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The concentration
of the mind's energy on
one
object of thought is attention.
In a state of attention the mind
may be likened to the rays of the sun which have been passed through a
window. You may let all the rays which can pass through your
window fall hour after hour upon the paper lying on your desk, and
no marked effects follow. But let the same amount of sunlight be passed
through a lens and converged to a point the size of your pencil point,
and the paper will at once burst into flame. What the diffused rays
could not do in hours or in ages is now accomplished in seconds.
Likewise the mind, allowed to scatter over many objects, can accomplish
just little, but when withdrawing
our thoughts from everything else and
concentrating mind on one thing, more can be accomplished in minutes
than before in hours. Things which could not be accomplished at
all before now become possible.
While attention is no doubt partly a natural gift, yet there is
probably
no power of the mind more susceptible to training than is attention.
And
with attention, as with every other power of body and mind, the secret
of its development lies in its use. Stated briefly, the only way to
train attention is by attending. No amount of theorizing or resolving
can take the place of practice in the actual process of attending.
No day
in
which you learn something
is a complete loss. ~David Eddings.
Did You Know?
Habit is one of nature's methods of
economizing time and effort, while
at the same time securing greater skill and efficiency.
Every training is pathological when stress is laid upon correcting
wrong-doing instead of upon forming positive habits.
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