r/streamentry • u/RusyAldo • 2d ago
Insight Mediation, Awareness & Attention
Mediation, Awareness & Attention
The brain creates a simulation of reality.
A delayed simulation based on external data from sense organs and filtered, coloured via EGO into perception. Reality as we know it, probably similar to real reality, but still just a simulation, a best guess, a prediction.
That’s why optical illusions can flick back and forth between different objects, prediction bouncing back and forth, which is relatively rare to see so obviously. That’s why vision appears smooth despite really being stitched together by more discrete points.
Awareness is the space of consciousness within the simulation. The space in which all that can be experienced is experienced.
Subconsciousness is another space where activity feeds into the space of open awareness, which we consider consciousness. But we cannot perceive or experience that directly. Experience, awareness, attention, consciousness. It doesn’t emerge from that layer, but it is derived from and heavily influenced from it. Due to this, we can “Know” things about these layers, discern things about them, sink further away from objects that have been constructed with bias and colouring, and focus more on raw, unfiltered perception.
Conscious experience, however, is just a memory, a delayed simulation of reality, it is literally our mind's best guess at the very recent past. But contains not just objective material predictions like the location of objects in space, but thoughts, feelings, and emotions. All that can be experienced.
We think we are a permanent self, living, thinking, feeling, and reasoning. A never-ending stream of attention. Some think this is the soul, something beyond our mind and body, something more permanent than even our bodies.
But this idea, this concept, is also just an experience; it is something that appears within awareness, within this internal simulation that makes up our reality, this knitting together of memories, life experiences, making it seem like it was one constant stream being experienced by a permanent self.
The same way, the flickering of our eyes looks like a smooth movement across a landscape.
We see smoothness where there is chaos of electrical inputs to the brain, we see a signal from the noise.
In reality, there is just subconscious processing, a conscious space of awareness in which we experience reality, and attention. What we attend to in this moment, an object within that space of awareness.
This movement of attention, this is a moving signal, emerging as a property from the dance of brain chemistry, an idea, sensation, feeling, connection. And the movement of one signal to the next, one object of attention to the next, this is the experience of the present, and all there is. Within that experience of the present, you can have objects which are memories of the past, you can have objects which are anxieties or excitement about potential futures. But these are all appearing as objects within the present moment, that signal which is you at this point in time and space. Your current experience.
There is no permanent outside self; there is just the experience itself, the signal. No one experiencing it, no constant you experiencing all of it, just one experience after the other. Not experience and experiencer, just experience.
This signal is finite, a moment, always replaced by the next, the next object we attend to it within this space of awareness. The current moment, thought will always pass, and the next will come. A never ending river, a stream of consciousness that we cannot pause, we can just thrash in, fight against or flow with.
Attention can be steady on one object, a movie, a person, the breath, or a game of table tennis. You can let all other objects fall away, and be fully attending to one thing, single-pointedness, flow state. Or you can be scattered, attention bouncing between various signals, often searching for what’s best to do or overly worried about an event or events that may come to pass. Feeling the need to prepare but too afraid to make a decision and commit to an action. x
What people fail to realise, along this meditation journey. Is that this one pointedness, this pure focus on the object of meditation, it’s not about finding it, building it, striving for it. It’s not about effort, trying harder, or figuring something out you don’t know. It’s about removing things. It’s about letting go, at least for a while, of the objects that are pulling your attention away. And in doing so, it can focus on just the desired object itself. It’s about letting go, moving away from tension towards effortless, and recognising that this can be done with a bright awareness.
Meditation is about short-term working memory. That through this exercise of having a focus for attention, recognising you have forgotten what that focus, that intent was, recognising you are lost. This is the muscle that you do need to grow, to catch yourself faster, to remember more about the thoughts and journey you took, from input - Maybe a sound, through several thoughts, or signals, to where you finally realised you were lost again. This cause and effect, one thought leading to the next,t all by itself.
This is your ability to see the simulation in action, to glance at what you have spent your whole life constantly forgetting, being overwritten into the smooth story of your life. This is where you can see how repetitive and habitual most thoughts are, how coloured and influenced they are by internal bias and beliefs, warping reality as we know it. Two people can see the same beautiful sunset and have completely different experiences.
With this short term working memory, you can analyse this journey, this being lost in thought, when before your mind would have stitched it together as part of the simulation, as just you living life. But this short term memory lets you analyse it, see it before it’s modified into the story of your life. You can investigate this with curiosity, because what this all points to is something that can be known but not directly experienced, which is the rules of the game itself, the rules of this simulation we know as our reality.
You do this enough times, you do it with curiosity at what is happening, not at frustration of being lost. Soft attempts to discern the underlying rules and not worry about the content itself, and you will come to realise what all traditions eventually arrive at.
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u/minaelena Veganism/Meditation 1d ago
Reality as we know it, probably similar to real reality, but still just a simulation, a best guess, a prediction.
The real reality is unknowable. All we can ever know is our perceptions: seeing, hearing, tasting etc.
The red of the apple does not exist in the real reality.
The color red does not exist independent of an observer, a sentient being endowed with consciousness and the "right" apparatus. The red arises when these conditions are met. The red does not have inherent existence independent of these conditions.
And that is valid for everything that we call real: forms, sounds, tastes etc
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u/RusyAldo 23h ago
We cannot know our perceptions. Our perceptions are electrical signals sent from sense organs to the brain. Just noise if not converted into useful objects within the simulation.
But probably close to base reality as we can play sports and interact with other people without being way off the mark at least within space.
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