Respect for Attention

Respect for your attention is respect for yourself, because you are your attention. That respect comes in several flavors. The first concerns whether you have in you, in this moment, something worthy of the name attention. Are you intentionally directing your awareness now? Or is your attention scattered, flitting around? Or is it submerged, identified with something? If you perceive it as your attention, free and ready to move as you intend, that is the crucial starting point. Respecting your attention means keeping it free.

The second concerns contact with where your attention is pointing, noticing the object of your attention in a given moment. Sometimes, when our attention is passive, we may not really notice whatever it has landed on. But when we do notice, we might see whether that is a suitable place for our attention, a suitable place for us to be. If I am taken by some emotional reaction, maybe on some unwelcome news, or having been slighted by someone, or having failed in some way, I can ask whether that sustained pain is a place I wish to be. Perhaps I need to take a psychological approach and comfort myself, for example by thinking of and regarding my situation from a different perspective. Who hurt me? Why I do I care so much about that? Recall times when I was not hurting in that way. And so on, seeking a mental antidote to the emotional pain, fear, embarrassment, anger, vanity, greed, and the rest.

But also, it may be possible, without ignoring or disavowing my emotion, without trying to bury it, to simply relax its hold on me, to broaden my attention and move it elsewhere, move myself elsewhere, perhaps to my breathing or to my body sensation, or to some other activity. This is respecting myself, respecting my attention, and not pouring my energy down the drain.

And in so doing, I may discover something else worthy of respect, a deeper aspect of myself, an inner peace and silence that is not disturbed, that is closer to who I truly am, closer to my sacred Source. We are all emanations of that one Source, we share in that One Will. In respecting our attention, we respect its Source, we respect our Source, we respect our real Self. What goes on in time matters, but we also live in and as that Source beyond time and space. If we can find the stillness, that uplifting emptiness within ourselves, it serves as our gateway to the depth and the light that we are.

This moves us beyond our egoism, beyond our self-centeredness, which we also respect as part of our equipment for this life, just as we respect this magnificent body that we receive as our material endowment at birth. Again and again, that gateway of inner stillness, beyond ego and body, shows us an entirely different level of ourselves, equally worthy of respect.

In respecting that depth, we allow the higher Will, in the form of our core attention, to fill us and make us whole. It does not feel like my attention, for it is simply attention, a full and robust Attention centered in that deeper sense of myself, the one that is not separate, that is connected with all, the one that is my Source. We come to this by letting go, by relaxing our self, and allowing this core attention, this axial attention to flow into us, to fill us, to subsume all our concerns and their inner chatter, to be us.

This is not our ordinary passive self, nor is it other than our self. It is not our sacred Source, nor is it other than our Source. This Attention, this Presence, is both and more. We are a robust blend of our self and our Source, individual and more than individual, individual and not separate, a singular whole without boundaries. In that moment, we are and we see that we are. It all comes from relaxing back into ourselves, blending with that depth, and letting that vivid Presence flow into us.

Full presence elicits self-respect. And it brings us face to face with our conscience, sometimes in unexpected ways. For example, presence shows us that what we do, moment to moment, matters. It shows us that presence matters. It shows us that how we spend our precious time matters. We can look at our life in a given moment and ask: is this how I must or wish to live? If not, then the conscience inherent in presence prompts us to reconsider. Attention, conscience, and presence all have will as their root nature, their Source. When we act with full presence, with full attention, we can longer hide those actions from ourselves, we can no longer ignore them. Now we see and we cannot not see.

For this week, please practice allowing that deeper attention to enter you from behind all your preoccupations and, as you do so, be that presence.

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