Good question! Your experience is entirely normative.
What’s happening is that your attention is rapidly shifting between the words you are typing and the sensations your shoulders being in pain. You are not paying attention to both of them at the same time. However, the movement of your attention is too rapid for you to percieve. If you strengthen your observational skills sufficiently, then you notice that your attention is only at one place at a time.
As an example, here is a vipassana practice Daniel Ingram writes about in his book MCTB2.
In one of these exercises, I sit quietly in a quiet place, close my eyes, put my right hand on my
right knee, my left hand on my left knee, and concentrate just on my two index fingers. Basic
dharma theory tells me that it is not possible to perceive both fingers simultaneously; so, with
this knowledge, I try to see in each instant which one of the two fingers’ physical sensations
are being perceived at any given moment. Once the mind has sped up a bit and become more
stable, I try to perceive the arising and passing of each of these sensations. I may do this for half
an hour or an hour, just staying with the sensations in my two fingers and perceiving when each
sensation is and is not there.
Seems coherent, my skeptical brain next asks “how do we know you are learning to distinguish fine-grained attention, instead of confabulating a new type of thing?”
Good question! Your experience is entirely normative.
Also I’m not 100% sure what “normative” means in this context.
I’m using “normative” to refer to what consciousness is like for the majority of people who don’t do intense meditation.
[H]ow do we know you are learning to distinguish fine-grained attention, instead of confabulating a new type of thing?
Trial and error. This belief pays rent. If you want to cultivate an altered state of consciousness through meditation, then you have to stabilize your attention on a single target. Stabilizing your attention on multiple targets doesn’t work. If your attention really could perceive multiple sensations at the same time, then it should be possible to cultivate altered states of consciousness by holding multiple targets in your attention at the same time, but nobody does that.
I was recently coaching a guy who had been trying to do insight meditation for years and was failing for this exact reason. One of the things he was doing wrong was he trying to pay attention to the sensation of the breath and <other sensation> in the same instant, not realizing that this is incompatible with access concentration.
Good question! Your experience is entirely normative.
What’s happening is that your attention is rapidly shifting between the words you are typing and the sensations your shoulders being in pain. You are not paying attention to both of them at the same time. However, the movement of your attention is too rapid for you to percieve. If you strengthen your observational skills sufficiently, then you notice that your attention is only at one place at a time.
As an example, here is a vipassana practice Daniel Ingram writes about in his book MCTB2.
Seems coherent, my skeptical brain next asks “how do we know you are learning to distinguish fine-grained attention, instead of confabulating a new type of thing?”
Also I’m not 100% sure what “normative” means in this context.
I’m using “normative” to refer to what consciousness is like for the majority of people who don’t do intense meditation.
Trial and error. This belief pays rent. If you want to cultivate an altered state of consciousness through meditation, then you have to stabilize your attention on a single target. Stabilizing your attention on multiple targets doesn’t work. If your attention really could perceive multiple sensations at the same time, then it should be possible to cultivate altered states of consciousness by holding multiple targets in your attention at the same time, but nobody does that.
I was recently coaching a guy who had been trying to do insight meditation for years and was failing for this exact reason. One of the things he was doing wrong was he trying to pay attention to the sensation of the breath and <other sensation> in the same instant, not realizing that this is incompatible with access concentration.