Lesson One: Attention Gives Energy

Move your hand deliberately. Did you need to think to move your hand?

Asking this question to yourself is inquiry. What you discover from your own inquiry becomes the treasure of your experience. In this example, you’re unlocking one of the essential understandings of how you function: your hand movement comes from pure attention, not from thinking.

Energy might not be the perfect word, but for now let’s say your attention gives energy to things. The more consistent your attention, the more energy you give.

Your attention is linked to your awareness. You look with your attention and you become aware of what you see. The more you look with attention, the more you see. If you’re open with attention, your awareness receives from that openness.

In the space we exist from—atoms, and everything else that emerges from this space—there is a variety of objects giving us a variety of experiences. You are aware of your relative position in that space through how you use your attention.

We will explore what thoughts are later, but for now, consider a thought as another object that your attention can give energy to. A thought emerges just like any other object you see—simply in different form. From the point of view of the quantum field, the boundary between a thought, your hand, and a book might be meaningless. They are essentially the same, just in slightly different form.

Back to your lesson: your attention gives energy to things. If you want clarity on this, inquire until it sinks in—or until you can say it’s not true.

Let’s look at the dimensions of attention. Moving one’s hand up and down deliberately is short and simple. We’ve experienced it so many times. Easy squeezy!

But what if you had to operate on a brain? The hand movements might be fine, but the attention would need to be razor sharp. A person who leads surgical operations on the brain has spent about 30,000 hours giving attention to that space before taking on that level of responsibility.

Here’s a hypothetical example to deepen your inquiry: be neutral and picture a person who spends most of their free attention on thoughts throughout the day. Was it 60,000 thoughts per day that the Cleveland Clinic estimates? Where is that attention going? Be indifferent to the content—just notice the action.

The action is attention to an object. If the object is a thought, and a person spends most of the day giving energy to that object, then they are professionals at giving attention to thoughts.

Put A and B together, and you get the picture.

There is no secret to doing what you want and doing it well. Become aware of where your attention goes. If you want to do something, be great at it, and enjoy it fully, then give consistent attention to the thing itself—not to the thoughts about it.

Lesson One is now Known.