How can your Attention be Utilized as your Energy?
Open your horizons. Find quality in small things, not the big
ones. A more spiritual orientation brings about observing the
details that go by unseen when you look for the big things.
SHET
Can you control your attention? The ability to control your
attention, to control where you focus your attention, endows you
with the ability to create your environment. It furnishes
you with energy to do work, study, finish projects, succeed in
your endeavors when you can see both the whole picture and also
the details, and in general, it enables you to react to
situations with enough rationality to direct them toward your
objectives. You become aware by focusing your attention on
something. Before placing your attention on that something, it
didn't exist for you. Now that you focused on it, you became
aware of it and it exists for you. By observing you make
things alive in your own universe. And obversely, when you put
less attention on something, it tends to disappear. Is your
life precisely what you wish it to be? If not, no matter the
reason, you can still learn to control your attention, and
thereby, learn to create.
Is your attention being controlled by external events when
everything disturbs you, when the smallest rustling distracts
you? If that is the case, then you certainly don't know how to
handle energy. When instead of being directed by you, your
attention is controlled by external events, then your energy too
is controlled by external events. We have bodies to learn how to
handle energy. An expression of wasting it could be the lack of
cash flow as wished. People who have a high concentration level,
who can control the flow of their attention, have more energy
than others do. It's not that they have more energy -- they
simply know how to handle it better. So control it. You see,
usually, when not working on it, awareness, or one's attention
is guided, controlled by outside events: by emotions, unwanted
emotions, the chattering of the mind, etc. However, when you
work on it and develop your control, consciousness is the one
directing the awareness, and that's as it should be. Then you
flow with the universal energy, which therewith can flow through
you and imbue you with its plenty. When you allow your attention
to float like a boat without a rudder on high seas, you block
the universe from being able to give to you.
Individuals with easily dispersed attention often seem to act
neurotically. They could be said to be unstable. They feel
guilt-ridden, having too many unfinished tasks on their
conscience. They get into something, then something else comes
up and they give that something else attention while they leave
the first thing unattended and so on and so on. Too many loose
ends. They seldom finish things before going on to the next
thing, and yet they leave their attention on the unfinished
projects or wishes. They don't even end them in their minds, so
they are kept in a constant state of distraction, their
concentration dispersed, and then they judge themselves on all
those things they haven't done. Instead of treating these
individuals with antidepressants, tranquilizers, barbiturates or
other goodies, instead of beating to death their childhood or
past life traumas, it would suffice to teach them step by step
how to control their attention and how to finish what they
began.
An inability to control one's attention may be regarded as "just
another symptom," and consequently, treatment may be aimed at
something else. Yet learning to control one's attention could
cure many psychological disorders. Your energy is your
ability to focus your attention where you wish.
Perhaps, you keep playing the same record in your private
chatterbox you call your brains, disabled by the automatic
repetitions of babble you call your thoughts. Maybe your
attention is stuck in past events, thinking that if you had only
said this or that, then... whatever, or maybe you hold onto all
those terrible things that were done to you. When your attention
is trapped in past unfulfilled wills, you have less attention,
less energy to carry on. If you become more in control of your
attention, you can learn to let go and thus become involved in
the present rather than in the past. For that to occur, however,
you need to know how to control your attention.
Of course, you could be one of those who lack self-confidence,
which is the result of being too self-conscious, which means
your attention is stuck on yourself -- the condition I named the
"bubble syndrome." This may be the result of being afraid of
critical attention. If that's the case, then you should turn
your attention outward instead of focusing it on the self.
That's listening. I call listening everything that has to do
with putting your attention outside yourself. Listening can be
achieved by being interested in the other instead of being
interested in oneself.
Self-confidence is the ability to not focus upon yourself,
the ability to give others your full attention. But since
your attention is curved back on you, the external world goes
unnoticed and you are either unaware or uninterested in others'
predicaments or joys. Because your attention is trapped in the
narrow circle described between you and you, there is not much
left over for others. When you direct your attention on
yourself, you don't direct it upon others. Then these others
can't feel you care for them. To really experience -- and this
has been a great secret -- you should experience others by being
them, loving them, without expecting something miraculous to
happen as a result of this act. The pure joy of being, existing,
is the greatest miracle.
How to love would be a relevant question here. The first thing
in learning to love is to be Nothing, which means not being
beautiful or ugly, happy or unhappy, not this and not that, just
being and then seeing -- seeing other life forms and listening
to them. This means that all your attention is on them, not on
yourself. You see them and become them as much as you can. You
feel what they feel. You participate in their hopes, loves,
whatever, and then it is only natural that you want to make them
happy by giving them what they want because you are no longer
separate from them. You are they, so you would do unto them what
you would have done unto yourself -- only it is their wish you
fulfill. You are they when you want the same, and since you have
gone through being Nothing, you can be anything and you are able
to love anyone.
Being self-centered is often the result of a fear of criticism,
of what-will-others-think-of-me. Wanting to be accepted and
loved, one can become wary of not being accepted and loved. This
vigilance is achieved by constantly searching for revealing
signs and statements uttered by others to detect what they think
of you. Such behavior may be misconceived as attentiveness, and
yet what is the self-conscious person really interested in? In
the other? No. He is interested in himself through the
other. That is still curving one's attention back on oneself,
investing in looking good in the eyes of the other.
