Attention
I have been thinking about the bridge between Clay and Light On the two modes of being — driven by desire or moved by something inexplicable. Read post .
How do we move from one mode to the other? What is the mechanism that shifts us from the heaviness of desire to the weightlessness of grace?
I think the answer is attention.
What are you paying attention to?
Simone Weil, the French philosopher and mystic who died at 34, wrote something that has stayed with me:
Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.
This is a radical claim. Not that attention helps prayer, or prepares you for prayer, but that pure attention is prayer.
When I am in Clay, my attention is fragmented. It jumps from desire to desire, notification to notification. I scroll without purpose. I eat without tasting. I listen without hearing.
When I am in Light, my attention rests. It settles on a single thing and stays there. A conversation. A line of code. The quality of light through a window.
The movement from Clay to Light is, I think, simply this: the gathering of scattered attention.
Weil makes another distinction that feels important. She contrasts attention with will:
We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will. The will only controls a few movements of a few muscles, and these movements are associated with the idea of the change of position of nearby objects.
This is why the Clay and Light On the two modes of being — driven by desire or moved by something inexplicable. Read post feels so exhausting. It is willpower. It is forcing. It is walking slowly with heavy things.
But attention is different. Attention is not forcing anything. It is simply being present to what is.
Attention is consent — Weil writes that attention is bound up with desire—'not with the will but with desire—or more exactly, consent.' We do not force ourselves to attend. We consent to it.
This maps onto the Spiritual Technology On systematized ways of improving character and soul, inspired by Ghazali. Read post that Ghazali describes. Solitude, silence, hunger, sleeplessness—these are not acts of will in the muscular sense. They are ways of creating the conditions for attention. They quiet the noise so we can hear what is already there.
There is something else happening in our age that feels significant.
The attention economy is not a metaphor. It is quite literal. There are billions of dollars being spent to capture and monetize your attention. Algorithms are trained on your behavior to predict what will keep you scrolling. Every notification is engineered for maximum interrupt.
Joshua Hochschild, writing about technology and the soul, puts it starkly:
The age of digital media has unleashed a profoundly threatening human experiment. By drawing us to waste not only our time, but our attention, social media seduces us to waste our souls.
This is not hyperbole. If attention—pure, unmixed attention—is prayer, then fragmented attention is its opposite. It is a kind of spiritual scattering.
The Sufis understood the soul as having stages. The nafs al-ammara—the commanding or tyrannical self—is ruled by impulse and desire. It is pure reaction. The nafs al-mutma’inna—the tranquil self—has found peace. It rests in God.
The journey between these stages is, I think, largely a journey of attention. What you attend to, you become. If you attend to every notification, every scroll, every impulse—you remain in the commanding self. If you can learn to attend to one thing, deeply, for a sustained period—you begin to move.
What is attention for?
Weil offers an answer:
If we turn our mind toward the good, it is impossible that little by little the whole soul will not be attracted thereto in spite of itself.
This is the promise of attention. It is not that we force ourselves to be good through sheer will. It is that we attend to the good, and the soul follows.
This feels true to my experience. When I am in Light, it is rarely because I willed myself there. It is because something caught my attention—a poem, a conversation, a moment of beauty—and I stayed with it. I consented to it. And in that staying, something shifted.
The practice, then, is simple but not easy: to notice where your attention goes, and to gently redirect it. Not through force. Through consent.
To choose what you attend to is, perhaps, the most fundamental spiritual act available to us.
Attention as spiritual technology — Like solitude and silence, attention is a tool for the soul. It is the mechanism by which we move from the lower to the higher self. It is, as Weil says, 'the rarest and purest form of generosity'—generosity toward ourselves, toward others, toward God.
I am trying to attend more. To my breath. To my work. To the people in front of me. To the quiet voice that speaks when I am still.
It is harder than it sounds. The world is very loud.
But I think this is the practice.