the-soul-becomes-what-it-attends-to

# The soul becomes what it attends to The nous does not receive the world so much as build the world it then seems to find. What you turn toward grows; what you deny your attention starves and dies. The perceiving self, then, is not given once and endured ever after but made slowly out of what it keeps looking at. This is why the desert fathers staked everything on watchfulness and the Jesus prayer: not to empty the mind, but to work the one lever that decides what a person becomes. Transformation of the seer comes before any new fact, and attention is how the seer is transformed. Related: [[as-a-man-is-so-he-sees]], [[internalised-exemplars-reshape-salience]], [[addiction-is-a-progressive-narrowing]]