Thursday, October 18, 2007
The Power of Focus
A person must resolve to be the master of their body, when you do so you soon acquire the power to arouse the body to activity, and alertness, during your entire day, you must also develop the habit of keen observation and be conscious of what is occurring around you, instead of being carelessly unconscious of the major portion of what is happening in your vicinity.
This skill of paying attention to the things that may engage the mind, and of using your will to arouse and control them, is of very great importance. It is not what we call paying attention; rather it is called situational awareness. Being conscious of where and when you are that makes the connection between the ego and the objective world. This giving attention is a process of consciousness, and the person who fails in this matter misses the purpose of life and throws away valuable time and opportunity.
To maintain situational awareness is to be alive and awake and in a condition to make the most of this limited physical life. Yet we find that many people cannot give sustained attention to an ordinary conversation nor direct their mind with sufficient precision to state a simple fact without wandering aimlessly about in the effort, bringing in various incidental matters until the original subject, instead of being made clear, it is obscured in a maze of unimportant details or lost sight of altogether.
These poor habits of the mind should resolutely be put aside, the attention should be fixed deliberately upon the subject at hand, whatever it may be, and nothing should be permitted to break the connection between that and the mind. Whether it is a conversation or a book, or a manual task, or a problem being silently worked out intellectually, it should have undivided attention until the task is completed or the time has expired.
Few of us ever give any subject the close attention which alone can prove its own effectiveness and demonstrate the fact that there goes with such steadily sustained attention a subtle power of extended, or accentuated, consciousness. The time spent in wavering attention is practically without effect. The connection between mind and subject has not been completed: Mind and subject were out of focus.
Attention must be sustained to the point where it becomes concentration. The mind must be used like you use a magnifying glass: Hold the glass between sun and paper, out of focus, for an hour and nothing will happen. Conversely if you bring it into perfect focus, concentrating the rays to the finest possible point, the paper turns brown and finally bursts into the fire that will consume it. They are the same rays that were previously ineffective: Concentration produced results.
The mind must be brought under such control of your will that it can be manipulated like a search-light, turning back and forth until it fixes full upon some obscure subject and held there until it illuminates every detail of it, as the search light sends a dazzling ray through the darkness of the night, so must you use your mind to define and clear up all that you can see.
Be Blessed
This skill of paying attention to the things that may engage the mind, and of using your will to arouse and control them, is of very great importance. It is not what we call paying attention; rather it is called situational awareness. Being conscious of where and when you are that makes the connection between the ego and the objective world. This giving attention is a process of consciousness, and the person who fails in this matter misses the purpose of life and throws away valuable time and opportunity.
To maintain situational awareness is to be alive and awake and in a condition to make the most of this limited physical life. Yet we find that many people cannot give sustained attention to an ordinary conversation nor direct their mind with sufficient precision to state a simple fact without wandering aimlessly about in the effort, bringing in various incidental matters until the original subject, instead of being made clear, it is obscured in a maze of unimportant details or lost sight of altogether.
These poor habits of the mind should resolutely be put aside, the attention should be fixed deliberately upon the subject at hand, whatever it may be, and nothing should be permitted to break the connection between that and the mind. Whether it is a conversation or a book, or a manual task, or a problem being silently worked out intellectually, it should have undivided attention until the task is completed or the time has expired.
Few of us ever give any subject the close attention which alone can prove its own effectiveness and demonstrate the fact that there goes with such steadily sustained attention a subtle power of extended, or accentuated, consciousness. The time spent in wavering attention is practically without effect. The connection between mind and subject has not been completed: Mind and subject were out of focus.
Attention must be sustained to the point where it becomes concentration. The mind must be used like you use a magnifying glass: Hold the glass between sun and paper, out of focus, for an hour and nothing will happen. Conversely if you bring it into perfect focus, concentrating the rays to the finest possible point, the paper turns brown and finally bursts into the fire that will consume it. They are the same rays that were previously ineffective: Concentration produced results.
The mind must be brought under such control of your will that it can be manipulated like a search-light, turning back and forth until it fixes full upon some obscure subject and held there until it illuminates every detail of it, as the search light sends a dazzling ray through the darkness of the night, so must you use your mind to define and clear up all that you can see.
Be Blessed
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