From Lost Focus to Concentration

Walk into any bookstore today and on prominent display in the nonfiction section, you’ll find titles featuring ‘focus’. Indeed, my own bookshelf includes the following:

• Fast Focus: A Quick-Start Guide to Mastering Your Attention
  
• Master Your Focus: A Practical Guide to … Focus on What Matters Until It’s Done
  
• Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention

As these titles suggest, there is a sense in which we’ve lost the art of focusing and are grappling with how to get it back. The numerous scientific studies cited in these texts bear this out. To give two examples, one study found that an American university student maintains concentration on a single task for a mere nineteen seconds, while a separate study reported that the commensurate time for an office worker is three minutes. The problem is not confined to those of us who are naturally a bit more disorganized or get bored easily. Even the experts whom one assumes would have no trouble concentrating are struggling. Professor Roy Baumeister, an authority on willpower, is one such example. During an interview with the author of Stolen Focus, the professor revealed:

I’m feeling like my control over my attention is weaker than it used to be … it seems like my mind jumps around a lot more.… I can see that I am not sustaining concentration in perhaps the way I used to … I’m just sort of giving in to it [lost focus] and will start to feel bad.

Reflecting on this, the author wondered if the person who has studied willpower “more than anyone else alive … is losing some of his ability to focus, who isn’t it happening to?” In fact, a growing body of scientific research provides evidence of a reduction in people’s attention span and the factors driving such a trend becoming greater and more powerful. It is easy to see why some commentators believe we have reached a crisis.

In a 1962 essay published in The New York Times Book Review, the author James Baldwin wrote, “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” The crisis of lost focus is of our making, but in the following letter in Spiritual Gems, Maharaj Sawan Singh explains how we can face it and unmake it too:

Collection and holding of the attention at the eye focus is to switch it off from the physical world and the physical body.…

You may have observed that this attention is not permanently attached to any material object in this world. From childhood onward it has had its likes and dislikes. At one time it is attached to friends, at another to family, and so on. It has not stuck to one thing. Herein lies the remedy: the attention is detachable…

The five names thus give us the main features of the path within, and when we remember these, we are, in a way, bringing our attention onto the inner path. It is only a matter of effort, longing, determination, and persistence in the face of failure, when this switching of the attention from the external, material world onto the inner worlds will become easy and a matter of routine. Sticking to the eye focus is essential.

The mind will often run away, and when you find it has run away, bring it back into the focus. Sometimes sleep intervenes. Sleep only means that the mind was withdrawn from the external world, but we did not stick to the focus, and instead the attention sank down to the lower focus – the throat or navel. So, bring it up again to the eye focus.

If one sticks to the focus, then the mind, which runs wild in the beginning, slowly and slowly quiets down and it begins to feel as if sticking to the eye focus is not an unnatural thing.…

Any act, therefore, that will make the attention stick to matter tenaciously, should be avoided. Discarding the sensual desires from the mind and being good, pure-minded, and honest in dealings with others, loosens the connection of the attention from the world. Concentration is the goal. Any act that assists in the achievement of this goal is right, and all those that keep the attention away from the focus are wrong. The nearer we are to concentration or the focus, the nearer we are to the light. Light, like Sound, is already within us. It never goes out. Only we do not reach the place where light is. The light is inside the focus and we are outside the focus. Says Guru Nanak, “The cure of all ills is the Word.” Let us, therefore, go within the focus to catch the Word.