ATTN: Can it be done?

If you hear a voice within you say 'you cannot paint,'
then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.

- Vincent Van Gogh

Martin Buber is one of the people who has shown it is possible to describe the impossible. I believe he's a painter with words.

What i would like to do is connect what we know to what we do. Krishnamurti said some beautiful things like "the mind will make you believe that love and action are two separated things, but really they cannot be separated". I think there are many ways in which attention as a product could indeed "heal" people. My purpose is less stretching than to heal people.

In Gestalt the proverb goes "the whole is earlier and more than the sum of parts". I think the same goes for attention. I don't know what is good for each individual. But i feel that we, the rich people in the world, the ones with the internet and all, have earned our material wealth at the cost of the immaterial attention. I think attention is a political issue; i think the people should put it on the agenda so the politicians can discuss the issue. Note how they cannot discuss a nonexistent issue. I think political work does not include making attention an issue. That is something we, the people, should do. It is only when attention has become a political issue, politicians can do their work.

The issue, as far as i can see it, is this: that the "short of attention" diseases that strike our western world may be revealed, out of their taboos, much the same way as the hunger and polluted water diseases in some african countries are revealed on television. I say we show this disease on television.

But first I would find out what attention is. In the sense of project management, one cannot come up with a problem without a proper solution attached. In creative thinking, a solution is another word for redefining the problem. My quest is about redefinition - about what attention really is.

Best regards,
Ron

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

ATTN: attention as punishment in court

Attention could be used in court. Let us say we have a victim (V) of a crime committed by a criminal (C). Picture this: the situation is that the Criminal has done something wrong to the Victim. Now the Victim is hurt and (s)he wants revenge. Criminal should be punished. But what should the punishment be? We'll examine an extreme case, where the Criminal has killed the Victim's child.

What if the judge condemns Criminal to pay attention to Victim? What if he orders Victim to decide upon the time when the punishment is fullfilled? In a verdict like this, the Victim is the director of the Criminal's punishment. It appears that the roles of Criminal and Victim are reverted.

The situation arises where the Victim can not be satisfied; even the death of the Criminal will not bring back Victim's child. In an effort to avoid the experience of deep loss, Victim will refuse the Criminal's attention and call for revenge. In his/her eyes, the Criminal is no longer a human being; there is only the desire to share the pain: "I want you to feel what I feel". But then a strange thing happens. Criminal will ask the judge to be relieved of his punishment because (s)he can not deliver; Victim refuses to accept the attention and therefore the Criminal should no longer be bound to the punishment.

At first, this imaginary situation may look like a Kafka scene. In family constellations however, the rightful place of the facilitator is next to the Criminal, because the Criminal is often the weakest person in the system. I once heard a story about a tribe. If one of the tribe members became ill, the tribe would say "not this person is ill, but the whole tribe is ill and it becomes visible through this one person". Reality is often the exact opposite of what morale wants us to believe.

Back to the situation. The punishment will work in such a way that Victim needs to accept Criminal's attention. If not, Criminal can not deliver and will ask the judge to be set free. Victim and Criminal are tied up to one another; not only does the act of the Criminal have great consequences in the Victim's life, it is also up to Victim to call it even. The influence on each other's life shows a deep bond between the two. Victim can only accept Criminal's attention if (s)he is able to see Criminal as a human being. It is only then that Victim can step out of this deadly embrace and start the harsh task of facing the loss of his/her child. The Criminal's attention, at that point, is desperately needed. When time has come, Victim will realize that enough attention has been paid, and Criminal is set free to accept his/her own part of the karma. I would think that by that time, Victim should be able to help the Criminal likewise.

Mind you, this resembles the situation in South Africa when apartheid was no more and Mandela had to prevent civil war. I trust you all know what happened back then.

Best regards,
Ron

ATTN: What is attention?

I dedicate this year (and probably most of next year) to the question of what attention is. I'm working on a white paper but i feel i haven't gotten into the very core of it. I believe that attention is the "power of mankind". With that i mean that when it comes down to the question "to act or not to act", the need for attention is what essentially makes all the difference. It occurred to me that the only way to find out about attention is to use attention itself. I think that is what the ancient buddhists meant by their proverb "attention is attention".

So I would like you to share your thoughts and experiences on the subject of attention.


Example: one proverb says "emotions, at the very core, always deal with the matter of life and death". You may have noticed that negative emotions (towards death) can take up a lot of attention. Some people i've met are capable of feeling attention flooding to the back of their head, where the amygdala is seated. (Amygdala is the center of freeze, fight or flight). This attention drain cannot continue endlessly. So the attention balance is headed towards bancrupcy. You need to increase either your own attention or get it from elsewhere. It's like an economy, but this time attention plays the money part. So how to increase solvability on your attention balance? How to stay alive?

