Our work, in terms of reclaiming our right as human beings to be in relationship with what we choose to be in relationship with, begins with being able to see that we suffer because choices are made for us. And it's an unnecessary suffering.
If we could learn to reclaim our attention and develop it sufficiently, it would improve our relationship with the experiences of our life. As we are now, the mind produces thoughts about what's happening in the moment that capture our attention, and then our automated responses to those self-created images make us miserable. Our awareness of these mechanical reactions and their origin would allow us to take back our attention.
There are natural places where our attention must be instinctually directed in order to protect and preserve the body. But the rest of the time our attention is not intended to be placed on whatever the mind wants to place it! We have the capacity to choose what our attention goes to. In the moment of a worry or a fear, we have the ability to come awake and attend to our understanding that the fear isn't real, even though it feels that way. Instead of being captured by a negative state, we can remain aware of it. We can give our attention to the awareness of the psychological condition instead of letting the psychological condition define us through the way it resists itself.
In order for us to grow spiritually, we must have this kind of conscious attention. We must remember to connect ourselves with -- and attend to -- what reveals us to ourselves, to what allows us to realize there is a broader, more whole life than our worried, fearful, resistant nature. We must lend an ear, lend our eyes -- lend our sensory apparatus -- to being in the present moment instead of being possessed by what the moment claims our attention for.
Eventually, when we reach a certain stage interiorly, we realize that the possibility has always existed for us to place our attention -- and therefore our experience of life -- on what we choose. To place our attention on what we choose doesn't mean that we resist or refuse what has come to claim our attention. In fact, it wouldn't even dawn on us to re-place our attention if it weren't first for the awareness that our attention was connected to something that was punishing us and putting us in conflict. So the aim is not to become something but to discover something.
Presently something calls for us and claims our attention, and then tries to direct us to discover what it wants us to based on our resistance to the moment produced by our misplaced attention. Then we're not really discovering anything -- we're just confirming the fear we feel. We're defined by whatever our negative attention has clung to that keeps us captive.
If we can gradually come to embrace the miracle of making personal discoveries, we would stand on the threshold of a completely different order of creative existence. We would start to understand that if we can choose, then there is no moment in which we couldn't be making new, healing discoveries about ourselves and our life.
Every day we can begin to discover something new about our lives through the proper use of attention. And this doesn't mean seeing just light and bright things. It also means seeing things that are dark or false in us by the grace of placing our attention on the light and rightness that reveals us to ourselves.
By working diligently to reclaim our attention, we awaken a love of what is true -- a living trust that life is balanced and just -- and a fearlessness born of realizing that there is no end to the discoveries that we can make about attention.
Key Lesson 
