Recognition

Thoughts

The first step in reclaiming our sovereignty over ourselves is to understand our thoughts – where they come from, and how little the vast majority of them really mean.

Most thoughts are automatic. They are products of our conditioning and programming. It is very easy to identify with a thought – to not just own it as yours, but to identify with it as yourself. When I was battling depression, there were thoughts in my head all the time, like these: “No one loves you. How could they?” “No one will ever care about you. You’re not worth it.” (In 2017, I custom-ordered a t-shirt to very literally label myself as such: “not worth it,” in all lower-case, of course). “You’re a burden.” I struggle with all of these same thoughts to this day, though far less often than before.

It is important to acknowledge that thoughts occur to you, and that you are not defined by your thoughts. The first step towards more attunement to consciousness is to observe and be aware of the array of thoughts in your mind, without identifying with any of them. Some mindfulness practices explicitly teach this technique: notice your thought, acknowledge that it exists. Maybe even thank it for its input. And then let it float right past.

Non-attachment to any given thought is the first step on the path to increased attunement to consciousness, since no thought actually comes from pure consciousness – recall the experience of the meditators from Chapter 3. Pure consciousness is a thought-free state. Thoughts simply happen in our brains, and like the weather outside, they pass.

Selective Attention

There are many thoughts, coming in on many “channels.” These channels aren’t literal, but the idea of a channel may be useful in properly compartmentalizing thoughts. You can, with practice, choose where to put your attention – choose which channels you want to hear. The prominent philosopher and psychologist William James put it succinctly: “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” This short sentence captures an important element of this step on the attunement path: agreement.

Your thoughts are enticing you to engage. Engaging with them is an agreement of sorts. Evan Thompson echoes and amplifies this in his excellent work, Waking, Dreaming, Being: attention shapes continuity of self. The “self” is not a static thing – we have all experienced changes in our identity over time. But the thread that holds this together, what makes us feel ourselves, is attention.²²

Attention, too, risks being automatically allocated. Peter Cathcart Wason, a psychologist in the 1960s, devised a clever experiment that demonstrated this readily. He gave subjects a three number sequence, “2-4-6,” and asked them to come up with their own new sequence that conformed to the rule that governed the original one – while keeping the original rule hidden from them. The most common answer would be to assume the rule was to increase by 2, so “1-3-5” or “10-12-14” would be typical. But it didn’t end there. Participants would get feedback and keep going until they guessed the actual rule, which was simply, “three numbers in increasing order.”²³

Without conscious effort, though, we make whatever assumption occurs to us most easily, and then what we see what we want to see in the information we ingest that supports our original thesis. As it happens, this was the underlying problem I have had to deal with in my battle with depression and feelings of worthlessness: I have had this assumption, so I not only focus on evidence that supports it, but I naturally tune into this channel more than is helpful to me. It is only with intentional effort that I can overcome this tendency in myself. Sadly, society mirrors me in this way, and it is the cause of a huge portion of our problems today. The good news is that, while subtle, this is easily addressed.

Our programming is inherently lazy – and I mean this as a compliment: we are wired to be as lazy as possible, so that we can conserve energy for hard things that may come later. By implication, we stick to our current understanding, unless something really makes us move from it. Usually, that’s a profound personal experience. So, imagine Bob learned from his parents that Indian people are bad; Bob will generally pay attention to information (whether fact or opinion) that supports this ingrained view. But if Bob has a profound personal experience—let’s say that an Indian woman saves his life, at great cost to herself—there may be a shift of perspective. But, outside of that profound experience, these beliefs may well persist indefinitely, ignoring all evidence that does not powerfully contradict.

Modern culture has seized hard on this weakness in our design. Social networking platforms exploit our preference for echo chambers that tell us what we want to hear. They also exploit our biochemistry to hijack our attention. Tristan Harris, a former Google design ethicist, argues that this exploitation is deliberate.²⁴ I am here to say, of course it is. The tech that we interact with most consists of social media, search engines and algorithms that either recommend or select things for us to see or buy.

Slot machines in casinos were an earlier instance of this exploit. You don’t know if or when the reward will come, so you keep coming back for more. This taps into dopaminergic reward-seeking – satisfying a primal craving – not any conscious decision you make. Social validation, via likes, comments, shares, appeal to our need to belong. Remember, we are social animals who have been subjected to continual isolation – within our own skills and interests, from our communities, and from our pasts and futures.

These apps also remove any natural stopping point. They’re specifically engaged to keep you there, so why would they ever stop showing you new content? And their algorithms prey on some of the strongest, but lowest, emotions that humans can experience – fear and anger. They promote content that is inflammatory and extreme, because it drives engagement. They are hacking our operating system, and it’s working.

Harris puts it well, again: “We’ve moved from a tools-based tech environment to a persuasion-based environment, where your attention is the product.” ²⁵ And here, Thompson is again helpful: “Attention isn’t just shaped by the brain or body—it’s shaped by culture. What we pay attention to, and how we understand what we experience, are structured by cultural practices and institutions. This is cultural entrainment.”²⁶

Our short-termist economic reward system has efficiently led the companies to which some of our brightest minds have devoted themselves to attack and exploit features of our inborn nature – most notably, the need to be connected and our biochemical reward systems – to generate profit by selling us goods and services. All of this mental firepower and compute cycles and energy devoted to one profoundly banal cause: buy more stuff. It’s disgusting to me – is it also for you?

We each, as individuals, control where we put our attention, nonetheless. We’re swimming upstream in doing so, but still, these decisions belong to us, not to Amazon, Netflix, Google, Facebook, Apple, or TikTok.

One of the best ways I know of to train this muscle of selecting objects of attention is meditation. Turning again to neuroscience, Tang, Holzel and Posner found, in a review of other studies, that focused-attention (FA) techniques train the brain to sustain attention on a chosen subject, and to redirect it when distracted. They also found that open-monitoring (OM) techniques train the mind on a meta level, to be aware of whatever arises, without reacting or attaching to it.²⁷

Long term meditation is associated with increased gray matter density in the parts of the pre-frontal cortex that are critical for top-down control over where attention is placed (specifically as opposed to those places driven by impulse and habit).²⁸ Even short bursts of 5 days of 20-minute meditation sessions in such practices had measurable attentional and functional benefits in brain networks.²⁹

To me, this is both daunting and encouraging, like the tiny seed of a giant tree. Something so small and subtle as where you agree to place your mind’s attention has such profound downstream effects. And it’s not terribly difficult to cultivate more agency in this regard. Thompson points out helpfully that it is awareness itself that creates the space between impulse and response. This pause, in turn, makes the space for volition to be possible.³⁰

Before we move on to intentions, it is worth highlighting a couple of fairly standard concepts from psychological techniques. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) trains patients to observe thoughts without fusing with them – as if watching the clouds, rather than getting pulled into the storm.³¹ And Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) also hinges on attention: noticing the thought that arises and asking oneself if this is the only perspective available in this situation.³²

You can see the parallels. Directing attention, tuning the dial, accepting information consciously, is a foundational step in the evolution from being driven by flawed automatic reactions to having agency over yourself. Selecting where to direct your attention is the first lever of volition. When we know how to aim it, we can start to think about where and why. That’s where intention comes in.