Meditation entails open awareness, attention at once focused and unfocused. Daniel Goleman, student of mind and brain, whose sister once kindly found me a job, writes thoughtfully about such awareness in his new book, Focus (HarperCollins, 2013). But a more useful and immediately available resource may be Nicholas Carr's review of Focus in The New York Times (well, if not more useful, certainly less demanding of our attention, and cheaper — Carr can be snippy and not above the cheap shot —"Focus lacks focus").
"[Open awareness]," Carr writes, "is a form of attentiveness characterized by 'utter receptivity to whatever floats into the mind.' Experiments suggest it’s also the source of our most creative thoughts. Going beyond 'orienting,' in which we deliberately gather information, and 'selective attention,' in which we concentrate on solving a particular problem, open awareness frees the brain to make the 'serendipitous associations' that lead to fresh insights. Artists and inventors alike seem unusually adept at such productive daydreaming.
"We tend to think of attention as a switch that’s on or off — we’re focused or we’re distracted. That’s a misperception [and a bad analogy]. Attention, as Goleman explains, comes in many varieties. Its extreme forms tend to be the most limiting. When we’re too attentive, we fall victim to tunnel vision. The mind narrows. When attention is absent, we lose control of our thoughts. We turn into scatterbrains. Open awareness lies in a particularly fertile area between the poles. It gives us entry into what Nathaniel Hawthorne, in one of his notebooks, described as 'that pleasant mood of mind where gaiety and pensiveness intermingle.'”
What a wonderful phrase, from an old master who knew whereof he wrote. Open awareness has been around for a very long time, longer in the East than in the West. It is often and rightly associated with Zen practice. I remember the writings of Alan Watts and Philip Kapleau, and of course Shunryu Suzuki's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind.