ATTN: A new theory of attention - part one

Love and attention are the high and low tide of our energy system.

Love is the food, flowing from the whole to its parts.
Where there is a movement, there is also a countermovement.
Attention is the the existential emptiness, the flow backwards from the parts to their whole.

And then there is the holon, the whole for its parts and the part within the whole.

When we consider love and attention, whole and parts, there are several orders to be observed.

One is time, where the parent is born before the child. And so the parent is the whole.
The child pays attention to the parent, in order to receive the love from the parent. And the parent decides how and when they will give their love to their child. This is what brings about conditioning.

One is again time, where the person was a child before he became an adult. Let's name the person as a child the "inner child", then the adult pays attention to the inner child. This inner child then radiates love to the adult. Such love is often called passion, or pain, or creativity, depending on context.

In nature, love and attention are seldomly used. For love, the word food usually applies. And for attention, it seems there is no word. The mother bird flies to the nest with a wurm in her mouth. The young birds spread their mouth wide open. Love is the food. What are the wide open mouths? Do young birds pay attention to their mother?

The last example in this part one, is where the whole is the woman and the parts are the man. Use other words if you like. For the woman: female energy, the intuition. For the man: male energy, the mind. So the mind pays attention to the intuition. And the intuition radiates love to the mind.

Why is this all of any importance? Consider the human being a drop of water in the ocean of love and attention. Would a drop of water ever get tired? So why would a human being get tired? Of what?

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Additional comments from this same Ecademy blog :

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yes absolutely
i think love and attention are the tides of our own psychic energy system.

in responding to your message, i wanted to use the word "chi" for psychic energy. i looked up the word in wikipedia and could not find it. then searched for energy and landed here :

Conservation of energy states that the total amount of energy (including potential energy) in a closed system remains constant. In other words, energy can be converted from one form to another, but it cannot be created or destroyed. In modern physics, all forms of energy exhibit mass and all mass is a form of energy.

I think love and attention also obey this rule. Paying attention is creating space. Quantum theory represents an object differently depending on whether it is being observed or not being observed. During the act of measurement, the mathematical description abruptly shifts--from a spread-out range of possible attributes (unmeasured object) to single-valued actual attributes (measured object).

The word "mass" reminds me of attention-related words. For instance, the word "important" has the element of the Latin "importare" = to carry in". Important=strongly affecting the course of events or the nature of things - so there again i see how attention "creates" reality.

For the word mass i currently use "fixed attention".

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yes i have read the book by Gary Chapman.
What you are referring to , i had in mind to make this part two of a series.

Here's the imaginary situation :
the mother rejects the way in which her husband pays her attention. next, she will find herself inhibited to radiate love to him. And so her desire to have children grows. The child will be a boy. He will then become her husband. This body needs love, and his mother is prepared to give him love, provided that he judges his father and finds him incompetent to love his mother. Next the boy receives love, he takes his father's place and suddenly he feels a deep emptiness inside. This boy has gone away from his place as a child. No longer has he got a father, no longer can he be a child.

For the holon, the chain of events, the karma, it does not matter whether you follow the boy into his marriage, where you can easily predict what kind of a woman he will marry and how similar his marriage will be; or to follow his mother back into her childhood, where she could not be a child and now, as a mother, wants to share her deepest feeling in the only way possible : by having her son experience as a child exactly what she as a child went through.

As for God, here's a quote from Bert Hellinger that resonates with me, about human greatness - which is essentially what the word God means for me:

Some time ago, I was reading texts of Kungtse. When I read these texts, I understood something about human greatness. What I understood from his writings was: What is greatest in human beings is what makes them equal to everybody else. Everything else that deviates higher or lower from what is common to all human beings makes us less. If we know this, we can develop a deep respect for every human being.
-- Bert Hellinger