Tag Archives: attention

And there was endlessness

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The wholeness of undivided, intimate attention – an awareing that has no boundaries, no sense of separation, where observer and observed are both obliterated in a single movement of observing – is the subject of one of Denise Levertov‘s last poems, First Love.  The whole poem is sublime, but the final few lines speak so powerfully to me that I’m singling them out for this post.

It seems to me that one taste of that timelessness changes everything. This is not some cunning escape into yet another thought-bubble; not some desperate effort to transcend one’s mediocre little life. This is an experienced glimpse of another order of relationship. Haven’t we all had this glimpse? For me, it took hold of the steering wheel and has driven the trajectory of my life.

Through the entirety of your lifetime, what is it that you’ve deeply desired?

What has been – is – the Great Motivator of your days?

 

Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita (1886-1968)

 
 
[…]

`Convolvulus,’ said my mother.
Pale shell-pink, a chalice
no wider across than a silver sixpence.

It looked at me, I looked
back, delight
filled me as if
I, not the flower,
were a flower and were brimful of rain.
And there was endlesness.
Perhaps through a lifetime what I’ve desired
has always been to return
to that endless giving and receiving, the wholeness
of that attention,
that once-in-a-lifetime
secret communion.

 

– Denise Levertov, from First Love
 in This Great Unknowing, Last Poems

 

Painting by Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita (1886-1968), Morning Glories (Convolvulus)

 

bright naked beingness

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What an odd sort of a night. The body is still somewhat travel-weary so it trotted off to bed early. There’s usually a time of sitting, settling, checking-in with Reality before snuggling under the doona, and last night was no exception. The mind was very bright. Sleep came instantly and went on for some hours.

Then suddenly one was jolted awake by what felt like an electric shock surging through the whole body. The really strange thing was that although I was asleep, something was aware of both the jolt and the waking up. “That was a bit weird,” thinking said.

So – I’m lying there wide awake in the moon-lit night wondering where all the energy now vibrating the body has come from. Feeling like a spring chicken and contemplating getting up to do something … then I hear a shout: “Be Beingness!”

Instantly, with no intention or volition, there was a turning, a converging of the energy we call attention … back. The sensation was physical.

“Back”? No. Backwards? Sort of. As though Aware-ing was falling out the back of the brain and into … space. And the whole of space was singing silence and it was breathing. This was not a dream; I have never felt more fully present.

There were no lights. There was no bliss. There was no center or reference-point. There was only this vast void, breathing.

It continued for some hours before sleep-tide washed in. And in the dawn, when Kookaburras’ cackling chorus rallied the sleeping world, it was still present. It’s here now, as I type and as your ‘I’ reads; it has always been here: bright naked Beingness.

This is what ‘I’ is.

~

what gets your attention creates you

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My mother’s mother was a wise one. She understood the dynamics of the thinking machine. She was aware that her thoughts were not her or hers, that they arrived uninvited and that not all deserved to be made welcome as guests. Talking about such unfamiliar notions in the early 20th century, a farmer’s wife on a high country New Zealand sheep station a hundred miles from anywhere brought sideways glances and cast her as an outsider. (What’s new, huh?)

She liked to say, “Stand porter at the door of thought.” Perhaps she’d read that somewhere, or even made it up herself, whatever – it was etched in pokerwork on my fresh young hard-drive.

My mother was a chip off the old block, philosophically speaking. Her favorite aphorism was, “What gets your attention gets you.” Come in after school with a bellyfull of moans about how one had been bullied or unfairly punished or cheated on, and that’s what you’d hear. Hmmm. She should’ve been called Kali, my mum.

So, unlike most kids (I suspect) I grew up with a healthy skepticism re thoughts, thinking, and even the ‘thinker’. When I came across the teachings of J Krishnamurti there was huge relief, because all through the years of my early education I had met no one outside my family who was remotely concerned about the way one’s thinking unfolds one’s experience.

But it would take the passing of many moons before the nonduality teachings of the Advaita sages would reveal the baseline error in both Granny’s and Mum’s pithy sayings, and explain why, in spite of their apparent wisdom, they actually made little difference. One was still locked into the effects generated by thinking – both one’s own, and that of others.

The error lies in the unexamined assumption that there is a separate self who can take up the role of that “porter”, or who can be ‘got’ if attention fixates somewhere it shouldn’t.

This morning, while mulling over delicate family business, the aphorisms reshuffled and restated themselves in a fresh cluster of words.

Thoughts are arising here.

The ones that receive attention create me.

 
Granny and Mum would know exactly what I mean. They’d be chuckling away like two crazy crones. Good company for this one eh?