Do you have Attention Power? From a talk given by E.J. Gold
PART 4
Attention is the key both for our own work and also for the Work itself, because attention is a very good indicator of the essential self. The essential self can do the Work, the machine cannot. And the machine cannot produce attention. It can’t be a source of attention, but it can pay attention.
To notice, to put our attention on something and to not allow anything to impose upon that, just to have attention on that allows the thing to be. It will only be itself if we don’t put anything on it, if we don’t attribute anything to it., if we don’t overlay our own personal and subjective interpretations off what it is supposed to be, if we don’t overcloud it with significance that actually changes its nature. Our perceptions are usually wrong. We need to learn to allow things to be, to experience them as they are-not as we believe them to be.
When we use our attention that way, we will bore a hole through our brain from inside out that will allow us to direct the laser beam of our attention, periodically widening the hole according to the force of our attention.
When we have intrusions, it is usually attributable to a bored mental centrum. It is the same operation that occurs in the brain when we mentally change a repeated word on a tape loop, when we begin to hear words that are not at all on the tape. This effect has been extensively documented by B.F. Skinner and Dr. John Lilly in the course of their separate researches.
Dr. Lilly produced a tape several years ago on which a single word is repeated flawlessly for a very long period of time. The desired effect was produced by a recorded disk loop-a particular type of machine that creates a looping effect. The given word is only spoken once, so we can be assured that we are hearing the same word spoken over and over again.
Listeners will have a variety of reactions to this repetition, but the majority of them are the same. One usually finds that the repeating tape loop forces the mind to create audio hallucinations because, if the mind is deprived of activity, it will create its own. When the brain hears the same word over and over again, even if only for a little while, the mind inevitably becomes very active and starts filling in what it considers to be the gaps.
This famous tape, known as the Cogitate Tape, was used at Esalen in an exercise where the listener would try to see how many different words he could derive from it. It makes one of the most wonderful exercises if one uses it the right way.
First, it can be used to generate all the words we can hear out of it.
There’s some five thousand words that can be heard on that tape. There even exists a spread of the words and the distribution level of each word-how often a particular word will be heard within any given sample group!
There is another much more powerful exercise which this tape affords. Where there is no stimulation the brain provides its own. In other words, if we look at the second hand on a clock for one minute, at first what we will be trying to do is just keep our attention from wandering off the second hand. We will be surprised at how difficult it is to do this! Sixty seconds of simple presence. not even ‘invoked’ presence is very difficult! We’re not even talking about consciousness-just simple awareness.
Now one hour of listening to the Cogitate Tape without translating it into something else is very rare. The mind usually throws in a few of its own quirks. If we get those quirks, this means that those changes in the sound are taking place by association.
We all know the associative function is representative of the functioning of the headbrain. As long as the headbrain is the awareness centrum, as long as the headbrain is that functioning part of ourselves which represents our totality, we will hear changes in the word cogitate. For all practical purposes, the observer is only the headbrain. However, the headbrain is bored and it keeps trying to change things around to make them more interesting.
This exercise is a biofeedback device in the sense that as long as we hear changes in the word cogitate, we know that the headbrain is functioning as the master of the machine. Let’s say that, in listening to this, we’re trying to keep the word the same but it keeps changing, and we get angry and frustrated, who now is the master of the machine?.
If after that we then get up and stalk out of the room.who is the master of the machine?.What about if we go to sleep? The machine conks out, everything goes blank for a moment, then we have another master of the machine. In each case, there is a definite feedback as to who is the master of the machine.