[this post was initially a reply to another thread Terry's Curious Where I am, and I'd like it to have its own space where it can be discussed, if anyone else wants]
I'd like to make clear a distinction between paying attention to the five senses and sensateness. Then, I'd like to consider the vibratory aspect of sensation as somewhat distinct from open sensateness (aka: open awareness , except that "awareness" may be incorrectly interpreted as to cause a sense of central observer and that is not intended nor to be deliberately applied) of the sense-objects (objects of sight (via the eyes), objects of sound (via the ears), objects of exterior tactility (a broad category that can be experienced on the ear drums, skin surface, throat lining in swallowing (as conventionally distinct from interoceptive tactility like stomach and muscle cramps, headaches/pressures, and various vibrations or tingling (as can arise with too much vitamin B6))),etc.
Considering five-exterocepective senses can be understood to occur in two gross styles (and this framing is not actual, but functional):
1. open awareness wherein there is no focus, there is just - if meditating on the cushion - inherent reception of sense-objects by virtue of having sense receptors. Getting into this may start briefly with being aware distinctly via the "five" sense-faculties which can receive respective sense-objects (breeze, sun setting registering through eyelids and on the skin, distant and close sounds (and to get fussier: distance and proximity are said to be proprioceptive senses or aspects of the sense faculties), etc). Over the course of meditating in open awareness (not noting, not deliberately looking at vibrations, not deliberately studying a single sense-faculty and its registry of sense-objects), perception of senses ceases to be felt as sight or sound or hearing or smell (touch is a little different, in my view as yet, and I attribute this to the broad array of objects the tactile sense encompasses).
In this open awareness, if I take a moment to perceive how the head feels in general, I will sense that sensation in the head has formed at the back of the head at the occipital plate.
This open awareness can be applied when moving about. I sometimes use open awareness with the sight-faculty while driving, because generally everything on the main road and out in front of my face is easily framed by the consistent asphalt, and I find it useful to have wide peripheral vision engaged in order to pick up movements on the road sides (animals, other cars)...it's a balance.
Now occasionally, especially with sudden sounds (water dripping irregularly in a nearby sink) or loud sounds (pot lid dropping) or forceful sounds (a high-up helicopter rotor's sinusoidal pressure-and-sound) vibration sensations come into awareness without any deliberate shift I make in my attention. My attention just goes to the rippling in the nerves of the skin and muscles (drip and pot lid) or to the sinusoidal sweeping perceived on the ear drums (rotor downdraft).
This sensation can be perceived with openness (again, also known as: open awareness, except that "awareness" may be incorrectly interpreted as to cause a sense of central observer and that is not intended nor to be deliberately applied) and skin-muscle vibrations may be barely perceptible. This, I think, is what happens when long-term meditators have little detectable startle response to strong stimulus (e.g.,
this is confirmed by what Lama Oser did with Daniel Goleman in UC Berkely's psychophysiological laboratory lab while in what he calls "the open state"). If you read the link, you may note that Oser describes strong sense stimulus as becoming softer and that he perceived the open state as being the most effective in rendering startling stimulus neutralized "If you can remain properly in this state, the bang seems neutral, like a bird crossing the sky." No facial muscle movement was detected.
To Daniel Goleman, the external observer of Oser's fMRI data, the single-point concentration was slightly more effective in neutralizing any physiological and neuroligical signals of the startle response. Facial muscle movement was detected but other physiological signals decreased.
The shambala article describes open state as "refer to a thought-free wakefulness where the mind, as Oser described it,
"is open, vast and aware, with no intentional mental activity. The mind is not focused on anything, yet totally present—not in a focused way, just very open and undistracted. Thoughts may start to arise weakly, but they don't chain into longer thoughts—they just fade away." This is what I learned in soto zen and this is what I understood from Tarin's explanation's of pure consciousness experience in actualism. When I get into this openness, there is often the intermittent awareness of childhood memory (laying the grass looking up at the sky, sitting in the back of the car watching the road side, laying down in bed hearing-feeling my own breathing and feeling the weight of the blanket)- This open state is wherein I am trying to extend my experience (because it seems relaxing), even as I write now and perform cognitive tasks. ("State" can be confusing in that it implies a fixed condition, when it is not fixed, however it is stilling like watching mist in a street-lamp can seem like a fast cacaphony or like slow drifting individual particles (Thank you, Beoman, for that shared experience!).
For a moment, think of this openness (aka: open state, open awareness) as particles being received by exteroceptive nerves receptors (here I deliberately avoid use of the phrase "five-senses", because there is a practice threshold after which, in my experience, the five senses cannot be confirmed as distinct units and certainly not as just five senses, (even total blindness resulting from optic neuropathies does not eliminate perception of space (is space a sight-sense or a sound-sense of its own sense, or other? How about time-sense? It gets very interesting and open state awareness makes these intellectually heady descriptions apparent simply and experientially to the practitioner).
Why particles? Because in open awareness (aka: open state, sensateness), the mind is doing what it naturally does, being aware of many many stimuli (sense-objects) fairly randomly (unless a particular sense-object causes alarm and strong attraction/aversion, then that sense-object jumps in the brain processing order of awareness). So, in the brain of open awareness, the brain is not directed to consider sense-objects nor is the person reflecting on the sense-objects, so there is brain doing its basic awareness without having to coordinate another level of aggregating the incoming data and directing it (i.e., concentration practices) nor personalizing it. Some well-familiar activity (i.e., driving, tai chi, walking, etc) can easily be done in open awareness, or a slight level of directing up from open awareness in what is often called "flow".
