This essay continues the series reflecting on Practicing Living Presence: Discovering the Mind of Christ Within, particularly the movement in Chapter 6 toward what Helminski calls “reserving some attention for being itself.” In the previous piece, we explored the claim that the ego has no attention of its own — that it lives parasitically on whatever awareness we fail to anchor in being. Here we take that insight further. If attention is the currency of consciousness, then how we use it determines whether we live from vitality or from psychic exhaustion. And nowhere is this more subtle than in the difference between unconscious daydreaming and voluntary attention.
When Imagination Becomes Identification
At first glance, daydreaming appears innocent. It feels like creativity, like interior space, like harmless mental wandering. We drift into imagined conversations, replay old arguments, rehearse future successes, refine scenes that never quite unfolded the way we wished they had. The mind moves, constructs, embellishes. Yet something decisive is usually missing: awareness that we are doing it. The subject disappears into the story. We are no longer imagining; we are inhabiting. The narrative absorbs us, and attention becomes entangled in the very images it produces.
Helminski describes a lower level of energy in which we lose ourselves in what we are doing. There is energy present, even intensity, but no retained center of consciousness. Daydreaming functions in precisely this way. The mind is active, but the thread of being is absent. We are carried by associative chains, emotional residues, and subtle desires that animate the scene. It is not the imagination itself that drains us; it is identification with what the imagination produces.
The Desire Structure Beneath Fantasy
Most daydreaming is fueled by desire. Not crude desire necessarily, but refined forms of it: the longing to be seen, to be vindicated, to be secure, to be finally complete. Helminski reminds us that desire is bottomless; objects change, but the craving structure remains. When attention binds itself to imagined objects that promise completion, it reinforces the assumption that being as it is now is insufficient. Fulfillment is projected outward — or forward — into a mental construct. In that projection, presence thins. Energy contracts around the fantasy. Afterwards, we often feel subtly depleted, though we cannot say why.
Reserving Attention for Being
Voluntary attention moves differently. It does not eliminate imagination. It alters the location of the center. Helminski speaks of the “straight and narrow path” as fastidious remembrance of being. To reserve attention for being is not to suppress thought but to remain aware of the field in which thought appears. You can imagine and know that you are imagining. You can rehearse and remain present. The subject does not collapse into the object. There is a retained, quiet sense of “I am here.”
This difference is almost imperceptible at first, yet energetically it is decisive. When attention remains anchored in being, imagination unfolds within a larger field of awareness. It becomes transparent rather than possessive. The story no longer defines the self. It is simply a movement within consciousness. Helminski’s description of sliding the sense of identity along a scale helps illuminate this shift. At one end, identity is fixed in roles and emotional definitions: “I am the rejected one,” “I am the future success,” “I am the wounded child.” At the deepest end, identity rests in simple presence: “I am.” Daydreaming that drains us usually occurs at the first two levels. Voluntary attention returns us to the third.
The Pulse of Conscious Awareness
There is also a temporal dimension to this work. Conscious awareness does not sustain itself by force. It pulses. We drift. We become absorbed. We lose the thread. The practice is not to maintain an artificial vigilance but to recognize, even briefly, when we have been carried away. The instant of seeing is already a return. Nothing dramatic needs to happen. The fantasy need not be condemned. The moment awareness reappears, energy re-centers. Psychic drain stops because identification loosens.
This is why the distinction between mindfulness and seeing matters. Mindfulness often implies a sustained slowing down, a deliberate attentiveness unfolding in time. Seeing, by contrast, is instantaneous. It cuts through. In a flash, you realize, “I am lost in this.” That realization is not self-reproach; it is being reasserting itself. Even if the imagination continues, it now unfolds within a conscious field rather than as an unconscious current.
The Real Inner War
The inner war, then, is not between imagination and rational control. It is between unconscious identification and conscious presence. One tightens around narratives that promise completion. The other rests in being and allows imagination to arise without captivity. One consumes attention. The other liberates it.
When attention is anchored in being, imagination becomes creative participation rather than compensatory escape. It does not attempt to fix identity or secure worth. It expresses. It plays. It serves. And paradoxically, vitality increases rather than diminishes. We are no longer borrowing energy from presence to fuel fantasy. We are allowing presence itself to animate imagination.
In this sense, the practice is simple but not easy: reserve some attention for being. Notice when you disappear into the story. Notice the contraction. Notice the return. Each moment of seeing strengthens the center. Each release of identification restores energy.
Attention is not a small faculty. It is the conduit through which being becomes conscious of itself. Whether we scatter it in unconscious narratives or anchor it in living presence determines the quality of our life. Daydreaming that feeds identification drains us because it forgets the source. Voluntary attention renews us because it remembers.
And perhaps this is the quiet invitation beneath the whole teaching: not to wage war against imagination, not to tighten into spiritual self-monitoring, but to become intimate with the movement of attention itself. To notice when it contracts. To notice when it opens. To notice when you vanish into narrative and when you remain rooted in being. Over time, this noticing reshapes the inner architecture. The compulsion to escape weakens. The need to complete yourself through story softens. What remains is simpler and more stable than fantasy ever was — a steady participation in being that does not depend on rehearsal, revision, or imagined arrival. From there, even imagination becomes transparent to its source.
Keep the Scrolls Unrolling
The Virgin Monk Boy Scrolls is a free publication.
If these words steady you, challenge you, make you laugh, or help you breathe deeper, here are three simple ways to support the work.
Share the Scrolls
Passing a link forward is how more wandering souls stumble into the monastery. Word of mouth is the whole engine.
Become a Supporting Member
Paid members unlock the Virgin Monk Boy Book Of Hours, Whispers from the Silence, and the ability to start threads and share their own Substacks in the private chat.
Tip with a coffee
A one time gift of holy caffeine that fuels both the monk and the Magdalene movement. ☕🔥
Your presence alone already helps.
Your support keeps the lantern lit for everyone else.
Follow (or troll) Virgin Monk Boy
Recommended Reading
(As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. These recommendations support the scrolls at no extra cost to you.)
Living Presence: A Sufi Way to Mindfulness & the Essential Self by Kabir Helminski
I'd call this simple shift of attention- to notice the drifting, to consciously step in and out- a micropractice. It sounds simple, it is, but the way we are conditioned and trained makes it challenging. What I found too is, that if being fully- embodied- present, there are barely or even no thoughts. And that doesn't happen by deciding that the mind shouldn't think. If the mind- and brain- engages with sensory input, tactile feelings, so the richness a moment contains, it has almost no capacity left for unconscious daydreaming or unnecessary word-forming. And one gets aware of desire itself too.
Truth. Multiple moments of remembering throughout the day, no matter what, where, when has been my practice. And then, at times, I do become consumed by a thought that has grabbed and held on, usually fear based. Even as I am giving it attention, it causes great suffering. So I notice that, and although it may 'have me' for varying periods of time, there is more. My hope is that we all cultivate a space that allows all to come and go, and enjoy the freedom that this bestows.