This week, Easwaran will speak directly to those of us who yearn to be of service in our troubled world. Answering the question of how to make our efforts more effective, he writes:
“All the great changes in the world for good and for ill have come from the impact of men and women with an overriding singleness of purpose and a concentrated mind. In our own time, on the positive side, Gandhi is a perfect example. To make our full contribution, we need to train the mind to be at peace and then radiate that peace to those around us.”
In our reading from the Q&A section in the latest edition of Passage Meditation, Easwaran will give us tips for developing an overriding singleness of purpose and concentrated mind.
Is there a sentence or two in this reading that stands out for you?
Easwaran offers tips for doing work in a way that unifies our attention. Try applying his tips to your tasks at hand this week. What are your observations from this experiment?
From Passage Meditation, by Eknath Easwaran:
One-Pointed Attention
Question: I really want to help my community and the world. Why do our efforts seem to have so little effect?
Easwaran: Most of us have minds that are scattered or distracted: sometimes positive, sometimes negative, constantly changing with our shifting moods and desires. Flickering attention is a sure sign of a divided mind. Division is tension. Division is friction. Division is ineffectiveness. Division is futility. And a mind divided cannot stand.
Most of us have a mind that is divided; that is why it sometimes cannot stand under the impact of life. It is the concentrated, focused mind that reaches people. All the great changes in the world for good and for ill have come from the impact of men and women with an overriding singleness of purpose and a concentrated mind. In our own times, on the positive side, Gandhi is a perfect example. To make our full contribution, we need to train the mind to be at peace and then radiate that peace to those around us.
Question: Can you say more about how we can make our full contribution?
Easwaran: Whoever we are, we can improve our contribution to the world simply by giving complete attention to the job at hand in a spirit of detachment. We don’t have to compare our lives or work with others’. All that is expected of us is that we give our very best to whatever responsibilities come our way. As our capacity to contribute increases, greater responsibilities will come to us. That is the way spiritual growth has always taken place down the centuries.
When I began to meditate, I don’t think it ever occurred to me to change jobs or to try to make a “spiritual” contribution with my writing. I simply gave more and more attention to my teaching — to my colleagues and especially to my students. I was meditating every day on the words of the Bhagavad Gita, where Sri Krishna counsels: “Do your best; then leave the results to me.”
Question: What does it mean to work in a spirit of detachment? And how does it tie in with one-pointedness?
Easwaran: It is helpful to keep each of these three aspects in mind — attention, detachment, and the job at hand. But before I comment on them, I want to emphasize that they are really not separate. They are three elements of a single skill.
When you dedicate yourself to the task at hand with complete concentration and without any trace of egotistic involvement, you are learning to live completely in the present. You are making yourself whole, undivided, which is the goal of the spiritual life and the meaning of that much-misunderstood word yoga.
In reality, all these three amount to unifying our attention. We don’t usually think in these terms, but when we ignore responsibilities, we are actually dividing our attention. When we postpone or neglect a task that needs doing, we are dividing attention. When we do a job halfheartedly, we are dividing attention.
Even when we get personally entangled in our activities, we are dividing our attention. And if “dividing attention” sounds abstract, let me assure you it is utterly practical. When we divide our attention, we split ourselves, which weakens everything we do. In this sense, perhaps the simplest expression of our goal in meditation is that we are trying to make ourselves whole.