Do you have Attention Power? From a talk given by E.J. Gold
PART 3If attention fails, it must mean either that the essential self is not producing presence and attention, or that the essential self has been distracted, or that something has happened to bleed it off-some kind of obstacle presented itself with the effect of interrupting attention and presence. Generally it is some kind of distraction: things happen.
Self-invocation is the key to attention. Without self-invocation there can be no attention. It’s the responsibility of the essential self to arouse and maintain its own attention. The essential self always has the will of attention and will to self invoke. So if it fails to self invoke and if attention should fail, it simply means that the essential self has lost interest.
This is all it could mean, there can be no other explanation! So we would be justified in concerning ourselves at this point with the question-why is it that the essential self loses interest? The answer to this is categorical: the essential self does not lose interest at all, ever! The impact of this statement should be resounding. If we discover-probably to our great dismay-that we seem to lose interest, then we have reason to worry about what is taking place within ourselves that we are not able to control. Indeed that we do not even know how to label. Where are we when this is taking place?.
If we actively try to develop presence and attention, inevitably we will notice the things that interrupt or distract. We will notice with great irony how very subtle things occur; things that strike us as peculiar and which call attention to themselves by their peculiarity and timing; things which we take for granted, things of no consequence.
The most harmless incidents, the insignificant things which arise in ourselves or which apparently arise in our surroundings, that pull us away from our purposes and intentions are those we should be most on guard against, because they conceal a blind spot; they are a smoke-screen thrown up in the air which obscures our vision.
The most trivial, the most commonplace, and the most seemingly harmless are the things to look for. The things that look like nothing. They indicate the area where we unconsciously deceive ourselves into legitimizing machine problems with the environment. They separate us from actually establishing a scale of relationships with the outer world based on true Work values. Yet it will never appear to us as if something wrong is happening.