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Here's a paraphrase, then a deeper look at each pointer.

Paraphrase

These aren't questions to think your way through — they're instructions for where to look. Read each one, then instead of answering it mentally, turn your attention toward whatever the question is gesturing at. Sit with one for a while. If you notice yourself constructing an answer in words, that's a sign attention has drifted into thought. Thoughts can't resolve these questions, because what's being pointed to comes before thought. So each time you catch yourself thinking, gently disengage from the thought and return attention to the raw place the question indicates.

The deep dive

"To whom does attention belong?"
The ordinary answer — "to me" — is itself a thought, and thoughts are downstream of whatever is asking. Try dropping the word "me" for a second and just look for the owner. Most people find they can't locate one. There's attention happening, and a felt sense of "mine-ness" laid over it, but the searcher never quite catches a separate proprietor standing behind the attention, holding its leash.

"From where does attention come?"
This is a spatial question aimed at something that has no location. If you actually try to trace attention back to a source point — behind the eyes, in the head, somewhere — you'll likely find you can't pin an origin. It seems to just be there, arising, without a traceable point of departure. The inquiry isn't really about geography; it's using space as a device to loosen the assumption that attention is emitted from a "you."

"What is paying attention?"
Notice the phrasing isn't "who" — it's "what." This nudges you away from personality and identity and toward bare noticing itself. When you look for the thing that is doing the attending, you typically find only attending — no separate agent behind it doing the job. The looker and the looked-for tend to collapse into the same thing.

"Whose attention is it?"
A variant of the first, but worth sitting with separately, because it's easy to answer the first one abstractly ("no one's") while still quietly assuming ownership here. This version tests whether that assumption has actually loosened or just been repeated as a concept.

"What knows where attention is at the moment?"
This one's subtle. It's not asking you to locate attention — it's asking what does the knowing. If you say "I know where it is," look for that "I" as a felt presence rather than a word. Usually what's found is a kind of open awareness that doesn't require a separate knower — the knowing and the known aren't two things meeting each other.

The mechanism the instructions describe

The practice has a simple loop: point, look, drift into thought, notice the drift, return. The drift isn't a failure — it's actually informative, because the moment you catch "attention has flown away to thoughts," you're demonstrating the very thing being pointed to: something noticed the wandering. That noticing is closer to the answer than anything you could formulate in words. So the repeated returning isn't just discipline — each return is itself a small taste of what's being sought.

If it's useful, you don't need to rush through all five — many people find one question, sat with for a long stretch, opens things up more than cycling through the list.