Notes on the First and Second Attentions
BY ANTERO ALLI
The development of a certain quality of attention remains crux to paratheatre's purpose of regenerating the ritual of theatre and of restoring the sense of its originating culture. This quality of attention is not that awareness commonly called "attention" which is linked to language, the machine of thinking and the automatic assignment of labels and meaning (refered to hereafter as the "first attention"). There is a second attention not linking to language, thinking and/or words but to presence, energy and phenomena. The first attention looks but cannot see; the second attention only sees. Most people know the feeling of being looked at; far fewer know the feeling of truly being seen. Or of seeing. Both attentions are important and necessary for differing reasons.
The underlying purpose of the first attention is survival, to figure out how to stay alive. The underlying purpose of the second attention is creativity, of directly engaging and working with the autonomous forces of creation. These two attentions can function separately and/or together with differing consequences. By itself, the first attention fixates awareness in survival issues -- such as security, status, analysis and problem solving, community needs -- with minimal access to the "post-survival" dynamic processes of creation. In electrical terms, when the second attention acts in isolation it behaves like a live wire without a ground wire; the forces of creation are engaged but sputter, disperse and fail to manifest intention in the world of time, space and knowledge. Both are necessary for the awareness and expression of our totality.
In much of the educational systems of western civilization, the first attention has gained powerful a priori status over the second attention thus, greatly inflating its sense of importance. This inflation has resulted in a mental tyranny over the body/psyche by the mechanism producing too much thinking. This quandary is further complicated by the compulsion towards non-stop comparisons compulsively associating this image with that, or that system with this one, etc. etc. Too much thinking turns the psyche into a tool for the intellect, rather than the psyche using intellect as a tool; something becomes a tool when it can be put down after its use.
Our social and public education systems have sanctioned over-thinking. Without cultivating second attention, the psyche remains tyrannized by the banal agendas of the mundane intellect and is doomed to repeat problems created by the very mechanistic mindset trying to solve them. This type of excessive mental activity expresses first attention out of control; nervous monkey mind. Those waking up to this problem can begin restoring perspective and context to our thinking by learning to cultivate the second attention. The second attention can be cultivated by relaxing the search for meaning. This can be experienced by relaxing the tendency to project and/or assume meaning onto whatever is perceived, in lieu of direct perception of the phenomena.
This can also be occur by dropping labels through an agreement to experience the world without naming what you are experiencing. The second attention functions more as intuition than intellect, though intellect can learn to follow its cues once humbled (enlightened) into a more receptive role. Intellect can be humbled after any authentic experience and encounter with the objective reality of unity -- the ineffable indivisibility of life itself -- and the realization (not merely the conceptual understanding) that duality expresses an arbitrary mental construct, rather than any ultimate reality. The suddenly humbled intellect usually reacts in one of two ways:
1) FEAR; intellect contracts into further explanations, justifications and defenses to maintain its delusional (and now paranoid) separatist position. The intellect as tyrant goes mad. Intellectual fundamentalism follows as the mental constructs of projection, assumption and preconception are fortified by blind certitude, the power of belief and finally, stone cold dogma.
2) LOVE; intellect is inspired into a devotional relationship with truth. In doing so, intellect becomes a more refined and flexible servant to the languaging of direct perceptions. The intellect as a Scribe to Life itself. Intellectual enlightenment follows as the innate meanings of experience unfold and are favored over previously outdated preconceptions, assumptions and prejudices.
The education of the first and second attentions turns into wisdom when both can work together. To review, the first attention is primarily attached to the day-to-day concerns of maintaining your survival, solving problems, and making sense of things by automatically assigning labels and meaning to experience. The second attention is primarily linked to presences, energies and phenomena and makes the experience and awareness of ritual, or cosmic, time possible. As these two attentions recognize each other and find ways to interact and work together, a kind of bridge is built, a bridge between worlds.
excerpted from
STATE OF EMERGENCE: Part Five
a paratheatre manifesto by Antero Alli
