20 July

Les Fehmi researches how we pay attention. He developed a technique called 'Open Focus' which helps people to move out of a common addiction to what he calls 'narrow-objective' focus, where we spend much of our days focused on individual things and activities, in an objective me-and-it sort of way. But he goes further, to show how our entire lives are dominated by this stressful narrow focus, as we accumulate experiences instead of just being. Just being was what religion used to provide for people, and unsurprisingly people are leaving organised religion in droves, and travelling and shopping instead, to accumulate ever more 'experiences'. Fehmi has shown in his clinic how many modern illnesses come from this addiction to narrow focus. "Our culture affirms personal relationships not by common experiences of oneness or union, but by the sharing or reiteration of common objective experiences...People can talk for hours about a football or baseball game, remembering each an every detail...They talk about the objects they've purchased or want to purchase. Or they chat about movies and television shows...We all remember commands like these from childhood and adolescence: "Pay attention to your homework"; "Pay attention to the teacher"; "Stop daydreaming"...What your parents or teacher really meant was that you weren't paying narrow enough attention...that you weren't doing a good enough job of excluding everything else...".