This reflection grows out of the same stream as Surrender and Attention: The Cosmic Breath: Cynthia Bourgeault’s work with Practicing Living Presence, read through Kabir Helminski’s Living Presence and that whole Sufi insistence that the problem is not simply what we feel, but what keeps organizing our attention beneath the feeling. One of the things that starts to become obvious, slowly and then all at once, is that most of us do not actually place attention. We follow preference. We move toward what pleases us, brace against what irritates us, and call that being a person. But preference is a terrible spiritual director. It keeps the soul shallow while convincing us we are being honest.
Where Preference Hides
Preference rarely shows up looking dramatic. It usually appears in much softer clothing. It sounds like discernment. It sounds like taste. It sounds like, “This just doesn’t resonate,” or “I’m not in the right space for this today.” Sometimes that is true. A lot of the time it is just the ego refusing to stay anywhere that does not immediately reward it. The problem is not that we have likes and dislikes. The problem is that we have made them the gatekeepers of attention. Nothing gets our full presence unless the personality approves.
The Attention That Gets Captured
Once you begin to watch this in real time, the mechanism is almost embarrassingly easy to see. Attention moves along until it hits something attractive or irritating, and then it sticks. It is pulled by praise, snagged by insult, seduced by stimulation, repelled by discomfort. The ego calls this freedom because it got to react first. But reaction is not freedom. Reaction is just bondage with better branding. If your attention can only stay where it feels rewarded, then your inner life is still being governed by appetite.
What We Mistake for Authenticity
Modern spirituality has made this worse by teaching people to trust every internal weather pattern as if it were revelation. If you feel open, it must be aligned. If you feel resistance, it must be wrong. If you feel bored, surely the soul is not meant for this. But boredom is often just wounded preference with nothing to feed on. Resistance is often vanity being denied its usual snacks. And alignment, at least in the deeper sense, does not always feel pleasant. Sometimes it feels like staying in the room when nothing in you is getting applause.
The Practice of Showing Up Anyway
This is where attention stops being a mood and becomes a practice. Not a clenched practice. Not a performative one. Just the simple act of remaining. You do not have to pretend to like the moment. You do not have to decorate it with spiritual language. You do not have to say the traffic jam is a blessing or the tedious conversation is secretly your guru. You only have to stop outsourcing your presence to preference. You stay. You notice. You let attention rest where it is instead of constantly asking whether the personality is having a good time.
What Changes When You Stay
At first, this feels almost disappointing. There is no instant glow. No soundtrack. No angelic fog machine. What appears instead is much quieter. The moment becomes more textured. The thing you wanted to escape begins to reveal details. A task that felt dead has its own rhythm. A person you were resisting becomes less flat. Even your own irritation becomes more interesting when you stop feeding it and start watching it. Preference had been reducing the world to a yes-or-no button. Attention, when it is freed from that reflex, starts giving reality back its depth.
Beyond Like and Dislike
This is also where a different kind of aliveness begins to show up. Not happiness exactly. Not pleasure. Something steadier than that. A vitality that comes from contact rather than approval. You begin to sense that being fully here has its own nourishment. The moment does not need to be improved before it can be inhabited. And this is where a lot of spiritual vanity dies, because the self that wanted to curate every experience starts to realize it is not actually the center of the room.
The Soul Gets Built Here
If attention only goes where the ego is pleased, then the soul never develops much strength. It remains dependent, reactive, and easily bought. But every time you stay present without demanding immediate emotional payment, something in you gets less flimsy. The inner witness grows. The tyranny of preference weakens. You stop being dragged so easily by attraction and aversion. This is not glamorous work, which is probably why it is real. A soul is not built through constant self-confirmation. It is built through contact, honesty, and the slow liberation of attention from the need to be flattered.
What This Looks Like in Ordinary Life
It usually starts in embarrassingly unromantic places. Brushing your teeth without wandering off into fantasy by the fourth tooth. Listening to someone without spending the whole time building your rebuttal. Folding laundry without needing a podcast, a mood, a sign from God, and a small miracle to get through it. Paying attention while annoyed. Paying attention while bored. Paying attention while unseen. This is where preference starts to lose its throne. Not in the Himalayas. Not in a branded retreat center. In the kitchen. In the car. In the line you did not want to stand in.
The Freedom on the Other Side
What begins to emerge from this is not passivity. It is not numbness. It is not becoming the kind of person who smiles beatifically while spiritually bypassing the whole human condition. It is something far more useful. You become less coerced. Less hijackable. Less easy to manipulate through praise, outrage, novelty, or discomfort. And because of that, attention becomes available for something deeper than reaction. It can begin to serve presence itself.
Returning Without Romance
Eventually it becomes obvious that the issue was never whether you liked the moment. The issue was whether you could stay conscious inside it. Preference had made attention conditional. It turned presence into a customer loyalty program. But the deeper work keeps cutting through that arrangement. You do not have to like it to pay attention. You do not have to enjoy it to be changed by it. You do not have to feel spiritually special for the moment to become real.
And that is where the whole thing starts to open.
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Living Presence: A Sufi Way to Mindfulness & the Essential Self by Kabir Helminski
This is so very good.
I find myself wandering off when folding laundry. Usually multitasking more than fantasizing, though. Traffic jams (until I started working remote full time) were often useful for solving coding problems too. ("If I must be here -- and apparently I must -- increasing my carbon footprint, is it not more productive to do this than sit here swearing at people I don't know about something they have no more control over than I do?") At least two intractable problems got resolved this way after spending the entire day (or more) chasing my tail at my desk. I suppose the question is "what did I miss while I was extending my workday?"
The one that got me thoguh was "listening to someone rather than preparing your rebuttal". I'm aware of it when I['m on the other end, the body language gives it away. The shaking head the waving hands, the crossed arms... but turning that around and seeing it in myself can be a challenge. Especially when most of my meetings are via Teams or Zoom. I *do* find that when I can catch myself and stop doing it, I very often learn something I hadn't considered before. I find a lot of that here on Substack as well.