Attention to detail is necessary

CHENNAI: Paying attention is something that most of us have found to be a struggling task from day one, isn’t it? No matter how hard we try, still the mind wanders. There is no doubt in it that attention is one of the most important thing needed for imbibing good qualities, lack of which results in severe loss of values. It’s a psychological truth that our mind can attend to one thing at a time, therefore in order to direct the attention of mind to a higher source of energy and concentrate upon it, one has to remove one’s attention from other things.

Attention is thus a selective act of mind, wherein it is natural for the mind to select the objects in which it is interested. To put it in simple words, attention is nothing but interest in action and interest is mainly the attention in latent form. To understand it better, let us take an example of a housewife who is a loyal viewer of an afternoon primetime show on television. As a regular viewer she dosen’t misses a single episode, however one fine day she experiences power failure due to which she misses her regular show on TV. Now! In those moments of power failure, her mind is constantly glued to the show and its storyline, and while there is no power, she tries calling her friends to get all the information that’s happening on her favourite show.

Due to this deep interest, her attention level is totally committed for those 30 minutes to the TV show and nothing else, however when the show gets over, her interest automatically shifts to other household chores. Similarly, the men in the house who are interested in politics and current affairs, would watch news related to politics, read political news and pay attention to poll results, and after all this is over, their interest too shifts automatically to other family matters. Thus, interest is the mental cause of attention that maintains and sustains it. It gives us the tendency and a suitable mental structure which provides sufficient motivating power to concentrate on a particular subject or object. The object or an individual, in which we are interested, works as a point of attraction in our life and this attraction further gets developed, through our emotions towards it.

It should therefore, be borne in mind that, if our interest shifts from higher source of energy who we know as Supreme, to mundane things of the mortal world, then our attention would also shift. So,it may, most probably, be due to lack of interest or diminishing of motivation, that we lose continuity in our spiritual progress. However, if our interest has been sufficiently aroused, then there is no cause for lagging behind in our efforts to attain a higher stage of attention to progress spiritually in life. So, let us make an effort to sustain adequate interest in order to develop proper attention in Supreme, because life is too short to miss the magic bus for new age.