ATTN: a theory about attention

For some reason, order seems to be a vital ingredient in wellbeing. Everything being in the right place is a state that i would call
SATORI or enlightment.
Satori i think means you've climbed a mountain, and now you're on top of it, enjoying the view that you longed for. But at the same time reaching the top is reaching a state of inertia Where would you go from here?

I'm in a group that uses the THOUGHTSTORM technique to find answers to these and other questions. The question this time was: "why do we make life so difficult for ourselves?" and the corecept was : "I can't do otherwise". In order to live, i.e. contrary to staying inert, I the Ego, need to reach satori until i get there, and then i need to get on, away from satori.

I have a theory of an order beyond what i can see, or even feel. DAVID BOHM is one of the people who have worked out such a theory. I think of myself as a cell in an organism. I don't know what the use of living of this organism is. It is beyond my scope. But i do believe that there is a place, which i call my destiny, that is reserved for me - it is my rightfull place. When i was born, i was dropped somewhere near by or far from this destiny; i don't know. The salmon wouldn't know where the origin of the river is, but it starts to swim at some point in its life.

Life is about movement. The earth orbits around the sun, I orbit around my destiny. I call this movement attention. The thing is, my destiny is no absolute place, it is a relative place. Relative to other people. Therefore, in order to reach my destiny, i need to DIALOGUE with other people; with my neighbours. And as much as i need them to find my destiny, they need me to find theirs.

I live, therefore i move. Even when i think i don't move, i orbit around my destiny. My idea of not moving is an idea created by perspective - i look at my destiny, and i measure the distance between me and my destiny. If the distance doesn't change, i may believe that i'm not moving. But my movement is the orbit, the circle around my destiny. Attention is like gravity, other people are like other planets, or comets, or sometimes black holes. They change my orbit, and i change theirs.

I believe inside me there is a measuring device capable of measuring the distance between me and my destiny. This is what i call my intuition. It relates to other people, so in fact it is not really "inside" me, and it is also not "outside" me. My conscious mind can sometimes capture what my intuition measures. For instance, if the amount of synchronicity in my life increases, then apparently i move towards my destiny. If I feel that I need less effort to live my life, then it comes into my mind that i'm moving towards my destiny. It also works the other way around. If i try to do something and it costs me a lot of enery, if it won't go the way i would like it to go, then apparently i drift away from my destiny.

So what is attention? Attention is the movement, the energy, the language that people use to find their place in this organism. The place is relatively known, but not absolute. We're in the system / the organism / the order, so we cannot have a look on the system itself and at the same time be conscious of the fact that we are part of it. This i think is a property of the human brain that we cannot view two perspectives (part and whole) at the same time.

We can however feel that we in fact are the organism; this i call awareness.

- November 2004
(still puzzling...)