Attention Makes Things Real

When we turn the light of our attention toward something, that thing emerges from the background to become vivid and real. Attention is our choice, an act of will, whereby our will engages our consciousness, the conscious energy, to apply it, to direct it, whether narrowly or widely.

When we pay attention, we are naturally and, depending on the degree of attention, exclusively engaged in actively focusing our awareness on a narrow object of attention or receptively opening our awareness to the whole wide field of our inner and outer senses, or some stance in between. The instability and control of attention are, of course, major issues in education, especially in early childhood. But attention also presents issues and opportunities in the spiritual path, where its further training directly contributes to discovering ourselves and the sacred.

One such issue: when we pay attention, we tacitly assume that we are the one who is paying attention, without any examination of who that one really is. The problem is that we default to our self-centered ego, the usurper of spiritual values and evolution.

A second issue is that we tend to get lost in, identified with whatever we are paying attention to. Both issues were addressed by Ouspensky with his double arrow approach to what Gurdjieff called self-remembering.[1] One end of the arrow points toward whatever we are paying attention to and the other end points back to us, to the one who is paying attention. This can bring us closer to our I, but tends to create an ongoing, unsustainable tension and balancing act between the outer and the inner. More problematically, it can convincingly lead us further into mistaking our ego for our I.

One way out of all that is to go beyond dividing our attention into a double-ended arrow and instead making it one broad attention encompassing both ends. Taking that a step further, we open the innermost side of our attention, to unblock, to uncap it entirely, to let attention flow from the deeper spirit behind and above us into and through us. This takes simple inner emptying, letting yourself, your center, descend behind your thoughts, behind your emotions, behind your senses, behind any notion of I or me, while also paying external attention. This inner receptivity coupled with outer activity is an exercise toward wholeness and purification.

Part of being real is being in your place, having your place. If we are sourcing our attention from our ego, then we have cut ourselves off from the roots of our place. We can seek to discover how to open that inner side of our attention to its true source, which means opening ourselves to not being our own source and letting the deeper will flow through us as attention. In that way we find our true place and make both ourselves and what we are paying attention to real.

If we block the real source of attention by inserting ourselves, our ego as the would-be source of our attention, then we and the things we pay attention to are only half real. Only in emptying does the true I, our core will, come, as an emanation of the All, the One Will. Only by reconnecting with the All, being the All, do we become Real. Only the Real can make us, along with what we see, truly Real. Though this sounds esoteric, it does come to us whenever our mind happens into silence and our emotions fall into peace. With no ego-centered stance blocking our source, with no commentary or reactions filtering our perceptions, we and what we see are simply Real. We go beyond surface appearances to context, to everything in its place, rooted in the Whole, with a live and life-giving circuit from the Source.

[1] P.D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, Chapter 7, pp. 118-119

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