Having promised us a technological utopia, our ubiquitous and intrusive cyberculture has instead precipitated a spiritual crisis in which the human experience has been systematically fragmented and the coherence of the self increasingly threatened. Living in a culture of organised distraction, our thoughts are isolated and disconnected, preventing us from seeing and experiencing the integrity of life. Distraction and fragmentation have negative consequences for the organisation of knowledge. They prevent us from engaging with our own spiritual depths and leave us unable to fathom the spiritual depths of others, for, having lost touch with our own personality, we can receive neither the personality of our neighbour nor that of God.
Since 2009, the New York Times has published a series of articles entitled ‘Distracted Driving’, highlighting accidents and fatalities involving distracted drivers 1. The series in question was expanded to include ‘Distracted Medical Care’, reporting on a large number of doctors answering their phones during operations, medical staff sending text messages whilst operating heart-lung machines, and anaesthetists booking flights online 2.
Distractions caused by social media whilst on duty cost the US economy $650 billion annually, with interruptions occurring every 10 minutes and workers spending 41 per cent of their working hours on Facebook. In the United States alone, over 12 billion collective hours are spent browsing social media every day. University students spend 3 hours a day on social media and only 2 hours studying. In addition to the official statistics, there is a wealth of anecdotal evidence, such as the incident in September 2013, when passengers on a train in San Francisco failed to notice, because they were distracted by their tablets and mobile phones, that an armed man was brandishing a gun in plain view for several minutes before being shot by a 20-year-old commuter (the entire incident was captured on the train’s CCTV cameras).
In addition to the financial costs and loss of life, there are also spiritual implications which the New York Times and the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention lack the expertise to diagnose, namely, the loss of the human factor, the fragmentation of human subjectivity and the growing incoherence of the self. In his recent book, The World Above Your Head, Matthew Crawford referred to this situation as a ‘crisis of self-ownership’, pointing out that we now find ourselves in an ‘attention economy’ in which, in fact, ‘attention is no longer ours to direct as we please’, making the ‘effort to be fully present’ an irretrievable struggle. Crawford argued that our insatiable need for endless entertainment stems from its irrelevant content, revealing a deeper crisis of values. According to Crawford, we have become ‘agnostics’ when it comes to ‘what we pay attention to’, which means we no longer know what to value 3. Consequently, our inner lives become ‘formless’ and we become susceptible to what is presented to us by those powerful commercial forces that have taken the place of traditional cultural authorities 4. On the other hand, being attentive is the first step in reclaiming our humanity, our human agency and our self-determination as human beings. We choose what we pay attention to and, in a very real sense, this determines what is real for us, what is present in our consciousness. By contrast, distractions and fragmentation reveal a moral void at the heart of our existence, leading Crawford to call for an ‘ethics’ and ‘asceticism’ of attention in our time, grounded in a realistic understanding of the human mind 5.
Crawford pointed out that our unquenchable need for endless distractions stems from their irrelevant content, revealing a deeper crisis of values. (…) On the other hand, being attentive is the first step towards reclaiming our humanity, our human essence and our self-determination as human beings. We choose what we pay attention to and, in a very real sense, this determines what is real for us, what is present in our consciousness.
Crawford’s previous work was an essay on the importance of labour, in which he lamented the loss of manual skills to the detriment of digital cultures which, he believes, have distanced human beings from tools and from the physical world in which those tools were meant to operate. Unsurprisingly, his proposal for an ‘ethics’ and ‘asceticism’ of attention is similarly centred on engagement in a skilled craft or practice—an activity that requires the craftsman to engage with an objective reality, directly and attentively, and thus to be fully present.
