Changes

=What Is Attention?=

It is to bring back all the scattered threads of consciousness to a single point, a single idea. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/23-december-1950#p7</ref>

This faculty of concentration belongs not only to the intellectual but to all activities and is obtained by the conscious control of the energies. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/12/concentration-and-dispersion#p1</ref>

...it may be found in all the activities of the being, including bodily activities. The control over the nerves should be such as would allow you a complete concentration on what you are doing and, through the very intensity of your concentration, you acquire an immediate response to external touches. To attain this concentration you need a conscious control of the energies. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/23-december-1950#p1</ref>

Attention is a factor in knowledge, the importance of which has been always recognised. Attention is the first condition of right memory and of accuracy. To attend to what he is doing is the first element of discipline required of the student, and, as I have suggested, this can easily be secured if the object of attention is made interesting. This attention to a single thing is called concentration. One truth is, however, sometimes overlooked, that concentration on several things at a time is often indispensable. When people talk of concentration, they imply centring the mind on one thing at a time; but it is quite possible to develop the power of double concentration, triple concentration, multiple concentration. When a given incident is happening, it may be made up of several simultaneous happenings or a set of simultaneous circumstances, a sight, a sound, a touch or several sights, sounds, touches occurring at the same moment or in the same short space of time. The tendency of the mind is to fasten on one and mark others vaguely, many not at all or, if compelled to attend to all, to be distracted and mark none perfectly. Yet this can be remedied and the attention equally distributed over a set of circumstances in such a way as to observe and remember each perfectly. It is merely a matter of ''abhyāsa'' or steady natural practice. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/01/a-system-of-national-education#p35</ref>

=Why Attention Is Necessary?=

Moreover, whatever you may want to do in life, one thing is absolutely indispensable and at the basis of ''everything'', the capacity of concentrating the attention. If you are able to gather together the rays of attention and consciousness on one point and can maintain this concentration with a persistent will, ''nothing'' can resist it—whatever it may be, from the most material physical development to the highest spiritual one. But this discipline must be followed in a constant and, it may be said, imperturbable way; not that you should always be concentrated on the same thing—that’s not what I mean, I mean learning to concentrate.