2. Now, to get into vibratory sensation and attention wave - beyond (but not different than) those sensations that occur spontaneously when a startling sense-event occurs; these remind me of jhanas and, in conjunction with the above particulate-ness of open awareness, of Bell's two-channel test in physics. For a moment, think of these sensations as waves.
When particles of sense-objects land and are put under the lens of deliberate attention, this attention links the particles and these creates a relationship and the sense of a wave of their newly-related-as-a-result-of-attention movements (this is "locality" in the physics vocabulary of Bell's two-channel test; the particles are newly related to each other and are now brought into each others locality and create a moving locality (e.g., a wave)). We could say that suddenly particles are influenced by attention to form a wave. (And the particles are in a wave formation as a result of ebbs and flows in the quality of attention - like "hard" or "soft" jhanas)
Thus, to the person who deliberately affects the attention, this influence of particles seems like a wave or waves (the person causes the particles to relate locally to one another and that relationship is a wave which mirrors the ebb and flow of single-point attention). Piti - bodily pleasure - is like this. I think, "let's have some piti", then suddenly the molecular activity in my body seems to arise as waves of augmenting/diminishing pleasurable sensation.
In this way, deliberate attention seems to effect what distinct particles are doing by aggregating them under attention and actual sensations can be formed and sustained based on the quality of ebbing and flowing attention.
Thus, the startle reflex is an attention wave formed by the attention of self-preservation (originating in the brain stem to cause a rapid muscular response to a threat - e.g., jumping back, blinking, twitching**).
**About twitching, one thing I noticed in myself when I had a chance to visit with Tarin Greco last summer is that a muscle around my right eye started twitching when he asked me questions about mindfulness and sensateness and I tried to explain (I was explaining how I was newly alienated from sensateness (after having been in this open state regularly) and he was offering questions probably to help me return to open state sensateness). I knew this twitching was some aspect of fear (nervousness), but I couldn't understand why it was arising. Recently, in discussing this open state sensateness with three other people I noticed they developed similar facial muscular twitches while explaining back what they thought of as sensateness or what they would call Pure Consciousness Event (PCE) - it is as if that open state (being shown to and discussed) causes anxiety/fear for some aspect of mental faculty (one that aggregates experiences and trusts a contiguous self, /distrusts anatta-concept) until one gets experience with and/or familiar, then trusts-and-goes-beyond-trusting with dropping everything away and entering open awareness/state (see above conceptual caveats about "awareness" and "state" as words). It is a very simple state and it is me. I know I am here. It is natural and simply unencumbered by surfeit deliberate self-conditioning like restlessness, delusion (such as negative/positive mental states) -- I have plenty of encumbered self, so I am describing my preferred experience of living, not a continuous "way" as yet. I get to see my surfeit additions (hindrances) better now and can thank many people for this. This me knows itself as an ongoing being with some general temperaments and personality and it cannot un-know anatta and that freeing knowledge and open awareness as well as the ability to place attention somewhere (jhanas, sensations, housework, listening, etc).
So, I think of #2 as "body jhana" like the mental jhanas: to know the sensation aggregation of sense-objects is useful for seeing what the body-mind can cause or interpret (and this is very useful for mitigating pain, though I cannot do that as yet). The mental jhanas show the practictioner what mental states can be caused (i.e., altered states) in attending to the mental faculty. Knowing some of the vast variability of the mental faculty and knowing that mastery is exhibited by a stable jhana of 2-3 hours points to the challenge of arraying particulate, disparate, un-unified "matter" into a steady or quasi-steady form (like a wave). In this way, anicca and anatta are experienced and suffering (not necessarily pain) ceases by one ceasing to take up fixity as the stable nature of some permanent actuality; perceiving temporary fixity allows me to see my desk as a good, useful place to put a hot tea).
Thus, when I offer sensateness I refer to open state sensateness - opening into it in daily life especially. I think that open state is a good, gentle balance to the centralized, cognitive wave of something like ebbing and flowing in psychotherapy.
To stay gentle, do not think of the open state as something you can accidentally make permanent and "lose" yourself. Truly, fear will prevent that and full-time open state is not necessary. see Aman's points and reply below. Thanks It is a vacation from centricity.
Is either #1 or #2 better or worse? I don't think so. I have the capacity to train attention on something and effect its conditions (e.g., attention wave) and I have the capacity to open into open awareness. I am both of these capacities (again, this framing is not actual, but is used to cause some gross useful framing of senses/sensateness). And they are also not really separate. As in the
Bell test (maybe I mean the Observer Effect here, my physics is about a zillion years old - I'll work on this, but I am referring to the test that shows light as both particle and wave depending on the presence of attention (observer)), both particle and wave can be evidenced to have occurred.
So attention to sensation is a form of concentration and relates occurrences to other occurrences (giving them a relatedness and causing a shared locality or space, like a wave). I generally feel that sensation in the forehead when I do such a concentration practice. My eyenbrows can even furrow. Open awareness/state (again caution to these words "awareness" and "state") do not forego knowledge or memory (water can still be "understood" to be a form-with-familiarity, for example), however, the open-state mind (which I feel in the occipital plate area if I briefly place attention on the head generally) creates a kind of relaxation (can be anxious event at first) and a window into anatta (no inherent self, yes mutably existing in mutability). Concentration and open awareness*. Both useful.
I know that was long, but I hope it is generally clear.
[edit: spelling, possible clarity, and link added]
[Edits after dialogue with Aman]