Our Attention Creates Our Reality
I think there is a core principle in meditation, and in life, and it’s this:
Our attention energises whatever we attach it to.
Whether it’s a thought, an idea, a feeling or emotion, a life view, an opinion or a physical condition – the more attention we give to it, whatever it is, the stronger and more coherent it will become in the mind. And if we keep on energizing it with our attention, it will ultimately become so substantial as to become an enduring reality in our life.
Now this has nothing to do with the New Age notion that thoughts create reality – not at all. In fact, if you’ve read my previous posts on that subject, you’ll know I have a low opinion of the New Age, and in particular, the ‘thoughts manifest reality’ snake oil they try to sell.
No, this is different. What I’m proposing relates to the highly integrated and reactive relationship between mind and body and the way thoughts can become so energised by our attention that they lead to intentions, which then appear in our life as actions and results.
I’ll explain with a few examples:
When I was a kid, I had a musical heart, but no way of expressing it, until one day I found an old nylon string guitar that someone had thrown out on the street with their rubbish. It only had two strings – the lower strings, and though I had no idea how to tune it, I loved the sound it made when I plucked the bottom string. With my ear down on the body, I’d hear whole orchestras in the harmonics as I slowly moved my fingertip from fret to fret.
I became obsessed with this guitar – sitting in my bedroom with my ears on the body, plucking on the bottom string, and imagining songs and music yet unwritten in the shifting of the notes. Then I found that if I tuned the second string in a certain way, I could play double note chords and the harmonics became more complex. Eventually my mother bought me a complete set of strings for the guitar and I taught myself to play.
My point is this – when people ask me how I learnt to play, I say the guitar taught me. All I had to do was give it my attention and my mind and the guitar did the rest. Somehow my intuitive understanding of the sounds it could make grew ever more coherent – and all I had to do was pay attention.
Eventually I became a songwriter and guitarist in a band and it all happened from simply being so fascinated I couldn’t stop.
Another example:
Recently I read about a court case where, in a fit of rage, a bloke we’ll call Fred murdered his lifelong friend. What stuck out for me in this case was what his girlfriend said in evidence. Apparently, Fred’s friend had said something hurtful a week before, which had stuck in Fred’s mind, such that he kept dwelling on it, becoming angrier and angrier as time passed.
His friend meanwhile, having forgotten about what he’d said, when he turned up a week later to visit, he happened to mention something similar. Fred, who’d been dwelling on his grievance for a week, suddenly lost the plot and embedded a hammer in his friend’s head as a result.
The hurtful comment had absorbed Fred’s attention so completely, his mind gradually built the anger into a mad rage that led to him losing control and killing his friend.
Now, if Fred had been practicing meditation and mindfulness, I’m sure he would have been able to disengage his attention from the story his anger was telling him so it would not feed on itself and morph into uncontrollable rage.
One more example:
I had a friend who was always having money troubles. He had a good job as a criminal lawyer, but no matter how much he earned he never had enough. Result being, money and the lack of it obsessed him. He was constantly coming up with schemes to make extra – gambling, buying and selling second hand stuff on Ebay and trading forex on the markets. And he’d get anxious and bad tempered when money was short, then over-elated when he had enough – such that he’d often spend everything he’d made on buying new clothes and gifts for his girlfriend, or dinner and drinks for his friends – until the windfall was gone and he’d revert to being anxious and angry with himself.
Put simply, his attention was so absorbed with money and his inability to ever have enough, his preoccupation led to him forming desperate intentions, which led to desperate actions – resulting in the self-fulfilling cycle he was stuck in, of never having enough money.
Recently, I had direct experience of what I’m writing about, as I’ve noticed this energising quality of my attention whenever I’ve been meditating recently.
A couple of months ago I broke up with my girlfriend and it caused a lot of intense feeling – grief, anger, sadness and so on. Result being, when I meditated, what I felt would arise and my mind would begin to percolate with the thought activity the intense feelings were generating. Nothing wrong there – I understood it was simply my heart and mind trying to process how I felt.
Thing is though, with the feelings being as raw and intense as they were, I had a hard time disengaging my attention from the thoughts that were appearing – which gave me the opportunity to watch the way my attention interacted and energized them – and how this in turn affected my body.
It went a bit like this:
It would begin with a rudimentary thought – perhaps a fleeting grievance, a sad realization, an angry insight. It would just pop up from the unconscious, like a bubble appearing on the surface of an ocean. And, in my raw state, my attention would instantly be drawn to it.
At that point, energised by my overwrought attention, the thought would become like a magnet, attracting similar thoughts up from my unconscious mind, and a theme would begin to expand and build on itself. And as it became more coherent, a narrative would appear – it would become a compelling story.
So now the story, still energised by my feelings and my attention, became even more magnetic – it would begin attracting other apparent ‘realisations’ up from my unconscious, and they would coalesce and reinforce the story, making it ever more convincing, as if my mind was collecting evidence – building a case.
As the story gathered power and coherence, the sadness or anger in my body would become more intense. And the effect of this hormonal excitement in my body would be to verify and energise the story even more – to the point where the version of events my mind was now creating seemed irrefutable.
But I know from experience that the stories the mind creates out of emotion are simply lies – propaganda designed to provoke the body to action, to help process the discomfort of what it’s feeling. So once I realised what was happening I would pull my attention away – let go of the story and return my attention to the breath.
Without my attention feeding the reactive storm now raging in my mind and body, the emotional intensity would gradually calm down and the story would disappear – to the extent that, as convincing as it had seemed, by the time I finished meditating I’d forgotten it.
This direct experience made me think, what if I had not learnt to meditate, and so had no ability to let go of that convincing story? Perhaps I’d have ended up so irradiated with sadness and rage that I might have made actions which I’d later regret.
So, to sum up.
Thought stuff, both light and dark, is constantly bubbling up from the unconscious mind. It’ll never stop, because that’s just a process of being alive in a feeling body, in an imperfect world.
And in this mental ecology of thought forms appearing and disappearing, our attention is like an electric wand – it energises whatever it sticks to. And the longer our attention sticks to that thought form, the more it will attract other like-minded thought forms from our unconscious, to form narratives that become ever more coherent and compelling.
Meditation and mindfulness practice gives us the ability to choose which thought forms we pay attention to and energize, and which we let go of, to pass away and disappear.
This ability to let go is the core of meditation and mindfulness practice, (and it’s central to almost every method out there), and it’s comprised of two skills that we develop from meditation:
- We learn to be instinctively and continuously aware of what our attention is doing at any one time.
- We learn to have enough control of our attention that we can choose what it engages with and energizes, and what it lets go of.
These two skills make it such that we become more resilient in coping with the vicissitudes of our life, and more clear in our life choices and the actions we make.
And considering it is our actions that create our life experience, it makes meditation and mindfulness essential skills to practice.
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Roger’s book, ‘BEING STILL – MEDITATION THAT MAKES SENSE’ is available now. Just click on the links below:
AUDIOBOOK (including ebook & MP3 exercises) – AUD $25.00
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