Sean Reagan

One way to think about giving attention is to see it as essentially permissive or even passive – it does not seek to change the object which is being attended (which may include attention itself). Attention has no goal outside its own expression or existence.

A great deal of our psychic energy, especially in our western religious and intellectual traditions (the generative nexus where A Course in Miracles dwells), focuses on changing the objects in our attention through healing, improvement, modification, amendment, substitution and so forth.

For most of my life, the predominant culture has emphasized “wellness,” “self-help,” and the dawning of a “new age” in which holiness, inner peace and joy prevail.

In that setting (and in the setting of anticipating that setting), is it natural to focus on what is not working – what makes us unhappy – and then actively work to transition to happiness. In that setting, not striving for spiritual betterment et cetera is incoherent.

For example, say that I am frustrated with how much prep work I have to do for the summer class I teach. I’d rather be planting in the garden, re-fencing the horse pasture, fixing the back stairs, gazing at violets, sitting with my feet in the river . . .

A traditional approach to that dilemma would be to try and change the frustration to acceptance – to go from being unhappy to happy – and to do so by specifically interacting with the frustration. We “deal” with the external circumstances.

On that view, perhaps I meditate on the reasons to be grateful for teaching – the student/teacher relationships, the income, the insights into specific writing and critical thinking challenges and how to respond to them, the opportunity to practice compassion and clarification . . .

Or maybe I bargain, because compromise is spiritual. I will do half the requisite prep for classes, and work in the garden but wait a few days to re-fence the pasture.

Or maybe I reframe the issue altogether. Why complain about teaching when some people don’t have clean water or safe homes? I mean, Jesus was literally tortured and executed and he didn’t whine. Have some perspective Sean!

Giving attention is an alternative to all that. I don’t say those approaches are wrong; they are certainly consistent with my experience over the years. But giving attention is different.

When I give attention to frustration I just let the frustration be what it is. It is like welcoming a nagging guest into my home. When I give attention, I don’t try to cut the visit short, or limit the number of rooms they can see, or curtail the dialogue. I just notice the visit, attend to it, and keep on attending and noticing until it is over.

Noticing is a form of being curious: I just want to see what this experience is. What does it feel like? What does it seem to want? Why do I want from it?

I became fluent in the language of “letting go,” “letting be” and “just breathe” and all of that around age twenty-two. That was when my confused Catholicism and early forays into psychotherapy met the Buddha and I began a relatively brief and half-assed (but intense and influential) study and practice of Zen.

But even in that setting – for which I remain grateful, tendrils of which yet bloom in my living – my “letting go,” “letting be,” and “just breathe” were subtly conditional. I’ll let go and let be and just breathe because doing so will cause negativity to evaporate, leaving only joy and inner peace.

In that way, self-improvement, betterment, willfulness and so forth all remained active ideals, active motivations. An underlying sense of needing to achieve a state other than the one I was presently in remained pervasive.

And it went on being pervasive through my thirties and forties. Through a much more serious and relatively mature engagement with Catholicism and psychotherapy, and finally through A Course in Miracles which for the better part of a decade supplanted psychotherapy and Catholicism and functioned as the whole of my practice.

It is important to remember that better/self-improvement/etc is okay; the impulse occurs in everyone, to varying degrees. We have the structure of human beings. That means that we have an inherent tendency to notice and solve problems. And, given our opposable thumbs and gift for language and so forth, we have become almost unimaginably good at problem-solving. Heart transplants, walking on the moon, representative democracy, food cooperatives, toilet paper . . . How grateful I am!

And yet, the ostensibly simple problem of being able to sit quietly without stress or anxiety, and to let others sit that way as well, appears practically insurmountable. Just being happy, content, at ease, alone and with others . . .

This became painfully and viscerally obvious to me in the past couple of years, as all my learning and thinking and study and sincerity failed to transform the underlying mechanism of “notice what’s wrong, identify a fix, apply the fix, evaluate the fix, notice what’s still wrong, identify a fix, apply the fix . . .”

Was there any way off that conveyor belt going nowhere?

I began to think of giving attention as a sort of spiritual practice coexisting with my practice of A Course in Miracles at some point in 2015. I realized then that a particularly vexing relationship did not exist unless I looked at it, and in that moment, became utterly fascinated with how attention worked.

What did it mean that fear and guilt could literally disappear? Where did it go? Why did it come back? Was attention responsive? Biological? What was the difference between attention and awareness? Why can’t attention give attention to itself? Or can it? Are there a priori reasons that a source/cause should appear or not appear to its effect?

