Attention

It Needs Guts

People are living in suffering. There are only two ways out of it: They can become meditators – alert, awake, conscious… that’s an arduous thing. It needs guts. Or the cheaper way is to find something that can make you even more unconscious than you are, so you cannot feel the misery. Find something that makes you utterly insensitive, some intoxicant, some painkiller that makes you so unconscious that you can escape into that unconsciousness and forget all about your anxiety, anguish, meaninglessness.

The Normal State of Humanity: Sleepwalking

“You sleep when you sleep, but you also sleep while you are awake… Even right now you are dreaming within. A thousand and one thoughts continue and you are not conscious of what is happening, you are not aware of what you are doing, you are not aware of who you are. You move as people move in sleep.”

“We go on living absolutely inattentive to what is happening around us. Yes, we have become very efficient in doing things. What we are doing, we have become so efficient in doing that we don’t need any awareness to do it. It has become mechanical, automatic. We function like robots.”

According to spiritual gurus like Lao Tzu, Osho or Buddha, most of us move through life like sleepwalkers, never really present in what we’re doing, never fully alert to our environment, and never even aware of what motivates us to do and say the things we do.

We live mechanical, automatic, unconscious lives. While we’re asleep, we simply act out our conditionings, habits, and impulses. That’s what sleepwalking means: acting mechanically, habitually, automatically, impulsively, unconsciously. When we’re sleepwalking, we’re not really there – we were absent, lost in our thoughts about the future or the past, but not present.

If you look at other people, you can see this quite well. People are never really here-now, never really alert and conscious. They are always asleep, either worrying about the future or thinking about the past. They are absent. And so are you. And so am I.

That’s simply the current state of humanity. The opposite of that state is being present, what spiritual guru calls awareness.

What Is Awareness?

“Awareness means that whatsoever is happening in the moment is happening with complete consciousness; you are present there.”

Awareness means being present to the moment. It means being fully alert, fully conscious, fully here-now. It means inhabiting the present moment with all five senses. You are simply taking in everything the moment has to offer.

When you’re washing the dishes, awareness means washing the dishes and not being occupied with anything else. Not thinking about yesterday. Not thinking about tomorrow. Just washing the dishes. Smelling the soap. Feeling the warm water running down your hands and arms. Seeing the ceramic of the dishes getting cleaner and cleaner.