Focus and Meditation
By Charles Rush
October 16, 2011
Psalm 46: 1-5, 10-11. Luke 5: 16
[ Audio
(mp3, 7.3Mb) ]
live in a world of technological stimulation that would probably confound our ancestors only a short 400 years ago. It is hard to overestimate just how it has changed our consciousness. I want to show you a video. I have a several-part question that will follow, but it requires that you focus up front. My first question is seemingly simple, how many passes does the white team actually make? Not how many they appear to make, but how many do they actually make?
[Video shows a
white team and a black team passing basketballs[i]]. Let's watch it again. This time, I want you
to notice the bear that moves across the screen from right to left doing
Michael Jackson's moon walk dance as he moves.
Very
interesting isn't it. Your mind is physically recording all of the action that
is coming at you. However, your attention focuses so that you interpret that
data selectively. The influence of your focus is considerable, so that you
unconsciously tune out that which you are not focused on. Every one of us has
had this experience. You are driving down the road, talking to your teenage
daughter on the phone who will never return your call, and she is saying
something that enrages you enough that you can feel emotion erupting from your
stomach, and suddenly you have to really hit the brakes because the traffic on
the Garden State Parkway has been slowing faster than you realized. You respond
to traffic almost automatically but not so well when your focus is eclipsed by
the shenanigans of little princess.
Shortly we will
have a spate of studies that will be released that have tested our ability to
multi-task. It is not nearly as good as we think it is. By the way, it is a lot
less efficient than we think it is as well. When you are on a conference call
and you check email, flip over to Facebook, make notes to self about the
conference call, flip back to email, each of these require us to focus,
unfocus, focus, unfocus. They don't work nearly as well as listening to the
conference call, then checking email, then reviewing what little you really
need to know on Facebook.
What we are
coming to recognize is that concentration and focus have a much bigger role to
play in how well we do in school and how well we do in our jobs than we
previously realized. Take memorization. In my generation, we lifted up the gift
of eidetic memory. Most of my fraternity brothers who had something approaching
eidetic memory are surgeons today. Their memory was close to photographic.
Perhaps you saw
the PBS special last summer on people that have this virtue or is it a curse.
They can literally remember every single thing that has happened to them. They
interviewed several people like this and they would say, “September 13th,
1998, what did you wear to work that morning?” The man would answer, “My blue
pinstripe suit with a heinous red tie. I'd wanted to wear a yellow power tie
but my daughter threw up on it and my wife forgot to take it to the cleaners,
so I had to run out at the last minute. I was worried that it would stand out
too much in the meeting we had that morning with the bank.”
If you are like
me, you've probably already had an experience this morning where you found
yourself standing in your bedroom wondering, ‘what did I come in here to
retrieve again?' 90 seconds later, after a circuitous review of the past 3
minutes, you finally remember and walk away wondering about yourself.
Take names. As
every visitor to Christ Church knows, I'm not too hot with names. Undoubtedly,
one of the reasons is that I'm a bit distracted when I first meet you, thinking
about the service or a few different people I should speak to on a Sunday
morning. I've learned that I really need to go have coffee with you, ask you
about yourself so that I get to know you, and then your name sticks.
Rev. Julie is
much better than me. And when you meet a real master, it is impressive. I once
met President Clinton when he was in office. There were 13 of us in the room, a
random collection of people from all over the country. The President, when he
had his game face on, had a remarkable ability to shake your hand, ask you a
couple of questions, look right at you and make it stick. He knew a friend of
everyone in the room. And then, when a discussion started, he could recall
enough of your name or a, “interesting question Reverend” so that you felt like
you really mattered to him, an amazing gift for a politician and a terrific
asset. The President was a smart man, no question, but he leveraged his
intellect several times over with his ability to concentrate in the here and
now, so all of us felt included in the inside.
It turns out
when we did studies on people who have made extraordinary contributions to our
world- Mozart, Beethoven, Leonardo Da Vinci, Einstein, the Dancer Rudolf
Nureyev, the Philosopher Immanuel Kant- what they all have in common is an
extraordinary ability to focus themselves. What we will shortly be able to
prove is that this ability is nearly as important as intelligence for actually
being able to succeed not only academically but in life.
You have
friends and colleagues like this. We had a professor at Wake Forest that had
published like twenty books in his life time. I remember going to his office.
