By Royal E. Alsup, Ph.D.

The one-pointed mind, once we have obtained it, gives us tremendous loyalty and steadfastness. Like grasshoppers jumping from one blade of grass to another, people who cannot concentrate move from thing to thing, activity to activity, person to person. On the other hand, those who can concentrate know how to remain still and absorbed. Such people are capable of sustained endeavor. -- Eknath Easwaran

One-pointed attention is the ability to be aware of our feelings and thoughts, and of our body and its actions, as we interact with other people. It is possible to train our attention and awareness by concentrating on one task at a time. Training our attention helps us to make our own choices of how we want to react to events and circumstances, instead of being triggered and reacting unconsciously. Developing one-pointed attention is training ourselves to love and to have compassion for those who are with us in the moment.

Talking to one person at a time, being aware of emotions arising and disappearing, while being interactive with one's whole being, is practicing one-pointed attention. The goal is to cultivate awareness, not self-observation. Awareness involves a clear consciousness of ourselves and our surroundings that includes being present and attentive to others. Self-observation keeps us from being fully present, and we do not truly see the face of the other person because of the concentrated self-consciousness.

Training the Emotions

Emotions are very powerful. They can rule us by taking command of our minds and our thoughts, causing us to fly into a rage, fall into depression, or even soar with elation. Being tossed about by our feelings and emotions occurs when we are not mindful of what attracts or repulses our attention. When we are angry at our spouse or our children, it is important to recognize that they are repulsing us in some way. Anger is a way of expressing what we dislike. When we feel the joy of intimacy with our loved ones it is because of our attraction to them. Cultivating awareness of our attractions and repulsions allows us to be conscious of what triggers our emotions, and this awareness nourishes the fine-tuning of one-pointed attention.

A person who responds automatically to their attractions will have difficulty maintaining good boundaries and being loyal to the one he or she loves. A person who gets attracted emotionally to one person, and then another and another, may enjoy discussing intimate issues as they act on those attractions. They may feel like they are being one-pointed with each new attraction, but they are unconsciously giving everything away in encounter after encounter. On the other hand, a person suffering from impulsive anger and rage is driven to respond to their repulsions. As with the blind pursuit of attractions, impulsively acting on one's repulsions also limits a person's freedom and choice. One-pointedness frees a person from the unsatisfied drivenness of blindly following attractions or repulsions.

Training the Thoughts;
the Alleviation of Depression and Anxiety

People who are depressed experience constant negative self-talk, which is the ever-present inner dialogue that goes on in the mind without even trying. Depressed people go through the day making negative judgments about themselves and their situation, and end up feeling exhausted, helpless, and hopeless. People who suffer from anxiety and worry are often overly conscious of how they may appear to others. Being stuck in negative thoughts about other people and about themselves, they sometimes have panic attacks and general anxiety about the future. Anxious people and depressed people are not living in the present. The depressed person is too busy criticizing self about the past, and the anxious person is too worried about the future. Depression is like being sucked into a whirlpool of self-absorption and negative self-talk. Anxiety is like being caught in a tornado of fear.

One-pointed attention offers a way out of depression and anxiety by becoming mindful of the content of our thoughts. The simple practice of mindfulness and being one-pointed frees us from a depressed concentration on the past and a fearful watchfulness toward the future. Depression and anxiety are major mental illnesses in American society that can be helped by practicing one-pointed attention and by moving beyond likes and dislikes to the cultivation of what the Buddha called right thought and right understanding. Right thought comes from an appreciation for the powerful effect that thinking has on oneself and on others, that when one focuses negative or positive attention upon something, it gains more life. Being one-pointed and focused brings about right understanding, a clearer picture of the person with whom one is interacting and more clarity about oneself in that interaction. All this leads to a deepening of compassion for the other person that paradoxically raises one's own self-esteem.

