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Be Here Now

By Joshua Seth |

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Accelerated Learning Through Personal Development

Today’s accelerated learning tip is to focus on one thing at a time. If you want to develop your mind to learn more, retain more, and be able to apply what you know in creative and useful ways then you first need to break the habit of mutitasking. You need to train your mind to Be Here Now as Ram Dass famously wrote over 35 years ago. It’s a topic more recently explored by Eckhart Toole in his book The Power of Now.

Everything and everyone is connected but before you can become aware of those connections you first need to become aware. The concepts of past and future only exist in our minds anyway. All that is real is the now.

Part of being human is that we have the ability to spilt our focus to think and do many things at once. The problem is that when you multitask you don’t do any of those activities well.

If you’re sitting in class and thinking about what happened yesterday or what may or may not come to pass tomorrow, then you will not absorb all of the knowledge being imparted to you. Part of this is due to social conditioning. People think it proves they’re smart if they can do many things at once. And part of it is mental laziness. A lack of discipline to focus on the task at hand for a prolonged period of time.

When you focus fully you make excellence possible. You lose track of time and distractions cease to exist. When you focus on one thing at a time you also get more out of life.

Really listen to the person in front of you. It’s the greatest compliment you can pay them. It shows interest and respect. It also allows you to absorb everything that they are communicating to you because only about 7% of communication is verbal. The rest is all body language and inflection and emotion. If you allow yourself to be distracted then you will miss the nuances and connections that impart real meaning.

There is a Zen story where the Buddha looked at a flower and became connected to it in that moment. It was his most famous sermon and was delivered without a single word. All of life is like that. If any one of us could ever be fully present in any one moment then we we would achieve a kind of lucidity that eludes us in the fog of daily living.

Strive to be connected in the present moment to the person who is teaching you and you will get far more out of every interaction. And by the way, every person with whom we come in contact can teach us something. Look for it.

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Topics: Accelerated Learning, Mindset |

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