An attention space is established by calling your attention. I call it ‘your’ attention but really it is that part of the universal attention that you can access as ‘yours’. To call it, you must be here and now. No past. No future. No elsewhere.
Your attention has been left in many places, on many things you care about, your job, friends, money, and possessions. If you are present, all these bits of attention will come back to you from where you unconsciously left them. If not, you may have to go and collect them. Try asking them to come home, at least for the time you are doing this work. They can always go back to your worries and obsessions later.
Attention has a strong attraction to itself. It accumulates and strengthens. It is self-magnetized.
To pull the plug on you as thinker, attention attends to sensations and especially breathing. Thoughts arise and fall away. Attention does not follow them, which would form the thinker. Attention is directly on sensing, not funneled through thinking.
There is a special benefit to this process. Attention directly on sensation transforms the energy of sensation into the energy of consciousness. The singular becomes the multiple, the linear becomes the simultaneous. You can know this transition as it occurs.
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July 21, 2025
Tags: attention, inner work
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July 7, 2025
Perhaps no one will follow these instructions or even have an interest in doing so. It is my obligation, nonetheless, to record this information for the future.
The essence of inner work is to establish an attention space above, but connected to, the physical world that is ruled by time, distance and separation. In this attention space, the facts of the physical world are fluid. They can be touched and caressed in this space without the limits of time and distance. You and they are moved together by universal forces unimpeded by separation. The facts of ‘what is’ can be induced to dance with you, sometimes to respond to your wishes.
I speak of making prayer space. This space is a wish-fulfilling jewel in which you lay your wish at the feet of the source of all attention and will. Its nature is intimacy. The active element of intimacy is love.First, consciousness, then realization.
To be conscious is to hold many things in the attention space simultaneously…thoughts, feelings, sensations…which requires that you not be the thinker. Do you see that having thought is not the same as being the thinker?
To be realized is to cease to react to facts. You can then be trusted to engage with the forces that shape the inner worlds where things take form. If you react, you are expelled from the attention space.
Inner work is not forceful. It cannot be willed. It has no ambition. It has no personal emotion. It does not want. It lies in the world between.Tags: attention, inner work
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April 15, 2025
I breathe in and out. Breathing brings the outside in and the inside out. Attending to this, outer merges with inner, one space, making the two, one.
There is no division in this one space, an attention-space. No boundaries. The phenomena in the attention-space are not limited.
I ask: where does attention come from? From my brain? Is it mine? This is a difficult but rewarding inquiry. I discover that there is attention mediated by my thinking. And there is attention that rests directly on sensation and feeling. Can attention attend to itself? I find that it can. This is a wordless state. It requires only that I allow it.
The more I study attention, the more it seems to exist apart from me. I live within a field of attention. I can sense/feel the attention of others, animals, connected to me in this field. I am a participant in attention which moves me, informs me. It is a bridge to my experience, uniting me to my world. The medium of my being.
In the one space, the attention-space, prayer is engagement.
There is something else…the power of intending. The power to wish. Intention is thought. Intending is will. In the attention-space, intending is an act with consequence. In the attention-space, what I wish for exists as me. I am united with the action and the consequence.Tags: attention, attention-space, breathing, intending, space
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March 22, 2025One of the outstanding observable characteristics of humans is how they assemble a thinker. Do you know this about yourself?
Thoughts come and go. No matter. You observe something. A thought arises in response. This is not thinking. This is thought. When thought follows along after attention, like the pen follows the hand, recording the movements of the attention, this could be called mentation. No thinker is required. The best poetry is this.
Thinking is a self-referential process. Your thinker is an assemblage held together by habit and a sense of identity. I am thinking easily becomes I am the thinker. Thinking has one thought following another, requiring limited or no input from the rest of the universe. It’s isolated within the mental sphere, coheres around an idea of an identity, proceeds by way of association and follows the well worn grooves of past thinking, sustained by specific muscular contractions..
Sit comfortably. Relax the body, releasing all the muscular tensions not required for sitting. Take your time. This has many layers. Then bring attention into sensation, all the sensations of sitting and breathing. Observe if there is part of you that is withheld. Agree to fully engage in attending to sensations and breathing. Agree to have nothing else to consider or attend to. Thoughts come and go? No matter.
Notice when you withdraw from engaging with sensation. Does this coincide with forming a thinker? Can you observe the assembling of the thinker as it occurs, the transfer of attention to a center in seeming control, becoming the thinker, a center that limits and screens engagement? When you have seen this many times, returning each time to simple attention on sensation, you have learned to engage in the real world. -
January 1, 2024
Thinking is not the problem. Thoughts arise and fall away. They notate our experiences and enable us to achieve coherent action. The issue is not to identify with the thinker. Let thinking ride the rail of attention, which is called mentation.
Tags: attention, mentation, thinker, work notes
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September 11, 2022
Work on self is utterly dependent on observation of self, not just the big events of anger and fear but also the small flutterings of sensation that lie beneath my actions, words, thoughts and gestures. Ambitious people on the spiritual path overlook this fact. They are so busy trying to do the ‘work’ that they do not know they are not reliable enough to have a connection to it.
I must become reliable. What does this mean? I must see exactly what is going on in me and be able to shift it, even the most minute reactions, in real time. Failing this, I must be able to account for all my uneasiness…the residual disturbances of sensation…after the fact of making them, and correct them. Cleaning up the mess in aisle 6 as it were.
This knowing of self in not analytical. It is perceiving in real time. The why of it is an indulgence, a backward look. What is wanted is the ability to dance among my own phenomena, using them or dismissing them as they arise.
Attention, attention attention. I have no other genuine tool for transforming me.Tags: attention, observation, reliable, sensation, work on self
