The other day I was driving along the H-2 freeway in Honolulu. Traffic was heavy and slow, and at one point choked to a standstill. To relieve my boredom I looked off toward the mountains, vaguely noticing a random row of coconut palms among some nondescript buildings.All of a sudden one palm tree caught my attention and I really looked at it, not as just another thing I called a "tree" among many other things of the same name, but as its single self, standing there fanning out its fronds to catch the sunlight and dance with the breeze.The minute I really saw this tree I felt a subtle connection with it and for a moment we were in each other's lives, that tree and I. This was the first time I ever realized that there are two distinct and very different ways of seeing our world and the people in it. There is generalized observation, which is heavily reliant on remembered concepts, names, and ideas: oh, there are some palm trees, the sky is cloudy, here comes my friend Sally.In this generalized mode of observation, we see our idea of the thing more than the thing or person itself. There is a vague kind of seeing, but not much detail and very little contact. Then there is the connected, relational kind of seeing in which you give the object or person your entire attention. This form of seeing notices the particular tree and what it's doing, it sees the shapes and changing forms of the clouds against the blue sky, it sees how Sally is moving, how she is dressed, what her mood is, and it sees and feels the look in her eyes. In my experience, general observation, while obviously useful, is remote and uninvolved; you see things and people in a generic sort of way. Its inner feeling is somewhat passive. It is a necessary, but impersonal function of our intellect.Giving our wholehearted attention, on the other hand, is akin to love. Its inner feeling is expansive, alive, connected. You are suddenly in genuine relationship with the object of your interest. When you give your full attention you automatically give yourself, your spirit and life energy, to the object of your interest. Your attention is the flow of your being. Giving your complete attention is an act of love. The recipient of this flow of your total interest, whether a person or a bird or a book or a tree cannot help but respond, however silently, and share itself with you.
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| The poet Mary Oliver: Born September 10, 1935 Died January 17, 2019 (aged 83) |
His observations about attention hit home but the impact was further emphasised later when I read an article in The Atlantic titled Attention is the Beginning of Devotion about the recently deceased poet Mary Oliver. To quote from the article by Franklin Foer:
Her collected works amount to an instruction manual for how to focus the gaze. The exhortations that filled her poems became my command:
“To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”
Her final collection of essays was called Upstream. In the title piece, she remembers getting separated from her parents in the woods as they stroll along a creek. But what she recalls isn’t the trauma of being lost, but the attentiveness she achieves in that charged moment of aloneness, “the sense of going toward the source.” In her narration, this is the very instant she began her long career as a noticer.
What she sees isn’t an undifferentiated mass of a forest or an abstraction called “nature.” Her revelation is the pluralism of the woods. “One tree is like another, but not too much. One tulip is like the next tulip, but not altogether.” This discovery of the “harmonies and also the discords of the natural world” fills her with ecstatic joy.
“Doesn’t anybody in the world anymore want to get up in the
middle of the night and
sing?”
The piece concludes with a sentence that implants itself in the brain, because it is, in fact, so far upstream from the way we live: “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” And, of course, this is so. The unnoticed can’t possibly be loved.
Nowadays of course, the word "attention" is locked into the acronyms ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) and ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). For those with these disorders, attention is crippled. Even though I don't suffer from these particular maladies, I feel my attention is all too superficial and fleeting. I remember watching a documentary once about the history of rock climbing in Yosemite National Park. In the beginning (maybe in the 1920's), teams inched their way up using ropes carefully fixed to the rock wall. In the end (maybe in the 1980's before climbing was made illegal), single persons were scaling the rock faces without ropes. Part of the appeal for these singleton climbers would be (I imagine) the necessity of absolute focus - complete attention - to the minutiae of the climb and the consequent feeling of being totally present and very much alive, with death only one slip away.
Not everybody wants to go to those extremes to achieve this sort of intense focus. If we lose ourselves in what we are doing, then we must love what we are doing. Our complete attention is given willingly and unreservedly. We let go of ourselves, drop the mask and, for a while, we are not. For the rest of the time, by contrast, we are this or that, clinging to one ideology or another, defending or attacking one system or another, embracing this religion or another and on and on. At such times, our ego is alive and well and keeping the world at bay. A stranger approaches us and before a word is spoken a number of provisional judgements have been made. If the person is dishevelled and unwashed, we may suspect that we are about to be accosted for money. If the person is young, well-dressed and smiling, we may suspect that we are about to be asked to sign up for a charity or be persuaded to accept a particular religious viewpoint. Whatever their appearance and attitude, we are already on the defensive and ready to push them away if their initial words confirm our suspicions. We see the person through the lens of our preconceived notions. Our full attention is not engaged because we are relating to an abstraction created by our thought processes.
How might a person without an ego, such as Meher Baba, interact with strangers:
Baba would make everyone feel that they were special; when he would greet someone, he would give that man or woman his full attention. The moment that person bowed and lowered his eyes, Baba would greet someone else, but when the person raised his head and looked up, Baba would always be ready and look at the man or woman again. Each felt his or her welcome was special and exclusive. "It was like clockwork," said Bernard. "I was intrigued watching this for hours." And, if Baba did not turn back, it was always when the person bowing did not look back up at him before moving on.
He was perfectly in tune with the stranger, usually but not always a devotee, because he did not put any distance between himself and the person. People would feel that Baba was totally accepting of them and that he knew their innermost secrets but did not pass judgement on them.
