Largely due to this digital culture, smart devices, information that is increasingly instantaneous and simplified, and the ubiquity of countless screens all at once, difficulties with concentration have become extremely common. The problem arises, naturally, because the modern man has less and less need to think. When the need arises, there are ways to delegate the thinking. The result is that one lives in a somewhat ethereal, unfocused state, and a multitude of impulses detrimental to concentration develop. Due to lack of practice, this ability is lost. How, then, can it be restored? As simple as the preceding diagnosis, it can be answered in a single word: by practicing it. And how? Well, through any activity that demands it, that isolates one from the environment, that is absorbing. Reading, for example; provided it arouses great interest, enough to override the distracting impulses. But to truly overcome the problem, to reacclimate the mind to the act of centering itself, to that ekagrata or one-pointedness of which the Indians speak, there may be no better solution than the old-fashioned meditation associated with the valuable and painstaking study of Latin.
Category: Notes
The Sense of Humor Reveals One’s Life…
The sense of humor reveals one’s life experience. And few personality traits are as revealing as this one. Someone accustomed to the factory floor, for example, does not need much to shock someone else, raised in the mold of the European elite. And the latter, if he makes a joke, will either not be understood by the former, or it will seem to him ridiculously childish. So it goes. But it is difficult, for someone who understands both, to classify one’s humor as better than the other’s. What is not difficult is to perceive, with just a little conversation, the life experiences that have shaped the person with whom one is speaking.
It Is Not Uncommon to Encounter Authors…
It is not uncommon to encounter authors who, after advancing in their studies and literary careers, renounce their former mentors. And if this is true of mentors, it is even more common for them to renounce authors they once admired, who contributed to their intellectual development. On the one hand, intellectual evolution involves significant shifts in thought, and there are times when the change occurs in the mentor himself, who becomes different from who he once was. However, it is an extremely difficult task to repudiate without simultaneously sweeping away the feeling of gratitude. It may seem to the philosopher, after reaching lofty heights, a shame to have benefited, as a young man, from a journalist, an economist, or some figure from the so-called intellectual lower ranks. What utter nonsense! It is far more honorable, from up there, to remember the unique path that allowed him to ascend.
One of the Most Beautiful Aspects of the Eastern…
One of the most beautiful aspects of the Eastern master-disciple system, through which knowledge is transmitted individually along a lineage dating back to time immemorial, is that the master endures and lives on in the disciple, without losing his own identity or overshadowing the disciple’s personality. As we read the stories, we are impressed by the achievements of all the masters, and it seems that the idea of comparing them to determine which was greater never crosses our minds. There is no rivalry; rather, there is a tradition that lives in all of them and continues to manifest itself in new forms, in response to specific circumstances, through individual acts.