It's a Question of Attention

I was talking with David yesterday morning about thinking and the fact that thinking can so often feel problematic.  How often we wish we could stop the chatter inside our minds or least stop some of the repetitiveness of the thoughts.  How often it seems as though it would be more peaceful if it were not for the incessant activity in our thinking minds.  How often it seems that we just think, think, think all the time, ceaselessly, whether we really want to or not.

On the other hand, it also seems that there are even more times when we simply aren't at all aware that we are thinking; because, hey, that's what we do.  Right?

How many people do you know who fully appreciate what was set in motion by Descartes' statement 'cogito ergo sum,' I think, therefore I am?  Of course, Descartes didn't come up with this idea out of a vacuum.  The trend in 'western' thought had been toward the supremacy of thought as the determiner that set humans apart from animals for quite some time, well before Descartes so succinctly stated what we have ever since taken completely for granted.

Two thousand years before Descartes made his proclamation, Plato had already insisted that it was the ideas of things that were ideal and real, as opposed to the corporeal, the physical, which were mere shadows of human thought.  So, the meme had already thoroughly made its way into our culture by the time Descartes was born.

So, what happens when a civilization has as one of its most dominant cultural memes the 'fact' that thinking not only sets us apart from and makes us superior to all other forms of life on this planet, but that it is the very thing, and perhaps the only thing, whereby we even know that we are?

We inevitably become a culture of animals who think that what we think matters more than anything else.  We become animals who live as though all otherness, anything 'outside our own heads,' is less than real.  We become animals whose only relationship with anything is perpetually filtered through a skein of habitual, repetitive, purely conditioned thoughts.  We become animals who have little, if any, direct relationship with anything.  We become animals whose 'created reality,' from the virtual to the purely imaginal, seems more real than the physical, the corporeal, the other--including our very own bodies.  We become animals whose vision of reality is completely solipsistic.

No wonder we are such a miserably unhappy group of humans!  We are animals whose every waking moment is consumed by incessant distraction-seeking.  We cannot stand even one naked instant in which we might really and truly feel the pain and suffering which we actually endure every moment.  'I, a stranger and afraid, in a world I never made.'  We are forever trapped inside our own minds.  How terribly, terribly lonely.

This is where the questioning can be very challenging but is probably most productive.  You have to be willing to listen deeply within and hear what that unquestioned voice inside is continuously telling you is true.

One device for accomplishing this is to notice by your actions what you hold to be important.

However, it might actually be easier, to start with, by watching other people and noticing by their actions what they deem to be important.  I'm not speaking of what people would tell you is important to them, but rather what their observable behavior seems to say is important to them.  Do you notice people looking around at the 'natural' environment, pausing to take in where they are in the world at that moment.  Do they easily and naturally make contact with other humans.  Do they notice the birds and other wild animals around them?  Are they looking up and out and taking it all in?

If these are not the things you see people attending to or 'minding' as Paul Shepard put it, then what do they seem to be doing?  What are they acting out as important?

After some time of doing this.  Turn your observations to your own actions.  Be gentle.  Don't judge.  Just notice.  Be lightly, even playfully curious about yourself and what your actions tell you.

If our attention is perennially on our thoughts, if we rarely, if ever, shift our attention away from our thoughts to whatever is around us, toward the others sharing the world we live on and in, then our behaviors, our actions will reflect our thinking only.

Choose often to shift you attention outward, upward, downward.  Open your senses and know where you are. Don't worry about being who you are.  Choose instead to be where you are.  The rest will take care of itself.  You don't have to think about it.

Let me know what you find out.


Most of us have seen the bumper stick, 'Question authority!'  Recently I saw this one, 'Question your thoughts.'  I like that one.