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“One begins developing this practice of awareness by being mindful of the experience as a whole. For example, one is mindful of ‘being-seated-on-a-chair-reading-a-Dhamma-essay’. That is one’s situation at that very time. That is one’s experience as a “whole”. This is always the necessary starting point. What is very important is to prevent the tendency to become absorbed in one particular thing. (Feeling, sensations or perception, and similar). Instead, one has to broaden the mindfulness and become aware of the generality of one’s current situation, without losing the sight of the particular either.

Of course, the attempts of discerning the background of one's current experience will not be perfect in the beginning. One will more often than not fall into a mistake of over-attending one’s experience as a whole. This is a mistake of making that background into an object of one’s attention, defining it, clarifying it, trying to keep it in front. These are all ways of making it a foreground, which means that then something else will be in place of the background.” -- Ven. N. Nyanamoli in his essay Peripheral Awareness.

The background is always a plurality of things on the same level of being as the foreground. The whole encompasses both the foreground and the background, and is on a higher level of generality, a different order of being. (According to the schemata laid out by the saḷāyatana the body is always in the background, always the “here” in experience.) Attending to the periphery would be horizontal awareness. Yoniso manasikāra requires satisampajañña, a stepping back vertically, at right angles to horizontal awareness. This is why satisampajañña is best practiced with activity that requires little thought. A lot of peripheral awareness is involved when engaged in our worldly projects and tasks. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s not the “proper” way to alleviate suffering. I do recognize that peripheral awareness can be useful in accentuating the whole, since it keeps us focused on the task at hand.

The goal is to direct one’s attention to the whole, making it the foreground of a yet more general whole. This brings to prominence the hierarchy of consciousness. It’s essentially a thing (our situation) against a background of itself as it endures. The insight being that this thing (our situation) isn’t a free floating entity independent of the levels that lie beneath it. And that our situation is an aspect of a yet greater whole, the greatest of which is our individuality.

If I’ve gone astray here, I’d welcome to be corrected by someone with greater understanding.

"Neither movement nor change of substance is fundamental: fundamental structure is necessary for them to be possible, and this is true also of their respective times (see §4 (j)). In other words, the time (past, present, future) that is manifest in movement and in change of substance is dependent upon, but does not share the structure of, the time that is discussed in these pages. Thus, in movement, the time is simply that of the hierarchy of trajectories (see PATICCASAMUPPĀDA [c]), and its structure is therefore that of the straight line (see §I/13): the time of movement, in other words, is perfectly homogeneous and infinitely subdivisible. In itself, therefore, this time makes no distinction between past, present, and future, and must necessarily rest upon a sub-structure that does give a meaning to these words. In fundamental time, each unit—each moment—is absolutely indivisible, since adjacent levels are heterogeneous." – FS II, footnote m

Unpacking Footnote M of Fundamental Structure II

I’ve edited Ven. Ñāṇavīra’s footnote and added emphasis to make it a little more comprehensible. As Ven. Bodhesako notes in Clearing the Path it appears Ven. Ñāṇavīra independently arrived at a similar notion of the present movement of time as that of Husserl. The principle could equally be applied to an ever expanding domain (āyatana) rather than a line, i.e. the “world” (cf. SN 35.117). Anicca has to do with fundamental time, not the manifest impermanence we perceive in change. In fundamental time things arise, change while standing, then vanish from existence. In the time related to change things always remain, be they as past, present, or future within an ever-present domain.

"Change is not fundamental: the hierarchy of consciousness is necessary for it to be possible, and this is true also of its respective times. In other words, the time (past, present, future) that is manifest in change is dependent upon, but does not share the structure of, the time that is discussed in these pages, i.e the hierarchy of consciousness. Thus, in change, the time is simply that of the hierarchy of trajectories, and its structure is therefore that of the straight line*: the time of change, in other words, is perfectly homogeneous and infinitely subdivisible. In itself, therefore, this time makes no distinction between past, present, and future, and must necessarily rest upon a sub-structure that does give a meaning to these words. In fundamental time, each unit—each moment—is absolutely indivisible, since adjacent levels are heterogeneous."

*"This explanation of the structure of the immediate experience of time, with its appeal to primary impression, retention, and protention, has an almost mathematical flavor to it. It is something like an attempt to generate a continuous line by describing points in such a way that any point implies its immediate neighboring points (to the right and left), which in turn imply their next neighbors, and so on. Any point would be related to its more distant neighbors only through the mediation of its closer neighbors. In this understanding, a point would not be a discrete unit, but would point on, so to speak, to the next point, and through it to all the other points on the line. To draw out the analogy a bit farther, it would be as if each point on the line could be a point, and could be exposed outward "towards the world," only while also implying its immediate neighbors, and through them its more distant neighbors." – Sokolowski, Introduction to Phenomenology, page 138