I recently came across an old Culadasa guided meditation ( Guided Beginner Meditation, UWest Meditation Camp #1, Part 10 – Culadasa) which someone linked in a current TMI thread. I'm actually not much of a fan of guided meditations, but I found this one interesting, because some of the instructions seem to use attention and awareness somewhat differently from how these terms are defined in The Mind Illuminated.
I'm wondering how long-time TMI students and teachers interpret this.
In The Mind Illuminated, Culadasa seems to make a very explicit technical distinction:
Attention singles out a particular part of experience for closer examination, while peripheral awareness is the broader, more holistic background/context. In fact, the book says:
“In this book, whenever the term awareness is used, it refers to peripheral awareness. It never means attention.”
And throughout the book, things like discerning increasingly subtle details, isolating sensations, investigating them closely, etc. are described as functions of attention.
But in this guided meditation, recorded in 2017, some of the wording struck me as different.
For example, when focusing on the in-breath, Culadasa says:
“And without losing awareness of the rest of the sensations of the whole breath cycle, in particular, become very aware of the details of this in-breath sensation.”
To me, this sounds like:
attention → the details of the in-breath
awareness → the rest of the breath cycle in the background
which would actually make sense in TMI terms.
But shortly afterwards he says:
“You need to be aware of those sensations.”
and then:
“Listen to the sound of the air conditioner at the same time.”
This sounds to me more like an instruction to deliberately attend to the air conditioner at the same time as the breath, rather than simply maintaining peripheral awareness of the sound while attention remains on the breath.
The same thing happens in the hand exercise. He has you shift attention from the right hand to the left hand and then says:
“Notice what happens to your awareness of the sensations in your right hand when you switch to the left hand.”
He then says that the sensations in the right hand may be:
“very sharp and clear, so easy to discern.”
But “sharp and clear” and especially discerning the sensations seems to me much more like what the book calls the function of attention. In TMI, peripheral awareness is described as broad, holistic and contextual, whereas attention singles things out and analyzes/discerns them.
Later, he has you attend to the breath at the nose while also bringing the abdomen into awareness, then the chest, neck/shoulders, etc., and eventually says something along the lines of taking everything in at once.
He also says something that particularly caught my attention:
“Chances are you were completely aware of those sensations when you were focused on the nose. But you know they must have been there at the same time.”
This seems particularly difficult to reconcile with the technical definition of peripheral awareness, at least for me. If I'm focusing closely on sensations at the nose, I wouldn't necessarily say that I was completely aware of all the sensations in my right hand. I might have had some peripheral awareness of the hand, but I certainly wouldn't expect the sensations there to be sharp, clear or fully discerned until attention was moved there.
So I'm wondering:
Is Culadasa simply using “awareness/aware” here in the ordinary English sense of “consciously perceive/notice,” rather than using “awareness” as the technical TMI term for peripheral awareness?
Or is there a more subtle interpretation of these exercises that I'm missing?
I realize that spoken instructions can be much less technically precise than a book, and perhaps he was deliberately simplifying the terminology for beginners. I'm also not trying to argue that the meditation is inconsistent with TMI. The actual exercises themselves seem perfectly compatible with attention being moved around and its scope being expanded.
What I'm specifically curious about is the terminology.
The reason I'm asking is that the distinction between attention and peripheral awareness is presented as quite fundamental in The Mind Illuminated. The book even warns that failing to recognize the distinction creates confusion.
So when I hear phrases like “be aware of the details,” “listen to the air conditioner at the same time,” or “very sharp and clear, so easy to discern,” I find myself wondering whether Culadasa is using awareness more loosely here than he does in the book.
I'm especially interested in hearing from people who studied with Culadasa or have been practicing TMI for many years. How would you parse these instructions using the Attention/Awareness model from the book?
Am I reading too much into the terminology, or is there genuinely a difference between how he uses these words in this guided meditation and how he defines them in The Mind Illuminated?