Sovereignty, Attention, Identification

I use the word “sovereignty” in a special, personal, technical sense to mean being centered, being attentively detached, ready for action, prepared, but above the fray. I’ve mentioned it on this blog before in the context of contemplation (link), saying that successful practice of contemplation produces a “feeling of sovereignty” in me. I’m not troubled by anything. In that state my troubles haven’t magically vanished—but they are spatially below me and cannot reach me.

This feeling is closely linked with attention—and is the very opposite of identification. A good example of identification in its raw but easily detectable form is watching my favorite baseball team, the Tigers, struggling. It’s the bottom of the ninth, the Yankees are at bat. The score is 3 to 2 in our favor. The bases are loaded. Two outs. The count is full, three balls, two strikes. I am a seething mass of the worst possible tensions. Sovereignty? Attention? Neither. I am a total slave of my lower being which is absolutely identified with the outcome of this game. But identification need not take this form. It tends to be our normal state. We’re just going with the flow, as the saying has it. And any little thing, arriving unseen from the edges of awareness—somebody’s statement, the telephone ringing, anything at all—can put me in a rage or a delight. Nobody at home, it turns out. To rise up from this state of waking sleep is, in a way, exactly like waking from a dream. There is a moment’s pause.

Genuine spontaneity—the admired kind, what pleases us when we behold it in the arts or in sports—arises from a fusion of sovereignty, thus presence, and attention—but in the midst of an action. The artist or the athlete is highly trained, disciplined, practiced, and alert. His or her attention is on the job at hand. And all those deliberate actions of training, study, practice, self-control, and so on have prepared the actor to act in a pure unity of intention, skill, and execution when events, unfolding with great rapidity, require instant reaction.

Identification is the ordinary state. Combating its sway is the banal but efficacious way of trying to become human. The spacesuits we now wear in this dimension—with which we are very, very identified—make the continuous achievement of sovereignty virtually impossible. But our ultimate well-being requires that we go there as often as we are lucky enough to remember to do so.