| growth | epistemic status |
|---|---|
| 🌱 first draft | ✅ confident that paying attention skilfully needs to be mastered |
You get what you pay
forattention toBuddha taught that yoniso manasikara (directing our attention at the origin of things) would lead inexorably toward awakening.
The Pali “yoni” means origin or womb, and I suppose being attentive to the origin of things comes along with knowing their arising, their temporary dwelling, then cessation. So that wise attention might be awareness that as every thing rises, dwells, then ceases. impermanence anicca
One of the Hillside Hermitage monks, Anīgha has it that yoniso manasikara and hearing the dhamma are two of factors of stream entry, for the arising of right view.
Another Hillside Hermitage monk, Thero says the ‘womb’ is the background against which we foreground our meditation object but our attention should be diffuse, allowing one to not-observe[^3] that background or periphery as the origin of our experience, and that this is the practice of yoniso manasikara.
Anīgha’s essay cites teachings that yoniso manasikara is a necessary cause for ‘destruction of the taints’, for complete liberation, and is itself a cause of ‘great good’, etc., and further, offers to helps [emphasis added]
come closer to what the Buddha meant with the term in a way that is consistent with its etymology and all its occurrences in the texts, and most importantly, tells us how and why it is the one thing responsible for the arising of those states conducive to freedom from suffering, and how we can practically go about developing it it.
A teaching couldn’t be more fundamental than this, so it’s a very important idea and practice to understand, not misunderstand.
Thero continues describing the practice, that by allowing an arisen experience to be, attention of the background/periphery manifests indirectly, like falling asleep happens indirectly when one directs the mind away from entanglement with itself, toward an anchor in the body or its shifting sensations. Falling asleep results indirectly from efforts directed elsewise than sleeping.
I think I intuited this periphery-as-object practice already, taking up the space for experience as my kamatana, and perhaps it’s just open awareness or shikantaza(?) and zazen. I think of it as something like reclining in the void because one becomes relaxed when just inhabiting this space without taking up every suggestion of an object and not clinging too hard to a single object. It’s not a state I can enter right away, but I know enough about its causes and conditions to have confidence that such an inhabitance is possible on a more consistent basis.
Such an inhabitance is alluded to by Frankl as well, in his idea of the space between stimulus and response.
There is a trend among contemporary meditation circles to teach one-pointed focus on the foreground object, but this practice precludes awareness of the background, of the origin of experience.
Should I say 🎯 origin of our experience one more time? I will say again how thrilled I am to have gained some understanding of yoniso manasikara through this process. It happens that the practice of wise attention is a key feature of the path leading to the realisation of stream-entry, so that’s cool!