The Art of Attention; Our Relationship to Wars; Announcements

Welcome to the October 2023 edition of The Nothing Newsletter!

Come as you are! Greetings from my heart to yours. Here we are free to be without?expectations, judgements, or biases. This month, I write about the Art of Attention, Our relationship to war, and some announcements.

The Art of Attention

What is attention? Is it mindfulness? Is it awareness? Attention to something means attend-ing: Let’s do a little activity:

You open a book to read it, after a few moments, you get distracted by the buzzing of your cell phone. Do you:

1/ Address your distraction (I’ll come back to the book, later)

2/ Address your distraction and then feel guilty about it (I should have been reading the book)

3/ Force yourself to stay focused on the book (even though you want to check your phone)

Which did you choose?

There is another option: Observe the fact that you are distracted. That is you are “attend-ing” to the fact that you are distracted, and hence, attention. The moment you say, “Oh, I am distracted, now I must go back to not being distracted”, then there is an action away from attention. Stay attend-ing.

I once talked to a group of young students and there was a girl who was staring out the window. The teacher in the room yelled at her to “Pay Attention”, but I said no wait! She is paying attention, but to what? I asked the girl and she tentatively told me there was a spider on the window making a web. I said go on looking. Stay with your curiosity.

The teacher pulled me aside later and told me I was being irresponsible. That I had no clue what “discipline” is and that is what the teacher was trying to instill. Discipline, or diciplina in Italian is related to learning. Not the kind of learning that has to do with copying a system, or conformity. Learning can only come with a certain sensitivity; when there is a certain freedom. Then, the love for learning is born. But the teacher was not convinced and that’s okay.

We spend most of our day thinking about something, whether it is planning what to cook, solving a problem at work, deciding when to pick up the kids, and so forth. That thinking occurs from your memory, that is, from knowledge, and experience attained in the past. And the content of this thinking is unique to each of us. This processing of thinking is what we do most of the day for which thought, operating from a center has produced. Therefore, if you are observing from a center, that is, there is a separate “me” doing the watching, or giving someone else attention, then thought lives and processes all of our biases, opinions, and views based on traditions, belief systems, and so forth thanks to the center! As long as this is happening, there is no attention because we are caught in the movement of thought. Can one observe, and be attentive, without the center? That is, without any movement, so that there is no resistance and no path or goal or reason for the meditation.

Now, let’s bring in our senses. In attention, there is also sight and sound. Listening to the waves on a beach. Listening to the birds. Hearing the beautiful sound of a human voice. Watching a beautiful sunset. Looking into your mother’s eyes or the eyes of another person. These are done without interpretation. One may put words to them to describe them but the moment you do you are no longer attending. Did you grasp “it”?

Have you ever looked at a blooming flower without labeling it in any way? That is, you see the flower for what it is, silently. Silently meaning you don’t describe it in your head with a color, how successful it is compared to the other flowers, when it's going to wither, what it's capable of and not, what it did yesterday. Just look at it for what it is.

Now replace the blooming flower with your spouse, parent, child, or boss – whichever you feel you have a strained relationship with and re-read that last paragraph again. Look without the noise of the past - past meaning the memory of that person. What are you learning from this freshness as you do this?

Active Listening is Rarely Done Properly

So, can see now that attention is not concentration? Concentration is when you focus all of your thought on something. This means you are restricting other thoughts from entering that space. You are narrowing down on something and suppressing other thoughts from interfering with what you are concentrating on.

Often in mindfulness classes, we ask people to “actively” listen but the “active” we impose on them is one of thought - not freedom.

Therefore this active is nothing but a game of concentration which we played at school. You ask one child to whisper a sentence into another child’s ear, and that child in-turn whispers to another, until the final child restates the sentence to the teacher.

When talking to another human being, put concentration aside and bring in pure awareness (where you are not bringing in the past) and then there is this thing called attention! Some people call this active listening but the difference is you are not suppressing thoughts and opinions, but completely attending to what the other person is saying, communicating, and portraying. You are not busy trying to remember things “in order to” repeat them. But in attention, there is no thought operating from a center that is projecting my thought to be actively listening. I am not forcing myself to focus on the what the other person is saying, rather I am approaching the conversation in meditation – with the freedom to look and listen.

…extracted from the book, “Nothing Changes the World”.

