I hope our discussions related to healing energy work and metaphoric language can broaden beyond the specific, namely to attention itself, the basic act underscoring our healing presence.

I began thinking more deeply about attention in the Internet age after listening to Ezra Klein’s podcast of May 31, Your Mind Is Being Fracked, a discussion with D. Graham Burnett. Without minimizing the enormity of working directly with universal lifeforce energy, I also want to acknowledge the power of bringing attention and presence to another’s process as a healing act in itself. We live in an age when our very ability to pay attention is compromised and our focus of attention is monetized, making the act of setting our personalities aside to offer healing energy to another in a contemplative expanse of non-interference an act of radical awareness and kindness.

Here are some quotes from that podcast that were particularly meaningful to me. (I encourage you to listed to the whole podcast, too).

A Problem Defined

Burnett talks about fracking mountains and then says, “This is a precise analogy to what’s happening to us in our contemporary attention economy. We have a, depending on who you ask, $500 billion, $3 trillion, $7 trillion industry, which, to get the money value of our attention out of us, is continuously pumping into our faces high-pressure, high-value detergent in the form of social media and non-stop content that holds us on our devices. And that pumping brings to the surface that spume, that foam of our attention, which can be aggregated and sold off to the highest bidder.”

None of these ideas is new to us, of course. We’re aware of the decrease in attention span created by constant tiny packets of information delivered to us over our communication devices, geared to elicit the hit of endorphins that keep us attached to asking for more. We also know, as yogis/energy workers what attention means to us as a spiritual practice. I found the definitions of attention in Ezra’s podcast useful language on which to hang my thoughts and my gratitude for our energy practices that combat the rote capture of our minds.

Definition #1

“That triggering or targeting conception of attention has been the primary way that scientists, experimental psychologists, engineers, have conceptualized and placed in evidence a thing called attention. When they started doing early eye tracking experiments to follow where people’s gaze went, how much information they could take in at a glance, and figuring out how to quantify that — largely, it should be said, financed by friends in the emerging advertising industry — there was a kind of unholy symbiotic relationship that emerged between certain forms of experimental psychology and those who were trying to study how to sell mouthwash and cigarettes.

When those folks were doing that kind of work, they were certainly talking about a thing that was attention. They could call it attention. And it’s very similar to the thing that, right now, the most powerful computational technologies, the most sophisticated programmers and the most intricate algorithms are madly working to aggregate and auction continuously.”

This is a definition of attention studied in a “highly instrumentalized way that is entirely bound to questions of stimulus and response, to triggering and targeting.” …In a laboratory, if you use instruments to get at a thing called attention, you end up finding an instrumentalized form of attention.”

Definition #2

“But that other thing that you are kind of calling in when you talk about meditation, when you talk about awareness, when we invoke the sort of experience of being, the kind of ecstasy that can come with a certain durational flow of immersion in a person, a conversation, a book, the experience of reading, an object, that comes from a different place. It’s also in the language of attention, and it has its own separate history.

…

The French philosopher Bernard Stiegler says attention is “waiting, the exact opposite of catalytic triggering. It’s waiting. It’s, in fact, for him, infinite waiting.  And what are you waiting on when you attend to an object? Wait on it. He says you’re waiting on the disclosure of the long webs of connectedness that are in the object. Which long webs of connectedness are a mirroring of the rich, long webs of connectedness that are in you.”

That captures the feeling of infinite time, infinite space—which amounts to timelessness and spaciousness—in a Reiki session.

Burnett describes a scene in Henry James’ novel, Wings of a Dove, in which a busy doctor places before his patient a “clear, clean, empty crystal cup, an empty crystal cup of attention…. And that sort of figuration of attention as an empty cup that we place between ourselves and the object of our attention I think exquisitely invokes the idea of imminence, that kind of negative capability. …Anything’s possible here, the gesture of generosity.  …Attention is that kind of empty cup we can place between ourselves and the things we care about in the world and see what happens.”

Reiki goes a step farther for me than the idea that I, Linda, am paying attention. It’s the belief that universal life force is awareness itself and I, Linda, am simply remembering the source of all knowing, however slightly, however briefly.

- The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures. It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers. It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth and of death, in ebb and in flow. I feel my limbs made glorious by the touch of this world of life. And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment. -

~ Rabindranath Tagore

- Helps us to believe

That it’s no great sin to give

Hoping to receive.

There I shall throw

Broken bread; this sullen day,

Out across the snow,

Betting crust and crumb

That birds will gather, and that

One more spring will come. -

~ Richard Wilbur

- The dream of my life

is to lie down by a slow river

and stare at the light in the trees –

to learn something by being nothing

a little while but the rich

lens of attention. -

~ Mary Oliver