What Are You Hungry For? (27 page)

Skill #2:
Paying Attention

Attention is important, because whatever you pay attention to grows. If you focus on your job, your relationship, or a favorite hobby, your attention nourishes that feedback loop. (When an unhappy wife complains that her husband doesn’t pay attention to her, he misses the point if he replies, “But I got you this house and everything you wanted.” Attention is the most personal and precious thing you can give.) Attention can’t be faked or forced. When a schoolteacher scolds an unruly class with, “Pay attention, people!” he may get results for a minute or two, but the demand loses its effect quickly. Asking a restless mind to settle down and pay attention is even more futile. The secret is to know how attention really works.

Attention is focused awareness. The first requirement is being centered, as we’ve just covered, because you have to be here in the first place. Second, your awareness focuses naturally when you have a desire. We focus on what we want. Third, attention works best when combined with intention—finding a way to fulfill your desire. When the three ingredients come together—you are centered, you have a desire, you have an intent to fulfill your desire—attention becomes extremely powerful. The tale is told by anyone who has fallen in love at first sight; it’s the definition of laser focus. But for some people the same focused attention applies to ambition, money, and power.

Attention becomes spiritual when you focus on objects of inner desire. Almost everyone has wondered, “Who am I?,” but the ones who actually find out are driven by a desire to know. This desire is as strong as other people’s desire for more money, status, and power. If you ask spiritual questions casually, they amount to little. God could send you a text message with the answers and it wouldn’t change your life. The whole spiritual path must be driven by desire. Let’s say that you experience a moment of inner peace that has arrived without expectation. It’s just there, appearing in the midst of an ordinary day.

You might casually notice it, or a train of thought could begin, as follows:

I’m at peace. How unusual. I like this.

I wonder where it came from.

I want to find out, because it would be good to be at peace more often.

I’m going to follow this experience up. It’s too valuable to forget.

This is a natural train of thought, and every spiritual person I know has followed it, not necessarily from a moment of inner peace. Some experience sudden joy; others felt protected and looked after; a few
sensed a divine presence that caught them totally by surprise. What they had in common was that they really paid attention to their experience. The process can be simplified into three steps. The next time you have an inner experience of peace, joy, love, inspiration, or insight, pause for a moment:

Step 1: Notice what is happening. Sit quietly without distraction. Soak up the experience without commenting or interrupting it.

Step 2: As the moment fades, don’t rush away from it. Consider how significant it is. Put the significance into context, reflecting on how different you feel from your ordinary self.

Step 3: Make the experience valuable. Consider how transformed your life would be if you could repeat the experience. Even more, think about a life filled with joy, peace, and love. See it in your mind’s eye; feel how beautiful your life would become.

In these three steps you are activating the emotional brain and the cortex, or higher brain—the first by fully feeling your experience, the second by applying thought and reflection. This is how dreams come true. You combine a vision of possibilities with the kind of focused intention that creates new pathways in the brain. The world “in here” is always connected to the world “out there.” You can’t seize an opportunity without being aware of it; you can’t nourish a new possibility without wanting to. When awareness, desire, and intention come together, you are mastering the skill of attention.

Skill #3:
Holding Focus

When you desire something, keeping focused on it comes naturally. But it’s harder to talk about focus in spiritual terms. God, the soul, spirit, or a higher power are vague images in most people’s minds.
Many cling to a Sunday school picture of God as a white-bearded patriarch sitting above the clouds, in large part because it’s a visual image that can be vividly seen. But to focus on God as a person doesn’t get at reality, nor does imagining your soul as a wispy ghost in the vicinity of your heart. Spiritual values are invisible and intangible, yet they come to life in your awareness.

To make spiritual values real, you must use a different kind of focus, known as
clear intention.
Knowing what you want, uncomplicated by confusion, is a clear intention. Your body obeys clear intentions more easily than confused intentions. Just look at the body language of someone who can’t wait to get to the golf course as opposed to someone being dragged to church. Every time you hesitate or feel mixed emotions, your intention is no longer clear. It’s the difference between running a marathon burning to win and running the same marathon worrying that you might collapse halfway through. The brain is thrown off by mixed messages, even when they are subtle. For example, if you know how to make an omelet, it will generally take less than two minutes from start to finish. But try timing yourself against the clock, setting a deadline of two minutes. You’ll find yourself fumbling over easy steps, and at the very least your mind will be divided between making the omelet and keeping your eye on the clock.

The problem of mixed motives applies to spiritual matters and leads to much frustration. Consider the act of prayer. People pray under many different circumstances: some of them quite desperate, when the mind is agitated, and some of them quite peaceful, when the mind calmly turns to God. There are prayers for redemption, forgiveness, or healing—or, if you happen to be ten years old, for a new bike. People make bargains in their prayers: “God, if you give me what I want, I promise to be good” is a well-tried formula. The fact that some prayers are answered while many are ignored leads to enormous confusion and frustration. But in terms of awareness,
prayer can’t be expected to work if your intention isn’t clear. In every area of life, intentions become murky when you:

Don’t really know what you want

Think you don’t deserve to get what you want

Feel skeptical that any result will come

Have mixed motives

Experience inner conflict

Prayer is a big subject, and I’m not passing judgment on whether it works (given a clear connection to your true self, I believe that prayers—or any clear intention—can come true). But the lines of communication are cut off when you send a confused message. With clarity comes focus, and when you are focused, the power of awareness is activated.

