Deep Attention

"… someone asked Gurdjieff if he would disclose his own 'whim,' and he said it was to live and teach so that there should be a new conception of God in the world, a change in the very meaning of the word." [1]

When it comes to the core attention, which is the center of our presence, greater duration leads to greater depth. Staying with attention quiets our mind and emotions, while it relaxes our body. Another way to look at this is that extending presence in time gives us a foothold in the timeless, in three ways. First, it opens us to the conscious energy, which holds a deeper position in the dimension of eternity, beyond time. We can sense that our consciousness is timeless, that time passes through consciousness rather than the other way around. Second, duration in time, because it aims to escape time, has an affinity with the timeless, with eternity. Third, the roots of attention itself are timeless, going beyond time, into hyparxis, the sixth dimension.

Whether the conscious energy and attention truly come from higher dimensions is not the real issue here. What matters is that we can verify, in our direct experience, that the conscious energy and attention both transcend time. We can perceive that in being our attention, we enter time from outside of it. As attention, we notice things in time without being subject to time ourselves. Our body certainly grapples with its subjection to time, but we ourselves, as attention, are timeless, as is our conscious awareness.

Relaxing into presence releases our identification with things in space and time, loosens the grip of our self-centered subjectivity, and lets us take our place in the timeless. When we are ourselves, when we can say in truth "Here I am," we realize ourselves as the timeless context within which things happen, within which time flows. And that fundamental self that we are shows up most directly as attention. We are our attention.

One approach to staying with attention is to adopt the inner posture of listening, not just with our ears but with all our senses. It means open attention to the whole of experience in this moment. This is the essence of presence. Keeping to that relaxed vigilance brings a quiet, inner stillness to our directly perceptible parts, a stillness that echoes the sacred emptiness at the root of attention. The resonance between the stillness of our heart-mind and the sacred emptiness in our Source, connects us with that Source. This is why every spiritual tradition values silence and stillness. This is why when we enter a venerable hall of worship, we feel its sacred stillness infuse our soul. Or when we stand in the temple of soaring redwoods. Or when we take in the vastness outside the window of an airplane. At such moments the sacred stillness comes to the foreground of our perceptions.

That is where we come from; in the stillness we come home. When we simply are, and we open inward, we reconnect with our Source, the source of our attention. The closer we come to that, the more stable our attention, and the more firmly rooted we are. This deep attention, spanning from things and events in time and space, all the way inward to our sacred source, defines what it means to be fully human. This deep attention is the bridge between Heaven and Earth, between higher and lower, between the Creator and the Universe. That attention resides in all of us, as us, and is why we are here.

Attention is one of the modes in which will operates in us. And because will is indivisible, it connects us directly to the Divine Will, and to each other. When you really look at another person, when you look into their eyes, it is as if you are looking into yourself. This is no illusion. We are our will. And we all share the same fundamental will, though it manifests differently and uniquely in each of us. Yet in our core, in our core attention, we are the same. And not just the same: we are not separate.

Of course, it does not stop there. Everything around us has the will to be itself. A rock has the will to be that rock. A cup has the will to be that cup. A tree has the will to be that tree. And a dog has the will to be itself. When we connect with the source of our attention, the source of our will, we are connecting with the Source of All. As it goes up the scale from rocks to trees to animals to humans, the One Will has a more and more refined instrument to use, to manifest Its individuality, Its uniqueness, and Its freedom. In us, the One Will can become aware of Its universality. This is how the overarching process of the spiritualization of the universe is unfolding. And it all begins with attention.

[1] A. R. Orage: A Memoir by Philip Mairet, University Books, 1966, p. 105

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