Attention and Will

Not to understand new things, but to arrive, by dint of patience, effort, and method, at understanding the evident truths with one's whole self.

Levels of belief. The most commonplace truth, when it floods the entire soul, is like a revelation.

Try to remedy faults by attention and not by will.

The will has power only over certain movements of certain muscles, associated with the representation of the displacement of nearby objects. I can will to place my hand flat on the table. If inner purity, or inspiration, or truth in thought were necessarily associated with attitudes of this kind, they could be objects of will. Since they are not, we can only implore them. To implore them is to believe that we have a Father in heaven. Or else to cease desiring them? What could be worse? Inner supplication alone is reasonable, for it avoids the stiffening of muscles that have nothing to do with the matter. What is more foolish than to stiffen one's muscles and clench one's jaw over virtue, or poetry, or the solution of a problem? Attention is something quite different.

Pride is just such a stiffening. There is a lack of grace (in both senses of the word) in the proud person. It is the effect of an error.

Attention, at its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer. If one turns the intelligence toward the good, it is impossible that little by little the whole soul should not be drawn to it in spite of itself. Extreme attention is what constitutes the creative faculty in the human being, and there is no extreme attention except religious attention. The quantity of creative genius in a given epoch is rigorously proportional to the quantity of extreme attention, and therefore of authentic religion, in that epoch. Bad way of seeking. Attention fastened on a problem. Another phenomenon of horror of the void. One does not want to have wasted one's effort. Relentlessness in the chase. One must not want to find: as in the case of excessive devotion, one becomes dependent on the object of the effort. One needs an external reward that chance sometimes provides and that one is ready to accept at the price of a distortion of truth. It is only effort without desire (not attached to an object) that infallibly contains a reward. To draw back before the object one pursues. Only what is indirect is effective. One accomplishes nothing if one has not first drawn back. By pulling at the bunch of grapes, one brings the berries to the ground. There are efforts that produce the opposite of the sought-after goal (examples: bitter devotees, false asceticism, certain forms of devotion, etc.). Others are always useful, even when they do not succeed. How to distinguish them?

Perhaps: some are accompanied by the (mendacious) denial of inner wretchedness. Others by attention continually concentrated on the distance between what one is and what one loves.

Love instructs gods and men, for no one learns without desiring to learn. Truth is sought not as truth but as good.

Attention is linked to desire. Not to the will, but to desire. Or, more exactly, to consent.

One liberates energy within oneself. But ceaselessly it attaches itself again. How to liberate it all? One must desire that this be done in us. Truly desire it. Simply desire it, not try to accomplish it. For every attempt in this direction is vain and dearly paid for. In such a work, everything I call "I" must be passive. Only attention -- that attention so full that the "I" disappears -- is required of me. To deprive all that I call "I" of the light of attention and transfer it to the inconceivable.

The capacity to dismiss a thought once and for all is the door of eternity. The infinite in an instant.

Regarding temptations, take the example of the very chaste woman who says nothing in reply to the seducer when he speaks to her and pretends not to hear him.

We must be indifferent to good and evil, but, being indifferent -- that is, projecting the light of attention equally upon both -- good prevails by an automatic phenomenon. This is essential grace. And it is the definition, the criterion, of good.

A divine inspiration operates infallibly, irresistibly, if one does not turn one's attention away from it, if one does not refuse it. There is no choice to be made in its favor; it suffices not to refuse to recognize that it is. Attention turned with love toward God (or, to a lesser degree, toward anything authentically beautiful) makes certain things impossible. Such is the non-acting action of prayer in the soul. There are behaviors that would veil this attention if they occurred, and that, reciprocally, this attention makes impossible. Once one has a point of eternity in the soul, one has nothing more to do than preserve it, for it grows of itself, like a seed. One must maintain around it an armed guard, motionless, and nourish it with the contemplation of numbers, of fixed and rigorous relations. One nourishes the invariant within the soul by the contemplation of the invariant within the body. One writes as one gives birth; one cannot help making the supreme effort. But one acts in the same way. I have no reason to fear not making the supreme effort -- on the sole condition that I do not lie to myself and that I pay attention. The poet produces beauty by attention fixed on what is real. So too does the act of love. To know that this person, who is hungry and thirsty, truly exists as much as I do -- that suffices; the rest follows of itself. The authentic and pure values of truth, beauty, and good in the activity of a human being are produced by one and the same act -- a certain application of the fullness of attention to the object.

Teaching should have as its sole aim the preparation of the possibility of such an act, through the exercise of attention. All other advantages of instruction are of no interest. Studies and faith. Prayer being nothing but attention in its pure form, and studies constituting a gymnastic of attention, each school exercise should be a refraction of spiritual life. A method is needed. A certain way of doing a Latin translation, a certain way of doing a geometry problem (and not just any way) constitutes a gymnastic of attention apt to make it more capable of prayer. Method for understanding images, symbols, etc. Not to try to interpret them, but to look at them until light springs forth. In general, the method for exercising the intelligence consists in looking. Application of this method for the discrimination of the real and the illusory. In sense perception, if one is not sure of what one sees, one shifts position while looking, and the real appears. In the inner life, time takes the place of space. With time one is modified, and if, through the modifications, one keeps one's gaze oriented toward the same thing, illusion eventually dissipates and the real appears. The condition is that attention be a gaze and not an attachment. When there is struggle between the will attached to an obligation and an evil desire, there is a wearing down of the energy attached to the good. One must undergo the bite of desire passively, as a suffering in which one experiences one's wretchedness, and maintain attention turned toward the good. There is then an elevation on the scale of energy qualities.

To steal from desires their energy by removing their orientation in time.

Our desires are infinite in their pretensions but limited by the energy from which they proceed. This is why, with the help of grace, one can master them and, by wearing them out, destroy them. Once this is clearly understood, one has virtually conquered them, if one keeps one's attention in contact with this truth.

Video meliora... In these states, it seems that one thinks the good, and one does think it in a sense, but one does not think its possibility.

The void that one grasps in the pincers of contradiction is incontestably the void from above, for one grasps it all the better as one sharpens the natural faculties of intelligence, will, and love. The void from below is the one into which one falls by allowing the natural faculties to atrophy.

The experience of the transcendent: this seems contradictory, and yet the transcendent can only be known through contact, since our faculties cannot fabricate it.

Solitude. In what, then, does its value consist? For one is in the presence of mere matter (even the sky, the stars, the moon, trees in blossom), of things of lesser worth (perhaps) than a human mind. Its value consists in the higher possibility of attention. If one could be attentive to the same degree in the presence of a human being...

We can know only one thing about God: that he is what we are not. Our wretchedness alone is his image. The more we contemplate it, the more we contemplate him. Sin is nothing other than the failure to recognize human wretchedness. It is unconscious wretchedness, and thereby guilty. The history of Christ is the experimental proof that human wretchedness is irreducible, that in the person absolutely without sin it is as great as in the sinner. It is merely illuminated... Knowledge of human wretchedness is difficult for the rich, for the powerful, because they are almost invincibly led to believe they are something. It is equally difficult for the wretched, because they are almost invincibly led to believe that the rich, the powerful, are something. It is not the fault that constitutes mortal sin, but the degree of light in the soul when the fault, whatever it may be, is committed. Purity is the power to contemplate defilement. Extreme purity can contemplate both the pure and the impure; impurity can contemplate neither: the first frightens it, the second absorbs it. It requires a mixture.