Life's Eternal Invitation to Itself

(Pay) Attention!

‘Observed’ — painted with acrylics

Alan Watts said not to measure a day by productivity but by presence. If you must measure, that is. Regardless of measurements, it all comes down to paying attention. That’s life’s eternal invitation to itself.

“Hey, are you paying attention?”

Paying attention to what? To nothing in particular and everything in general. Just pay attention.

Paying attention is not a practice that leads you anywhere specific, but is basically all practices in a nutshell. Every practice asks you to do or not do something with your attention, which can be summed up as: Pay attention!

And yet, it’s undeniable that the more you pay attention, the more you notice. There are countless things to notice. It doesn’t take much to see that there’s more to see. You might notice that you haven’t even been here for the full Technicolor explosion that is your sense experience. You might notice that thoughts, beliefs, feelings aren’t divorced from your environment. You might notice that what you’ve called the world is nothing but experience.

Such noticings may alter your relationship with life, up to the point where even the idea of a relationship collapses.

In Huxley’s Island, the protagonist shipwrecks on Pala, a fictional island in the Indian Ocean that has developed a unique society, blending Western science and Eastern philosophy, Buddhist-adjacent, you might say. The locals have groomed the mynah birds into living mindfulness cues. They squawk phrases such as “Attention!” and “Here and now!” all day long, so none of the islanders forgets to pay attention.

Reaching the moment when you realize that you’ve been sleepwalking through life, always lost in your own narratives and stories, is a blessing, pure grace. Whatever reminded you to pay attention was a wake-up call, no matter how rude and painful it may have seemed. Wake-up calls aren’t always pleasant, especially when it’s dark and cold outside, and the bed is nice and snug.

In his book, Awareness, Anthony DeMello tells the following parable:

“It’s like the tramp in London who was settling in for the night. He’d barely been able to eat a crust of bread. Then he gets onto this embankment on the River Thames.

And there’s a slight drizzle. So he huddles in his old tattered cloak. And as he’s about to sleep, what do you know?

A Rolls Royce rolls up, chauffeur driven. And out of that car steps a gorgeously beautiful young lady who says, my poor man, are you planning to spend the night here on this embankment? And the poor man says, yes.

She says, I won’t have it. You’re coming to my house. And you’re going to spend a comfortable night.

And you’re going to get a good dinner. So she insists on his getting into the car. They ride out of London, get into a place where she has a sprawling mansion, large grounds.

They get in. They’re ushered in by the butler. And she hands this man over to the butler and says, James, make sure he’s put in the servant’s quarters and treated well, which is what James does.

And when the young lady’s about to go to bed, she’d undressed and was going to bed. She suddenly remembered her guest for the night. So she slips something on and goes over to the servant’s quarters and pads along the corridor and sees a little chink of light where the man was apparently put up.

So he hadn’t gone to sleep. She taps lightly at the door and opens it and finds the man awake. And she says, what’s the trouble, my good man?

Did you not get a good meal? He said, never had a better meal in my life, lady. Are you warm enough?

He says, yes, lovely warm bed. She says, maybe you need a little company. Why don’t you move over a bit?

And she comes close to him. He moves over and falls right into the Thames. Ah, you didn’t expect that one.

Enlightenment. Enlightenment. Wake up.”

I’m not saying wake-up calls can’t be pleasant, but more often than not, the pleasantness of the wake-up call is proportional to the unpleasantness of the dream. If your dream is a nightmare, waking up is a wonderful relief. If your dream is most beautiful, you might prefer to keep sleeping.

But no one can sleep forever. Sooner or later, everyone’s gotta wake up and pay attention.

Paying attention pierces the dream right through its heart. You wonder how you’ve ever missed all the dream marks cluttering this place. This whole thing, by the mere fact that it is, is way more magical than our materialistic upbringing has taught us to believe.

I’ll say this off-hand, but a life paid attention to is a life worth living. I’m not assuring anything, but by paying attention, we’re heeding our own invitation. That’s all that is ever asked of any of us.

We might call paying attention, being or presence or being present, but in the end, these descriptions amount to the same thing: snapping out of the stories and minutiae.

In Zen, koans are deployed for that purpose — they focus your attention on one silly question, which means you’re paying attention.

Speaking of snapping and koans, what’s the sound of one finger snapping?

Attention!

Mind is addicted to figuring life out, looking for problems, keeping up a continuous sense of self and world. And if you’re identified with mind, which means being identified with thought, you’ll hold on to it as if it’s your lifeline. You believe every passing thought, and your attention is dragged up and down these endless conceptual hills — rolling and stretching beyond the horizon.

When we say it like that, it sounds like there are multiple moving parts. There’s mind and there’s attention and then, of course, there’s you. But all that is just a temporary concession, for practical purposes. Another thing to notice.

Attention focused or relaxed to the extreme may collapse in on itself and perform an impossible maneuver — a knife cutting itself. You come to consider that whatever you’ve taken for granted about yourself and the world was only a magic trick. That’s what the illusion of the many moving parts is for: they catch and divert your attention so the full immersion show can go on.

Are you not entertained?

If not, maybe it’s because you’re wearing your costume too tightly. You’re fully locked in, which is commendable. But pay attention and the full immersion stops being so full. You remember you’re playing a role. You might forget or skip a line. You might walk off stage and look for popcorn lodged between seats.

I’m not speaking of seat popcorn (only) for the sake of being silly. Consider the energetic, experiential equivalent of ditching your role and the theatrical production for a moment. I’m talking about a visceral recognition and appreciation of existence as a whole. The details of our human, although they’re wonderful, do not matter as much as we think because look what else is going on: everything.

However experience is appearing right now is the whole thing. It’s complete, free experience. An experience of boundless openness isn’t more representative of the whole than an experience of constrained closedness. This might be hard to grok, but from that standpoint, there truly is no bondage or liberation.

I don’t mean this as a fact to carry around. I mean this as: what if you forget the assumptions and interpretations for now and just pay attention to your present experience, because what more do you have?

This isn’t to say that there can’t be a change in how life is experienced, but that such a change doesn’t result from idolizing an imagined experience and comparing it to your present experience. Turning toward your own experience, unbuffered, isn’t sexy at all. There’s nothing to idolize. But that’s where you make your own discoveries, where the sage’s finger becomes the moon, and the silence is louder than any noise.

“Attention!” says the island parrot.

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