Being mindful
Without wishing to downplay the importance of skilled craftsmanship (which the Holy Mountain has practised and upheld throughout its long history), I should like to focus on the moment of ‘attention’ itself, which logically precedes and, to some extent, may be independent of any activity (which is logically subsequent) for which such attention might be necessary or useful. As we shall see, attention offers us a profound and effective response to our modern culture of organised distractions. Certainly, the ‘ethics’ and ‘asceticism’ of attention that Crawford pursues are central to Orthodox Anthropology and moral psychology, namely: the practice of attention (προσοχή) or ‘giving attention’ (to take note) of oneself (προσέχειν σεαυτῷ)6. This phrase – which is only superficially related to the Socratic exhortation ‘know thyself’ (γνῶθι σεαυτόν)7 – appears in various forms in the New Testament but, in fact, derives from Deuteronomy 4:9: ‘Take heed to yourself, guard your heart with all diligence’ (πρόσεχε σεαυτῷ καὶ φύλαξον τὴν ψυχήν σου σφόδρα), or, elsewhere, in Deuteronomy XV:9, where it is said: ‘Take care that no wicked thought enters your heart’ (πρόσεχε σεαυτῷ μὴ γένηται ῥῆμα κρυπτὸν ἐν τῇ καρδίᾳ σου, ἀνόμημα)8. This phrase, which is a moral imperative, has a rich history, of which only a few examples will be given here.
In the fourth-century work The Life of Anthony, we are told that the first ascetic practice Saint Anthony undertook before going into the desert was to ‘take heed to himself’9 A younger contemporary of Saint Anthony, Saint Basil of Caesarea in Cappadocia, wrote what appears to be his very first sermon, dedicating it to the passage from Deuteronomy 15:9: On the words, ‘Know thyself’10 Although the Life of Anthony does not describe the practice of ‘taking heed’ in detail, Basil describes it at length. Far from being an external ‘observation of the self’ and having nothing to do with solipsistic absorption in one’s own self, ‘self-examination’ has a comprehensive vision, being at the same time: (1) the awakening of the rational principles which God has planted in the soul; (2) vigilant watchfulness over the movements of the mind, which governs the movements of the body and of society as a whole; (3) bearing in mind the primacy of the mind (or soul) over the body and the beauty of God over the pleasures of the senses; (4) remaining grounded in reality and rejecting mental fantasies; (5) self-examination and the refusal to meddle in the affairs of others; (6) the knowledge of God mediated through oneself as the image of God, a conclusion with which Saint Basil the Great ends his entire sermon: ‘Therefore, be mindful of yourself, that you may be mindful of God!’11
The practice of self-reflection, well established in the fourth century, has remained central to Christian anthropology and morality. Subsequent generations of writers and practitioners developed the concept, generally aligning self-examination with related practices such as ‘stillness’ (isihia) and ‘vigilance’ (nepsis)12. In this more comprehensive form – already suggested by Saint Basil – it was given a fundamental role in Christian life and was ultimately regarded as a necessary presupposition or precondition for salvation 13.
The extraordinary emphasis placed on mindfulness is explained both by the fact that the human mind is naturally prone to inattention, and because the disintegration of the inner life began precisely with the Fall, when man separated himself from God. From this perspective, distraction has rightly been termed the ‘original sin of the mind’.
The notion of the primal error as a fall from mindfulness into the scattering of the mind is a central element of the theology of the fifth-century writer, Diadochus of Photice: ‘Divine knowledge teaches us that our natural faculty of perception is one, but that it was divided into two modes of operation as a result of Adam’s disobedience’14 Created with a single, simple, and indivisible consciousness, the Fall corrupted the integrity of the self into two opposing activities, one drawn towards divine realities, the other drawn outwards, towards the illusory surface of the visible world, through sensory perception and subject to a process of continuous fragmentation.
We shall also find similar views in the writings of Saint Gregory of Sinai (†1346), who argues that the human mind, created in a state of repose, became agitated and distracted when it fell from grace by choosing bodily sensations in place of God and, as a result, found itself lost and wandering amongst the things of the world 15. Saint Gregory Palamas, probably alluding to the teachings of Saint Gregory of Sinai, stated that: ‘A great teacher said that after the Fall our natural inner being adapts itself to external forms’ and urges the reader to ‘take heed to oneself’, quoting directly from Deuteronomy 15:9 16.
