Nudge

Recognition

Seeing depends on recognition. We need to have seen something before to know what we’re looking for, to lock on to the sense of known. Even when we can’t identify something right away there can be a feeling of familiarity that draws focus. After more than a decade since neuroscience’s discovery of the importance of feelings to thinking, it is finally being acknowledged in media. Feelings come first, providing incentives regarding what needs attention. Feelings accompany vision as an initial assessment of what we’re seeing. They are far more nuanced than words can express, think how many different ways a beautiful day or a wild ocean can look. If we’re looking at another person, the inner mirroring of face and body language help us feel what another is experiencing. Besides our experience of our surroundings, we have art to show the deep movements of the heart. Artists throughout time have shown what’s it’s like to be human, to appreciate beauty, shudder at horror and gasp at what’s ugly beyond human understanding. Art is our vehicle to witness what’s not within our own experience and enlarge our understanding of feeling and intuitive judgment. Looking at the art that attracts you trains that sensitivity. Building faith in our response to what we see can strengthen our moral judgments to hold up against the flood of verbal justification. Realizing the importance of visual judgments could guide us in better understanding what is happening in our world. Vision shows what’s harmonious, what’s in conflict, where something valued has been defiled. Many of us felt heartsick at the demolition of the east wing of the White House, a place that belonged to the country, not an individual, and provides a recent example of how what is wrong is felt. The machine bites off a piece of building we care about and we feel it in our chest. Likewise, we recoil at human beings being thrown to the ground, treated with disrespect and carted off to cages. Destroying small boats and the people in them without evidence of wrongdoing is another ugly scene in our current reality horror show. The words and explanations don’t carry the weight of witnessing and feeling the truth of what we see. Understanding how powerful our vision is in seeing right and wrong, goodness and cruelty, comes with the responsibility to look. In a world full of distractions, it’s too easy to ignore what’s actually happening around us. Making decisions about where to give our attention is the first step in active awareness.

Joy in Action

Loss of Care

In the early stages of my grief after my husband died, I was grateful for texting because answering any question, especially about how I was doing meant falling apart. The distance and detachment of texting allowed me to communicate without losing control of my emotions. But the level to which this detachment now pervades modern consciousness worries me. Connecting to my last post about the condition of modern attention, I was struck while recently in Ireland, by a column by Joe Humphreys in the Irish Times focusing on the same direction. Referring to the work of an Irish based study group, Attentive Inquiry Reclaiming Environment, who draw on the work of Simone Weil and her philosophy of attention, Humphreys asks, “What, after all is the smartphone but a mechanism for drawing your attention away from the physical reality surrounding you?” It’s an important question. What we notice is what we care about, good and bad. With the lack of attention to our environment, the concern that should be generated by what’s being eroded isn’t there. Our image of our world is being blinkered by one small device. The loss of care, of feeling for our surroundings is a casualty of the phone-based lifestyle. The detachment I appreciated when grieving has become a pervasive default state, the full range of emotions flattened by the same inexpressive text. I think to myself of what I wrote about a friend’s piece last month and how deeply expressive each of the fonts of each of the layers of words were, adding a tone of voice and emotional attitude. What she’d done with the style of each font felt like a master orator’s persuasive tones in a monologue. The option to illustrate, in that piece, an open-mouthed reptile near the bottom added anxiety to the whole. It's not the words that are the problem. There is privacy in writing by hand as well as a level of intimacy that is hard to achieve with technology. Sometimes a letter arrives, and I know instantly who it is from, handwritten, hand drawn and collaged, the appearance says more than the words themselves. It’s a multidimensional depth of expression which is why letters are kept for life, expansive personal messages that say they care in every part. We don’t realize how much is lost when we only email and text, all content regimented, made uniform by the mechanism. We make more of ourselves visible when we write by hand. Taking time to look, to notice the world around us, seeing the needs of others and the condition of the environment build care for them. Thinking about how we express ourselves to others offers a choice of how much care we want to give.

Indecision

Unmixed Attention

A friend was showing me her new work a few days ago and I was struck by how well it portrayed the modern mind, so many levels of mental activity, vying for attention. With competing storylines running after so many levels of preoccupation, it’s hard to pay attention to any of them, like a radio station with several frequencies bleeding into the foreground, impossible to follow. Around the same time another friend sent me a video by he and his wife that had a similar effect but expressing the effort to tune out the distracting layers of drone and buzz of multiple conversations with a mandala like emergence that came and went. Simone Weil wrote that unmixed attention is prayer, very hard to achieve in our time. Living today produces so much mental clutter, so much competing for our attention. Though I meditate twenty minutes a day, random thoughts always invade that space. Working on my art, however, is almost always unmixed, and I like the idea that it’s when I’m working, I’m closest to praying, that I’m participating in a flow of consciousness that’s bigger than myself. Other artists have mentioned to me that they see their work as prayer. It is, in fact an offering. As a person who often feels like I’m channeling the work, that it comes from beyond me, and often surprises me, it makes sense that the pure absorption in the task joins with a larger aspect of consciousness. The key to pure focus is absorption in a task. Like in some video games, there’s an alert participation in what’s unfolding that loses the game when attention strays. I’ve had conversations with friends that were occasionally so focused as to qualify as unmixed, and many situations with other people can do that. Arguments might seem unmixed in their intensity, but often personal history, with pre-existing ideas and opinions flood in alongside personal baggage. The distracted nature of everyday consciousness has the mind so full of competing areas that even in intimate contact, there can be mental interference. Weil’s distinction of the personality and the soul might help with sorting through those layers. Personality is concerned with the public self, cares what others want from us and aspires to their esteem, source of so much anxiety. Absorption in any interest takes us out of personality and into the subject of interest. She sees the soul as beyond the personal, our connection to the universal in humanity. That deeper Self is where we know justice, balance, beauty and truth. Any choice in where to focus is an opportunity. The closer you look the more you find, and in a state of fascination we have unmixed attention. The key is to fully be there, attention flowing outward to enfold what draws us in.

Formative Energy