Here’s an interesting quote by William Walker Atkinson:
“Attention is not a faculty of the mind in the same sense as perception, abstraction, judgment, etc., but is rather in the nature of an act of will concerned in the focusing of the consciousness upon some object of thought presented or represented to the mind. In some respects it bears a resemblance to Abstraction, inasmuch as it sets aside some particular object for the consideration of the consciousness, to the exclusion of other objects. Wayland explains attention as a condition of mind in which the consciousness is excited and directed by an act of the will.
Realizing the importance of attention, the student will naturally wish to cultivate the power of bestowing it when necessary. The first role in the cultivation of the attention is that the student shall carefully acquire the habit of thinking of or doing but one thing at a time. This first rule may seem easy, but in practice it will be found very difficult of observance, so careless are the majority of us in our actions and thinking.
Not only will the trouble and care bestowed upon the acquiring of this habit of thought and action be well repaid by the development of the attention, but the student will also acquire a facility for accomplishing his tasks quickly and thoroughly.
As Kay says: “There is nothing that contributes more to success in any pursuit than that of having the attention concentrated on the matter in hand; and, on the contrary, nothing is more detrimental than when doing one thing to have the mind taken up with something else.”
And as Granville says: “A frequent cause of failure in the faculty of attention is striving to think of more than one thing at a time.” Kay also well says: “If we would possess the power of attention in a high degree, we must cultivate the habit of attending to what is directly before the mind, to the exclusion of all else. All distracting thoughts and feelings that tend to withdraw the mind from what is immediately before it are therefore to be carefully avoided. This is a matter of great importance, and of no little difficulty.
Frequently the mind, in place of being concentrated on what is immediately before it, is thinking of something else—something, it may be, that went before or that may come after, or something quite alien to the subject.”
It may seem like this is a superficial or even naive advice, but it’s a very important aspect of concentration. We’re often lost among many different calls for our attention. Cell phone notifications keep ringing, emails keep dropping, people calling us and so forth.
It’s very rarely that we have ONE intense focus during our day. And as such, our minds are then trained by constant interruption instead of one objective, one focus.
Train your attention and concentration with the course:
>>> Concentration and Mind Control
