Attention & Focus · “You Become What You Hold”
Sensing, Looking, Listening
To be aware of yourself AND your surroundings at once — deliberately sensing your body, really looking, and really listening — so you snap out of the automatic ‘consensus trance’ and become genuinely present.
Sensing, looking, listening in 4 lines: Feel your body. Really look at what’s in front of you — see what it actually is. Really listen. Hold all of it, plus the sense that you are here, at once. You’ll be suddenly present; when you stop, you slip back into autopilot. Do it for a few seconds, many times a day.
What it is
This is Charles Tart’s practical, psychologist’s version of the Gurdjieffian practice of self-remembering. Tart — a founder of transpersonal psychology and a serious consciousness researcher — adopted the Fourth Way exercise but stripped it of jargon and gave it a plain, do-it-now instruction he calls “sensing, looking, and listening.” The aim is the same divided attention the Fourth Way teaches: be aware of yourself (especially the felt sensations of your own body) and of your surroundings at the same moment, instead of being lost inside thought.
Tart’s report of his own first success is direct: when he did it he was suddenly present, and it became clear that, before that, he had been relatively “unconscious” — the “machine” of his mind and senses simply running on its own.
The technique operationalises attention (The Inner Creates the Outer), presence to the now (Everything Happens in the Now), and self-witnessing (Life Is a Dream), framed by a working psychologist rather than a metaphysical teacher.
The Method
Following Tart’s instruction in Waking Up:
- Right now, sense your body. Deliberately feel the weight of your body, the contact of feet on the floor, hands, posture, the sensation of being physically here. Tart treats body-sensation as the anchor that keeps you from floating off into thought.
- Really look. Don’t just let your eyes drift over the scene. As Tart insists, when you look at something, look to see what it actually is — not the mental label, the real thing in front of you.
- Really listen. Same with sound: don’t mechanically let your ears pick up noise — actively hear what is there.
- Hold all three at once, plus yourself. The trick is the simultaneity: body-sensation and seeing and hearing and the quiet sense of “I am the one here, doing this.” That combined act is what Gurdjieff called self-remembering; Tart just gives it sensory handles.
- Notice the shift — and notice when you stop. Tart reports that the moment he engaged it he was present; the moment he stopped, he “fell back into ordinary consciousness.” So the practice is really two observations: the vivid being-here when it’s on, and the automatic daze the rest of the time.
- Do it often, briefly. A few seconds, many times through the day, rather than one long heroic effort. Each repetition is a small “waking up.” (Sourcing note: “sensing, looking, and listening,” being “suddenly present,” the “machine” of mind and senses “just operating,” falling back into “ordinary consciousness,” and the admonition to actually look and listen rather than move the eyes mechanically are Tart’s framing of the technique in Waking Up and his own accounts of practising it; “self-remembering” is the Gurdjieff-work name he uses for it.)
Source & Lineage
Charles T. Tart (b. 1937) is an American psychologist, a founding figure of transpersonal psychology and the scientific study of consciousness (Altered States of Consciousness, 1969).
In Waking Up: Overcoming the Obstacles to Human Potential (1986) he built a whole programme on G.I. Gurdjieff’s premise that we are mostly not awake.
Tart’s distinctive move was to take Gurdjieff’s self-remembering and recast it as a teachable, almost clinical attention exercise — “sensing, looking, listening” — that any reader can verify on themselves without buying the surrounding cosmology. → (cf. Gurdjieff, Ouspensky).
Common refinements
Going mechanical. Tart’s specific warning: don’t just move your eyes around and let sound wash over you — that’s the trance dressed up as practice. Actually see and hear.
- Dropping the body. People try to do it purely “in the head.” The body-sensation channel is the anchor; without it you slip back into thought.
- Straining for duration. Brief and frequent beats long and forced. Forcing produces eye/head tension and an earlier collapse.
- Refinement: Hang it on a recurring cue — every doorway, every time the phone buzzes, take three seconds of sensing-looking-listening. Tart’s point is repetition, not marathon effort.