A systems view of biological health

Section 2: Theory

30 : Attentive engagement

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How attentive engagement is used determines what we are aware of.

Attention may veer towards extremes of focus (bringing clarity at a price of excluding) or universality (at the price of loss of clarity).

Moving through this spectrum of effort and softness is a skill that improves with use, and the more skilful you become the more easy it is to navigate the territory of the interface between conscious mind and somatic presence and embodiment.

The "Invisible Gorilla" experiment involved a group of people [1] wearing different coloured shirts moving quickly around a small space, passing a ball. Someone watching the video is then asked to keep careful count of the number of passes made by players wearing white shirts. The experiment just lasted a couple of minutes, during which a man in a black gorilla suit walked through the group. The interesting thing is that – hardly anyone who does this test sees the gorilla!! Here we are seeing three of the phenomena previously described in action (and obviously there is some considerable overlap between these different aspects of sensing, meaning-making and attending:

1. A temporary Gestalt is set up to only see people wearing white – which means that other things are of low interest and are filtered out

2. The strong concentration on fast movements fills the window of attention with no spare capacity to take in anything else.

3. This is a classic case of highly focussed attention, which is a "stressed" form of attending to counting, and therefore a Left cortex activity. As the Left cortex becomes more dominant, it (the "inner PA") starts to take over and filters out anything "not of interest".

This kind of very focussed (and therefore strongly exclusive) attentive engagement is useful in certain intense tasks – such as playing squash, spearing a fish for your next meal, and so on. But your useful window of attention – those 10 new items of information a second – is completely taken up within a very narrow window of activity. So this is not the kind of attention that will re-calibrate your safety status or help you to see anything new in the world that lies beyond the end of your nose. It’s a commonly recognised state. "I can’t see for looking" means that searching too forcefully for a lost item is far less likely to find it than just letting go of trying to find it at all. Not-trying leads to a more spacious, wider, less exclusive way of seeing that is actually far better at finding lost objects, and also frees off less conscious processes, allowing right-cortex memory to be available. It seems that Zen has a practical use after all.

Once you have speared the fish, then you would feel happy, would have time to be more attentive to the feeling of ground under your feet, the sky, the colour of leaves, the feel of a breeze on your face. Attention in this state becomes more expansive, relational, exploratory, and so shifts towards the Right cortex. Details become more interesting for no reason or purpose other than because they are interesting. This kind of attentive engagement is more likely to be slightly unfocussed most of the time, with specific focus homing into detail and then broadening again. The unfocussed attentive state allows for the greatest bandwidth of senses to be available for engagement. The natural relational state we drop into in this de-focussed attention is one of appreciation and gratitude – or vice-versa, appreciation and gratitude tend to induce this slightly more expansive more mobile attentive state.

As such, meditation is not about training awareness (though training of clarity is a necessary skill) but more about training the ability to not be imprisoned in a single, and often self-constructed reality; and conversely not to be lost in a universe in which everything swims in an undifferentiated soup. In all these explorations of the internal world, the "where" of sensation is as important as (or even more important than) the "what", and the releasing of detail (to be able to settle into a greater, more timeless spacious reality) is more important than minutiae. The detail cannot be released fully until it is recognised, because full recognition (accurate "Naming") provides a means by which we are not attempting to deny or fight or escape[2]. The Gestalts and nouns of recognition in this case provide an important entry point, but an automaton-like one – that has a superficial clarity that actually skates over the detail.

Some practical considerations

If this all sounds confusing, it is (if it’s thought about too much) - because working with the body is an intrinsically paradoxical act that walks a delicate and infinitely thin line between

• excessively fuzzy disconnection through merging back into the universal soup – where insufficient attention is paid because "it’s all one". This tends towards more dissociative and less embodied states, but also enters a dream-like imaginal world. One remedy for this is to veer towards clarity by conscious naming (naming being identified as accurate by a somatic feeling of exactness) and deliberate awe-some appreciative relational curiosity (particularly a-where-ness). vs.
• excessively intense disconnection-through-separation, where too much laser-like attention is paid to one thing, to the exclusion of everything else that could be. This level of focussed attention may literally lock up body tissue and prevent it from moving, and excludes other sensory channels as if they do not exist at all, but on the other hand brings exceptional clarity to the focus of attention. One remedy for this is a wide and relaxed perceptual field. Hearing takes place from the core of the body rather than the ears, as does seeing – and the eyes therefore become slightly de-focussed. The somatic (interoceptive) sense is softened and broadened to also include the space immediately around the body and even something of the landscape.

This the skill is cultivated to apply both

• a playful relational exploratory interest in the body in which specifics are named (and the accuracy of that Naming is verified by somatically feeling a sense of rightness), and
• a softened un-forceful spacious form of awareness within which it is possible to clarify for a few seconds and then release.

This is in effect a practical application of Varela’s idea of a "Not-One, Not-Two" relational duality[3]. If both approaches are used simultaneously then we can settle into something quite profound and powerful without needing years and years of meditation practice. These two skills are everyday sensory capacities, and so can be easily cultivated and made available just by intending to use them a little more.