There are four bases of awareness or mindfulness: breath, experience, mental state, mental object or phenomenon. Besides awareness, they are practised using wisdom, effort, require ethics as a foundation, and lead to heavenly immersion.

It is essential what type of effort is used to develop awareness.
An effort can be cruel, ignoring pain or allowing it to deepen underneath harsh judgements to oneself. This effort is painful and may contract awareness.

To ensure right effort in developing awareness of the bases, it is informative to know how or out of what one contacts those four bases. If contact with the breath, experience, mental object such as a distraction is out agitation, fear, unawareness, that is not going to develop much the awareness of those bases. But one can catch this source behind the contact with the distraction. That gives an opportunity to cultivate awareness around that mental state as the basis of contact. And one can see that it is possible to make contact instead out of supportive, wholesome states as well. If one can make single light contact with the breath, that is one round of practice. One can then develop more contacts, eventually turning it into a stream of light contacts.

If there is a stream of light contacts, those contacts are the births of new worlds of the six sense bases. That is, at every contact there is a new consciousness arising dependent upon the object and the sense base. So over time, the world, which is this interface of six consciousness related to six senses, will necessarily reflect the quality of those contacts. Put differently: recollecting and immersing oneself in pleasant or light contacts, one can see the origin of the world one will soon be surrounded in.¹

Advanced:
1. Cultivate a mindful, light, wholesome contact.
2. Immerse oneself immediately into that contact.

This practice can alternative be understood as catching a ride.
Catching a ride on what? On a heavenly consciousness that is arising in the very moment of cultivating it. That heavenly consciousness that is arising in that moment is new, and separate from the heap of consciousness up until that point that has been seen as self. One can submerge into the new world that is created in those moments of contact, which is the origin of the world.

Dependent upon a wholesome desire, a wish for peace, loving-kindness, that very wish or intention generates consciousness. Dependent upon a mental object (the perception of a friend), a the sense base (the mental sense base), there can arise consciousness. If consciousness arises dependent upon these two, and only if, that very moment is contact. If one can catch it and strengthen it, it is possible to be immersed in it.

Below K Nananande explains contact and develops the practice to make mindful contact with attention itself. Rather than have attention be robbed by mara, and it jumping around, it is itself stilled through continued mindful, stilling contact on it. This can be associated with quenching the foods that are nutriment to consciousness. Three of those are intention, contact, attention. If there is a stilling intention behind a contact to attention itself, this can produce powerful quenching or extinguishment of fuel (nibbana).

1. Check out The Miracle of Contact from Most Ven. K. Nananande. https://seeingthroughthenet.net/books/ ↩︎