I have noticed that the more mindfulness there is, the more the mind finds patterns to be interesting and attractive. I see this mostly with patterns in the visual field, but I have also noticed this in regards to tactile and auditory patterns too. An example of this occurred recently while I was out hiking. After walking for some time and holding empty awareness, there was an opening in the path. Several trees came into view up ahead, and the mind immediately focused on the pattern created by the branches silhouetted against the sky. The experience was that of these thousands of lines of color moving–bobbing up and down, swaying back and forth, passing through each other. There was a great appreciation for the synchrony of all of these objects moving in concert. It felt like they were all dancing together; it was quite beautiful. It felt very natural and effortless when the mind rested strong, focused attention on this for a while. Some other, similar experiences of being captivated by pattern involved: ripples on water; looking up into a canopy of leaves in front of the sun; the feel of threads in a piece of fabric against my finger; and hearing the individual combustion sounds that make up the noise of an engine.
Framing these kinds of experiences in Buddhist terms, this is the way I understand what is happening. When there is not much mindfulness, the mind engages with the world through concepts, rather than the actual sense data (e.g. the mind perceives a branch as a branch, and not as the full bundle of color, sound, smell, etc. that it is) as a sort of cognitive shorthand. The Pali word for this is sañña. Sañña is usually translated as perception, but it is better understood as conceptualization–the mind’s process of slicing out a portion of reality and summarizing it by putting that portion of reality into a conceptual box. When there is a lot of mindfulness, there is–by definition–access to reality in the present moment, which includes the raw, unconceptualized, sense data. When that sense data is made available to the conscious mind through mindfulness, the mind can engage with it directly, bypassing the concepts. That sense data often contains novel patterns (novel in the sense that we don’t normally perceive the world in that way), and the mind generally finds both novelty and pattern to be attractive. Thus when this happens, the mind finds it very easy to put attention on it.
