To begin to understand what is a desirable way for us to carry on, first we'll need to look at what we don't want.
As a taster, I'll briefly explain here what it was that I scribbled on that napkin. In the diagram above we can see the four dissociations of attention. When we engage the world indirectly we do so through one or more of the these filters: Past, Future, Elsewhere or Otherminds. It's common to hear someone say, with a startle, something along the lines of "sorry, I was miles away then". They may have been making a shopping list for later, or remembering an event from the past, they may even have been having a conversation inside their head - it's at these unmindful times that we lose our connection with where we are and what we are doing.
Habitual and extreme trips out of the present moment can breed depression, anxiety, discontent or paranoia - or any combination. The future causes anxiety, the past either regret or nostalgia and so on. It's not right or wrong, good or bad per se to drift off away from the world and inside our minds like this. But all too often we can find ourselves drifting there unnecessarily and causing ourselves distress and disconnection with the only true reality - what is happening right HERE, right NOW.
So thinking now 'where' we'd like to find our attention directed, let us have a look at this handsome chap, below.
He's demonstrating the channels through which we connect to the world, and they are of course our five senses. It's important, and I won't go into the techniques here, to fully 'get into' each sense with as little interpretation or projection as possible. If, for example, I eat a meal I can go through analyzing and labeling all the tastes until I get to one, then I say - "I'm not sure what that is" so I zero in on the taste. At this stage I'm fully experiencing a largely uninterrupted (and somewhat timeless) moment. Then I get it! That's Caraway seed, and at that point I begin the engage with the taste indirectly once again - and in doing so I literally lose some of my world (that is to say - lose some of my connection with the world). How would it be if we could bring more of this uninterrupted experience to the world and bring back a more childlike (but not necessarily childish) perception and wonder about our surroundings?
