If you are in the habit of listening to Jiddu Krishnamurti’s talks, you will notice that he frequently checks on his audience to see if they are still following his drift. The wizen-faced philosopher would often interject his sermons with “Are you following this, sirs?”, “I hope we are meeting each other”, and “Have you understood my question?” because I bet he knew that his listeners had probably let their attention slip on his abstractions and needed to be reeled back in. I know I for one stand to benefit from his periodic pauses, firstly because I find myself regularly losing my attention and then scampering over his subsequent sentences to salvage my dignity and get back on track, and secondly because attention is a tricky concept.
A few days ago, I overambitiously tried to read a book while also listening to the news on TV and quickly realized that space monkeys perform better than I did. When I tried to listen to the words, my eyes lost context of what I was reading, and when I re-read the words in the book, I lost the stream of what the anchor on the TV was reporting. I ended up milling about the same two paragraphs for 20 minutes and understood squat about the Taliban’s takeover in the middle east.
Try reading this paragraph while simultaneously listening to the second most audible noise in your background. Notice how your brain is doing multiple double-takes and rereadings to figure out the second loudest sound while skimming over these words. Once you get a hang of it and when you think you are able to do both tasks in sync, watch closely to see if you are really multitasking or if what feels like simultaneous is really an indiscernible, yet rapid shifting of your attention between the two tasks.
It is a biological fact that our brain can give conscious attention to only one job at a time. Generally, we get by with the brain’s autonomic functions, reflexes, and habits while juggling things like listening to music and driving or talking on the phone while walking. But those impressive instances where we delude ourselves into thinking that we were the master multitaskers who could split attention right in the middle is actually our brain switching focus on individual tasks back and forth at breakneck speed and stitching them together seamlessly to make the actions appear concurrent. In fact, our brain was never designed to put tight focus on anything, rather weave the attention in and out to ensure an evolutionary advantage by distracting itself frequently onto the periphery for threats. But even so, be it a subject of attention or an object of distraction, the brain could attend to only one thing at any given instance.
“Imagine a novel that consists of the life story of a hundred-year-old woman. The time that seems to exist for the woman in the novel is present simultaneously in the form of the complete book. However, our mind only has access to the story one word at a time.”
Rupert Spira
In an age where we bend over backward to control the plethora of thoughts crowding our headspace and tame the mind of its chaos so we could blossom into the halo-framed yoginis that we fantasize ourselves to be, it feels ironic that in truth, there is no chaos to begin with, no overload of thoughts to strain against. To be present in the moment with our focus on one object is not just an ideal meditative choice, but also an evolutionary design by default. Be it hardcore science of the brain or personal experience of the mind, it is evident that at any given moment, there is only a single image, sensation, or perception present in our awareness for our engagement. Just one object in the form of one thought. Yet why does it feel like we are standing amid a swirling whirlpool of emotions, decisions, and stimuli, all of it interpreted through an exasperating deluge of thoughts? Why does life feel like being stuffed through a sausage casing thick with excess thoughts ready to burst at the seams when all that this moment could carry is only one thought?
To top off this disconnect, we have J.K. rubbing it in with the following –
“When you give attention without any form of resistance, attending with your heart, your mind, your body, and everything so that you are completely attentive, then you will see that there is no person or entity, a center that is aware that it is attending. And we do this when we are profoundly interested in something.”
J. Krishnamurti
-which begs the question, when was the last time we were profoundly interested in anything? Was it when we held up our hand for the first time as a baby, wiggled the pointy stick things, and realized that they can move? Or was it when we were mesmerized by a toy and were so absorbed in it that there was no concept of “me” or “toy” but only the experience of “playing”? Maybe an artist who is in his element translating complex emotions into richly-hued brushstrokes or stirring music might know something about timeless moments.
There is a true “I” in us that remains beyond thoughts or words and pervades our every experience as an all-inclusive Awareness. Just in front of it, temporarily obscuring this true “I” is a false, egoic “I” that identifies with every experience as “I am the body” and “I am the mind”. While the true “I” sees thoughts as a movement that comes but flows – “I am aware of offensive words”, the false “I” sees every thought as an entity upon itself – “I am offended by the words”.
Every time the egoic “I” arises from a deep sleep, a spontaneous and continuous flow of thoughts arises to engage our attention. But thoughts are never in the moment. Every thought that arises to inform us of the object of our experience is actually a delayed interpretation of the ‘now’ that has just passed. So the egoic “I” that identifies with the thought as the thinker, “I” who thinks “the thought” and follows its continuous flow also can never be in the ‘now’ but only in the now’s afterglow.
When thoughts flow into our awareness, we should either attend to the thought with unswerving attention that is devoid of any personal stories or conditionings, so that there is no entity attending, as in the likeness of J.K.’s quote, but only a pure experiencing; or we should remain as the watcher that passively attends to the flow of non-stop thoughts without identifying with them. We are incapable of the former because our childlike innocence is long gone, nor are we endowed with a creative slant. We are inept of the latter because realizing our true nature seems like an oceanic leap from where we stand.
Instead, we thrash around in the middle ground as the egoic “I” that clings on to every thought and claims it as its own. It believes in the substance of every thought and wears it as a layer to define the shape and form of its empty self. With each thought birthing more thoughts and more thoughts adding more layers, the egoic “I” weighs itself down with opinions, principles, despair, insults, pride, and power where every piece is only an imagination of its own making.
Bearing a lifetime of layers, the egoic “I” searches for eternal bliss while standing in the afterglow of ‘now’ not knowing that the thing it yearns for is always one step away, separated only by a thought.
“I have been asked many times, “How do you stop thinking?” And I have found one way. The minute I can look at any person or condition and know that it is neither good nor evil, my thought stops, and my mind becomes quiet. I do not think good of it and I do not think evil of it. All I know is that it is, and then I am back at the center of my being where all power is. Our mind is restless only when we are thinking about things or persons, either in terms of good or evil, but the mind is at rest when we surrender all such concepts.”
Joel Goldsmith