AVAILABLE ON AMAZON, KOBO, and Google Books.

www.nothingchangestheworld.com

PS: The audiobook version is now in production and is due for release in November

If Love Really Existed In This World, There Would Be No Wars

Once again, this is a very challenging time for humanity. Whilst many people turn inward for peace and tranquility, we must not lose touch with the relationship we have with each other. This is the key in bringing peace to the world - no outside organization has been successful in doing so as far as time has existed. They may have brought peace to one part of the world, but it has never lasted. But if you can make a little bit of time, step back and you will see the reasons for this: nationalism - division of countries, division of races, division of religions, division of society, etc. All of these ideas that humans have created have caused immense conflict and we are all deeply buried in them. Society can not give us peace - whether we live in Japan, Australia, Germany, or otherwise. The society in which we live is created by us, our ancestors whom held tight beliefs and control over traditions, ways of living, etc which are in conflict to another society's way of living, traditions, etc. As long as we live in a society, no matter what its structure, rules, school systems, and so on, we are responsible for it. And the fact is, societies are divided, causing corruption, violence, cruelty, etc.

Can we recognize that we are the society. Each of us have created and continue to create this world in which terrible wars occur, acts of brutality that are unimaginable by love and since we have such brutality, love does not exist in this world. We are responsible for each despicable act of violence that occurs whether it is happening on your street or on the other side of the planet. Until we humans - that is each and every one of us - can transform ourselves, we will continue to go on destroying each others.

But so few of us see the relationship to this because it's not affecting us directly. It is a simple fact to say that we live on one planet, but to understand this seems to be something left only to the philosophers or what they call "great thinkers" on this earth. Is it because we have been so well-trained to express individuality? After all, that is what they train us to do in school. Our culture, our country, our beliefs, our experiences all make up who we think we are as individuals. It’s also what we promote at work - respect everyone’s uniqueness. But isn't it this individuality that is psychologically dividing us from each other?

Many of us have twisted the meaning of freedom to think one is free to do what they like, which in none other than acts of self satisfaction. But is this freedom? The freedom to live freely is the most beautiful form of living - but with wars hovering over us, we are certainly not free.

So what are we to do? Form another community or organization, anti-war groups, peace activists... we have tried all of these. The problem is that if we recognize that we are divided outwardly, and we recognize that we are divided intrinsically, too, we will see how we bring about this conflict and suffering in the entire world. That is, we are outwardly violent, as we are inwardly. How can we bring about a peaceful world if one is not peaceful in oneself? If one is not free? But there is a danger in this question, because one is always moving towards an answer, outwardly. We never make the time to understand the inner - why do we live in division, which is the cause of pain, suffering, conflict and we don't seem to let it bother us unless it’s ugliness presents itself directly to us. Instead, we indulge in cultivating beautiful things such as love and compassion from a source which has absolutely no understanding of what it is to begin with. It thinks it knows what compassion is, and so it creates an image of that and tries to create that image. And, can one cultivate self-love before one can give it to another? Or is there a way to look at it without the separate inner and then the outer happens? If one can take the time to see the relationship between the inner and outer, one also understands the mirror of relationship with which we see ourselves. So begin to understand by understanding ourselves - each one of us - and see what we are. From there, we will change the consciousness of the inner and outer.

[From the "Nothing Blog"]

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Updates from the “Nothing Blog”

Gab is on a break for the moment attending to family matters. A few articles were published recently at the Nothing Blog:

Can Artificial Intelligence by Built with Compassion: Enlightened AI

The Healing Beauty of Silence in Life and Death

Is Prayer A Waste Of Time And Energy?

Invite me for a Workplace Dialogue!

Is your workplace culture serious about enabling an environment where staff thrive in creativity, well-being, happiness, teamwork? Explore if the “Art of Nothing” can help you foster an environment where people thrive at work. If you’d like to explore a workplace dialogue with Gab for 45, 60, or 90 minutes talk and Q/A sessions at your premises (or online), contact us below!

Warning: this is not “surface-level” learning. It deep dives in the core challenges at work to help you understand how to create a potential shift to totally transform your workplace culture into a deeper human-centric passion-driven inspired culture. Themes are based around the ART OF NOTHING . Available dialogues are:

1.? Relationships at Work

2.? Unconscious and conscious biases, Equality

3.? Workplace and Individual Wellbeing

4.? Happiness at Work

5.? Creating an Inspired Workplace

For more information or to consider booking a dialogue, please click the button below:

?Introduce Dialogues at Work for Your Company??

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Announcement: Website renewal, Premium Members Area to be dissolved

Over the next few months, the art-of-nothing.com website will be upgraded to a faster and more user-friendly experience that can foster online courses. I’m excited to be working on this in the next few months! It also means the current members premium area will be made redundant. Articles in the premium blog will be available to the general public in the near future!

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New Video: You are the light you seek!

A new video was created on the art of nothing youtube channel. Please click here to view it. It is produced from a poem written by Gab Ciminelli called, "The Earth Speaks". It there a way to live in peace where life and love is in abundance? There is a moment where you are not separate from what is. Where thought does not cloud what you are.

Stay Safe!

Thank you for taking the time to read this month’s newsletter! In the kind time, be well and from my heart to yours, as one, thank you!

Love and light,

Gab

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Silent Leadership Institute, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan

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