Attention is of the Essence

It is ours to master and refine: otherwise we remain prey to the vicissitudes of life.

1

Passing through Palma Airport on returning from a trip to mainland Spain I was struck by the onscreen police videos alerting tourists against pickpockets and conmen. Wow, I thought to myself, so they still warn against real crime here, as opposed to tracking down anti-Regime thoughts, hate speech, offences against gender ideology and so on! Well, I suppose there’s a tourist industry still to be taken care of; and maybe Spain hasn’t slipped quite so far down the totalitarian slope as other countries in Europe and beyond. Not yet, at least…

One of the videos featured a typical scenario of a young woman standing by a cash dispenser. Foolishly she has left her wallet by her hand next to the ATM keyboard. A guy approaches, distracting her to her left, then his accomplice swoops in on the wallet from the other side and they’re gone. It all happens in a moment, in the video just as in real life. By the time the victim realises what’s happened the perpetrators are already well clear.

This little scene got me thinking about the nature of attention. What is it exactly, and why can it be so easily bamboozled? Certainly it’s something we all have available to us, for it is a fundamental characteristic of consciousness itself, and hence of the human as a conscious being. Animals have it too of course, certainly the higher species do; indeed animals in the wild are far more attentive than we are, at least within the range of awareness available to them.

They need to be for their own survival, that’s for sure. Yet in some ways it also makes it easier for them that they don’t have a reflexive mind, as we do, to confuse and interfere with their sense of the environment. Instead they have an acute instinctual knowing of how to act, for example when a predator stalks its prey. A classic example is the lioness, prowling around the herd of gazelles whose avoidance strategy only leads them into the clutches of the concealed and waiting lion.

Compared to that elaborate performance our little ATM scenario looks pretty tame and simplistic. Yet even though it must be one of the oldest ploys in the long history of petty criminality, it works, time and time again. And it works because mostly our attention is tied up in immediate externalities, or in our own thoughts, which for practical purposes amounts to much the same thing. Certainly the result is the same: we have no reserve of uncommitted awareness when challenged by something unforeseen.

Now let’s apply this view of things to the larger world. We are constantly being jostled and nudged, offline and even much more so online, and sometimes those prompts are aimed simply at attracting our attention so that we buy something or sign up for something or whatever. But also there is a jostling of the one-two pickpocket variety, and this we find most especially in the narratives spun to us by the news media.

Here the aim is not only, or not even primarily, to attract, but rather is designed above all to distract us. One arm of the octopus goes “look here, look at this”, while the other arms rifle one’s pockets and pick or implant the brain. And because what we’ve lost is not something tangible like a wallet or phone, we don’t register that it’s missing until it’s likely too late for redress.

Always one of the first rules of thumb in dealing with this kind of propaganda is, don’t look just at what they are telling you, but rather get a sense of what they are not telling you, of what is not being said. Yet even people who are wise to that rule in theory are liable to forget it in practice. This is because it’s not enough to be aware of the gambit, you’ve got to be able to re-educate your reactions so that you deal with it effectively. Again it’s just like the one-two pickpocket trick: in theory you may be perfectly aware of how it works, but if you haven’t mastered your reflexes, chances are you’ll still fall for it should it happen to you in real life.

But it’s not just a matter of getting on top of one’s reflex reactions. That’s the relatively mechanical part of it; behind it there’s something deeper at issue. Why is it so much more difficult to be aware of the falsification arising out of what is left unsaid, of what is studiously ignored, as compared to the falsity of what does get to be uttered? Because again our attention is tied up with the way the dominant reality presents itself. Given such a tie-up we may still be capable of spotting the outright lie, but we may not be so good at identifying the mendacious silences in which those lies are embedded. And yet it is those silences which constitute the darkness setting off the upfront falsehoods that strut before us, enticing or taunting our attention.

To put it another way, it’s much easier to be aware of a presence than an absence. Nonetheless key absences can indeed be sensed quickly enough once there is a reserve of uncommitted attention within ourselves. This is the kind of attention which declines to react to the noisy come-ons in the foreground, and instead contemplates the spectacle in its entirety with unmoved dispassion. To such a gaze the absences, the darknesses will assume their true significance, and will reveal in spite of themselves the secrets they wished to keep hidden.

Ultimately what is at issue here is a move away from a cognitive mode orientated to the graspable and the pin-down-able and towards an intuitive mode which senses the elusive patterns beneath surface events. It’s a different quality of knowing, a shift from the gross to the subtle, from the obvious to the oblique. Without that inner shift we will likely have recourse to the same mental tools we use to deal with surface phenomena, yet which are not best adapted to sounding the depths out of which those appearances arise.

The distinction could be drawn in another way by sensing what is meant by consciousness as opposed to awareness. Consciousness is directional and outgoing, being naturally “positivistic”. It is keen to identify, label and respond, typically by finding correct answers, or answers as near to correct as possible. Awareness is non-directional, it scarcely moves out of itself, nor is it particularly concerned with right answers, for it recognises that even in the best of cases these will only be partially right, and liable to change to wrong at the next moment. Instead it receives in silence, and out of that receiving there arises as though by itself an adequate response.

Silence here is the key. Silence and receiving. Consciousness turned towards an objectified reality is more concerned with getting than receiving - getting answers, amassing information, marshalling its available resources. But receptivity is concerned not with the already known but with what lies just beyond it. And the more silent it is, the finer, more subtle and more penetrating will be its awareness of the beyond, of the not yet formulated, of what has not yet taken tangible shape. This holds true for our largest understandings of reality, and it holds equally true for the most immediate situations of everyday life.

