NOEMAYA

A trick I learned at the vet to clip my dog’s nails or to put him through any difficult process, was to rub a piece of American cheese on an appliance to create a big distraction for him so I could take him through what he hated so much but was also for his own good. Leroy the dog was always a source of inspiration for me, until it died a tragic death and mauled to death in a catfight. 

I can’t say that the cheese bought Leroy’s permission for us to make him uncomfortable; it rather veiled his discomfort and made it practically non-existent for him. Practically non-existent! Let’s talk about this for a minute. 

A thing can become as if it doesn’t exist, for all practical purposes. This means that conscious interaction of the person with that thing is minimized or entirely eliminated. The object doesn’t evoke a response or reaction in the subject, considering here awareness itself as a response or engagement. 

But this makes the category of existence quite interesting: it ties its meaning to its relationship with the existence of a subjectivity, as if it is in this relationship that such a category can enter our conceptual framework. 

Taking from Kant that place, time, and causality are a priori forms of all intuition, that is, all experience is enveloped in this threefold matrix, then what sense does it make to speak of an entity merely existing and not existing for a consciousness? In relation to whose place, what kind of temporality, and what causal matrix does it exist? Though the mind and language have furnished the concepts and words for us to speak of the idea of independent existence, that doesn’t give the parts of that proposition independent reality. We say “that color is blue,” but objectively speaking this is the most nonsensible proposition because its parts don’t correspond to any concrete parts of reality. The thing about concepts is that they name not only the divisible parts of objective experience, they also name indivisible moments; and much of confusion in metaphysics has always been mixing up parts with moments, and giving moments a reality that is reserved for parts. 

All this being said, we leave it to the reader to explore for themselves, if it interests them to see beyond the pixelated jargon of this epoch, the subjective sense of existence, to see for themselves that it is quite meaningless to speak of an entity existing for itself, and that existence, which etymologically implies standing out, presupposes a subjective distinction between standing in and standing out in relation to the stream of consciousness. 

Now some may throw in a fit and say “what about the existence of consciousness?” Would it not entail that consciousness, too, must exist for some other consciousness, ad infinitum! The confusion leading to this question comes from treating the stage in the same way as we treat the actors. The performance is quite different from the platform on which it is presented. Consciousness is a framework in which time, place, causality make appearances possible. To think of consciousness, the platform, as something situated in time, place, or subject to causality, is as absurd as thinking of the screen on which a movie is projected as just another item inside the movie and subject to the same spatiality and temporality that’s immanent in the movie. Consciousness, however, is both transcendent and immanent, and so it has a quite peculiar character that can only be explored in terms of consciousness itself than what it projects., and that we know is the prerogative of phenomenology. 

Let’s get back to Leroy the dog. Of course, Leroy knew no phenomenology and was simply being the type of consciousness that he was, and a he he was as we took it! 

The practical implication here when it comes so the popular sphere of effective change and personal growth is that realities are held in place not because of some mysterious  force that keeps them in independent existence but rather by the sheer force of our attention. We hold in place situations, i.e. profiles of phenomena, by holding them in the light of our attention, just like two hands that are forcefully keeping together disconnected lego pieces that would otherwise fall apart.

My personal rule on this matter is this: if I can get distracted from a situation or a thought even for a second, whether by a joke or a pleasant scene, then that thing’s reality is staged by myself.

I have had this experience many times where I was preoccupied with something bothersome, and somehow was pulled out of it by a distraction, and then I had to dig deep into my mind to remember that bothersome thought, to reinstate it back to power so it could keep torturing me. I was the one keeping it alive all along; my attention was its life support.    

And how many of our worries, manufactured situations that ceaselessly pop out of our psyche so we can rehearse for worst case scenarios that will probably never happen, are there in our lives because we keep them alive, feeding our own torturers! Remember, there is not such thing as a situation in reality; situation is mental construct, something of the nature of interpretation, superimposed on the manifold of sensations. 

The Real is that which cannot not be. That which can not be is not.

So what do we do here? Do we simply stop funneling our attention into situations, situations we don’t even know are sustained by our very attention? Not quite! Remember when Arthur told Saito “Do not think about elephants,” and all Saito could think of were elephants! Trying not to think about something is just another way of thinking about it. But when Arthur abruptly diverted Saito’s attention to a catfight across the street where a dog was being mauled to death, Saito didn’t think about elephants anymore. The catfight became Saito’s American cheese.

Trying to resolve situations that are maintained by attention is like forcing Leroy to surrender to the discomfort. Instead, we can make that discomfort disappear by shifting attention to something that is energetically aligned with our most sensitive parts. 

Nothing is more engaging to attention than actionable items, the content of the present moment. To return to the present, some may use the rope of breath, some the ground of embodiment, etc.. 

Things are as real as the intensity of the attention we pay them. Just like an object is only as valuable as the most amount of cash anyone is willing to pay for it.

If you ever needed to remember what you were thinking about after a brief distraction, then you were the sole provider of that thought; it must be a construct of your own making. Let this be your totem to discern between the real and the unreal.

This, however, is not the only implication of the dependence of situations on attention. It is not always best to just let go of all constructs as some might be vital abstractions to our development. The immanence of sight in the look, of existence in attention, also means that a particular situation can change form and find a different meaning if we look at it differently. A vessel shows different profiles from different vantage points. Situations, too, don’t have a fixed nature if they are maintained by our attention; it means that their form depends on the intensity and quality of our attention. Sometimes taking a break from ruminating can reveal novel aspects of a situation that was otherwise hopeless, aspects that can signal breakthroughs and new ways of dealing with complexities of life. 

These unknown and unanticipated aspects don’t find the opportunity to show themselves as long as we are stuck in a particular pattern of attention; they typically emerge after we give our projections a break and return to them at a later time. 

It has been a common experience for me where my problems had a different texture and even color before vs. after a fun evening with good friends. When we engage in activities that massage our attention and make it more relaxed, we start seeing things differently, and hence our approach to them, whether as a solution or an attitude of acceptance, can become surprisingly creative. 

Attention is pretty much like Leroy the dog: it can live in fear, in excitement, or worse be mauled in a catfight of intrusive thoughts.