Focusing and seeking

They're not exactly the same, but related. When you're regarding what's in front of you, and trying to get clarity, moving from a blur to something you can grasp, that's more like focusing. When you're moving around erratically, trying to find a point of contact, something on which to focus, that's more like seeking.

There are those people who are ardent seekers. I used to be. I gave up. I came to my boundaries when my  friend of forty plus years died, and all the stabilities of my life were challenged. I found that nothing stable was left. I realized that all of myself is a collection of emotional and cognitive habits, all challengeable, all a matter of self-response based on nothing more that the moment's need. I was amazed at the trigger: both my parents had died, and I had not experienced this, I had gone through divorce, for which I had never been primed, not my register at all, and had not experienced this. 

Quite abruptly, I was utterly humbled by the terminality of my life.

I claim to be able to teach people how to focus, but the fact that I had not yet found what I sought made me re-think.

For me, it now works like this: if you have a question, you have words, if it's a quest, it's an evocative and emotional reaching out.

If you seek, you may have found something, and are still seeking, but why?

If you have sought, and have declared a choice, a finding, a finality, no doubt your experience holds, although your words may be premature, as is the case when you allow formal religion to word your deepest experiences for you.

When you seek, your attention moves perpetually, maybe erratically, maybe looking for something in particular to recognise.

When you focus, your seeking comes to rest, and you move towards clarity in respect of something in particular.

A spiritual coach may be able to help with seeking, a life coach more with focusing.

The more intense your seeking is, the less likely are you to able to focus on daily practicalia.

Intense seekers are likely to be emotionally distraught people who have been dislodged from stable experience.

They can often be helped through narratives that have appeal, and resonate with their sense of reality. They need to find a personal myth. The story and meaning of Jesus Christ goes all the way to the uttermost limits of human emotions: few grasp the freedom rather than the lessons that are learnt along the way. Eatern approaches use story less, depending more on the koan of enlightenment.

However, truth is humilty, and focusing on ultimate truth in contrast to daily truth is daunting. I have stopped. Ultimate truth is shattering. Humans aren't designed to grasp, fully. Daily truth is about responsiveness, competence, communicativeness, carefulness and cheerfulness.

Scott Fitzgerald's story about Gatsby had for many years been a sort of Bible to me: an immensity of a dream that you sought, without finding, it eluded, most enigmatically and poignantly. I felt it deeply.

Today I am on the threshold (time is short) of the real dream, and I am keen to translate it into a curious mixture of money and meaning. I am confused by the fact that some offer meaning, but want money for it, and others, more viciously honest, demand money without meaning.

My view is this:

You will always find yourself travelling on rough terrain.

You have to move towards your destination. You have to survey and negotiate the ground you traverse.

The combination of these is the curious mixture of focusing and seeking. You have to choose the appropriate balance between focusing on what you seek, and how to get there.

My friend's death has helped me to get to this balance. The most baffling experience of my life has also been the sense of the keen wind that offers the no small comfort of daily direction. God is not only the biggest picture, but also the the crucial details, as subtle as they can possibly be.

Focusing on the Holy Spirit

This is slightly easier than focusing on God, because there'a an actual, active, immediate, real point of contact. No-one is going to find a ready jargon, and if you read through as many books as I have trying to find words that stick, stop when you get the feeling that the Holy Spirit is not a system of anything, but a very individual and intense relationship that touches you in your personal, historical, biological and committed places.

Once more, the Holy Spirit isn't an "out there" reaching in kind of dynamic, as I understand. Just as stitches create a woven fabric, the human condition is darted through with the presence of God, the immediacy of which is encounter with God's Holy Spirit.

These words sound very grand, but the reality is quite ordinary: everybody experiences happiness, joy, disappointment, disillusionment, despair, gratefulness, anger, hope, love and loneliness.

In any of these, take one step back, create a space and ask: I dont know what words you should use: merely ask for spiritual truth and presence.

I have learnt not to use words, but to use the breath given to my body, and not to quest too deeply, but to receive.

I have learnt to become quiet, which is not the way I used to be when I was intense about spiritual movement.

When you focus on the Holy Spirit you're going beyond mere Christianity. The Holy Spirit is no respecter of anything man-made. You're going past the boundaries of formal religion, fervent tribalism, family feuds, cultural bias, financial priorities, belief systems, even physical realities.

You're also going beyond your very own, real needs.

