Conscious attention is love
Photo by Simon Berger on Unsplash
Today I realized that conscious attention is love. If you pay very close attention to anything, you:
- feel empathy for it,
- desire to see it succeed,
- experience an upwelling of self-effacing love
- feel determination and strength to keep paying attention and respect.
The subject of attention feels the energy at a more fundamental level of being than the physical. This "trumps" anything happening on the physical level.
Also, the conscious attention individuates the subject of its gaze. That is, the energy given to that space assists in the creation of a sort of container around the space, which becomes identity. Much as a toddler, having received the doting care of parents begins to acquire a sense of self, which opens up enormous interior caverns to explore, as well as providing a base for the growing child to explore "outward" into sensed reality.
Gaze lovingly at your cat long enough, and the cat will certainly not attain the kind of deep individuation that a human can, but it will know itself as distinct. You are it's "creator" in this sense. Not that you are its only creator...each being is a self-creator too, if only because it allows your gaze to touch the space over which it is sovereign.
Most of our universe is still in dreamless sleep. Your gaze rouses its subject into dreaming. If your subject is dreaming, then the stream of directed love brings it into soft wakefulness. Here, it is on the brink of self-awareness, from which point it begins to interiorize, adding it's own energy to the project. In this way, love "kick-starts" a bountiful, abundant universe.
I know these words are not startling or original. The secrets of the world are in plain sight -- only secret because we prefer information that enlarges the self to that which is merely true.
How did this "idea" that "attention is love" come? I was practicing a technique called Spinal Breathing, in which attention is focused on a ball of energy moving up and down the spinal column with the breath, visiting energetic points along the way at the belly, heart, and throat.
It was suddenly clear. I was directing my attention to the throat area (this is a "chakra" which has to do with communicating your vision to the world. The "creative word" is expressed here.). I felt warm energy "responding" there, and it had the quality of thankfulness, like that of a cat whose ears are being scratched.
The whole thing, including the awareness of feedback connections between related "components" (units of consciousness) went from dry intellectual concept to "plain as day" knowing.
With this came a plug of emotion, of mingled joy, relief, gratitude and wonder. Validation for my long journey. Strength to continue. Wonder at the beautiful design of creation, a design which propagates love and growth, and can only have come from the profoundest meditation.
I walk amid the Mountains of God, and each breath is Gift.
I myself was individuated by a thousand-year gaze of love. My journey into the state called Man, with all my subjective interiors, was not walked by me alone. I've been carried like a baby the whole time.
Only now do my tender feet touch the sand.