There is a reason why we “pay” attention. It is energetically expensive to the frugal body and brain, designed to conserve the energy at hand in order to store it up for situations when you’ll need a burst to run or fight successfully. We “pay” by investing energy and focus into something in order for it to thrive but at the expense of all other things going on around us. Inattentional blindness is an official term for what happens when we focus on something to gain certain information and it almost always means something else needs to be ignored as the “invisible gorilla” experiment showed. The participants were instructed to count how many times the ball was passed between the black and white team and 50% of the participants missed the person in a giant gorilla suit who walked right in the middle of the screen, beat its chest and walked away.

The Egyptians got it right millennia ago when they introduced Horus, symbolized by the eye, as their highest deity. Using their gods as vessels for certain traits, skills and value, they put Horus on the top because eye is that which sees, that which goes where attention goes and they understand what we’ve forgot for so long – that the ability to pay attention is our greatest asset in the way we live this life. It’s aligned with the thing we’re just starting to rediscover in our own explorations as we mature as beings when we realize that energy and attention are one and the same and that energy flows where attention goes. Whatever we focus on becomes more visible, prominent and takes over more of our mental landscapes. We don’t see in facts, we see through our own eye, a combination of motivations, desires, shortcuts the brain has devised to conserve energy resources, through what draws out attention or the tasks we focus on to get something done.

As the Egyptians got it right with putting attention to your surroundings, its dangers and joys, at the top of this godly system of viewing the word, the West has long been consumed by rationality as the highest virtue, although rationality itself is already tainted by what we don’t see because attention is seeping into other places. Attention is “payed” because it is a debt to seeing in order to be able to act in the world functionally, it is a debt to reality and, if not paid in full, will come with interest punishing us for the things we could have seen but didn’t. The eye and consciously choosing to see and analyze, willingly engaging, is what makes the difference in how things play out for us. So play the game and pay your attention dues. That’s the best bet you have in this game.