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Lesson 15 Exercises for Improving Attention

Learning new skills, a good memory, strength in carrying out one’s goals, and in sum, the internal growth of one’s capacity to change, all depend on one’s attention. The following exercises are of great importance; they allow you to work with your attention using motor “pretext” tasks, that is, tasks unimportant in themselves which are a pretext to exercise your attention. These “pretext” tasks are not in themselves useful, and they will make you both physically fatigued and emotionally annoyed. This happens because repeating motor tasks from which you obtain apparently no benefit is truly disheartening. And yet, there can be a great deal of meaning in these practices if they are done in order to improve your attention. The improvement of your attentional faculty is indicated by how much it is able to overcome your motor fatigue and emotional annoyance. Consider an example in which a person digs a large hole, and then fills it in again. He is doing a materially useless job, and if he knows this, he will have little interest in doing a perfect job. Casual sports and gymnastics are like this when there aren’t incentives like competition, physical fitness, etc. There is no apparent physical benefit in the “pretext” tasks we will do, nor is there the added incentive of competition. Viewed from outside, anyone doing these exercises would appear absolutely ridiculous, unlike someone playing a sport or any usual kind of exercise.

Exercise Series 13: Simple Attention Collect a number of objects in the room and move them all to one place, piling them up or arranging them in the most neat and perfect order possible. Once you have done this, return all the objects to their original places. Repeat this operation several times. Observe as you repeat this how you become fatigued and your work deteriorates; as time passes you pay less and less attention to carrying out perfect movements. This is a typical “pretext” exercise; you may use other pretext exercises such as digging and filling in holes. This work will certainly be more interesting if you devise several different pretext exercises, especially ones to do outdoors. Using any pretext task do the following “simple attention” exercises. Do the pretext work using as much as possible the correct body posture you learned in Lesson 10. At the same time, pay strict attention to the work you are doing. Avoid rhythmic or monotonous movements (which make you day-dream) so that attention will always be required in your work. Sawing, for example, is a monotonous exercise not at all suitable as a pretext exercise.

Exercise Series 14: Divided Attention Do several pretext works keeping perfect body posture, and divide your attention so you attend simultaneously to both the sensation of your right leg and whatever work you are doing. Repeat this exercise, but now attend simultaneously to the sensation of your left leg and what you are doing. Repeat this again, and attend to both your right hand and what you are doing. Finally, repeat this and attend to both your left hand and what you are doing. Using the same pretext work in each case.

Exercise Series 15: Directed Attention Repeat the same pretext work several times using correct body posture. Each time try to pay greater attention to your movements. In this way, face increasing fatigue and the consequent diminishing of your attentional faculty with a greater direction of your attention. We are, of course, speaking of reasonable efforts, and not super-efforts which lead to unnecessary suffering that is totally negative. In this kind of practice suffering is not a “former” but rather a “deformer.” Repeat this exercise several times, gradually increasing the direction of your attention. When your attentional mechanism no longer works well, rest quietly for a while and then begin again. IMPORTANT: Try to pay increasing attention to whatever work you do in everyday life. In this way you can turn even boring everyday tasks into quite interesting pretext works highly useful for developing your attention.

Review 1. Study all the notes you have taken lesson by lesson. Observe whether the same difficulties show up in the same parts of different centers, for example, in all the emotional parts. 2. Make a chart with a space for each of the four centers, with each center divided into three parts. Write a synthesis of your observations in each corresponding space. 3. Extract conclusions based on this chart about your difficulties, and review the considerations in the introduction to Lesson 4. In the light of those explanations, observe what kind of problems the difficulties you have discovered may bring you. 4. Now, select the major defect you have discovered throughout all these lessons, and resolve to work on it until you overcome it. Organize a schedule to practice on your own the same exercises you used as a test to discover this difficulty.

SELF KNOWLEDGE

The next seven lessons are on Self Knowledge. In them you will study your negative aspects, and more importantly, you will discover positive qualities you may not have known about, that you should strengthen and develop. Most people are unclear about which aspects of themselves are positive and negative because they do not have a good system with which to study themselves. Self-Knowledge is a fundamentally important tool because it spurs you on towards change which is both positive and conscious, In doing these lessons, you will also no doubt uncover areas of self-deception when faults are brought to light that you formerly considered being outstanding merits. You should not believe that to know yourself you have to sit and meditate. To know yourself, you must study yourself in relation to the actual situations of your everyday life. You must consider the events that have happened to you in the past, your actual situation at present, and what you want to achieve in the future. Most people would have considerable difficulty in answering these questions seriously and accurately; they do not really know what things have decisively influenced their lives in the past, they do not understand the situation they presently live in, nor do they have a clear image of what they want to achieve in the future. We will cover all these points following an original method. The most important part of this method is left to you, the student; your progress will depend on how thoroughly you carry out all the exercises we propose.

Recommendations 1. The Self Knowledge lessons have been designed so that you should not go from one lesson to the next until you completely understand and have mastered the previous lesson. 2. To master a lesson means to neatly carry out the proposed exercises and reach coherent conclusions about what you have done. 3. Write your conclusions in a notebook for each exercise of every lesson. Record each discovery, and each resolution you make to modify any aspects which you conclude are negative. 4. Using this lesson by lesson record of your self-examination, you can see the progress you make as time passes. Compare the results of each lesson with the results of the others, and as a final review, combine the different specific results into a synthesis. 5. Always do these lessons with several other people, because doing them well requires the points of view of the other participants.