If you want to add attention from others, there are two way that i know of. You either blame someone else, or you share your emotions with them. When you blame someone else, it is like attracting high risk venture capital. You won't go bancrupt but it wont do your solvability (aka self-esteem) any good.

On the other hand: sharing your emotions calls for an additional personal investment. Note that you already ran low on attention so this is not an easy decision to make. The risk is that the other person responds different from what you were hoping / expecting for. Then you are really in trouble. You may even need to slow down (burn-out: living on a minimum of attention). Now, if all goes well, the other person responds / connects / understands / has compassion. Then, some kind of accelerator is working. While the both of you feel that you hardly invest any attention, the outcome is that both have more attention than before. This is what creation is all about.

I hope my example is not too confusing - like i said i still haven't found the very core of attention. I hope some of you will join me on my quest, and share with me / us from what you've learned in life.

Thank you for your attention.
Best regards, Ron.

ATTN: What is attention?

As you may have read in my profile, i dedicate this year (and probably most of next year) to the question of what attention is. I'm working on a white paper but i feel i haven't gotten into the very core of it. I believe that attention is the "power of mankind". With that i mean that when it comes down to the question "to act or not to act", the need for attention is what essentially makes all the difference. It occurred to me that the only way to find out about attention is to use attention itself. I think that is what the ancient buddhists meant by their proverb "attention is attention".

So I would like you to share your thoughts and experiences on the subject of attention.


Example: one proverb says "emotions, at the very core, always deal with the matter of life and death". You may have noticed that negative emotions (towards death) can take up a lot of attention. Some people i've met are capable of feeling attention flooding to the back of their head, where the amygdala is seated. (Amygdala is the center of freeze, fight or flight). This attention drain cannot continue endlessly. So the attention balance is headed towards bancrupcy. You need to increase either your own attention or get it from elsewhere. It's like an economy, but this time attention plays the money part. So how to increase solvability on your attention balance? How to stay alive?

If you want to add attention from others, there are two way that i know of. You either blame someone else, or you share your emotions with them. When you blame someone else, it is like attracting high risk venture capital. You won't go bancrupt but it wont do your solvability (aka self-esteem) any good.

On the other hand: sharing your emotions calls for an additional personal investment. Note that you already ran low on attention so this is not an easy decision to make. The risk is that the other person responds different from what you were hoping / expecting for. Then you are really in trouble. You may even need to slow down (burn-out: living on a minimum of attention). Now, if all goes well, the other person responds / connects / understands / has compassion. Then, some kind of accelerator is working. While the both of you feel that you hardly invest any attention, the outcome is that both have more attention than before. This is what creation is all about.

I hope my example is not too confusing - like i said i still haven't found the very core of attention. I hope some of you will join me on my quest, and share with me / us from what you've learned in life.

Thank you for your attention.
Best regards, Ron.

PG: Simplicity leads to fuzzy logic

The quest for simplicity reminds me of the law of two, aka the law of apparently opposites. This law states that every movement has its opposite movement. If one is foreground, then the other is background.

A friend once told me his view, that a team could never exceed twelve persons. What about a company having 100,000 employees? Let's suppose complexity arises from mergers (companies, production chains etc). The opposite movement would then be movement from complexity to simplicity, and from bigger (mergers) to smaller (chunks). These movements are foreground movement, one can observe how reorganizations are in effect operations to simplify the scope of a CEO to this twelve person border.

The background movement however is that by the law of two, simplicity inevitably calls for complexity. Meaning that these big chunks are living organisms that interact. Management should therefore acknowledge the movement from a mechanical view (time-related thinking, cause-and-effect models) to a more organic approach (space-related thinking, quantum-type models).

Fuzzy logic has to do with relativity (more less / better worse). It is used in situations when by the time you know the exact outcome its too late to intervent, because meanwhile things have changed again. Managers that want to know what's inside the black box belong to a different world. A shift is needed.

