This week’s Zen story is about focus. The human mind is so amazing because it can wander to so many things. Imagination can be vivid and real. It’s easy for our attention to be drawn from one thing to another. In fact, that’s one of the things that distinguishes a child: the mind and imagination floats freely.
But when we are adults then we are often divided. The capacity for imagination becomes like a split identity, floating from one shiny thing to another.
Lack of focus
When you don’t know who you are your attention is easily sucked off and you become the thing your attention is focused on. This can happen for outside or inside things.
You have an emotion and it feels so compelling it’s like “I am this emotion.” Particularly if it’s a negative emotion right? We get sucked into it and lose focus.
Awakening is like a focus point. Knowing who you are is finding this point of awareness inside ourselves. It is such a single point that it is dissolved into nothing. That’s you seeing the world.
The King
This story is about a King. He has a couple of sons and he brings the sons out to go hunting. Only one of his sons is able to focus so sharp on what he is shooting that he sees nothing else.
One cool point in this story is that this one son, the youngest son, was a dreamer. He was an artist, full of imagination. But he had learned how to focus his imagination.
The king knew the value of focus in a leader and made this son king.
Focus on focus
Work on increasing focus. This is one of the reasons why learning how to play music is so important because learning music requires lots of focus. It’s a Zen practice.
Listen to the story: https://mapremzareen.com/the-three-sons/