WEEK 7: PRIMARY SATISFACTIONS - ATTENTION, PRESENCE, CONNECTION

“Time.. is eternity in disguise.” - Abraham Joshua Heschel

Last week we talked about how time is the necessary ingredient to embrace our emotions and our experience of life. "Progress," being on the clock, and perfectionism prevent you from just "staying" and savoring our humanness.

Researchers say that we say the equivalent of 4000 words to ourselves every minute. Sixteen hours a day, for every day of your life, you are being talked at by your mental chatter. We spend half of that living in the past or the future, projecting back and forth. When we attach negative feelings to it, that constant chatter is called rumination (past) and worry (future). When we attach positive feelings to it, that constant chatter is called nostalgia (past) and fantasy/hope (future).

Do you spend half your waking life ruminating, worrying, nostalgizing, and fantasizing/hoping?

This week we talk about the antidote: staying in the ever-present now with attention, presence, and connection. Not surprisingly, it's the stuff most of you said was your primary satisfaction. It's almost like your soul instinctively knew the cure for the ails of capitalism and the life of the ego. But how we we carve out the time to live in attention, presence, and connection? This week, we talk about the Jewish idea of keeping Sabbath

Remember the Sabbath day

As many of you know, the Fourth Commandment of the Bible is to "remember the Sabbath and keep it holy." You can read more of traditional Sabbath practices here but I'll pull out a few quotes:

- "Shabbat is a day of feasting: we eat every day, but on Shabbat, we eat more elaborately and in a more leisurely fashion." ("When all of you is there, you will know. When all of you is present, the banquet will begin.” - Richard Rohr)

- "In modern America, we take the five-day work-week so much for granted that we forget what a radical concept a day of rest was in ancient times. The weekly day of rest has no parallel in any other ancient civilization. In ancient times, leisure was for the wealthy and the ruling classes only, never for the serving or laboring classes. In addition, the very idea of rest each week was unimaginable. The Greeks thought Jews were lazy because we insisted on having a "holiday" every seventh day."

- "By resting on the Shabbat, we are reminded that we are free. But in a more general sense, Shabbat frees us from our weekday concerns, from our deadlines and schedules and commitments. During the week, we are slaves to our jobs, to our creditors, to our need to provide for ourselves; on Shabbat, we are freed from these concerns, much as our ancestors were freed from slavery in Egypt."

“Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath of the Eternal your God.” -Exodus 20:9-10

“This present moment, since it knows neither past nor future, is itself timeless, and that which is timeless is Eternal. Thus the eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.” - Ken Wilber

Keeping Sabbath is a recognition that you're not always supposed to be producing (compare to the American religion of workism and the cult of productivity). We all "know" that producing is something we *do* but not something we are. But how many of us define ourselves via the means of production? "I am a lawyer" "I am a consultant." Defining our being by work is part of the ideology of capitalism. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote that we take a break from the distractions of the world not as a rest to give us more strength to dive back in, but as the climax of living. “The seventh day is a palace in time which we build. It is made of soul, joy and reticence,” he said. In other words, the Sabbath is not a day of rest in order to go back after and be more productive at work, but the prize itself: to stay awake, free, and fully conscious.

Remember Francis Weller in Week 1? Reread this, with the eye towards the rewards of the Sabbath, as opposed to the rewards of capitalism:

"We need to restore, what I call primary satisfaction. The things that we evolved with over hundreds of thousands of years that satisfy the soul at the most basic level; adequate levels of touch, you know, comforting in times of sorrow and loss, celebration and gratitude, gathering food together, eating together under the stars, telling stories around the camp fire, you know, laughing and playfulness together, sensuous erotic connection to the wider world. These are what made us human. But for the most part these things have disappeared. Now, we are left with secondary satisfactions— material goods, seeking power, rank, prestige, addictions— and these things never satisfy the soul."

My parents were Seventh Day Adventist, so growing up, we observed the Sabbath. As a child, it felt like restriction. In retrospect, having a full day of no TV, phone, or radio and just spending time eating, napping, and spending time with friends without the intrusions of work or technology is not punishment, it's a joy. It's attentional hygiene. It's getting rid of the unimportant things for a single day in order to make room for the really important things, i.e. your primary satisfactions. A friend in his 70s described how Sundays in the U.S. used to be in the 1950s: "There was no tv, no cooking. Sunday was a big shutdown. There was no air conditioning, so people used to sit on their porches and neighbors would drop by and visit, leisurely. Nothing to do, no where to go. Your community was your neighborhood. You just existed in communion with God or others."

Nowadays we spend more time alone in our air-conditioned homes (using more and more electricity), communing with capitalism on our electronic devices, occuping our minds with advertisements. Or continuing to work, in order to allay our sense of feeling that we're not enough.

