Giving Attention

    4:05PM Apr 9, 2025

    Speakers:

    Dhara Kowal

    Keywords:

    Attention

    Zen practice

    sustained attention

    single-pointed attention

    open awareness

    metta awareness

    extractive attention economy

    digital media

    mental focus

    executive function

    practice challenges

    mindfulness

    attention span

    technology impact

    radical attention.

    This is Sunday, April 6, 2025 and this morning I'm going to talk about attention, what it is and the challenges that we all have to work with in trying to cultivate it, and we really do need to cultivate to nurture our attention.

    Tend to it,

    unlike a house plant that you may only occasionally have to water, maybe sometimes fertilize and prune. It doesn't work that way with attention.

    Our attention needs a lot more care than that. So when we talk about effort in Zen, that's a big part of it, attention, giving attention. Yeah, there's the effort involved in carving out time on a daily basis to sit to do Zazen, time, to go to sittings, whether in person or online, time to go to seshin. There's effort in all of that, but there's a more fundamental effort

    and that is basic attention, moment by moment, experiencing directly

    and and, we do need to be intentional about it. Attention is active. It's not passive.

    We also need to make it complete, undivided, not scattered or split across competing things we

    there's actually quite a lot to this topic, as simple as it sounds, and I'm going to look at it from the vantage point of Zen practice, how we tend to our practice, but also a scientific perspective. And for starters, I want to begin with an anecdote that appears in the three pillars of Zen.

    One day, a man of the people asked Master, IKU, will you please write for me some maxims of the highest wisdom? IKU immediately picked up his brush and wrote the word attention. Is that all will you not add some more? The man asked. IQ then wrote two words, Attention, attention. And at this the man became irritable. Well, I really don't see much depth or subtlety in what you have just written. And then Master ikyu wrote the same word three times, running, Attention, attention, attention, half angered, the man demanded, what does this word attention mean? Anyway? And ikyu replied, attention means attention. You.

    And in commenting on this story about the highest wisdom, Kapleau Roshi says, for the ordinary person whose mind is a checkerboard of criss crossing reflections, opinions and prejudices, bare attention is virtually impossible. Life is thus centered not in reality itself, but in one's ideas of it by focusing the mind wholly on each object and every action, zazen strips it of extraneous thoughts and allows us to enter into full

    rapport with life in

    so the practice of directing Our attention isn't easy, virtually impossible. Kapleau Roshi says

    why is that?

    Why? Why is it so difficult to break through that checkerboard of Chris criss crossing thoughts. I

    I'll get into that a little later. First, I want to define what attention is and how we work with it in Zen practice. So depending on whom you consult, you'll find slightly different definitions of attention, but one of the more common themes seems to be having a point of focus or a point of awareness in 1890 William James, who was a, I believe, a philosopher and considered the founder of American psychology. William James said attention is the taking possession by the mind in clear and vivid form of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. So so with that definition, we can appreciate what is going on when we direct our attention. First and foremost, we need to recognize that it's a choice that we make and

    I could imagine being in the dining room after the sitting this morning for the brunch that we always have on Sundays, and there's a lot of talking going on. I Yeah, but you're directing your attention to the person seated next to you. You're not trying to take in what everybody else is saying, just that one that you're talking to

    and that's how it is. In doing zazen, we're making the choice to direct our attention to our practice, to a koan or the breath, and all the while there's this background noise happening,

    but We make that choice to stay with our practice.

    Paying no mind to the mental noise, just keeping that one point

    of focus and.

    Yeah, and we do have the ability to sustain our attention for a long period. And in saying that, it doesn't mean that we won't get distracted. I remember reading somewhere that the average attention span of an adult is eight seconds. It used to be 12 seconds, but it got knocked down thanks to technology, the distractions of digital media,

    that's, yeah, that's important to recognize. So we really have to let go of our aspirations for perfection when we when we talk about sustained, continuous attention. What we're talking about is keeping on returning

    to it

    every time you notice that you've drifted often to thoughts return I

    that's what it means to cultivate and nurture our attention. It's the same when being absorbed in activities like writing or reading, there can be distractions, but you make a choice to return to what you doing.

    Sustained attention also plays a role in what's called executive function, and that's the ability to plan and organize and carry out tasks or projects in an intentional way while not getting sucked into competing demands while not getting caught up In some impulsive reaction, staying the course. And some people really struggle with that.

    That's why we call it a practice.

