Walking along a country path you approach a shallow pool from which the sound of an invisible frog is heard. As you draw close the frog falls silent. You stop, unmoving, breathing quietly, and await the resumption of the frog's steady croaking. If you wait long enough this may happen, but in that interval the frog's attention has been keener than yours, since having far less brain it is not likely to be distracted by a cloud of thoughts such as you carry with you. Whether the frog is 'conscious' or not is beside the point, this term, for us, being so contaminated with concepts arising from self-consciousness as to be inapplicable, and also, the frog being unlikely to have a recognisable analogue of our reticular activating system. Still, the interval of silence is pure attention in which the frog open-endedly awaits the resumption of its purposive action, an event which will follow on the adequate perception, or registration if 'perception' is too loaded a word, of an absence. Again, one must imagine the frog in its concealment as entirely cool, as much at its ease in suspending as it was in continuing its croaking, as if they are merely two sides of an activity by which it effortlessly and faithfully enacts its being in the world. Croaking or waiting to croak are two modalities of pure transcendental attention, an accomplishment not of the frog but of the life it embodies. Thus the frog is analogous, on a vastly different level of consciousness, to a monk sitting in meditation. There is something fundamental about this pure directedness without a direction which makes the details of the frog's life: the pool, the insects, vegetation, mates, rivals, predators, its biology and life-cycle - as much as those of the monk's life: a human consciousness, childhood, thought, language, renunciation, nostalgias and regrets, ideals and disillusionments, vows, teachers, fellow monks, work and play etc., merely peripheral colourings, more or less elaborate frames around a single reality.