That is why Pastor Wayne Muller insists that we remember the Sabbath was made for us, not us for the Sabbath. By finding a place outside of work, spending, and technology, we enter a wider state of consciousness, a difference sense of time, where we can just be free, independent of the twin attentional demands of capitalism, producing and consuming. In doing so, we find ourselves, wild and feral, stepping to kairos, or spiritual time.

“…And keep it holy”

What are your thoughts of keeping a Sabbath, a self-enforced time of attention, presence, and connection. Recognize that Sabbath was a "socially-enforced cultural ritual." Keeping it holy means making it sacroscant, prioritizing your soul's freedom over everything else, the regular daily demands of capitalism and the ruminating, worrying ego telling you you are not enough.

As a previous student in this course said, "When we make something sacred, when we offer our attention and presence, and when we choose this over the thousands of other choices we may have or over productivity and work, it takes on more meaning." A friend going to rabbinical school told me that on Sabbath, you were allowed to sleep, eat delicious food, spend time with friends, make love, and attune with God. Those sound like primary satisfactions to me. His personal practice was to eliminate electronic devices, driving, spending any money, or working. Those sound like secondary satisfactions to me.

This is the only “assignment” in this course: create your own Sabbath. Make your own palace in time for your deepest desires. Here are some questions to consider and I can't wait to see your responses:

- When can you create your own Sabbath? even if it's only for 5 minutes during your workday or a whole Saturday. or a whole "sabbatical," carve out time where you independent of the chatter of your mind and of the demands of capitalism.

- The holiness comes from the reverence you have for it. What time in your week or day can you make inviolate? Because Sabbath is your “palace of time,” in which you protect your attention, presence, and connection.

- Similarly, how do you "ritualize" something in your life? The difference between a habit and a ritual is that a habit is something you do regularly without consciousness and a ritual is the exact opposite. Rituals are not chores on autopilot; they are miniature celebrations. We don’t engage less, we engage more. How do you bring consciousness to the commitment?

- Who would you want to keep Sabbath with? Remember, the Sabbath is socially-enforced, meaning there is community and accountability. The people you do it with will be as important as the practices you keep. Are they willing to keep Sabbath too?

- What are the practices you want to ritualize to mark the time as sancrosant? Where are the holy places that mark that you're ritualizing the time? By doing so, you are adding internal meaning to both the act and the time.

- Think about what rules you will make: activities you will and will not allow yourself. Go back to your primary satisfactions you wrote about in Week 1. Is your Sabbath about your primary satisfactions and eliminating secondary ones?

Note: I notice from responses from the previous cohort that their constructed Sabbaths are only an hour or two long. The Jewish Sabbath is 25 hours long (start of sundown Friday to end of sundown Saturday). I imagine the *quality* of kairos is so different when it’s 25x longer. How long can you make your Sabbath, to gain more time away from time-devouring chronos?

Attention, presence, and connection make the Sabbath holy and the Sabbath makes time for attention, presence, and connection, the solution to the endless mental chatter about the past and future. It's kairos. It's emotional freedom. Looking forward to your reflections on creating the Sabbath! So looking forward. - warmly, Douglas

BONUS DEVOTIONAL QUOTES:

“You must have a room or a certain hour of the day or so where you do not know what was in the morning paper, where you do not know who your friends are, you don't know what you owe anybody or what they owe you - but a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are, and what you might be.” - Joseph Campbell

“True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation. One’s inner voices become audible” - Wendell Berry

"Attention is the beginning of devotion" - Mary Oliver

“I’ve spent many years learning how to fix life, only to discover at the end of the day that life is not broken. There is a hidden seed of greater wholeness in everyone and everything. We serve life best when we water it and befriend it. When we listen before we act. In befriending life, we do not make things happen according to our own design. We uncover something that is already happening in us and around us and create conditions that enable it. Everything is moving toward its place of wholeness always struggling against odds. Everything has a deep dream of itself and its fulfillment.” - Rabbi Rachel Naomi Remen

“One of the deepest habitual patterns that we have is the feeling that the present moment is not good enough.” - Pema Chodron

“Being here now sounds simple, but these three words contain inner work for a lifetime. To live in the here and now is to have no regrets about the past, no worries or expectations about the future. To be fully present in each moment of existence is to reside in a different state of being, in a timeless moment, in the eternal present. . . . There’s nothing to do, nothing to think about. Just be here now... When our thinking mind subsides, what we might call our heartmind takes over, and we can begin to live in love. Love is opening to merge with another being, whether with another person or with God (in the end they’re the same). Love is the doorway to oneness with all things, to being in harmony with the entire universe. This return to oneness, to a simplicity of just being, of unconditional love, is what we all long for. This unified state is the real yoga, or union.” - Ram Dass

“Put off envy, put on contentment. Put off gluttony, put on pure joy” - Sister Mary Jo Chaves (Douglas's Franciscan Spiritual Director teacher)