Focusing attention is how humans create. God manifests the universe as a creative act, giving existence to all being; God shines through the universe as all beings. Humans manifest being by focusing attention; being shines through us as attention. Focus is our ability to direct the light and potency of being itself into a task, into getting something done. This extraordinary ability exactly parallels God's manifestation of the universe, on a human scale; the ability to manifest, to bring into being is a quality we have in common with God. Development and becoming would be nothing more than wishful thinking if we didn't already have the seed of God's own creative power in us.
In giving us this divine possibility, God commands us to become like God; we bear the curse of becoming. Every terrible thing - and every wonderful thing - we humans have ever done is part of our struggle to fulfill this command. Our terror and misery are nothing in light of this potential. We will never peacefully coexist; we will never play nice. We don't have that option, because we are disrupters. Peaceful coexistence is what plants and animals do. God has laid this soul-shattering gift and burden on us, and we just have to fucking contend with it; there's no way out. If you can grasp what that means, you'll be filled and overflowing with love and understanding and admiration for yourself and all your fellow humans, wherever their successes and failures have taken them. You want to learn compassion? Grasp this burden and blessing, and take it to heart; your heart will break and an inexhaustible flood of compassion will pour out. You'll have become a bodhisattva; that's how it happens.
Your attention is the light of being shining through. When you focus your attention on something real, for instance when you take internal inventory, being shines into what you're doing and development is possible. Your attention is your best friend, your staunchest ally, and your most valuable tool for development. What do you pay attention to? The answer to that question will tell you where your life is headed.
If you pay attention to being, to God in you, you become. If you pay attention to another being, you love. If you lavish all your attention on unimportant things, your life goes nowhere. It's absolutely crucial to pay attention to what's important: being, survival, God and other beings. Paying attention to anything else simply diminishes the amount of attention you have for what's important.
We are all born with attention, being shining through, but the ability to focus attention is not a given; it only begins to develop in you only after you've chosen to participate in creation. In the early and middle stages of becoming, what people mean when they talk about focus is just a sort of mental interest or wish. Focusing your attention has nothing to do with your mind or thoughts. Focused attention feels light and relaxed; the focus doesn't narrow or diminish your awareness of other things. Instead it expands your awareness of everything around so you can make better use of everything for whatever you're working on. It doesn't harden you emotionally or make you less receptive; your receptivity and flexibility expand. The better your focus, the less anything will feel like an interruption; everything that happens is somehow contributing to what you're working on. The better your focus, the more you feel the qualities of being within your work and what you're working on: tranquility, expansiveness, generosity, satisfaction and all the rest.
You pay attention to what interests you. To learn more about yourself, make a practice of observing your natural attention patterns; watch what catches your interest, what catches your eye. In the moment before your thoughts, ideas and reactions can intervene, being will sometimes point you to something. Also watch for changing interests. For instance, when something that used to be a bad habit starts to be less interesting, even a little boring, notice that and enjoy it. Resisting temptation can be useful, and even necessary for survival, but it's just a temporary fix. When a bad habit begins to bore you, that's a sign of development as opposed to mere behavior modification.
Focusing your attention is bringing the light of being to whatever you're focusing on. Being is God in you; the work of focus is you working to make God in you part of your everyday life. Seen from this perspective, it's easy to understand that focus does not have to be directed to a specific thing or task. Yes, that's how you work on focus and develop the ability to focus, but your long-term goal is to maintain focus, not just on a particular thing but in your life in general. Aim yourself in the direction of having the light of being, of God in you shine through you all the time, illuminating not just a particular task but the course of your life in your day. It's not a goal you can attain quickly or easily, and there's a good reason for that: if you got there too fast it would completely fry your nervous system. But it's a worthy goal, and it's something you can work on every day as you do the irreplaceable daily work on contending. Contend with grace.
The only sources of potentially useful information about development are people who've gone before you in the process of becoming. Focus your attention when you consider what someone who may be a source of useful information has to say. Focus opens up a direct connection between being and whatever you're studying; being separates what's useful from what's not. Being immediately recognizes anything of value. If what you're trying to focus on is useless there won't be a connection, and the words will just lie there on the page (or screen). But if there's something that might be helpful to you in your struggle, being will recognize that and you'll find yourself intensely drawn to what you're reading or hearing.
