Do you have Attention Power? From a talk given by E.J. Gold
PART 7
We are alone, yet not alone. In other words, we must come to accept our fate as a single being existing alone forever, no matter what it seems like, no matter what it looks like. There is no point to our existence or non-existence. There is nothing to be accomplished. All accomplishments in the face of reality, in the end, are useless, null and void; they have no effect when viewed from that perspective.
Yet when it is right, action becomes a factor. Action directed from the essential self. A year from now we will look back at our lives, and we will ask ourselves what we have really done for our work. And most probably we will see that it is as close to zero as is possible-without actually being zero. Those in the school have probably done less since being there than they did before coming. That often happens. Because when we come to the school, the tendency is to re-establish our lives, re-balance ourselves, re-orient ourselves because we are disoriented.
So we immediately start to send out tendrils and hooks everywhere, and create involvements with all kinds of things and people. We start a whole process of involvement to re-establish what is normal for us. In doing that, we are so busy that we do not have time for our work, and our work life suffers.
If we were smart and we knew how to do it, we could work all year every day. We know that that is the right course, that we should be doing that, but we do not know how.
There are two things that we need to look at. One is that inevitably, no matter what we do, there will be a certain amount of involvement and distraction. No matter where we are, no matter where we go, we will do essentially the same things from moment to moment, from day to day. We are not going to change radically just because we are in a different place. Just coming to a school does not guarantee anything. It does not gain us anything.
Even the fact that there are more reminding factors in the school does not help. Eventually everything blends itself into the general humdrum of background noise. So every so often, the teacher will put a fork in the right place, just because he realizes that we cannot possibly remember that we are in a school. It is not expected of us to remember that all the time.
Every so often we are reminded but, it is not the same thing as really working seriously. In order to work seriously we must clear away the obstructions to work-and there are obstacles. Without obstacles, we would gain nothing from being in the school, there would be no profit. There are actually more obstacles to work in the school than there are in ordinary life, which makes the work there more valuable. The more obstacles, the tougher we must be and the more able.
Our ability increases according to the number of obstacles, and the degree of difficulty. It does not decrease; our being increases in direct ratio to the number of obstacles. That is what we are trying to do, strengthen the essential self’s will.
We want exercises for attention, but we don’t want to use attention in our lives.