Wise Attention – The Root of Well-being (English)

In our time, we are increasingly using our attention in ways that deepen a sense of lack and disconnection and stoke the internal fires of craving, aversion, division, and delusion. Twenty-five hundred years ago, under very different societal and technological conditions, the Buddha suggested that each of us author a declaration of independence for our own minds and that we begin by paying attention to how we pay attention. He demonstrated through mindfulness, clear seeing, sustained inquiry and intuitive insight, that we can liberate our attention from being captured, driven, and shaped by craving, aversion, and delusion and incline our minds in ways that support greater connection, creativity, spaciousness, wisdom, love, and liberation.

The term wise attention, Yoniso Manasikara (Pali), has two layers of meaning, relating both to what we choose to pay attention to (the content of experience) and how we pay attention. With wise attention we attend to objects that support an increase in wholesome states and a decrease in unwholesome states, and we attend in such a way as to see more clearly the nature of these objects, their impermanence, ungraspableness, conditionality, and selflessness.

The counterpart to wise attention is unwise attention, Ayoniso Manasikara. Unwise attention involves attending to objects that bring unhappiness, stress or suffering to oneself and others and/or attending in such a way as to not perceive the nature of the objects of attention. With unwise attention we perceive what we experience to be permanent, and as being or belonging to self.

In this six-week practice online class we will bring mindfulness and clear seeing to our personal patterns of wise and unwise attention, explore how our discoveries relate to the core of the Buddha's teaching, and deepen our inquiry through sharing and dialogue.