At the most important times in our lives… the truly pivotal moments… the do or die situations, we all know that the best way to achieve positive results is to hunker down and focus on the matter at hand. We believe that if we just focus on a problem enough we will be able to solve it and then resume our default apathetic mode until the next emergency presents itself to us.
Although this seems to be a solid strategy in theory, there is a little more to it that we should be aware of if we want to steer clear of disaster. Any good photographer will tell you that the thing about focus is that you must first understand how to select the proper focal point.
One day i was driving my car to pick a friend up from the airport. As i steered through the turns on the winding road, a bottle of Gatorade rolled around on the passenger side floor. When i turned the steering wheel to the left, the bottle would roll to the right, when i accelerated, the bottle would shoot backwards, etc. When i noticed this, i imagined what would happen if i stopped paying attention to the road and instead put my focus on the movements of the bottle… i could make it roll around in specific shapes and patterns… it could be a really neat game! Of course if i had actually played this game my car would have wound up either wrapped around a tree, in a ditch or smashed up against another vehicle, and the motions of the Gatorade bottle would no longer be of any amusement to me.
But if we think about it, this is exactly what most of us are doing with our lives. This life (whether we accept it or not) is a spiritual journey. We are spiritual beings searching for our rightful place. We all start out on various points on the spiritual path and the choices we make determine whether or not we make forward progress on said path. If we focus on spirituality and seek bona fide instructions with our consciousness focused on the Supreme, we will surely make forward progress. But if our focus is elsewhere, our life becomes the equivalent of a useless mangled wreck wrapped around a tree.
Magicians use a trick called misdirection to divert our attention from what is really going on so that their deceitful ruse seems mystical or transcendental. Our material minds are expert magicians, as they play similar tricks on us making us think we are still on our desired spiritual path while misdirecting our attention to mundane endeavors.
To illustrate this point further, let’s say that there is a father who finds out that the neighborhood kids take a shortcut to school on a short path through the woods. When the father checks out the shortcut he notices that on one side of the path there is a tree root sticking up out of the ground a little bit. If this prompts the man to start a campaign about how this shortcut is unsafe because of a tripping hazard and subsequently proposes a nine step plan on how to fix the shortcut (because if the root is simply cut to remove the tripping hazard, the tree might die and turn into a crushing hazard, therefore making it prudent to remove the entire tree, which then removes the shade and rain cover from the path leading to sunburn and mud hazards, which suggests that the path should thus be paved and that a canopy be constructed over it with padded covers on every pole and safety rails), one might say the man’s focus, although noble, is a little off. If all we see are problems, our focus needs to be adjusted. There is no need to fix every minor problem on a path that we do not own when we can simply walk around them with much greater ease.
This, of course, is not to say that no problem is worth fixing. There is nothing wrong with building a bridge to get across a river here and there, but we should expend our energy wisely and only when it is necessary. And when it is necessary, we should still be careful to keep the focus where it belongs and not become trapped or attached to one of the easements we helped pioneer.
Even while actively on the path of spirituality, there is always the danger of distractions. There are many side effects that come along as a result of our successful spiritual advancement, which can be a major distraction if given their own separate value. Sometimes these mere side effects are mistaken for the process itself and with our attention thus diverted, we miss out on the full benefits and as a result are delayed in reaching our desired goal.
As we make spiritual progress, we are endowed with unprecedented clarity, a strong foundation of knowledge, a sense of humility and other attractive qualities. When people begin to take notice of these qualities there is a chance that we will lose sight of their connection with our spiritual path and instead embrace our newfound popularity and again return to the (now slightly nicer) material pool, all the while considering ourselves still on the path.
Of course eventually we realize that our clarity, knowledge, humility, etc. have stalled out on some sort of plateau and it is during that critical time where we have to make an important self-evaluation. While some will blame the process at this point for failing to continue to work for them, others decide that it is again time to hunker down and focus, considering this to be their next obstacle. But the truth of the matter is that in these situations we left the path as soon as we considered ourselves the cause of our advancement… we have been living on the obstacle for years, spinning our wheels against it, not understanding why we haven’t gone anywhere.
And all of this is due to misdirection… we think we know what is really going on, but the fact is we have absolutely no idea.
So how do we make sure that we no longer become the victim of this misdirection? How can we avoid being duped into believing that we are going somewhere when we are in fact stuck?
We simply have to periodically assess and adjust our focus. There is only one focal point. Are we focused on ourselves or are we focused on Krsna? Self-focus will keep us spinning our wheels and wrapping around trees whereas Krsna-focus will get us beyond, around, over or through any material obstacle no matter how big and daunting it is.
It is up to us to decide what we want to focus on... and it is up to us to make sure we keep focused at all times. We have no one to blame but ourselves if we get distracted, so pay attention.
No comments:
Post a Comment