Contemplation, Attention, Reality

Anonymous Artist, 19th Century | Public Domain

Reality itself, it turns out, is dramatically bigger and more infinite than a human mind can comprehend. One effect of this fact is that we can only focus attention on a few small aspects of reality in a given moment. Mental attention is like a perfectly focused beam of light in a perfectly dark room. We can see and consider that upon which we direct the light, while everything else around it remains in utter blackness as though it does not even really exist.

We can shift the beam of our attention horizontally to attend to various different things around us, and we continuously do so in almost every moment. One may sit in a quiet room perfectly unaware of the ticking of the clock or the furniture a few feet a way or the cat curled up cozily at one’s feet because one’s focus is on a book. The clock, table, and cat are naturally still there. But within the space of reality as manifested to us by our minds, they effectively do not exist until we focus on them. They can, of course, draw our attention—and they often do. The cat might stand up and stretch, or our brain might start noticing the clock in a moment of pause. But this only furthers the point.

Such horizontal movements of our attention are so constant that we almost never think about them. Both our brains and our minds are calibrated to make such movements continuously. We could never take any action at all in a world wherein every piece of stimulus was always deemed salient and important. Focused attention is required even for simple survival in an almost infinitely complex environment.

What we notice perhaps less often is that our minds are also capable of shifting the light beam of our attention vertically—up and down—to present reality to our consciousness in a variety of modes. One’s mind can and does operate within different strata, organizing its attention in different ways as we navigate existence. Let us imagine that the cat has finished its stretch, and now leaps into our lap as we begin to stroke its head. The cat begins to purr, and most likely we will now just listen to its sounds of affection as precisely sound and nothing more, letting it nuzzle its head into our hands as cats like to do. In such a moment we are simply existing with the cat, doing little or nothing to interpret the moment.

But if someone were to ask us to put a name to what the cat is now doing, we will shift our consciousness into the verbal realm and perhaps name the animal’s sound: “purring.” This transition to verbal awareness is usually quick, but if we are especially lost in other thoughts it may take us a second or two to shift our attention and come up with the word come up with the word. Indeed, when I am experiencing severe aphasia during a migraine, I personally may not be able to come up with the word at all or it could take ten or twenty agonizing seconds. That is to say that while the transition often feels immediate and effortless, it in fact takes at least some amount of time and concentration—we are shifting our attention to a different stratum with which to understand reality.

Once we have provided the word for our cat’s purr, we could (if we wished) begin to think about how and why cats behave this way. We could ask such questions from a materialist perspective, focusing on the various organs the cat uses to make its sounds. We could think more socially about why cats like to let each other (as well as humans) know that they are happy. We could reflect on the deep philosophy of what happiness can possibly mean for an animal in the first place. We could think about how we would express this moment through poetry, or visual art, or music to another human being through various forms of abstraction. And on and on. Such commonplace experiences are all small examples of how we shift between different framing strata to represent what reality is—from simple being, to verbal expression, to interpretation, to abstract conceptualization, to the sharing of experience with others.

The different strata within which we can frame reality to ourselves are probably too many and too various to ever fully count or classify. They also exist on a continuum rather than discretely; verbal expression quickly blends towards abstract conceptualization, for instance, and vice versa. The strata of consciousness thus scaffold one another, building in different directions as we trace the light beam of consciousness up and down seeking a more holistic picture of what is in front of us.

The cat is a simple and relatively concrete example. Yet, as we raise and lower the beam of attention we can also begin to focus on bigger and ever more abstract kinds of realities. We can begin thinking about the idea of humans having pets, focusing on this phenomenon as a broad social reality. We can reflect on such a reality even without meeting every person who has ever owned a cat, and look for patterns across conversations and experiences we have had with pet owners to project what such experiences are like for the many we will never meet. We can think about the by-laws of our city pertaining to pets, or wonder why people never take their cats for a walk, or why nobody seems to own a gerbil anymore. We can ponder the fact that we are able to tell stories about cats without even owning one—because, in fact, I do not have a cat myself! And, again, onward forever.

Upwards we can continue to travel until we are thinking about wholly abstract realities: things like our nation (Canada, in my case), or “the economy,” or a political party, or “society” as a whole. Such things are undoubtedly real, yet can never be touched or held in our hands. They, in fact, do not have concrete bodily existence the way a cat does—they are realities that only exist in the abstract stratum. This in no way makes them non-existent. Rather we are simply observing the layer of attentional focus in which they can exist, and in some cases almost even creating them through the very act of attention paid.

Interestingly, we arrive in some very similar places when we focus our beam of light ever downward. For instance, we can begin to ask what our cat is made out of, thinking first about its fur, skin, body, then perhaps asking whether it has anything we can call a soul (and what that might be). Moving downward we could consider the animal’s composition of various proteins made of various molecules made of atoms made of particles made of smaller particles and so forth forever. I am no physicist, but from my limited knowledge it strikes me as both fascinating and unsurprising that as we descend infinitely toward the sub-microscopic we also begin to see ever more abstraction. As we delve into the quantum realm, Newton’s laws appear to cease their application and if we keep going deep enough we soon find ourselves attending to effectively nothing physically concrete at all, peering rather into the realm of pure mathematics—one of the most wholly abstract strata of reality to which a human being can attend.

