The Paradoxical Effects of Attentiveness

Abstract

[...]what begins as a method for controlling attention gradually becomes established as a condition or state of being in which the practitioner remains calm and focused in all circumstances.9 Although attentiveness was much more than a strategy for controlling attention, this spiritual method did involve (at least initially) a systematic and disciplined effort at attention management. [...]as far as suppressive strategies can be seen as the embodiment of beliefs about need to control thoughts, which themselves derive from changing social ideas of self-control, suppression is a psychological process that can be identified and studied by historians and anthropologists.77 By talking about suppression rather than repression, therefore, we are in a better position to study the intricate, often paradoxical, relationship between desire and resistance. [...]whereas scholarly discussions of attentiveness in ancient philosophy and early monastic spirituality have concentrated on one aspect of this spiritual method, namely concentration-the exercise of focusing the thoughts on the present moment, on death, on the remembrance of God, and so on-the above discussion suggests that a more complete analysis of this practice should also include the complementary attentional process of suppression.78 Concentration on the thought of God, let us keep in mind, also requires (at least initially) the concomitant endeavor to rid the mind of sinful or otherwise mundane thoughts. According to the Attentional Control Theory put forward by Eysenck and Calvo, anxiety produces increased susceptibility to mental control failures because anxiety consumes attentional resources. According to Maureen Flynn, until the late middle ages blasphemy had been regarded by church authorities as immoral and condemned as a grave sin, and it is only in this period that theologians began to recognize a variety of unintentional impulses motivating human behavior in Taming Anger's Daughters: New Treatment for Emotional Problems in Renaissance Spain, Renaissance Quarterly 51 (1998): 864-86, at 877.