What did the Buddha mean by this term:
wise attention? Why was it so central to his teaching that it pops up
in so many places in the Nikayas? And how is it cultivated not just
in meditation but in everyday life activities?
The term wise attention refers to the
careful choosing on which things, topics or characteristics we focus
on in our minds. What to think about, what to ponder upon, to hein in
on and what to put aside, leave behind or lay down for now, dependent
on the results this focus has on our state of mind. So mindfulness is
central to being even able to discern our own state of mind when we
engage in different topics, discussions, thoughts and activities. But
not just the mind, also how we feel inside our bodies. So this takes
quite some practice to learn from our experience through try and
error. What is the state of mind when you watch the news? How is your
heartrate effected when you see violence in a movie or a romantic
scene? What makes you get goosebumps on your upper arms or tickling
down your back? How do you feel after you eat? What kinds of food
taste great but have unhealthy consequences? What brings short-term
sense-gratification but long-term unease or distress? All that and
much more is part of practicing wise attention.
When somebody critizised you, what
happens in your mind and body when you sit at home hours later,
thinking back to the event and following thoughts as: "Who is
he/she to tell me that?", "She is so wrong, I am so right!"
or "She always does that."? We are so used to having those
thoughts in the first place, and allowing them to obesess us, to
dwell on them and feeling in the right to do so, that we hardly
notice that we are creating our own suffering. The event is long
gone, the other person probably doesn't even think about it anymore
or maybe not even noticed how offensive or hurtful those words were.
But you sit there and not only relive the event time and time again,
it even gets distorted and made worse in your mind, than it actually
was. One word can cause us to hate somebody intensively for the rest
of our lives. And the reason for that is firstly lack of mindfulness
and secondly wrong attention. Right and wrong are quite unpopulare in
spiritual circles these days, and not without reason. There is no
inherent right or wrong in the universe, but in respect to our
wellbeing and release from suffering, there are quite sustinct rights
and wrongs. The basic question the Buddha asked and that you must ask
yourself in every situation is: do I want to suffer or do I want to
be free?
Instead of "wrongly"
focussing on how stupid or inconsiderate the other person was by
saying those things, you have a choice here, to re-direct your focus
on the feeling of suffering itself in the body and on the sourse of
it. Stepping back and taking a look like that takes a lot of effort
and mindfulness. So right this moment there is your choice on how you
want to spend the next hours: wallowing in your hurt and making plans
of revenge and feeling sorry for yourself OR going into your body
and tracking the sensation of hurt, it's center in your stomache,
your forehead, your solarplexus, your lower abdomen or your physical
heart and purposefully feeling the feeling in all its nuances. This
in itself takes all the mental stress away of judging, lamenting and
story-telling we are all so used to. I know that there is bound to
arise the sense of giving the other person a pass on his wrong
behaviour, on giving up one's rightness and loosing one's
selfrespect. But again, the really important thing to consider is
what are the actual, factual, sense-able consequences for your state
of body and mind if you hold on to these? Another way of putting it
is, do you want to be happy and free or do you want to be right? The
universal answer I heard from anyone I asked that question was: both!
But in truth you can't have both. It is either or, whether you like
it or not. Because in order for you to be right, there must be
somebody wrong. That in itself is a cause of suffering, this sense of
separation, this believe in a self that is separate from the other.
And apart from that, the one who got set into the wrong by your being
right will probably not entirely forget about the issue and seek ways
to pay you back by setting you into the wrong and regaining the upper
hand.
In this way victorious military
invasions in the past and present have always had the bitter taste of
having sewn the seeds of future revenge. This can also be taken to a
smaller, personal scale or to national, international warfare. But
back to the topic of this blogentry.
In your daily life, what do you pay
attention to? What do you deem worth of your energy and focus? Are
those things conducive to your long term happiness, ease and health
or to stress, suffering and dis-ease? In order to answer these
questions you need relentless honesty and discernment. Some things
that feel easeful or rewarding might actually wield uncomfortable
results in the long run. Let's take watching the news.
Right at the beginning I admit that I
consciously chose to stop following the news about ten years ago. And
my life did not come to a sudden stop and everything I really needed
to know came to my knowledge anyhow. Almost everyone I talked about
that to, said that they don't want to give up their sense of being
informed. That would give them the feeling of closing the eyes to the
problems of the world. But you need to carefully consider this. Are
the news an actual mirror of what the world is like or is it a small,
carefully chosen part of reality certain people want you to see? Who
chooses what to show and what to leave out? Why? How many people are
interviewed on a certain topic on the street and how many of those
actually make it into the program? Again, why? Is there really
anything new in the "news" or is it essentially the same
stuff that kept the world spinning centuries or even millenia ago?
But the even more important questions
are: how does watching the news affect how you see the world and how
you feel and how you act? Does it make you feel more at ease, safe
and happy or do you get scared or feel despair in regard to the
future? Do you grow more loving and compessionate or more distrustful
and drawn back? Are you in the present moment when and after you
watch the news? There is nothing wrong with being informed and
knowing things, if what you get informed about is actually important
and unavoidable. How many people develop a sense of powerlessness in
regard to solving the economic, ecologic and social problems of our
times? Shrugging stuff off, closing their eyes and drifting off
through all this overdose of things to care and worry about? How many
people know more about happenings on other continents then about what
happens right infront of their doorsteps? We know instantly when
something explodes in near-east, but read about the death of our
neighbour in the newspaper a week later.
So those were two things of many to
consider when cultivating wise attention: instead of paying attention
to what moved us in negative or positive ways you can refer it back
to awareness, sensing the resultant feelings in the body instead of
going into the habitual storytelling of the poor me or the grand me.
And secondly checking the ways in which societal and cultural habits
and conformaties influence our reality, our actions, our views and
re-actions. I'll be back for more, but that's a lot to take in for
now, I guess.
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