By David Loy

DO WE FAIL TO SEE THE NATURE of the liberated mind, not because it is too difficult to understand, but because it is too obvious? Maybe we cannot find what we are searching for because it is in plain sight, like the spectacles that rest unnoticed on my nose.

According to the seventeenth-century Japanese Zen master Hakuin, the difference between Buddhas and other beings is like that between water and ice. Without water there is no ice, without Buddha no sentient beings--which suggests that deluded beings are simply "frozen" Buddhas. "Let your mind come forth without fixing it anywhere," says the most-quoted line from the Diamond Sutra, prompting the great awakening of the sixth Chan patriarch Huineng, whose Platform Sutra makes and remakes the same point. "When our mind works freely without any hindrance, and is at liberty to 'come' or to 'go,' we attain liberation." Such a mind "is everywhere present, yet it 'sticks' nowhere." A mind that dwells upon nothing is the unborn Buddha-mind itself, according to Chan master Huihai: "This full awareness in yourself of a mind dwelling upon nothing is known as having a clear perception of your own mind, or, in other words, as having a clear perception of your own nature."

These teachers are pointing to the same realization:

Delusion (ignorance, samsara): attention/awareness is fixated (attached to forms)

Liberation (enlightenment, nirvana): attention/awareness is liberated from grasping Although the true nature of awareness is formless, it becomes trapped when our attention is conditioned--that is, when we come to identify with particular forms. Such identifications happen due to ignorance of the essential "non-dwelling" nature of our attention.

We are familiar with such teachings, yet an important implication is not usually considered: the danger of what might be called collective attention-traps. Meditation practices make me more sensitive to my attachments: the places where my awareness is stuck. But my problems with attachment are not just my own. We tend to have the same problems because as members of the same society we are subjected to similar conditioning and so tend to get stuck in similar ways. How different is our present conditioning from social conditioning in the time of the Buddha, and in other Asian Buddhist societies? How has the development of the modern/postmodern world affected human attention generally, not only in what we attend to, but how we attend to it? The constriction or liberation of awareness is not merely a personal, individual matter. What do contemporary societies do to encourage or discourage its emancipation?

These questions are important because today our awareness is conditioned in at least three new ways that did not afflict previous Buddhist cultures and practitioners.

The Fragmentation of Attention

MEDIA COVERAGE SUGGESTS THAT ONE OF OUR MAJOR CONCERNS ABOUT ATTENTION IS THE lack thereof. Attention-Deficit Disorder (ADD) and Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) have become serious medical issues in the United States, originally among schoolchildren but now among young adults as well. According to the New York Times, the use of drugs to treat Attention-Deficit Disorder in young adults doubled between 2000 and 2004 to 1% of adults under sixty-five, and the share of children using such drugs increased to almost 5%, despite increasing concern about their side-effects. What are we to make of this?

Buddhist practice evokes images of meditation with minimal distractions. The "IT revolution"--personal computers, the Internet, email, cell phones, and iPods, etc--encourages an unremitting connectivity that pulls us in the opposite direction. As we become attentive to so many more people and so many more possibilities always available, is less attention available for the people and things most important to us?

Consider, for example, how MP3 players are changing the ways we listen to music. A century ago, you are part of a live audience, and once you are there you are there, so you settle down and focus on the music being performed. For me today, strolling along with my iPod, the decision to listen to any particular "selection" is never completely settled in the sense that I can instantaneously change what is playing if I become dissatisfied with it, for any reason at any time, simply by pressing a button. I must, in effect, continually decide to listen to this particular song. Does awareness of these other possibilities distract my attention from the music 1 am actually hearing?

Of course, this point applies just as much to many other aspects of our lives: TV channel-surfing, the surfeit of books and DVDs (obtained via Amazon One-Click orders!), video games, surfing the net, etc. Our old foraging habits were based on info-scarcity, but suddenly, like Mickey Mouse as the sorcerer's apprentice, we find ourselves trying to survive an info-glut, and the scarcest resources have become attention and control over our own time. The Swedish scholar of information technology Thomas Eriksen has formalized this relationship into a general law of the information revolution: "When an ever-increasing amount of information has to be squeezed into the relatively constant amount of time each of us has at our disposal, the span of attention necessarily decreases."

One problem with such an avalanche of information (and therefore shorter attention spans) is that it challenges our ability to construct narratives and logical sequences. The MIT professor Sherry Turkle has noticed that some of her students now reason and arrange their ideas differently. "There is this sense that the world is out there to be Googled," she says, "and there is this associative glut But linking from one thing to another is not the same as having something to say. A structured thought is more than a link."

In place of the usual Buddhist warnings about clinging and attachment, many of us now have the opposite problem: an inability to concentrate. Yet an attention that jumps from this to that, unable to focus itself, is no improvement over an awareness that is stuck on something.

The Commodification of Attention

FOR MOST OF US IN THE DEVELOPED WORLD, THE GREATEST "ATTENTION TRAP" IS consumerism, which involves sophisticated advertising that has become very good at manipulating our attention. Today the big economic challenge is not production but keeping us convinced that the solution to our dukkha (suffering) is our next purchase. According to the pioneering advertising executive Leo Burnett, good advertising does more than circulate information. "It penetrates the public mind with desire and belief That penetration may have been lucrative for his clients, but there are other consequences, as Ivan Illich pointed out: "In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves, the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy." Whether or not one is able to afford the desired product, one's attention is captured.

