It seems generally hard to get a handle on words like perception, attention and sensation, and especially so in nonduality: When paying attention who is the subject doing the attending, and what is the object that is being attended to?
Here’s Sam Harris from his Waking Up app on how choice happens:
When we focus our attention on consciousness, who is it that is being attentive? In other words, which faculty of mind can set the focus to the experience of consciousness? Well, like many of these kinds of questions, much of this seems backwards from the experience of just noticing how consciousness is. It’s not that you are focusing your attention on consciousness, you are simply ceasing to be distracted, […] you’re ceasing to be identified with thought and with attention itself.
The feeling that you can direct your attention is part of this undercurrent of thinking that you’re not noticing […] there’s simply consciousness … already. Everything is appearing on its own, including acts of attention. And the truth is you don’t even have to be attentive, you simply have to no longer be distracted, you’re ceasing to do something, you’re not doing something, the sense that you’re doing something is more distraction.
– Sam Harris
I find this very useful indeed. That paying attention is a recognition of distraction and that if I have the thought (one of many) “pay attention to the weight of my arm” the flow of distracted thought ceases and there is simply arm’s weight being sensed.
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