The secret to holding focus is to make it effortless. The image of a genius with furrowed brow concentrating like mad is the wrong image. Awareness likes to be focused when it is pleased—that’s why two people in love can’t tear their eyes off each other. They drink each other in; there’s no effort involved. So apply your focus to the things that charm you in spiritual life. For me, the poetry of Rumi has been fascinating for thirty years because I love the feeling it gives me. Inspiring spiritual writings all have the same effect on me, as they do for most people once they remember to start reading. In a more expanded definition, you can find spiritual pleasure anywhere—a tropical sunset, the sight of children at play, the serenity in the face of someone as they sleep.

Focus is effortless but not passive. When you truly focus on a spiritual experience, the following happens:

You relax into a receptive state.

You are quiet inside.

The experience is allowed to sink in.

You are filled with a subtle feeling of beauty, pleasure, wonder, or love.

You appreciate this feeling and allow it to linger.

In short, this is one of the gentlest skills in awareness, and one of the most pleasing.

Skill #4:
Diving Deeper

When I think of my mind, I see the image of a river. On the surface there are lapping waves, and the current flows quickly. Dive beneath the surface and the same river flows more slowly; there are no waves agitating the water. Keep diving, and the water slows even more, until at the bottom there is hardly any motion at all. Yet it’s all the same river. Most people spend 90 percent of their waking hours at the surface of the mind, which is tossed and turned by daily events. It would be easy to believe that this restless activity
is
the mind. There is nothing else until you dive deeper and experience it.

We’ve all had moments when our minds grew more peaceful—millions of people go on vacation just to find this experience. But the world’s wisdom traditions don’t consider peace and calm a vacation. They teach that the nature of the mind is silent, vast, and calm. The mind’s activity—meaning all the thoughts and feelings you could possibly have—is secondary. The silent mind is primary. But why? You won’t know the value of silence until you acquire the skill to get there and explore it on your own. Children in kindergarten are told to put their heads down for a few minutes every afternoon. You probably remember how impatient this made you, how quickly you wanted to get back to playing and running around.

In adults, this same impatience has worn a deep groove. We resist
being still because what we know is activity, a constant state of mental churning. If the nature of the mind is silent, calm, and peaceful, it’s not part of our experience. Millions of people in the West have heard of meditation by now. A large number have given it a try. Life is stressful and hectic enough that getting a short respite every day sounds appealing. But the spiritual teacher J. Krishnamurti said something important when he declared that true meditation lasts twenty-four hours a day. True meditation occurs when you dive deep into your mind and stay there.

Diving deeper brings you closer to your source. At the mind’s source is creativity, intelligence, peace, and bliss. You don’t have to work to achieve these things. They are part of the landscape. As the saying goes, they come with the territory. Meditation allows you to find the territory in the first place. A glimpse isn’t hard to find, and with repetition, the glimpse grows into a view. Your mind will like what it sees, and so the desire to dive deeper increases on its own.

To dive deeper right this minute, here’s a simple breath meditation. Sit quietly by yourself. Make sure that you won’t be disturbed. Close your eyes for a moment to clear your mind and make it receptive. Now place your attention on the tip of your nose. Feel the air gently going in and out as you breathe. Do this for 10 minutes. If your attention strays from the tip of your nose—as it naturally will—easily bring it back. Don’t force your attention; don’t try to control your breathing. Just be natural and easy.

Before you open your eyes, sit and appreciate where you are inside. Let the feeling sink in—just be with it. Now open your eyes and go about your day. Almost everyone will find that the effects of this simple meditation linger for a while. Colors seem a bit more vivid, or sounds seem clearer. There’s a sense of calm inside and less tendency to be pulled out into activity. If your day is frantic and you plunge quickly back into it, this lingering will be slight. But meditate twice
a day for 10 to 20 minutes, and then you will begin to taste a lasting difference.

Silence would have little use except as a kind of inner vacation if it didn’t change outer life. That’s the ultimate measure. By keeping up a faithful meditation schedule for a month, you are in a position to ask yourself the following questions:

Do I feel lighter?

Do I have more energy?

Am I more settled?

Are the hard things getting easier?

Has my mood improved?

Is my stress level lower?

Have I had some inspiring moments?

Do I feel more grateful?

Do I appreciate my life more?

Am I getting closer to those I love?

Do I feel that I belong?

Am I judging myself—and others—less than I used to?

Am I more comfortable inside myself?

Do I have inner peace?

This inventory is detailed. It has to be, because whenever someone says, “I tried meditating for a while, but it dropped away,” they usually have no specific reason for quitting. A new habit didn’t take hold; old habits did. But if you go through the inventory item by item, you’ll realize that meditation isn’t about simply feeling a bit calmer. It’s about activating the whole mind, and the whole mind touches every aspect of your life.

Using these four skills, you can make the spiritual path practical.
Transformation comes within reach. It’s no longer a dream or a faraway vision inspired by scriptures and poetry. The greatest miracles are achieved by accepting the gift of awareness that you were born with. It may seem as if we’ve wandered a long way from where we began. Overeating was the original problem, which most of us would consider important to solve but mundane. Yet the solution—awareness eating—had a long reach. It expanded into awareness living, and the most inspiring way to live is spiritually. The themes of lightness, purity, energy, and balance apply to lightness of soul and purity of heart, the balance of inner and outer, and the energy to pursue your highest fulfillment.

It spoils life to sit in the corner like one of Rumi’s unopened letters. For me, it takes only a reminder from Rumi to return to the meaning of life:

This day knows itself

Beyond what words can tell,

Like passing a cup on which is written,

Life is mine, but not mine.

Life belongs to each of us, but we also belong to life. Every moment when you feel fulfilled, you are bringing a cosmic impulse to fruition. In the present moment a cup is passed back and forth. You hold it in your hands for the briefest second before handing it back to the universe. The greatest miracle is that when you receive it again, the cup is always full, ready to be savored anew.