The Need for Attention vs. the Discipline of Attentiveness
Some resentments may have their merit; they are based on actual slights and injustice. To voice such resentment is not necessarily bad (and as we say in German, literally translated, “the tone makes the music”, i.e., how you voice it matters). Not every resentful person expressing their grudges publicly (often implicitly) is attention-seeking; but all resentful people share a lack of attentiveness. Of course, at one point or another we all share in that lack. Thoughts drift away; we think about our own pressing matters or profane sorrows while pretending (more or less) to still listen to another person. I am tempted to say that’s human nature. Or rather, our ego’s nature. Just as it is its nature to already draft a reply or statement while still “listening”: preparing the stage appearance of the one person that really matters – us. I am certainly guilty of this now and then, and I bet you are too. Again, that’s the ego’s nature. (Or, in a few cases, attention deficit disorder.) Not our fault. It is our fault, though, if we allow our ego to act like this most of the time; if we do not try to change it; if we rarely listen properly, rarely read properly, rarely pay attention properly.
Such lack of attentiveness is part of a general issue. However, being part of the occult substrata of society, I notice it there in particular – which is all the more noteworthy, as it is exactly in the esoteric, spiritual, occult, and magical (even religious) groups of humanity that attentiveness should be a basic skill to be developed and refined. If one’s aim is to actually change one’s status quo that is. Only if we pay attention to the other person, to what they say, write, or express, can we meet something other, get to know something other, learn something other, and be enthused and moved by something that is not already our own. Yet, the more I observe people’s “feedback” after lectures and read comments on blogs, podcasts, or social media posts, the more I see this utter lack of attentiveness and deeper engagement.
In the best (and most common) case, readers/listeners use something resonating with them to validate themselves. You write a careful post and they extract one phrase like a souvenir and walk off with it to decorate their existing opinion. And I don’t mean this as actual disagreement. Actual disagreement already requires attentiveness and engagement. It requires you to inhabit the other person’s thought long enough to understand what you’re disagreeing with. It requires thought and transference: “If you mean this, then…”. Even when disagreement comes as sharp criticism, it is still a kind of respect: the disagreeing party took the time to recognize the stance of the other. What I’m speaking about here is something else: the way words and phrases have become mere triggers for personal reassurance – self-validation, confirmation that one’s self-image is intact. But the best teachings, the real Gnosis, are not meant to validate your own narrative, but to prick holes in it: to act as a mirror, showing you your real Self, not the one you imagine.
Attentive listening and reading are spiritual disciplines. You let your inner monologue be interrupted; you allow your own certainty to stagger. You let something from the other enter your inner temple without converting it immediately into “mine”. With attentiveness, you allow the conversation, talk, or writing to become a bridge – an encounter. But in today’s times, we more often than not turn them into a selfie. Every text, every speech by another, is an opportunity to reflect ourselves back to ourselves and collect evidence that we are right, worthy, important; that our path is as valid as any other (it probably is, but that does not mean they all lead to the same result – and actual results still matter). Way too often, readers/listeners take something from the surface (one word, the title, an attitude, the sound of a voice), and immediately respond to it: provide their view of things, their story, their performance of correct politics, correct psychology, correct spirituality. Or, more common still, a response that makes them the protagonist: “This reminds me of my experience… In my opinion…”. A single word from the other becomes a springboard for the Self, the rigid ego, as if the real purpose of receiving anyone’s experience is to harvest it for content.
In the worst case, however, the reader/listener does not even relate back to themselves, but takes that one aspect – that one superficiality – to “criticize” and antagonize, to gain attention and engagement from the author/speaker/teacher. To drag them into their own self-made world or “bubble” so they can feel seen for that one little instance, and keep turning away from the reality of the abyss, from the mirror that the author held up. Wanting to be seen, to be recognized, to be acknowledged is natural, and so is a need for certain kinds of attention, but there are two very different origins here. One is the longing of our souls; the other is the claim of our egos. The former will manifest in attentiveness; the latter in the need for attention at every price and in any shape. Petty attention-seekers are usually the most resentful people.
When Nietzsche wrote about ressentiment, he wasn’t merely describing people being mean. He was describing a strategy of the wounded ego: unable to create, it revalues; unable to achieve, it condemns what it cannot reach. The resentful person doesn’t engage with another’s thoughts; they manage the threat those thoughts pose to their identity. If a speaker’s/writer’s words carry a certain weight, then the resentful response is a kind of antagonism – not the honest argument of criticism, but the low polemics of sneer. Turning the other into something they can disregard. Making the other small to protect the ego. This dynamic is visible in every place where status and belonging are on the line. But, as I said above, I have been particularly struck by how easily it flourishes in the occult and esoteric scenes. Perhaps it is because the occult, at its best, needs proper attentiveness: training deeper perception, learning to sit with symbols until they begin to speak, rather than forcing them to say what we already want. Tarot, divination, ritual, meditation, prayer – the work is to become capable of receiving, to become open rather than closed off, open also to the reality of other people/beings.
Yet these “subcultures” are flooded with spiritual consumerism. Teachings become accessories. Archetypes become personal brand identities. Everyone is a sorcerer, a witch, a mystic, a seer, and the entire cosmology is rearranged to orbit personal importance. Attentive engagement with anything from the other erodes. A long essay becomes a battlefield of comments that respond to a keyword alone. An hour-long talk becomes a hunt for one clip that can be interpreted as problematic or as affirming. People do not meet the work on its own terms; they meet it as ammunition for their own arsenal. The reader/listener has a thesis and uses the writer/speaker as a citation. Again, this is something observable in contemporary society in general. It seems to be an ingrained part of the worldwide web and social media.
And yet, I regard the gnostic/occult work as actually being about undoing that very impulse. The deeper the work goes, the less interested you become in being “right” and applauded. Those are shallow pleasures – like a sugar high. They are the mind patting itself on the head. But to walk this path in any way that matters – in a way that may actually change your life or way of living – you have to be willing to be wrong, to keep quiet, to be surprised, to be challenged, to have your story about yourself punctured by something from the other. It takes the courage to say: “Let me sit with this. Let it work on me.” That courage is rare today because so much of our everyday life is built on immediate positioning. The easiest way to prove belonging and/or to validate one’s Self is not to understand (to listen or read with attention), but to react, to declare, to extract and repurpose. The ego wants transcendence, not surrender to the All. It wants initiation and katabasis without ordeal. It wants to touch the real, traverse the abyss, but keep its social persona in place and admired. So it turns attentive engagement into superficial interaction for self-validation at best, and resentful need for attention at worst.
At this point, I think we need to make a decision for ourselves: to attempt giving our attention to someone or something without immediately taking from them; to read a paragraph and let it resonate; to hear an interview and not rush to be clever; to allow our soul to be addressed. Train the old discipline of attentive listening and reading with appropriate practices. For example, the mystic practice of Lectio Divina, in which we may learn (again) to remain with what is being said long enough for something other than our preconceptions to appear. This does not (and should not) lead to universal agreement. But disagreement could regain its dignity. And we could stop using other people’s thoughts as props in our personal narrative and begin, again, to meet them as real. Not every resentful person will lose their grudges through attentiveness. But every attentive person opens a door, begins building a bridge, to meet the other, to receive from the other, to relate to the other – and to stop clinging to that rigid Self.
