Attention Is the Fastest Way to World Peace
The two most precious resources each of us have in this life are our time and our attention. No matter how life may seem to drag on in some moments, every one of us knows our time here is limited; at some point in time these bodies of our stop and drop; and, then we are no longer among these people in these places on this planet. None of us, young or old, knows how many moments we have left here. What ever absorbs our attention moment-by-moment, constitutes the lived, experiential flow of our life.
Endowed with these precious resources of a finite amount of time and the capacity to focus our attention where we choose, it is wise for us to realize we are each sovereign in our own consciousness. Although we may not be able to hold it steady for long, we can choose where we place our attention.
Our attention is the living presence of our innate intelligence engaged with our world. When it is said that what we give our attention to, grows; this means wherever attention happens to be focused, the mental, emotional and somatic experience of what we are attending to is occupying the largest share of our neural real estate. Whatever is most salient to us in any given moment, however we happen to be focused, is our living experience during that moment.
Fortunately, with the choice we have available to us, we can choose to turn our attention from one object or point of view to another. We can in fact choose to direct our attention away from the dualistic narrative that’s usually running in our head, and toward what we are intuitively beginning to sense may be a much more important focus. How long will attention stay before it strays? That, we don’t seem to have much control over. But we can always take another short moment to focus on what we intuit or know is most essential, as soon as we remember to do so.
I’ll use myself as an example but this could be any one of us. I look around me and I can’t help but notice that this world is insane, groups of us are incredibly belligerent with each other and, all of that is so costly in every sense of the word that most of us are either destitute or scrambling frantically to not become destitute. Truth be told, I want a sane, peaceful and prosperous world; I want a world of creative collaboration with a widely-shared desire to create benefit for all of us.
I have noticed that in the moments when I am resting as and living from the silent ground of being, I am peace and the world of my experience is peaceful. The quality of still, silent presence pervades the experience of my private, internal world as well as the experience of my public external world – regardless of what may be happening out there at the moment. In these, sometimes brief, moments, I am offering this set of resonances of consciousness as my contribution to the field of our shared consciousness. I tend to experience these moments as a positive influence. From my personal point of view, of course, I cannot know what effect this has on our shared field although I may witness what seems to be an effect on someone around me at the moment.
Likewise, once my attention has again become ensnared in one of my current, conditioned identifications in our habituated, 3-dimensional mind-world of polarized and conceptually separated reifications, I am contributing that set of resonances to the moment of our human consciousness field. This is inevitable for me at this stage of our shared process of awakening. I and, I believe, most of us are not yet established strongly enough in the clear openness and inclusiveness of our natural state to remain stably when the old patterns arise. The neurological habits of our mind, our body, our emotions and our relational field are, as yet, too compelling for us to resist when they resurface into our conscious awareness.
As we awaken out of our conditioned belief, perception and experience; as we awaken out of imagining this ongoing narrative that we are who & what we have come to think we are, we are awakening into the silent, experiential immediacy of the awareness of being which we always and already are. It is like we are learning a new language that is based in the silent, peaceful openness that is our actual nature and we are, gradually, leaving behind the old language of our conditioned, adopted identities and their co-arising worlds.
As we learn this new language of being who we are in our lives, in this world, it is inevitable that we’ll conflate the two languages for a while, thinking or imagining we are perfectly clear; it is inevitable that we’ll mispronounce. This cannot be avoided and, it serves us by providing catalyst for the further refinement of our understanding. When it appears to me that you are spiritually bypassing your responsibility for your own shadow, when I perceive you egotistically taking credit for “your” awakening, I have an opportunity. I can bypass responsibility for my shadow, I can egotistically criticize you for being arrogant; or, I can recognize another expression of the same One I am, mispronouncing the language we are both still learning.
It is not an easy task to continuously focus attention on the underlying reality and extract it from the polarized reifications we have all come to take for reality. And yet, as we realize what’s at stake – for ourselves individually and for us all as a species, nothing matters more.
