This is Evert Taube, troubadour whose songs have been widely sung since he wrote them on his travels by sea around the world in the 20s and 30s and later. Taube could capture the beauty of the moment, even when marked by hardship. One of my favorites goes like this: Så länge skutan kan gå, så länge hjärtat kan slå, så länge solen den glittrar i böljorna blå – as long as the ship is sailing, as long as your heart is beating, as long as the sun glitters in the blue waves. It is about remembering to enjoy life while it lasts, even in moments of suffering, to see the light that is always within reach.
Taube is for me an example of an artist who was deliberate in how he attended to the world around him, and how he expressed his experience. Whether he described a tragic death aboard a brig in full storm or a woman flirting from a window in Havana, his stories capture a shimmering quality in every person he depicts.
So what does Taube have to do with the self and attention? In psychosynthesis, how we attend to the world determines how we make meaning of it and how we experience it. In that sense, it is a vital part of self-inquiry. With William James’ words: our experience is what we agree to attend to.
Now, how we attend is a choice that will depend on what contents of consciousness and what subpersonalities we are identified with. And the quality of our attention will also impact the world we encounter. McGilchrist, in his book The Matter with Things, puts it like this:
”Attention changes the world. How you attend to it changes what it is you find there. What you find then governs the kind of attention you will think it appropriate to pay in the future. And so it is that the world you recognize (which will not be exactly the same as my world) is “firmed up” — and brought into being.
When we disidentify from the contents of our consciousness (Experience#1), we are implicitly nurturing the core, unattached experience of our self – the observing center in us which can know any part of our conscious experience firsthand. We become aware of this ”personal self” when all the drama of our life calms, and we begin to discern a constant unattached presence in us.
I have come to particularly appreciate the description of the I (another name for the personal self) as the ”center of awareness and will.” It is not a thing or a place, it has no features, yet the personal self enables me to attend to the external world, that is distinct from that which I call myself. As we shall see later, the will is also always present in the personal self, seeding our response to the world. Together, the continuous process of attending and willing offers my conscious self a sense of coherence over time. And this presence is independent of the contents of consciousness. I once heard a priest refer to this calm inner presence as a ”cantus firmus” which we can experience beneath the noise of everyday life, when there is enough inner silence.
Discovering and nourishing the self is made possible through the practice of disidentification. The more in touch we are with the self in its unattached essence, the more able we are to choose what we attend to. For Taube, his way of attending brought us songs that speak in a direct way to the heart and the beauty of this Earth.
For McGilchrist, this is in fact the essential personal choice:
The choice we make of how we dispose our consciousness is the ultimate creative act: it renders the world what it is. It is, therefore, a moral act: it has consequences.
Source of inspiration:
McGilchrist, Iain: ”The Matter with Things” (2021)
William James The Principles of Psychology (1890)
Jean-Paul Sartre: ”L’être et le Néant” (1976)
Anna Thurdin Hedblad, founder Paxsum AB