ATTENTION ALLOWS YOU TO TAKE INVENTORY OF YOUR ATTITUDE - SEEING THE TRUTH IS THE FIRST STEP TO SELF-MASTERY.
One of the profoundly practical and profitable benefits of this type of training is that it teaches you to continually, ceaselessly MONITOR YOURSELF.
In that habit, interior activity typically hidden from your notice is quickly exposed to your conscious watchfulness.
It is through this internal 'KEEPING WATCH' that you can detect any misaligned, impractical, painful, unhelpful, self-sabotaging thought, feeling, or mood...in other words...this is where you begin to see your BAD ATTITUDES creep in.
This is also the ground from which you dismantle such states and send them packing, to be naturally replaced by genetically-endowed calm, confidence, and lightheartedness.
How Does Paying Attention Affect and Improve Your Attitude?
Your Attitude is your current, immediate mental state. Your Attitude toward the day, this hour, and this moment is the strongest determiner of a quality - or lousy - experience.
Whatever is occurring right now and is picked up by your senses is first filtered through your current mental state: Your 'Attitude.'If you are not at that point in active control of your Attention, then the strong impressions delivered by your own rising thoughts will DRAW ATTENTION to them, and PULL YOU IN, so that you perceive and believe only what you're thinking at the time, no matter how outlandish, false, or irrational.
If you've allowed yourself to slip into a lousy feeling, immersed in lousy thoughts, your experience of that moment transforms instantly into a lousy one.
If you are in an excellent, pleasant mental state - enjoying a positive thought or NO THOUGHT AT ALL - then your experience of events is affected by that.
As the moment filters through your Attitude, that mental state colors your experiences of the world.
Painted by your mental state, your experiences are not then objective but SUBJECTIVE.
Instead of dealing in 'REALITY,' we find ourselves wrestling within endless daily 'ME-ALITIES,' subjective experiences of objective reality that belong only to us but which NOBODY ELSE knows of.
- Nobody knows how you're feeling - they only know how THEY feel. The same applies to you.
- This uniqueness of individual experience is true even if other people surround you because no two humans can have the same subjective experience.
- You are experiencing this life alone, and nobody is having YOUR experience but you. Instead, they are experiencing their OWN 'ME-ALITY.'
- We delude ourselves into thinking we're...'sharing' a reality.
Your Attitude - your mental state - transforms your experience and feeds it back to you in an altered form, giving you an experience that may or may NOT match up with what's actually happening.
For example, you may see a pretty sunset, and it should cause you to feel fantastic, but if, in that moment, your mental state - your Attitude - centers around a negative thought about not wanting to go to work in the morning, then the sunset experience becomes transformed into a lousy one thanks to the downcast Attitude.
People can be in the middle of a wild party of a good time and feel unhappy while doing it.
Unattended Attention Summons Lousy Mental States.
If you don't use your Attention to begin intentionally DETECTING your current ongoing mental state (the way you feel, the thoughts making you feel that way, your 'mood'), then every mental state and mood DOMINATES and OWNS YOU by mere default, because you are not consciously involved, not stepping in, not doing work...not PAYING ATTENTION TO YOURSELF AND WHAT'S GOING ON INSIDE YOU.
The mere act, practice, and HABIT of taking this very Present Moment to quietly observe and manage your internal state - your streams of thought, inner dialog, and ceaseless mental impressions - eases the problem of Attitude.
if you do not step into the breach with your Attention to build a habit of self-management and emotional intelligence, then you will continue to be and remain the slave of an undisciplined faculty of Attention, and spend the next few years - or rest of your life - under the spell and domination of a runaway imagination that ignores your wishes.