The Dojo of Attention

This weekend I thought about attention deconcentration. If you google that phrase, you'll see most of the list is based off of one article by Natalia Molchanova, a free diver. The link to the original article appears to be dead. Today's google search yielded a pdf that I look forward to reading. Two of results actually come from me.

This is a Russian training technique for elite athletes- probably military too, but, like I said, one article in English for all these years- so I don't know how widespread it got in Russian circles.

The thing is is that it has a coherency with some of the hesychatic stuff, or at least it does in my mind. Guess where your locus of attention ends up if you try to do this stuff? Your heart, more or less.

So, naturally my mind jumps to having a training center, and being me, I'd like a pretty expensive set up. Waterworks. People can use technology to create brown noise, but come on, we want to improve our relationship with space here, right? So, we need something that we can place ourselves in.

I have no idea if the levels I imagine in my head are true, but I tend to think closing your eyes and just listening to sounds around you is the easy beginner way to deconcentrate. Since I have glasses, I found it relatively easy to do it with my eyes open; the frame allows me to easily imagine my field of view is a plane, and that plane can be viewed as a whole.

I am not sure were the integration of the physical comes in. I suspect it would be different for different people.

So, I envisioned training people. And I also realized this was a possible hack that could get Christians back to being real Christians again. Pickstock, in her book, After Writing, made much of the change in our relationship to space. It has been assumed space has many of the properties once reserved for the Eternal. Attention Deconcentration seems like it would help very much for an athlete because it improves that relationship. I suspect it would also improve the likelihood people could actually hear the still small voice, rather than the yammering.

Oh well, I don't have the money. Nor do I know if what I imagine to be necessary is necessary. How different are men? How long would it take to teach someone to walk down the street as I have done doing a simple version? I want the dojo for myself as much as anyone, for there are experiments to try.