Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Laser focus is a brittle skill
Narrow focus
The practice is to pay attention to one thing so well that everything else fades out. Taken far enough, all sense of hearing can go, the physical body can disappear, and experience becomes incredibly subtle, vast, and drug-like.
The ladder
Many people approach meditation as a climb up a ladder of these changes into subtlety and vastness. It can be a deeply rewarding game, with ancillary benefits: the focus, the calm, and the smoothness of emotional states all come with greater concentration.
Mindfulness as the aim
At best, though, that concentration is a tool aimed at mindfulness, and ultimately non-dual mindfulness, where the underlying goal is to be more and more equanimous with changes. That means not grasping at what is pleasant or interesting and not pushing away what is unpleasant or boring. The target is a skylike mind that lets everything appear without clinging or reacting.
How do meditators describe the jhanas?
The Pali Canon describes eight absorption states called jhanas, four of form and four of formless experience. In the first four, rapture and joy gradually give way to equanimity as attention settles on a single object. Accounts of the deeper states describe a fading of the senses and of the body. The Buddha is described in the texts as having practiced these states before his awakening.
Why can intense focus make sounds vanish?
The effect is related to inattentional blindness, studied by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris in their 1999 gorilla experiment. Viewers counting basketball passes often failed to notice a person in a gorilla suit walk through the scene. A 2012 study by Polly Dalton and Nick Fraenkel found an auditory version, in which many listeners missed a voice repeating the words I'm a gorilla while attending to another conversation. Attention acts as a filter that can leave unattended input unnoticed even when it is clearly present.
How is equanimity different from indifference?
In Buddhist teaching, equanimity is called upekkha in Pali. It is one of four boundless states, alongside loving-kindness, compassion, and sympathetic joy. The texts describe it as a balanced response to pleasant and unpleasant experience, held together with care for others. Classical commentaries name indifference as its near enemy, a state that resembles equanimity on the surface.