I draw upon the olden days when I would have been Garius, Roman orator, leafing thru the latest by scribes for inspiration, or taking quill and ink in hand to scribe inspiration.
"The only independent element in our selves is the attention of our mind-not our passing thoughts, but the force of attention that is obscurely linked to our thoughts….all great spiritual disciplines are rooted in the understanding of the attention factor in human life and seek to develop in man a stronger and more enduring quality of independent attention."*
William James wrote that the power of attention is the only aspect of human nature for which we are truly responsible. All ethics and morality are founded on how we direct our attention.
Many of the Hip generation took great knowledge from Baba Ram Dass's brown paper bag original Be Here Now. The Oprah-ites pay homage to Eckhart Tolle's, The Power of Now. The power embodied in Now was captured from Emperor of Rome, Marcus Aurelius, the wealthiest and most powerful man of the time when he wrote:
"If thou wilt separate, … from thy ruling faculty, the things which are attached to it by impressions of sense, and the things time to come and time that is past…and if thou shalt strive to live only what is really thy life, that is, the present-then thou wilt be able to pass that portion of life which remains for thee up to the time of thy death free from perturbations, nobly and obedient to the god that is with in." **
As for sermonizing, I'll lengthen my attention, shorten the writing, and continue to be to explore Now, Attention and the meanings of Life.
*Jacob Needleman, Money, and the Meaning of Life, pg 274
** The Thoughts of Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus book II #3 translation pg 291.