Ivan Campuzano                                                                                                                                    (edited by Ashley Mwanza with additional material)

OUR attention is one the most powerful things we possess. Whatever we pay attention to is what we become conscious of. Ultimately consciousness and attention is one and the same. Unfortunately we live in a world where our attention is so divided that we have become lost in life, we have lost ourselves. We don’t pay proper attention to ourselves so we end up living an unconscious life.

Attention is a vitamin. Many people receive this vitamin through love, relationships etc. What happens when your lover no longer pays you the same quality of attention? You start feeling empty, not loved, malnourished.

Attention can manifest as a loving presence. Plants can have the right soil, the right amount of water, sufficient light, but without a loving attention the plant can still die. We are no different, we can have a healthy body, but without giving the proper attention to the essential aspects of our being, we too will not truly feel alive.

If you are to love yourself, give attention to yourself. You need to understand a fundamental principle, which is that whatever you pay attention to will grow. If you pay attention to yourself, you’ll grow as a person.

If you pay attention to suffering, if you become identified to it, it will naturally grow. Unfortunately, when we take a penetrating look at where we place our attention, many of us come to find that a majority of it is spent on trivial things.

You need to clearly see that any feelings of being incomplete, of being unfulfilled, are not coming from without, but from within. Many of us try to fill this hole by give all our attention to worldly pursuits in hopes that it will make us feel whole, but we will only find what we are looking for if we move our attention inward.

Having money, success, and material possessions is really nice, nothing wrong with them, but ultimately what we are looking for is spiritual fulfillment. The longing to feel at peace is coming from the aspect ourselves that is non-physical so obviously it cannot be satisfied through physical means.

Learn to not pay wrong attention. Switch your attention when it’s needed, try to remember blissful moments, remember that it is possible for you to experience other states of being. People tend to always gather and remember their miseries, they forget their happy moments, and life then becomes a hell, a vicious circle of the same dramas.

The ultimate thing to give your attention to is your inner witness, because the witness is pure unconditioned attention, awareness. Merge with the witness (get to know who you really are).

When you were a kid your attention was focused on the only thing that existed, that is; the moment. Which means you accepted life as it is, you experienced life totally and fully. The ‘experiencer’ was not separate from the experience, you were the experience. This is why many people remember their childhood.

The more you learn to pay attention to your inner witness, the more you will feel your pure essential presence emerge, which simply means you are being present to yourself, you and the moment are one. When you are present to yourself, you are “being” yourself, which feels amazing, because in this state we recognize reality, we know who we are, we recognize what it is to be authentically alive.

Susan Baroncini-Moe and Ashley Mwanza

Ralph Waldo Emerson reminded us that we should, “finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”

But how do you bounce back from those moments of frustration and avoid feeling discouraged? Sometimes the best thing to do when you hit a wall is to take a step backward and reassess your position. Analyse the failure and look for the lesson. Look toward the future. Start planning from here forward and get back on track. One mistake won't make the Earth tilt off its axis and one failure doesn't mean your life is over.

Take some time and look at the bigger picture and see this moment for what it really is: a blip on the radar, if even that. Often, our gaffes seem much larger to us than they do to anyone else. Many times, mistakes aren't even noticed by other people. So gain a little perspective and remember that what seems massive to you might seem minimal to the rest of the world.

The best thing you can do is to decide before you make a mistake that you'll never give up in your pursuit to resolve it. That way you'll be prepared to keep going, no matter what happens.

Sometimes all you can do when you make a mistake or fail at something is to just get up, dust yourself off, and move on. There are times for thought and analysis and there are times for moving on. In fact, in a recent chat about entrepreneurial success, Sir Richard Branson was asked, "What's the best way to handle failure?" and his answer was, "Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again."

There's nothing wrong with starting over. There's nothing wrong with backtracking and fixing something. The bottom is a great place to start because frankly, the only way us up. Start over. Start again. There's nothing wrong with it.

