Using Attention in a New Way

 What do you understand by "folding everything back into the attention?"  Folding everything into attention means, a macro view of life that includes all things around us, including our own ego (thought-patterns) and emotions. This is ‘Sakshitva’ or a witnessing, macro perspective on life. This helps us share our joys and sorrows with others, and reduces stress and increases happiness. The other choice would be a micro view of life that is ego-centered, where everything revolves around our likes and dislikes. This makes us more reactive and less sensitive to others. How do you develop the ability to not beat yourself up for lapses, and instead constructively move forward? If we have a macro perspective on life, we will be grateful for our blessings. We will also be less critical of ourselves and others. We notice that perfection is inconsistent with change and evolution. We can only do our best with presence of mind and ‘witness’ the result. This helps us deal with the ‘lapses’…..If we are ego centered, we unduly force results. Forced results tend to reverse themselves over time. This starts a never-ending, stagnating, lonely fight against our environment, and in the long run, we compromise our happiness and the quality of our life. …..We can stabilize our life and move forward by alternating between the micro and the macro view of life. It is like driving while paying attention to other drivers. Can you share a personal story where this principle has played an important role in your life? It is my experience that the root of all thought problems, are emotions that create micro view of life. It is almost impossible to fix thought problems without fixing emotions first. Self-analysis will help us only until the next emotional outburst and then, self-analysis turns into self-criticism (beat yourself up). If you don’t have emotional outbursts, you don’t need self-analysis. The only way to fix persistent, contradicting, unstable emotions is to reduce their impact by making love our primary emotion. This can be done with meditation on love/heart and witnessing from love/heart. Love stabilizes both our micro and macro perspectives on life - without contradictions.