Attention is the essence of contemplation. Paying attention. Attention, says one dictionary definition, is the cognitive process of paying attention to one aspect of the environment while ignoring others. So it is deliberately selective -- we are choosing to pay attention somewhere and not elsewhere, during the time of prayer. The mantra is intended to assist us in this, because left to ourselves our monkey minds are all over the place.
Of course in other parts of our life, being able to attend to fifteen things at once is widely admired. This is now called multi-tasking. People add it to their CVs. Others of us, usually male I understand, are more or less unable to multi-task. And that I imagine explains why I am not CEO of Air New Zealand or Archbishop of Canterbury. I am generally unable to do more than one thing at a time. Well, while it may indeed be admirable to multi-task, in contemplative prayer and life what matters is that we learn how to focus attention to the present moment and to God’s presence. God is paying attention to us. This is a discipline that needs to be practised and developed.
Another thing we hear a lot about is attention span. Commercial advertisers seem to be of the opinion that we have very limited attention spans, and so they have to speak to us in rapid sound bites and suchlike. A lot of people have an extremely low boredom threshold. Suddenly, very soon, they need to be entertained in some way. In contemplative prayer and life we work on our attention span. We set aside times for prayer in silence and stillness, and sometimes these can be quite demanding. During these times we are awake and alert and paying attention.
The ability to pay attention starts to spill over into the rest of life. We begin to find that it is possible and important to be able to give someone else our undivided attention -- this is a gift, often a healing gift, which we can both receive and give. Total attention... I remember seeing one teaching monk, who was in great demand at a crowded meeting, and getting pecked to death by devotees -- but he was giving his undivided attention to one person who had asked, and he would not be diverted. It was an object lesson for me, lest I be one of those ministers with shallow automatic responses to people, their eyes always flickering around elsewhere in the room in case there is something they are missing. The development of the gift of attention spills over in all sorts of ways -- it may also produce a growing impatience with shallowness and triviality.
No comments:
Post a Comment