Recently Amido and I were in Playa del Carmen, Mexico on a 40-day working holiday. We spent our days working on editing and assembling the A Course in Witnessing, interspersed with walks on the beach and swimming in the cenote and the sea.
On one of those walks on the beach, the realization struck me while enjoying the show on display of suntans, tattoos and undulating buttocks that we seek attention in many ways and that it is natural to seek attention until we are ourselves giving attention to our true being in self-remembering or right-remembering. Once we begin to nourish our being with our own light of attention, the need for getting attention from others simply evaporates. This must be at least one of the meanings of Buddha’s statement, “Be a light unto yourself.”
-purushottama