    There are also times when our attention is divided, and this is something we experience frequently in our day to day lives,

    like

    talking on the phone, say while eating, listening to a podcast while driving.

    Right now, I'm keeping track of time while offering a TA show, this isn't inherently bad. I mean, it's pretty amazing that our brains can even do this, but we we do need to be mindful of it. We need to notice when it's useful, when it's needed, when it's not, when it when it's a distraction,

    when it divides her mind and

    a lot of people ask about how to work with practice, focusing on one's practice during activity, and that's that's A little complicated, really, kind of depends on the practice and the situation. If you're doing something really simple, like folding laundry, that doesn't require really any cognitive function, you can, you can be, you. Working on on mu. What is mu? What is this? You can be focusing on following the breath, but if you're doing some kind of activity, like having a conversation with somebody, or an activity where you have to be really careful and thoughtful, then the best thing to do is to put down your practice for that time being and just fully absorb yourself in what you're doing. You

    uh, that's not abandoning the practice when you do that, as long as you're absorbed, you're undivided, that's what really matters. You know, another complication. If you're newer to practice and you're counting inhalations and exhalations, you can see where, if you It's you can do that while doing zazen, but Kien could be problematic if it ends up you're no longer counting inhalations and exhalations, but instead you're counting steps. Yeah, there too. You just put it down and just direct your awareness on the sheer experience of walking, of being a body moving through space, the feeling of your foot touching the ground And then the other foot,

    generally speaking, in practice, we're honing two different we can call modes of attention. One is the single pointed attention, and the other is the more open awareness and

    we engage the single pointed attention in focusing on our practice, especially koans and breath Practice, and in some cases, activities, if it's simple,

    and what we invariably find is that our attention drifts. We start. It might just take eight seconds for this to happen, by the way, we may start thinking about a meeting that happened yesterday, or rehashing your complaints about somebody, and when that happens, you know, it doesn't matter what the content is. All thoughts are equally thoughts. You just return, return your focus to your practice.

    We can get better at it through practice, the more determined, the more effort we put into it. We notice when we drift off a lot more sooner, and we return all the more sooner as well.

    And the thoughts, they take care of themselves. You don't have to do a thing with them. In fact, if you attempt to do something with them, then you're adding another layer of thought. They just fade away on their own, just by not paying attention to them and instead tending to the practice.

    You know, the goal of practice is not to empty the mind. There is no goal at all in practice.

    Just the simple a. Returning, returning, returning, and letting the rest pass, letting the phenomena of the mind come and go, not rejecting anything and not pursuing it either. And in the process of that, we start to notice more intimately what we're experiencing that's wonderful. We also notice sometimes patterns. We notice things that we tend to cling to, and in noticing it, we let it go, go back to what we're experiencing. There's a Japanese word nen n e n that refers to the tiniest fraction of a moment, the smallest bit of thought activity, and this nen concept gets at the sequence that takes place from one moment to another. It happens very fast. I the first men we can say is before thought, no thought, it's the pure sound, without any interpretation or judgment, just hearing.

    Then the second then is perhaps a name that we give to it, Bell.

    And after that arises another kind of thought, another layer,

    church bell, I

    and then another one, another n, the bell rings at the top of The hour and so on.

    This plays out constantly, and it is the terrain of practice. So we have these two modes of attention, single pointed and the more open awareness of what we're experiencing, and the two play together in a kind of dynamic interplay. We're training the mind to not get caught up in thoughts, and we're also training the mind

    to be aware

    of what you're experiencing in a non abiding kind of way, not Not holding on to anything, just that raw sensory experience

    of being a living being, Being in a body.

    And out of that, there's another kind of attention that happens naturally, and we can call it metta awareness, or metta attention. It's, it's awareness of awareness. It's kind of like seeing this mind from a distance, seeing it from outer space and.

    Now, in describing attention in this way picking it apart, I do not mean to suggest that you should be, you know, judging or analyzing your practice to see if you are activating these kinds of attention. I It's not a it's not a set of criteria.

    And if you do use it that way, or any any topic of Taisho that way, then you're thinking your way through your practice. You're not doing it,

    by the way, the way to get your attention out of your head, the way to not think this, but to embody it is to work from the hara, which is Located an inch or two below the navel.

