Dear Unknown Friends:

The lecture by Eli Siegel we are now serializing, Mind and Attention, was given in March 1949. And in it is that understanding of the human mind—one’s own mind, one’s own self—which people are thirsting for now, and are not finding in the therapists, counselors, books on self, magazines, talk shows. In the section of the lecture printed here, Mr. Siegel explains some of the things that mind can do which have most bewildered people and frightened them. His explanation is not only clear, logical, historic, true: it is given with his beautiful grace and humor; with his scholarship, which was always at one with tremendous kindness; with his honesty, which was utter and therefore always at one with ease.

Every person wants to feel good and to think well of himself or herself. To understand why a person (who may be ourselves) does not, and to know what will end this person’s unease, nervousness, deep discomfort, we have to know what the nature of the human mind is. The various counselors today do not have that knowledge. It exists, magnificently, in Aesthetic Realism. So with tremendous gratitude and critical joy, I present here something of what Eli Siegel showed the human mind to be. And I use a poem of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Around 1885, Hopkins wrote, in one of his intricate, jaggedly musical sonnets, about the fact that our own minds can give us so much trouble—why should we be against ourselves so much?; why aren’t we more soothing to ourselves? The sonnet begins:

This means: Let me pity more my own heart, be kind and charitable from now on to myself; let me stop using my own mind to torment that same mind. People all over the world are thinking something like that right now.

There is, of course, a huge desire to say the reason our minds can come up with thoughts against ourselves, the reason we can accuse ourselves, has a source outside us: somebody else made us dislike ourselves. This desire has been much fostered by the counselors of our time, who have been ready to tell you the chief reason you disesteem yourself is that you were abused by somebody in some fashion.

Our Mind Is Ethical and Aesthetic

Eli Siegel showed that we can give ourselves trouble, we can make ourselves feel bad, we can be unwittingly severe with ourselves, we can dislike ourselves—because our mind, by its nature, is ethical and aesthetic. This principle, stated by him, is true about our seemingly so refractory mind: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” There is an ethical demand in us, which is also an aesthetic demand, to put together the two opposites of self and world. In the same way that we are made with a need to breathe the world’s air, we are made with an irrevocable inner demand that we be just to this world we were born into—see meaning in it, care for it.

“Man’s deepest desire, his largest desire,” Mr. Siegel wrote, “is to like the world on an honest or accurate basis” (Self and World, Definition Press, p. 1). This desire is a force as existent in us as our heartbeat, saying, “Listen lady, listen gent—you can’t be yourself unless you are trying to be just to the world, which includes trying to know it!” The goodness of our mind, its intelligence, its originality, is how fully we welcome into it what is not ourselves. A mind that doesn’t have the alphabet in it, knowledge of arithmetic, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the play Hamlet, awareness of the American Civil War, is a mind deeply curtailed, not truly itself—but the alphabet, numbers, Beethoven’s notes, Hamlet, the Civil War are the outside world. This is aesthetics—the oneness of opposites—and ethics: for our mind to be really ours is for it to be just to the world.

The aesthetics and ethics of mind is also in the fact that we cannot like ourselves unless we are trying to like the world. Mr. Siegel writes, in a sentence I love: “The greatest biological fact in human history is this: that the whole world went to the making of every individual; in other words, that it was the universe, or existence, or reality, which gave us birth” (Self and World, p. 52). Our atoms are not different from those of a tree, a brick, a lizard. And we have, Mr. Siegel showed, in our physical beings and personalities, the opposites that are reality’s. For example, the being and change that go on in all our cells are opposites to be seen any day in the sky, which is there always yet is always changing. Our personalities have in them gentleness and strength—which are also in a bird flying—and we want gentleness and strength to be together well in us, as they are in that bird. That we are continuous with what the world is, has to do with the Hopkins lines—with why a person uses his own mind unwittingly to pain himself. Mr. Siegel explains, in other sentences I love for their sheer and vibrant truth, and their kind and ringing prose:

When we are unfair to the world, it can be shown that something in us which is the world itself, doesn’t like it….The unconscious, as judge, has said: “Do not separate yourself from reality. If you do, you are not being yourself entirely, and one side of you will punish the other.” [Self and World, pp. 45, 53]

The Other Desire

Mr. Siegel has explained what it is in us that we ourselves punish ourselves for whether we wish to or not. It is contempt, “the lessening of what is different from oneself as a means of self-increase as one sees it.” Contempt pits those opposites of care for self and justice to the world against each other: it is utterly unaesthetic; yet it is “the greatest danger or temptation of man.” He showed that contempt is the source of every unjust act and mean thought. For instance, racism, in all its hideousness, comes from that feeling “I’m more if I can make what is different from me less.” Meanwhile, contempt is immensely ordinary. It is the hope that someone look stupid so we can look smarter. It is the feeling, constant in people, that the chief thing about another person is how he treats us—we do not have to think about who he is, how he sees everything. It is the constant sense of ourselves as more real than other people: our feelings are important, urgent; theirs are dim or nonexistent.