The place where you encounter the Holy Spirit is the place you dare to step out onto the tottering platform of your truth and feel how insecure that place is. I like what Steve Jobs said, that heaven is a good place to be but no-one wants to die to get there.

The older I get the more I realise that for me, dying is not about a fear of getting to heaven, but a badly entangled experience of emotional involvement with this planet and humans. I just don't want it to have been like this. I really want to have done more. "So much to do, so little done," said Cecil John Rhodes, the empire builder.

I ponder my six decades of living, and realise that my place in history is poised at a significant juncture. This is true for everybody. I like what one of my facebook friends says is her occupation: "activist".

I recognise that the human world is what it is because not enough people have responded to the activity of the Holy Spirit. The startling power of life that grows each blade of grass, plant and tree in your garden is the same power that maintains your body on an hourly basis.Electricity is a discovery more than an invention, yet what it does has become, so to speak, irreversible.

One's faith, in the same way, is irreversible. You can never undo what God's Holy Spirit does in your life.

But how do you focus on this? Humility, openness, respect, reciprocity and worship. How does it happen? Very individually and personallly: a matter of personal narrative opening up from the indulgent paragraph to the dispassionate epic, viewing the vista of relationship impinging on relationship as well as recognising the anguish of individual aspiration.

What's it like?

Blinding, baffling, bewildering, because the tamed, domestic world we've become used to is not directly related to the wildness of spirit. As humans, we get old, tired, sick, sad, disillusioned and we want to go. It's kind of normal although it's not what it's supposed to be. We feel our hearts filling with longing for family, friends, memories, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, homes everywhere. We believe but we aren't sure. We know on the basis of hope.

Well, my experience is different. Everyone is psychic, and I've tested this, and found it to be startlingly true. I don't particuarly want to be psychic, but if you're going to talk spirit, don't be domineering about it, because you never will be. You're a product of spirit not an engendering agent. No one walks alone. If you're a person of truth, prepare to be surprised. The more you kick against the goads because of your imagined integrity, the greater will be the fall from your horse of purpose.
The more firmly you hold your rod, the more it will writhe. Disobey paradise, and wander in the desert for a long time. Test your own story to know it for what it is.

Spiritual living is not discontinuous. This is a complicated way of saying that you are always surrounded by the holiness of spiritual company. Some people are querulous about evil spirits waiting to jump on you. Superstition is of two kinds: the better kind and the worse kind. Choose the one that excites you most and learn the difference.

As a youngster I was taught that it was a bad idea to focus on the Holy Spirit, because you had to focus on Jesus first, in a special kind of way I couldn't figure out, and then all the rest would fall into place. Today I know that you can ask whatever you want, and you will always be answered. The Holy Spirit is really about truth, not conceptual truth but living truth. You need to square up, not be in control of. You will always be humbled, never humiliated. And if you have anything to give, it will be asked of you.

If you focus on the Holy Spirit, you will soon lose concepts and gain energy. If you spend this energy dancing and singing you may lose weight, and gain nothing. If you pursue this energy determinedly, you will find ways of bringing heaven to earth, perhaps by re-inventing electricity, perhaps by bringing much-needed relief in one form or another to a corner of humankind. Perhaps by rescuing one more animal, or human.

Perhaps by reducing the stress in your body little by little to find the peace that is given to you.

Focusing on God

It's not difficult, it's actually impossible but you find people who are intent on doing this. I think it's a compulsion born of a too urgent requirement arising from slightly crazy circumstances or totally crazy parents or families. I never met my paternal grandfather, but I know he was intent on converting the Catholics to being Protestants. When you encounter zeal, take care. Sometimes a zealot claims the course is love, and then you have to duck.

The first thing to recognise is that God is not a noun. God is more like a present continuous verb, the action of which is creative being, an overwhelming, enigmatic, ontic, essential presence, in respect of which the human mind has to learn rather than command.

Humility becomes necessary when you focus on God.

Do religions matter? I think not really, at the end of the day, as much of formal religion is man-made. Respond to the part that's God-made.

I grew up in a fervent and committed Christian context, where the Bible was God, because that was how God was communicated. I learnt to fear the Bible much as a pupil in a nineteenth century school learnt to fear the strap, belt, ruler and cane because that's how God ruled, according to the teachers of God's word. That wasn't true, of course, but I had to learn the very difficult lessons in respect of truth being different to that message. I still learn.

When I focused on God, I read the theologians, mystics, mediums, prophets and poets.Some of these were helpful. But I found that the actual focus was on words. The grander they became, the less I understood. Yet every now and then, there was a current of energy and drama that entranced and motivated me to grow towards a real yet unnameable dream.