Be the actor, not the act. When your whole world is you and
only you, it is a small world and you are the act. When you are
interested in others, when you can turn your attention outward,
then you are the actor, and then you are the world, the big
world.
As long as your attention is on yourself instead of the joy of
doing and acting, you draw critical attention back at you and
you receive evaluations. When you enhance your self as the
object, then it is you who is getting graded and judged, not the
act. This is why you feel you are losing confidence in yourself.
Enjoy the doing and you will see the difference. Stop dreaming
of how you will be admired, and instead, revel in acting out the
different parts, sense the feelings and emotions of the roles.
That makes the whole difference.
This constant preoccupation with one's self prevents one from
having experiences, real, enriching experiences. Affirmations of
being good, or getting "gooder" by the day, is such a
preoccupation that too often turns into self-criticism,
intensifying the labels of what's wrong with oneself. When
that's the main theme of one's existence, then what do you think
this person experiences? Occupy yourself with experiencing
things. Turn your attention outward rather than toward what
you think to be your deficiencies.
You may be unhappy because you don't have: you don't have money,
you don't have youth, you don't have health, you don't have
beauty, you don't have a sex-partner, you don't have parents,
you don't have a job, and the list goes on and on. Look at you!
You center your attention on what you miss and miss what you
have. Life can pass you by and you won't notice that you forgot
to live and experience. As if this wasn't serious enough,
the consequences of focusing on what we miss are even more
morbid.
About 99% of humans fear uncertainty and lack of stability.
However, when you look at the lack, then that is what you
increase since you create your own reality by focusing. By
putting your attention on things, you make them real. So when
you put your attention on a lack, you increase that lack. In
order to feel stability -- which is a feeling, an attitude, and
not something objective -- you ought to change your attitude.
You are not confronting immediate life threatening problems. You
are afraid of the future, afraid of how you will perform in the
future. To solve this problem, think of uncertainty in a
different way: try to learn to live with uncertainty. How?
Through faith in the universe, in knowing you belong to the
universe, faith in yourself. The wider your scope of activity
becomes, the more uncertainties you will face. Learn to live
with uncertainty and then you won't need to shrink the sphere of
your activities and interests in order to entomb yourself in
certainty. Expand, have faith, and then you can live with
uncertainty and live well, feeling stable in spite of
uncertainty uncertainty (how to achieve that, see my article, Could
Holophany Guide us to Live Comfortably in Uncertainty?).
Know that you, the real you, can never be hurt, only the role,
the possessions, the temporary part. That is indeed a leap into
the spiritual realm. Faith. When you have faith, your attitude
changes, and you won't view uncertainty as an unwelcome guest.
When you have that attitude, then you will have freed attention
to work with and expand into more stability in your everyday
life, without pressure, without feeling that doom hangs over
your head, which was placed there by your own self in the first
place.
Stability is due to control. Life is one big uncertainty,
which you cannot control. What you can control is your
attention, which when controlled can guarantee your stability
even within uncertainty. This ensures that you can live well in
uncertainty.
Happiness could be a few blocks down the road, once you can
control your attention and when you know where to direct it. If
you are bored, uncreative, or you feel life is a drag because of
all those things you have to do, put your attention on things
that really interest you, and then you will be able to enjoy
your life in full. However, this is not always as simply done as
said, because you may feel you have to do those things you don't
enjoy and you have no choice. To overcome this platitude (which
seems to you the coercion of facts), you may need to understand
Holophany enough so you can change your attitude in those areas
where indicated and thereby turn your environment into a more
desirable scene. Even to learn Holophany and to understand the
philosophy of how things work, you need a certain span of
attention and concentration, and a certain control of your
energy. The main lesson to learn is to handle energy, which
includes knowing where your attention is aimed at and
controlling it. This teaches you to look and observe, to see
others including their problems and desperation. This is
exercising control over your energy.
When you are familiar with the techniques of controlling your
attention, you can become a virtuoso with abilities that may
seem supernatural to those who don't know how to observe. Your
memory and intelligence will improve as well as your creativity.
First, however, you need to learn to focus. Focusing is the
ability to concentrate on one thing for a long time (long
defined as relative to you). It is putting attention on
something, investing your energy as stated above. It is also
paying attention to detail. When you can lock out the automatic
mind chatter, then you can start splitting attention and focus
on more than one thing at a time, thereby creating a kind of
field, which is very creative in all respects. That's when you
get insights, connect between things you have not connected
before. Splitting your attention allows you to trigger things
within an area in which you focus and then things happen. This
focus allows you to see the nature of things as a process, the
relations within a certain complex structure, and from there you
can easily create changes by changing the dynamic aspect, the
relations of the complex structure. Then the whole structure
changes somewhat as seen from your point of view. Try to
visualize this paragraph, even in meditation, until you get it.
This is the result of the ability to focus, which of course
starts, as I have stated, with a laser-like ability to center,
locking out all other noise.
Controlling the wanderings of one's attention is controlling
awareness, which is the access code of consciousness. Our
attention is the most basic dynamic aspect of our creation.