These questions led to some very complex thinkers and fields of research, a lot of which I can only pretend to understand. Yet that study truly shifted the way I interacted with the world and with others sharing that world (broadly defined to include people, black bears, sunflowers, stars, et cetera). I went slower, with more patience and humility.

But it wasn’t until the past year or so that I began to realize “giving attention” was akin to what other folks were calling “meditation” or “mindfulness practice” or “contemplative prayer”.

In that tradition, “giving attention” is liberating, just because it frees me from the ongoing cycle of self-improvement, which always see-saws from “things are great!” to “things need work.” I become willing at last to see in a clear and fructive way my utter ranklessness (the premise of our shared equality) and the futility and lovelessness of believing it is possible to have something that others do not (which is the underlying premise of self-improvement – it is very hard to see this clearly but it’s there to be seen).

When I no longer needed to change anything, when I was truly willing to just let it be what it was, and attend to it on those terms, rather than my own, living settled in a very deep and loving way.

You could imagine the shift somewhat like someone who stumbles on an old guitar and plays around with it, learning some rudimentary chords and melodies. But then one day someone more expert shows her how to tune the guitar. And suddenly, everything she was doing has a new flavor. It coheres in a delightful, integral and harmonious way.

The essence of giving attention – or mindfulness or meditation, if you like – is simply intentional nonresistance. What is this experience? What does this breath feel like? What does that bird sound like? *Where does it sound? What does the zafu feel like on my ass? Who is this “me” asserting possession of that ass? Et cetera.

It is an ongoing noticing what is happening – what this experience is – without rushing to do anything about it, which includes defining it, explaining it, translating it, et cetera.

I tend to prefer an academic approach to the world. I am happiest with books, second happiest writing, and third happiest talking about what I’m reading and writing. That’s okay!

But it is also profoundly powerful to simply spend some time noticing all that without needing to engage with it. A lot of what arises doesn’t require engagement; and when engagement does happen, it is enriched and nourished by the calm of having been still and attentive, by engaging on terms other than those that “I” assert.

Of course, one could argue that “giving attention” is a form of engagement; I wouldn’t disagree. Yet I might reframe it: “giving attention” is a form of being in gentle relationship with what gives attention, a soft mutuality that is less active than contemplative and more present than provactive, proactive, et cetera.

In any case, a generative inner peace obtains – not merely our personal feeling of at-ease, but an ease that offers itself to a world that receives it, as if confirming – and conforming to – a blessing.

One element of reflexive domains is that they are not pre-existing. We do not discover or detect them. Rather, they arise with us. We bring them forth as they bring us forth. This is love.

When I say “bring them forth” I do not mean that we will them into being. For we, too, are brought forth. We are not our own author! We arise with the reflexive domain; as we specify, or distinguish, it, in turn it specifies or distinguishes us.

Seeing this mutuality clearly allows one to experience living as reflexive. What we call the self is simply a reflexive loop – really, many reflexive loops – intertwined with an apparently infinite number of other reflexive loops. The shared loopiness is the reflexive domain.

One way to give attention to this, is to attend one’s ordinary experience in a simple but focused way. Take my cup of coffee this morning. In order to perceive “cup of coffee” I must distinguish it. I must separate it from what it is not.

Thus, the mug of coffee is not the table on which it rests. It is not the east-facing window that frames it. It is not the room in which the table and window are found. It is not the house in which the room is found, nor the town in which the house is found, nor the country in which the town is found, nor the planet on which the country is located, nor the solar system in which . . .

You see where this goes? In order to specify the coffee mug, the entire universe must also be specified. The mug – and the whole cosmos – come into being at the same time. Absent one, the other is not possible. They mutually specify one another.

It’s true we ordinarily don’t think of it this way. It’s true that when we look at the coffee mug we don’t also realize the universe. But that does not make the observation untrue or unhelpful. You can, if you like, look at your morning tea or coffee, and see in it the literal shape and form of the cosmos.

And to say this is simply to say that the mug – and the cosmos – and the awareness of both – arise together in a reflexive domain, that is neither a beginning nor an end, but simply a process. And, as a process, it is stable unto other observers who observe it in their own reflexive domain – one that the present-awareness we call the self may not have the slightest inkling of, just as your coffee mug is probably not aware you are using it to give attention to the cosmos.

Our living changes a little based on this insight. It’s harder to sustain anger and jealousy and greed and so forth. Since everyone can be our own self, the need to “win” or “possess” loses a lot of its intensity. The desire to help seems to come to the fore, probably as a function of self-love, or just love itself.

