Ramji and I recently arrived in the US where we are being lovingly hosted by wonderful friends and fellow Vedantins, for which we are deeply grateful. To be alive to the wonder of life, fully cognizant of its infinite generosity despite its inevitable losses, and to be the Self observing it all, is a gift beyond measure. It is the measure of all things.
From this hallowed vantage point, we view the turmoil that the world around us is experiencing, with all its apparently intractable and threatening ‘real’ or potential realities. In Portland we experienced most acutely the degradation of the collective spirit, the cultural slide towards dystopia. And we wonder at it all. That the Self apparently under the spell of ignorance blinded by Maya’s dark underbelly could lose sight of the beauty of what is, when life is truly an embarrassment of riches. It seems that worldwide there is such focus on the negative that many have lost sight of the fact that life has never been this good, despite the problems facing humanity.
It is like the collective mind is sleep walking in a nightmare of dread and dissatisfaction, lost to itself, captive by fear and aggrievement, stubbornly unwilling to pay attention to anything but the darkness. For those of us with Self-knowledge, we would like to shake people awake from this terrible dream, to shift their attention towards the light of their true nature, the gloriously shining, limitless Self.
Despite all the negativity, there are potent voices of love and hope, too. One of them is Maria Popova, a Bulgarian born essayist, author and poet, who runs the blog, The Marginalian. Though Maria is an atheist and seems to lack knowledge of her nature as the nondual Self, taking the world to be real, as she is the Self, aspects of her highly astute and beautiful writings reflect the ancient wisdom of nonduality, Vedanta.
A few weeks ago she wrote about attention as an instrument of love. How she expressed it fits perfectly with the teachings. Ramji has always said that love is willing attention, that we do not love what we do not pay attention to. Awareness of our attention is such transformative wisdom that if recognized, it has the power to instantly shift our reality, whether or not we are committed to self-inquiry and the nondual teachings of Vedanta.
Here is what Maria wrote, with my comments:
Maria: Whatever fundamental reality might exist, we live out our lives in a subjective reality defined by what we agree to attend to. “An act of pure attention, if you are capable of it, will bring its own answer,” D.H. Lawrence wrote. But we live largely in the territory of the unanswerable because there is no pure attention — the aperture of our attention is constricted by myriad conditionings and focused by a brain honed on millions of years of evolutionary necessities, many of which we have long outgrown.
Sundari: What Maria does not seem to know is that our ‘fundamental reality’ is the knower or witness of our subjective reality – the nondual Self, that which is always present and never changes. What she is describing here is how our subjective psychological filters and cognitive commitments shape our perception of reality and render our understanding of what life is presenting to us “unanswerable’. I.e., life under the spell of Maya, duality, that which is not always present and always changing, is fundamentally unknowable because it is never what it appears to be.
Maria: How the brain metes out attention and what that means for our intimacy with reality is what the philosophy-lensed British psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist takes up in his immense, in both senses of the word, book The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World (public library) — an investigation of how “the very brain mechanisms which succeed in simplifying the world so as to subject it to our control militate against a true understanding of it,” and what a richer understanding of those mechanisms can do for living in closer and more felicitous communion with reality. At its heart is the recognition that “the whole is never the same as the sum of its ‘parts’” and that “there are in fact no ‘parts’ as such, but that they are an artefact of a certain way of looking at the world.”
Sundari: Our ‘intimacy with reality’, that which determines our satisfaction or lack of it, is knowledge of our true nature as the nondual Self. It is knowledge of the forces that run the field of experience, the three gunas. If ignorance of our true nature rules our minds, these forces condition them to a vastly reduced aperture of what is there to behold. Our brains by virtue of their miniscule capacity, are forced to squeeze all sensory information into patterns we are familiar with and concur with our filters and inner narrative. We are prisoners of our cognitive networks without Self-knowledge, which is the only way to step out of our tiny little bubble – our ‘personal’ story.
Maria: Punctuating his ambitious 3,000-page effort to braid neuropsychology (the way our brains shape our impression of reality), epistemology (the way we come to know anything at all), and metaphysics (our yearning to wrest meaning from fundamental truth as we try to discern the nature of the universe) is an ongoing inquiry into our way of looking at the world — the lens of consciousness we call attention. He writes:
The world we know cannot be wholly mind-independent, and it cannot be wholly mind-dependent… What is required is an attentive response to something real and other than ourselves, of which we have only inklings at first, but which comes more and more into being through our response to it — if we are truly responsive to it. We nurture it into being; or not. In this it has something of the structure of love.
