A technique for stopping the mind from wandering

In many traditions we make an effort to keep our attention fixed on something. In Patanjali’s yoga that something can be anything. In Ramana’s method that something is I, the me that seems to think and have experiences.

As we all know, keeping our attention fixed can be very difficult, because attention has an extremely strong tendency to wander without our noticing.

“Without our noticing” is the killer. It means we lose voluntary control over our attention and experience a diminished sense of consciousness. In Advaita Vedanta this loss is called “pramada.”

Are there any practical techniques to limit this wandering and keep our attention fixed? Yes. One of them is discussed by a number of people including Ramana and Patanjali.

The idea is to keep repeating the act of starting to pay attention before attention has been lost.

In other words, after you focus your attention, the way you keep it focused is by performing the initial act of focusing again. And again. And again.

You don’t wait until attention has wandered to repeat. By then you’re lost in thought and it’s too late. The key to this technique is that you keep initiating new acts of paying attention while you’re still paying attention from the previous one.

When you begin a session you may want to repeat quickly, maybe every second or two. As the wandering subsides you can go slower.

This technique works because each new act of paying attention prevents wandering for a few seconds. That’s how the brain’s built-in attention mechanism functions. During that interval, you retain voluntary control over your attention. Instead of waiting for the interval to time out, resulting in mind wandering and getting lost in thought, you restart the clock by performing a new act of paying attention.

Here’s one of Ramana’s descriptions of the technique.

Maharshi: See to whom the trouble is. It is to the ‘I-thought’. Hold it. Then the other thoughts vanish.

Devotee.: Yes. How to do it? That is the whole trouble.

Maharhsi: Think ‘I’ ‘I’ ‘I’ and hold to that one thought to the exclusion of all others. Then the other thoughts vanish.

[Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi, number 266.]

The instruction is so terse it’s easy to overlook it. “Think ‘I’ ‘I’ ‘I’” — the whole technique expressed in four words. Like all conversations in the big Talks book, this one is a condensed paraphrase, so maybe Ramana’s actual description was longer, but he was famous for speaking very little.

When I started writing this article a few minutes ago I planned to quote Patanjali on the same topic but I just remembered that I did that ten years ago in an earlier blog post.

I just reread that ten-year-old article and my God, I wrote much better back then. The earlier article explains the idea much more clearly, it’s much more engaging, and I hung the article on a brilliant metaphor of bouncing a tennis ball repeatedly off a racket to simulate continuous levitation. Sorry if that last sentence sounds like bragging, but the earlier Freddie who wrote that article is a stranger to me, and anyway he never created anything he wrote. It just popped into his head or poured out of his fingers. I don’t think metaphors like that can pop into my head anymore. Old age has devoured that gift like so many others. Oh well — easy come, easy go! So far it looks like as long as consciousness and love remain, everything is fine. 🙂