Cultivating Oases
The Practice of “Naked Attention”
Abstract
In European culture, a systematic reflection on attention starts from the seventeenth century with Descartes until Freud’s notion of fluctuating attention, which promotes free associations and is realized in the suspension of everything that focuses attention. The practice of attention encourages the acceptance of reality as it is: that is basically the exact opposite of the neurotic disposition, which manifests itself with a sense of dissatisfaction linked to a conflict between reality as it is and reality as one would like it to be. Being open to what it is, includes choiceless awareness, not undermined by comparison with what could be but what is not. This is not an easy exercise, because it presupposes the education to use a "naked attention": objectless, open, impersonal and non-judgmental. In this way the events are simply "recorded", separated from emotional reactions and projections, not interpreted according to pre-established grids. Naked attention acts like a mirror reflecting what is happening in the mind, body and environment, acknowledging that everything changes: sensations, feelings, images, thoughts. The happiest outcome consists in developing the art of saying yes to life as it presents itself: a coniunctio oppositorum between mutability and invariability.
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