Only those who've gone before you in the process of becoming can be of any help. People who hang on the coattails of someone who's gone before - preachers, disciples, analyzers, believers, summarizers, evangelists, commentators, popular authors, the whole self-help/human potential industry - none of them have anything to say that's worth the time it would take you to read or hear it. Everything they have to say is just canned truth, of no value. Only those who've actually gone before you can be helpful. You have to find your own way, your own truth, but the words of those who've gone before can point out possibilities and traps. It's also simply encouraging to read their words.
Go directly to the words of those who went before. Avoid the whole coattail crowd and go directly to the words of Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha, Laozi, Zoroaster, the Bhagavad Gita etcetera in the best translations you can find. Take the time to learn about different translations, their strengths and weaknesses, and scholarly reputation. Ignore their popularity or lack of it among believers. Never trust anything a believer tells you; believers are the foot soldiers of the power structure. Read the words and make what you can of them. Find your own truth in them; resist the temptation to read the interpretations and expositions. Translator's notes and explanations can be helpful, however; translating an ancient language is a difficult and inexact process. Pay attention to what a respected translator says is unknown or dubious, and why. But avoid anyone who wants to tell you what the words "really mean."
What you have to do to get what's of value from writings about being and becoming, including this website, is to focus your attention, the light of being shining through you, onto what you're reading and see what rings true for you. Being responds to the truth, to what's truly helpful, and to nothing else. When being responds, it'll be clear to you; there's no murkiness about it. If it's not clear, if it feels the least bit murky, move on. You have to find what's true for you, what really works. The fact that something worked for someone else can be a clue, and you can use clues like that to find your way to potential resources. But once you're there, nobody else's experience means a damn thing. You have to find out for yourself.
Humans are cursed (or blessed, depending on your perspective) with God's commandment to focus: to become. Your job, as someone interested in becoming, is to let being shine out of you, take hold of being with your godlike ability to focus, and focus being into your process of becoming. Paying attention is being shining through; focusing attention is becoming the author of your development, the creative director of your life.
In the early and middle stages of becoming, focus is at best a passing mental fancy; mental "focus" has no power. Anything under control of your mind doesn't last very long or go very far. Once you've chosen to participate in creation, it becomes possible for focus to arise in you when you turn your attention to what's real: God, being, love, or something leading that way. It's not automatic; you must choose to focus on what's real. If you do, being shines out though your attention more brightly and is able to set to work by means of your godlike ability to focus. Being in you is aching to get to work; let it happen.
You like to think of yourself as a free agent, master of your fate etcetera, but there's not much to that. Life happens to you, and your reactions are predictable. You do whatever you're conditioned to do by early childhood experiences, education, culture, etcetera. There's really very little freedom in it. But you do have one freedom: you're always free to direct your focus where you will. You are free, and in that freedom you will always choose to focus on development, because you - the you that exists in being and has the capacity to wield the godlike power of focus - you are not interested in anything else. Never have been and never will be.
Now that we've mangled most of the planet, we humans are drawn to and delighted by wilderness, which we used to fear. We're fascinated by the perfection of it: nothing planned, nothing out of place, nothing to do. There really is no more wilderness; the intricate perfection of it required pretty much the whole planet to sustain. If you've been going to the same patch of legislative wilderness for 10 or even 5 years, you've seen the changes. Wilderness is a relic, a museum piece, a stuffed dodo. But we're fascinated by the perfection we see in the crumbling shards of it: it's a lovely fading image of being not cursed by becoming.
We were never meant to peacefully coexist with each other or with nature. We are disrupters; we bear the curse of becoming. Back to nature is a dead end for us, a miserable dullness. Wilderness is a beautiful picture we have no place in except to mess things up. The Anasazi would've done just as thorough a job on the desert Southwest as the modern residents are doing if they'd had the technical means. Chief Seattle's speech was written by a sentimental paleface hack long after it was supposedly given. Give it up; not only can you not go back, there's nothing to go back to. This is what we've always been like; we just have more powerful tools and toys now.
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