The Role of Attention in Change (and staying stuck)

All of us are seeking change on some level, and many of us may have been trying to shift patterns of behavior or outlooks for years.

But lasting change can be difficult to affect because it requires what’s called a paradigm shift - a permanent transformation in the structure of our thinking.

For the ancient Daoists, the character that best captured that process was ‘Wind’ 風 or ‘Feng’ - suggesting that deep change is a matter of moving beyond the fixed confines of our habitual thinking.

Analogous to the modern notion of ‘thinking outside the box’, this shift in paradigms occurs when we literally step beyond the limits of our current level of understanding, and move into a deeper feeling, from which fresh new insights can occur.

And at root, all of this boils down to one thing: attention.

The performance of any task requires a certain degree of attention, as do everyday activities such as studying, driving, listening, and holding a meaningful conversation. And we know that  in those diagnosed with ADHD that inability to focus the mind can have significant negative consequences.

But there are many other subtle dimensions to the role of attention in our lives.

In our waking life we receive a constant stream of input from our five senses which is then mediated by a brain that’s always cut off from direct engagement with the ‘outside world’. 

In fact, the 18th Century physician Hermann von Helmholtz argued that our very sense of the ‘outside world’ is only ever a best guess or working hypothesis, and contemplative tradition over millennia have argued that that ‘outside’ world can actually be dissolved away entirely in meditation.

So from the perspective of both modern neuroscience and ancient wisdom, practically speaking we always find ourselves within a ‘mind made’ version of reality. Therefore, in a very real and practical sense, our level of attention has a profound effect on our life.

This is important in two contrasting ways. Firstly, what we attend to in our life assumes greater importance and becomes ‘reality.’ But secondly, our life is also impacted by important phenomena that we neglect to focus on. Because the familiar neural pathways of our current attentional habits reveal only a partial and distorted picture of what we’re actually capable of.

Our sense of identity, for example, is to a large degree merely an accumulation of attentional moments - built up over the course of a lifetime into an apparently fixed personal story or narrative. 

These accumulative attention structures exert a strong control over our behavior and outlook  - but often without us having any awareness at all of the impact they are having in our lives. 

The power of attention also profoundly affects our ethical behavior, and our ability to recognize the importance of another person’s emotional wellbeing. 

So with the world in a more perilous state than ever, assuming a greater degree of control over our own attention represents a genuinely positive contribution to the current global situation.

How can we do this? In meditation we train in the capacity to bring our attention back to a chosen object over and over again. This apparently simple practice reduces our distractions and in so doing averts many types of mental afflictions that arise from dwelling on objects that disturb our mind and lead to harmful behaviour. 

Developing our attention and insight further, it becomes possible to uproot the inner sources of mental suffering, and to greatly expand the apparent limits of consciousness, compassion and insight.

Through training then, our attentional habits can truly become like that ‘wind’ (Feng) that the ancient Daoists spoke of - lifting our consciousness out of the fixed confines of our neural pathways, and upwards in the direction of genuine transformation.