Darkness Incubation as Attention Restoration

Our north star at Black Stone Sanctuary is deep refinement, reclaiming, and sovereignty of human attention.

Attention sovereignty is a fundamental building block in our approach to "open-source modular monasticism" in polytheist-animist revival contexts. (Unfamiliar with our work? Start with our welcome page).

Accordingly, one of our ascetic practices involves retreating into incubation spaces where darkness (literal and metaphorical) can serve as a healing force. We take inspiration for this work from sources such as Peter Kingsley's book In the Dark Places of Wisdom, modern reconstructions of the dream incubation temples of Asklepios in ancient Greece, and a modern semi-secret society called the Order of the Third Bird.

Through regular use of dark incubation spaces, we've observed that slow pacing, quiet rooms, and aesthetically immersive atmospheres can be used for healing of attention — as in restoring humans' capacity for high quality, deep, and refined attention.

Incubation spaces teach us that some types of healing forces can only reach human beings under conditions of time spaciousness — a state which often manifests psychologically as a sense of having all the time in the world to meander, explore, reflect, and simply let curiosity lead where it may.

How often do you have the sense that it's OK to lose track of time because there's nothing urgent on your plate, and a long unstructured stretch of time before you?

Black Stone Sanctuary aims to align our service work in incubation spaces with these patterns of time spaciousness as much as possible.

One reason we consider time spaciousness important is that it creates space for the restorative practice of giving attention non-coercively, as a gift. This is quite different from forced or structurally appropriated attention. Non-consensual extraction of human attention labor happens every day, even on tiny micro-levels — autoplay videos, pop-up subscription nags, etc. Over time, it all adds up.

At the Sanctuary we do our best to opt out of all non-consensual attention labor. We do so by using incubation spaces as a tool to set limits and withdraw our attention from extractive forces that concentrate value inwardly without proper reciprocity.

For true attention sovereignty, sufficient value must be distributed back to its rightful place: in the hands of those who create that value with their gifts of time, care, attention, creativity, and so on. When it is not — when the attention is coerced and most of its value is captured elsewhere, while the value-creators are left with mere scraps and chronic time pressures — the need for incubation spaces grows ever more urgent.

Because we live in a world that drains human attention non-consensually in many ways (e.g., noise pollution) and often leaves us chronically bereft of deep attentional nourishment, humans benefit from physical spaces that can do at least part of the limiting for us.

This is why we need monasteries. It's also why place-making and sacristan duties are so important for monastic life.

Spaces designed to facilitate attention sovereignty cannot be left to rely on fallible things like human willpower. Extractive forces are powerful enough to derail even the most conscientious objectors, because they're designed to bypass or circumvent humans' best judgment.

Contemplative practices can help build these restorative attentional habits and cognitive muscles, but they work best in appropriate surroundings and with the aid of collective intelligence. Humans are much more likely to thrive in relational contexts of reciprocity.

Here the astute observer will note a big problem: much of modern culture is optimized to extract profit from our time, attention, and labor without full reciprocity. Such extraction is the norm rather than the exception.

In other words, we're drafted into daily micro-battles for our attention.

At the Sanctuary, monastics use darkness and incubation spaces as tools to help us heal and train for sovereignty over our individual and collective attention.

The kind of healing that deepens and refines quality of attention is largely unavailable through the standard channels of the dominant culture, because extractive forces are dispersed and low-level; they're normalized everywhere. This presents formidable challenges to humans' mental health. (Psychiatrist Dr. Craig Heacock describes modern mental health stresses evocatively as "rivers of trauma").

On a more hopeful note, we've also seen that some wounds can resolve themselves when they are given quality attention within a safe incubation space. The healing available this way can be witnessed, but it proceeds of its own accord and in its own time; it cannot be planned or coerced. It's a form of embodied intelligence.

Building truly attention-restorative places while living in a structurally extractive culture requires refusal. It calls for learning to say no to many things, including many we'd genuinely love to do — not out of self-punishment or masochism in the name of monastic discipline, but out of awareness that every yes we utter means a no to countless other things (implicitly or explicitly). It calls for insistence on boundaries. It calls for withdrawing our energy from all extractive forces that leave humans drained without adequate reciprocation.

In contexts that provide the necessary support, monastic attention training — limiting low-quality/non-reciprocal demands on our attention — can serve as a form of care, respect, and self-kindness. Setting these limits can also be a gift to others, because it creates more room for us to bring our best caring selves to interactions with others and the larger world.

The Black Stone Sanctuary approach to self-kindness means we don't mock ourselves, minimize our struggles (e.g., "first world problems"), or shrink back from what we're capable of out of fear that we'll be dismissed as elitist navel-gazers for prioritizing attention sovereignty, including aesthetically pleasing IRL incubation spaces to support attention retraining.

We also believe that even the smallest monastic healing "nodes" can be of service to the public. We're in the US, where the existing care infrastructure is so woefully inadequate that dark incubation spaces can sometimes make a difference just by serving as an example of what's possible.

Paths toward reaping the emergent gifts of darkness can be opened through cultivation of deep and refined states of attention. Incubation and deep rest are tools for cultivating such attention. Nancy Kline, author of The Ten Components of a Thinking Environment (a piece we quote often) writes:

"Attention is an act of creation. The quality of our attention determines the quality of other people's thinking. Attention, driven by the promise of no interruption, and by respect and interest in where people will go with their thinking, is the key to a Thinking Environment. Attention is that powerful. It generates thinking. It is an act of creation."

Attention generates thinking. Isn't that marvelous?

At Black Stone Sanctuary, we design and maintain dark incubation spaces as a public service. We'd like to help bring higher-quality attention and thought to the divine, to ourselves, to other humans, and to the world.

Image by Trish Deneen.