Paraphrasing Thich Nhat Hahn, when you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don't blame the lettuce. You look for reasons it is not doing well. It may need fertilizer, or more water, or less sun. You never blame the lettuce. If we have problems in our lives, we blame ourselves. But if we know how to take care of ourselves, we will grow well, like the lettuce. Blaming has no positive effect at all, nor does trying to persuade using reason and arguments. Assess the conditions and adjust them to suit your growth. No blaming, no argument, just understanding, learn to understand your surroundings and how they affect your pursuit/s in life. Don’t blame, don’t give up, give it all you’ve got, analyse it and persevere.

Ultimately, the most important thing to remember is that everyone makes mistakes. Remember that if  you don't try, you can't succeed. Keep in mind that old adage, "If at first you don't succeed, try, try, try again," and make it a part of your mind-set, and you'll try, try, try until you do succeed...and you'll learn from every little bump in the road along the way.

Rewritten by Ashley D. Mwanza (Original text by Karl F. Stewart, 2000)

WE all realize that the world we inhabit is far from perfect, right? Even on a good day, there are some things we would undoubtedly all like to improve. The guiding principle by which you live your life is to feel love in your heart for humanity. But in this our sad world, if you say to your friends that you hate humanity, they’ll sit there quietly and silently nod their heads in understanding. People can relate to hate. But our society doesn’t relate well to love. Many human beings have trashed love as a global human experience. If you express love for humanity, you are often viewed as living in a fairy tale world, as being unrealistic, as being weak or of even being a religious extremist.

Most human beings today see hate, and its consequence, suffering, as a natural part of life. How many of you believe living life is only real if we hate and suffer and that love is an illusion? I’m sure there are many human beings today who would suggest that without hatred and suffering, we wouldn’t be human beings, and that life would be boring and flat. Apparently human beings have grown addicted to strong negative emotions.

Consequently, we continually live our mass depression, and suicide, thinking that life offers no other possibility. We kill our dreams for a better life and a better world with our so-called realism that life equals suffering. And be careful of any human being who professes to love humanity.

But who could blame humanity for being sceptical about love? During the last 100 years, humanity’s more recent generations have only seen death and destruction as the guiding rule for life. I need not list them, the list is endless.

Apparently, because of our continuing human tragedy, we have become numb to humanity. We see life in its relationship to ourselves, but not to humanity as a whole. As human beings we no longer want to know or be held responsible for what our ignorance and indifference is doing to our fellow human beings. The world we presently live in today is a very sad world indeed. And is this the world many of us were hoping to prosper in? Look around at the world we’ve helped to create. Should we be proud of ourselves, of each other, of humanity for what we’ve created?

Most politicians throughout the world are obviously totally indifferent to humanity’s suffering – in the majority of cases they’re the cause of it. The so-called political elite typically worry more about helping corporate special interest groups and themselves, than helping humanity. As compensation they’ve had their egos inflated and received crusts of bread for their slavery. Will they ever admit their responsibility toward humanity and finally decide to help create a world of peace and love? Will they ever see the ghetto they’ve turned our planet Earth into? But of course politicians are nothing more than a mirror of the individuals they represent.

Until we as human beings start to rethink what it means to be a human being on planet Earth, we will only continue to reduce the human experience down to its most deprived elements – indifference, corruption, torture and murder.

One of the main characteristics at the turn of the new millennium was, and was historically anticipated to be, that humanity and life as we know it today would change. Many might not believe in that prediction, but the indications are all around us. Humanity today has definitely come to a fork in the road. And we can either continue to move forward by default or decide to make a conscious decision to shape what our life is going to be.

The sad thing is that most human beings are clueless to what’s happening around them. Most of the world has failed to acknowledge the tragedies. And this indifference could kill us all. Humanity’s ignorance of or indifference to the changes that are taking place in our world won’t make those changes disappear. Whatever happens, we have always had the power to change the course of our history.

Misery isn't just something that "happens" to us.  We create a lot of our own misery ourselves by what we do, how we think and feelings we habitually hold. The good news is, this means we can change it and end it!

As human beings, we have been a tragedy. We have failed ourselves as individuals and we have failed humanity. Are we going to continue along this road of self-destruction, or are we going to learn to love in life? The choice is ours and always has been ours. Where’s our courage to assume our responsibilities as human beings on planet Earth?