The Elephant Inside the Attention

Squeezed inside the tight packed stuff of the Mountain i.e. ALL OF EXISTENCE, things are going to look and sound pretty foggy. In fact the fog is so dense, our only way through is by that thread (you know, the one the princess gave to the hero to navigate the labyrinth) —a lifeline of such whispy striation we fear it will slip from our fingers so we tighten tighten tighten our grip with such quaking intensity, the fog appears to vanish and we believe we have become lucid having condensed beyond the fog, our precious thread a dormant memory tension taking its place and thus becoming our ruler. ‘Quality of perception’ here becomes a different kind of circumstance. Pressure, anxiety, stress—none preclude possessing this. They can offer us ‘clarity’ on a plate with such clean presentation, our Attention becomes wholly engrossed by its promise that comes with a very serious condition: that Attention continues its tensing, riveting its gaze into a quality of perception that supplants all room for movement. ‘Clarity’ can wear anything now that fits inside this casket. It is easy to take for granted a certain clarity of expectation when we are so used to that very clarity telling us what to expect. With Attention so absorbed in its tensing, its focus now so fixed succored in those plushy IMAX seats as ‘clarity’ plunges our nerves into a spellbound obedience barely aware of its reach for the popcorn… The Sky Inside the Mountain. Whose sky are we so transfixed by? And inside whose fortress of a maze? It is simply worth the questioning, because the distance we think we keep is nearer than our need for breath. What is the Sky Inside? The reality of this absent distance. The horizons are indeed infinite, but hardly indefinite terrain every inch filled with intimate intelligence just waiting for the tension to allay, to be seen and known for what it is: wild vitality, wisdom of the ages pathways of longing life that may be forgotten but not lost in fact they are all right here, as clear as any day we welcome them into. Which is the fundamental challenge, because we cannot do it all at once, and as is the common approach when faced with a mountain of chaos is we pick and choose our favourites and find ways to disown the rest. But it does not work that way either. What is the Sky Inside? “The Rest.” And it tends to be the best of us, something we only notice when our foundations begin to split. And no wonder! When we finally concede venturing inside to meet the fog, we encounter a hurricane instead because WILD VITALITY was left on its own to sow the relationship with our brains. So it is going to be tricky to make sense of things. Visibility at such close range requires the use of our more delicate faculties that when caught inside a hurricane either became refugees inside the tension or were swept away with the storm. There are strategies for recovering each, but all require Attention getting over itself first, be the leader it needs to be and learn to rely on the team. Which is where our work begins. We have seen this next story too: the hero must gather his ramshackle band of scattered misfits so together they can fight the foe. Except who or what is this foe? The hurricane? No. As every decent plot reveals, the enemy is always somebody we already know… a finer feeling-turned frozen heart that capitulated to the cold. But the betrayal here is a misnomer; a chip on culture’s shoulder revelling in a collective catharsis for the sake of ancient injury we all lost the plot to… Hence the mammoth theatre to shock our nerves into continued firing. Our nerves! As in the same fragmented faculties, hurricane fugitives, ramshackle misfits and frozen finer feelings we must retrieve into our breast not as a warband, but our thread through our fog of fear that only clears when Attention is willing to join it. What is inside this Clarity You so greatly covet? We hear the deliberate whisper. Recalling the answer from our studies, we issue the ready reply: Clarity requires transparency, an empty medium ...and we presume this just appears? We presume it bestows the end? What is the Sky Inside? A hall of mirrors. And the Mountain? The mirrors themselves. And Clarity? A soft, clean cloth in Attention’s relaxed, firm hold… We have to do this work for ourselves, which does not mean we do it alone. ~