Saturday, November 13, 2004

ATTN: What is attention?

The question is "what is attention?" . i put down to words some examples of what i mean by attention. but since i feel i do not have found the very heart of it, i could not give you a clear definition - hence my question of what attention is.

In Western psychology, attention means selective perception. Focus, if you will, all the way from the sensory input to cortex elaboration, and all stages in between (filtering etc). This is not - or rather, only part of - what i mean by attention.

If i were to describe attention, it would be the activity that occurs inside me, in a place i call my intuition. This place is part of me and at the same time is not a part of me. The way i see it, my intuition is a meeting point where i meet other people. Call it empathy, telepathy or whatever. I can not feel my intuition, but i can feel the activity going on in there. The activity, which i call attention, is a feeling that is sometimes inside my head: in the back of my head when i am sucked into the past, into memories and thoughts; or in my forehead when i focus. Sometimes it is all around me, inside and outside, like when i walk in a forest and listen to the conversation of the birds; it's a kind of awareness. And when i meet other people, i can feel how my attention sometimes gets diffuse, less dense, mingling with the other person's attention.

If you ask me why i chase for a definition, i do not know. But i feel there is an instrument inside my body that can pass the borders of time and space, like in a 5th dimension. My brain cannot understand - at least one of the reasons is that it is limited by the dimensions that Kant talked about. Also, brain functions in a serial way - i cannot understand with my brain that past, present and future are here at the same time, simply because it cannot look in multiple directions concurrently. With attention, i can feel all directions of space and time. Yet i cannot do something simple like predicting the future, or create any future that i want. It is not because these things are not there (have a look at quantum theory, or the book The Field by Lynn McTaggart, for some examples) but because my intuition is still blocked, filtered if you will, by a lot of beliefs that i still carry around. My ultimate goal is to clean up all resistance and get to a state of superconductance. I think attention is a basic food for each person, and in essence it is also what people are made of.

I don't know if this helps or makes things more difficult. Anyway, in his book "Attention and presence" Gerard Bodifée wrote - and i translate from Flemish so beware :-)
"God is a creator, not by being at the start of all, but by being their destiny. At the start there is only an amorph, unknowable emptiness. Destiny is a completion; it is the fullness of attention and of an existence without imperfectnesses. In the attention paying human being this destiny makes itself knowable and gives even more direction to the continuing creation. Every conscious realisation eliminates something from the randomness that remains in the still immature cosmos".

Best regards,
Ron

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