If you’re not sure what attention is, then how can you make all those claims in your title? When you say “attention is required for thinking”, what did you have in mind? Are you sure you’re not just calling several different things by the same name? How would attention be a prerequisite to thinking and not just a component of it?
From a modern psych perspective, attention is kind of filter. We receive countless stimuli and the brain chooses which ones to ignore and which to attend to. That might be called “thinking” but even an earwig can do it. It is indeed the “axis of reality” because it’s what shapes our perception. And attention, or rather attending behaviors, can indeed be a component of love.