Attention Is the Fastest Way to World Peace
The two most precious resources each of us have in this life are our time and our attention. No matter how life may seem to drag on in some moments, every one of us knows our time here is limited; at some point in time these bodies of our stop and drop; and, then we are no longer among these people in these places on this planet. None of us, young or old, knows how many moments we have left here. What ever absorbs our attention moment-by-moment, constitutes the lived, experiential flow of our life.
Endowed with these precious resources of a finite amount of time and the capacity to focus our attention where we choose, it is wise for us to realize we are each sovereign in our own consciousness. Although we may not be able to hold it steady for long, we can choose where we place our attention.
Our attention is the living presence of our innate intelligence engaged with our world. When it is said that what we give our attention to, grows; this means wherever attention happens to be focused, the mental, emotional and somatic experience of what we are attending to is occupying the largest share of our neural real estate. Whatever is most salient to us in any given moment, however we happen to be focused, is our living experience during that moment.
Fortunately, with the choice we have available to us, we can choose to turn our attention from one object or point of view to another. We can in fact choose to direct our attention away from the dualistic narrative that’s usually running in our head, and toward what we are intuitively beginning to sense may be a much more important focus. How long will attention stay before it strays? That, we don’t seem to have much control over. But we can always take another short moment to focus on what we intuit or know is most essential, as soon as we remember to do so.
I’ll use myself as an example but this could be any one of us. I look around me and I can’t help but notice that this world is insane, groups of us are incredibly belligerent with each other and, all of that is so costly in every sense of the word that most of us are either destitute or scrambling frantically to not become destitute. Truth be told, I want a sane, peaceful and prosperous world; I want a world of creative collaboration with a widely-shared desire to create benefit for all of us.
I have noticed that in the moments when I am resting as and living from the silent ground of being, I am peace and the world of my experience is peaceful. The quality of still, silent presence pervades the experience of my private, internal world as well as the experience of my public external world – regardless of what may be happening out there at the moment. In these, sometimes brief, moments, I am offering this set of resonances of consciousness as my contribution to the field of our shared consciousness. I tend to experience these moments as a positive influence. From my personal point of view, of course, I cannot know what effect this has on our shared field although I may witness what seems to be an effect on someone around me at the moment.
Likewise, once my attention has again become ensnared in one of my current, conditioned identifications in our habituated, 3-dimensional mind-world of polarized and conceptually separated reifications, I am contributing that set of resonances to the moment of our human consciousness field. This is inevitable for me at this stage of our shared process of awakening. I and, I believe, most of us are not yet established strongly enough in the clear openness and inclusiveness of our natural state to remain stably when the old patterns arise. The neurological habits of our mind, our body, our emotions and our relational field are, as yet, too compelling for us to resist when they resurface into our conscious awareness.
As we awaken out of our conditioned belief, perception and experience; as we awaken out of imagining this ongoing narrative that we are who & what we have come to think we are, we are awakening into the silent, experiential immediacy of the awareness of being which we always and already are. It is like we are learning a new language that is based in the silent, peaceful openness that is our actual nature and we are, gradually, leaving behind the old language of our conditioned, adopted identities and their co-arising worlds.
As we learn this new language of being who we are in our lives, in this world, it is inevitable that we’ll conflate the two languages for a while, thinking or imagining we are perfectly clear; it is inevitable that we’ll mispronounce. This cannot be avoided and, it serves us by providing catalyst for the further refinement of our understanding. When it appears to me that you are spiritually bypassing your responsibility for your own shadow, when I perceive you egotistically taking credit for “your” awakening, I have an opportunity. I can bypass responsibility for my shadow, I can egotistically criticize you for being arrogant; or, I can recognize another expression of the same One I am, mispronouncing the language we are both still learning.
It is not an easy task to continuously focus attention on the underlying reality and extract it from the polarized reifications we have all come to take for reality. And yet, as we realize what’s at stake – for ourselves individually and for us all as a species, nothing matters more.