The First Attention: Part I

 

I often say, “what is working?”, and acknowledge that I'm not quite sure what I'm up to in this effort to be more attentive to life. 

Yet I already have a set of formulas about what work is —and I apply it everywhere, to everything. The assumptions get in the way, because I assume that sitting and meditating is working — or that sensing myself is working — or that coming back to myself after I have been asleep is work —and then, not uncommonly, I berate myself for failing to do these things. 

I’m reminded of Dr. Welch, who frequently came into the room where we were meeting, plopped himself down in a chair, and quite firmly pronounced: 

“Why don’t I work?”

He said this with conviction, in a way that implied he understood what work was and that he didn't do it. So work is something specific; it’s not everything I do at any time. 

Work, in the sense he meant it, is how I bring an attention to my life.

Yet he was not necessarily indicating the attention of the intellectual mind and the way that it notices something and comments on it. There has to be a first attention that begins in the body.

So what is working and how can I reconfigure my ideas about it? 

How can I come to my work as a completely new thing?

Is my work to be there at a specific time? To be there in a specific place? Is it an action? Is it an experience? Is it a question of where my presence is located? I need to keep this attitude of uncertainty alive within me as I sense myself. 

The first attention of the body says, “here I am.” This is the foundation. The house must be built on a foundation. If it isn’t, the house itself is unsteady; it drifts around like a structure that has been floated by water and in danger of imminent collapse.

This work I speak of is not, furthermore, an excessive focus on my inward life — for example, sitting in the lotus position with my hands folded in my lap, eyes closed, earnestly contemplating the darkness for hours at a time. This can so easily become selfishness. If I characterize this as my “work,” it’s all about me. Even if I am trying to reach the void, it’s my void — not this world which I was tasked with inhabiting.

As long as there is a contradiction between my inner and outer work it’s a difficulty.

A few other things occur to me in regard to this question. It’s better to do nothing than to try and force my work. Also, how am I preparing? Perhaps I lack focus. I can’t try to do everything or say that my work is everything. There’s a tendency among us all, especially those enamored of New Age philosophies, to try to merge our understanding of life into the cosmic all and make a soup with the whole damn kitchen of ingredients in it, saying, “it’s all good,” and, “everything is everything.”

When we say everything is everything, we spread the butter so thin it’s all toast.

At a certain level, a universality and a connection between everything is quite true. But we're very tiny creatures at the bottom of God’s Ray of creation — in every sense — and it is up to us to be much more specific than this. Our tasks are limited and connected to just a few things, not everything. Trying to merge with everything already has a whisper of arrogance in it. Something as tiny as we are can never merge with everything. 

We are particles of His Endlessness;and particles must be true to their nature as particles.

On behalf of our search for inward relationship,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola magazine.