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was 2,400,000, and this number is quickly rising. In prescribing this drug, physicians are
warned that Ritalin is contraindicated for patients with psychological problems such as
depression, psychosis, or chronic fatigue. If they do have other psychological problems,
other drugs, with their own daunting sets of possible side effects, are prescribed. In the
United States 20 percent of children up to the age of twelve are believed to suffer
emotional problems, for which they may eventually be given a variety of powerful drugs
to suppress their symptoms. Perhaps the most serious long-term effect of taking such
medications is that children are encouraged to get in the habit of taking drugs to change
the state of their minds, even though the medications themselves may not be addictive.13
Over the past century let us call it the Century of Scientific Materialism the
cognitive sciences have made no progress in developing means of enhancing either the
stability or vividness of attention beyond normal levels. In the meantime, attention deficit
disorders are becoming more and more
endemic, and our primary treatments for them are medications that have no long-
lasting benefits but do have serious side effects. Psychologist James Hans comments as
follows.
That our life passes with more or less attention to its passing is ... obvious. That the
richness of life is a function of our full attentiveness to what is goes without saying as
well. ... If attention is truly all we have and all we are . . . then we need to reconsider our
relationship to the most fundamental feature of our lives. 14
In reconsidering our relation to attention, given the paucity of our own scientific
resources, it is only reasonable to look beyond our own contemporary society to the
wisdom of earlier eras of our own culture and to other cultures that have not been
encumbered by the dominant ideology that so constrains modern scientific and medical
research.
Augustinian Contemplative Inquiry into Consciousness
Augustine is only one of many contemplatives from around the world to have
practiced means of refining mental perception so that it can be used more effectively in
exploring the nature of consciousness and other mental phenomena; and it seems he did
so by developing sustained attention with consciousness itself as his object. While the
contemplative training he advocates culminates in genuine contemplation, in which the
soul is said to transcend itself in the experience of God, the proximate preparation to that
stage consists of two processes, recollection and introversion. Recollection entails
withdrawing the attention from all sensory and conceptual phenomena; and the
subsequent training in introversion consists of introspectively settling the mind in its own
fundamental nature.15 In a similar vein, the early Christian desert fathers spoke of a state
called apatheia, a kind of dispassionate serenity in which the intellect rises above
distraction and attains its natural state. This is not something the mind does but rather
something it is, hence it is called a state (katastasis).
The feebleness of the attention as an obstacle in the pursuit of contemplative
insight has been widely recognized since the early centuries of Christianity. One of the
clearest descriptions of the ordinary which is to say, attentionally dysfunctional mind
is the immensely popular and seminal fifth-century work The Conferences of Cassian.
Cassian s Abba Moses says of the undisciplined mind that it flutters hither and thither,
according to the whim of the passing moment and follows whatever immediate and
external impression is presented to it, while thoughts career about the soul like
bubbling, effervescent boiling water. 16 The same observation was made almost a
millennium later by the German Christian contemplative Meister Eckhart (1206?-1327?),
who spoke of the storm of inward thoughts that had to be calmed in the course of one s
contemplative training.17 Like Augustine, Eckhart taught that in order to fathom the
nature of one s own being, a man must collect all his powers as if into a corner of his
soul.. . hiding away from all images and forms. 18 By calming attentional excitation and
stilling the mind utterly, Eckhart claimed, one experiences a state of rapture
(Gezucken), in which the contemplative finds himself in a state in which there are no
images and no desires in him, and he will therefore stand without activity, internal or
external. 19
William James rejects the notion that we can introspectively capture our
consciousness life-like, as a pure spiritual activity, neglecting almost completely the
materials which consciousness illuminates at any given moment. 20 However, Augustine
and later Christian contemplatives maintained that while the nature of the mind cannot be
discovered by observing external phenomena, it can be discovered by withdrawing the
mind from all appearances that have been added onto it. Once the mind dispenses with all
such phenomena, including speculative ideas about itself, and simply encounters its own
inward presence, then that which remains is the mind itself.21
Augustine raises a number of questions concerning the manner in which the mind
observes itself: Since the mind is never without itself, why does it not always observe
itself? Does one part of the mind observe another part? In the process of introspection
does the mind serve as both its subject and its object? To all such questions he responds
that such notions are artificial, conceptual constructions and that the mind is not such is
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