When space forgets to be a container

On effortless attention and incoherence

Something curious has happened to my attention since the Yab-Yum nyam described in Sex is not a metaphor. Now that the space is open ended, there is no direction to the attention. In this way there is no need for the effort of holding it in place, or following something.

In the The Mind Illuminated (I learnt a lot about the attention from this book), the effortlessness is connected to the cohesion between the sub-minds. Put simply, if all sub-minds agree on following the breath, then attention follows it effortlessly. Notice how in this picture the attention is assumed to be focused on one thing and one thing only and the moments of attention neatly follow each other. That is you attend to your breath, then to the itch on your bum, and then back to your breath (minor distraction).

But what if time and space are open-ended? What if itching and breathing are not temporally or spatially related? If the effort of maintaining the spatial relationship between the phenomena is relaxed, there is no tension or effort in the attention. It simply happens. It also doesn’t require a particular object or fixation.

This tolerance to incoherence allows the senses to resonate. A bright large eye is in front of my eyes and at the same time in my throat is vibrating with the sound of silence. The resonance with sound makes imagery in the mind’s eye crisper, more stable and large. The experience is disorienting and synesthetic. It also makes it easier to work with intensity, as there are a lot more ways the energy could dissipate, move or transform.

I have described a very similar experience in my sit report on Nyam Nyid. The main difference back then was that this groundless experience would arise as if under a microscope, when I would drill into a sensation. The show is bigger now, it is not under the microscope it is everywhere. I drop into it during my daily activities and as I write these lines. It is as if the experience I had back then laid an egg or pulled out a bottom jenga piece and now the whole tower is coming down. There is a distinct taste of insanity, as the incoherence is spreading to personal and relational experiences. My identity demons come all at once, take each other apart and re-assemble into Frankenstein monsters that keep recycling each other’s bits.