By forgetting God and clinging to the world, we become prey to unhealthy desires and addictive behaviours, driven by a constant preoccupation and pursuit of nothing. Being fixated on the superficial appearances of things, we are no longer aware of their deeper meanings and how they relate to one another, but seek only that part of an object or person which can satisfy our temporary desire for pleasure. As we grow accustomed to surrendering to our irrational inclinations and impulses, the mind becomes enslaved by sensations (whether physical or psychological); we break down into isolated fragments, leading double or triple lives, being divided amongst scattered activities, in such a way that our pursuit of pleasure contributes not only to the union of the self with the world, but also to the disintegration and disorganisation of both. Divided by the scattered acts of irrational sensations, the mind receives only the fleeting impression of something finite and isolated from everything else 17.
Being fixated on the superficial appearances of things, we are no longer aware of their meanings and their interrelationships, but seek only that part of an object or person which can satisfy our temporary desire for pleasure.
This condition has been diagnosed and described by Orthodox spiritual writers and fathers, who call it the ‘scattering’ or ‘distraction’ of the mind. For example, Nichita Stithatul, the disciple of Saint Simeon the New Theologian, maintains that ‘the more our inner life is in a divided and scattered state amongst many conflicting things, the more powerless we are to participate in life with God. We desire things that are opposed and contradictory, and we are torn to pieces by the ceaseless war between them; this is called ‘the division of the mind’, a condition that divides and destroys the soul. ‘As long as we are wounded by the struggle of thoughts, and as long as we are dominated and constrained by passions, we ourselves are fragmented and severed from the divine Unity’18’.
However, if attention is the answer to the dilemma of human fragmentation and disintegration, the aim is not a return to a supposed Edenic form of consciousness, but rather to the grace of the Holy Spirit, formed within our hearts at the moment of our baptism. This sacramental focus is central to Diadochus’s spiritual theology, for whom healing begins with the gift of the Holy Spirit, whilst the duality of the fallen self is united through the invocation of the Jesus Prayer 19. The consequence is that the primary motivation for cultivating inner attention, the aim of turning inwards and descending into the heart, is to encounter the Holy Spirit dwelling there—a principle which was consistently and systematically reaffirmed by all the late Byzantine Hesychasts 20.
We find this same teaching, in practical terms, in Holy Scripture. The prodigal son left his home and went to a distant place, where – as the Gospel tells us – he squandered (scattered) his wealth/being (διεσκόρπισεν τὴν οὐσίαν αὐτοῦ) (Luke XV, 13). On the surface, this means that he spent all his money, but the deeper meaning is that he squandered his spiritual wealth, our spiritual inheritance, for our ‘essence’ is the spirit which God has planted within us and into which, through Holy Baptism, He Himself has planted His grace, clothing us in ‘the first garment of glory’ (cf. Luke 15:22), and ‘God has sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts’ (Galatians 4:6). We, however, when we separate ourselves from this grace, lose our spiritual unity and become fragmented.
Conclusions
The fallen human mind is fragmented, constantly prone to distractions and scattered across a problematic infinity of diffuse thoughts and sensations. Our minds are always elsewhere than our bodies. Instead of working to remedy this inherent weakness, we have built a culture of organised distractions, thereby helping and enabling the mind to reinforce its fallen state. One might argue that the computer itself is like a fallen mind, a powerful extension of our dubious desires, created in our own image. Lingering without renewal in a realm of illusions, spellbound by the images flitting across our computer screens, we become ‘boring flies on the bedroom window’21 desperate to consume all the world’s futility.
And yet, we are not the predators, but the prey. We are not the ones utilising technological information and social media; rather, we are being used, manipulated and exploited by them. In our culture of entertainment, public and private spaces are saturated with technologies designed specifically to capture and hold our attention; our inner lives, as well as our bodies, are merely resources ready to be exploited by powerful economic interests. (Crawford suggests that the ability to be distracted is to the mind what fat is to the body). Our focus, then, should not be solely on technology and digital culture, but on the interests and motivations that guide their design and promote their dissemination into every aspect of our lives.