    We tend to work on our practice and go about our day with the energy collected in our head. There's just a lot of mental energy, but when we work from the hara,

    it drops down,

    it loosens up. And posture plays a role in this. Actually noticed, just during the keenheen this morning, a number of people during the keenheim had their head kind of leaning forward.

    See what happens when you pull the head back, rest it on the shoulders, make the ears in alignment with the shoulders, allow the back of your neck to touch against your the collar of your robe. Now you're working from the hara, lowering that center of gravity. You it,

    but it's not easy. As it's often said, practice is simple, but not easy. Here's how Mark Epstein, who's a Buddhist and a psychotherapist, describes how our ordinary thinking mind operates, and this is from his book, thinker without thoughts. He says meditation is ruthless in the way it reveals the stark reality of our day to day mind, we are constantly murmuring, muttering, scheming or wondering to ourselves, under our breath, comforting ourselves in a perverse fashion with our own silent voices. Much of our interior life is characterized by this kind of primary process, almost infantile way of thinking. I like this. I don't like that. She hurt me. How can I get that? More of this? No more of that, none of us has moved very far from the seven year old who vigilantly watches who got more so that that's what we're up against. We all have to work with that, but it doesn't define who we are. Doesn't contain us or limit us in any way. We have this method for noticing the phenomena of the mind, and we also have the capacity to not dwell in it. Yeah, it requires determination, effort, persistent effort

    and faith.

    And it's unending. It's truly unending work. It doesn't matter how long you. Been practicing. Our attitude needs to be of continuous, giving, giving, giving our attention, returning, returning, you. And unfortunately, when it comes to the challenges of working with this monkey mind, as it's called at this particular moment, we also have to deal with the effects of technology. The Buddha didn't have to deal with that in recent weeks, and this is what really got me on this topic. There were several people who mentioned to me that they've been really struggling with how much news, how much social media that they consume, there's this desire to want to minimize exposure to that daily cycle of drama negativity, wanting not to get caught up in reacting to distressing events, while at the same time, wanting to stay informed, wanting to stay engaged, to not turn away from things as they are, to not turn away from suffering our own and others and our our relationship to technology does revolve around attention, where we direct our attention, and also our capacity to make the choice in the first place, not getting lured into Doom scrolling or zombie scrolling, not using media in a mindless kind of passive way, allowing it to occupy, literally occupy our mind and our time, and also allowing it to harm our mental and emotional well being.

    How do you work with that,

    and to the extent that you spend any time online, you live in what's called the extractive attention economy. This is a new word I learned recently, extractive attention economy, and this term refers to the way companies try to capture and monetize our attention, and it all happens through the collection and manipulation of data, all the things you click on, all the searches you make on the web, the pages you Visit, online purchases you make, the content and the advertisements that appear on your social feed are not accidental. They're designed to steal, literally, to steal your attention and to get you to consume, to consume products and information. I came upon an interesting podcast by Ezra Klein titled your mind is being fracked. And it was released by the New York Times last year on May 31 2024 and Ezra interviews this history of science professor from Princeton named D Graham Burnett, and they discuss how online habits affect the misuse of our attention. It's a very long interview, longer than our attention span span can bear this morning. So I'm only going to pull out a couple of things that relate to practice. Ezra starts off. I think a lot about the way we talk about attention, because the way we talk about something is the way we think about it. What do you always hear about attention when you're in school? Pay attention as if, as if you have a certain amount of attention in your mental wallet, and we have to spend it wisely. We need to use it to buy algebra rather than buying gossip or jokes or daydreams. And it is interesting that, you know, we use this economic metaphor for attention like it is a commodity to be bought, sold, exchanged, returned. It's a scarce, invaluable resource not to be wasted. Don't waste a moment, as the inscription reads on the wooden block outside the Zen do Ezra says, I wish that was how my attention worked. It certainly did not work that way back then, I graduated high school with a 2.2 because I cannot pay attention. I just can't to information delivered in the form of long lectures. I wish I could. I try my attention just doesn't feel to me like something I get to spend it feels more like taking my dogs on a walk. Sometimes they walk where I want them to. Sometimes I'm in control, and sometimes I'm not in control. They walk where they want to. They get scared by thunder, and they try to run away. Sometimes a dog side eyes them from across the street, and they turn from mild mannered terriers into killing machines. Some sometimes they are obsessively trying to get a chicken bone, and even when I hurry them past it, they spend the whole rest of the walk clearly thinking about that chicken bone and scheming about how to get back there. My attention feels like that to me, and this is what I don't like about the way we talk about attention. We are not always in control of it. We may not even usually be in control of it. The context in which our attention plays out what kinds of things are around us, it really matters, and it's supposed to attention is supposed to be open to the world around us. So this is a really important observation for practice, because there is a tendency right to want to control our attention, the quality of it, the continuity of it. We also want to control our thoughts, the content of them, and also how many we have. We want to control our conditions. We want everything to feel good, to feel pleasant, comfortable. We want it all to be easy, not hard. But that's not what practice is, and that's not things as they are. Ezra then says about being open to the world around us, that openness, it makes us subject to manipulation. You really see that now, when you open your computer on your phone, when you open your computer or your phone, it's like the whole digital Street is covered in chicken bones. And then Ezra says that observation got him interested in this the work of this professor, Graham Burnett, who conducts laboratory studies on attention, and he's also co founder of a non profit organization called Get this the struther School of radical attention. I've never heard of that organization before, so I had to check it out. Check out the website. And here's, here's the excerpt on the homepage about the purpose of this school, radical attention is the root of a shared world. Through it, we form our very selves, build community and care for the planet that sustains us. This faculty, which is at the. Heart of Education, art and politics is immeasurably precious. It is also being stolen from us. Digital platforms, eye tracking technologies and extractive market structures known as the attention economy seek to capture every second of our waking gaze. In doing so, they convert our eyeballs into dollar signs and yield enormous profits at our expense. This poses a great threat our ability to care for ourselves, others and the Earth itself. All this hinges ultimately on our ability to choose where and how we direct our attention to do so we must understand what attention is and might be what it is good for, and how we might use it

