--- ai_generation_date: '2026-10-11' ai_model: gemini-3-pro-preview ai_prompt_hash: 964013ba audiodharma: talks: - date: '2026-10-07' is_meditation: true mp3_url: https://audiodharma.us-east-1.linodeobjects.com/talks/26405/20261007-nikki_mirghafori-imc-guided_meditation_attention.mp3 section_slug: guided-meditation-attention speakers: - speaker_name: Nikki Mirghafori speaker_url: https://www.audiodharma.org/speakers/229 talk_start_time_seconds: 0 title: 'Guided Meditation: Attention' url: https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/26405 video_unavailable: false - date: '2026-10-07' is_meditation: false mp3_url: https://audiodharma.us-east-1.linodeobjects.com/talks/26406/20261007-nikki_mirghafori-imc-dharmette_tech-sati_3_5_cultivating_wholesome_attention_in_an_attention_economy.mp3 section_slug: dharmette-tech-sati-3-of-5-cultivating-wholesome-attention-in-an-attention-economy speakers: - speaker_name: Nikki Mirghafori speaker_url: https://www.audiodharma.org/speakers/229 talk_start_time_seconds: 1927 title: 'Dharmette: Tech-Sati (3 of 5): Cultivating Wholesome Attention in an Attention Economy' url: https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/26406 video_unavailable: false collapsed_sections: - guided-meditation-attention location_city: Redwood City, CA video_unavailable: false youtube: id: qJu9UaIEqlE imprecise_upload_date: null title: 'Guided Meditation: Attention;Tech-Sati (3/5) Cultivating Wholesome Attention in an Attention Economy' upload_date: '2026-10-07' uploader_str: Insight Meditation Center uploader_url: https://www.youtube.com/@InsightMeditationCenter youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJu9UaIEqlE --- # Guided Meditation: Attention; Dharmette: Tech-Sati (3 of 5): Cultivating Wholesome Attention in an Attention Economy - [Nikki Mirghafori](https://www.audiodharma.org/speakers/229) _This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video above. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers._ Greetings friends, greetings, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, whatever the time zone might be where you are. Delighted to be together and practicing in this moment in time. So we continue our exploration of _tech-sati_[^1], mindfulness of technology, how to mindfully interact with technology. And the focus today is on attention. Attention, and the quality of our attention, is important in our practice, in our meditation practice, and in our life. How do we maintain and support a quality of wholesome attention in an attention economy where it's used as fuel for the economy? That's the theme of today—the talk later. First, we'll start with meditating and paying attention, not just to the body and the breath, but also to how we're paying attention. We will be bringing a little more awareness to attention itself and the quality of attention. So without further ado, let's begin. ## [Guided Meditation: Attention](https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/26405) So arriving, arriving in our seat in this moment in time. Always we begin by arriving in the body. Awareness of the body first and foremost. Arriving here, now, in this moment that will never be repeated. We cannot redo this moment. How do we show up in this moment for the first time and for the last time? Softening the body. Softening the heart with a receptive attitude. Open, receiving. The sensations of the breath, sensations of the body. How is the body this morning in this moment in time? Can we have some interest? Curiosity. Gentle, gentle curiosity, interest. And also bringing awareness—just as we bring awareness to the body and the sensations, also bringing gentle curiosity to the quality of our attention. Is our attention sustained in this moment? Is it jumpy? Does it flutter from one object to another? And no judgment. Just getting a sense. Is it steady? Is it easily distracted? Simply know. After you investigate, let the body again, the breath, be the anchor. And now and then, also check in with the quality of attention. Just as we pay attention and are aware of the body sensations—our feet touching the earth, our legs. Relax. Sit bones, hands, and the touch point of lips, as well as sensations of breathing within the frame of the body. Just as we can become curious, interested in the phenomena we are observing, knowing—such as: How is the body? Is it tight? Sit soft. How is the breath? Where is the breath felt? Curious about the sensations, the raw sensations. So too, we can become curious about the quality of our attention. Does our attention connect with the object, say with the sensations of the breath? Does it connect and then stay, or does it keep connecting and then dropping away? Connecting, knowing, and then dropping away. Become curious, interested in this laboratory of our minds. You have everything you need. If your attention gets grabbed by something else, get to know it. How does it happen? What kind of energy, effort, or engagement does it take to reconnect the attention when it has drifted back to the breath sensations? Become curious. Does it take a lot of energy, effort? A little bit? Investigate gently, steadily. And how am I paying attention? What am I paying attention to? Attention is a gift. Your limited attention is sacred. What if we paid attention as if it were a prayer? And as we turn our attention, as we direct