Being Present: Cultivating Attention in an Age of Distraction; An Excerpt from Alex Castro's Book

We live in an age of inattention, doing everything in a shallow, uncommitted way. Inattention means more than just a lack of focus or concentration; it means above all a lack of care, a lack of tenderness, a lack of affection. It is being in the world and not caring for it. It is living alongside people without truly engaging with them. And in this age of distraction, Alex Castro presents in his new book “Attention: Toward a Politics of Care” the different ways we can develop our attention and transform it into an instrument of political action. A book that rests on the conviction that becoming a better person for others is far more important than becoming a better person for yourself alone. Attention practices ultimately aim at caring for the other, and so Alex coined the term “other-help” because it goes beyond the ideas of “personal development” or “self-help”: “we practice attention to be better for other people. We practice attention not to live better lives, but so that the people who must live alongside us live better lives. The more attention we practice, the more we see that there are no other people. We are all together.” Below we publish some excerpts from chapter 17, “Being Present,” which discusses formal meditation practice. You can acquire the complete book here and discover different ways we can practice engaged care and active listening, acts that transform both ourselves and society.

“Meditation is not a sedative; it is a laxative”

When we meditate, one of the first illusions that falls away is our carefully sculpted self-image as calm, peaceful, relaxed, controlled people. To our great surprise, we perceive how trapped we are in the past and the future, still obsessed with that old lover and already suffering the anguish of future death, still chewing over some silly offense and already spiraling in fear of potential rejection. Our consciousness is a runaway train, a machine gun firing, a terrorist truck in a crowd.

Meditation is facing our own madness and lack of control: beneath the image we try to project to others lies the deepest chaos.

Meditation does not require silence

Some people think they cannot meditate because they have no access to an ideally calm and quiet place. But just as we can be the safe space we seek so desperately, the practice of meditation itself already creates the conditions necessary for its own existence.

The temple where I meditate sits on Morro do Pavão-Pavãozinho, in Copacabana. On good days, we meditate with funk music shaking our walls. On the worst days, amid gunshots and explosions.

Meditation is being fully present. Our meditation is being fully present with the funk and with the gunshots. All of this is part of the world, part of us, part of me. The world will never quiet itself for us, but we can choose to be present in this world as it actually is.

When attention fails

My distraction is not what justifies me; it is what condemns me. (I spoke more about this in the 7th practice, Listening with Full Attention.)

Unfortunately, we live in a society where everything pushes us toward distraction. The primary engine of the global economy is our attention, and the largest companies in the world have built their business model around stealing it, diverting it toward their sponsors' advertisements. In every restaurant, there is a television screen robbing our attention from the person sitting across the table. On the roads, how many accidents have been caused by furtive glances at billboards and street signs? With the spread of smartphones, pedestrian deaths have only climbed. Even when we are watching television, already distracted from the real world around us, often there is a banner in the lower corner of the screen, competing for our attention with the screen itself: “Breaking News!!! Latest updates!!!!”

The ring of my sister's phone call distracts me from the person sitting beside me, talking to me; the vibration alert of a kitten video sent by my mother (“look at this beautiful thing, my son!”) distracts me from my sister's call; a text ad for my cell phone company's new exclusive bundle (“buy in the next two hours and get a 50% bonus!”) suddenly pops up over the kitten video: with so much distraction piled on distraction, it is easy to forget who we are and where we are, what our priorities are and what we want to do with our time and our lives. When I finally manage to bring my attention back to the person physically present with me, after peeling away layer after layer of distraction, she will not have left only because, let's be honest, the moment I picked up my phone to answer my sister, she picked up hers too and is already on her tenth distraction, just like me.

* * *

A common objection to attention practices:

I can't do it. It doesn't work. I have no focus! In two seconds, my brain is gone and I'm already thinking about the calf's death, the political situation, yesterday's soap opera, anything but the present, the here-and-now! I'm a failure!

But none of this is a problem. Failing is how our conditioned brain functions. What people describe as if it were an individual character flaw is basically our shared human condition. And as if that were not enough, the entire global economy has been built to distract us. It would be strange if we succeeded in such an unequal struggle. A hypothetical person who (thought they) did not fail is only because they are so, so self-centered that they do not even notice how thin, fleeting, nonexistent their attention really is.