In psychotherapy, I have taught depressed teenagers how to focus on their friends and family members and to set themselves aside in order to pay one-pointed attention to whomever they talked with during their week. They were surprised that their friends liked to be around them more because of the focused attention they were receiving. It surprised the young people because the more they focused and were present for other person, the more centered they felt within themselves, and they liked themselves better. Parents reported improvement in interactions and reported that their teenagers had learned to be more considerate of their family because of the one-pointed attention.

One-pointed Attention to Tasks

Sri Easwaran talks about training ourselves to eat when we eat. Eating while watching television or reading splits our consciousness and trains us to be fragmented. Being one-pointed while we do unpleasant or boring tasks actually transforms the task, and we can discover the miracle of mindfulness of which Thich Nhat Hanh, the famous Vietnamese Buddhist, writes. Thich Nhat Hanh says that the wonderful experience of being mindful is when we have an experience of being fully present with our whole being. When we are washing the dishes while we are washing the dishes, or chopping wood when we are chopping wood, Nhat Hanh tells us, we can start learning to find peace with every step.

The Practice of One-Pointedness and Meeting Suffering

When my wife's father passed away. we had to rush to Redding, California. During the traveling period, I stayed one-pointed and listened to Patricia's suffering about losing her father and being worried about her mother. It was a time for me to be awake and to cultivate awareness about my own feelings and thoughts as I listened to her. This helped me to refrain from trying to give Patricia instructions or to try to take away her feelings and thoughts of grief and loss. I just stayed present in the moment and listened to her.

Upon arriving in Redding, Patricia became one-pointed and performed great services for her grieving mother and siblings. She would hold her mother and let her grieve each day while staying one-pointed and focused on her mother. This gave Patricia a purpose and a way of channeling her own grief. She was not repressing, nor negating her own needs; rather, she was transforming her grief into purposeful action. This is what the Buddha would call right action. Practicing being mindful helped her to be there for her mother with her whole being and full love. The following quote of Thich Nhat Hanh in his small book entitled The Miracle of Mindfulness describes what my wife was practicing with her family:

Remember that there is only one important time and that is now. The present moment is the only time over which we have dominion.The most important person is always the person you are with, who is right before you, for who knows if you will have dealings with any other person in the future? The most important pursuit is making the person standing at your side happy, for that alone is the pursuit of life

Patricia realized that being in the moment, in the present, gave her dominion over her personal grief and suffering from losing her father. It allowed her to treat her mother as the most important person in her life on a daily basis for the whole week. Patricia's most important pursuit was not to take away her mother's grief, but to help her with her life changes so that she could focus inwardly to grieve and honor the life of her husband. This helped her mother feel love and hope in a time of challenge and pain. Patricia had the feminine strength and essential one-pointedness that enabled her to make this attention to her mother the pursuit of her life in that particular moment. Her practice of one-pointed attention was a witness to the concentration she has developed by being a painter for 30 years and by using Sri Easwaran's method of meditation, which involves concentrating and repeating spiritual passages.

A relationship that is based on one-pointed attention demands openness, honesty and a great respect for life. Being one-pointed and cultivating awareness allows for the Spirit to come into an I-It relationship and transform it into an I-Thou relationship. An I-It relation is manipulative, exploitative, and defensive. An I-Thou relationship is one of love and respect that involves our whole being—body, mind, spirit, emotions, and soul. One women reported to me that when she hugs a tree or lays on the ground, she has a one-pointed experience that grounds her in the unity of her body, the tree, and the earth. This is the wonder of mindfulness.

Striving to create the conditions to change I-It relationships into I-Thou relationships allows the Eternal Thou to infuse all aspects of nature, our community and relationships with love.

One-pointed attention is a method,and the Eternal Thou is the spirit of Grace that allows for I-Thou love relationships to become happenings in our concrete, lived everyday life.

Resources

Buber, Martin. (1970). I and Thou. New York: Scribner's Sons.

Easwaran, Eknath. (1978). Meditation: Commonsense Directions for an Uncommon Life.Petaluma, CA: Nilgiri Press.

Nhat Hanh, Thich. (1975). The Miracle of Mindfulness: A Manual on Meditation. Boston: Beacon Press