I became aware of participating in an eternal drama, representing something hardly born in my guessing consciousness.

I don't want to go into personal narrative, in respect of focusing on God; that's just that: personal narrative. What I want to declare is that if you really focus on God, things will change in your life. This focus requires a move from concept to commitment, from casual enquiry to care, from obsservation to action.

God is no gendered, ultra-human in a separate heaven: God is more like a holy Presence who will visit you if you make yourself open. I understand God's presence to be usually subtle in a one's personal life, utterly obvious in social and economic dynamics, and more often than not absent in formal religion.

We're blessed when God shows us something of divine Presence in our daily joys and domestic affections. Home cooked curry, the cat and rain on the roof are much of God's love. Humans and hobbits are closely related. 

Conversely, pogroms, ethnic cleansings and cullings end our naive innocence.

I have never managed to forget the heaps of personal belongings and photos lying in abandoned warehouses filled with empty and futile nostalgia that Schindler's List showed us.

In my heart I rail against empty and futile nostalgia. I sense this is not how God works.

God is never about separation, but rather total engagement.

The terms of such engagement might be in the table of elements, human intentionaltiy, Divine grace: pick the words and terms you want: they don't matter other than that they open your mind and awareness rather than close and limit your focus: and that's your business: to focus.

When you choose to focus, your choice is assisted, I believe. Mind is never merely yours; consciousness is not merely solitary, awareness is never limited. You're working out your salvation, perhaps in fear and trembling, because it's God working in you.

Don't tell, show

Okay, follow the logic if you will. Grand schemes come from grand agendas, like academic disciplines, scientific programmes, motivational business, anything that wants to put your mind in a spell for purposes you might want or not want.

Check the spell you want, because most of living is about living under a spell.

Your desires and your needs overlap. You put yourself in a place of power and vulnerability.

There's a scalpel of truth that knows how to cut between these.

The simplicity is that each day, I'll walk, do, breathe, think, breathe, and it will make no difference to the day that I wasa born or the day I'll die.

Then again, if I'm obedient to the sensitivity of G-d acting in m,y life, there will be a difference.

I have learnt once and for all that my mind, my awareness, my sense of self, my sense of me is an utter vulnerability, a folly, a mere wish.

Truly, I have never existed in the way that faith prompts, the way I am called, the path that the tree of life expects.

My heart is like my dog's ears: waiting for a call to movement.

There are two kinds of voices I hear:

the comforting one, the challenging one.

At last I know I can choose which one to listen to.

I have stepped out on a path between these, a jetty into the estuary, lagoon and sea into which I have committed myself.

All the stories I know about truth that arrives as affection, I recognise.

No more than that. Human affection is what they set as love.

What a huge scope is left: there is much to hear, see, sense and smell, and the the close corners that come your way are the entire secret.

Mindfulness and courageous consciousness

For the first time ever, a few minutes ago, I thought of being born as an act of courage in contrast to a passive event. Since living after being born is anything but passive, if the experience is to be worthwhile, let's take the logic the whole way back.

I am quite convinced that my living began long before I was born or even conceived. Animals, with thier limited ability to think, don't wast time with endless loops of pseudo-learning. They get on with living ASAP.

Humans are not so direct. Formality, finance and fickleness are merely some of the fiends that dent the possibility of mindful consciousness from the word go.

What's mindful consciousness? My answer is that it's full awareness intact from the distractions of everyday disruption and interruption. It's a happy meeting point where thought, emotion and decision come to rest in a balance of peace. I think that Louis MacNeice worded this place in his poem "Meeting Point".

Peace is not something you sink into. Peace is something you create with courage, by steering your own living beyond the boundaries of fear, like fear of losing your loved ones, fear of poverty, fear of being wrong in your faith, fear of God, fear of being punished for not being obedient or compliant enough, fear of isolation, fear of defeat.

To experience losing fear all you have to do is take the first step and act, to move beyond that fearful boundary. The first step is the worst.

You just do it, and the next timeit's not as bad. Gradually, step by step, you learn to manage to get quite far. You learn to think as far as you want to. You learn to feel beyond given boundaries. You learn that your decisions can be as valid as anybody's. You learn the difference between courage and recklessness. If you want to find a way, you should learn the difference between your way, my way, our way and the only way. It's always a matter of balance.

