Greetings, Friendlies. :)
Alan Watts differentiates between what he calls “spotlight” and “floodlight” attention (he sometimes uses the terms “awareness” or “consciousness”. Standardizing to “attention” for now). Spotlight attention, just like it sounds, is a narrow beam of intense attention. It picks things out. You can imagine standing in a dark room using a bright, narrow beam of light to see first this thing, then that thing. The experience is linear. Spotlight attention examines details closely but with a restricted gaze. It is highly selective. It picks out features in the environment.
Floodlight attention on the other hand is less intense but very broad. It illuminates the entire field. It does not separate out “things”. It sees holistically; it recognizes relationship.
In The Tao of Philosophy Watts says, “…our culture has taught us to specialize in spotlight [attention], and to identify ourselves with that form of [attention] alone. ‘I am my spotlight [attention]…; that is my ego; that is me.'” [1]
“[We] have learned to specialize in [spotlight] attention. Even if a person’s attention span is short, they are, as it were, wavering their spotlight over many fields. The price which we pay for specialization in [spotlight] attention is ignorance of everything outside its field. I would rather say “ignore-ance,” than ignorance, because if you concentrate on a figure, you tend to ignore the background…”.
“…you tend, therefore, to see the world in a disintegrated aspect. You take separate things and events seriously, imagining that these really do exist” as independent, inherently existing things.
Okay, Alan, So What?
“As a result we select from the total input to our senses only a very small fraction of our perception” when in fact, “our physical world is a system of inseparable differences. Everything exists with everything else”. [2]
Watts talks about the world as made up of “wiggles”. Our spotlight attention “…is essentially calculus”. That is, it takes this world made of intractable wiggles, continuous curves, and segments it out into packagable, calculable chunks. That’s fine, but as Watts says elsewhere, we make too much of it. “This procedure is so successful … [that we] come to imagine that the physical world really is discreet, discontinuous, full of points…”
Over the next few posts we’ll look at hemisphere lateralization, where the two attentions dwell in the brain, and how all this may enrich our dhammic understanding of being-in-the-world.
With friendliness!
***
[1] “Myth of Myself”. 1965?
[2] Side note, having read Watts years earlier I was struck to learn that the Pāli word Viññāṇa, often translated “consciousness”, etymologically means “Divided Knowing”.
Dharma PhD 