The door was always closed. You could hear his old Underwood typewriter (tick,
te tick te tick te tick te tick). I would knock on the door, come in, have a
seat. He would give me his undivided attention for 15 minutes, pull up a couple
papers and books for me to read, shake my hand and wish me well. I would shut
the door to his office and stand there for just a second. Every time I'd hear
(tick te tick te tick te tick te tick). He picked right back up where his train
of thought left off. His output was considerably richer than mine as a result.
The good news
is that we can increase our focus substantially and there are better reasons to
do it than simply testing better. Now that I am well into middle age, I'm more
attuned to the importance of what I input into my soul, like I am more attuned
to the importance of what I put into my belly. Clearly, I've overindulged in
pizza and wine and it has had adverse effects on my ability to say run 5 miles.
You get to a point where you just don't eat ice cream because it is just not
worth it. (Wine??? OK. There are areas
for improvement.)
Spiritually,
you probably find yourself self-censoring as well. Right now is a good example.
Because of the wonders of our world, I can wake up at 5:30 in the morning and
get the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times
delivered at home. Usually, I have a copy of the Economist and the New Republic
and Foreign Affairs on my night stand. The news is often grim and the
prognosticators regularly bearish, so that it is possible for me to input 60
minutes of pure negativity into my consciousness before I step into the shower.
Part of it is that our world has some structural problems that are serious but
part of it is simply that the media only cover crises. You almost never read
about a group of neighbors say, in Joplin Missouri, that are rebuilding their
community after the tornado with money donated from Bahrain and are doing some
really creative things that are making their community a richer, more inclusive
place to live.
Particularly in
a down cycle, it is almost like negative news feeds on itself. If you just feed
yourself what the media is serving up, you can easily find yourself cynical,
negative, defensive and aggressive just to start your day. Do you find
yourself, like I do occasionally, reading a story and thinking to yourself, “I
don't really need to know this today”? Skim the headlines to get the idea but
the details may be more than is really good for my soul…
Do you find yourself,
like I do occasionally, saying “you know, I need a Sabbath break from the
media, so for a few days, I'm turning this all off?” Your soul is reaching saturation for toxins that are embedded in
our social world. You are feeling spiritually sicker and sicker because you are
becoming polluted.
You need to
reset your soul. The best way to do this is through meditation, what Christians
call prayer. We're sticking with meditation here because it needs to be longer
and less wordy than when we pray in worship. It is like working out every day.
Any exercise is good but if you really want the benefit that meditation has to
offer, you have to do it for 20 minutes twice a day. If you continue doing this
for a few weeks, we can measure the improvement in your health, your awareness
of the world around you, your compassion, and your zest for life. They all
increase substantively.
Hindu's
discovered the value of this through yoga. Buddhists have developed the
techniques of meditation more than any other faith tradition. When you look at
the life of Jesus, all of the gospels record that Jesus would regularly retreat
from the crowds, from the psychic pressure of public presence and the demands
of the crowd (both great and petty), and he would pray.
We can enter into
a deeper spiritual state which is the goal. It turns out that putting ourselves
in this state of deeper peace, serenity and relaxation not only reboots our
system so to speak, it also strengthens our ability to focus.
So we find some
place that evokes serenity for us. The Japanese Buddhists used to create those
wonderful meditation gardens. I know that, for me, the sound of running water
is very helpful, so I will go to the seashore or sit by the running brook that
is on our farm. My children gave me a sound machine with white noise on it when
I can't get to places in nature. Perhaps a single candle if you are up just
before dawn. You need to create a refuge of uninterrupted quiet, a place of
intentional peace.
Pick one theme
for your meditative space- love, gratitude, understanding, compassion, peace
something that you can concentrate on and interiorize in your life. Close your
eyes and let a single image of love guide you. Meditation takes that image from
your imagination and imprints it on your soul.
Almost always,
you have to spend a few minutes at the beginning of meditation clearing your
mind. You start imaging love, say, and all of these other thoughts pervade your
mind that are not ‘love' whatever they might be.
We can take
ourselves into the meditative state by intentionally regulating our breathing.
All of our traditions converge on this point. We slow our breathing, inhaling
in our image of love, holding it in our consciousness, and if other thoughts
interrupt, releasing them when we exhale. Inhale in love, hold it, and then
release it again.
We aren't
thinking of anything from the day. We aren't thinking of anything for tomorrow.
The goal is to become as present in the moment as possible. The goal isn't to
think about anything at all but to embody what the Buddhists call ‘pure
consciousness', to be as much in the moment as you can be. It is very elusive
and the more you try to be simply in the moment, the more impossible it seems
to be. I suspect this is doubly true for New Yorkers because our world is so
poorly designed to accommodate being ‘simply present' that we can't do it
anymore than a Tibetan monk could work the remote control to our Television
sets. Just like it is tempting to throw that remote that you can't understand
against the wall, so it is tempting to just quit meditation because at first
you will find that your soul is cluttered with distraction.