That is already rather fascinating. Yet my interest in this piece is, in fact, our well being as living creatures, something that I think has a great deal indeed to do with this way of inhabiting reality through specific attention.

Perhaps you have noticed, as I have, that it takes a tremendous amount of mental energy to focus our attention on abstract realities. The more abstract they become, the harder it is to sustain our focus. For many of us, certain levels of abstraction are fully beyond what we as individuals can even actually focus our minds on. Quantum physics and the mathematics behind it are simply too much for me, for example—I cannot properly attend to them no matter how hard I try even though many people can and do. Conversely, this essay (itself wholly an abstraction) is perhaps largely incomprehensible for some physicists whose talents tend them further in the other direction. The limits of attention do not appear to be universal among all human beings.

Nor are they static even within an individual person. Indeed, my own periodic experiences of aphasia during a migraine (which I have mentioned above) demonstrate how the relatively simple work of attending to the verbal stratum can be too much for a person when the body and brain are utterly exhausted. In fact, in a few rare cases of severe mental deficiency the verbal stratum may never be attainable at all, as with the non-verbal clients I once worked with in adult foster care. Even the majority of people (who do not suffer migraine aphasia and are most certainly capable of using language in general) have almost certainly found themselves at times so exhausted after a long day that a deep and sustained conversation about an important issue must be left off until the morning. This, as a light aside, is why none of us like getting complex work e-mails on Friday afternoon and except in cases of emergency will generally leave off responding until Monday. Ultimately, attention to any level of abstraction requires energy and thus begins to deplete us at least a little every time we use it.

As a result, almost every stratum of reality on which we typically focus in our modern lives takes energy from us. Yet, in my experience at least, there are perhaps only two strata of focus that ever really give energy back: these are (paradoxically for me) the stratum of maximum and almost complete abstraction into the purely mystical, and the stratum of simple being and presence in a moment without interpretation, without abstraction—just being.

I wrote some time ago that contemplation is not optional for human beings if they wish to be well. The experience of attentional focus is, I think, an essential part of the reason that this is so. It is through contemplative practice that we retreive our minds from various important but draining strata of focus and turn towards those strata that return energy, love, courage, and strength back into us.

Our modern world is one in which the draining strata of abstraction take up ever more of our attention. Most of us work at jobs that require focus on such things for many hours each and every day—working with our minds rather than our hands. Already fully exhausted, we then often have no choice but to turn to the many issues that require our attention in our family life, our social circles, our churches, and the like. None of that is entirely new. Yet one of the enormous problems we now face as moderns is that even in our leisure time—when we are truly free to do as we please—we turn more and more to yet other abstractions that simply drain us even further. We scroll the internet thinking about politics, or other people’s problems—encouraged all along by algorithms that have learned to entice our attention through outrage, emergency, and peril. These are things that we cannot help to focus since they signal to our minds and brains a sense of urgency and immediate need, pumping adrenaline and any number of other hormones into our bodies to seek out some last stores of energy with which to respond to an accute threat. Our rest time therefore ceases to be restful. Our mental attention is on the draining strata of reality nearly every second of our waking day, and also quite often as we lie in bed with the doom of all the world’s problems still weighing heavily on our minds, our phone perhaps still casting its dire light into our eyes.

We should not, then, be surprised at the rates of depression, exhaustion, anxiety, and anger we see climbing to ever greater heights around us. When we are fully depleted we become depressed as our bodies and minds begin to signal that we must stop for a while and truly rest. Yet, so often, when we attempt to respond to this call to lower the beam of attention back to simpler realities, the super computer in our pockets, or the blaring news on television beckon us like an intoxicating mist. Our attention returns to that which drains us. We live this way day after day until we find ourselves in a stupor, wondering if we are even capable of feeling joy, delight, love, or energy anymore—wondering why such things seem utterly absent from our lives.

Returning intentionally to a simpler focus is, therefore, a skill that we all need now more than ever. In times past human beings would often find themselves forced to take a long walk for an hour or two (even weeks or days), or to work mainly with their hands throughout the day, or to simply sit and do nothing since there was nothing really to do. Such liminal spaces of existence create natural moments of simplicity wherein the mind needs to do nothing other than focus its attention on immediate existence—the simple world that it can see and hear. This, it turns out, is the most basic and perhaps the most important form of contemplation: simple, uninterpreted existence as a finite creature. And it brings refreshment and rest whenever we visit it.

Today, however, when journeys are usually taken by the draining mechanisms of car or transit, when work is most often mental, and when there is literally always something abstract calling out for attention, we must deliberately carve out space to contemplate. We must begin a practice of contemplation, starting with a practice of simply sitting still. We must train ourselves to take a moment to let the cat simply purr, and to let the light beam of our attention focus on the smallest things in front of us, or even be turned off completely for a while. Contemplation is, in many ways, nothing more than the art of focusing attention on that which gives us life. I have said above that the mystical realm of infinite abstraction can also bring us life and energy, but I will leave reflections on that for another time. For now it is an important thing indeed just to notice how essential it is to take purposeful time to let our attention rest on simply being.