I think this brings up the question of "attachment" . . . only the relinquishing of attachment gets you to the real shit.

Well, this is true. You release your hold on narrowed attention, let it open out and deepen to encompass everything. You become the entire world, universe, the real deal...

At which point patterns fade, you become only the continuum, and you will think it is absolutely perfect.

What you've learned is that to have an experience, requires a division. If you have a division, you have opposition. If you have opposition, you have conflict.

The recognition of this means you no longer feel you have to fight the conflict, not that it disappears. It becomes sort of "transparent" and you can see through it. You realise that it's okay to go swimming even if the water has ripples in it, because otherwise there would be no water in which to swim.

I wonder if it's possible to be both attached and detached at the same time? I know some meditative dudes claim to maintain "split consciousness," where they are simultaneously, say, carrying on a conversation with you and repeating a mantra in order to ground themselves.

Well, I'm not a fan of that "mantra" stuff, but I certainly think you can have multiple patterns arising in your awareness at once that don't necessarily form a continuous space.

You do it all the time, in fact, by looking around you while a thought appear. The thought appears somehow parallel-simulataneous - occurring at the same time but no in the same "perceptual space".

Normally we flip perspectives - you can do it right now: Just decide to "become" the space in the room, including the volume of space your body occupies. Now "become" your body again. And so on.

From there, you can experience everything as just being "made from the background awareness".

How does this then relate to our enlightened folk and their action in the world?

Well, I'm not quite sure about this.

If you ponder it, there is the fundamental situation (the nonmaterial material) and there is the arbitrary patterns within it. Anything at all that is not the fundamental is pattern-based, and therefore specific to the forms/habits underlying our experience.

So-called "wisdom" is then relative. It's just a case of which granularity, which level of subtly, you are speaking from in terms of the patterning.

The most subtle patterns will be simple properties, then concepts, such as "relative division" and "spatial extent" and then "perimeter". These will be felt-known. Much later, there might be concepts of "image" and "sound" and "texture". We haven't even go to "object" yet...

It is all very well to say that the true reality is "love" - by which people mean the unbounded openness of being-aware - but while you are a human you have certain baseline structures in your experience that dissolving will mean, if not death, then a ceasing of this-world in perception.