Exploring unsupressing thinking during meditation and not collapsing awareness around it but holding it as one more 'sense' among many. Doing this practice as I increase sensory resolution.

This practice works best after you have disembedded from thought being your sensory boundary.*

*Once you are able to hold many senses open and increase their resolution over a sit instead of being lost in thought and forgetting of the body and other senses.

It can be useful in the beginning of a practice to 'place attention' back on breath, but my leading edge is telling me this is only to develop enough capacity to be able to hold awareness open and increasing in resolution.

Place 'attention on breath' is feeling not like the right direction because it

1) reifies breath
2) reifies attention

Both of these are 'collapsed' or 'embedded' perspectives in that they operate from a more particulaized form of mental formation.

For beginners, this is a good direction to aim for in creating 'attentional stability'. But it's an instrumental capability as opposed to an end.

Also I have problems with language around attention and awareness. I'm still spellcasting & refactoring dis. https://twitter.com/_StevenFan/status/1318953090528153600?s=20

Hmm wanting to be more clear than "particularized mental formation" jargon and lazy af.

My own language is still baking but lets try some ball park synonyms or related terms. I need to find distinctions within: habit of mind, limiting belief, mental construct...

These all have a feel of sustained, self reinforcing structure of mind.

What are structures of mind? Perhaps correlative+ (causal models), which bind together different elements of mind via wire-together-fire-together; the stuff of perceptions that make us able to orient.

So 'attention' being a 'mental formation' means it's a built up way of using elements of mind, the senses, but brings something extra. In this case it filters out senses dependent on emotional salience of 'objects' appearing through senses.

There is certainly an inherent seeming propensity to use mind this way (hello society) but it is still conditioned in that it can be reconditioned or unconditioned. I recommend verifying this for yourself.

To tie this back to start:

'Attention on breath' to the exclusion of other senses, including mental sense, is only an instrumental goal.

As soon as you can stand firmly on a new shore, abandon the confines of vehicle that got you there.