Attention

Not chasing after the Edifice of Thought.

Out Loud! oil on wooden panel

Attention is the only “thing” we “have.” Everything else is beyond us or an illusion. It is only through attention that we can tell the difference or find ways to act that are not bound by futility.

Proprioception

David Bohm and Krishnamurti adapted the term and applied it to Thought. Physical Proprioception, the awareness of one’s own body in space, also applies to strength. A key difference between strength and power is that strength is keenly aware of its limits. While those seeking power are easily duped into feeling that “their power” is limitless. Strength, being embodied; either physical, emotional, or intellectual; has to be nurtured and developed. This discipline; in the sense of a practice and not simply a means of domination; keeps us aware of its extent, its limits. We grasp how far and how high. This is a functional aspect of strength. The seductive quality of power-seeking relies on its capacity to intoxicate us with fantasies of dissolving our limits.

How is the present course on any level going to lead us into anything but a cascade of intertwined and compounding catastrophes? Unless we press on and look for ways out of this trap the results are clear and self-evident. As is the incredible, unbelievable depths and lengths we as a society, culture, collection of atomized, estranged, and broken individuals, mob, mass-audience… are willing to go to hide all of this from our awareness and insist that maintaining the present course must go on at any and all costs.

This has been the most shocking revelation of this apocalyptic moment. I’ve banged into it often; and for this post I’d like to set it to the side and get back to pulling on the threads present in its title. A phrase that came to me, “What we are here to do is to attend to creation.” What could this mean?

One of my first significant insights. That is, not something “I thought.” But something that came to me.

Thought presents itself as arising from our labors, thinking thoughts. The brain as a computer. Cogitation as a form of work. It is much more likely and a far more useful metaphor to see the brain as a receiver and that creativity is a receptive action. We receive what is present in the field.

What came to me was that all we can truly say we have; and have any say in; is our attention and where and how we turn it. Being alive begins with the capacity to attend.

Here is where Thought’s push to make us all un-dead begins. The Edifice of Thought distracts our attention from what it is to be alive and turns our attention into an interior prison. What makes beginning any meditative practice so difficult is that Thought has gone to such elaborate efforts to keep us from looking at, attending to, what Thought does and is and is not. While keeping us off-balance. Lost in precarity so that we have little energy, and less interest, in challenging its hegemony.

Thought is the accumulated psychological baggage we carry about with us. It includes every form of dogma, recognized or not, that takes us out of any possibility of responding to the moment as it arises and keeps us within what I’ve long seen as stereotypical behavior. Thought and creation are antithetical.

The language of power structures and political analysis as we find in words like prison and hegemony points to the way that all that we see as a series of possibly intransigent political problems are neither political nor problems at their cores. What we find, as with every aspect of the Edifice of Thought, are structures Thought has brought about; and the only avenues we are aware of are those that Thought has imposed upon us; and these only serve Thought.

The entire edifice is built on a series of conflations. We conflate thinking with Thought. We conflate our desperate desire for certainty and the resulting rush to analyze life as a series of problems to which Thought can provide answers and bring us security. We fail to see that every attempt to impose a result that does not actually take us out of Thought will only, and will always, lead to “unintended consequences” that can only; and will only; lead us into deepening desperation and increasing destruction.

This is where we see the limits of political thought,

“We’ll hammer out a solution!”

“We have the answers!”

“They are wrong!”

As with any reduction to a binary the chances are at best 50/50 that we are “right” and they are “wrong.” And in either case; acting as if the whole process is not thoroughly bankrupt and that all its so-called potentials totally corrupt; we surrender to fear. We approach risk in a way that Thought has imposed upon us. A way that keeps us hemmed in to a series of “possibilities” that are no more than fantasies.

Every statement made; every position held; from a desire to maintain or further an existing agenda; is corrupt; and can only lead us into more danger. There is no good idea, no healthy principle, no guiding precept that is immune to this fact.

