Attention Deficiency Syndrome: Pandemic of 21st Century

This is not just the age of information and communication technology but also an era of attention deficiency. We are just busy in fixing the outside world with the help of technological evolutions and gadgets but “The Most Sophisticated Gadget” The Human Being has been completely vandalized in this process. All the gadgets and technological evolutions are the byproduct of “THE GADGET” but now “THE GADGET” has become the victim of its own creation like Frankenstein’s monster.

All these technological evolutions have provided us things to make our living comfortable, which is all fine but our essential LIFE EXPERIENCE is worsening only and that is also being substantiated by a myriad of alarming social trends like increasing rates of suicide, violence of all kinds ,depression and so on, all across the globe.

                                      So, now let’s figure out what went wrong!!

We all have our unique place in this cosmos by default because the DNA structure of every single human being on this face of earth is unique. So it’s pretty evident that everybody has been rewarded with a separate unique path of his own to lead his life-journey, but because of sheer stupidity, we lose the sight and fall in the same line of meaningless race as a SHEEPLE.

In order to find our own space we have to learn to stay centered. That subtle connection with the centre is the source of all encompassing energy. It is just like a center of a cyclone which is very quiet and it is this “Quiet Center” from which cyclone attains it’s horrendous power. It seems pertinent to mention a few lines written by a Latin American Poet. It goes like:

Still Still

The forest knows where you are

You must let it find you!!

The sages and yogis of ancient India did exactly that. They did not roam around the world in the quest of truth. They looked for it in the stillness of their own beings and figured it out! In the 21^st century very few of us live in forests. However, we have to deal with the jungle of information overload. If we have lost ourselves in the wilderness of information, the only way out is to find our centre in the calm depths of a reflective mind. It is like searching a misplaced key by quieting our mind rather than rushing around the room.

We must make peace with this jungle to find ourselves in it. The fragmented world of information is held together in the wholeness of our attention. This attention knows the relevance of information. This attention puts the information in its proper context and perspective. This attention brings us home to ourselves.

Every Information/external stimuli absorbs our attention and excess of information therefore, results in complete loss of attention! Unless of course we put in a conscious effort and care within ourselves to create greater attention capacity within us.

The draught of attention everywhere - from the living room to showrooms. In the world of trade and commerce, brands germinate and terminate in a short span of attention. Either we take examples of consumer durables, FMCG or music and film industry.The script is same whether it is boardroom, living room or bedroom. One out of every two marriages in western world fails for lack of attention on the part of spouses. A troubled professional is channel surfing for hours on his living room television or surfing the net, not in particular, for that matter. So the trend is being manifested in all our relationships.

But the most disappointing & disturbing of all these attention lapses is that we have messed up ourselves so much that we can’t have an appointment with ourselves even for moment! And even if we get some odd seconds free, we become restless and start searching some gadget or somebody to which we could outsource our anxiety and frustration. It’s just like that our body and soul live like two decent neighbors in adjacent flats in a luxurious apartment but they never get to meet.

We take time off to service our car, upgrade the upholstery décor of our drawing and living room and so on but, there is no time to refresh our relationship to ourselves. This is nothing less than suicide. We have capitulated the vitality of our lives to drab economic equations: while making a living we have completely botched up the life.

So, what is stopping us from realizing to the greater profound and unique capacities we are born with??

As per my gut response, it is ego. This ego only prospers with the fodder of continuous attention. We want a bigger car and bigger house not to accommodate our body but to massage our ego. If we start examining our responses and reactions to the external stimuli in a course of a day, we would come up with the conclusion that most of the responses are governed by ego, not by self. Ego is nothing but an accumulation of all the labels and identities what we have acquired from the outside. These acquired identities do not have any existential relevance, they do have the social relevance but up to an extent, beyond that they start suffocating us. And the brunt of this suffocation is being felt by us very evidently in our current socio-economic, socio-cultural scenario cutting across all the boundaries and geographies.

                          Some practice points to DATE YOURSELF!

1.      To start with, set aside few minutes for active and productive reflection. Explore what mistakes you committed or what you could have said or done better.
2.      Another way to connect with ourselves is to start witnessing some of the activities what we perform on regular basis in the course of the day. This practice helps us in realizing the power of ourselves as observer.
3.       One of the ways to have a self appointment is to dis-identify with those labels that we identify wrongly with our self. We can say to ourselves

       I have a degree or qualification but I am not my degree. I have a job but I am not my job.

                THESE ALL BELONG TO ME BUT THEY ARE NOT WHAT I AM.