A post from my fellow director of the Silent Eye, Steve Tanham.

Sitting here, in the small room that serves as my study, my attention began to wander from the Silent Eye lesson I am currently writing, to the picture of the stone circle at Castlerigg that sits on the wall behind my laptop. I watched myself as the object of my attention changed, and wondered.

It had wandered because, for the past few hours, I have been ripping up paragraph after paragraph of the most crucial part of the Guided Journey that accompanies this and every lesson. This particular Silent Eye lesson is vital in understanding the power of what Freud would have called the “Superego” ¬– that overarching behavioural watcher, sitting in perpetual judgement over all our individual lives.

In the Lesson, the student (or Companion as Sue and I prefer to think of our fellow travellers) comes face to face with an authority figure whose role in the Landscape of the Exiles is to guide the way, or at least that’s how she sees it (yes, she). Part of the authority figure’s character is correctly aligned, part of it is misaligned and the Companion is guided to have an inner experience that contrasts the difference and thereby opens the way to a piece of important self-transformation.

Now, the reason I raise all this under the heading of “Attention” is that my own superego – merciless slave-driver that it is, was giving me a hard time for turning away from the much re-written said paragraph when it carried such importance. I did explain to the inner prosecutor that my eyes would feel much better and my mind would be fresher after a cup of tea and a few minutes of focussing at a distance of more than fourteen inches. It was having none of it, of course, and berated me for being weak in holding my attention on the subject in hand. Sigh.

So, in order to do something useful with the fact that I won that tussle, and, while drinking my well-earned cup of tea, I lit my Amarex candle and let the other bits of my consciousness simply bask in its peaceful glow. And that got me thinking about attention in more detail.

In many ways, attention is all we have.

I say that in the sense that if we truly believe we have the capacity to change our lives, spiritually; then we have to stop thinking that there will always be a tomorrow and actually let ourselves be drawn, repeatedly, to the task of personal transformation, or self-alchemy as I like to think of it. Attention has a positive and negative aspect. It can be active or passive. Positive attention is focus on something; negative attention is denying the focus that our habitual minds want to have.

We live in an age dominated by the head. Our thoughts, and the discipline applied to them, largely determine our success in life. In parallel to our thoughts we have feelings, of course, but few of us get paid for the art of our feelings, wonderful though they may be.

This over-emphasis on our thoughts, our intellect, leads to a painful process of detachment from the real world, or the “Objective world” as Gurdjieff and many other philosophers have called it. It’s startling but true that, a lifetime of thinking, we no longer actually think. We think we do, but we don’t (I’ll stop in a minute!) Instead, our comfort-seeking minds, so capable with language and concepts and living life for us, do the equivalent of a video recorder (thank you dear, departed Douglas Adams), and watch life for us, ticking the box nicely to show us it was done correctly.

And of course we’ll come back to it at a future point when we have more “time”, and watch it properly. Oh, yes . . .

Negative attention means denying the video recorder its habitual effect on our lives. It means knowing the corrosive power of automatic and discursive thought – and switching it off. Try it on the next occasion you have time. Stop the chattering in your head and shift the attention to your feet. Feel the body – that miracle of intelligent organic engineering that was given to us at birth and which we largely ignore except when we neglect is so much that it hurts.

Like the candle flame in the picture, we can be dominated by the lights around us, demanding our attention, or we can drown them in non-attention, “stopping the world” as Casteneda once wrote; and bask in the truth of the Self that does not need to seek attention.

So, did it work? Did I get the vital paragraph rewritten? Well, I think so. But you’ll have to ask the Companions in the Land of the Exiles, as each one opens the third door and steps into the Chamber of Judgement to face their own Prosecutor. A dramatic but pleasant surprise may await the traveller. The faint-hearted need not apply, of course. But then I do tend towards mischief in these things.
Steve

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