The Gravity of Habitual Attention

When we show up here as infants, we are raw and open. We have no mental cognition, but what I will call our essential, or core selves are energetically attuning to the natural frequency ranges of physicality and the basic hominid instincts that our consciousness cannot avoid. Over time, societal and personal enculturation comes into play and those manifestations are formed downstream from the essential self and those built-in hominid features. Our narrowing of attention continues to create many streams of focused attention in order to handle the wide variety of circumstances that we encounter in individual and societal situations. That narrowing of attention towards these focal points constricts the full flow of the essential self. All of the thinking and planning that goes into creating, firming up and justifying these habits will further dilute the deep essential energy of the core self that reaches our localized experience. All aspects of our lives are still fed from the fields of that essential self. It’s just expressed in a less purified form.

As we explore farther into our essential natures, the more “truth” we find. The clarity in those spaces can be experienced as profound, as we inherently know that we are closer to that essential self. But the resonances of the frequency ranges that we have developed over our lifetimes call us back to the habits that were formed in various kinds of situations. Family gatherings are a perfect example. I tend to engage with my family in the well-known historical grooves of those energetic spaces. It is mostly enjoyable, but I do sometimes get caught up in debates that bring out some of our older disagreements and resistances. In those cases, I find myself saying things that match those energies rather than from the fields that I tend to inhabit now. I will sometimes get a bit upset with myself for doing that. But the gravitation of practiced and repetitive attention is strong and unrelenting. That is its nature. And the fact that we formed those patterns, in that environment, grounds us all the more in their gravitational fields. And we all instinctively train ourselves to act automatically for two reasons that I heard John Vervaeke articulate. One, automatic behaviors reduce reaction time and two, thinking uses more calories than automated behavior, both of which are beneficial for survival. As an example, your instinctive reaction to a car careening towards yours will be much faster and more efficient after years of driving than it was when you were first behind the wheel.

So even though our behavior can change a great deal by being inside our spiritual practice communities, that does not automatically transform our day-to-day enculturated ways of being “out in the real world.” There is an energetic gravity, due to years of attention, that pulls us into what has worked before. And, at least in my experience, it can take years of concerted effort to extract oneself from most of those habitual ways of being. Any energetic knots of shadow that we have tied in order to protect us against real or perceived threats, along with their behavioral counterparts, must be addressed in the present and within the same frequency range in which they were created. Separation from them, along with their observation from a place of relative dispassion, is made easier by the energy and perspectives from the less diluted spaces that we find in consciousness practices. But if there is any hope of loosening the grip of those knots, the less diluted spaces must be remembered and brought into play while we are actually entangled in those knots, and not later.

What I am saying is that what we know to be true about ourselves in our deepest explorations is often not reflected downstream in those smaller rivulets, and it is particularly choked off when encountering the knots that we have created during the enculturation and adaptation process of life. We may expect others to see us as we see ourselves in those new depths that we are exploring, but when presented with familiar circumstances, our default will almost always be to act the way we have acted before. In a way, every survival mechanism that you have employed has worked, since you are alive. And though there will certainly be a hierarchy within that resource pool, something in it that resonates with what is present in a given moment will always be used as our default response.

Walt Whitman said: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.” We all do, and those multitudes often have different purposes, different ways of expressing themselves and can, indeed, be contradictory. The energy used for the individuation and enculturation process spreads out from the wellspring of our essential selves, which are themselves quite vast and varied. Being downstream, these more worldly behavior patterns are even more differentiated and thus there will be more contradictory aspects. As our consciousness practices move our attention toward that core wellspring, we sense that space as more whole-like, more true to our nature, because it is. That essential or core self shows up in muted form in all of the rivulets that have spread and diversified downstream into the entirety of our energetic creations within these lives here in the physical and temporal. But we cannot take for granted that the very real truths that we are re-connecting to are clearly reflected downstream in the multitude ways that we express ourselves.

In spiritual groups, particularly online, the collective attention of those deeper, essential energies create a field that is not in resonance with the habitual attention streams of our past. Thus, the gravitational pull of the frequency ranges where those knots and tender spots were created are not experientially nearby. So while in those practice spaces we are much less likely to be triggered into those habitual frequencies. I remember a teacher once saying something like If you think that you don’t get triggered much, go back and live with your parents for a while. Imagining that the deeper energy will vacate the embedded enculturation is unrealistic, in my view. The gravitational fields around our knots may be impacted by the deeper emanations that imbue us via our practices, but long focused energy will dominate over the more recently explored. The body hasn’t fully tuned to the newer terrain of the essential self yet, despite the fact that we feel very much at home there.

The manifestations of lifelong attention to certain behaviors, beliefs and patterns must be addressed at the frequency ranges at which they were formed. The gravity of the terrain will make this difficult, as the like-attracts-like mechanism will take over and do what it has always done. To bring the awareness of the essential self into the midst of such energies is possible and advisable, but it is not easy.