our attention, see what it feels like to direct. Now, just gently direct—like a conductor directing your attention—to the sensations of breath in the body. One last time, as we bring this meditation period to a close, trusting that every moment of supporting, training, and cultivating wholesome attention offers us more freedom from conditioned response. And may your practice be of benefit to all beings in ways we cannot fathom. [bell] Thank you friends. Thanks for your practice. ## [Dharmette: Tech-Sati (3 of 5): Cultivating Wholesome Attention in an Attention Economy](https://www.audiodharma.org/talks/26406) So hello and greetings as we continue our exploration of this third day on what I'm calling the series _tech-sati_—awareness, mindfulness of technology, and how we interact and engage in a digital world. Today the focus is on attention. Becoming more aware of our attention, how it gets hijacked, and how we can support it. What are the teachings? We're not going to get through everything. There's so much to say in the dharma to support qualities of wholesome attention. First, I want to talk about what attention is, because we throw this word around as if we all know what it is. I want to start from the Western psychological view of what attention is and how it's defined, and then we'll bring in the dharmic understanding and perspective. In Western psychology, the prevailing model is by Posner and Petersen. Instead of being a monolithic entity, neuroscience identifies that there are three distinct and anatomically separate attentional networks. There is the alerting network, the orienting network, and the executive control network. Just briefly, the alerting network is the process of achieving and maintaining an alert, vigilant state. So becoming ready to receive and process incoming information. It alerts you. This is an old network. For example, our ancestors walking in the savanna alerting, "Oh, is there the sound of a bush being shifted? Does that mean there is a rattlesnake there or a tiger there?" Then attention gets oriented after the alerting network says, "Alert, alert, there's something here of interest." The orienting network selects a target from the environment to pay attention to. Then this third network, the executive control, is a top-down, goal-directed system that manages conflicting information, suppresses competing demands, and monitors complex tasks. Basically, executive control says, "Okay, that's not interesting, that's not important. Let's not get distracted with this. Let's go, that's important and our life depends on it." So these three networks are working all the time. Knowing this actually helps us to better understand that in an attention economy—it's such an interesting phrase if we consider it—our attention is the fuel. Our attention is the logs that are burned for the economy. Our eyeballs, our attention, this wholesome factor in Buddhism, is so important and connected to our karma, our destiny. We'll come back to the dharmic perspective in a moment. Here is how algorithms hijack our attention. Instead of engaging a top-down executive function, they target bottom-up. It's stimulus-driven attention grabbing. We get bombarded. The alerting network gets bombarded with constant notifications. We talked about notifications already yesterday, and I offered an invitation to silence them and disable them. The alerting network gets bombarded by constant notifications, and the orienting network gets hijacked through hyper-salient things that are really relevant to you, along with variable reward. This is another important thing: variable reward cues like autoplay, flashing feeds, colors, all of these things. With the orienting network, it's like, "Whoop, okay, this is yummy. There's reward here." There is also research suggesting that if there's variable reward—if you pull down and sometimes you get fresh new content, but sometimes you don't get fresh new content—you actually become more dependent. There is more dependency and more _taṇhā_[^2], more craving. These notifications are hyper-salient. They're really relevant to what you want and what you're interested in. And even more so, these flashing feeds and autoplay have given you satisfaction in the past, so there's extra reward built in there. So the orienting network is now hijacked. Then the algorithmic platforms purposefully deplete and bypass the executive control—this top-down network that controls—so that it forces us to continuously react to bottom-up demands, causing executive control to suffer from cognitive fatigue or what's called ego depletion. It is basically this exhaustion that we feel. Even if we do not attend to a distraction, there is a cost. I talked about research yesterday showing that even if we get notifications and we don't read them or follow up (if we follow up, of course, there is residue and more stress), there is still this exhaustion of the executive control network that's trying to say, "No, not that, not that, stay here." Lots is happening, it's interesting. Now I want to connect this with the Theravada[^3] taxonomy. There's a lot to say, so I'm going to carefully select what I talk about this morning. In the Theravada taxonomy, there is _viññāṇa_[^4] and _citta_[^5]. _Viññāṇa_ is the bare cognitive awareness, and _citta_ is the subjective heart-mind state of consciousness that's experiencing