I understand that the more you develop mindfulness, the more your capacity for courageous consciousness grows. Everyone has an own calling to courage, and whether it's a public demonstration or a private perseverance, following that calling to courage is an intense honour.

The journey is unpredictable, and the calling comes spontaneoulsy. Developing mindfulness is the preparation required to act when the need arises. One of the tests of whether the time has come to respond courageously is the sense that if you do something that's right, you will stand out and be noticed with disapproval.

Discretion and mindfulness work differently: discretion is when it's wise not to do something, and mindfulness is when it's wise to do something that should be done when no-one else is prepared to act.

Once you embark on that journey, there's no telling where you will go.

You will, however, learn the real learning: that each hour it's possible to inspire as well as mystify yourself and others.

And if the experience isn't humbling, it was never courageous.

Bio-focusing: an eternally living lens

You come to the point where you have to choose what sort of a lens you are. I have discussions with my neighbour who says he's a sceptic, and that when you die, you go out like a candle-flame, and that's the end. I don't argue because I've learnt that you can't argue with a decision. I've spent a long time coming to my own decision. I don't know exactly what to expect, but I do expect experiences  of deep peace, vivid excitement, joy of home and friendship, and the thrill of re-discovery.

Having been born as a human in a specific context, and having the gift of language to explore this context, I have been extremely baffled by people who use language to limit their "lens-ability".

A lens is a material thing, and living is an activity, so the metaphor is forced, but it's helpful to reduce the complexity of living to simplicity, which is what we do all the time.

The activity of seeing is complicated enough, and an ophthalmologist could spend hours explaining what happens when we see, but we don't need to hear the explanation in order to see. We just see.

Living is even more complicated, and can't be reduced to anything, especially not a belief system. There's far too much going on with and in our minds for us to come up with anything neat to package the vastness of experience.

The word "decision" implies conscious choice, but I've come to realise that there's actually a sliding scale of conscious choice. Visceral, cognitive and volitional awareness focus inasmuch as we choose to focus. I don't think we're in a position to choose with full awareness, since awareness itself is a growing thing.

If we're fortunate enough to have been intellectually schooled, we have some control in respect of thinking clearly. If we've come from any platform that has instilled emotional balance in our hearts, we're blessed. Yet living itself is an emotional maze.

Our most vivid emotions come from "deep within the marrow" as my Irish friend puts it. We can't help those ones.

Then, again, perhaps, if we pay attention to them, we can own them rather than them owning us.

They're not pleasant. In fact, our instincts often instruct us to get away from these emotions as far and as fast as possible.

My personal worsts are fear of and rage at being made powerless by the folly of people who have authority over me, despair of never experiencing closeness with another human, and overwhelming pain for the pathos of suffering living beings. By learning to embrace rather than run from these, I have discovered that willing, conscious focus of personal energy creates amazing paths of realization, relief, contemplation and compassion.

To get to this place you have to allow the sense of ultimacy to come to rest in your living. Ultimacy isn't the end, but the sense of what's at the end, and it's a big, scary sense.

So what's at the end? There's no way I can or want to try to word that one. I'm more confident of wording what's in the middle, which is my lens of living. in the here and now. Bio-focusing means taking what surrounds living in the here and now and letting that massively imponderable and incomprehensible yet immeasurably vivid current leap through minute details of daily living. Beauty may seem complicated if you analyse it, but to experience it is infinitely simple.

 

The energy in focusing

I teach people and organisations how to focus. There are a few questions to start using when you want to learn about this:

What are you focusing on?

Where are you focusing from?

What are you focusing?

The third question is what I want to address here.

You're alive, although you take this for granted most of the time, unless you've been through a life-threatening situation, had a seriously shocking emotional encounter or are just a naturally extra-sensitive person.

How do you know you're alive? By being aware, and being conscious of being aware. We could also talk about being cognizant of consciousness of being aware, but then we begin to sound like drunk philosophical lawyers, although it's true that there are many layers of consciousness and awareness. Lets' go another way, linking sensory experience to focused awareness. You usually float along on a default of habitual attention: white bread toasted, that shirt, this train, this key, that file, has to be this desk, it's mine, coffee at this time, lunch at that, my work, I know what I have to do, my home, my family, TV time, etc, etc.

The daily habit is a hard one to break. You've been doing it for a long time, even if you pay attention to complicated things. As I want to say to my son-in-law who flies Boeings, any fool can fly a Boeing. All you do is flick switches, press buttons and say "Roger" every now and then. Now who can't do that?

