Your Attention Please

by Robert Brumet

The ability to direct your attention is your greatest power. Through the power of attention, you essentially create your world. Where your attention goes, your life energy will flow; and you can choose any object of attention that you wish.

Your attention is one of the greatest gifts you can give to anyone. Nonjudgmental attention is virtually synonymous with love. When we love someone, it’s quite natural to give them our attention. We pay attention to that which we love.

Your attention is a precious commodity: an entire industry has been created to hijack your attention. Every day, marketers spend millions of dollars trying to capture your attention. We will return to this thought in a moment.

In dharma practice, we train our attention by practicing concentration. In concentration practice, we choose an object of our concentration and then we rest our attention on it. Whenever we discover that our attention has wandered, we bring it back to the object of concentration. The object of concentration can be visual, auditory, mental, or kinesthetic. This practice strengthens your ability to concentrate.

In mindfulness practice, attention is focused on your ever-changing experience in the present moment. With mindfulness, you broaden awareness to include the full spectrum of your experience in each moment. You become aware of your present experience through each of the sense-gates: seeing, hearing, sensing, thinking, tasting, and smelling. By contrast, concentration practice typically includes only one sense-gate.
In this article, I will address the issue of how prolonged use of electronic media—the internet in particular—can undermine your ability to concentrate.

Let’s look at the history of how we in the Western world have received and processed information. Until the fifteenth century, most of our information came from direct experience and from stories: verbal narratives or sung as ballads. After use of the printing press became common, we began to take in more information through reading.

Reading is a very different experience than listening to a story. Hearing (and perhaps seeing) a story is an organic, holistic process. It requires prolonged attention and active use of your imagination.

With reading, information is received one word at a time. The mind collects words to form thoughts and images in the mind. We digest information line by line. Although reading is not as natural as listening to a story, it does require the ability to concentrate and to use the imagination. One must be actively engaged in order to read.

Then, about 75 years ago, the television became a household item and began to compete with reading as our primary way of receiving information. Watching television requires a radical shift in the way we receive information.

Viewing television is a very passive process: neither active imagination nor concentration is required. Information is dumped into the psyche without a filter.

Today we are loath to allow our computers to receive information without a filter or “firewall” protecting it, yet every day our minds routinely absorb huge amounts of unfiltered information from television screens.
Watch children as they listen to someone tell them a story; then observe children as they watch television. The expression on their faces will validate my point.

About thirty years ago, the internet came into popular use. Information now comes to us neither holistically nor word by word, but rather in unrelated chunks: fragmented bites of disparate information.
Typically, we are presented with enough information to capture our attention but not enough to explore any subject in depth. The result is that our knowledge is then fragmented and shallow. Instead of digesting information, we swallow whole large quantities of unrelated bites of information.

Another effect of receiving information in this way is that the brain becomes programmed for constant interruption. Over time, the brain is trained to interrupt itself–distraction becomes a way of life.

The internet is rewiring your brain. Marketers, politicians, hate-mongers, and conspiracy theorists exploit this to influence our minds and our behavior. They have become extremely sophisticated at capturing your attention and selling their “product.” They learn how to capture and then manipulate your attention by presenting a lure that will hook your attention and then pull it into a brain bath of whatever they wish to sell you. This process is structured like a lobster trap which is ingeniously designed for the lobster to easily enter and virtually impossible for it leave.

Prolonged use of electronic media can destroy your ability to concentrate, and it feeds impulses and amplifies craving. It also tends to isolate and fragment individuals, so there is a great disparity among us as to what we believe is real or true. This fragments our social system into a variety of “reality-bubbles” that have little in common with one another. This is very dangerous and can lead to the collapse of our social systems and to political chaos.

Developing your ability to concentrate is essential. Meditation is one of the best ways to develop concentration. It is necessary not only for your own spiritual development but perhaps for a healthy and cohesive society as well.