The Root of Judgment, Character, and Will

Hey, welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. In today's session, I'm going to share a quote about the power of attention. The quote is by the great American philosopher and psychologist, William James. And what he says is, "The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will. An education which should cultivate this faculty would be the education par excellence." The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again.

Why does that sound so familiar? Oh, I know. It's exactly what we're doing in meditation. We give our mind something to focus on, let's say the breath, the attention wanders off, and then we bring it back. It wanders off again, we bring it back. It wanders again, we bring it back, over and over.

But William James is making an interesting argument here, which is that this capacity of bringing back a wandering attention is the root of judgment, character and will. So let's examine that more closely. The root of judgment, our ability to assess, to discern this requires our attention brought, be brought back to the thing that we're trying to understand so that we can see it more clearly to, to bring a full concentration to it, rather than just a loose awareness. The closer we can bring our attention to that thing, the more discerning we can be about it, whether it's a person, a problem or something within ourselves that we're trying to understand that requires a close attention. But then he says, it's the root of character, which we might understand as how we show up in the world - our ethics, morality, and integrity.

Well, that requires noticing when our less skillful tendencies and impulses arise, that causes us to react in ways that might not be in alignment with our character. Noticing when our attention gets pulled to those things and then be able to bring our attention back to how we most want to be in the world. And then lastly, he says, this is the root of will. So if we think of will as our capacity to sustain effort and energy toward a particular pursuit or goal, well, it's very easy for our attention to wander off when we start something like that, even if we have the best of intentions. Maybe you've noticed that.

So being able to notice when the mind wanders off from that goal or pursuit and redirect our attention back to it, this becomes the foundation for will. What I most love is that William James went on to say that an education which should cultivate this faculty would be the education par excellence. Said as if there is no education that exists. William James clearly didn't have a subscription to Mindfulness.com. In all seriousness, we, we now have that education, it's meditation.

In fact, it's been around for thousands of years and the more you practice, the more you're training, this ability to bring back a wandering attention. But even outside of your meditation practice, as you go about your day, notice when your attention wanders from what's most important to you and see if you can practice bringing it back to the point, right here. As William James says, this is the root of judgment, character and will. And I think we can all agree that those are important things. So I'll talk to you about this more in the meditation.

Thank you for your practice and take care.