What is the Attention? – William Segal
The study of attention can begin with its place in ordinary life…Take, for instance, what is noticed in response to the command “Pay attention.” One sees a momentary gathering of a power of greater discrimination and intelligence, before its integrity again lapses. This investigation can confirm the fact that ordinarily one’s attention lacks unity, that it fluctuates, that there is no base of operation, no home for it….
The attention, far from being at one’s command, actually serves the chance whims and fancies of separate functions; arising with no sense of common purpose these conflict and tyrannize one another.
Attention is an instrument. Cleared of all internal noise it can vibrate like a crystal, at its own proper frequency.
While an instrument for one’s use, it is clear that the attention is not “mine” in any narrow sense. Having it at one’s disposal allows a person to face the fact that it does not originate with him at all. One is there to serve it, not the converse.
The attention lives in, and through the body. Returning to the body is a gesture of welcoming the attention.
The Reality of Being
8. The Watchman
Who is present—who is seeing? And whom? The whole problem is here. In order to observe ourselves we need an attention that is different from our ordinary attention. … I believe I need to pay attention when, in fact, I need to see and know my inattention.
Life is Real Only Then, When I Am
Third Talk (re: an exercise of attention for Americans)
… it is indispensable first to learn to divide one’s entire attention in three approximately equal parts, and to concentrate each separate part simultaneously for a definite time on three diverse inner or outer “objects.”
…it is necessary to learn … what should, in real man, be “self-willed attention” … in you, is merely a “self-tenseness,”
19. An echo of “I”
A right effort to be present requires … attention coming from the different centers … in a right proportion and … engaged as a conscious Presence. But it is constantly threatened by what draws it outside. We need to become conscious of this
…It is only by working to be present that my attention will develop. …I try to prevent its being taken. I try but cannot… I begin to understand what this requires from me even if I cannot do it. In the struggle where I come back and then go again toward manifestation, …I will always lose myself unless my attention goes both toward life and toward the inside.
…If I cannot center my effort in a certain way, I am bound to lose myself.
6. The First Initiation
I need to see myself as a machine driven by the processes that appear—thoughts, desires, movements. I need to …be present while I function as a machine. …, have a more conscious impression of it. In order to face the force of identification, there must be something present that attends—an attention that is stable, free and related to another level.
Spiritual Physics, Jerry Brewster
Buffers are very subtle and one sees them by the struggle of sensing and maintaining a divided attention. You’ll never see a buffer just by taking an inner ‘snapshot,’ which is the beginning of observation. …you have to be present long enough to see how you digest that shock. …The moment that you receive the shock of observing yourself the buffer steps in. But by that time we’re already reacting to the shock; we’re analyzing the shock; or we’re gone; or we’re thinking, “How will I bring this to the group.” We move to another center in that moment and we lose our attention. We don’t maintain separation or division of attention long enough, strong enough or consistently enough.
The Reality of Being
21. A new way of functioning
…the functions must all be attuned and united in a single movement of availability. If there is any distance between them, the common aim is lost and the blind function acts according to its habit.
This accord of my centers of energy and their functioning cannot be brought about by forcing. There must be a quieting, a letting go of their movement, in order for a balance of energy to appear between them. But something is missing. I feel I am always too passive. So the need for an energy appears, an attention that will stay free and not become fixed on anything. It is an attention that will contain everything and refuse nothing, that will not take sides or demand anything. It will be without possessiveness, without avidity, but always with a sincerity that comes from the need to remain free in order to know.
15. Hypnotized by my mind
There is in me an essential energy that is the basis of all that exists. I do not feel it because my attention is occupied by everything contained in my memory—thoughts, images, desires, disappointments, physical impressions. I do not know what I am. It seems that I am nothing. Yet something tells me to look, to listen, to seek seriously and truly. When I try to listen, I see that I am stopped by thoughts and feelings of all kinds. I listen poorly; I am not quiet enough to hear, to feel. What I wish to know is more subtle. I do not have the attention that is required.
I have not yet seen the difference between a fixed attention coming from only one part of myself and a free attention attached to nothing, held back by nothing, which involves all the centers at the same time. My usual attention is caught in one part and remains taken by the movement, the functioning of this part.
A Sense of the Cosmos, Jacob Needleman
The development of active attention is the key to man’s coming under higher influences both in the universe and in himself. Power, which is the ability to live in the world of real causes, begins with the growth of human attention.
The traditions teach us that man loses everything unless he is able to listen, to see, to be present both to the lower and the higher elements in himself. In these traditional formulations, man is a bridge; and the bridge is awareness – awareness that is evoked by the struggle for active attention.
Reality of Being
11. Conscious effort
…I am connected with higher forces. At the same time, I am connected with lower forces. I am in between. … A conscious attention means something that is between two worlds.
61. The aim of my effort
To be centered means to abdicate, for each part has to renounce the pretense that it is the whole, that it sees and directs the whole. It is as though I submit to an order that is greater, an order on a cosmic scale, and all my parts accept to serve it, to remain voluntarily passive in front of it.
…. My whole effort, my whole work, is to maintain this direction… It is an effort of attention coming from all the parts of myself—to purify the attention in order to concentrate on “I.” In this effort I discover a way of functioning that is no longer passive, a work in which the functions are called to obey the movement of attention.