How Attention Structures Consciousness

The first is the Garden of Satisfaction. In this garden you get everything you want. The garden fulfills all your desires and it satisfies all your preferences. But there is a price: you don’t get the capacity of the will, and thus you cannot choose anything. In such a garden an important element of agency would be missing: you would be no more than a slave to your passions. The second garden is the Garden of Appearances. In this garden everything is as it appears to you in conscious experience. The garden reveals its nature in consciousness. Yet, there is a price here too: you don’t get the capacity of attention, and thus you cannot focus attention on anything nor is your attention ever drawn to anything. Among the buzzing and blooming, you cannot selectively look at a rose, or its shape or color. You cannot listen to the song of a nightingale. And your attention isn’t captured by how the early morning sun illuminates the mountains.