The Three Factors of Awareness
Meditation can be a funny thing. It seems that only when we try to quiet the mind, does the volume button of our brain crank up to its highest volume.
These thoughts are often disruptive and useless, but every now and then, a glimmering diamond is unvieled in the silent space. For me, a 10-day silent meditation retreat in rural Mexico ended up illuminating a fascinating model of the human mind.
I call it the Three Factors of Awareness.
Here’s the premise: at any given point in waking consciousness, your experience of life can be separated into three categories (three factors) — what you are focusing on, how much you are focusing on it, and the quality of that focus. Let’s break them down:
1. What you are focusing on: While all three factors are constantly in flux, this one tends to be the most unstable. Anyone who has meditated has had the experience of trying to focus on the breath, getting distracted by a nearby sound, mind floating to distant memories, getting distracted again by an itchy nose, thinking about what’s for lunch, wondering how much time is left in this disastrous meditation, and eventually realizing “oh crap, my mind has been wandering the entire time.”
The flow of our mind in meditation is symbolic of how our mind works in every day life. Experts estimate that humans have anywhere from 60,000 to 80,000 thoughts a day, and very often, our mind’s dialogue is more discordant than a middle school orchestra. But the point remains — at any point in time, your mind is focusing on something.
2. How much you are focusing: The second factor of awareness is a little more elusive. When I was on my meditation retreat, there were moments of intense clarity where the entirety of my presence was centered directly on the inflow and outflow of my breath. Every single ounce of my being was concentrated single-pointedly on my breathing. Not an hour later, though, I would notice that while I was still loosely focused on my breath, my concentration lacked the same strength.
So even though we can be somewhat focused on a task at hand (such as work, or grocery shopping, or paying attention to your kids), our concentration can still be diffracted in different directions. Cellphones are just one culprit. The extreme end of this spectrum is multi-tasking, where we are quite literally ripping our attention into pieces to focus on multiple things at once. For the record, don’t do this.
The reason this Factor of Awareness is important is that many of the most happy and productive people tend to have one thing in common, which is that they are highly skilled at maintaining complete focus on just one thing at a time. This ability is the precursor to the flow state, offering us full immersion in the present moment to tap into our greatest creative and physical genius. All of the greatest writers, artists, athletes, and musicians in the world rely on flow to compete. If you are going into surgery, you’re going to want your surgeon to be in the flow state — a distracted surgeon is not ideal. In many ways, this skill of employing single-pointed concentration forms the backbone of living a more present, fluid, and stress-free life.
3. The Quality of the focus: In this description, quality does not necessarily refer to how good or bad it is. Rather, the “quality” of your focus is your qualitative relationship to whatever is present in your conscious state of mind. You know, your emotions and feelings towards the thing you’re doing. If you hate the blogpost you’re reading right now, the Quality of your focus can be one of frustration, or anger, or disappointment, or numbness, or any combination of expressions. If you love what I’m writing about, the Quality might be curious, intrigued, fascinated, grateful, etc.
The important thing to remember is that the Quality of your focus is not a word, but a felt sentiment. These Qualities are as fluid as the other two factors, and give rise to your emotional perception in every given moment.
So then, we come to find that all Three Factors of Awareness are present with us from the day we’re born until the day we die. Check in on your Three Factors in this very moment. Chances are, you are (1) focusing on reading this blogpost, (2) hopefully focusing fully on it, perhaps with some distractions present, and (3) feeling some kind of way about it!
So why is any of this important? Herein lives the magnificent design of human awareness: these factors that give shape to our conscious experience of life are adaptable.
By practicing mindfulness, we are training our minds to audit our attention with greater frequency, so that we can course-correct and align our awareness with our intention (for example, realizing that you’ve read the same line in your book 6 times).
By practicing meditation, we are systematically increasing the likelihood that in each moment, we will be more focused on whatever it is we are doing (thus making it easier to reduce distractions, and more likely that we will drop into a flow state).
The quality of our awareness is perhaps the most pliable. Reading a good book, changing your diet, traveling, practicing gratitude, and breathwork are all reliable routes to enhancing your baseline Quality of awareness. One might say that in the pursuit of happiness, this third Factor of Awareness is the most important.
At the end of the day, we all want to feel happier and more fulfilled in our day-to-day life. So we listen to Tony Robbins, drink kale smoothies, use non-violent communication, and take magic mushrooms, in a life-long effort to find greater fulfillment. But the conversation of self-development cannot be had without the inclusion of awareness. The Three Factors of Awareness model offers one way to approach the betterment of mind, and thus, the betterment of life.
Nate Macanian is a mindfulness meditation teacher and writer from New York. You can see more of his work at https://www.natemacanian.com/writing
