Attention as Worship

"Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer" - Simone Weil

I want to talk about attention, but I’m worried it’ll sound petty. It feels like you'll hear it as small.

I could repeat the usual things, the ways that attention spans have shrunk, that attention is scattered, that The Attention Economy™ has poisoned something critical about what it means to be deeply human. I could talk about the doomscrolling, the feeds, the iPad kids and the YouTube rabbit holes. I could probably write something about neurology and multi-tasking and what we're finding out about the structural changes in the brain associated with smartphone use. I could talk about all of this but I can feel you not hearing me — or hearing me the wrong way, which is the same thing.

My view of the world isn't one that everyone necessarily buys into. I get that, I respect that. For a lot of you, the question of attention is a very human-level question. It's about how mammal brains work, or how culture changes. It's about how present your children are at the dinner table, or how you have a hard time sitting through a meeting without reaching for your phone. These aren't small things, they aren't petty. They're important. But they're also very very far downstream from what I want to talk about, when I talk about attention.

For me, the question of attention is human-level only to the extent that it is total, and includes the human level amid everything else.

My worldview: I'm one of those people who's pretty sure that Reality is conscious. Or that Consciousness is reality. Or both. (More accurately, I believe that what we call 'consciousness' is the human level expression of the intelligent aliveness of the Fabric of Being itself.)

I also believe that this conscious reality we live in is evolving and transforming, and that it does this through us.

One of the special things about human consciousness is that we can shape it. We can choose to bend and sculpt our consciousness through attention. Which, if you entertain a worldview similar to mine, means that we can sculpt Reality's intelligent drive towards Life & evolution by choosing what we attend to and how we attend to it.

It's worth a mention that etymologically, "attention" means "reaching towards." When we attend to something, we're reaching towards it — and when we keep reaching towards it over and over and over again, it's impossible for us to stay where we started. We move, over and over again, in the direction of what we reach towards.

Attention is Worship

Simone Weil said that "Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer."

I've been pulling a similar thread lately, exploring the idea that worship is total attention. Perfect worship is when we use our attention to merge with the object of awareness — whether that's a feeling, an object, a word, an action, a task, or anything else. It can be anything. When we lose the separation between the "me" and what's in awareness, we are worshiping whatever it is that we've merged with. This is devotion.

When our attention is scattered, it becomes functionally impossible to worship. Some bits of fractional worship are accessible — a third of your attention on your love for your wife, while the other two thirds wanders between some MMA clips you saw earlier, a snide comment your coworker made yesterday, the grass needing a trim... — but fully merged awareness is no longer accessible. The rapture of total immersion is something that starts to sound like a legend or just one of those things mystics talk about to sound cool.

Which isn't to say that we live in an age of no worship. There's actually quite a lot of unmixed-attention-as-worship going on. The problem is what we worship; what we as a culture are reaching towards and moving towards.

When we decide not to worship divinity, we do not stop worshipping: we merely find something else less worthy to worship.
— Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary

Porn is maybe one of the fullest forms of worship we have around. People get very, very fully absorbed there. Whoever wrote this definition of gooning was pretty clearly A) ferally horny on a sentence by sentence level, and B) quite well-acquainted with the ecstasy of unmixed attention. As for the question of what one moves towards when one gives total unmixed attention to porn, what transformations in consciousness occur there, I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Various feeds and scrolling behaviors are also a form of worship. The mindless immersion in the endless scroll, that unpredictable algorithmic worship of one-liners, cute cats, Palestinian wreckage, gender wars, crypto ads, podcast notes, and slice-of-life musings.

Anxiety is another one — people will spend hours per day fully lost in their anxieties, merged with their worries and fears. Playing over and over again these scenes and voices, torturing themselves with possible futures they don't want to feel (but apparently do want to feel, because, well, they keep doing it).

Drugs can be a pretty solid way to fall into worship — merge with the desired state and forget everything else. Certain approaches to meditation can do the same thing. Binge-watching tv shows. An endless stream of Breaking News alerts, dismay at the state of the world.

There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.
— David Foster Wallace

Some of these forms of worship are deeper, more merged than others. Some are less harmful than others. But from where I stand all of them are detrimental, in that they don't move consciousness towards what it really wants to move towards.

Following Eros, Attractors, the Sacred

If we turn our minds towards the good, it is impossible that little by little the whole soul will not be attracted thereto in spite of itself.
— Simone Weil

Tell me what you pay attention to and I will tell you who you are.
— José Ortega y Gasset

We are shaped by cosmic forces, bound to cosmic forces — and we spend our lives navigating the perception of cosmic forces.

Your inner ear and the way your muscles and joints are set up — you are built to sense and navigate gravity, every day of your life. Keeping your balance as the earth pulls you, holding yourself up, adjusting and compensating to not be hurt by gravity when its force is more than your body could bear. Those videos where people jump off buildings and do an expert roll to absorb the impact without injury — that is the navigation of a cosmic force. In a very grounded, simple way, they sense and navigate it.

