Poster Boy Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> " As you say, the changes are very subtle and if
> the attention is not then it will interfere with
> those changes. If this happens then the process in
> its "natural state" cannnot be observed anymore
> (because of said interference). The only solution
> for this problem is "upgrading" the attention
> until it reaches the same subtlety as the natural
> behaving process. This takes a lot of excercising
> and of "failures". "
>
> Can you provide an example of what you see as a
> useful exercise, in this regard?

Hi Mark,

One very simple example would be observing your own breathing process.
But again: maybe not that simple. If you just try it right now maybe you will notice that before you tried you were completely unaware of your breathing. It went on automatically by itself. What is needed here is to observe the unawareness itself; leave it as it is and then, very quietly, “sneak up on it” like a “sly man” would.
A “success” would be when you “fail”: then you would notice that your breathing changes under the influence of your attempt (I put those words in quotation marks to emphasize their relativity). The breathing process is initiated by the instinctive and moving functions of the physical body and those functions work with very subtle energies (hardly known to western science). Untrained attention (sometimes called “one dimensional attention”) works with much cruder energies mostly derived from the thinking function. This function is much too slow to catch up with the speed of the instinctive and moving functions.
So all in all the key expression would be: “the quality of your attention limits (or, on the other hand, deepens) your perception”.

When I was writing these lines a lot more came to my mind, but it already seems a bit like a "side-topic" of Eddy's original post, so for the moment this seems enough. It was a pleasure writing this post,

Naveen.