Recently it has become more evident that attention is the basic commodity to be exploited. Ben Franklin's old adage needs to be updated: not time is money but attention is money. According to Jonathan Rowe's article "Carpe Callosum," the key economic resource of this new economy is not something they provide, it's something we provide--"mindshare," to use the new idiom. But, he asks, "What if there's only so much mind to share? If you've wondered how people could feel so depleted in such a prosperous economy, how stress could become the trademark affliction of the age, part of the answer might be here."

A turning point in the development of capitalism was "the enclosures" in sixteenth-and eighteenth-century Britain, when villagers were forced out of their traditional homes because landlords could make more money raising sheep. Rowe discusses "the ultimate enclosure--the enclosure of the cognitive commons, the ambient mental atmosphere of daily life," a rapid development now so pervasive that it has become like the air we breathe unnoticed. Time and space have already been reconstructed: holidays (including new commercialized ones such as Mother's Day) into shopping days, Main Street into shopping malls. Advertising is infiltrating into every corner of our conscious (and unconscious) awareness. Sports stadiums used to have ads; now renamed stadiums are themselves ads. TV shows used to be sponsored by ads; today product placement makes the whole show (and many movies) an ad. The jewelry company Bulgari sponsored a novel by Fay Weldon that included over three dozen references to its products. A 2005 issue of the New Yorker did not include any ads because the whole magazine was a promotion for the retail chain Target. Children are especially vulnerable, of course, and while half of four-year-old children do not know their own name, two-thirds of three-year-olds recognize the golden arches of McDonald's.

In the past one could often ignore ads, but enclosure of the cognitive commons means they now confront us wherever our attention turns. Unless we're meditating in a Himalayan cave, we have to process thousands of commercial messages every day. As Rowe emphasizes, they do not just grab our attention, they exploit it:

The attention economy mines us much the way the industrial economy mines the earth. It mines us first for incapacities and wants. Our capacity for interaction and reflection must become a need for entertainment. Our capacity to deal with life's bumps and jolts becomes a need for "grief counseling" or Prozac. The progress of the consumer economy has come to mean the diminution of ourselves.

Consumerism requires and develops a sense of our own impoverishment. By manipulating the gnawing sense of lack that haunts our insecure sense of self, the attention economy insinuates its basic message deep into our awareness: the solution to any discomfort we might have is consumption. Needless to say, this all-pervasive conditioning is incompatible with the liberative path of Buddhism.

The Control of Attention

DICTATORSHIPS CONTROL PEOPLE WITH VIOLENCE AND THE THREAT OF IT, TO RESTRAIN what they do. Modern democracies control people with sophisticated propaganda, by manipulating what they think. The title of one of Noam Chomsky's books sums it up well: Manufacturing Consent. We worry about weapons of mass destruction, but we should be as concerned about weapons of mass deception (and weapons of mass distraction), which may be more insidious and more difficult to detect. To cite only the most obvious example, the disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq would never have been possible without carefully orchestrated attempts to make the public anxious about weapons that did not exist. It was easy to do because 9/11 has made us fearful, and fearful people are more susceptible to manipulation.

Traditionally rulers and ruling classes used religious ideologies to justify their power. In premodern Europe the Church supported the "divine right" of kings. In Asian Buddhist societies karma offered a convenient way to rationalize both the ruler's authority and the powerlessness of his oppressed subjects. In both, people were told: You should accept your present social status because it is a consequence of your past deeds. In modern secular societies, however, acquiescence must be molded in different ways.

According to the Australian scholar Alex Carey, the twentieth century was characterized by three important political developments: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of propaganda as a way to protect corporate power against democracy. Although corporations are not mentioned in the Constitution--the Founding Fathers were wary of them--corporate power began to expand dramatically towards the end of the nineteenth century, so successfully that today there is little if any effective distinction between major corporations and the federal government. Both identify wholeheartedly with the same goal of continuous economic growth, regardless of its social or ecological effects. (We are repeatedly told that any unfortunate consequences from this growth obsession can be solved by more economic growth.) This often requires foreign intervention, for our access to resources and markets must be protected and expanded, usually under the guise of "defending ourselves." In effect, we have only one major political party: the Business Party, with two different faces that promote much the same agenda.

Continual economic growth requires that we define ourselves primarily as workers and consumers, while accepting that our present government and economy are "the best in the world." Instead of raising questions about this orientation, the mainstream media--our collective nervous system--serve to rationalize that belief system. Only a very narrow spectrum of opinion is considered acceptable, "realistic," and whatever problems arise require only a few minor adjustments here and there. As the earth begins to burn, as ecosystems start to collapse, the media focus our collective attention on the things that really matter: the Superbowl, the price of gas, the latest murder or sex scandal.

The Liberation of Collective Attention

WHO OWNS OUR ATTENTION, AND WHO SHOULD HAVE THE RIGHT TO DECIDE WHAT happens to it? Rowe concludes that we need a new freedom movement, to "battle for the cognitive commons. If we have no choice regarding what fills our attention, then we really have no choice at all." From a Buddhist perspective, however, it seems doubtful that any social protest movement could be successful without an alternative understanding of what our attention is and what alternative practices promote more liberated attention. It is not enough to fight against billboards and Internet banner ads without also considering: what does it really mean for awareness to be here-and-now, deconditioned from attention traps both individual and collective? Is awareness to be valued as a means to some other end, or should we cherish its liberation as the most valuable end? The Buddhist answer to such questions is clear. What is less clear is what role that answer might play in our collective response to the challenge.

David R. Loy is Besl Professor of Ethics/ Religion and Society at Xavier University in Cincinnati. He is the author of A Buddhist History of the West and The Great Awakening: a Buddhist Social Theory.