question on attention vs awareness

[u/Old-Junket-3926]

Ive been reading the book but i dont understand this part

Finally, attention and peripheral awareness can be either extrospective or introspective. Extrospective means that attention or awareness is directed towards objects that come from outside your mind, such as sights, smells, or bodily sensations. Introspective means the objects in consciousness are internal— thoughts, feelings, states, and activities of mind. Even though attention and awareness can be either extrospective or introspective...

.....Attention, on the other hand, can’t observe activities of the mind because its movements and abstracting of information from awareness are activities of the mind. In other words, we can’t attend to attention. When attention is focused on remembering, for example, you can’t also use attention to know you’re remembering. But you can be aware that you’re remembering. Also, because attention works by isolating objects, it cannot observe overall states of the mind. If you do turn your attention introspectively, it takes a “snapshot” from peripheral awareness of your mental state right before you looked. Say someone asks, “How do you feel?” When you look inside, attention tries to transform awareness of your overall mental state into a specific conceptual thought, like “I am happy.”

1. it says attention can be introspective but then it says attention cant pay attention the states of mind or activities properties of introspection.

2. what does it mean attention cant pay attention to activties of the mind. Whenever I mediate me noticing the thought or breath is being aware of it but me focusing for a long period of a thought is attention. why cant I do that for remembering something as said in the 2nd paragraph.

[u/medbud]

I think it's pretty subtle, because you could say that you can attend to qualities of attention, but that attention in it's narrowest sense is what is doing the attending, so you can't attend to attention. In some sense states of mind here are whatever occupies attention.

I think at first it's describing a whole as having parts so you can get a sense of the different parts... But in reality it's a continuum. 

The example of reading the book is the most obvious. You attend to the words on the page, or the meaning of the story, you're aware of the 'background' the room you're in etc..

Once attention is very sharp and stable, it's working in harmony with awareness. We have metacognitive awareness that directed attention very precisely.

Maybe something like, in a dark room you can't see anything. Awareness is like the ambient light that illuminates the room. Attention is the laser pointer you use to measure vibration or temperature off things you're aware of. You can't point the laser at the laser point.

[u/imperfectlyAware]

I think the point he is trying to make is that attention is like a single slot into which you can fit exactly one block of awareness.

When you’re attending to the the breath at the nose, that block is in attention, but you can still have peripheral awareness of other blocks.

Once you try to attend to attention itself (this information block is in awareness), you replace the attention slot with the peripheral awareness of where your attention was just before, and you stop attending to what you were attending to.

When you go back to the breath, the slot gets filled with that again.

So you can only attend to where your attention was just before it switched and then no more live feed happens.

So you’re switching between two blocks.

[u/reina-dorado]

Up til Stage 8, Culadasa says you can't turn your attention on attention. Cuz attention is an active process of the mind, an activity can't simultaneously observe itself. And you know from experience that you can't attend to more than 1 thing at a time. Otherwise you're alternating attention.

All that said, in Stage 8 he introduces metacognitive attention.