Scientific Proof – Table of
Contents
Chapter 9: The Western Way
The Secret of Attention
Attention is the root of all experience of mind, body,
and the bodys relations. It is in the process of attention
that we become habituated to the presumption of limitations.
And attention itself arises directly, as the first element
of all experience, from the essential being (which inheres
in the Infinitely Radiant Transcendental Being).
If the intuition of the ecstatic inherence of the
essential being in the Radiant Transcendental Being is
forgotten in the play of attention (or experience), then the
presumption of limits binds the being. From this forgetting
there first arises the presumption of an independent,
separate, and limited self, and attention seems to be
projected from that separate self-center. From this there
arises the total realm of subjectivity or mind, with its
mechanical relationship to body and world.
Therefore, the key to both Enlightenment and suffering is
the process or fact of attention itself.
The spiritual process or Way of Life is a development
founded on insight and responsibility relative to attention
(which is the root of experience, and which is also both
rooted and expanded in the Radiant Transcendental Being).
That process or Way begins, on the basis of intuition and
insight, as a responsible redirection of attention into the
Radiant Divine Being. (It is a matter of the surrender of
the body and its relations into the Radiant Life-Principle
while the attention, prior to the random subjective movement
of perception, thought, and self-contraction, is directed to
Invocation or Remembrance of the Divine Being.)
Attention may go to objects (mental or physical) or it
may contract upon itself (thus producing the negative sense
of separate self, doubt, limitation, frustration, and so
forth). But the spiritual process or Way of Life is a matter
of understanding and feeling and surrendering the body-mind
and its root-attention into the Radiant All-Pervading Divine
Being.
Over time this process develops into a profound
re-cognition of the conditions of psycho-physical
experience, so that the spiritual process in each moment
becomes one of tacit re-cognition or transcendence of every
act of attention (or attention itself). Then all conditions
are directly Realized to be only modifications of the
Radiant Divine or Transcendental Being and it is Realized
that only that Radiant Being is the case. When this
Realization becomes constant, the body-mind and the world of
experience become Transfigured (seeming to the being to be
as if transparent and utterly continuous with Infinitely
Radiant Bliss). And such Transfiguration becomes the
Liberated Life-Will, or Transformation of the body-mind and
the world, until these are Outshined, or else the apparent
being is Translated beyond the human domain.
Scientific Proof – Table
of Contents