Where Our Attention Goes, So Our Love Flows

Be it negative attention or the healthy, positive kind of attention, attention in whatever form is indeed a kind of love. If you hate someone, the attention flowing towards that person is as much as it would be if you loved that someone dearly. This is a universal truth that saints do not deny.

Hatred is another form of love. When we hate anybody, we are actually in love with him; otherwise, we would never hate him. How could others affect us if we were not concerned about them, if we did not bother about them, if we never thought about them? When you hate a person, you are always thinking about that person. You cannot drive that man out of your mind, you hate him so much. You are not analyzing yourself, for actually you are in love with him. You have not been able to make him according to your wishes, so you hate him; but all the time you are in love with him or you would not even be thinking about him.
_{Maharaj Charan Singh, Spiritual Perspectives, Vol. I}

Bulleh Shah was told by his Master, his Murshid, Shah Inayat, that to realize God one must just do one simple thing: pull one’s attention away from the world and redirect it within. In practice, it is not that simple. Our conscious attention, conditioned by lifetimes, has a tendency to escape into illusion.

The path of Sant Mat asks of us one sublime action: to focus our attention with the intensity of a laser beam towards the eye centre. This is the most difficult yet most powerful act we can perform.

Unfortunately, we have no inkling of the value of our attention. How often do we catch ourselves thinking of the most useless things, or shifting our thoughts to the past or future? Now that is attention wasted. Our attention determines our destiny to a great extent.

Man’s attention has been scattered outside through these five passions since time immemorial. We have not yet found the path and have wasted our whole lives in straying farther away from our real home. Only by attaching ourselves to and merging ourselves in something which is permanent and everlasting do we become immortal; otherwise after death we are reborn in the form in which we can best fulfil our desires and thus once again go through the ‘wheel of eighty-four’.
_{Maharaj Jagat Singh, The Science of the Soul}

The Master often says that to keep any relationship going we need to give it two things: time and attention. Everyone is starved for attention. It is a natural human need. Our children need our attention more than they need pricey toys and nannies. What the world needs is not more mega-malls and high-tech gadgets. It needs more loving human relationships. Love and attention are a package deal. They cannot be separated.

But more than the outer flow, the inner flow of attention is extremely powerful. Inner concentration comes from holding one’s unbroken attention at the eye centre. When concentrated rays of the sun pass through a magnifying glass, it can kindle a leaf to burst into flames. Imagine what concentrated attention could do within us. It could ignite our soul consciousness into a flame of devotion that could burn our stored karmas.

By focusing at the third eye, we can access the inner world. The Master has taught us how to enter the inner realms whenever we wish.

Our focused attention is the greatest and most appreciated gift we can offer our Master. To hold the reins of the mind in our own hands requires relentless practice, until eventually it becomes a healthy habit. The objective is to ensure that the mind does not wander but stays fixed in the present, and in the simran, even throughout the day.

Whatever we pay attention to will grow and grow. If you give attention to your garden, it will grow, and if you give attention to your aches and pains they will worsen. We aggravate our pain by paying too much attention to it, like adding fuel to fire.

We must use the mind only when we need to perform a function. When it is not required, we must hook it on the hanger of simran.

This whole process eventually leads to emancipation from the wheel of birth and death. Therefore, we must focus our attention at the eye centre with patience and determination.