Thank you all for your inspiring contributions and collective endeavors on the spiritual path!
How did your experiment with one-pointed attention go this this past week? If you forgot to try it or weren’t able to find the time, we’d love to hear your insights about that, too! You could also consider trying the experiment again this week. Hearing about your successes and challenges helps us grow as a community.
This week we’ll continue reading from the chapter on One-Pointed Attention in Passage Meditation. In the final two paragraphs below, Easwaran provides several encouraging and desirable benefits to a one-pointed mind. What benefits have you noticed from your own experience of practicing one-pointedness during the day?
The excerpts below are from Passage Meditation, by Eknath Easwaran.
One thing at a time
If, as is the case for nearly all of us, our minds are indeed diffuse, how do we develop this valuable capacity of one-pointedness? The first step is the systematic practice of meditation, which is the perfect way to learn this skill. There is another valuable aid too: to refrain from doing more than one thing at a time, to abandon totally our habit of trying to perform several operations simultaneously.
I learned this emphatically when I was still a teenager. My uncle, my English teacher, had just introduced me to Washington Irving. I had read about Ichabod Crane frightened nearly to death by his own imagination and was well into the tale of Rip Van Winkle one morning when it was time for breakfast. I brought my book and set it down beside the plate of rice cakes and coconut chutney. Chewing absentmindedly on the rice cakes, I read about poor Rip’s reception by the village children when he returns after that long snooze. My grandmother, who had made the rice cakes with great love, just walked up quietly and took my plate of food away. I had not been aware of the taste, and for a few moments – I was really absorbed – I must have kept on lifting an empty hand to my mouth, because I heard her say, “You haven’t got anything in your hand.” I looked down for the plate . . . it was gone! Then she added, “This is poor reading. This is poor eating.” I learned to put some distance between Washington Irving and rice cakes.
For a similar sight on this side of the world, visit Montgomery Street in the financial district of San Francisco. The favorite lunch of these financiers and would-be tycoons is not a Caesar salad or a club sandwich but a big serving of the Wall Street Journal. They may have some food on their plates, but all their attention is on the stock quotations, and that is what really goes in. You can see the same thing – different newspapers, of course – at soda fountains, truck stops, and coffeehouses.
Perhaps you know people who try to split their attention by reading books or newspapers even when they eat with their family or friends. It seems an inconsiderate thing to do, because it shuts other people out. In fact, I’ve seen a few who deliberately lift their newspapers up like a big shield which they hide behind so they won’t have to see or be seen, talk or be talked to. But wouldn’t those who love you rather look at your countenance – doleful as it may be some mornings – than at a full-page advertisement about saving seventy-three dollars by flying to Minneapolis on an after-midnight flight?
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Concentration is Consecration
Developing a one-pointed mind as suggested here will enrich your life moment by moment. You will find that your senses are keener, your emotions more stable, your intellect more lucid, your sensitivity to the needs of others heightened. Whatever you do, you will be there more fully. Entering a home, you won’t slam the door because you will be there to hear it. You won’t so easily trip or spill things or bump into people because you will be aware of your movements. You won’t forget things, because now your mind is engaged. You won’t become mentally fatigued, for you are conserving your powers. You will not be fickle or vacillating because you will have healed the mind of its divisions. And perhaps most precious of all, you will not ignore the distress or joy of others, because in looking into their eyes you will be looking truly into their hearts.
Achieving this precious – I might say wondrous – one-pointedness will also greatly facilitate meditation and speed our progress on the spiritual path. Meditation is concentration, and concentration becomes, finally, consecration. As our absorption grows, we shall come to see that possessions, evanescent pleasures, fame, and all the power in the world can never satisfy us, but only that which is full of love and wisdom, that which does not pass. When we let our minds become scattered, we are but leaves on the surface of the lake of life, far from the infinite reality. When we unify our minds, we plunge deeper and deeper into that reality and move ever closer to the Lord.