Reading Highlight

Practice: Bare attention If you are not already very familiar with working in this way, practise periods of bringing and sustaining, as much as you can, a bare attention to experience – trying to meet experience as it presents itself, as free as possible from the veils of concepts, interpretations, and abstractions. Make sure you experiment with all the sense doors, both when there is obviously dukkha present and also when there is not, and both in and out of formal meditation in different situations – for example with the sensations of sitting (in a chair, in a car, or on a bus), of the hands in cold or hot water, of the body in the shower; with the sounds around you, wherever you are; with various smells and tastes of different things. The individual possibilities are endless. What do you notice happens when you sustain bare attention on an experience? Is it possible to see that at least some level of fabrication cannot be supported if the attention is more ‘bare’? How do you notice this? What happens to any dukkha present? What else do you notice?