Control of Your Attention
Student: You introduced the word attention. Can you explain why understanding attention is important to developing awareness?
Barbara: Up until now, really what we decide on, as a structure of beliefs has been completely controlling our attention. Whether we are aware of it or not, you made a contract early on in life that you were going to believe a number of different things about what you are and what life is. Your attention goes to any situation or perception that supports those beliefs.
The difference between that and what we are calling awareness is you are in control of where your attention goes. Not necessarily toward the beliefs you’ve contracted to over a lifetime, but your attention goes to where you say: to modifying those beliefs, to regrouping those beliefs, to unloading those beliefs, to knowing yourself as something beyond a structure of beliefs and reflex responses.
Student: In our minds, there are conversations going on in the background of all types, all the time. How do we learn to use our power in order to move our attention to where we want it to be?
Barbara: We are able to put our attention on many things in fast order. We put our attentions on our work, our jobs, our children, our shopping, and our driving. In a sense, that is our attention controlled by automatic reflex. The attention I am talking about has to do with conscious awareness of where you are putting attention, and what beliefs are pulling on it at any given moment.
The answer to your question is by looking and listening to how we do it; how our focus is being pulled by a fact, a reflex response, a memory. All kinds of things that we think we know but aren’t necessarily true, but we are responding to them anyway.
Student: For example, we are sitting at home, it is a quiet evening, the phone rings. How many of us can resist the phone call? If we meet a friend on the street and they want to start a conversation, can we simply walk on by? If there is a thought in our heads, can we not participate in that conversation?
Barbara: Right. Well, your analogy of the phone call is very apt, because we CAN disregard a phone call, we CAN resist conversing with a friend who insists on gossiping, spreading, let’s say, poisonous thoughts about the world. We CAN say no to a thought. We are being hooked all the time, and this is just conditioning. What we think we know, what we think we need to be involved in, this is just conditioning, and we can un-condition ourselves. We just have to listen and to look. Observe our own behavior and make modifications.
I’ve often used the imagery of sitting at a stop light on a beautiful summer night on an ocean boulevard, smelling the ocean breezes and seeing moonlight on the water, and the lights kicking up from a wet road. There is beautiful music playing on our radio, and so many beautiful sensory experiences are happening at once, and we invest our total attention on a conversation that happened earlier in the day that upset us. This happens to us all the time. In the middle of a perfect moment we bring in the past, or speculations about the future, and we clutter the moment, simply because we’ve been conditioned to go to places in our thinking, our remembering that create emotional moods. These emotional moods are feeding old habits, a way of being that doesn’t need to exist anymore.
We can live precisely in the moment, feel the good and the bad of one single instant without bringing in our interpretations, our memories, or what we think we need to know about this situation, or what it means. We can!
Student: But it often makes us uncomfortable . . .
Barbara: That’s just like changing habits.
Student: There is almost a sense that we aren’t “good people” if we don’t go over things we’ve done wrong, and make them better.
Barbara: If we don’t feel guilt, if we don’t feel shame, if we don’t feel a certain indignation then we’re not. It’s not really that we’re not good people, but we don’t know who we are. This is, believe it or not, a great thing. For a minute not to know who you are is the beginning of learning how to perceive things as they are!