But even if it doesn’t, it’s okay, because the domain itself simply goes along, endlessly transforming and looping and folding. War, famine and pestilence can’t deter it. Not seeing it doesn’t deter it. I can’t see the back of my head right now but the hair on it grows just fine.

However, we notice as give attention that this ongoing process, this infinitely transformative loopiness, these sensuous undulations, are responsive. It is possible to give attention; it is possible to respond. We can try to feed the hungry; we can invent vaccinations for diseases; we can be dialogic rather than monologic. We can choose non-zero sum games rather than zero-sum games.

We can seek and find coherence.

All this is a way of saying that reflexive domains are creative. Creativity is their essence. It is natural to bring forth love and coherence. It is natural to be playful and peaceful. It is natural to serve one another.

This is a lovely thing to perceive! The work becomes less about our own “awakening” or “enlightenment” than simply attending the bringing forth of love in a reflexive domain whose transformations are fundamentally loving.

Thus, we aren’t inventing love or fighting for love or insisting on love: we are simply giving attention to the love that naturally arises as a function of the reflexivity that we naturally are. There are blocks to love, yes. There is looking away from love, yes. But these are not proof of hate! They are not proof of the absence of love! Rather, they are emptinesses whose form specifies love. When we see this, the love that is is naturally brought forth is brought forth.

For example, I might notice that I am impatient in the classroom, and that my impatience makes some students anxious, frustrated, confused. But the very impatience and its effects make clear what love is – love is the patience and kindness which soothes anxiety, calms frustration, and clarifies confusion.

The apparent absence of love testifies to the ongoing presence of love, and when it does, then love is present. Love is brought forth.

Love does not actually become absent. We merely forget about it, or fail to notice it, or stubbornly resist it. But love is akin to breathing. It’s just there. It inheres in living. We can become more or less skillful, attentive, responsible and so forth with respect to breathing but so long as we are living, we are breathing. Just so with love.

I have been thinking lately about the concept of reperceiving. Reperceiving is a way of enlarging the field of awareness, such that one no longer focuses obsessively or exclusively on a personal or subjective sense of an experience, set of circumstances, et cetera.

When we repercieve, it becomes possible to perceive more of the situation – other perspectives or possibilities, which in turn foster humility and other forms of gentleness as we respond to the situation.

Here is how Shauna Shapiro, a mindfulness teacher whose work is clear and helpful puts it in “Mindfulness-based stress reduction effects on moral reasoning and decision making” (co-written wth Hooria Jazaieri and Philippe R. Goldin):

. . . our ethical decision making process, when personal is typically driven by emotional intuitions, however, these can be modified and brought into more conscious awareness and reflection, by taking a more objective approach to the situation. One of the central features of mindfulness practice, is this capacity to shift perspective from subject to object, whereby experience becomes less personal and subjective, allowing the practitioner to see with greater clarity and objectivity. This shift in perspective has been termed reperceiving.

I actually wonder if reperceiving is a misnomer. My sense is that perception is initially sound, but then egoic mind patterns enter and “reperceive” the situation through their own distorted and distorting lens, begetting confusion and discord to varying degrees.

On that view, the second – or repeated – perception (the reperception) is the ego’s and is unhelpfully complex, self-serving, dramatic, et cetera.

In that sense, mindfulness-based practices allow for a spaciousness in which one’s ego-based patterning is slower and less tenacious, which means that the original clear seeing – which is our natural state, our natural seeing – retains its fundamental clarity and efficacy.

The basic idea is to redirect our attention in a way that broadens awareness. Mindfulness practices help by emphasizing non-resistance. We simply notice what is – we give attention to it – without instantly moving to change, amend, alter or improve it. We just let the experience be what it is. When we do this in an gently sustainable intentional way, awareness expands – spaciousness arises – and there is more clarity, compassion, patience, interest and so forth.

As Shapiro et al note, this has nontrivial social and cultural ramifications.

There is ample empirical evidence that mindfulness increases compassion and empathy. It has been suggested that through helping one dis-identify with a subjective, ego-centered perspective, mindfulness helps practitioners to see another’s perspective and to cultivate greater empathy and compassion.

As I alluded to here, one way to understand the final lessons of A Course in Miracles may be as encouraging us to develop a mindfulness practice. “Greater empathy and compassion” are equivalent to bringing forth more love. Reperceiving – however one defines it (though tracking Shapiro is probably the better part of wisdom 🙂 ) – simply direct us to notice how noticing expands to become more effective and inclusive, which is to say, more loving.