Sundari: How beautifully written this is – and how much more powerful it would be if we add:
What is required is to turn our attention around and inward, to the Self. If we can do this, we realize that this is our true nature, and it does respond because it is the only ‘thing’ that is real. It is the witness of the mind, the one paying attention, who is only apparently real. Our willing attention is the lens of Love, Consciousness with a capital ‘C’ – our means of contact with the world. It is the ‘I” that knows and sees all, seeing only itSelf.
Maria: This property of reality is what Iris Murdoch had in view when she observed that “love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real,” and what the poet J.D. McClatchy captured in his insistence that “love is the quality of attention we pay to things.”
Sundari: If Maria could discriminate between the ‘small’ ego identity and the limitless Self, she would know that ‘the something other than oneself’, is the Self. The one and only non-negatable factor, and has no properties.
Maria: McGilchrist considers the way our attention constructs our reality and becomes the beating heart with which we love the world:
The whole illuminates the parts as much as the parts can illuminate the whole… The world we experience — which is the only one we can know — is affected by the kind of attention we pay to it.
Sundari: Attention is ‘the beating heart with which we love the world because it is love itself. Even if attention comes in the form of hate, it is still love covered by fear. Where your attention is or is not, is where your love is present, or absent. Those lost in the fear-filled dream of despair cannot see that they are trapped in a tamasic conviction of negativity, which is no more than a belief they have convinced themselves is true. Fear and cynicism has eaten their souls, leaving it shorn of love and seemingly in tatters. Yet love is indestructible and always present because it is untouched by everything and conditions to nothing. Love cannot be altered, even if it ‘alteration finds’.
Maria: Defining attention as “the manner in which our consciousness is disposed towards whatever else exists,” he (Gilchrist) writes:
The choice we make of how we dispose our consciousness is the ultimate creative act: it renders the world what it is. It is, therefore, a moral act: it has consequences.
Sundari: Yes it does! Where we place our attention is shaped by what we value or don’t value. If our values are eroded by fear and desire, we justify whatever immoral acts of attack and defence we deem necessary to survive. All the tragedy and injustice of life originates from where we do or do not place our attention. As does all that redeems and fulfils us.
Maria: A century-some after William James insisted that our experience is what we agree to attend to, and two generations after Simone Weil asserted that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,”
Sundari: All that sustains us, that colours our world giving it true meaning, that which expands our hearts and frees us from the fear of lack, the prism of loss, and the vices of the unloved, is the fearless generosity of true attention to what is. And the opposite is also true. All that contracts our world, stripping it of colour and meaning, is the avaricious shrunken aperture of fear based attention.
Maria: McGilchrist adds:
Attention changes the world. How you attend to it changes what it is you find there. What you find then governs the kind of attention you will think it appropriate to pay in the future. And so it is that the world you recognise (which will not be exactly the same as my world) is “firmed up” — and brought into being.
Sundari: As there is no escaping that our lives are shaped by what we pay attention to, make sure you know what that is.
Maria: Attention is not just another “cognitive function”: it is… the disposition adopted by one’s consciousness towards the world. Absent, present, detached, engaged, alienated, empathic, broad or narrow, sustained or piecemeal, it therefore has the power to alter whatever it meets. Since our consciousness plays some part in what comes into being, the play of attention can both create and destroy, but it never leaves its object unchanged. So how you attend to something — or don’t attend to it — matters a very great deal.
Sundari: ‘One’s consciousness’ implies that everyone has a different consciousness, which, as this is a nondual reality, is not possible. But although there is only one Consciousness that illuminates our seemingly individual consciousnesses, we do have a unique lense through which we experience the world. In this way, we ‘create our own reality’ in that what we pay attention to determines the quality of our lives. When what we pay attention to as society becomes entrenched in fear, the doors of our perception are colluding en masse with fear, and life is likewise threatening and fearful for all. The light of the Self, which never dims, can no longer be accessed by such minds.
If our individual lenses are cleaned constantly by karma yoga and jnana yoga – Self-knowledge, we know that the person we appear to be is not who we really are. Life is a zero sum game, and we are not the authors of it. The forces at present in our world today have always and will always play out in endless cycles. It cannot be any other way because that is how duality functions. The solution is in knowing none of it is real, and choosing the opposite thought to fear and anxiety.
In this way, every thought, feeling and act is consecrated to Life, or God, by whichever name you prefer. We are released from the Sisyphean burden of doership, the soul-destroying carrying of every result, thought and emotion as ‘mine’. We are free of the person and its conditioned responses to life. All is well with the world no matter what. The light of the Self shines through and every act is an act of love and dedication to God, because there is only God, i.e., the Self. You.
Sundari