the object. Attention itself is identified in Theravada as _manasikāra_[^6]. It's a mental factor, a _cetasika_[^7] for those who are interested, of orienting, directing, and steering the mind towards an object in the cognitive process. Then there is _sati_[^8], which we translate as awareness or mindfulness. It derives from the root of memory, _sarati_[^9]: remembering or keeping the object in mind, not floating away, not forgetting the object, staying with the object. A couple of other things to bring in here are the teachings on _vitakka_[^10] and _vicāra_[^11], which are the _jhānic_[^12] factors. _Vitakka_ is a mental factor that connects the mind to an object, and _vicāra_ sustains the mind on the object. The cake is cut differently—you can cut the cake vertically or horizontally, in different ways. But you can see some parallels between how Theravada and _Abhidhamma_[^13] higher teachings define these various mental factors that have to do with our attention and how it is directed. There's a lot more to say about how these orienting networks work—how, for example, the alerting network relates to adverting. Anyway, I won't get to that. I want to get to the punchline this morning. I always have too much material, being an ex-academic. What is important are the teachings on how we support our attention. Why is attention important? Well, karma is intention. What we intend to pay attention to, what we train our mind on, becomes the inclination of our minds. The Buddha has said whatever you incline your mind to, whatever you frequently ponder upon, becomes the inclination of your mind. So whatever we pay attention to becomes our pattern of attention. It becomes our karma. The outcome is that if you always pay attention to being angry or being distracted, that becomes the pattern of your mind. Jumping to the last couple of minutes we have left, what are some of the things that support wise attention, or _yoniso manasikāra_[^14]? The first is hearing the true dharma, through the voice of another or our internal contemplation. Spiritual friendship, _kalyāṇa-mittatā_[^15], also supports wise attention. We pay attention to something that is wise instead of unwise. Then, what supports _sati_—awareness, staying with the object? The first canonical invitation is what's called _indriya-saṃvara_[^16], guarding the sense gates. Isn't this great? Guarding the sense gates refers to being careful about what you look at and what you pay attention to. In your life, there might be different ways to guard the sense gates. For example, disabling notifications that are really not needed is a way for me to guard my sense gates. The second important support for _sati_ is what we've been practicing on day one, two, and three: we always start with the bodily anchor, _kāyagatāsati_[^17]. Always coming back to the body as an anchor. I think I will end there. There's plenty more to say, but I think that is enough and that's all the time we have. So for today, I want to invite you to pay attention to the quality of your attention. Does it get distracted? Are these networks getting overwhelmed? Is the executive control getting overwhelmed? Just pay attention to the quality of your attention. Can you stay with the anchor of the body, guarding the sense doors, and maintaining wholesome friendships? Thank you all for your practice. May you have a wholesomely attentive day, and I'm looking forward to continuing the series tomorrow. Take good care. --- [^1]: **Tech-Sati:** A portmanteau coined by the speaker combining "technology" and the Pali word _sati_ (mindfulness) to mean mindfulness of technology. [^2]: **Taṇhā:** A Pali word meaning "thirst" or "craving." It is identified as a principal cause of suffering in Buddhist teachings. [^3]: **Theravada:** The "School of the Elders," the oldest extant Buddhist school, predominantly practiced in Southeast Asia. [^4]: **Viññāṇa:** A Pali term typically translated as "consciousness" or "bare cognitive awareness." [^5]: **Citta:** A Pali word commonly translated as "mind," "heart," or "mind-set," referring to the subjective heart-mind state. [^6]: **Manasikāra:** A Pali term for "attention" or the mental factor of orienting and directing the mind towards an object. [^7]: **Cetasika:** A Pali term for "mental factors" or concomitant states that arise alongside consciousness. [^8]: **Sati:** A Pali word commonly translated as "mindfulness" or "awareness." [^9]: **Sarati:** A Pali verb meaning "to remember"; the etymological root of _sati_. [^10]: **Vitakka:** A Pali term referring to the initial application of the mind to its object. [^11]: **Vicāra:** A Pali term meaning sustained application or examination; keeping the mind anchored on its object. [^12]: **Jhāna:** Meditative states of profound stillness and concentration in Buddhist practice. (_Jhānic_ is the adjectival form). [^13]: **Abhidhamma:** The Buddhist psychological and philosophical system that categorizes all mental and physical phenomena. [^14]: **Yoniso manasikāra:** A Pali term translated as "wise attention," "careful attention," or "appropriate consideration." [^15]: **Kalyāṇa-mittatā:** A Pali term meaning "spiritual friendship" or "noble friendship." [^16]: **Indriya-saṃvara:** A Pali term meaning "restraint of the sense faculties" or "guarding the sense doors." [^17]: **Kāyagatāsati:** Mindfulness directed towards the body.