Where Is Your Attention? A Talk By Jared Franks

In this talk, Jared invites the listener to reflect on where their attention is. He reminds us that when we turn our attention to what is always here, we discover a field of open presence, that is our very nature.
Music: Sailing Away by Shane Ivers

Transcript

If you just stay true to emptiness,

If you stay true to no story,

Even if it's a little bit boring,

What happens is you start to get freed up from the addiction of me.

Something my teacher always said to me was,

You pay for your life with where you pay your attention.

Where you pay your attention is where you pay for your whole life.

Because finally that's all you have.

All you have is your attention.

Everything else is coming and going.

The only true choice is the choice of what is it that you love.

What is it that I will give my life to?

And you start to reflect on yourself,

What have I been giving my life to?

I can say for me it was fear,

Wanting to be liked,

Looking for a partner,

Mostly looking outside for what was going to make the inside better.

What was going to take away the bad feelings inside that I could get from outside.

But I wasn't aware that that's what I was doing at the time.

I thought I was just living my life.

I thought I was just doing what everybody was doing.

I mean it turns out I was doing what everyone else was doing.

But no one ever kind of stopped me to say,

You know,

What are you doing?

And do you like it?

And do you actually have a choice in this?

You have an option.

Because you start to see what you have options,

What are your real options?

What do you have choice about?

You didn't choose your body.

You didn't choose your hair color.

Maybe some of us do.

And not our original,

Let's say,

Hair color.

You know,

We didn't choose our brain.

So you didn't even really choose like your interests.

What makes you happy,

Like art and what work you do.

You didn't really choose that.

Because even that came from your conditioning.

Even that came from your brain.

And where did your brain come from?

Hundreds of years of evolution from single-cell bacteria has led to your body-mind.

And so then you start to look and see what do I have control over?

What do I have choice in?

And my suggestion is really to consider the choice of where you turn your attention towards and to reflect on what your attention is on currently.

Most of us,

Our attention is on our own thoughts most of the day.

So we're thinking and we're listening to those thoughts and we're continuing the conversation.

Working with ourselves,

Disagreeing with ourselves and going to the next sentence.

Is that the case for you?

Maybe not all of you.

And to varying degrees I would say too.

And when it's not our thoughts we're then looking for survival.

So where's the work?

Where's the money?

Where's the partner?

Where's the sex?

Where's the relationships to keep me safe?

Where's the herd?

Where's the family?

Where is my safety?

Where is my love?

And if you then look at those thoughts and then you look at the theme of survival,

You start to see that our attention is generally almost always focused on me.

Not me,

Jared,

You.

Each one of us is focused on me.

And this is where most human beings are paying their whole life.

How am I doing?

Am I surviving?

Am I loved?

Am I in relationship?

Am I being successful?

What's my image like?

Am I safe?

Even in spirituality,

You know,

A lot of people get into spirituality,

Meet true teachers,

Hear the true teaching.

And then the spiritual search becomes hooked in and wrapped up in this same focus of me.

How am I doing spiritually?

Am I awake?

Am I enlightened?

That person seems more enlightened than me.

I'm more enlightened than them.

I feel some fear that must mean I'm not enlightened.

Therefore I now need to go and go to satsang so that I can make the fear go away.

It's still all about me.

And all I have to offer is the possibility of turning away from this me,

Of actually turning towards what's before me,

Turning towards where me itself arises out of and where me falls back into.

Every night we all go to sleep.

And I've never met someone who ever said to me,

I don't like sleep.

Everyone loves sleep.

But in a deep sleep,

Where is me?

And if you really consider it,

If you're really listening in this moment,

When you consider when this me turns to black,

When you go to sleep and you actually surrender your world,

I remember Papaji saying it so well that first you go into your house and you say goodbye to the world and close the door.

Then you say goodbye to your house and go into your bedroom and close the door.

Then you have to say goodbye to your partner and your own body and you have to close your eyes.

And then finally you say goodbye to yourself.

And this is what we call rest,

Deep rest.