That which you are focusing, and using, by bringing your energy to the fore of the routine, is attention. There's only one person in charge of your attention, and that's you. Because our eyes, ears and noses are on our head, and thus a lot of attention feels to happen around these, we identify with our heads most of the time. And then, because our heart area is the one that feels very excited or very vulnerable from time to time, we point to our hearts if we are asked to point to "me". I've wondered sometimes, where a porn star would point if asked to point to the "me". Could be fun to find out.

The energy of focusing and the focusing of energy are indeed close to being the same thing. The thing common to both is decisive action. Let's try the same stunt: are decisive action and active decision the same thing? The age-old distinction between body and mind is false. You can't reduce the one to the other, neither can you separate the one from the other. You have to learn to surf, bob and bounce between them.

If, for you, the experience of living is frequently, perhaps mostly, unpleasant, as it is for many, the way to go is to beautify your being.

 

 



There are a number of places to start doing this. Daily routine is one, emotional habits another, imaginative agility a third. Intellectual versatility is the one I like, but it's not everybody's favourite. 

 

Back to the third question: what am I focusing?

 

The simplest answer is: my attention, my energy. These are the same thing. When you pay attention, you focus your emotional attention, your intellectual attention and your decisive attention. Unless you decide to attend to something else. Like the hunger in your tummy. Or is it mouth? No wait, there's a message waiting for me. I still need to go to the toilet. I'm late. What was I going to do before doing this? What's the date today? My foot hurts.

 

Focus. It's a skill of attention. It's a deliberate manipulation of energy. It's a management of self-awareness. The more you do it, the more challenging it becomes. Why do it? Life is short and then you die. Let's have another bucket of KFC. Let's have another beer.

 

What's a useful way of understanding the energy of focusing?

 

 

 

It does it automatically. When you look at what's in front of you, your eyes, or more exactly, the muscles and lenses of your eyes do what's needed without you thinking. You decide without thinking. In less than a blink.

 

What also happens, for humans, who have a weird access called imagination, is that attention obeys the words that the language part of the mind throws in. "This is the office, don't get funny." "This is my bedroom, I can do what I want." "There's no money left! It's over!" "What a wonderful world..."

 

Choose a vision and then see it. It can be as small, selfish, cruel and vicious as you want. If you can envision it, you can move towards it. Everyone goes towards what they decide without thinking. Some go towards what they decide after thinking. A few go towards what they feel and keep going even when the waves are high. Even fewer go into their thinking and feel what they think. The possibilities are myriad. Some hear beauty straight away. Some see compassion. Some smell truth.

 

 

 

 

 

 The energy that focuses your attention is not only you, it's also much more than you. Your experience, your meaning, your insight, your mind's heart is no one thing. It's not centred. Ask anyone who's been dead for a couple of hundred years. Being oneself is also a choice.

 

By now you should realize that the energy of focusing doesn't fit into words easily. In fact you can use words to focus energy, and to energize focusing. They're amazing paddles for going upstream and against the tide. But I get impatient with them. They're good friends, in themselves, but people use them to reduce, restrict and restrain the natural energy of focused attention. Ask any curious child.

 

 

 Unfocused energy doesn't go anywhere in particular. Focused energy grows, exponentially. Another blog will deal with learning how to focus energy. Unfocused energy, though, is necessary. Nothing wrong with going nowhere, slowly. One decision leads to another, and focused energy can't be reduced to business mentality, salvationism or devotion. It is what it is, and the mission in focusing is not to be slavish to clarity, but to be as clear as the energy of freedom.

 

Perhaps this comes to me vividly because living in a "free" South Africa, now, is a whole lot less free than it was when it was oppressed. It's more feasible to stand up to a bully, if you have the courage, than to correct a liar whose lies are lucrative.

 

 

 

 It's an important learning curve, choosing how to focus. It begins with the irreversible and astounding realization that the heart of your mind is what focuses, and that focusing is inevitable. Your very living is a focus, and should you never use this facility, no doubt you will die still staring blankly at nothing. That's actually not possible. A small bird on a twig is enough to register eternal meaning. That's because the reverse is also true. Indeed, words are mirrors, and that's because they're like the drops of the Victoria Falls and the Niagra Falls. If one or more hit your face, then you must have been close enough to see, and definitely close enough to hear.

 

 

 

 

"Focus" is a word. The action is limitless. The means is indefinable. The meaning is unimaginable.

 

Yet learning to do this is always possible.