19th September 2022
The train of life is now ready to run!
Some old and wise have disembarked at the station, others young and many in-between, yes even The Queen. New fresh faces have entered. Some of their family handing them baggage from their long trip ahead. Slowly the train continues from station to station. The train never changes nature though the scenery does, which the passengers get caught up in from time to time. Indeed all the trains passengers eventually get replaced by new ones too. Of course the passenger taking the longest journey has seen many come and go and may be under the rigid assumption of knowing what the train has to offer.
The horn blares! Where was your attention? Thinking about your next stop? Thinking about the previous one? Comparing your clothes to the others on 2nd class? Nice Versace bag. Or simply dreaming outside the window as the scenery changes? Ah so beautiful!…or maybe not.
Attention. It’s the only thing we can control.
We can even use it to focus or not focus on certain thoughts. Attention let’s us grow our muscles by putting focus on thoughts and therefore actions to exercise. Attention can sharpen our mastery focusing on our unique gifts & interests. Attention can grow our perception of the world focusing on the senses. However not paying attention allows a mysterious force to take that focused mind elsewhere. Our bellies grow as our thoughts start savouring on those alluring visions of sweet treats.
Creating a pause, we may ask why do the thoughts go there? Is there a mild pain behind the anesthetising stimulus of such enticing pleasure. Who is the master that bears the torch of attention? What will we find by shining the torch into the dark labyrinth of the cerebrum.
Attention economy. We live in an age where attention can be subtly engineered & directed into pockets & wallets. Algorithms cleverly siphoning the attention from our conscience to unlimited pleasure. The engineers coding the quickest route to unlock the desires of the mind. Being able to own your own attention and focusing it to grow your potential is subtly being drawn away. The Social Dilemma beautifully but startlingly indicates this. Acting on the impulse of endless pleasure, pursuing it and becoming enslaved by it, as eloquently shown in Pinocchio in Pleasure Island, transforms us into something unrecognisable, a donkey! Lonely holes inside us can often be exploited by short term pleasure. It often can be easier to temporarily fill these needs with junk than quality and feel better. A real lonely hole that is more true than ever in todays society is in indeed loneliness itself, leading to many ways of dysfunctionally attending to it.
When attention is continually gathered like rays of the sun to focus through the magnifying glass of the mind, a human being can produce wonderous works of art, music, poetry etc. In particular reading a book, if you have enough attention to read it of course, is so distilled that it can impact us deeply. A book can be written over many years of life experiences, knowledge accumulation and wisdom learned. Whole life lessons focused onto a few hundred pages, iterated over many times. The person even writing the book presumably has read many books of other great people. Amazingly we can read several of these intellectually rich and distilled content over our lifetimes on any topic. So bringing our attention to read each page is truly like standing on the shoulder of giants.
Through the scientific method we use our consciousness to focus our attention externally. We systematically analyse and label the material world into concepts and theories. This rather amazingly helps us build practical tools to solve all sort of worldly problems and brings us super powers our early Homo Sapiens ancestors would of fainted at seeing! However as our ancestors were deeply connected to nature they had superpowers of their own that could perhaps make us gasp in surprise.
Our disconnection from nature & deep intuition and time away from ourselves has placed us outside our natural habitat in a sort of human zoo. We sit surrounded by concrete walls disconnected from our bodies for hours in front of screens. capitalising on our mind activity. Ancient teachings suggest that when we logically turn our attention to explore internally our own consciousness we may also intuitively grow something deeper.
We may follow our habits, actions, thoughts, conditionings. Observing each one like a separate droplet. Exploring its unique features, and as part of the flow. We can grow thoughts giving attention and energy to them. Constructing a positive story and break negative ones, both in our heads and externally. We can even choose not to entertain such thoughts at the most deepest level, “we must first set our hearts right” as Confucius said. Aristotle fittingly adds however “the mark of an educated mind is to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it”. Such stories thought creates lead to genocides but also put us on the moon when weaved in and around a society. Masters of these stories are truly wizards, sorcerers and, I’ve got a better word…politicians!
Choo-Choo! The train whistle then brings attention back. Back to our simple senses:)
-Jhoty
Jhoty 