Your eyes, your skin — they navigate radiation, sunlight; they let you move through the world comfortably under the constant bombardment of stellar radiation, not only warning you when you're getting close to being damaged by it (remember your sunscreen, y'all), but also using this stellar radiation to sense the world around us.

In the same way that our skin and eyes attune us to stellar radiation, and our senses of balance and proprioception attune us to the force of gravity — there are certain qualities (or structures?) of consciousness that attune us to the unfolding journey of cosmic consciousness. This, I believe, is the great project of spirituality and religion. To attune ourselves more closely to what Reality wants from us, and to take part in the ecstatic immersion of reaching towards those wants.

This, to me, is the proper role of attention. Attention must be in service to eros, or soul (my names for the structures of consciousness that attune us to Reality's desires for us). If we "worship" things out of animal craving, or boredom, or cultural habits, or social shoulds, or other such unconscious urgings, we're misusing one of our greatest gifts.

Attention is our capacity to partake in the reshaping of the fabric of Reality, to contribute to its evolution and unfolding — and, aligned with/inseparable from that: to partake in our own evolution and unfolding.

The shape of Reality is such that Realizing our own highest unfolding is the exact same act as Realizing the highest unfolding of Reality itself.

So when we use that capacity badly — or, when we wreck that capacity by allowing our attention to be scattered out of presence — we are, in some deep and melancholy way, Lost.

I've spent a lot of years Lost. I still get Lost embarrassingly often, and am habitually Lost in certain critical ways. That's okay. What matters is that I keep trying, over and over again, to find my way back. To hone my sense of soul and eros, my sensitivity to the attractors in consciousness that seem to "want" me to reach towards them, and that my soul seems to want to reach towards. And, when that feels like a match, to hone my ability to do so more and more fully, to shape my attention to that attractor. To worship in a way that unfolds the structure of my life and consciousness more and more into alignment with that sacred attractor that calls to me.

For me, writing is one of those forms of worship. (Art seems to be one of the most common & available forms of wholesome worship — a core reason that I believe allowing AI to take over art-making is a critical mistake, but that's for another day.) Others have included shucking cardamom pods for hours at a time, chanting mantras while throwing handfuls of mulch into a fire for hours at a time, spending days in close communion with people who I feel resonance with, meditating on my experience of my lower belly and pelvis, eye gazing, wading out into the ocean every morning to talk to the waves, automatic writing & poetry.

For one very strange and intense morning during panchakarma treatment, vomiting was a form of worship. Worship can take many shapes. The key thing is that it shapes my attention towards the things eros guides me to. Which means that it shapes my attention towards not just my own unfolding, but the unfolding of the sacred Cosmos itself.

It's Not Petty

The human level of attention isn't petty, I'm sorry I said that. It's important. It matters. All this stuff about presence at the dinner table, iPad kids, scattered attention, social media feeds — it all comes down to the most important thing there is, the way we can be either intentional or unintentional in shaping our attention. In shaping our presence.

The past few years, I've been blessed to be in a lot of relationships and communities where some version of this idea is common-sense. Where my friends are tuning to their eros, following what feels alive to them, and shaping their attention towards the person they want to be and the world they want to live in.

It feels so good.

It feels good the way it feels good to bask in sunlight on a spring morning. The way it feels good to balance competently on one foot in the firm steadiness of a yoga pose. The way it feels good to eat exactly the meal your body was asking for.

We human animals, we want to feel this way — we want to feel ourselves and the people around us living in alignment with the forces of Reality. We want to be attuned to our desires in the world and what the world desires for us. We want to feel this attunement in the atmosphere between us and our friends, our families, our communities.

Right now, when I step out of the relationships and communities that feel like this, out into connections that don't — it doesn't feel good. It's like the cultural equivalent of sunburn, or vertigo. I feel like something is Not Quite Right, the ways that attention is shaped towards goals and objects and obsessions that don't unfold into much of anything. Maybe towards numbness, or greed, or control, or power.

I want a world where more of us can rely on the world to be a place where attention is shaped skillfully and sensitively. Where unfolding naturally happens, and is expected. It's a beautiful world, and one I'd love to share more widely (and to deepen, where it's already present present).

One of my big anxieties is that it feels like the solutions are pretty simple — just attune yourself to eros and build the skill of merging your attention with what wholesomely unfolds — but it's hard to get buy-in for that within the dominant materialist worldview. If attention is just something the brain does, and eros is just a fancy way of saying "want"... the whole project feels small. Petty. One more pretty idea on the McMindfulness heap. In a materialist universe, there's just no oomf for such a project.

If we share a view of attention as the human capacity to participate in the unfolding of the sacred Fabric of Being, of course it gets much easier to see the ecstatic urgency. John O'Donahue wrote "When we approach with reverence, great things decide to approach us.” If we approach ideas like this with a view that diminishes them, their possibilities are diminished. If we approach with reverence, they meet us the same way.