Do you have Attention Power? From a talk given by E.J. Gold
PART 2
We can start to train our attention in little ways. How long can we look at an object in front of us without intrusions? What do we mean by intrusions? Anything which has to do with something other than the object of our attention is an intrusion-whether it be mental, psychic, emotional, visual, perceptual or sensational. It doesn’t make any difference what it is. Anything which is not the intended object of our directed attention but which could potentially distract us from our purpose is technically an intrusion. So how long can we look at an object without an intrusion? Not a very long time-which means our attention is weak.
There are many names for this single-pointed consciousness and attention which have been used to express this idea throughout a variety of spiritual traditions-from early Egyptian metaphysical writings, pre-Socratic Greek philosophers and mystics, to Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism, and all the way to medieval monasticism including St. Thomas Aquinas.
The question behind all these names is whether or not we are able to maintain our attention without any interruptions on nothing other than the chosen object of our attention. Are we able to look at something, just that, and do nothing but that?
When we can do that, then we can move on to more ambitious projects. For example, reading a book. The only way we normally keep our attention on a book is through interest. But can we read a book that we are not interested in, and keep our attention on it as if we were interested in it?
Interest guides and pulls the attention; that is not a work attention. If we are just attentive to something because we are interested, then we missed the point entirely. We must be able to put our attention where we want it, and keep it there without intrusions, for as long as we wish to do so-that can be hours or months or years-to the exclusion of everything else.
There is an important distinction between attention and awareness. Though our attention may be exclusively on something, we can be aware of everything else at the same time. Attention is specific, awareness is general. Awareness is never specific. And attention is never general. So, we can put our attention on an object, but be aware of the environment. If we do not do that then we are either stupid, sick, blind, foolish, or all of the above.
When we become inattentive, we do stupid things. When the machine is asleep, stupid things happen. It seems as if inattention and sleep have something to do with one another. The clue is that attention comes from the essential self. The essential self is the source of attention. The loss of attention can come from two different causes. The first cause is that the essential self has ceased to be a source of attention for the moment. For one reason or other, it is no longer invoking its own presence and it has lost its attention.
Presence and attention fall under the category of will which means that they are completely in the voluntary range. In other words, there is no such thing as involuntary attention and involuntary presence.
The essential self must take action in order for them to appear because they have to be roused. We either invoke our presence or we don’t. It won’t get invoked on its own. The essential self has to decide to gather attention and presence, move them around, bring them down, or increase their scope and range. However, attention can never achieve the kind of range that awareness can include, although a lot can be done with it.
Awareness is one of the attentions of the machine. The machine has several different types of attention. The word attention is misleading because we use it for the essential self and for the machine. We should have a different name for both, but language is limited and there is no other word that we can really use. It would be better to say machine awareness and essential self attention, although this is an artificial distinction. Technically speaking, we could say that attention only refers to what the essential self does.