Divided Attention, please!
- smcculley
- Nov 26, 2023
- 3 min read
Divided Attention, please!
Many of us have been instructed and urged to give a project or an activity our undivided attention either at school, at our jobs, at home or while participating in sports, etc. In contrast, in the Fourth Way we work directly toward a state of awareness called divided attention. The act of dividing attention is not dependent upon external circumstances and, therefore, anything external that I am doing can be adorned with the awareness of myself. As an example, I sit writing at my computer and at the same time I am aware of my moving center typing, aware of my intellectual center assembling my thoughts and choosing words to express those thoughts, aware of my emotional center trying to share these ancient ideas in an inspiring way with readers and noticing that my instinctive center is quite satisfied after a delicious meal. In its simplest form, divided attention is concurrently splitting one’s awareness between oneself and something else.
Our Facebook Fourth Way Glossary states that Divided Attention is “a state in which one is aware of oneself and at the same time remains aware of an external object or event. Divided attention may begin with a realization that one is not Being Present. Divided Attention is the same as Self-Remembering; it does not mean multi-tasking. One may also employ the technique of making the effort to divide attention as a means of reaching Presence.”
Divided attention has been described as an arrow pointing in two directions and is not an end in and of itself. Connecting to the Law of Three, Rodney Collin observed that “it is much more possible for [attention] to be divided into three.” He describes the two-pointed arrow, but in addition a third point where “he must remember that himself and the situation both stand in the presence of higher powers.” Collin uses the example of being aware of a tree, aware of oneself and aware of the sun as the third point shining down upon both. Returning to my own example, I sit writing aware of myself, aware of typing and a higher awareness of feeling blessed to have found a conscious school. Sometimes this effort has extraordinary effects and sometimes it seems very ordinary without flashes of insight. However, the slow, deliberate accumulation of energy we gain as we reside in higher states begins to affect every part of one’s being.
Self-awareness through divided attention is the kernel of consciousness which can grow into self-remembering more frequently, more deeply and with longer duration of attaining higher states of consciousness. Along the path of enlightenment, divided attention is a tool that leads to self-remembering or presence and eventually to a permanent connection to higher centers and self-transcendence. Rodney Collin says “the practice of self-remembering or division of attention is connected with the attempt to produce a certain phenomenon, the birth of consciousness in oneself.”
In the following excerpt, from the “Bhagavad Gita” you may hear in Krishna’s counsel to Arjuna a similarity to the state of divided attention and the goal of higher states of consciousness:
“I will teach you about the state called the eternal, the absolute, which those who strive toward me enter desireless, freed from attachments … keeping the attention in the heart, drawing the breath to the forehead, with the mind absorbed.” At a further point, Arjuna is told “Just as the sun by itself illumines the entire world, so the field owner illumines everything in the field. He whose inner eye sees how the Knower is distinct from the field, and how men are set free from Nature, arrives at the highest state.”
As an exercise, try dividing your attention while listening [2:21 minutes] to Johann Sebastian Bach’s Prelude in C Minor, BWV 999 performed by David Tayler on the archlute.
Krishna Holding Mount Govardhan, Mola Ram, 1790
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