Attention to Being and to the Mind

Attention, the mind’s dynamic aspect, determines and creates the world in which any being’s activity and self-knowledge take place. At the same time, although in a broad sense Magi call the mind a system’s general ability to single out its aspects as objects for interaction, the focus of that mind, its attention, is usually directed at the products of description, rather than the process of describing.

In other words, by fixing attention on interacting energy patterns, the mind usually perceives only the final stage of description – as if a momentary snapshot forms – that is, the image of the object. The mind becomes habitually trained to operate this way – and as a result a person lives among objects, among static forms; the flow from one into another completely escapes attention or is viewed as insignificant.

This strange one-sidedness of perception is very convenient for the parasite of the mind – for, wandering among forms, the mind becomes unaccustomed to perceiving the stream of life and therefore does not notice its own energy fluctuations, outflows and losses of energy.

Any perception of an object is assembled from the movement of attention over its separate properties, which are then summed into an overall picture – an image. For example, when a person arrives in another city, in reality they perceive the walls of houses, facades and shop windows, the faces of people met in the streets, the trunks of trees and the asphalt or paving of streets. And often all of this slips from their attention, which concentrates instead on large-scale images connected, for example, with the purpose of visiting the city, the “sights” or other major objects.

Such functioning of the mind rests on its capacity to generalize – unquestionably a very valuable and useful ability, yet, when developed one-sidedly, easily turning into a distractor.

By the way, this very feature of the mind is used by tour guides, who draw attention to particular objects or historical facts while breaking the continuous flow of perception. It seems to the person that it is “interesting”, but in fact it becomes a substitute for living experience and direct perception, by a succession of separate images, sometimes loosely connected to the mind’s flow, which becomes fragmented, loses its unity, and therefore loses energy.

Harmonious development of the mind requires balanced attention to both objects, the products of description, and to the process of awareness itself.

If the focus of attention shifts from static, successive pictures – images – to the very flow of awareness, the stream of ideas, then we say the mind shifts from focusing on Being to focusing on itself – that is, from the Macrocosm to the Psychocosmos.

Put another way, if the mind begins to focus on the individual qualities of energy passing through it, and on its reactions to those qualities, it turns its gaze from the object to the subject of perception.

By tracking which ideas in this stream are dictated by the properties of the object at which attention is directed (whether that object appears “internal” or “external” in relation to the mind), and which are imposed to reduce the effectiveness of the process of awareness, one can discover the sources of energy loss, and thus increase the harmony and efficiency of awareness.

A simple example – people often do not notice nearby objects’ energy, simply because their mind is occupied with other properties. If, for example, a person sees a tree, then in reality they perceive the color and texture of the bark, the color and shape of the leaves, defects and branchings of the trunk, and so on, and besides that, they always perceive the characteristic energy of that tree. But as a result of the habit of focusing on being, an image arises in the mind instead, ‘an oak,’ for example, and the person says: “this is an oak; it has solid wood and will make good firewood” (or something of that sort). The living stream of perception is replaced by the static image of “oak”, filling the mind, and displacing from it everything considered “unimportant” by habit – all that is magical and wondrous, all that is living and immediate.

For a Magus it is very important to shift one’s focus from perceiving whole objects to the process of perceiving and describing, and back, from the Macrocosm to the Psychocosmos, and only in such equilibrium does the mind begin to work at full capacity, reducing energy dispersion and increasing its efficiency.