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.
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.