James H. Austin
More books by James H. Austin…
“Ordinary man to Zen Master Ikkyu: ‘‘Master, please write the maxims exemplifying the highest wisdom.’’ Ikkyu immediately writes the ideogram ‘‘Attention,’’ with his brush. The man asks, ‘‘Will you please add something more?’’ Ikkyu now writes, twice: ‘‘Attention. Attention.’’ The man remarks, with an edge, ‘‘There’s really not much depth or subtlety here.’’ Ikkyu then writes the same ideogram three times: ‘‘Attention. Attention. Attention.’’ The man now demands: ‘‘What does that word ‘Attention’ mean, anyway?’’ Ikkyu replies: ‘‘Attention means attention.”
― On the Varieties of Attention: A BIT of Selfless Insight
― On the Varieties of Attention: A BIT of Selfless Insight
“Perceiving Clearly The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will. William James (1842-1910) Can we trust what we perceive? William James pointed to another attribute of attention: it helped augment the ‘‘clearness of all that we perceive or conceive.”
― On the Varieties of Attention: A BIT of Selfless Insight
― On the Varieties of Attention: A BIT of Selfless Insight
“Attention is malleable. We can intensify it, shift it either voluntarily or involuntarily. We can soften it, diffuse it. We can deploy global attention toward tangible external objects, or to their intangible attributes. We can direct attention internally to retrieve items that we have stored in memory. We can sustain attention by infusing a component of motivation, either from the top-down (by intention) or by much more subtler means related to our habitual ongoing attitudes.”
― On the Varieties of Attention: A BIT of Selfless Insight
― On the Varieties of Attention: A BIT of Selfless Insight
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