The next lines of Hopkins’ poem tell, in his usefully rocky way, that he is unable to bring comfort to himself:

This means: I am looking for comfort, but can’t get it groping in that comfortless territory which is me, any more than a blind person can find day in his darkness; or any more than someone suffering thirst is able to quench that thirst, though there is so much wetness in the world. The reason is: unless we are able clearly to criticize the contempt we have—nothing, no amount of praise, will have us feel at ease. We punish ourselves inevitably for contempt. But we need to be able to criticize our contempt consciously, accurately. Because of Aesthetic Realism, at last we can! This fact is cause for tremendous celebration in everyone’s personal life—and nationally too, as the Declaration of Independence is seen as cause for national celebration for the rest of time.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

Attentive to Something

By Eli Siegel

The purpose of attention is to see a thing as it is, wholly as it is, cheerfully as it is, courageously as it is, and not let what it is be interfered with by some junk from ourselves. Sometimes the junk takes a terrible and interesting form.

Walter Scott wrote, in 1830, Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft. The book really isn’t just about demonology and witchcraft; it is about something else. Early in it, there’s a person who insists on seeing something that comes only from himself:

A patient of Dr. Gregory…made the following extraordinary statement of his complaint. “I am in the habit,” he said, “of dining at five and exactly as the hour of six arrives,…the door of the room, even when I have been weak enough to bolt it,…flies wide open; an old hag…enters with a frowning and incensed countenance…; she rushes upon me;…then strikes me a severe blow with her staff. I fall from my chair in a swoon….To the recurrence of this apparition I am daily subjected….”

Now, this is an example of the fact that if we do not want to attend fairly to what is about us, we shall be forced to attend to something that comes only from ourselves. If a person, for example, has a dream night after night, or frequently, and, though he doesn’t want to have this dream, the dream comes, then he is compelled to give attention to something because he has failed to give attention to something else.

A Kind of Love

Attention is a kind of love. When people listen to someone and say deeply, “I want to know everything that this person is saying. I want to know the source of what he is saying. These words deserve to be known by me,” that person is in a state of deep attention. However, if there’s something in him that feels that to be attentive to someone or to something constantly is a diminishing of oneself, his attention will that much be corrupt. If a person has, without knowing it, tried not to be attentive, he can—as this person of the 1820s did—get something for himself which pursues him and says that at six o’clock some dreadful woman you don’t want to see will come to see you, and you’ll have to be aware of her. Hallucinations and fixations and bad dreams are of this source.

We have to take the world truly as it is; otherwise we shall punish ourselves by becoming attentive to something we don’t want to be attentive to. There is a good deal of punishment of this kind. Some persons can’t put a notion out of their minds; they have to think about it. This is called a fixation. Some persons have to do a certain thing at 10 o’clock: they have to wipe something at 10 o’clock; they have to be attentive there. This also comes from the fact that they’ve wanted to be unattentive, careless, tra-la-la about everything else—so something in them says, “Look here, bozo, you don’t want to be attentive to things. So you’ll be attentive at 10 o’clock to something you don’t want to do. You don’t want to listen to people—you’ll get a fixation. You don’t want to be attentive to people—you’ll have to count. You don’t want to see what other people are—you’re going to get a hallucination that you can’t get rid of, or a bad dream. Be attentive to things in the sunlight, and you won’t have to be punishing yourself by being attentive to things in the night hours when you don’t want to be attentive.”

The idea of being attentive is the giving of oneself. Anytime we look at something, we are giving ourselves to that thing. That thing is also giving itself to us. Anytime a child looks at an apple, the child is giving itself to the apple; and the apple, even without being eaten, is giving itself to the child. But if we are not in the habit of giving ourselves to anything, every time we look at something there will be a devil that will interfere, whether we know it or not.

The Senses Are for Attention

This is one of the reasons why people get eye trouble. I say this not medically. People haven’t wanted to see, and they can interfere with their sight. There is eye trouble from another source, to be sure; the eye can have all sorts of interferences. But people can get eye trouble because they don’t want to be fully attentive. While they look at something, they want to feel they can get a discount by thinking of something else, interfering with what they’re looking at.

This can go on in terms of the ear. It can go on in terms, even, of taste. People have tried not to taste food. It has gone on in terms of smell. It has gone on in terms of touch. People, for instance, can be punished by finding part of their arm not feeling anything. Many people awake numb in the morning; they don’t feel things. And the reason is that during their waking hours they decided to be 67⅜ % attentive: they feel, That’s enough; that’s what the world deserves, 67⅜, or maybe less.

But if you’re going to be 67⅜ % attentive, something in you is going to say, “Your glory doesn’t come from being inattentive,” and is going to punish you. The method of punishment is ever so various. You can get a nice hallucination of having to meet a green skeleton at 7:30 (that used to happen in Scotland in the 18th century). But you’re going to be attentive to something. You’re going to get a nice fixation, or a nice obsession, or a most wonderful compulsion. And all this because you’ve taken a tra-la-la attitude to the world: “I’ll look at it when I want to, and if I don’t want to—well, I won’t!”