Attention and Intention

Attention is closely related to intention. Intention includes some of the meanings of will, volition, aim, and purpose. Such words point to an aspect of consciousness that can’t be completely represented by a single concept or cluster of related concepts. Attempts to do so is like trying to walk across a quicksand pit. “Once the whole is divided, the parts need names…. Knowing when to stop averts trouble.” [Tao te Ching, translated by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English, Vintage Books, 1972]

According to the Buddhists, an action doesn’t influence future states of consciousness unless it is intentional. Such intentional action became known as karma,.

If I’m walking in my garden, for example, and I accidentally step on a snail and kill it, this action is not karmic. However, if I see the snail (that is, if it becomes an object of my attention), and I step on it “on purpose”, as we usually say, the action is karmic, that is, its influence propagates like a wave into future states of consciousness. Buddhists believe we will meet with the effects of this action again in a kind of moral or ethical version of Newton’s Third Law of Motion: “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Or as the popular version puts it: "What goes around, comes around."

The situation is more complicated than that described by the laws of motion, however. What if the snail in question had been injured already and appeared to be trapped in a hopeless state of suffering, and my intention in stepping on it was merciful? Should our concern be for the bare facts of what happened (physically and biologically) as a result of the action? Or is the intent of the action the matter of concern?

I was confronted with these questions once when I was walking through Jackson Square in front of St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans. There on the burning hot sidewalk in the hundred-degree heat was a baby pigeon with no feathers who had fallen from its nest high on the wall of the cathedral. It was dehydrated, infected with pox, and severely wounded by the fall. To make matters worse, it was being devoured alive by fire ants. Its condition was clearly terminal and hopeless. All that remained was senseless suffering. I knocked the ants off, put it into a paper bag that I found lying nearby, and took it home. There I gave it water. It drank and drank and drank. Then I bathed it, and when this precious little morsel of life had relaxed and fallen asleep, I killed it. Intentionally. With tears in my eyes.  And with the hope that its passing had been quick and painless. It had suffered enough for several lifetimes.

So you see, intention is a profound phenomenon. It’s like a portal into a multidimensional world of motives and emotions that co-exists in parallel to the world of sensory perception. In the world of sensory perception, where attention operates, two events may appear to be identical (man steps on snail and kills it). But they may be entirely different in the world of intention, emotion,  and motivation. And yet attention and intention are inseparable aspects of a single event. We usually make our judgments about things from the external appearances. But we have recognized for many centuries that intention must also be considered, "As a man thinks in his heart, so is he," [Proverbs 23:7]

Some people think that meditation involves paying attention without having any intentions involved in the process. I have serious doubts that's possible. One may enter a trance state in which attention may be present and intention may not be apparent. But my guess is that intention is still hiding in there somewhere. But if it is possible to separate attention from intention, I doubt that the resulting state of consciousness would be a functional one. In the ordinary states of awareness that are required for survival, I believe attention and intention are inseparable.

That intention is impossible apart from attention seems self-evident to me. I saw many people walk by the little pigeon in Jackson Square without noticing it at all. They had no intention with respect to the little bird because they paid no attention to it. Many of these people probably were aware of the bird at a deep level of consciousness. But they were victims of what Harry Stack Sullivan called “selective inattention”. The sight was too disturbing for them to allow themselves to notice it. In any case, it’s easy to see that intention cannot occur apart from attention.

It’s taken me longer to see that attention does not occur apart from intention. Intention is what directs attention. If attention is the car, intention is the driver. I'm not sure if Sullivan thought inattention is always selective, but I do. And if inattention is selective, then attention certainly is too. And the selection process is directed and controlled by our intentions. And these intentions are shaped by our values -- by what is important to us.

If this post has seemed a bit of a rough ride to you so far, my apologies. And hold on to your hat. We have one last little bump coming up. While intentions are certainly shaped by our values, this happens because of  the emotions aroused by those values in response to the objects of our attention. The complication is that those emotions are in turn influenced by our intentions. And not only that. The intentions and feelings that arise in response to what we are noticing (the objects of our attention in the world of sensory perception) feedback and influence what it is that we actually perceive when we notice something!

So when I said in the post just before this one that meditation is not so much about what we pay attention to as it is about how we pay attention, I was talking about those streams of intention and emotion that run alongside of or within the world of attention. In meditation, we not only look outward at the objects of attention in the world of sensory perception, but also inward at that world of emotion and intention that is directing our attention. That’s why we call meditation mindful awareness. Mindful awareness is complete awareness – the whole picture. It’s a transcendent state of mind – and I use the word transcendent in this context simply to mean something beyond what words can express. And it’s utterly impossible for full awareness to occur in its most profound manifestation apart from that state of intention and emotion that St. Paul called agape in 1 Cor 13 and which I called “boundless unconditional love” in the first post of this blog. Such a state of boundless love is in the Buddhist tradition named by the Pali word metta.