Understanding Attention

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Humans love control, but the mind and emotions are wild things which, by definition, are out of your control.

Meditation is used to tame the mind, but its true aim is observing it as one would an animal in the wild.

Allow and embrace the untamed nature of mind and emotions rather than trying to suppress or transcend it.

In The African Queen, Katharine Hepburn upbraids Humphrey Bogart by telling him that “Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.”

Not surprisingly, Hepburn’s character is a missionary, and as such holds dear a belief congenital to Western religion that spiritual life should take us up and out from nature, that it’s the antidote to our instincts and emotions, our animal wants and sensual passions.

But the term “human nature” admits that the two are inextricably entwined. We’re a subset of the larger category called Nature, which isn’t out there somewhere, or left behind in the past, or, as Hepburn’s character would have it, beneath us. It’s in us, body and mind. “Our instincts, our motives, our biology, our basic needs, our struggles over status, resources, attachments—pure animal,” says Diane Ackerman in A Natural History of the Senses.

That pure animal's brain spent 99 percent of its developmental time in the wild kingdom—and wild things are, by definition, those we don’t control—but we never seem to tire of trying to control it, which often makes us feel like little more than a baby on the back of an elephant.

For example, one of our favorite spiritual techniques for trying to tame our wild minds is meditation, but even meditation itself has a wild origin. It arose among hunting cultures in the Himalayan foothills as a direct descendant of the stilling and centering tactics essential to all hunters, animal and human, and it aims not for control but........

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