Focus Is Like Driving a Stick Shift
Start by locking in one thing: you are not the mind, you are awareness moving within the mind, because until you have that you cannot steer focus any more than you can drive a stick shift without knowing the clutch, accelerator and gears.
Asked where someone should begin with focus, Dandapani points to the distinction between awareness and the mind, and compares it to learning the clutch and gears before you can drive a manual car. He then separates understanding from realizing, using his guru's death and his own reordering of priorities, and applies it to families sitting together on their phones.
What this talk covers
- The first thing to learn is that you are not the mind, you are awareness, a ball of light moving within the mind, and the goal is not to control the mind but to choose where in it you go and hold the ball of light there.
- Like a stick shift, you have to get clutch, accelerator and gears right before you can do anything else, and once you have that you can go as fast as you like.
- Understanding is knowing something intellectually; realizing causes a shift in behaviour, the way everyone knows they will die but realizing it reorders your priorities today.
- When his guru died he realized that the people we love die, and from then on everything and everyone important to him became his number one priority, with everything else second.
- With a home, food and a few months of bills he considers himself fine, and even without those, having the people important to you and being present with them is what matters, which he contrasts with families at restaurants scrolling separately, and a father who let his daughter eat breakfast alone for twenty five minutes.
When you realize that you're going to die, you shift everything in your life.Dandapani
Questions
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With the mechanics. Learn the difference between awareness and the mind until it is locked in, the way you learn the clutch and gears before driving a manual car. He points people to chapters three to five of his book for it.
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Understanding is intellectual knowledge. Realizing changes your behaviour. Everyone understands they will die; when you realize it, your priorities reorder that same day.
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He describes a father at a resort scrolling through breakfast while his seven or eight year old daughter ate alone for twenty five minutes, on a holiday the two of them took together. In the father's mind he was spending time with his daughter. Physically present, mentally absent.
Transcript
626 words · 3:19
If I said to you, hey, I'm feeling as though this has become a distraction for me, what's the one thing you would tell me to start with outside of, hey, find those consistent things and practice your focus there? Read my book, chapters three to five.
Drill it into your head to get the understanding of the difference between awareness and the mind. Do you drive a stick shift car? Can, but I don't on a day-to-day basis.
But you can. Yes. What's the critical thing to know? Yes, clutch, brake, accelerator.
I need to know how to release the clutch, step on the accelerator, and change gears at the same time. Three things, right? If I don't get that right, I'm going to stall the car, or I'm just going to hop.
Once I get that down, I can start doing other things. But if I don't understand that, I can't drive a stick shift car. With Focus, the thing you need to learn is you're not the mind, you're awareness, ball of light, moving within the mind.
Your goal is not to control the mind, but to choose when the mind you want to go. And to be able to hold that ball of light in one place for an extended period of time. You understand that concept and difference between understanding and realizing. What's the difference?
Understanding is intellectually knowing it. Realizing something causes a shift in behavior, like death. Everybody knows we die at some point. That's understanding that.
When you realize that you're going to die, you shift everything in your life. priorities become your number one today. Everything else can wait. When my guru died, I realized that, oh my god, the people we love die. And at that point, I made everything and everyone that was important to me my number one priority.
And everything else is number two. As long as I have a home, I have food on the table, I can pay my bills for a few months, I'm golden. You know, nothing else matters. And even that, if you didn't have the roof, and if you didn't have food on the table. As long as you had your family, the people important to you, you'd
figure the rest of it out. You'd figure it out. And not only just having family, but being able to be present with them. How many people spend time with their families? I can't tell you, Matt, I travel so much and I'm eating at a restaurant. How many people on the phone, the whole family,
everyone's on the phone scrolling, going up for family dinner, and no one's talking to each other at all. I was on a holiday recently and we had this resort and there was a dad and a daughter a holiday by themselves. And the dad at breakfast is scrolling and the daughter must have been
seven or eight. She didn't have a phone, so she just ate her breakfast by herself for like 25 minutes while he was on the phone. Obviously nothing urgent because you can see how they're scrolling. Like, you know, it's not like typing frantically. What's the point? So in his mind, he's spending time with his daughter. My mind, you're not. You're physically
the mentally absent. So for me, that's where I would start. Understand awareness in the mind, lock that in. Once you realize that you're in charge of your ball of light, now you know how to drive a stick shift car. Now you can start going faster, doing donuts in your backyard, whatever you want. Right? But if you don't understand how to change
gears in the clutch and accelerator, you're never going to drive.