Who Cultivates Attention?

Hello Robert,

I am a relative newcomer to your posts and have not yet managed to obtain a copy of The Ten Thousand Things, so please excuse me if what follows has long since been addressed.

On the meaning of “awake”

In my (Bill’s) life, “I” notice two very different types of experience. So let’s take washing dishes. Sometimes when doing that, what I call Bill is more fully engaged. I am attending to the sensations of the water temperature, the feel of the dishes, the pots, pans, and silverware, the motion of moving a dish from the sink to the drying rack, etc. I am attending to my sensorial world. And other times, I am just going through the motions of doing the dishes, daydreaming my way through, mostly unaware of any sensation at all. Or let’s take driving. Sometimes I am “with it,” and other times, especially if I am familiar with the route, I am just on automatic, oblivious to what I am doing, the passing countryside or city environment, etc and can actually get to my destination and wonder: How did I get here?

I would be disingenuous to say that I don’t believe that one is preferable to the other. I do. I prefer the aliveness of attending to sleepwalking through life.

So for me, the word “awake” refers to the experiences that I have when I am attending, when my sensorial world is alive and ”I” am not somewhere else.

I doubt that anyone is permanently “awake,” but I would hope that all of us experience what I call awake-ness, at least from time to time.

Hoping for your feedback,

Hi, Bill.

I see being able to drive mechanically or wash dishes without needing to attend to every stroke of the sponge as a kind of freedom to attend to other matters while still getting routine tasks accomplished. I often “write” while driving or policing the kitchen. I understand that some teaching suggests focusing on the physical in preference to the ideational, but I find that focus goes wherever needed without needing management.

But the larger question you are raising is about preference, and that is where I would probe. You say you prefer attending to not attending. I understand that report and do not doubt it. What I would ask is whether the preference itself is generating the distinction.

A system that values a particular output will code certain states as full and others as deficient. The coding feels like perception, but it is also evaluation. Awake, as I use the word, is not a heightened sensorial state. It is the absence of the demand that experience be otherwise than it is, including the demand that one be more present, more alive, more attending. That demand is itself a form of not being here, in my view.

In my view, Robert, you are fortunate that you are able to attend to other things, such as writing, while doing routine things. I believe that most of us are not attending to anything. We are just daydreaming until we are finished and then hopefully actually attend to something. It is not a matter of demand. I feel fortunate when I find myself attending to whatever I am doing rather than sleepwalking through life, lost in habitual automatism.

Yes, Bill. You may have just made the point without intending to. “I find myself attending” is precise in a way that “I attend” is not. “Finding myself attending” implies that the attending arrived spontaneously, not that it was produced intentionally, perhaps as a prescribed practice.

The word “fortunate” confirms it; one does not feel fortunate about something one engineered. So the no-doer is already present in your description; the system notices a state it did not choose and registers it as good.

I do feel fortunate, but not because I can simply choose what to attend to. I cannot. I feel fortunate because I have seen and understood that finding myself doing or not doing is part of the flow, not a goal.

When I say I cannot simply choose what to attend to, you may doubt it, so let me give you an example. I might be reading a book, and then become aware that my eyes are scanning the print mechanically, but no information is passing from the page to my mind. So I resolve to concentrate on the text, but soon I am back in the same automatic scanning without meaning. I have found that the best course is to put the book aside and do something else. Force does not avail.

First off, thank you, Robert, for so generously responding to my comments. Actually, I believe that I did intend to make that point. An analogy: just as with a radioactive substance, one cannot predict or know which electron will next be emitted or when, seemingly randomly, so with “my mind.” I never know which thought or memory will arise from one moment to the next, and then a thread continue by association until that plays itself out and I find myself with my thoughts on something entirely unrelated. However, it seems that, as with concern for my health, for example, the more time I spend intentionally caring for it, the more I seem to be “primed” so that I will find myself following through with that concern more frequently. So with attending to what I am doing and the environment that I am in. The more it arises, the more likely it is to arise again. Maybe I am just a hedonist who likes the greater feeling of aliveness that arises when I find myself “attending” rather than just daydreaming my life away.

You are most welcome, Bill. I, too, have no idea what I will think or say next. If that is seen clearly, the idea of controlling attention may not make much sense. If thoughts arise and reach conscious awareness already formed, then the thought “I must not let my mind wander” is itself an arising, not a directive issued from above.

The priming you describe is a real mechanism. Repeated activation lowers the threshold for future activation. “Neurons that fire together wire together,” meaning simultaneous activation strengthens synaptic connections.

But notice what that does to the argument. If intentional attention primes future attention, intention is doing causal work. So then the question is what initiated the intention in the first place. If that too arose without a chooser behind it, then the priming is one more condition producing another condition, and the self that believes it is cultivating attention is an output of the loop, not its author.

It’s not hedonism I hear in your comments, but rather an argument for the self as curator of experience. I understand the appeal. The felt sense of managing attention, of returning to presence, is actual as a phenomenon. What I would question is the architecture it implies, a self located slightly outside experience, monitoring it, intervening when it drifts. In my observation, “myself” is not outside experience. It is part of it, arising within the same flow it believes it is directing.