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There are many speakers and teachers out there who promote ‘being awake’, as I call it.
Some call it present moment awareness, or mindfulness, or awareness, or living in the now, or whatever bla bla bla.
They then go on to share a million other useless, but otherwise entertaining things that stray from that basic premise.
What is that basic premise again?
Well, since you’re asking, I would put it like this:
THE, single most important understanding you will ever come across is this:
Learn to keep your attention energetically connected to your present experience, without becoming lost in it (over-involved) or distracted by LESS REAL experiences such as thoughts, imaginings, memories or other types of fantasy’s.
This means to be simultaneously aware of
1. your surroundings
2. your physical relationship to your surroundings
3. your inner world.
4. your actions and behaviors
No small task, but let’s not stop there.
They way I see it, to be simultaneously aware of these 4 realms is JOB #1 of our moment to moment experience of Life.
Anything less and you are asleep.
Anything less and you are missing the show.
Anything less and you are wasting the Life you were given.
Anything less and you are living a Life of mediocrity, half awake, half aware, and half alive.
My point here is this:
There is one skill that is based on one understanding that can radically improve every single dimension of your Life.
Unless you know, practice and live that skill and understanding, you are missing the boat.
That skill and understanding is the key that unlocks the door to EVERY OTHER skill and understanding.
SWACK!
What say you
about that?
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
~ Rumi ~
For convenience and clarity I like to place the benefits of Attention Training on a spectrum, from practical to beyond practical.
For example, it’s very practical to energetically anchor your attention in your present experience. You function better because you are more in tune with your environment which means you are more able to make decisions based on accurate interpretations.
You are far safer because you can manage your relationship to your environment in a skillful way. You will walk and drive with vastly improved precision because you are monitoring the details of your surroundings and taking into account the ever changing landscape you inhabit.
When your attention is energetically anchored to your immediate experience, your thoughts will settle down which leads to emotional stability. You will not be as impulsive, because there is a spaciousness in your experience.
These are all practical benefits and rational reasons to learn to train your attention to remain energetically alert and awake.
Beyond the practicalities are benefits that some might call ’spiritual’, where you may uncover the truth of your existence, what is really ‘real’, and how things ‘really’ are.
This doesn’t mean how things are for ‘you’, but how things are beyond ‘you’.
This means that in the realms of the ‘real’, you as a separate person don’t matter.
When ‘you’ are gone, what is real still IS.
This is neither practical nor rational, but beyond both.
Attention Training in this sense, is the key to the door that leads to the depths of Life itself. There you may come to understand that you are simply a wondrous expression of the enormity of Life and that everything is simply an appearance arising in the vastness of awareness.
That very same awareness in which these words appear.
That same awareness that also contains
the smile on your beautiful…
face.
(I got this in an email yesterday, I’m not sure where it originated, but it supports an entry of mine called On Helmets, Bubbles and Paranoid Moms. Enjoy.)
First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they were pregnant. They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can, and didn’t get tested for diabetes. Then after that trauma, we were put to sleep on our tummies in baby cribs covered with bright colored lead-based paints.
We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets, not to mention, the risks we took hitchhiking.
As infants & children, we would ride in cars with no car seats, booster seats, seat belts or air bags. Riding in the back of a pick up on a warm day was always a special treat.
We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle. We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and NO ONE actually died from this. We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter and drank koolade made with sugar, but we weren’t overweight because WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING !
We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on.
No one was able to reach us all day. And we were O.K.
We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes.
After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem.
We did not have Playstations, Nintendo’s, X-boxes, no video games at all, no 150 channels on cable, no video movies or DVD’s, no surround-sound or CD’s, no cell phones, no personal computer! s, no Internet or chat rooms……. WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!
We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents. We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever. We were given BB guns for our 10th birthdays, made up games with sticks and tennis balls and, although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes.
We rode bikes or walked to a friend’s house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just walked in and talked to them!
Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn’t had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!!
The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law! These generations have produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors ever!
The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas. We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned HOW TO DEAL WITH IT ALL! If YOU are one of them . . CONGRATULATIONS!
You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids, before the lawyers and the government regulated so much of our lives for our own good. And while you are at it, forward it to your kids so they will know how brave (and lucky) their parents were.
Kind of makes you want to run through the house with scissors, doesn’t it?!
I have for some time wondered what it would look like if, at the end of my life, I could see the mess I’m leaving behind.
