Treasure of the Sierra Mente
                                            or
               Secret Map to the Source of Attention


These are a series of simple exercises to locate the source of attention.  After trying the Clock Exercise you may be interested in better locating the source of your attention.

This is a big thing.  It could be said that all awakening including, if we believe in such a thing, “supreme enlightenment” or “merging with reality” can be considered as merely more accurately locating the source of our attention.  This is a moving target and the one term “source of our attention” means different things to people at different stages of the path.

Although simple these exercises can be challenging.   If they were not, everyone would already be enlightened.  Instead, everyone already believes they know completely the source of their attention and where it is.  It is their familiar feeling of  “I”.   People are not even aware they have a feeling of being an “I”, any more than they are usually aware of their breathing. Just as people can learn to become aware of their breath and even to modify it, so they can become aware of their feeling of “I” and learn to modify it in a healthy, healing way leading to awakening.

These exercises approach awakening our awareness of our feeling of being “I” through the sense of sight.

Exercise 1:

Look around you.  You see things (if your eyes are open, which is recommended). These things surround your body.

That was easy, wasn’t it?

Exercise 2:

Examine this photograph of a long hallway.





Notice how some objects seem far away and some seem close.  In this case, objects around the edge seem very close, and in the center seem very far.  This is a psychological effect of the visual centers In our brain that process the image.  We know in fact that this is a photograph and every object in it is at the same distance, the distance of our eyes from our display device. 

There are numerous perspective cues that our brain analyzes to report to our frontal cortex how far each object is. Artists study these cues to paint flat pictures that look three dimensional.  When done very well, in the right type of presentation, it can momentarily fool people into thinking it is real and not just a painting.  This is called “Trompe-l'œil” meaning fool the eye.  It is a deception or illusion of 3-D space.

Notice that you know exactly where you are in the illusory space of the photograph.  You are standing in the middle of an intersection of two hallways, facing down one of them. The cues in the photo tell you your exact location, in the imaginary space of the photograph, with respect to all the objects in the photograph.  For example, you are located about six feet away from the door on the left, in the south-east direction if the center corridor is leading north.

In reality you are about two feet directly in front of the brown colored space on the photograph that represents a door.

When you are clear about the four things to notice while looking at the photograph, again look around yourself at the space you are in.  Notice the perspective cues  like the ones in the photograph. Unlike the photography, you also now have stereoscopic vision,  The difference in location of your two eyes allow your brain to compute distances to objects without any of those perspective cues.  This is a strong effect at up to 1.2 meters and helps a lot in distance estimate by our brain up to 20 meters.  You can remove stereoscopic cues by closing one eye.   Notice the difference in how the scene, the place where you are, appears when you close one eye.  The vivid three dimensionality disappears, although you still know how far each object is from you.

Exercise   3:

Now hold your hand up in front of your face and point outward like this:




You are pointing away from yourself at distant end of the long corridor.  You can try pointing at different objects in your environment.  When you direct your gaze in those directions, you see the objects that have color, shape and distance.

Exercise 4:

Now reverse your hand and point toward your face:

You are now pointing directly at the exact spot where the observer appears to be located.   You know you are pointing at your eyes. For the purpose of this exercise though we want to stick to what appears to our vision, without including our mental model of the world.

In our visual field the if we can direct our attention in the direction the finger is pointing, we might find nothing there.  There may appear to be a space that dark or empty, with no colors or shapes.  We appear to be located there looking out at the world through our eyes.

It is not so easy to stop relying on our mental model of the world.  As long we do that our attention is not on our actual direct perceptions but on how they are interpreted by our ideas about the world. Then the empty dark space is replaced by an imaginary image of our head, as if we were looking at ourselves from outside.  We know our head is there.  And it of course it is there.  But for this exercise, we want to examine strictly what is appearing from our direct perception.  This is called phenomenology in Western philosophy and Vipassana meditation in Buddhism.

Phenomenologically we do not see our source of attention in this dark empty space. It does not appear as having a color or a shape.  It itself is invisible.  It is not only invisible- there is no perceptual data about it at all. We know it is where the source of our attention is in the same way we know where we are standing in the first photograph.  All the visual cues tell us that is where we, the observer, are located.

This mysterious empty space behind our eyes, if we find it, can be taken provisionally as the source of our attention. If not, we can take our eyes or our head as the source of our attention for the purpose of the Clock Exercise.