Do you have Attention Power? From a talk given by E.J. Gold
"No one else will train our attention for us, because it can’t be done. We are the only ones who can. And if we can train our attention, we can do anything; we literally can move mountains. If our attention can be focused, we can do anything that we have ever heard of anyone doing. It is our attention that gives us that power."
Involvement is one of our principal obstacles to getting nearer to the Work. Loving or hating, being a slave or a master - it’s all the same. Either way we are always involved with the outside world, with objects of desire, repulsion, attachment, or interest, constantly involved in petty things, throwing our time away, allowing the solution to dribble away between our fingers just like sand.
Why does this happen? Why do we believe that these demands on our attention are legitimate? How easily we forget that they do not have a rightful demand on us.
As a matter of fact, rightful attention, rightful demands on our attention is a subject that we will have to address sooner or later in our work life. We will have to, at some point, start making value judgments about what does and does not deserve our attention, because our attention is so precious. Our attention is our work tool. It is our only work tool. And we need to sharpen it, hone it to a very fine degree.
If we fail to do that we will not be able to work. The Work requires discipline, it demands that we do the same thing day after day. It does not imply variety; there is not a lot of variety in our training.
Many individuals dislike repetition. Their tendency is to want something fresh and creative every minute. And that is why they take the odd turns; they live in the old format, the zig-zag era, madly dashing about looking for something new and different.
At some point we will have to make value judgments about our attention on a minute to minute, hour to hour basis. Eventually, we will have to start looking at everything, and ask ourselves if it is worth putting our attention on the things that normally occupy it. We will ask ourselves why we are doing what we are doing, and whether we could be doing anything better with our time and attention. Is what we are doing worth the sacrifice we have made in withdrawing our attention from other efforts?
We have just one Work life-many lives, but only one life in the Work. Either we make it or we don’t. And we only have the one life in which to make it. We have got to do it in one lifetime. We do not have an indefinite amount of time to hop on the wagon. We need to be free in this life, free to work or free to be a Work slave.Freedom and slavery are actually totally irrelevant. They are not an issue at all. In effect, they are a wrong way of saying something.
