Pay attention to what you pay attention to

Because attention determines what will or will not appear in consciousness, and because it is also required to make any other mental events—such as remembering, thinking, feeling, and making decisions—happen there, it is useful to think of it as psychic energy. Attention is like energy in that without it no work can be done, and in doing work it is

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When we turn our attention to the life of our body we’re cultivating a Somatic Awareness and at the same time we’re strengthening our attention. The attention is like a muscle in that it can be trained. Just like going to a gym and doing repetitions with barbells with a certain muscle group to make it stronger, we can make the attention stronger by

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"There are two ways to make the world more mesmerizing: to seek out new and increasingly intense experiences, or to loosen the filters that make ordinary experience “ordinary”. You can go skydiving, or you can meditate for long enough that walking feels like skydiving. Either way, I think what we’re seeking is an escape back into what we used to be... See more

Your mind is programmable. If you’re not programming it, then someone else will program it for you

We experience the externalities of the attention economy in little drips, so we tend to describe them with words of mild bemusement like “annoying” or “distracting.” But this is a grave misreading of their nature. In the short term, distractions can keep us from doing the things we want to do. In the longer term, however, they can accumulate and ke... See more