Chris G:
Could you try to describe what "pressing" is in more detail, perhaps in terms of more easily understandable components?
'Pressing', in this context, was meant to mean 'actively sustaining'. I.e.: A sensation appears, it is (re)cognized, attention is brought to/contracted around the sensation and then attention is actively sustained on that sensation for the purpose of investigation. If the sensation is the breath, then this whole process is 'attending to the breath'.
Any form of contraction of attention in this way is stressful, I think. Maybe it is ultimately grasping. This resonates:
End in Sight:
The harder you 'try' to attend to something sensory, the more the sensory experience is obscured by the experience of 'trying', the harder it is to actually notice the sensory thing (because it appears to be constantly disappearing). The less you try, the less 'trying' obscures it, the easier and smoother the noticing is.
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End in Sight:
"Not having an overview" is a great characterization...as different forms of 'trying' fall away, cognition and mental representation concerning what you're doing fall away too. You lose your "grasp" on the activity. (Perhaps cf. "naivete" in actualism.)
From the point of view of a 'controller', it is chaotic and uncomfortable/unpleasant.
When in the A&P, or in the mode of attention characterized by the second vipassana jhana, 'the controller' is encouraged and in control, so to speak. One directs attention, laser-like. One 'wields' attention. (NOTE: this seems to imply an actual controller, a self, something which will be properly challenged in the third and fourth vipassana jhana). Moving into the 3rd vipassana jhana, 'the surrenderer' is encouraged. If not skillfully handled, this leads to a bucket load of crap/dukkha. Moving into the 4th vipassana jhana, 'the observer' is encouraged.
Never mind these concepts (controller, surrenderer, observer). They're not for practical use.
End in Sight:
I suggest re-examining this mode of experience.
What mode of experience, exactly?
End in Sight:
This phenomenon is not new to me. I remember especially well a similar episode, quite some time ago, which involved much higher levels of concentration.
That's probably an important clue.
You're referring to "higher levels of concentration"?
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End in Sight:
(...) dissolution (with the form of 'attention' that is characteristic of it) has merely shown you the difference between these two forms of experience in an exaggerated way.
End in Sight:
But what I hadn't thought about before was 'why?'. Why do our brains so obviously have a certain mode of operation where attention is inside-out - such a counter-intuitive mode? What benefit? What evolutionary benefit?
The mode of attention not being "inside-out" appears to be the "sensuality / desire mode", and it is
that mode which is probably (primarily) evolutionarily selected for...the opposite may be a fortuitous human capacity, or maybe has some evolutionary explanation, I don't know.
Do you mean there is a "sensuality / desire mode" and a non-"sensuality / desire mode"? One in which attention is 'laser-like' and the other in which attention is 'diffuse' (like mist/fog; 'ungraspable' leading to 'loss-of-overview'), respectively?