Good Morning Everyone!! Friday’s right around the corner and the end is in sight. This week, we’ve gone deeply into the western philosophical ideas of attention. From the ancient Greeks, to the Stoics, to our Christian theologians, they all reduce to the same linear reasoning inspired by the Greeks (particularly Plato and Aristotle). Today, we’re going to kick it to the east.

For our main course, we’re going to look at Alan Watts and the Buddhists, and shift the question of attention. Burning that off, we’re going to do a fun little exercise that visualizes our attention. Finishing off with our Book Nook, we’re going to look at a passage from Alan Watts’ The Wisdom of Insecurity.

I’m excited to get into this, so let’s dive in. Thought Breakfast is served!

For the past three days, we’ve considered the subject of attention through the lens of Western thinkers. This creates a bit of a contrast from how thought develops in other parts of the world. Where Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Augustine, and Aquinas focus on what attention aims at, Buddhism and Eastern philosophy shift the question toward how attention relates to its object.

Buddhism teaches attention as bare awareness (sati). The Second Noble Truth asserts that the majority of human suffering arises from grasping (clinging, craving, identifying with your impressions). So attention (sati) is a non-possessive awareness of what’s around you. It’s noticing without grabbing. The past few days have been about asking “What do I attend to?” but the Buddhist would ask “Can I attend without trying to own, fix, judge, or resist what I’m seeing?” This is where we can see the contrast between the Stoic impression analysis and the Christian desire-shaping.

Zen Buddhism strips this down even further. In Zen, attention is direct experience before thought. It’s not about attending upward (Plato), inward (Stoics), or toward the good (Christians). It’s about attending here and now, without letting the mind take a position. “The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon.” Attention must always stay on reality and not simply the concepts and notions about it.

Alan Watts does a great job at bridging the East and West by showing that our attention becomes distorted when it becomes effortful. In The Way of Zen, he demonstrates this by using the analogy of reading. If you try to concentrate on reading, then you’ll just end up concentrating on concentration. Therefore, trying to pay attention is often the thing that destroys our attention. He extends this with a muddy metaphor: “Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.” So to Watts, we should view attention as a soft receptivity to the world, instead of strenuous focus.

So we had Monday with attention as orientation. Tuesday was attention as self-governance. Yesterday was attention as desire. Today, attention is non-attachment. Even though we’ve been largely looking toward western thinkers, we seem to have followed a more Buddhist path with each day removing another layer of grasping and attachment.

Try this out:

Then ask yourself:

“We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain. We cannot grasp the one without the other. Life is a moving process, and trying to hold it still is like trying to hold your breath — you will lose it.” - Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

Attention that grasps, that tries to hold life still, becomes fear and control. Attention that accepts the moving, elusive nature of life becomes awareness and harmony.

The progression we’ve been building (orientation to governance to love to presence) is deepened by Watts here. You can’t attend fully to life if you resist its changing nature. You’ll wind up casting your attention on the things that don’t change (which is nothing). Trying to stabilize something that’s inherently fluid and elusive creates distraction which then creates suffering. Clear, right attention requires acceptance of the uncertainty, which is what Watts is saying here.

Here lies the contrast: Plato and Augustine were focused on our attention moving constantly upward toward the good. The Stoics were focused on filtering our impressions to only attend to things with meaning that would help us become better people. Watts and the Zen Buddhists, however, focus on letting go of the urge to grasp or control.

Munch on that for today. Try to go through your day without clinging, without resisting. Stay open to what actually is and let every moment be a teacher. Now we’re seeing that attention doesn’t just shape who you become, but also shapes how you meet every moment of your life. Have a great day, and come back tomorrow, when we’ll wrap up this week’s theme of attention with another steaming hot plate of Thought Breakfast.

Thank you for reading along with us today! If you enjoy this content, and want to start your days grounded in thought and mindfulness, I suggest you have a seat at our table! Smash that button below to check out more editions and subscribe!

Remember to stay mindful, smell the flowers, and take it easy.

Chef Ricky - Thought Breakfast