Throughout its long history, Christianity has often been subservient to political and economic structures, forgetting that the Gospel does not derive from human culture, but is the source of a new way of life. We need to reclaim the power of the Gospel as a force that runs counter to the current of culture, not with the aim of destabilising society, but to create communities that affirm life. We must rediscover, not merely in theory, how faith and the call to holiness set us apart from the world, and give birth to a new, alternative world; not a virtual reality, but the reality of virtue 22.
In order to be able to fulfil our calling, mindfulness must be our fundamental attitude and ethos. Without mindfulness there is no prayer, and without prayer there is no communion with God, no participation in the divine life. The practice of inner attentiveness—of bringing the mind down into the heart—is, at the same time, both an activity and a way of life that places us in authentic existence, that is, in relationship with God. That is why attention is often said to be equivalent to the remembrance of God and the awareness that the grace of the Holy Spirit dwells within us. Being mindful, paying attention to ourselves, is the most effective way to regain control over our self-determination, in spite of those who seek to rob us of it. Transfigured by grace, our attention will discover new objects worthy of it, for it will have its source in a new subject—not one conformed to the world, but transformed by the renewal of the mind (Romans 12:2), possessing and being possessed by the mind of Christ (1 Corinthians 2:16).
The practice of inner attention—of bringing the mind down into the heart—is, at the same time, both an activity and a way of life that places us in authentic existence, that is, in relationship with God.
- 1
In 2012, the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention reported 570,000 accidents and 3,328 deaths, an increase of 9 per cent compared with the previous year.
- 2
50 per cent of the auxiliary medical staff interviewed admitted to sending text messages on their mobile phones during operations, and nearly 60 per cent admitted to talking on their mobile phones as well.
- 3
Matthew B. Crawford, The World Above Your Head: How to Become an Individual in the Age of Distraction, New York, 2015, p. 5. Simone Weil, ‘Attention and Will’, in Gravity and Grace, London, 2008, pp. 116–122.
- 4
M. Crawford, The World Above Your Head, p. 6.
- 5
Ibid., pp. 7, 15.
- 6
The various translations of προσέχειν reflect the diversity of English translations of Scripture, which offer many nuances of meaning: ‘Be careful’, ‘Take heed’, ‘Pay attention’, ‘Be mindful’, ‘Take care of yourself carefully’. The Greek word ‘προσοχή’ derives from ‘προσεχειν’, which in its primary sense means to retain, to turn one’s attention towards something. So, in this context, it can mean to pay attention, to be mindful, to devote oneself to someone.
- 7
Saint Gregory of Nyssa, in his Homily ‘On Those Who Have Fallen Asleep’, briefly identifies the two exhortations (GNO 9:40); as does (pseudo?) John of Damascus, in the Sacra Parallela (PG 95: 1049), although this identification is ruled out by the differences between Christian and Hellenistic anthropologies; cf. John M. Cooper, The Quest for Wisdom: Six Ways of Life in the Ancient Philosophy of Socrates and Plotinus, Princeton, 2012, pp. 326–341 (Plotinus’s Theory of the Human Person).
- 8
Compare Luke 17:3 ‘Take heed to yourselves’, Acts 5:35 ‘Men of Israel, take heed to yourselves’ and Acts 20:28 ‘Therefore, take heed to yourselves and to the whole flock, over which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to shepherd the Church of God.’
- 9
Life of Anthony 3.1 cf. 91.3 – On his deathbed, Anthony says to his disciples: ‘Live as though you were to die every day; take heed to yourselves and remember all that you have heard from me’ (ed. G.J.M. Bartelink SC 400:368). It should be noted that this phrase and the corresponding practice are also well attested in the Paterikon.
- 10
PG 31:185–98. As a seminal essay on the inner life, Saint Basil’s homily is found in Byzantine and post-Byzantine Philokalia collections such as that of the Lavra M 54 (which Paul Gehin refers to as the ‘Philokalia bis’). See also Ephrem Graecus, ‘On Know Thyself’, K.G. Phrantzoles (ed.), vol. 2, Thessaloniki, 1989, pp. 142–198. According to Rufinus and Cassiodorus, Origen is also said to have written four homilies on Deuteronomy, though these have not survived.
