Open Participatory Spirituality 01 - Becoming context aware
Awareness is comparable to our eye's focus. Just like the eye wanders so awareness does. We know that humanimals and many other animals do not look at a scene in fixed steadiness; instead, the eyes move around, locating interesting parts of the scene and building up a mental, three-dimensional image corresponding to the scene. When we look at what surrounds us, when we read or watch a screen, our eyes make jerky or saccadic movements and stop, moving very quickly between each stop. That's because the central part of our retina, the innermost, light-sensitive tissue of the eye which provides the high-resolution portion of what we see is very small, only about 1–2 degrees of vision, but it plays a critical role in resolving objects. By saccadic rapid movements the eye serves the brain with many high resolution focused areas that we then "see" as a whole.
It seems to me that our awareness is comparable to this. It jumps around like the eye. And then we pick up or focus on the most interesting "thing", on whatever catches our awareness. And if we take our whole awareness to be similar to the retina than our conscious awareness, like the eye's fovea (which is what the high resolution part of the retina is called) gives us a high resolution thought, feeling, intuition, image or whatever else we focus our consciousness on. "Pay attention" is the same as saying, focus your consciousness on this particular area of the whole of your awareness.
We could call the whole of what we can potentially have conscious awareness of, what we can focus on, as "context." The context is akin to the environment our eyes can see only it is very, very much larger. It includes what we see, hear, sense, smell, taste, and feel emotionally plus all the psychological, psychic, logic, imaginary, remembered experiences and a whole lot more, anything that is potentially open to our awareness. And then there is the whole range of culture, economy, politics and so on that can sorely occupy awareness. Not even to mention love and hate...
We can only be selectively aware. To use a very modern metaphor, the bandwidth of consciousness is limited even if you take "cosmic consciousness" to be utterly real, like I do. It's just that the resolution of cosmic consciousness is rather low, it doesn't allow for much more than an ecstatic sense of absolute unity, for instance. When being cosmically conscious you cannot really focus on anything in particular, like the ant crawling up your leg or a US-President lying about every little thing he ever did.
Knowing this you could experiment a bit with "unfocusing." You may want to start with sight. Try aiming your attention at the unfocused areas of the visual field. Playing around with that can be entertaining while you learn a lot about your present limits and about how hard it is to let go of focus and what you focus on. Once you've mastered that to your personal satisfaction it becomes easier to defocus conscious awareness and allow the context more prominence in awareness.
(The first of a number of fragments exploring OPS)