Attention Or Atencion?

A Zen Master in ancient Japan was asked to summarize his teaching. He replied with one word: “Attention.” In Spanish the word is atencion, which has connotations of care, courtesy, focus, diligence and vigilance. None of which are typically implied by the word in English, which is often conflated with concentration.

For example, a prominent scientist rhetorically asks: “In the millions of visual images, sounds, smells, and other sensory inputs that bombard the brain every second, what mechanism allows us to pay attention to some things and disregard others?” He answers with circularity: “Attention allows us to pay attention to some things and disregard others.”

That’s mistaken. Attention is inclusive awareness that ends division and duality, not exclusive concentration that assumes them. Attention is therefore a very different faculty of the brain than concentration. Our future as individuals and a species turns on the difference.

The high priests of science, neuroscientists, say things like, “Attention is not consciousness; however, it is probably a necessary condition for consciousness, and its neural mechanics are a step along the way to understanding the material basis of consciousness.”

Notice the loaded terms– “neural mechanics” and “material basis.” Life and consciousness are, in this worldview, mechanical, material and reductionistic. This belief system is a projection of symbolic thought, which is mechanical, material and reductionistic.

So we should not be persuaded when a scientist says, “Like almost all biologists and neuroscientists, I firmly believe that consciousness and all mental experiences are sensations brought about by the chemicals and electrical currents in the brain.”

That is, as he acknowledges, a statement of belief, not a statement of fact. The fact is that no one knows what the basis of thought-based consciousness is -- much less the consciousness that emerges when thought is completely still.

It simply doesn’t wash for scientists to say, “even though we may not have a full explanation of that mysterious sensation we call consciousness, a great deal of evidence suggests that it originates in the material brain.”

Is consciousness merely a “mysterious sensation?” Is the core premise of materialism, that consciousness can be reduced to scientifically explainable workings of atoms and molecules, valid?

“The material basis of consciousness” --the bedrock premise of reductionist science -- is a misleading phrase. Without doubt thought and self have a material basis in the brain. However the meaning of materialism becomes very unclear when considering meditative states of consciousness.

The consciousness we usually know is “the first-person participation in the world; the awareness of self; the feeling of ‘I-ness’; the sense of being a separate entity in the world.” Most scientists say that IS consciousness, and some even say it falls under “the heading of spirituality.”

However to equate the source of man’s fragmentation and darkness, which flows from “the sense of being a separate entity in the world,” with consciousness (much less spirituality) is the height of philosophical (and spiritual) confusion.

Spirituality actually begins with the ending, at least for a few fully conscious moments, of the sense of being a separate entity. Dogmatic materialism cannot be dressed up in spirituality simply because the materialist appreciates sunsets, marvels at the forms of nature, or feels a connection with others.

Conventional materialism ends up with nonsensical ideas like, “Consciousness exists on a spectrum, from automatic responses to the surrounding environment at the low end to self-awareness, ego, and the ability to plan ahead at the high end. Amoebas may not be conscious in any meaningful way, while crows and dolphins and dogs almost certainly are.”

So the human ego represents the “high end” consciousness? And perhaps dolphins and dogs have egos? The increasing crisis of man’s destructiveness is airbrushed by such ludicrous mediocrity, which utterly fails to consider how we are the only species that’s tearing apart the web of life, though we emerged from the web of life.

It’s easy to talk about “the emergence of consciousness” along a spectrum that encompasses everything from amoebas to humans, without emotionally perceiving what a radical break the human adaptive pattern is with the basic evolutionary dynamic on Earth.

Besides, “the belief that everything is made out of atoms and molecules, and nothing more,” and that all spiritual experiences “can be explained in terms of the forces of Darwinian evolution” is a theological claim, not a scientific or philosophic insight.

It ignores the crisis of human consciousness, which is manifesting ecologically to the peril of millions of species on Earth, as well as to the peril of the human species. It ignores the sublimity of so-called mystical experience, during which the mind as thought is still and the ego is absent.

And it ignores the deeper question of the material universe: Are matter and space permeated with consciousness, which the human brain is capable of communing with and participating in when thought is still, knowledge is held in abeyance, and the known dissolves in awareness?

Psychological thought, the chattering of memory and indulgence of imagination, is not a given. Watch its movement carefully enough, without a goal and the infinite regress of the watcher, and it ends. Then the universe opens to you.

The state of insight is not a matter of exclusively concentrating the mind through an act of will, but inclusively attending to the movement of one’s mind and emotions in the mirror of nature. Then attention and atencion mean the same thing, and it’s the most important action we human beings are capable.

Martin LeFevre

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