There is a maxim in martial arts that goes something like this: a good martial artist knows what his adversary is going to do a moment after he starts doing it; an excellent martial artist knows the adversary’s move in the same instant he starts moving; but a grand master knows what the other intends before the action begins - even before the adversary knows himself what he is going to do. And the grand master knows it not because he’s anxiously scanning for prompts but because he is in his natural state - a relaxed and quiet mode where information is received in its subtlest expression, prior to taking form in a physical act.

Applied to our ATM scenario, the good martial artist would likely cotton on to the threat just as it starts to take shape, thereby frustrating the attempted theft. An excellent martial artist would deter the thieves simply by the quality of his presence, even if the would-be assailants couldn’t quite understand why they felt disinclined to try it on in his case. Finally with a grand master the situation wouldn’t arise in the first place. Why not? It’s impossible to say exactly why not. It just wouldn’t. That’s simply the nature of awareness when it’s refined to an extraordinary degree.

Unforeseen situations, situations of threat or danger, are good ways of revealing the balance obtaining in any given instance between consciousness and awareness. Someone is jostled, and they turn towards the impact, and if only their consciousness is at play to the detriment of their awareness, they can say goodbye to their phone or wallet. Someone else is jostled, and if their awareness has even a minority share of their total attention, they’re in with a chance of protecting themselves and their belongings. And they can do this for the simple reason that they are not taken up wholly with a mechanical reaction to a stimulus, but have just enough available awareness to respond to the greater but hidden threat coming from the other side.

2

Assuming all this to be the case, the question then must naturally arise: how to foster a reserve of uncommitted attention within ourselves? Doubtless there are different responses to this question, but so far as I’m concerned, one solution stands out: the practice of meditation. For this in essence is what the practice is all about: the cultivation of non-committed and hence dispassionate attention, freely available to the situations of life as they may arise and yet entangling itself in none of them.

Meditation is paradoxical in many ways. It seems to be “about” nothing in particular, yet it is just for that reason that it can ease our dealings with the manifold particularities of life. It seems to entail a great deal of self-absorption, a major turn inwards, and yet it facilitates a far keener and more responsive approach to the outside world. It seems to be all about oneself to the exclusion of everyone else, yet it fosters an inner space out of which one can be naturally responsive to others - far more than when we are merely reacting to them.

I wish I could say I had understood these things when I started in earnest on my own spiritual quest almost a quarter of a century ago. But the truth is that I’ve been meditating on a regular basis only for the last three or four years, having spent twenty years before that in the pursuit of superficially more appealing avenues of inquiry. For we live in a world that craves quick-fix solutions, and of course there is no shortage of these in the vast and rather nebulous zone of “alternative spirituality”. Typically we want change on a timescale of days or weeks, and meditation promises it in terms of months and years.

And what’s more, when there’s such a plethora of glamorous new techniques out there, and more it seems every day, meditation just seems so staid and old-fashioned, doesn’t it? Just as unglamorous as that well-worn piece of advice about how to get your writing done: through the application of arse of trousers to seat of chair. Substitute “meditation cushion” for “chair” and it’s pretty much the same message. And yet there is no better way - I’m tempted to say, no other way, but that’s just my experience - to temper and recondition one’s entire system over time than a steady practice of this kind.

I would only qualify this by adding that meditation isn’t necessarily a matter of sitting down with one’s legs crossed somehow. Since I’ve mentioned martial arts, it’s worth pointing out that the latter, properly understood, are essentially a form of meditation in movement - besides of course having practical applications as well! Nor do I mean to be dismissive of the numerous innovations in spiritual practice over the last few decades. While there has been a fair bit of dodgy stuff, some of the new approaches have opened up very valuable possibilities. For that matter I’m not even against quick results, if you can get them; it’s just that I’ve never got them very quickly myself…

Be that as it may, the point remains that we are made to be the masters of our own attention. We spend so much time and effort trying to get on top of the circumstances of our lives, and yet so easily overlook that inner quality which will ultimately determine how everything else shows up for us. We bestow attention on so many things, and yet rarely does it occur to us to turn it back on itself, to give attention to attention, calibrating and refining that quality out of which all the rest of our experience must flow.

We may be slow in understanding this, but the forces adverse to humanity which are so preponderant in the world today are very much focused on the matter. Whether expressing themselves in terms of commerce, entertainment or propaganda - and these three are increasingly indistinguishable - they make it quite clear that they want our attention more than anything else. They want it more even than our money, or our consent to their abuse of power at our expense, since these things come after, being downstream from the captured attention that is logically prior to them.

But remember that attention is a key attribute of consciousness itself, so when I say that they want the one, it means that they very much want the other as well. They want our consciousness, so that they can feed off what they do not have themselves, or have in only a very low degree. And this they can do if we are not alert, if we are not attentive to how our own attention works.

It can easily seem like a humble, insignificant thing, the quality of our own attention, when set off against our experience of an enormous, indifferent and increasingly malignant world. Yet contrary to the typical assumption, the trouble is not that we have no control over the experience of that world, but that we have more control than we know how to handle. For at every moment we have some kind of choice as to how to direct our attention. We can let it run in its familiar grooves of compulsive thinking, or we can reroute it towards more fruitful directions. It’s up to us, and it’s up to us constantly, on an ongoing basis.

And yet as we do become alive to this boundless inner resource, we gradually realise that our attention can never be taken away from us, at least not without our deluded consent. Hence the title of this post: attention is of the essence, in the dual sense of having paramount importance, but also of pertaining directly to the essence of what we are. In this realisation there is the dawning of the awareness that we need never be the victims of this world, unless we set ourselves up for that role. For the world is never other than a form of our attention, and to the extent that we master the one, the other will become responsive - hard to believe but true - to our highest good.