    for good together,

    radical attention, using it for good, being responsive. The only thing left out of that statement is waking up to our true nature,

    and as the title of the podcast suggests, Burnet compares the commodification of Attention to fracking. This is that process of extracting petroleum.

    He says, The only way you can get the remaining petroleum and natural gas resources out of the deep earth is to pump down in their high pressure, high volume detergent, which forces up to the surface, this kind of slurry mixture of natural gas, crude oil, leftover detergent and juice and nasty stuff, which you then separate out, and you get your monetizable crude. This is the precise analogy to what's happening to us in our contemporary attention economy. We have, depending on who you ask, a 5,000,000,003 chi, 3 trillion or $7 trillion industry, which to get the money value of our attention out of us is continuously pumping into our faces, high pressure, high value detergent in the form of social media and non stop content that holds us on our devices, and that pumping brings to the surface, that spume, that foam of our attention, which can be aggregated and sold Off to the highest bidder. This is really sobering. You.

    To see that this there's this price that's put on our attention, and there's a great cost to us. It's a good reminder that we we do need to put care into and be intentional about where we direct our attention and not indulging in in content, In media content that's constantly trying to exploit us. Okay?

    The Interview gets into two different ways of thinking about attention, and one is instrumental, and this involves quantifying it and exploiting it for productivity purposes, for optimizing work. And Graham says studying it in this highly instrumentalized way is entirely bound to questions of stimulus and response, to triggering and targeting. So this instrumentalized way of giving attention, we can liken that to being attached to results in Zen practice. We're trying to get something out of it.

    We're doing it, say, to improve our concentration, to be more confident, to be more successful at work, for self help purposes, to reduce our anxiety and our stress, to get enlightened. We see that as a result, as a goal. If I do this, I'm gonna get that. It's like we're exploiting our own attention. We're fracking our own attention out of self interest. That's one perspective, the instrumental one, as he calls it, the second one involves a reference to a French philosopher named Bernard Stiegler. Bernard Stiegler, who defines attention completely differently. He defines it as waiting, infinite waiting. It's the opposite of triggering. And what is it that you're waiting on? He says you're waiting on the disclosure of the long webs of connectedness that are within ourselves. Waiting on the disclosure of the long webs of connectedness that are in ourselves, you

    a disclosing this, not to Ness, disclosing who we are,

    disclosing that our true self is no self

    to experience this directly. Our attention cannot be coercive. It cannot be a goal, seeking endeavor, trying to get something,

    fracking, to get what we want, doesn't work. I

    what we need to do is

    just give

    the pure giving. How

    do you mind? Monetize that? How do you how do you monetize

    this? Just this,

    and no beings are left out,

    just giving freely, expecting nothing in return. And we'll

    stop

    here and recite the four vows we're.