There is; there has to be; a growing awareness that “Beating the bad guys!” will always and only ever result in turning those of us opposing bad guys into bad guys. Repressing the urges of un-dead haters and destroyers will only result in their force popping up somewhere, sometime, else.

Attend Creation.

To attend is to allow our attention to turn and remain…, not necessarily focused, but open to something.

What does creation mean?

Thought has refused the primacy of attention and forced it into a role where it is seen as a force to be distracted. It has done a similar thing with creation. Within Thought creation implies a creator. A sky-god patriarch; angry and pathetic for all his bluster and fury; who must have created creation and all its creatures.

The moment that arose when Quantum Theory broke through our insistence that cause & effect were simple physical reactions that could be solved for the way a ballistic calculation solves the aiming of a weapon; and revealed the bankruptcy of all the Habits of Thought. This crisis of belief was met by the culture at large the same way that Niels Bohr and the other future bomb-makers decided to frame it. If the implications of Quantum Mechanics are too daunting; just forget about them and focus on running the numbers. As Tolkien showed us; when presented with the true horrors of the Ring most will accept its intoxicating allure and insist on grasping it for themselves at whatever cost.

David Bohm, aided and supported by his collaborations with Krishnamurti, never dropped the question. He persisted, looking for a way to follow the implications the new Physics had laid bare. His Implicate Order points at a truly radical, addressing the root, cosmology that does not begin and end with wish-fulfillment and self-projection. In the Implicate Order we have a different way of looking at creation, at creatures, at what it is to be alive in this cosmos we find ourselves in.

The risk has remained that in seeking authority and codifying the good we turn Bohm’s insights into a new dogma and let it all get folded back into the Edifice of Thought.

There are kernels we can follow showing us a way out of this always fatal mechanism. Inherent in the Implicate Order as he saw it. As I would say; as it came to him. If at every moment what is tacit; that is, what is apparent and touchable, present; has unfolded from implications that arise from the unfolding of the previous moment. This happens at the tiniest possible dimension of distance and within the shortest possible increment of time. There is no room for or need of a creator. No author. No authority. There are momentums. There is inertia; but unlike in ballistic physics; these are no laws. There are, as Rupert Sheldrake proposed, Habits of Nature. What has existed persists and is subject to evolutionary forces.

Creatures, and creation itself, are no longer seen as the objects of a creator who is nothing more than a projection of an internalized abuser. We can suspend our insistence on authority and refuse our role as perpetuators of abuse.

Clarity is not an imposed certainty. Coherence is not the result of a negotiation or battle for supremacy. Clarity is a characteristic of that which we find to be coherent and coherence is that which we find holds together despite what we may wish to be true. We cannot always see this. We cannot attend equally well at every moment; but we can acknowledge that attending creation is the only way to break out of the bonds of Thought.

To be a creature among creatures inside of creation is to attend to and align our selves with the forces of life; an unfolding that we can still see around us in the fragments and remnants, the ruins of the Natural World, superseded and corroded by the forces of power as they have worked through the habits of Thought.

It came to me the other day that while we create, as in making art, we approach what I’ve always admired about our fellow creatures. We find that we are. We are not trying, not pushing, not establishing, or following an agenda. We are; and we find our selves co-creating a moment that has never existed before. One that has within it implications that will help form the next iteration, moving from implicit to tacit.

Unless we can hold these matters in our attention we risk remaining complicit in the destruction closing in from all sides. None of this “solves” anything. Neither does any of the Chimeras of Thought that we’ve seen play out again and again and that have led us to this moment of extreme danger.

Incoherence and destructive chaos act to erode our capacities for attention. Proprioceptive Attention is the only form of resistance that offers a way out of these cycles of violence and escalating destruction.

Our habits of Thought will insist that it alone can provide us with safety, security, the certainty that what we value will persist. Even, and especially when we fail to consider that value and desire are not the same thing. Thought can provide none of these promises. Every paroxysm of competing forms of Thought takes us deeper into destruction. Every reaction made without considering the Enormity Thought has brought us to only adds to the misery of the world and holds us in needless suffering.

Attend….