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.