ATTN: questions about attention

My departure point is: people need attention as a kind of food. For people attention is (a source of) energy. From that point of view a number of questions arise. And those questions cover rather a broad area of science. For what is attention really? Can attention be measured? What's the composition of attention like; what physical characteristics are measurable; what qualitative properties does attention have? Where does attention come from? Where does the attention go to? How do you "pay" attention? How is it possible for something inanimate like a golden bracelet to "draw" attention? What is actually happening here? Can you store attention, for example in a painting? It is possible to point your attention at something? Can you avoid attention and if so, how do you do that? For the next ten minutes, don't think of a polar bear. Is "may i have your attention please" also a form of attention? Is attention the same as communication? And if so, can you determine the polarity of sender and recipient? Someone is watching television and I ask this person something, is the word jammer adequate or do I in fact draw part of the attention that was meant for the television? How aware are you, if you aim the attention of others? I look attentively in air, in the middle of on a busy shop square; the child of the baker will be a baker too. What happens here? Attention meets (draws) attention? Is there something like an attention sense inside the human body? Can you feel eyes in your back? I look in the air, beside me stands a blind person person. What happens? Can you draw someone's attention if you're not there? Is the attention of the painter the same attention as the attention of the person who looks at the painting? Does attention precede perception? Is there a maximum to the quantity of attention people can take in, process and spend? Is attention the same as energy? Example: I'm getting warm because you look at me == to me warmth indicates energy conversion. How does spreading your attention work? is it similar to focussing - or not focussing - of a spotlight? Suppose that undiluted attention is possible, how much would one person need on a daily basis?

-- what can attention be mixed with? and has it always to do with thinking?
--- with interests? example: conditional love - parents who stipulate the way in which children may express their love
--- with relations? example: wu wei is in a way approximately the reverse of reaction (reaction is the basis of a relation according to Krishnamurti)
- is occupation therapy a substitute for attention? and why does it or does it not work? what are the discriminating dimensions
- someone pays attention to me (gives me attention) and then i act differently. What happens here? Why can't i be the 2 year old child and just accept instead of responding?
- how do you attract attention? AIDA - you must do something extreme - is there a threshold on attention? above standard noise level?
- is attention the same as social cohesion?
- can you accumulate attention like in a battery?
- is there a need for attention?
- is attention flowing? (wave/particle)
- what about attention and familiarisation?
- how much attention can one give ? is there a maximum in loading or processing capacity?

Ron

PG: dynamic of nearly touch and then run off

Today, I am walking with a friend along the Pieterpad, a cross country path here in the Netherlands. We are talking about our lives, and i tell her what happened at the Avatar course in 2002, the Family Constellations event in 2003 and the incident with my dad that same year.

I suddenly realize that there is a dynamic in my life that makes sense of all these experiences i´ve had. I visualized putting a window between me and the other person. I can see them, they can see me, but we can not touch. I want to get closer to them. Then i feel the glass of the window. I realize i can not touch them. And then i want them to go away.

This reminded me of the child in the glass box.

Pappa wanneer kom je weer bij ons thuis wonen?

Zondag 11 april 2004.

11:00 uur
Naar papa. Karin en Marlies, met man en kids zijn er.

13:00 uur
Mijn dochter, ruim drie jaar oud, ze huilt en huilt. Ze blijft huilen als ik haar op bed leg. Tien minuten later kom ik bij haar kijken. Ze wil dat ik weer "bij ons thuis" kom wonen. Een diep verdriet welt in me op, ik huil en zeg dat het niet gaat en hoe ik het ook heel erg vind. Ik wil het niet. Ze ziet naar me, wordt stil en lijkt aan te voelen dat het leven soms zijn eigen beslissingen neemt.
We beginnen allebei te lachen, een enorme opluchting maakt zich van ons meester, het voelt aan als overgave. De rest van de middag is ze vrolijk, en als ik even later met haar broer naar oma ga (gisteren rode tulpen gekocht) ben ook ik stil van binnen. Ik verwacht dat zij niet langer over deze kwestie zal beginnen; ergens heeft ze de acceptatie een plek weten te geven.

PG: acceptance

(PG = personal growth)

My sister Ivonne called me up, mum is getting worse again.
She won't come out of the bed any more.

Are we going to give her medication?
Only the one against the pain.
It could be over any day now.

Thursday and friday i'll be in Baarlo.
I planned to go to family constellations in Breda next saturday
but Marije let me know that I'm not needed
(that is our agreement: i let her know if I'm able to come, she lets me know if i'm needed)

Therefore i decided to go to Lichtenvoorde on friday night, and nowhere else.
Funny enough i have the idea that she will die on friday night, or saturday during the day.
That she will wait until i return home.

This evening i will go to the school in Zwolle.
Shouldn't i be with my mum?
I have no doubt, or maybe a little.

Maybe it is my wish to accompany her to the border,
and wave her goodbye.
Maybe this is also her wish.
She might wait on me.

I draw my own plan, and try to keep observing
how my desire and reality can sometimes be different

Sorrow is for me the strength to make my desire be different from reality
Acceptance is letting go of sorrow.

If i'm with my mother, i have no sorrow.
My strength is streaming through my hand on to her shoulders.
Her eyes start to shine bright whenever i touch her. I can feel it.

The farewell is intense, though i am miles and miles away from her.

Ronald.
5 november 2003 16:18