2018.05.30 - Day 77

I would love to read Rovelli's book but have too many unread atm. I also bought Niebaur's book yesterday. Yes, probably know most of it from other teachings, but it looks interesting :)

From Tart: 'It is very satisfying to interact with someone who is relatively awake. There is a rewarding quality that intuitively feels as if it is based on realistic perception. You feel that you are being given real attention by the other, as well as giving real attention to yourself and the other. Ordinary attention from others, by contrast, feels as if you are something of a peripheral stimulus to someone's fantasy process.'

Tart, Charles T.. Waking Up: Overcoming the Obstacles to Human Potential (Kindle Locations 4655-4659). Fearless Books. Kindle Edition.

I notice this 'ordinary attention' in care workers. Especially when they are scrolling through stuff on their phones while talking to me at the same time ! One of my cleaning ladies, a good soul otherwise, gives me a detailed of her current life problems every time she comes. When I start to say something she only hears a keyword that relates to her own situation and starts on that again :) So, I wonder what the quality of my own attention is like. I think it has definitely improved - have to give ourselves some credit too sometimes - but can improve more I guess.

Zen, will comment on this while I remember! ...

I love the Tart quote. It is very true. But once in my life I found a paradox.

I worked with someone 33 years ago who was a strange combination. They gave people their full attention, but I'm not necessarily sure they were "relatively awake" as such, as I'm not sure they understood the effect their attention had.

It was like a powerful spotlight coming from them that illuminated you during the interaction. So much so, that when they turned that spotlight away onto someone else, which of course would always happen in an office environment, you felt an amazing sense of emptiness and loss.

Real attention, as Tart puts it, I think is more cooperative than that. It doesn't demand attention or strip it away from anything else. Rather it encourages it. It leaves you feeling exhilarated afterwards, rather than empty.

Your cleaning lady stands on a fine line, as I so often do. We're taught in communication skill training to make more effective connections with people by better listening. There are plenty of techniques to help with that, for example by summarizing parts of what someone has said back to them. But another technique involves demonstrating empathy by showing you understand because of your own real life experience. Therein lies a trap! It's hard to do effectively. If the listener starts relating their own relevant experience, they can be seen as being self-centered and dismissive of the original speaker. And I do that too much. edited 14:21, 30 May 2018

Darn, I wanted in, but was about to begin my sentence with "I've experienced this too..." ;-)

Was being cheeky earlier, but I like this conversation. It feels to be central to unlearning isolation, because as humans 'we' can't possibly give full attention, in a zero-sum sort of way. There is simply too much, even once simplified. We also can't give up and not strive to do better when it comes to common societal habits like checking the phone continually or impostering listening.

Once I was talking with a new friend who had the boldness to stop me when I was engaged in default politeness with her. It was pretty amazing because it was a correction, but it came from such a personal place of wanting me really to hear her and also showing me that we could converse on a level I wasn't used to, that I felt too awestruck to have hurt feelings. That was a rare and tricky moment of the sort Tart seems to be talking about concerning mindful feedback. Peer review. :) I can contrast that experience with others where it felt like someone was practicing what they may have thought was skillful means, but coming from head rather than heart... correcting rather than connecting. That can go pretty wrong.

The kinds of practices we've been attending to expand the range and stability of attention, but can that make one more disappointed to find shallow responses? Yes and no. It is like meditating with an object. At some point a non-grasping openness can take the place of latching on, but the rock or whatever object is not going to leave. I know that when my grandfather visits and I want for us not to argue (which may include just being in the room together with little to say), it is very hard not to grasp for openness, then feel at a loss if nothing budges. I can get into a trap of being preoccupied with ways to make that happen, too, so can't say my attention is fully 'there' or 'relaxed' in that sense either. edited 19:42, 30 May 2018

thoughts:
Reading through concentration, focus, attention, narrow-wide angle lens = all good stuff.
Thinking through several analogs.
The world had very fine SLR cameras available to 'see', record and show others the vision of a world.
They took in the whole voew in one snap.
Digital cameras came out a new way, cheap, lo-res and scan across the view.
Digitals got better and better and with so many working on it got up to using the SLR lens, accessiories, techniques.
However, it is now a really fast scan across the scene, not the whole picture in one take.
Now reminded of articles read long ago. i.e. (ref?) where eye specialists explain the eye actually flits super fast over the field of vision
The eye balls do not take in the whole picture. Just many points combined together to make up a picture/view.
The panarama is a composit and contains many interesting potential attention takers e.g. attention 'might' want to be pointed to the crow about to land.
10 years of a 9-second long gong ringing every 15 minutes. Eyes closing, breathe in, mind reset. Then what was, what is and where should the next attention go? a snap shot of the current 15min. a picture of view after 15min. A 're-focus' this next moment(s)