Toward Ecosophy

Sara's been reading Barbara Ehrenreich's recent (and apparently very good) book Natural Causes, on the way that the frantic quest for health has made so many Americans sick. (I'll be picking it up as soon as she's done with it.) One detail she quoted me from its pages is that at this point, the average adult American has an attention span of eight seconds -- which is significantly less than that of your average goldfish. 

Fortunately this is something you can do something about. Concentration exercises used to be one of the standard bits of occult training, and they're still worth doing whether or not you happen to be an aspiring occultist. The more effectively you can concentrate on a single task, no matter what it is, the more effectively you can do that task. And of course if you happen to be an aspiring occultist, the ability to focus your will and attention with unwavering force on your workings is a major part of success. 

The practices I used when I was first studying this stuff back in the day were from Mouni Sadhu's book Concentration. (Sadhu wasn't Indian, btw; his real name was Dymitr Sudowski; he took the name while studying in India with Ramana Maharshi, between a youth spent in Poland and the latter part of his life in Australia.) They're simple, they're effective, and -- like any good concentration exercise -- they start by teaching you that you, too, have the attention span of a mayfly. Here's the first of them. 

1. Get yourself a clock or watch with an old-fashioned analog dial and a second hand. 

2. Sit comfortably, with the clock or watch in a position that makes it easy for you to watch the second hand move. 

3. Watch the second hand move. Keep your gaze fixed on it, and note how many seconds pass before you unthinkingly look away from it or start thinking about something else. That's your effective attention span. Try again and see if you can better the first figure. Spend a total of five to ten minutes at this exercise. 

4. Once each day, put five to ten minutes into the same exercise. Your first goal is to get to the point that you can reliably triple your original attention span. Your long term goal is to reach the point where you can focus unwaveringly on that second hand, without thinking about anything else, for five minutes. Once you can do that, extending concentration to a much longer period is rarely difficult. 

Give it a try. An insufficiently developed ability to concentrate is a major cause of failure in life; a strong will -- and the ability to concentrate, in my experience, is the single best measure of your strength of will -- is a key that will open almost any door you care to name.