Day 243 - The Responsibility of Self-Attention

"The solution of attention I present to you is the focused specificity application of yourself as who you are in every moment as every breath. "

While I was walking through my DIP lesson this month, there was a section on attention that I found to be very relevant to what I'm walking through right now. It's so simple and yet so profound.

It's all too often that I allow attention diversions to take me away from my breath, my being here, my presence of and within the moment. Silly distractions even. One my guilty indulgences is this game called Subway Surfers. One of it's main features is that it's "highly addictive." It's also a time sink that I don't really want anyone to know about. Hidden and shameful....nice. SO, I blog about it because it's what has come up.

source

I could go into excuses and justifications why I continually allow myself to play this game, but the key point is that it's one of the major attention diversions in my life. I probably won't even be writing about it if I had somehow decided to open the app while I was watching the Solution of Attention video interview. It was much like a window of opportunity to see myself and finally take responsibility for what I am accepting and allowing in this context. There is one other video game app that I like to play, but I'll address that in another post.

Which leads me to a noteworthy side point: selective self-responsibility. Oh, how I react to that concept! Like what the hell am I doing. Okay, breathe.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to to become frustrated with myself for what I have been allowing myself to exist as and participate in.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to get angry that I do not act within the common sense of what is best for all.

I compromise myself through repetitive allowance of attention diversion. It's bullshit. It's shameful. And this is where SF come in. Breathe..

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to, for a long time, continue to participate in the video game because I want to have lots of virtual coins. Why? I want the purchasing power, even if it is only within the game. Oh man, there is something else going on here.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to be greedy and filled with desire to have lots of (virtual/not real) money.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to believe that I will have real satisfaction from unlocking something new. This is a primary additive point for most video games.

Now, why is this (guilty) indulgence something that I must stop? It's who I am within it. I reduced myself to a simplified, zombie state. Motivated by a transient/null reward, I play it every day so I can get the "super mystery box" each time I play. The consequence of letting this play out, unchecked, unmoderated, unfettered, automatically, is an accumulation of lost time, time that I will never get back. And this is vital time. I am walking my process. Don't I want to be as effective as I can be? YES! I do.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to become angry with myself for relinquishing my attention.

I commit myself to to patiently and consistently work myself back to here by investigating these long running patterns of lost time where I have allowed an attention diversion and deliberately not investigate it.

I'll continue tomorrow with more detailed SF on Self-Attention. For now, If you are curious about the video interview I was watching, I am happy to inform you that it's publicly available here: The Solution of Attention

:)