But your soul
can get into spiritual shape. You can become grow substantially at being
present, at emptying yourself of distraction, and staying focused on one thing
longer and longer. Until… until… you find yourself almost imperceptibly
attaining a deeper state of relaxation and meditation. And you can stay in it
for longer and longer.
We can watch it
on an MRI screen now and the effects we have only recently begun to document.
It slows our heart rate, decreases anxiety, elevates serenity. More than that,
it has some comprehensive benefits that are akin to our need for sleep. It
appears that by putting ourselves into ‘meditative mode', we can access our
imagination more fully, we make connections around sophisticated issues that
need resolution, we increase our total capacity for compassion and
understanding (so essential for being a good spouse, a good leader in the
family and good leader anywhere else). It appears to be intrinsically important
for developing profounder meaning in our lives. We actually have a bit of a
sense of our becoming one with ourselves, one with God.
Jesus taught us
that this is the more fulfilling way. One time Jesus was eating with a
Pharisee, one of the religiously observant Jews of his day and the Pharisees
were always grilling Jesus because he didn't follow the orthodox way exactly.
In Luke 11 Jesus responds by saying “do not simply clean the outside of the
dish and cups, if inside you also have evil. Didn't the God who made the
outside, make the inside also? Do things from within and let them shine out. It
is the only authentic spiritual existence. The appearance on the outside for
family and public consumption, although we all have done it, is simply false
and hypocritical. Also, as we know, it doesn't work except with gullible
neighbors. But it certainly doesn't work with our spouse, with ourselves, with
God- which is the point, I believe.
Live from an
authentic center and radiate out. And this can be considerable as you know. So
many of us finally stumble on the power of meditation in our lives out of
simple necessity. We encounter something like an illness that is debilitating
enough that we need to re-group our inner resources and find some inner
spiritual strength, so that we can stand up to it, and get on through to a more
positive holistic space. And it can literally transform us.
I read an
obituary a few years ago about Larry Stewart. By the time he died in 2007, he'd
made several million dollars. But what struck me about Mr. Stewart was how he
had transformed himself inside out in the midst of real negativity and set
back. The year was 1979, when the economy was as bad as it is right now. Mr.
Stewart lived in Missouri. It just before Christmas. He'd been laid off from
his job and he was feeling really crappy about himself as a husband and a
provider. In fact, his life was beginning to have that negative déjà vu. This was
the second year in a row that he was fired from his job just before Christmas.
He didn't really want to go home, so he drove over to get a burger and fries.
He is sitting there, feeling like a loser, numb and in the bottom of a bad
cycle when the burger girl comes out to his car with his order in her oversized
coat. He watches her make change with the car next to him and then he started
to imagine her actual life, living on tips that are change from a dollar. That
day he was overcome with his life in perspective and he gave her a twenty and
told her to keep the change.
Then he started
to meditate on gratitude and gracious living, as Christians just might do when
they live out of their higher self. And he set on a plan. He took as much money
as he could afford and in the days leading up to Christmas, he would walk
around the town he lived in and the town that he grew up in, and he would take
deeper notice of the world of people around him. He started to notice those in
need. And he would walk up to them, hand them a bill, and keep on going. Some
twenties, some hundreds. He blessed that money, blessed other people, lived out
of his gratitude and grace and he became changed.
His
unemployment situation resolved itself and the economic boat steadied.
Eventually, he got into the Cable TV business and the local rural phone
business, so his budget for blessing others got bigger. By the time he died at
58, he had personally given away 1.3 million dollars in random acts of
kindness. More than that, and this is what a obituary can never really capture,
he was, I am sure completely transformed spiritually and fell upon the secret
beauty of living from the inside out, authentically, with meaning and
fulfillment. I'm sure he would have like to live longer but I bet if you asked
him, he would tell you that he couldn't have lived better. Authenticity that
comes from being in touch with your gratitude and living out of that center is
what it is all about. Jesus taught us that this is the point of our existence.
You can't go wrong with that.
My brothers and
sisters, don't overlook the obvious. Cultivate what matters and move it from
here (the brain) down to here (the heart). As St. Paul once said, “whatever it
good, whatever is true, whatever is beautiful, meditate upon these things” and
may God's peace which “transcends all understanding” be upon you and may you
shower your family and your neighborhood with that deeper peace as well. Amen.