The French photographer Robert Doisneau became famous for capturing everyday scenes on the streets of Paris. One day, a reporter asked to follow him on his walks and observe his method. He refused: he would be embarrassed if she saw how many times he passed by the perfect shot without noticing, only to come running back ten seconds or five minutes later and have to beg complete strangers to do again, for the camera, what they had done naturally just before. But I wonder: how many other people did not pass by those same scenes? Doisneau's great art was precisely knowing how to go back.

We practice attention to observe this failure happening live within us. After all, just as Doisneau going back in search of the perfect shot, we can only return to our natural state of attention if we notice that we have left it.

But for that, it is necessary, in a conscious act of will, to choose where we want to place our attention and, facing all the beeps and flashing lights of the world, to return there always.

After all, if Doisneau could turn around, walk two blocks, and ask two strangers to kiss again inside a fruit cart, then we can set aside our electronic rectangles and return our attention to the friend who left home to see us.

Distraction is inevitable: noticing distraction and correcting it is the 17th practice.

We are not our anger

Our emotions, our thoughts, our impulses are like a fire that suddenly arises in the middle of a forest. Some forest fires are more violent, others less. But all of them, if not fed, consume themselves and end up extinguishing. Being present is, instead of feeding thoughts, actively observing the process through which they arise and pass, are born and die, without involving ourselves or clinging to them.

To quiet the body and be fully present does not require emptying our head of thoughts. First of all, because that is an impossible goal. Someone asking us to “not think of an albino tiger” is the most efficient way to guarantee that we will think of an albino tiger. On the other hand, without that request, we could easily go through our entire lives without ever once thinking of an albino tiger. In the same way, trying to “not think” is the most efficient way to guarantee that our mind will be bubbling with thoughts.

Rather, the 17th practice is to observe our thoughts, our emotions, our impulses without clinging to them. In fact, there is no reason to cling: it is in their nature to be impermanent. Just as an itch passes and a fire consumes itself, our thoughts, emotions, impulses also disappear if they are not fed.

Observing our thoughts, our emotions, our impulses without clinging means breaking our identification with them. Now we are no longer people seized by jealousy, but rather people who observe jealousy within ourselves and think:

Hey, look at this jealousy. Really, I'm in the middle of a jealous fit!

If we can observe our jealousy dispassionately, then we are not controlled by it: this jealousy is just one more thing, among so many other things, that happens to us, in the face of which we can decide how to deal with it, how to respond. This jealousy, which before seemed so large and so overwhelming, which dominated our actions and destroyed our peace, which made us rude to our spouse and speak words we regretted later, this jealousy is only a sensation, only a feeling: it is ethereal, it has no substance, it has no reality.

Just as we sit at a sidewalk cafe and observe the people passing by (“look at that skateboarding teenager, look at that ridiculous man, look at that humming street sweeper”), we can also sit anywhere and observe the sensations, thoughts, impulses that pass within us (“look at me getting jealous about my girlfriend's skirt, look at me getting irritated for no reason with my mother”) and not let ourselves be dominated by them. Our irritation with our mother is like the skateboarding teenager: both pass, both do not dominate me, both do not demand that I do anything about them.

We are not our mind dominated by jealousy: we are that corner of our mind observing the jealousy.

We are not this anger, we are not this jealousy, we are not this vanity: these are like trains and we can choose to sit on a bench at the station and observe each one in detail, from the moment they appear tiny on the horizon, follow them growing larger as they approach, feel the displacement of air as they pass us, and watch them receding further and further until they disappear. We have no obligation to board any of these trains: we do not need to be our anger or act angrily simply because we feel anger, but we can simply observe anger arising and disappearing within us, like trains that come and go, without needing to do anything about it.

It is not a matter of discipline, repression, or self-control. Knowing that even our lowest emotions consume themselves, that our worst thoughts end on their own, all we need to do is not consume ourselves along with them, not self-destruct as victims of our anger, not transform ourselves into our own anxiety, not sink while clinging to our jealousy. We can choose which of the two wolves we want to feed.

