Wide Attention
Given all this, how can you make a connection be-tween this vast world within and mundane reality? How can you avoid the danger of spiritual narcissism, whereby you become so fascinated by the inner world that the outer world no longer holds out interest? Part of Glyn’s answer to this question lay in observation. As the twentieth-century spiritual teacher G.I. Gurdjieff pointed out, we pass our daily lives in a kind of waking trance. We walk down the street barely seeing what is before our eyes, enraptured by a sometimes pleasing, something frightening, sometimes bor-ing sequence of thoughts, images, and emotions that swallow up our attention. We perceive many things but observe very few. If there is to be some connection between the inner and the outer world, it has to be through a conscious effort at awareness. While I have written more than once in this magazine about Gurdjieff’s teachings about self-remember-ing and self-observation, there is a correlated practice that
takes this approach one step further. Glyn called it “wide attention.”
His own powers of observation were remarkable. At one point I was in a residential course that had been set up under his auspices, but which he did not, for the most part, attend. This course was on some country property. At one point a friend of mine took me aside and said, “Don’t tell anyone,
but there’s a tree over there that has some plums that are just about ripe.” It was our little secret (although I gathered that it was one that had circulated with considerable freedom among the participants). At a certain point Glyn turned up to teach a class. He sat himself down on an ottoman in the large room that served as a classroom, looked out the win-dow, saw the tree, and said, “Plums! Got to get me some of those before I go.” He zeroed in at once on an item of interest that I had totally failed to notice until someone told me about it.
Essentially, wide observation is nothing more than expanding the scope of your senses to take in the fullness of the setting, whether this is the view out of a window of a country house or a cluttered little office. Say you are in a room. Normally we are only aware of two or three items in our view – per-haps fewer than that. But what if your consciousness expanded to fill the entire scene of your experience at any given time? Again, we all have this capac-ity to a degree. It is why practically everyone can sense the atmosphere of a place, whether it imparts a serene calm or a gut-wrenching dread. But we are usually aware of such things only in acute circumstances, and we neglect this capacity when we are in more neutral settings.
One way of developing this sense of “wide attention” would be to sense the four corners of the room you are in, not only with your sight, but with a kind of sense of touch that is able, with a little training, to extend itself outward and fill a space. You can take this sense of observation further to include the view from the windows outside, and the smells and sounds in the vicinity. This is “wide attention.”
If you maintain this awareness of the room’s corners – say by imagining a column of light in each one – you can not only expand your own consciousness but change the room’s atmosphere. While most people affect their environs in this way to some degree, it is usually only unconsciously and haphazardly. Great sages seem to have this capacity un-der conscious control. They can change the mood of a room simply by an act of will. Other, more saintly types exude a sense of peace and well-being from themselves at all times. They have made such contact with their own depths that beneficent forces flow from them more or less automatically. But that is an advanced stage.
All of which raises the issue of power. And by “power” I mean something fairly specific. It may be best described by an example. Charles R. Tetworth, who also works within the native British magical tradition, writes:The most effective magic that I have observed was per-formed by a group of people who were sitting around in an ordinary room, in an odd assortment of chairs, wear-ing ordinary clothes and chattering as usual. Then they just stopped smoking, drinking tea, and chatting. The leader reminded them why they were there, checked the roles each was to fulfil and then, without apparent evocation or invocation, proceeded with the matter. To me, as an observer, the atmosphere in the room became electric. It felt as though danger was present. In the course of time, I happened to attend a seminar on a comparatively abstruse branch of morphology and – whether or not this was a coincidence – one of the speakers talked about the very matter that the magical group had attempted to bring into consciousness.
Another British magus, Aleister Crowley, defined magic as “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with will.” One could add that this “Science and Art” involves the use of power – the “electric” atmosphere in the room during the ritual that was so powerful as to pos-sess a sense of danger.
From even this short discussion it should be obvious that power and attention are closely related. Perhaps at some level they are identical. In any event, power is, under ordi-nary circumstances, fairly diffuse. It is only when the will and the attention have been trained that it can be directed in
the intense, “electric” way that a magical ritual requires.
Training this attention can take a number of forms. With meditation and observation, we have already seen two of these forms. But there is another way that one can become proficient in the use of power and attention. It is through craft.
takes this approach one step further. Glyn called it “wide attention.”
His own powers of observation were remarkable. At one point I was in a residential course that had been set up under his auspices, but which he did not, for the most part, attend. This course was on some country property. At one point a friend of mine took me aside and said, “Don’t tell anyone,
but there’s a tree over there that has some plums that are just about ripe.” It was our little secret (although I gathered that it was one that had circulated with considerable freedom among the participants). At a certain point Glyn turned up to teach a class. He sat himself down on an ottoman in the large room that served as a classroom, looked out the win-dow, saw the tree, and said, “Plums! Got to get me some of those before I go.” He zeroed in at once on an item of interest that I had totally failed to notice until someone told me about it.
Essentially, wide observation is nothing more than expanding the scope of your senses to take in the fullness of the setting, whether this is the view out of a window of a country house or a cluttered little office. Say you are in a room. Normally we are only aware of two or three items in our view – per-haps fewer than that. But what if your consciousness expanded to fill the entire scene of your experience at any given time? Again, we all have this capac-ity to a degree. It is why practically everyone can sense the atmosphere of a place, whether it imparts a serene calm or a gut-wrenching dread. But we are usually aware of such things only in acute circumstances, and we neglect this capacity when we are in more neutral settings.
One way of developing this sense of “wide attention” would be to sense the four corners of the room you are in, not only with your sight, but with a kind of sense of touch that is able, with a little training, to extend itself outward and fill a space. You can take this sense of observation further to include the view from the windows outside, and the smells and sounds in the vicinity. This is “wide attention.”
If you maintain this awareness of the room’s corners – say by imagining a column of light in each one – you can not only expand your own consciousness but change the room’s atmosphere. While most people affect their environs in this way to some degree, it is usually only unconsciously and haphazardly. Great sages seem to have this capacity un-der conscious control. They can change the mood of a room simply by an act of will. Other, more saintly types exude a sense of peace and well-being from themselves at all times. They have made such contact with their own depths that beneficent forces flow from them more or less automatically. But that is an advanced stage.
All of which raises the issue of power. And by “power” I mean something fairly specific. It may be best described by an example. Charles R. Tetworth, who also works within the native British magical tradition, writes:The most effective magic that I have observed was per-formed by a group of people who were sitting around in an ordinary room, in an odd assortment of chairs, wear-ing ordinary clothes and chattering as usual. Then they just stopped smoking, drinking tea, and chatting. The leader reminded them why they were there, checked the roles each was to fulfil and then, without apparent evocation or invocation, proceeded with the matter. To me, as an observer, the atmosphere in the room became electric. It felt as though danger was present. In the course of time, I happened to attend a seminar on a comparatively abstruse branch of morphology and – whether or not this was a coincidence – one of the speakers talked about the very matter that the magical group had attempted to bring into consciousness.
Another British magus, Aleister Crowley, defined magic as “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with will.” One could add that this “Science and Art” involves the use of power – the “electric” atmosphere in the room during the ritual that was so powerful as to pos-sess a sense of danger.
From even this short discussion it should be obvious that power and attention are closely related. Perhaps at some level they are identical. In any event, power is, under ordi-nary circumstances, fairly diffuse. It is only when the will and the attention have been trained that it can be directed in
the intense, “electric” way that a magical ritual requires.
Training this attention can take a number of forms. With meditation and observation, we have already seen two of these forms. But there is another way that one can become proficient in the use of power and attention. It is through craft.
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