Liberating human attention – the struggle of our time 

Jesus commands us to be continuously watchful, but the cultivation of awareness is neglected in Western culture, a situation exacerbated by the digital nature of our society. 

Fortunately we can train our attention, writes Shaun Lambert, and historically Christianity has had practices which have attentional training potential

 
The second habit of the Baptist Union’s Continuing Ministerial Development (CMD) is attentiveness: attentiveness to God, our own selves and others. This is an important focus. But attentiveness needs to be our number one habit whoever we are. It is fundamental because ‘What you pay attention to is your life.’[1] The problem is that we are not in control of our attention, it has been hijacked by our culture, our focus stolen.[2] William James the psychologist and philosopher says that, ‘The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgement, character, and will.’[3] Tellingly he goes on to say, ‘No one is (master of himself) if he have it not.’[4]
 
We are not master of ourselves; the attention economy is our master. The virtual world and media, information and communication technologies, which make up the attention economy are designed to capture and hold our attention. In fact, philosopher James Williams goes as far to say that ‘The liberation of human attention may be the defining moral and political struggle of our time.’[5] It is not just that we cannot control our wandering minds, or that the capture of our attention is bad for our health, our attentional capacities are being reshaped.
 
N. Katherine Hayles critiques the wider digital nature of our culture which channels us into ‘hyper-attention, a cognitive mode that has a low threshold for boredom, alternates flexibly between different information streams, and  prefers a high level of stimulation.’[6] I see this in myself when I go on retreat and put my phone away, and experience immediate boredom and the desire to search for the different information streams my phone provides.

The other phrase that Hayles uses as the opposite of hyper-attention is ‘deep attention.’[7] This is the ability to sustain attention, to switch attention when our mind wanders. Deep attention is something that we lack but that Jesus modelled. Jesus paid attention to those whom his society dismissed: women, children, lepers, tax-collectors and publicans. He was able to break free from the gravitational pull of his culture.
 
So, what is attention? Attention is, according to Tim Lomas, ‘awareness stretched toward something.’[8] This interconnection between awareness and attention is underlined in the definitions provided by Brown and Ryan, ‘Awareness is the background “radar” of consciousness’ which scans the environment, and attention ‘is a process of focusing conscious awareness.’[9] Our senses are also streams of awareness, although we don’t often think of them like that. Awareness and attention are a God-given human capacity. It is important to ask what the purpose, or telos of these capacities are.
 
Focused attention is not the only important capacity we have although it helps us to concentrate, which is a central part of educational attention. Awareness which is our ability to scan the whole of our environment is also an important element of being human. It is our inner radar. Watchfulness as a theme in Mark’s gospel is our open awareness of the kingdom of God. Jesus commands us to be continuously watchful (Mark 13:37)! The cultivation of awareness is neglected in Western culture. Mindfulness pioneers Mark Williams and Jon Kabat-Zinn in the context of critiquing Western culture make the point that ‘While we get a great deal of training in our education systems in thinking of all kinds, we have almost no exposure to the cultivation of intimacy with that other innate capacity of ours that we call awareness.’[10]
 
This open awareness is another way of redressing our cultural shaping. Robert Pogue Harrison in an essay about gardens laments the lost art of seeing. He argues there is ‘in our era a tragic discrepancy between the staggering richness of the visible world and the extreme poverty of our capacity to perceive it.’[11] Lucy Alford sees this as a technological narrowing of our capacity to attend and perceive.[12] We need to reinhabit, our bodies, senses, imagination, and emotions. This is about being, not just doing.
 
Psychologists have more recently understood the central importance of our capacities for attention and awareness through the development of mindfulness therapies. Mindfulness which is used as an umbrella term is our capacity for attention and awareness, and mindfulness-based therapies enable us to cultivate and inhabit that awareness and train that attention. This includes enhancing the capacities for self-awareness and self-regulation. Our attentional capacities are depleted by ‘stress, threat, or poor mood.’[13] All three of this unholy trinity have been around in abundance over the last few years. Fortunately, we can train our attention.
 
Awareness and attention are not just important for living fully, for wellbeing, but also for our ethical decision making. Mindfulness is employed in secular ethical decision models. This is because ‘awareness’ is an important precursor to making an ethical decision.[14] Ruedy argues that ‘Mindfulness promotes self-awareness, and greater self-awareness curtails unethical behavior.’[15]
 
Sadly most of the time we are living on autopilot, unaware of our cultural captivity to the virtual world, living in our heads and unhappy without quite being able to put our finger on why. We are told not to conform to the patterns of this world (Romans 12:2), but this communication and information technology (packaged in our phones), ‘rather than supporting our intentions…largely sought to grab and keep our attention.’[16] It has shaped us in a disincarnate way. One of the ways out of this cultural captivity is to formulate our intentions for living, and then see if they are fulfilled in the virtual world. One vital intention is to seek to live incarnationally, to live embodied, emotionally full, and morally imaginative lives.
 
Historically Christianity has had practices which have attentional training potential: meditating on scripture (lectio divina); the Jesus Prayer; listening to sermons – but the attentional training element is implicit rather than explicit. Paradoxically there is often a call to pay attention, without ever teaching someone how to pay attention. Cultivating attention and awareness is like learning a new language, the language of being. The purpose at the heart of this gift is continuous awareness of the presence of God. It is at the centre of gospel living.


Image | Sara Kurfeß | Unsplash
 

ShaunLambert is a Baptist minister and completed a PhD last year at the London School of Theology examining mindfulness of God.

[1] Dr Amishi Jha, Peak Mind (Piatkus, 2021), 26.
[2] Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022).
[3] William James, The Principles of Psychology, Vols. 1-2 (New York: Holt, 1890), 424, quoted in Jha, 9.
[4] Ibid, 9.
[5] James Williams, Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), xii.
[6] N. Katherine Hayles, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), 12.
[7] Hayles, 12.
[8] Tim Lomas, Masculinity, Meditation and Mental Health (Palgrave, Macmillan, 2014), 100-101.
[9] Kirk Warren Brown, and Richard M. Ryan, "The Benefits of Being Present: Mindfulness and its Role in Psychological Well-being." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 84, no. 4 (2003): 822-848. Accessed September 18, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.84.4.822.
[10] J. Mark G. Williams and Jon Kabat-Zinn, “Mindfulness: Diverse Perspectives on its Meaning, Origins, and Multiple Applications at the Intersection of Science and Dharma,” in Mindfulness: Diverse Perspectives on its Meaning, Origins, and Applications, eds. J. Mark G. Williams and Jon Kabat-Zinn (London: Routledge, 2013), 15.
[11] Robert Pogue Harrison, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition (Chicago, London: Chicago University Press, 2008), 114.
[12] Lucy Alford, Forms of Poetic Attention (New York, Columbia University Press, 2020), 166.
[13][13] Jha, 6.
[14] N.E. Ruedy and M. Schweitzer, “In the Moment: The Effect of Mindfulness on Ethical Decision Making,” Journal of Business Ethics 95, no. 1 (2010), 73, accessed December 13, 2021, http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10551-011-0796-y.
[15] Ruedy and Schweitzer, 81.
[16] Williams,(2018), xi.
 

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