Alright, let's see some ID, pal.

So, naturally, things always are always more complicated in the world, and I have oversimplified things when talking about paying attention. In a practical sense, just doing the things I described in earlier posts will get you farther along if you are an average person. When I teach people, especially my karate students and physicians who wind up in my lectures on science, I tend to oversimplify on purpose. If you can get someone working with a simple model of something, it becomes much easier to teach them to add little bits to that model, until little by little the model is real. Never mind that the initial model is a bit of a lie!

In this case, paying attention is certainly no lie, but it is a tool for painting a larger picture. In fact, I already mentioned the larger picture, i.e. the Oneness of all that there is, the interrelation of all things. The Dalai Lama likes to point out the interdependence, rather than the independence, of all things. That's the larger picture.

When you pay attention for a long period of time, intermittently for years maybe, you can begin to catch glimpses of this larger picture. When you do that, you begin to realize something: You aren't what you think you are.

Let's work backwards. In Reality (capital "R"), we are all One. That Oneness takes pieces of itself and expresses them as things. That's how you come about, essentially.

Now look at yourself. You're probably saying, "This is crap. There's no way I am anything other than a person in a body with all kinds of problems, issues, vices, and virtues. It's just Me in here, and nothing else!"

If you are thinking anything like that, notice it! You are doing what's called identifying with your body, mind, and emotions.... the things you think of as yourself. It's not "bad" or "wrong". (I hate those words.) It just is what it is. It's what you're doing. Human beings all do it.

The "goal" of paying attention, if it can be called a goal, is to eventually be able to identify more and more with the One, and not with the meat that you think of as you.

The world and everything in it are expressions of the One. They are the movie playing on the screen. The Real You, is the One. In this case, it's like the audience and the movie theater, and the space within the movie theater where the movie is playing.

Standing up and saying, "I am ME. I am a physical body that does stuff, and that is the real ME." is just as silly as a projection of Clint Eastwood on a movie screen insisting to the audience that he is real, and that if they think otherwise, they ought to try and make his day (as he points his projected gun at them.)

Idries Shah, a great Sufi teacher who wrote most of his works in the 60's, 70's, and 80's, passed down a great Sufi saying: Be in the world, not of it.

This is a fabulous proverb!! It means, be here now in the present moment, but don't identify with it. Be in it, but all the while, remember what you really are: the One. Don't forget that and suddenly become "of it", which is a fancy term for "becoming wrapped up in it".

This is where the Buddhists get their principle of detachment. Detachment doesn't mean you should not care about things. You can care about things with all your heart and soul, and you can even be attached to them emotionally. However, as you do so, realize what is really going on: a piece of the One is doing that to a piece of the One.