* * *

Being present and quieting the body does not mean controlling or disciplining, nor even ignoring or transcending, our thoughts, emotions, impulses. Rather, it means experiencing them freely, knowing that we have the freedom to neither approve nor disapprove of them, neither justify nor attack them, neither repress nor reproduce them: we can simply observe them appearing and disappearing within us, without feeling obligated to anything. If they are a bubbling cauldron, we can simply observe them bubble: we do not need to run either to extinguish the fire or to add more wood to it, nor to empty the cauldron, nor to clean up the liquid that spilled on the floor.

Why meditate in a group

We are not chronically distracted people because of our cell phones and the internet. On the contrary, we invented cell phones and the internet, the way they are today, because of our constitutive chronic distraction.

Meditation is not an ancient technique, present in nearly every culture since the beginning of time, because it “solves” a problem that arose in 2007. The Buddha, like you and me, was born into a world where meditation was already ancestral, and one day he too decided to sit, learn, practice. We are, since always and probably forever, maddened, stressed, obsessive little creatures. We meditate because we want to stop being that way.

In a meditation hall, each person is indeed fighting a battle that none of the others knows about. While I am there, struggling with my knees and bargaining with my back, flooded by anxieties and buried by desires, why did she leave me? what will become of my literary career? what will dinner be today?, the people around me are not meditating in perfect peace and cruising speed: they are, with absolute certainty, struggling with their shoulders and bargaining with their diaphragms, flooded by their fears and buried by their compulsions: why does he treat me this way? is that spot benign? what will dinner be today?

I admire people who can meditate on their own. In my life, so that meditation does not become just one more of my many egocentric whims, it needs to be an intrinsically collective activity, so I never forget that my uncontrolled mind is not my problem: our uncontrolled mind is our problem. We are together.

Things that are done

My daily life is full of myself: there are things I want to do and things I do not want to do, people I like to spend time with and people I do not like to spend time with. Everything always revolving around pleasure and displeasure, likes and dislikes, this Self so cultivated, so protected, so pampered. Me, me, me!

The practice of attention, when placed in the category “things I want to do” or “things I like to do,” etc., is already doomed to fail, because soon, on a day of tiredness or frustration that will come sooner or later, it will be placed in the category “things I do not want to do” and will cease to be a practice.

I developed the first attention practices in 2009; I rewrote everything in 2013; I rewrote everything again in 2017; and they are only now being published in book form, in 2019. Why? Because for much of those years, they were in the category “things I like to do,” you know how it is, when I feel like it. They were clever little texts written by me, but with no real impact on my life.

The attention practices only became a habit when I managed to place them in the category “things that are done,” which includes the classics like eating and sleeping, urinating and defecating, but also “being polite and kind to people” and meditating. I do these things not because I want to (God knows I almost never want to be polite and kind to people) and not because I have some concrete goal to achieve (most of the people I am kind and polite to do not know my name and will never see me again), but simply because: because it is what one does. It has nothing to do with me, with my desires, with my pleasures.

* * *

The choice is: either we want to be here, fully inhabiting the present moment that is happening now and that is the ultimate culmination of reality, or we want to be where we have always been, chewing on offenses and savoring desires, never noticing the people around us, eternally orbiting our own, gigantic Selves.

* * * 

Attention is the great commodity of our time. It is constantly contested by large companies, which spread every possible type of advertising before our eyes and count on, and commercialize, the numbers of likes, shares, and pageviews of websites or social media profiles. There is a vast amount of information and stimuli designed to divide our attention from ourselves and, especially, from the other. Yet paradoxically, we live in an age of inattention, doing everything in a shallow way, with a lack of care and tenderness. In this book, zen practitioner Alex Castro examines the different ways we can practice attention, not in pursuit of personal self-development, but to transform it into an instrument of political action. Rather than looking inward in search of self-improvement, the author argues for the necessity of seeing and accepting the other, welcoming and caring for our neighbor. To learn more and read the book, visit this site.

Learn more and follow Alex at alexcastro.com.br.