Attention is Currency

Your attention is your currency. This is both a spiritual fact and a political fact. We live in a distraction economy. The biggest corporations of our day live and die based on how much of YOUR attention they can get. Advertisement is the backbone of capitalism. Advertisement’s purpose is to capture your attention. Once your attention is captured it seeks a hold on your imagination and once it has your imagination it seeks to shape who and how you choose to be. It promises meaning and purpose, but it leaves you empty instead.

This is how your life-force is harvested for someone else’s profit.

Our mental environment is thoroughly polluted. It is shaped by an economy that commodifies our attention.

Choosing where to place your attention is a political act. It is an act of subversion. It is how we pry ourselves out of the consumer identity, the consumer self, that is eating us from inside.

We can also look at this in spiritual terms. Swami Muktananda used to say that the crane was a master meditator, but the bird only had one problem - it would only meditate on fish, and so fish were all that it could attain. Meditation is the training of the mind. It is how we redirect our attention to what is actually real. It is how we find our true Self.