My main teacher Shinzen Young defines mindfulness as “concentration, clarity, and equanimity”. A big part of the “clarity” aspect of mindfulness is experiencing what we are aware of in higher detail. We can intentionally sensitize our awareness so that we notice more nuanced texture and specifics it any phenomena, seeing it in higher resolution and with greater granularity. And one way to understand this change is through a metaphor of a topographical picture of a mountain range coming into better focus, with more crispness as to its specifics.
When we don’t pay attention in life, our experience of things is often binary. For example, we might be working on a computer, immersed in what we are doing, and then suddenly we are aware that we are hungry. When this happens, “hungry” went from zero to one. And maybe a few minutes later, we are reabsorbed into our project, and have forgotten about our hunger. Our awareness has goes from one back to zero. This is represented in the graphic above by the colorful castle battlement. Other examples: we hear the sound of the helicopter flying above, or we don’t. We are feeling guilty, or we are not. It’s a one or a zero.
When we meditate on how our body feels while we are hungry and give that our full attention, however, we start to notice that the feeling has many gradients between zero and one. Our experience of being hungry may start as a tiny little vibrating tickle, then flare up, abate again, and then rise again, dancing around dynamically the whole time. When we pay closer attention, hunger shows up as a wave that rises and falls with infinite nuance, like the rising and falling of a mountain range.
All phenomena that we pay attention to can be perceived in this clearer, more distinct way – the rising and falling of vibrations of pain in an aching joint, the rising and falling of verbal analytical thinking in our mind’s mental space, the coming and goings of the sound of traffic on a freeway, or the brightness and darkness of what we see as we scan our vision across a room. As the clarity of our perception deepens, we tune in more in the subtleties and texture of the natural waves of coming and going, the ebb and flow of experience. As our mind becomes like a microscope that was out of focus but now is in focus, we more deeply richly perceive subtle shift and changes, the real-life fluxing and pulsating of things.
In the graphic above, as we grow more mindful, and as our attention becomes more and more precise, our perception of things travels up through the numbers. We grow more aware with exacting crispness of the precise activation levels of body sensations, thoughts, emotions, sounds, sights, and all else. When we do, our experience becomes more vivid, alive, rich, full of vitality, interesting, captivating, fulfilling, and enjoyable, and we realize why it is so valuable to develop our sense of mindful “clarity”.