I imagine a massive pit of consumption next to a massive pile of waste. A big hole or absence, representing: all the food I’ve taken in, great herds of cattle, flocks of chickens, schools of fish, fields of grains, gardens of vegetables, and orchards of fruits I’ve eaten; large lakes of water, juice, milk and other fluids I have guzzled; barrels of medications, and buckets of popcorn, peanuts, and candy I’ve munched; the million year old underground lakes of gas and oil I’ve used; and the whole aged forest I’ve destroyed in one way or another.
Next to this great pit is the great pile of garbage I’ve generated. Tons of paper, plastic, glass and whole clothing stores I’ve worn, worn out and discarded. A mountain of furniture, electronics, automobiles, gadgets, books and magazines, toys and trinkets, not to mention the material needed for the houses and apartments I have lived in.
I imagine I alone have created at least on average, a fair sized bag of garbage per week. Even a conservative estimate would mean well over 2000 bags I’ve kicked to the curb in my life. I won’t even get into the bodily waste I’ve produced that needed processing.
PARASITE: An organism that grows, feeds and is sheltered on or in a different organism, while contributing nothing to the survival of its host.
Now I don’t think it too outrageous to consider the Earth as an organism, or a host, as it is already considered as such by many in the scientific community.
In the words of James Lovelock, the Gaia Hypothesis states:
“The entire range of living matter on Earth, from whales to viruses, and from oaks to algae, could be regarded as constituting a single living entity, capable of manipulating the Earth’s atmosphere to suit its overall needs and endowed with faculties and powers far beyond those of its constituent parts.” (J. E. Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, 1982).
At this point I’m sure you can see that we needn’t stretch the definition of parasite too far for me to wear it.
Aaron McParasite.
I see myself attached to the Earth by my lips, sucking the sustenance from my host, then destroying it, until the day I die. I contribute nothing to my host’s survival. In fact I’m sure the whole Earth will heave a sigh of relief when I’m done draining it and lie down dead atop the pile, or perhaps fall down dead in the pit I’ve described above.
Just as an interesting mental experiment, take a moment to determine if your own pit and pile resembles mine in any way. Then imagine your neighborhood pit and pile. Then the pit and pile of your city/town. Your country. The world.
You can also do a daily pit/pile and then imagine the daily pit/pile of the world. What would it look like?
The more effort you put into this, by becoming specific about certain disposable objects makes for an interesting and depressing imagining. How many disposable razors does the world use in a day? How many trees does it take to supply a day’s worth of paper cups for the coffee shops of the world?
How much waste is generated by the world’s fast food operations? How much product packaging hits the daily garbage in your city alone? How twisted are we? Really?
Each year, 200 billion cans, bottles, plastic cartons and paper cups, are thrown away in the ‘developed’ world.
Let me know what you think about your own pit and pile. Are you doing anything about it?
I love to run distances of three to five miles a few times a week.
I noticed a long time ago while running, that when my attention was lost in mental activity, I would breathe incorrectly, my running technique was sloppy and I was running at a pace that was not appropriate for the distance I had set for myself.
Alternatively, when attention was anchored in the body, there was much less of a struggle with my running. Breathing was rhythmic, my pace was stable and it seemed very much like I was ‘being run’, rather than effort-fully running.
When attention is allowed to flood the body, the body naturally relaxes, releasing unconscious tension that traps energy in body parts/areas such as upper back, shoulders, neck and belly.
If I live to be sixty, Life will breathe me over a million times, beating my heart over five million times. The body’s capacity for self maintenance, growth and healing, demonstrates a wisdom far beyond comprehension.
Imagine if the processes of the body needed my attention to function.
I have difficulty multitasking now.
What if I also had to remember to breathe, beat my heart, release my hormones, digest my food, as well as chew gum, all at the same time?
“What we call normality in psychology is really a psychopathology of the average, so undramatic and so widely spread that we don’t even notice it.”
Normality is a form of arrested development, where the developmental process has stopped prematurely, incomplete.
Many people now see development beyond normality as the logical culmination of human development.
In the first phase of life, from childhood to middle adulthood, we are becoming individuals, learning to meet the demands of family, work, and society.
In the second phase, which begins, according to Jung, with the midlife crisis, we begin to turn inward, to reconnect with the center of our being.
In the first phase we build and develop our ego and in the second phase we transcend it.
(YES, we transcend it. This means that we build an ego so that we can go beyond it. Ego is only the halfway point up the development ladder that is described here.)
The above quotation is a compilation of Maslow, Walsh and Vaughan, Metzner and Diane Zimberoff
