Aaron McNaught

What is Awakened Attention?

But what happens when you begin to question this way of being? What happens when you begin to look at your Life with clarity and precision? What happens when the mind stops moving, you allow yourself to become still, and connect with the bare actuality of your Life? What happens then?

You are living in an increasingly complex world. You are faced with decisions every moment while being bombarded with information. Combine this with your familial, financial, cultural, recreational, and social demands, and the pressure can be detrimental. One of the most common results of your attempts to meet these expectations is an increase in the amount of time you spend in your own mind, thinking, imagining, analyzing, remembering, planning, hoping, and regretting. This would not be such a problem were it not for the severity of the situation.

We as human being have become compulsive ‘thinkers’, ‘thought junkies’ mesmerized by our own mental chatter and emotional dramas that seldom have anything to do with reality. To put it quite simply, we do not use our minds; we are lost in our minds. This is the dis-ease of our modern times, and nearly everyone has it.

When we are lost in our minds, we are vulnerable to:

• Mental and emotional reactivity (anger/violence/abuse)
• Addiction (drug/alcohol/sex)
• Stress (anxiety/guilt/fear)
• Low self-esteem (negative self-talk/pessimism/apathy)
• Lost relationships (poor communications/reactivity/carelessness)
• Ineffectiveness (lack of clarity/lack of concentration/poor decision making/carelessness)

There are many words used to describe an individual that suffers from the effects of attending to compulsive mental activity: Asleep, lost, dreaming, autopilot, hypnotized, and robotic to list a few of the kinder ones. The more technically correct term is ‘unconscious’. Unconscious means ‘lacking in awareness’, and it is this ‘lacking in awareness’ that can be traced to the roots of much of the worlds confusion, fear and suffering. We lack the ability to attend to our present situation with awareness and clarity, here and now, free of the useless habitual mental activity outlined above. Instead, we are immersed in our own mental activity, lost in inner chatter, opinions, beliefs, misinterpretations, analysis, and judgments. We live in a fantasyland made up of thoughts, memories, self-talk, fantasy, and imaginings. This is the Human Condition, north and south, east and west.

While I have no wish to completely vilify the mind and ignore the enormous benefits humanity drives from mental activity, the long-term effects of these subtle and debilitating forms of suffering I’ve outlined above are enormous and far-reaching. But ...

But what happens when you begin to question this way of being? What happens when you begin to look at your Life with clarity and precision? What happens when the mind stops moving, you allow yourself to become still, and connect with the bare actuality of your Life? What happens then? These questions are my deepest interest, and it is my greatest gift to be able to assist you to explore these questions, as well as their implications to your Life. It is my understanding that nothing can make a bigger difference in this world than remedying the unconsciousness of which I describe. It is also my understanding that Waking Up (increased consciousness) is a prerequisite to ALL other efforts toward change, healing, and growth.

Awakened Attention is:

• Intensely energetic and alert, never lost in experience.
• Aware of what’s happening, without becoming over-involved, over-invested or over-reactive.
• A remedy for the unnecessary suffering outlined above.
• Immediate and responsive, fluid and spontaneous, open and alive!
• Awake to Life as it’s unfolding, right this moment NOW!.  

www.wakinguptolife.com

Article Tags: Outlined Above

Source: Free Articles from ArticlesFactory.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR