Attention and Awareness


Other schools and teachers use the words consciousness, awareness and attention in different ways. We need to be sure we are understanding these terms in the same way.

In this system, ‘consciousness’, ‘awareness’ and ‘attention’ are seen as a trinity, three faces of one thing.  Pure Consciousness IS everything but we experience it in three ways.

Consciousness itself is the power, the light, which runs the whole show and gives consciousness/intelligence to all our organs and cells (and everything else in the universe), whether we notice it or not.  Consciousness lights up the screen of the mind which is always playing the movie produced by the sum of the impressions presented by the two hemispheres of the forebrain. Pure Consciousness, unconditioned by any material manifestation, is unknowable except to itself. (See here)

Attention is purposeful, focused, ‘exclusive’ consciousness, used as a grasping tool to discern and examine objects and concepts, mainly left/verbal hemisphere — ‘personality’.

Awareness is ‘inclusive’ consciousness, ever-widening in stillness, mainly right hemisphere — body, senses and ‘essence’. Widening awareness reveals that Consciousness and universal Love are One.

Each hemisphere employs both attention and awareness but in modern cultures the left hemisphere preoccupation with logic, analysis and verbal expression usually predominates so that the natural balance and harmony is lost. (See here)

When attention and awareness become still and fold back into pure consciousness, ‘without any object’, then there is ONE, beyond any words or concepts.

‘There is only one consciousness. The levels are levels
of impediment to that consciousness. Everything is that
consciousness. That is what we have to feel and know.’
Francis Roles.