Cultivating Consciousness in an Unconscious World by Richard Smoley There are many approaches, but the point is the same: to sharpen and focus a capacity for attention does not forget what question was asked, that does not go out the window. In this the seed of will is sown. The British occultist Charles R. Tetworth writes about the training of a magician: As an apprentice, he or she will have learned how to hold an image in his mind for an hour at a time. He will have learned how to maintain direction in the midst of life’s distractions. He will have learned to keep contact with what is real within him, even in the throes of passion. He will have learned something of the uneven tides that move the hearts of men. He will be independent of the movements of fashionable views and capable of taking a long-term view of humankind’s apparent tragedies. This will make him a more conscious member of the human race. While some of this passage may have little bearing on us – not many people will be able to hold an image in their minds for a solid hour – it provides some genuine, and important, guidelines for living in the midst of today’s turmoils. The key practice is – however you manage to do it – to cultivate a centre of attention in yourself. You can do this right now, by closing your eyes and sitting attentively for a few minutes. At first you let your attention go to your bodily sensations, however they present themselves: sensations of the feet on the floor, your back against the chair, and so on. Then you let your attention go to the flow of thoughts, images, and emotions that pass before the mind’s eye. You will soon realise that you can watch these thoughts come into awareness like images on a screen, and pass away again just as readily. The question then becomes, who exactly is doing the watching? It is not the body; the body is part of what is being observed. Nor is it the stream of thoughts that flow across the screen of the mind. You will rapidly find that you can observe them as from a distance. And if there is some distance, however slight, between you and thoughts, this immediately proves that the thoughts are not you. This realisation is one of the principal goals of meditation. It will enable you, to use Tetworth’s words, “to keep contact with what is real” within you, even in the sorrows and disturbances of life. It will also free you from enslavements to such things as opinions, the current fashions of belief, and, what is perhaps most important, the subtle but debilitating attachment to your self-concept as a “good person.” If you pursue the inquiry of self-observation far enough, you will find that these opinions and self-concepts are merely what you have absorbed from the media, from advertising, from your family, from your friends. You will also discover that you have encompassed yourself in a circle. You read opinions that already mirror your own. You listen to “experts” who merely confirm what you believe already. You support politicians who appeal to your own fears and delusions. I do not pretend that the exercises I have sketched out in this article are a panacea. Nor are they easy, and it will generally take a great deal of patience and effort to apply them in any but the most basic way. And you will notice that in and of themselves they do not present any brilliant solutions to the world’s multifold problems. But if you apply them, you will be a more conscious being, and you will be more free of the delusions and anxieties that press so heavily on the human race. What comes next? A long work, in which you begin to become aware of your own special function – that is, the role that you can play to help the world most effectively. It may or may not mean embracing a cause or political program. Instead it may, for example, involve working quietly as a light shining in the dark corridors of an apparently soulless corporation. It does not matter: that is your work. As you move deeper into your reaches that some teachings call the Self or the “true I,” the more this function will come into focus for you, and you will be able to become a powerful force for change rather than a weak, worried, and anxious consumer.
Posted on: Fri, 01 Aug 2014 15:44:01 +0000
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