This month we’ve been exploring how we can use one-pointed attention to help us make our full contribution to a world that needs the compassion, awareness, and wisdom that is hidden in each of our hearts.
In our reading from Passage Meditation, Easwaran tells us, “When you see opposition, do not get afraid. Look upon tough opposition as a challenge to test your inner growth – to see if your capacities have grown so that through patience, courtesy, and the depth of your conviction you can win over your opponent into a fast friend. But all this takes time, and it takes the capacity to concentrate. You have to be willing to develop these skills, which is the purpose of slowing down and one-pointed attention.”
What strikes you in this reading?
Choose one of Easwaran’s tips to try out this week. Try it as many times as you can. What does your experiment tell you about your own potential for compassion, awareness, and wisdom?
In the excerpt below from Passage Meditation, Easwaran gives tips about how to work in a spirit of detachment.
Easwaran: Let me offer a few practical suggestions from my own experience. Over time, every job becomes routine. For a year or two everything seems new; every task presents an interesting challenge. But after a few years, it’s “Oh, another patient, another client, another performance, another report.” New things have a way of becoming old; new hats become old hat; everything becomes passé.
The answer is not to change jobs, drop out, or walk away, but to give more attention and do the very best we can. With complete attention, everything in life becomes fresh.
Therefore, the Gita says, don’t ask, “Is this interesting? Is this exciting?” If a job is exciting today, it’s going to be depressing later. Unless it is at the expense of life, give it your very best. Doing a routine job well, with concentration, is the greatest challenge I can imagine. You’re not just doing a job but learning a skill: the skill of improving concentration, which pays rich dividends in every aspect of life.
Finally, in attending to the task at hand, the Gita urges us never to get attached to personal pleasure or profit. Whatever the job, do it as a service to others. Don’t do it to gain credit or prestige or to win attention.
Sometimes people ask me incredulously, “You mean you’re not interested in the results of what you do?” Of course I am interested. I doubt that there is anybody more interested in his work than I am, because I know how much people can benefit from what we are doing at the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation. But after many years of practice, I have learned to do my best and then not worry about whether things will work out my way.
Question: I work hard and I worry a lot. What can I do to stop worrying?
Easwaran: This habit of worrying is a significant comment on our times. I know people who put a great deal of effort into developing this habit. When they leave home, they worry about whether they have locked the door; they have got to go back and turn the key in the lock to make doubly sure. Then they realize they have left the letter inside and worry whether they have remembered to write the address. If we lock the door and mail our letters with attention on what we are doing, these little problems don’t arise at all.
It is in these small matters of daily life that lack of concentration shows up easily. People worry because they don’t concentrate. Whatever you are doing, give it your full attention. We can guard ourselves against tension by learning to be mindful in everything we do.
Similarly, when the day is done, leave your work at the office. Many people who work hard bring their work home with them, yapping like a poodle at their heels. At the dinner table, when they sit thinking about their deadlines and responsibilities, the poodle is nestled under the chair, whining away. They curl up with it at night and dream about reports that haven’t been filed, statistics that don’t point to the right conclusions, mail that hasn’t been responded to or that has been sent out with the wrong memo attached. This is what I mean by bringing the poodle home: it’s not just in your briefcase, but in your cranium too.
It takes a lot of control to work with concentration for eight hours and then drop your work at will, but this is one of the greatest skills that one-pointed attention can bring. When you enter your office, you give all your attention to your job; once you leave, you put the job out of your mind. This simple skill guards against tension and allows you to give your very best. If you have given your best, there is no need to worry about the results.
Question: Could you explain how one-pointedness can help in conflicts?
Easwaran: The person who can give undivided attention when others are being unpleasant is a real peacemaker. Slowly he or she can disarm the hostile person simply by listening without hostility, with complete and loving attention.
When you see opposition, do not get afraid. Look upon tough opposition as a challenge to test your inner growth—to see if your capacities have grown so that through patience, courtesy, and the depth of your conviction, you can win over your opponent into a fast friend.
But all this takes time, and it takes the capacity to concentrate. You have to be willing to develop these skills, which is the purpose of slowing down and one-pointed attention.
Question: How does a one-pointed mind help with our interpersonal problems in general?
Easwaran: Many problems that we take for granted are not really necessary; they arise from attention getting distracted and caught without our consent.
For example, all of us are familiar with the toll negative memories can take. When they come up, they simply won’t let us alone. They claim our attention and dwelling on them only makes them stronger. The mind gets upset until finally the body begins to suffer. But if you can turn attention away, just as you do in meditation, the memory will gradually lose its emotional charge. The memory itself is not lost; it simply loses its compulsive hold on you.
Again, when a friend has offended you, it is not your friend that causes the agitation; it is dwelling on what happened. Attention is caught, and the mind cannot stop thinking about it. When you go to the theater, you can’t pay attention to the film. When you go to bed, you can’t stop thinking about what happened, so you toss and turn all night. Dwelling on resentment or hostility or any other negative emotion magnifies it; the answer is to turn attention away.
Happiness comes when we forget ourselves, and misery when we can’t think about anybody else. This is essentially a problem of attention getting trapped. One of the greatest benefits of meditation is that it releases the precious faculty of redirecting our love and attention from our little selves so it can flow towards other people. It’s an exhilarating experience, because most of us have no idea of the capacity for love we have imprisoned.