Paying Attention: A Case for Contemplative Autonomy

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In 2019 Ben Hunt wrote Part 2 of The Long Now: Make, Protect, Teach. If you haven’t read, you should, because it’s basically “canon law” around here. Ben’s exhortation is to find our own path towards civilization in an increasingly uncivil world, and I hear him regularly in my inner voice: what exactly am I making, protecting, or teaching?

Here’s the part that’s stuck with me, years later though, and it’s not even the point: it’s his introduction:

The only thing you can actually control is whether you accept the terms of the game: refusing ridiculous candidates, refusing ridiculous debts, refusing to sacrifice your autonomy of mind.

This phrase “Autonomy of Mind” has in the last few years become more prevalent in thinky word-nerd circles. Folks use it to mean all sorts of things, but most often I hear it from folks who are “doing their own research” on something like ivermectin or nuclear fusion (to justify a strongly held prior, of course).

“I’m a free thinker,” says the Autonomy-of-Mind robot. “I don’t need experts to tell me what to think.”

Horsefeathers. Call me when you need a tumor removed.

Before Autonomy comes Attention

Part of why I react so negatively to the “do your own research” crowd is because I feel like “it me.” Most of my life and all of my career has been spelunking rabbitholes in that special way only those of us with certain … ahem … neurospicy tendencies really can. So when someone says “I’ve done the research” I immediately want to talk sources. “You’ve done the research on Christian Mystics?” I’ll say. “That’s SO COOL. Tell me about your retreat experiences? What do you think of the whole ‘interior castle vs. monastic discipline’ angle? Have you tried heartbeat-sync-prayer? What’s your Gamma level look like on EEG when you really drop in? What’s your take on Merton?”

At which point nobody wants to talk to me anymore, so I tend to keep to myself a lot.

My problem was never an attention deficit. My problem was attention intention: learning how to focus on what I wanted, or told myself I needed, to focus on.

Why Meditation Sucks

The standard answer for someone looking to “improve their focus” or “calm the mind” or more likely “make the voices stop for a minute” is to take up a meditation practice. 20 minutes, 2 times a day, paying attention to something like your breath, or a candle. I’ve recommended this to countless folks, and myself have maintained a practice of some sort forever, so I get it.

It’s also the wrong answer for many people right now, I fear.

For many people — maybe you — it is unreasonable, in this dopamine-addled, AI-supercompute-in-jeans’-pocket world, to expect someone to go from frantic information overload and decision paralysis at 4:55PM to single-mindedly following their breath just because someone in a robe rang a gong on the YouTube video at 5:15PM.

So don’t. That’s my advice. Don’t grab some awesome guided meditation and expect to “drop in.” It’s like telling someone who’s never run a mile in their life to just “target an easy 3-4 miles a day to get started.” Completely rational long term advice. Dangerous and stupid if you’re out of shape and out of breath right now.

So don’t meditate. Contemplate.

Contemplation: You’d Pay to Know What You Really Think!

Sarcasticult “Church of the Subgenius” spent a lot of time making fun of how little people actually think. But the good news is, you don’t need to pay anyone anything.

The first three instructions are identical to what I tell people starting a traditional meditation or prayer practice:

Space: Quiet is good. Dimly lit isn’t bad. A corner of a bedroom. Your office with the door shut.

Time: Time passes much slower when the mind is focused. Get a pomodoro timer. Try to leave your phone in another room — don’t use it to keep time.

Posture: For years I laughed at the proffered adage from a teacher that “a straight spine builds a clear mind,” but she was so so right. While I can meditate sitting, standing, walking or lying down (sometimes called “the four postures” because Buddhists have a pathological addiction to numbered lists), in each posture the focus is on finishing-school posture: head pulled up on a string, sitsbones or feet or scapula firmly contacting the ground. Something about it forces “alertness.”

And from here, like Frost’s yellow woods, the roads diverge. The well travelled road is to pick an “object” (visual, somatic, or even repetitive words) and hold your attention on it, catching yourself mindwandering and refocusing. That’s basically what all meditation is.

But here, we’re doing something different. We’re going to take that 20 minutes and think. Before you sit, grab a pencil and a pad, and write down what you’re going to think about. I would start with something very simple. Mundane. Even stupid. Better “what do I want for dinner” than “how do I deal with my boss” or “does God exist.”

And here’s the surprisingly hard part. For 20 minutes, that’s all you’re going to think about. When your mind inevitably goes to your coworker’s annoying laugh, that’s mind wandering. Recognize it, and come back to dinner plans. Your internal dialog might go something like:

I mean fish sounds good. I like fish. Fish is healthy for me. But doesn’t some fish have mercury? Maybe I should eat less fish? But wait, that’s not really thinking about what I want for dinner. Why fish? Is it just the health thing? What do I really know about fish, as a nutrient. Also where does the fish from the Price Chopper even come from?

And so on. Sounds insane? Great. Do it anyway. 20 minutes later, you will likely have a much better answer — and know why you have that answer — when your spouse asks you what you want for dinner.

In other words: you will know what you really think, and why.

The Why

The point of this isn’t to discover how much you like Atlantic whitefish. The point of it is to practice sustaining your attention on a single, messy thing for a significant period of time.

Most people I’ve talked to (also me) have a hard time holding firm attention on something that’s not inherently interesting. I can pay attention to a movie, or stay in flow-state while flying an FPV drone, or read a book. But if I’m not inherently interested, my mind will find something better to do. The job here is to recognize the mind wandering away from the task — thinking deeply about one thing — and bring yourself back. (“Wait, I haven’t considered trout yet… how do I really feel about trout?”)

Like any other kind of exercise — or practice — you get better at it over time. Better at thinking only about one thing for 20 solid minutes. That’s the skill you develop, the muscle that gets stronger.

A World of Thinkers

Imagine a world where everyone did some kind of a contemplative practice — phones down, eyes closed, alone, in silence — before making decisions. In a recent Masters in Business interview with Barry Ritholtz, storied investor Seth Klarman described his own analytical process: “I have a lot of ideas and I end up with no opinion.” In the modern world, I see very few people who are consciously separating the “consumption of information” from the “formation of opinion,” to the point when some famous person has the guts to say ‘I don’t know’ in public, it’s shocking.

Directed attention towards ideas allows you to fully explore the things you think you know, vs. the things you believe to be true. And (just like meditation), the more you do it, and thus the better you get at it, the more confident you’ll likely become in how little you know.

In the anonymous Christian mystical text, The Cloud of Unknowing, the author — in fits of religious ecstasy half the time — points this out in no uncertain terms:

Even meditating on God’s love must be put down and covered with a cloud of forgetting. Show your determination next. Let that joyful stirring of love make you resolute, and in its enthusiasm bravely step over meditation and reach up to penetrate the darkness above you.

The point isn’t to know more — it’s to be determined and resolute in our action of contemplation of what we think we know. Rarely do I find I have such knowledge and insight that I have real opinions that I can claim come from my “autonomous mind.”

And that’s OK. It’s awesome actually. Because the real fruit of this kind of practice isn’t perfected knowledge but something much more interesting: if I know with firm conviction what I don’t know, then I know what I get to learn next.