- 11
See St Basil the Great, Letter 2: ‘Prayer is to be praised because it gives rise to a distinct conception of God within the soul. And this is what it means for God to dwell within us: to keep God ever in mind, firmly established within us’ (LCL1:16).
- 12
See, for example, Saint Nicifor of Solitude (†1340), On Vigilance and the Guarding of the Heart: ‘Some saints have called vigilance the guarding of the mind; others have called it the guarding of the heart, or watchfulness, or the quieting of the mind, whilst others have used other terms. All these expressions point to one and the same thing” (Philokalia 4:26). Nicetas goes on to define mindfulness as (1) the sign of true repentance; (2) spiritual restoration; (3) hatred of worldly things; (4) a return to God; (5) the rejection of sin; (6) the regaining of virtue; (7) the assurance that sins have been forgiven; (8) the necessary beginning of contemplation; (9) the revelation of God to the intellect; (10) serenity of mind; (11) the subjugation of thoughts; (12) the palace of attention to God; (13) the fortified citadel that enables us to accept all that befalls us; (14) the level of faith, hope and love. See also Hesychius, On Vigilance, 115: ‘If you wish to be in the Lord […] seek with all your might the virtue of mindfulness – that defence and guardian of the mind, that perfect tranquillity of the heart and that blessed state of the soul when it is free from imaginings’ (Philokalia 1:182) and the anonymous author found in PG 147:828–32 under the name Kallistos Telikoudis.
- 13
See, for example, Peter of Damascus, ‘The Guarding of the Mind’ (Philokalia 3:30).
- 14
Diadochus of Photice, ‘On Spiritual Knowledge’, 25, (Philokalia 1:241); cf. Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua 45:4.
- 15
Saint Gregory of Sinai, On the Commandments and Doctrines, 60: ‘The source and basis of our scattered thoughts (λογισμοι) is the fragmented state (διαϊθεραισα) of our memory. Memory was, from the beginning, simple and uniform, but, as a result of the Fall, its natural powers were perverted: it lost its remembrance of God and became composite instead of simple, diversified instead of remaining uniform (Philokalia 4:39).
- 16
Saint Gregory Palamas, In Defence of Those Who Practise the Life of Stillness (Triads 1.2; Philokalia 4:128) cf. Hesychius, On Vigilance 172, ‘Woe is me, for what is within comes from without’ (Philokalia 1:168).
- 17
Dumitru Stăniloae, Orthodox Spirituality, South Cancan, 2002, p. 93.
- 18
Nichita Stithatul, On Spiritual Knowledge, 16–17 (Philokalia 3:330; Philokalia 4:144). To keep things concise, I have combined the ideas from these two chapters.
- 19
Diadochus of Photice, On Spiritual Knowledge, 77–80, (Philokalia 1:279–82).
- 20
See Gregory of Sinai, On the Signs of Grace and Deception, 1 (Philokalia 4:257); and Kallistos and Ignatius, The Method and Canon of Godly Correction 1, 4–6 (Philokalia 4:199–201). This doctrine has older roots in writers such as Mark the Monk, To Those Who Imagine Themselves Saved by Works 56, 92, 118 (Philokalia 1:130, 133, 134–35); and Maximus the Confessor, Replies to Thalassius, 6 (CCSG 7:69–71); and is aptly summarised by Saint Nicodemus, The Manual of the Unseen Warfare, Mahwah, 1989, chapter 10.
- 21
A phrase adapted from Emily Dickinson (†1886), ‘How Many Times Have Our Feet Wavered’ (poem no. 238, published posthumously in 1890).
- 22
See here the insightful study by C. Kavin Rowe, The World Turned Upside Down: Reading the Acts of the Apostles in the Greco-Roman Era, Oxford, 2010; John F. Kavanaugh, Following Christ in a Consumer Society: The Spirituality of Spiritual Resistance, Maryknoll, 2006.