A long time ago, one of my first meaningful insights was the realization that no matter how much consumerism tried to hide us from the truth, attention is the only thing any of us can truly say we have. Something we alone have a say on how and where we place it.
It’s too much to say that attention is the locus of our freedom or that we have “control” over our attention. Thought and its weight and precedence strives incessantly to dominate our attention and distract us from any possibility of attention connecting us with intelligence and creativity. Ego’s incessant, “Look at me!” As we see daily from our Narcissist-in-Chief has no stronger motivation and will even discount self-preservation to the point of driving and maintaining a Death Cult murder/suicide pact to maintain its devotion to this ultimate domination.
In this there is a bit of fool’s wisdom. An instinctive understanding that holding attention is even more Winning!™ than consolidating so-called wealth. The hunger that can never be satisfied comes closest to fulfilling its demented aspirations with the satisfaction that it dominates the one thing that people can rightly say they “own.”
You could say that Success!™ as it is seen under the domination of Thought boils down to this pernicious loop: Egomania insisting on being the center of attention and Thought providing all the weapons needed to get the ball rolling. Eventually we arrive at Juggernaut.
This points at why it can be so difficult to maintain a practice or work on a discipline. Thought has internalized its attacks on attention so that we find our selves at war with our selves, trying to keep our attention where it doesn’t just serve Ego and Thought.
