well, so far we’ve been emphasising what to do with attention. The scaffolding practice instructions are very attention-oriented. But that narrow, fixed, overly-conceptual mode isn’t always the most supportive thing for metta. Probably you’ve noticed this already!
In the beginning, clear instructions for attention are necessary, but more and more, as you become familiar with the felt sense, you can allow attention to be lighter, more receptive, and simply hold space with an open awareness.
Another way of wording this which points to the same thing is to use a more receptive mode of attention, rather than a probing mode. A probing mode of attention points directly and specifically to a defined thing, like a laser pointer. Whereas a receptive mode of attention is open to whatever might arise, like a satellite dish, or a radar.
Bringing a light, receptive, open kind of attention, without agenda or forcing, allows much more room for awareness. You might have got a sense of this in the sounding a gong vs. listening to the sound practice in the last section, which pointed to the same thing.
Attention tries to grab metta, as though it were something separate from you, whereas when you’re relating more with awareness, there’s a sense of being metta. Your awareness and whole being is coloured with metta. This is part of the progression towards absorption and stability.
There’s a balance between attention and awareness, and some skillful use of attention is often needed; you of course need some degree of attention to engage with any instructions at all! There’s not a right or wrong about this; experiment with that balance playfully. The trick is to be aware of the spectrum, to get a feel for what’s supportive, and not to get stuck in an overly attention-oriented mode.
A little more detail and some playful experiments with attention and awareness here.