The Mind Illuminated: A Complete Meditation Guide Integrating Buddhist Wisdom and Brain Science for Greater Mindfulness

by Culadasa (John Yates)

strengthen your ability to intentionally direct attention. But that’s only half the work. After directing your attention to the breath, you’ll soon find that your mind has wandered off. For this reason, you also have to learn how to sustain attention.5 This means you want to stop all spontaneous movements of attention. Now, sustaining attention is trickier than directing attention. Why? It’s possible to voluntarily direct attention. However, the part of the mind that sustains attention for more than a few moments works entirely unconsciously. We can’t use our will to control how long we remain focused on one thing. Instead, an unconscious process weighs the importance of what we’re focusing on against other possible objects of attention. If an object is important or interesting enough, attention remains stable. If something else is judged more important or interesting, then the balance tips, and attention moves elsewhere.6