Eugene Pustoshkin & Tatyana Parfenova
Often contemplative practice, meditation, and mindfulness practices are associated with focused, concentrated attention. Concentration (e.g., on breathing) tends to be conceived as a gateway even to mindfulness. (Mindfulness is usually defined as non-judgmental awareness of everything that is arising moment to moment.)
There are, however, contemplative practices that stress not concentration as narrowing down of attention towards exclusive staying with a single figure/object but deconcentration and a sort of decentering as gradual or rapid widening of attention in order to gain access to spacious awareness (openness to the entire field which evenly encompasses both foreground and background).
In Integral Awareness Meditation (IAM) concentration is always practiced in conjunction with—and on the basis of—deconcentration, with the latter being a primary mode of bringing forth open wide-awake consciousness state that allows accessing different layers of awareness even in novice practitioners. Altered states of meditative consciousness can be easily enacted and developed this way, and energy field resonances manifest as operands at more advanced state-stages of IAM.
For further info see Eugene Pustoshkin’s English page
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