For those of us who prize wisdom as a virtue, how do we actually go about cultivating it? Is it something that we can actually apprehend directly? Wisdom is troubling to define in some ways and yet if we cannot define it how do we know that we are moving towards it? Or even if we can define it, what is the pathway there?
While a definition like, “doing the right thing at the right time” has a certain robustness to it, and may be adequately descriptive, it is not particularly prescriptive in how we ascertain what the right thing or right time is.
A faculty that would necessarily be intimately intertwined with wisdom is attention. By contrast, a fool is often beset by difficulties precisely due to its lack.
In one sense our lives are directed by meaning. What is meaningful is what matters to you. And if something matters to you, you attend to it.
So what do you pay attention to? How do we measure this? In time, energy and life force – or money, as the idiom goes.
To go meta, how much do we actually pay attention to our attention?
Despite considering myself an intermediate meditator in 2019 with 5 years of fairly consistent practice under my belt, The Mind Illuminated helped me appreciate nuances between attention and awareness. Written by Culadasa (John Yates, PhD), a longtime Buddhist practitioner, teacher and brain scientist, it serves as a useful manual for meditation intended for a Western audience.
As alluded to above, wisdom cannot be apprehended directly. It must be seen in the rearview mirror.
If I were to share one insight, in order to deepen and stabilize attention, peripheral awareness must also expand commensurately. When we are distracted, our attention gets hooked and absorbed with the distraction instead of remaining with the intended object. Simply put, in order to zoom in our attention, we must also simultaneously zoom out our awareness.
I've recently come across a Pali term, yoniso manasikara, which translates to “womb attention” or interpreted as “wise attention.”
My current understanding (subject to change, as all things are) is that womb attention is about noticing things indirectly in the periphery of our minds. This term is likely the deep cut from which the above insight derived. To paraphrase one discourse, the Buddha makes the comparison that an eye beholds sights but cannot see itself. Similarly in the mind, mental objects appear while the subject eludes our direct apprehension. One last metaphor to drive the point home comes from an Alan Watts expression of a finger trying to touch its own tip.
While we live in the attention economy, most of us remain uninstructed in how to effectively manage this precious resource of ours, while hopelessly enthralled in one distraction or the next. It's apparently worth trillions of dollars, as tech companies and the advertising industry have aptly demonstrated. In a wonderful stroke of irony, even the mindfulness revolution has been thoroughly commodified and is available for sale or subscription — there are assuredly less worthwhile things to spend one’s money and attention on.
If only liberation was as simple as watching the breath at the tip of our nose. If it was, I imagine awakening would be more commonplace. Nevertheless, it’s not a bad place to start. And remember to keep your eyes on the road ahead and check your mirrors.
Thanks for sharing this Tai. Have noted down this book. John Vervaeke makes a similar case in distinguishing meditation from contemplation; meditation is looking through the glasses and trying to find focus in your vision, contemplation is taking off the glasses and inspecting how your reality is influenced by the glasses. Appreciate your work man.