Cultivating Wise Attention: The Gift of Awareness and the Path of Practice

Cultivating wise attention is about bringing an attitude of interest and investigation to the activity of the mind. As a number of teachers suggest, we can ask, "What is my attitude?" Or, "How am I perceiving this experience?" There may be unwholesome mental states we are often only dimly aware of: mild disinterest or boredom; niggling doubt or uncertainty; habitual judgment or comparing mind; even lingering envy or jealousy. Often these background mental states are so subtle and so familiar that we don't notice them. Yet by allowing them to remain half-hidden, unexposed in the shadowy recesses of our mind, we are giving them permission to condition how we see the world.

At the same time, there may be wholesome mental states that we don't recognize, and therefore we miss the opportunity to cultivate them and bring them to fullness.

The first two verses of the Dhammapada express the way in which the mind generates our experience:

Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are all mind-wrought. If with an impure mind a person speaks or acts suffering follows him like the wheel that follows the foot of the ox.

Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are all mind-wrought. If with a pure mind a person speaks or acts happiness follows him like his never-departing shadow.

Cultivating wise attention is an invitation to shine the light of our awareness not just on what's happening in the physical realm of experience, but on our reaction to it and the subtle ways we construct an identity through these reactions.