Spiritual Profiling: Trained or Untrained

Your tastes, abilities, and experience are vastly different from mine. You say po-tay-toe, I say po-tah-toe. We may all have similar descriptions of what inspiration can feel like (see the book FLOW: The Psychology of Optimal Experience), but it takes different things at different times to get us inspired. At one moment, you come home from work and simply want to fall onto the couch with someone you love and be held close. At another moment, you want the challenge of a difficult game: chess, basketball, ultimate fighting, cards, whatever. And at another moment, you simply let your mind drift into the natural beauty of the mountaintop or forest.

Some people don't actually get high on the things I get high on. It's hard for me to understand that, but I know it's true. Some people love stuff that I also can't understand, that I have no feel for. Sometimes I can learn to appreciate what they do but sometimes not. Over the last fourteen years, I've been focused on how people learn to appreciate and what influences meditation can have on how we live. I don't know if meditation can be considered a normal or "natural part of who we are, but it is done in some form in every culture. The simplest way is to just breathe deeply and let your stomach relax. Contemplation and prayer are similar ways of being more intentional and sometimes more self-aware than we tend to be in our daily lives.

My focus has been on what Wilber has called the first- and third-person approaches to spirituality. I have been very curious about meditating and what I can experience within myself or as myself, checking out what it might mean to say that "I" am spiritual. That's the first person approach. The third person approach has included a curiosity concerning evolution, the human body and nervous system, brain states, the influence of different chemicals, etc. For the most part, I have set up a system of understanding that focuses on these first- and third-person perspectives. That has allowed me to sidestep all of the arguments concerning which tradition or culture is best. So rather than speaking in terms of values or preferring one religion over another--since all expressions of religion are deeply rooted in separatist types of cultural traditions (due to historical societies separating themselves from the global university of humanity)--I try to speak about attention.

No society or historical culture has cornered the market on attention. In fact, while many argue over whose God is best or whose values are best, attention is often largely ignored by religious folks. Surprisingly, attention is also only considered secondarily in modern educational systems even though psychiatrists and psychologists are willing to diagnose Attention Deficit Disorder. As far as I can tell, attention is fundamental to learning anything. And yet we don't teach people how to improve their attention directly. Most often, we teach various topic subjects and simply HOPE that kids will improve their attention along the way. When I was in middle school, we joked about some kids just carrying their texts around without opening them as if they thought they might learn something by osmosis. Teachers liked to use that joke. And yet, no teacher that I had directly taught how to improve attention, as if they thought we would simply pick up attentional skills by osmosis.

I had never heard another person use the phrase "attentional abilities" before I started using it with friends and fellow students. It's probably been used somewhere, but it's not commonly used. Even more crazy to me is that I have rarely if ever heard people speak about improving attentional abilities.

Attention is an important idiom, then, because it is not claimed or owned by any particular culture. It's not a "Western" cognitive science concept because it's been used in Asian cultures for millenia. It's not an "Eastern" idea because it has been studied for decades by neuroscientists working in a "Western" scientific paradigm. At least, it was described as "Western" during the postcolonial decades of the latter half of 20th century. As if experimentation and learning in humans did not originate in our common ancestors in Africa. Just as every culture has something to add concerning how to train attentional abilities, every one of us has our own experience of attentional abilities and limitations. In other words, you already know what I'm talking about even if you haven't used these terms and phrases before. You've already felt your attentional abilities, including some of your limitations.

Contrary to the medical-based terminology, there is no such thing as a deficit in attention. Attention is never not happening in some way until you're dead. But it's interesting to think about it. When you dream, you pay attention to dream sequences. People knocked unconscious and in comas even have accurately reported what has happened around them when they were "unconscious". There is even an interesting example of consciousness in deep, dreamless sleep from Advaita Vedanta. In other words, consciousness has different forms or qualities at different times, but since it is always there throughout your life in some way, it cannot accurately be said to be deficient. (Consciousness and attention may be somewhat different, but maybe not. We'll leave that for later.)

Because attention always apprehends something in some way, and because it seems that mind (as a metaphysical category, I suppose) always moves, we can say that our attention is deficient in certain ways, but we are never actually lacking attention itself. It is hardly reasonable to say that students who are uninterested in some topic that they aren't paying attention to are deficient in attentional skills. They are skillfully paying attention to something else, even if that something is only daydreams. The social situation is agreement-deficient in such a case, with teachers assuming (for no good reason I can discern) agreement and then perhaps diagnosing a deficiency in concentration on their chosen subject. Perhaps we could say that the students are deficient in interest or involvement.

Having said that, many people are diminutive in their ability to maintain concentration. Lots of factors can play into this, but we've all had times when we have been unable to concentrate. Some people seem born with an innate strength in concentration, while others are apparently born with relatively weak concentration. If we do not teach and practice concentration, we have little to no grasp on how much of concentration is innate and what can be learned. (So I don't disagree with the actuality of ADD even if I'd call it something else, but we're only beginning to sort out where folks are weak in concentration and where our society is weak in being able to teach concentration. ADD may be largely--certainly not only--a deficiency in social flexibility teaching competence.)

ADD is an excellent example of why I talk about intention, self-awareness, and meditation in terms of attentional abilities. Just as we may have a hard time maintaining our concentration on grammar, most of us have a hard time maintaining our concentration on retaining a certain amount of equanimity in dealing with others, a certain feeling of generosity, or even the avoidance of feeling irritated. MANY adults feel themselves, and sometimes their friends, to be more mature than most other people. Isn't that curious? We often believe that other adults simply do not have the maturity to handle adult-type interactions, and because of their lack, our own lives are made more difficult or less satisfying. This is possible through an interesting trick of the mind that is no more than a simple trick once you see it. We see it in others as they convince themselves of something that isn't true. We might even notice it in ourselves. And it is only possible through a certain deficit in concentration.

So another point about attention is that I don't have to describe someone in ethical terms (as over-proud, self-righteous, etc.) in order to describe their faults in a way that allows progressive change. Because my mind plays the very same trick on me (I remember where I do well and where others don't more often than not), I can actually benefit from people helping me notice when it happens. We can act as if our minds doing this naturally is some form of evil in humanity, or we can be curious and amused by it. And once we recognize anything concerning how we deploy and experience our attention, we can do something about it whereas if we are inherently evil that is harder to address.

I'd say that if adults cannot learn enough concentration to maintain a degree of equanimity within themselves, they have little place to criticize kids (that's the same old mental trick). The functional question in all of this is: how do we do it? Because I've phrased the problem in attentional terms, an attentional solution lends itself to the problem. I've briefly listed what I see as the significant developmentally-outlined attentional abilities here.

Since we cannot "see" our own subconscious clearly, we may not be able to say correctly in which abilities we are most lacking. We may know what we are strong in, though. The interesting thing for me is that, since we are all complex human beings, if we are too deficient in any of these areas, we will not only be somewhat unhappy, but we will also create social problems for ourselves. The unfulfilled desires that lead to unhappiness are the personal or internal signs of unfulfilled potential, and the social problems we are a part of are the social or external signs of that same unfulfilled potential. Why do I say this? Because inspiration is your birthright and creating inspiration is an ability.

In the movie, "Man on Fire", Denzel Washington's character makes the point that there is no such thing as being tough. "There is only trained and untrained." If you haven't felt inspiration to be a significant part of your life, it doesn't mean that you are evil, broken or weak. You are either trained or untrained.