Live Session Summary, Sunday, August 13, 2023: It was good to be with you for our Live session exploring the theme of wise attention. Here is a summary of the main themes and quotes from today’s session:
Main themes of talk on wise attention:
• How we use our attention is crucial to our happiness, well-being, and freedom. Without awareness, the mind easily becomes swept up in clinging, aversion, fear, confusion, and other harmful states. With awareness, we can untangle ourselves from difficult emotions and mind states and develop those that lead to well-being and freedom.
• Attention is a neutral quality: it can be used for harmful purposes—for example, the attention required to be an effect pickpocket, burglar, or assassin—or for wholesome and skillful purposes. So, attention needs to be wise and compassionate, and supported by the ethical elements of the Buddha’s eightfold path—wise speech, action, and livelihood—as well as wise understanding and wise intention.
• It is essential that we train our mind (as the Buddha states in the quote below). Mindfulness meditation—to abandon unskillful states and cultivate beneficial ones—is a ‘direct path to liberation,’ as the Buddha termed his central teaching on mindfulness; the discourse on the foundations of mindfulness (the Satipatthana Sutta).
• It is important that we train our minds to make wise attention our default, rather than something we occasionally cultivate or happen to fall into. Eckhart Tolle spoke about ‘living in the Now’ and visiting the past and future when we need to—rather than the converse.
Quotes:
• William James: “The faculty of bringing back a wandering attention over and over again is the very root of judgment, character, and will… An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence.”
• Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spoke of attention as ‘psychic energy’: ‘‘We create ourselves by how we use this energy…. Attention is the most important tool in the task of improving the quality of experience.’’ It is helpful to ask ourselves, how am I using this faculty of attention—my psychic energy? On worrying, judging myself, or getting angry with someone? Or in being kind, compassionate, and present for ourselves and others?
• Jose Ortega y Gasset: “Tell me what you pay attention to and I will tell you who you are.”
• James Redfield: “Where attention goes, energy flows.”
• Buddha: “What you frequently think about and ponder on becomes the inclination of your mind.”
• Buddha: “I don’t envision a single thing that, when unguarded, leads to such great harm as the mind. The mind, when unguarded leads to great harm.”
• Eckhart Tolle: “Anything unconscious dissolves when you shine the light of consciousness on it.”
• Carl Jung: “What is not brought to consciousness comes to us as fate.”
• Viktor Frankl: ““Between the stimulus and response, there is a space. And in that space lies our freedom and power to choose our responses. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
• “Sow a thought, reap an act. Sow an act, reap a habit. Sow a habit, reap a character. Sow a character, reap a destiny.” (Attributed to various sources)
Poems and excerpts: ‘For Warmth,’ by Thich Nhat Hanh; ‘Clearing,’ by Martha Postlethwaite; excerpt from Dorothy Hunt’s ‘Peace is this moment without judgment’; T.S. Eliot: “A condition of complete simplicity // (Costing not less than everything)…” (from ‘Four Quartets’).
I hope this is helpful. Please let me know if I missed anything significant. Have a lovely week—and see you next Sunday, August 20, at 9am eastern for our next Live session, from Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. Warmly, Hugh 🙏🏻 💜 🌻