And we actually need it.

It's a form of torture.

Deprivation is a form of torture.

Better way to say it is if the ego is on 24 hours a day,

It's a form of torture.

We can only survive 12 to 14 hours or whatever of ego a day of ourselves.

We need,

You know,

Six to eight hours of break from our own mind,

From our own story of who we are,

How we're doing,

What's happening,

Who likes me,

Who doesn't,

Where am I,

Where should I be.

So the possibility is in this instant to find out where does this I thought,

Where does it arise from?

Where does it get its power from?

What is here before it arises?

And this is sometimes so quiet and so non,

It can never ever meet your expectations because it's so,

It's not mental.

It's before thought.

Expectations are all thought.

Whatever expectations you have,

And I have many people who've had profound experiences with teachers and then that becomes the expectation.

I'm going to feel like that.

And then of course then they reflect on their own being and initially it's like,

Well,

It can't be this because nothing's really happening because it doesn't have any fireworks.

But it's not often the profound experiences we have when we go sit with a teacher or something,

Just grace comes.

The feeling we have of bliss and profound opening is often a juxtaposition to the feeling of crampedness and limitation and suffering that you were just feeling 10 milliseconds before that.

So that's why we call it awakening.

It's like coming out of a nightmare,

Out of a dream into reality.

You wake up from this dream and to the degree that your dream was bad is the degree to which you feel a heightened sense of a spiritual experience when you wake up.

But if you just stay true to emptiness,

If you stay true to no story,

Even if it's a little bit boring for the first few seconds,

Minutes,

Hours,

Days,

What happens is you start to get freed up from the addiction of me.

You get freed up from the continual feeding of the dream.

Then there are moments of bliss,

Moments of love,

Clarity,

And moments of discomfort and fear and tiredness and everything.

Everything still shows up.

The only difference is that you are no longer believing yourself to be an object in your own presence.

You recognize yourself to be the presence which gives life to your idea of yourself.

You recognize the field of open presence.

I don't know.

I want to use different words.

The words become too familiar.

I'm not talking about the words at all.

I'm talking about what is alive in this moment that is here in my voice.

It's the same alive presence or consciousness that is actually here when you start thinking about yourself,

When you start identifying as a human,

As a man,

As a woman,

As a somebody,

As you're identifying with that and then feeling bad and feeling good and whatever.

In that moment,

To be asleep is to be unaware of your own presence which is holding and animating this sense of separate identity.

To be awake is to know,

To see,

To recognize that this thought,

This belief,

And this idea and this body and this brain and these preferences are arising in me,

Arising in something you can't even talk about because it's not a something.

So this was my experience,

Was living this life with Jared and I mean it was so limited and so full of suffering and then in the recognition of what is always here while Jared is coming and going,

Where Jared gets sacrificed at sleep time and gets reincarnated in the morning,

Recognizing what is always here,

Recognizing that there is a presence here that doesn't have a name,

Doesn't have a form,

Doesn't have a color,

Doesn't have an age,

Doesn't have a birth date,

Doesn't have a death date.

This beyond the mind's capacity to understand because the mind is inside it and because it's alive,

Meaning it's not a concept,

It's not an idea,

It's not a belief,

It's bigger than all of that.

And in that,

I could then look at this entity of Jared and see that all the thoughts and beliefs and stories were all made up.

But in this moment,

In an instant of having a quiet mind,

I saw that there isn't a Jared as I think of Jared,

As I'd always thought.

There is just isn't.

I have to tell that story and then believe it and then act as if.

Even when I'm telling the story,

Believing it and acting as if,

Still there's no Jared.

Just because you believe it and act as if doesn't make it real,

Doesn't make it true.

It just means you're in a trance.

The whole world is in a sleepwalking trance called me and it's possible for you,

For everyone to wake up,

To just stop in an instant and it's finished.

Reviews

Absolutely stunning thank you :)

Very clarifying! Thank you for this talk.

Really interesting approach on the topic, insightful and valuable, thanks you 🙏🏼✨