Fighting for Attention

For several of my first decades of mature life, post-puberty, I thought my center of attention was  my brain.  I did not give much thought to the fact that during orgasm or intense emotional outburst my center of attention seemed to disappear from my brain. As soon as the “emergency” was over, my center of attention would quickly reappear and make comment on what just happened or some other distracting commentary.

I knew when I got stoned on marijuana, I felt released from everyday thoughts and another level of intelligence filled with wonder would emerge. Later I started to meditate and I recognized my mind was addicted to having the internal microphone and would not easily shut up.  Then I started doing Chi Gong, a traditional Chinese practice of gaining control over our attention.  The literal english translation means energy(Chi) exercise (Gong).

I was opened to a mystical world written about by Carlos Castaneda, hidden away in secret societies and as the basis for many supernatural stories from China and around the world.  Once our attention is under our control, as taught by the Gurdjieff Work, we can begin to give attention to and nourish our deeper and higher selves hidden dormant.  Attention is willpower, energy and currency all rolled into one.

I wastefully spent my daily dose of attention in my early years locked away in my brain in an unconscious game of “capture the attention” with the outer world.  But once my path led me to the ability to move my attention out of its mental prison, I could travel all over my body to practice a defensive martial art and, most importantly, I found my empty throne room at the center of my heart.  Once my attention, and my sense of self was moved to my throne, I became sovereign over my inner universe.  After a long and hard fight.

Sleep is the body’s forced starvation of the mind of attention.  After all, attention is really just a collection and concentration of sensation, donated by the cells of our body who want to participate in the conscious experience of being a human.  Once the body and its trillions of cells tires of watching it just pulls the plug on the donation of sensation.  There might be a fight for attention between the mind and the body for a minute or for hours over being awake or asleep, but this is a pathology that is not healthy except as feedback and is not well supported,  And the mind always loses, by design.

Not so for the heart.  The attention and nourishment for the heart that once shared every experience with the mind in an innocent and open childhood, is eventually starved by both the creating of an ego wall around the heart and the mind becoming ever more a tyrant to learned patterns demanding control of our attention.  Our mind is like the Prime Minister who has usurped the throne and is running the country for a child or an enfeebled king.  Our heart and our conscience are essentially kept in the dungeon.

Of course, the greatest teacher of our own captured attention is our children.  If you are lucky enough to be a parent, then you get to watch the whole process of of the death of innocence and of ego formation up close and personal from the closest time to yourself in the world.  This is the nature of the world as required for the human responsibility to cosmonomics.  Being charged with contradictions in mind, heart and body is the human cross to bare for being alive in this reality.  But that does not mean we are sheep or are supposed to remain as children.

The fight for our own attention, to vest it within the heart and to put the mind in its place of service to the whole, is the master work of every human life, by design.  When we leave our body at the end of life, hopefully there is a soul container and a citadel that you have discovered and have been nurturing for many years to have a vehicle to travel to our next destination.

Perhaps citadelization is the real master work. And it can only begin once we have discovered the cosmic commodity we call attention and have fought for our conscious sovereignty over it.  Only then can we build our citadel beyond our flesh and blood.