December 17, 2001.
 
 
 

The maximum exercise & enjoyment of those things unique to man
all require one thing  --   his attention.
Activities driven by animal instinct (eating, breathing, sleeping) need no attention;
they automatically tend to themselves,
but everyone understands that to become proficient at chemistry, carpentry, cosmology requires a participant's attention,
but grasping the great secret demands,  attention-to-attention --
an enterprise few men can comprehend.
 

It is clear that to learn anything new you must concentrate your mind:
be attentive to the lesson offered:
to master pole vaulting you must concentrate and hold your physical attention on watching your instructor show you how it is done;
to master mathematics you must concentrate your mental attention on
your teacher’s explanation of the use of abstract symbols;
in either instance, whenever your attention strays from the lesson at hand,
you gain no new information, even though you be there in body,
and with eyeballs aimed in the expected direction.
 

Attention is a most tricky matter,
although everyone believes they understand fully the concept;
it seems quite simple & straightforward;
you give yourself completely to the observing of a specific something;
either watching a human body in motion (broad jumping, pirouetting,
putting up sheet rock),
or to the motion caused in your own mind by your verbally following what
another mind says (lessons in physics, history, politics).
 

Everything even tenuously related to the above examples
is readily apparent and understood by all;
man’s survival instincts cannot be educated –
they need no additional instructions in what they do,
it is only in that neural activity he calls his mind that men need to be taught,
and about this, there is no sane dispute.
But there are born on this planet, amongst the routine herd of humanity,
a few people with a hunger for information about a matter which
no one has ever satisfactorily identified (explained by the fact that it cannot be);
they stumble about seeking instructions --  not in any physical activity,
which can be learnt through mechanical imitation,
and not, as they quickly discover,
in any of the recognized intellectual, academic activities.
Initial verbal encounter with the certain social studies leads them to
think otherwise: that in Psychology, Sociology, Political Science, Theology,
History, et al, will be the answer to the unnamed question that bedevils them,
but they are soon disabused, and with nowhere apparently to look.
 

There is however a place to look, but near impossible to see, that is:
it is almost impossible to see that this is where you should look;
it is not a problem that involves what it IS that you will see when you look “there” –
but one of the mind not being readily capable of grasping where it is that
it should BE looking.
This is why the few – disparate in their frustration --  are so susceptible to the idea of Hidden Knowledge, or that the information they need exists only
on the other side of the world from wherever they happen to be;
it is understandable --  but impuissant.
 
 

If you want to learn to do somersaults,
you are attentive to your body and physical surroundings;
it you want to learn calculus,
you are mentally attentive to the abstract concepts being described,
but if you want to learn what-is-going-on,
you must be attentive to attention  --  so insistently that
one day the egg will crack of its own accord and it is suddenly --  Omelet Time In Dixie.
 
 

                                                       J