Attention. Nothing is more important than attention. I make progress with love when and only if I pay attention. I don't hold with any kind of religion, Zen Buddhism included, but I treasure wisdom wherever I find it:
When Master Ikkyū was asked what the most profound teaching of Zen was he replied “Attention.” When asked for more elaboration and commentary on that teaching he replied “Attention. Attention. Attention. What else is there?” The questioner grew angrier and asked “Well what is attention anyway?” “Attention is attention” was his profound, quiet reply [source].
I read that story in the lake house in Tallahassee and it stuck with me. I didn't know what attention meant back then, so it didn't do me any good at the time, but I knew it was an important clue, like the simple pleasure to being.
What draws my attention? I spent most of my life simply letting my attention be drawn to anything that commanded it. That's normal and natural for a child, and for me it was often a wonderful thing. Leela arranged for me to have moments of spontaneous presence; that's a good way for a child to make progress with love. It's slow and reliable. Most of the time my attention was drawn the usual way: squirrel! But once I got a little older and learned how to talk and then to read, my head filled up with words and I began to let my attention be drawn to the endless banal chatter of my thinking, mostly ignoring the world around me. When I started trying to practice formal meditation, I discovered I was unable to stop that endless chatter, and unable to ignore it. No matter how hard I tried to be quiet inside and meditate, the mental noise went on, and my attention went to the noise. I was completely unable to intentionally pay attention to whatever I was supposed to pay it to, according to the teachings regarding meditation. I was a failure at meditating. I just couldn't pay attention, period. Turns out I was attempting the impossible. Inner silence is a gift from Leela. Not something I could earn or work my way into.
Mental noise. When I woke up from my cannabis glut I heard nothing inside but glorious silence for a long moment. Then I was overtaken by intense psychological pain caused by the residue of the high dose cannabis Leela used to wake me up. In the year that followed I made friends with silence as the cannabis gradually depurated out. Silence is Leela's voice in me. Before that night my head was always filled with the ceaseless chatter of thinking. If Leela's voice was there it was drowned out by all my noisy thinking. Mental noise—my internal monolog—has always been the main barrier to paying attention. Any time I turn to Leela and let the voices fade away I can find my way back to the sweet sound of silence.
Paying attention is a conscious act: being intentionally present with whatever I'm doing so I can receive the wisdom of that moment. Consciously paying attention is my one step that opens the door for god to take a hundred steps toward me. Progress with love is what happens when I pay conscious attention to everything going on, inside me and out. It has taken me an uncountable number of lifetimes to begin to get that. When I was a child I didn't know how to pay conscious attention. But I made a little bit of progress anyway, just the right amount for a child. I was able to do that because Leela put me into situations where my attention would be drawn the right way. She did that for me, way back in the 1950s, because in 2006 I would wake up a little, beginning a process of surrendering to Leela that's still going strong. My future success has blessed my past all through this life. Even the serious mistakes I've made have helped me along.