Manufacture Magic

How time is not your currency — your attention is

Traditionally, we always believed we must give time. Time to our loved ones, to our work, to our health, to reading, to writing, to thinking, to meditating — to the hundred things that seem important. So we hand out our hours and feel we have given something of ourselves.

But in this life of fragmented living, time is no longer time. It has been broken up. Dissected. Misunderstood. Assumed to be something it is not.

And I am talking about your own time — the time you believe you are giving to others, to the things you love.

Time is not the currency. The currency was, is, and will remain your attention.

You have been to school — but did you give it your attention, or only your hours? You have poured years into your relationships — but did you give them your attention? You sit at work ten hours a day — but have you given those hours your attention?

Wherever you place your attention, results begin. Give attention to your learning and you will learn faster than if you had spent five times the hours. The currency is attention. Spend it wisely.

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## The problem is that attention does not stay whole

Attention exhausts quickly. And the reason is simple, so read these words slowly: **attention multiplies when it is focused, and it depletes exponentially when it is divided.**

The more focused you are, the more attention you generate. The more scattered you are, the faster it drains. This is true of almost everything.

Most of us live divided. It is like watching three series on Netflix at once, all halfway through, none finished. The mind becomes a khichdi of three unfinished stories. And that is exactly what we do to our days — we give a little time to everything, and let us be honest, nothing actually gets done.

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## The impact is that you end the day empty

Let me tell you where I see this in my own life.

I am an entrepreneur, and I keep my office door open. All day I am surrounded by my team, walking in to ask me questions — questions they could answer themselves. From morning to evening I attend to all of them, and by the end of the day I have achieved nothing of my own.

For weeks I struggled with my sales team. They had no structure to their work. I always carried the structure in my mind — but I could never execute it, because I was constantly swamped, my attention pulled across a dozen topics at once by whoever walked through that open door.

Think about it in your own life. You go for a walk in the park to relax, and you check your phone fifteen times. The walk does not relax you, because you have actively given your attention to fifteen things instead of one.

This is the cost. Fragmented attention does not only kill your time and your productivity — it kills your energy. You come home and say, *aaj kuch kaam nahi kiya, aur thak gaya.* I did nothing today, and I am exhausted. That is the signature of a scattered day.

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## The solution is to give your whole soul to one thing at a time

The day I forced my team to think for themselves, and forced myself to hold my attention on one thing at a time, things began to move.

One example: an hour and a half of focused sales calls this week moved a customer who had been stalling for weeks — from a no, toward a yes. Not ten hours. Ninety focused minutes. And the sales structure I could never execute while my door was a revolving one — that, too, only got built when I finally gave it undivided attention.

This is what I mean when I say: **if I give time and attention to one thing, I manufacture magic.**

Read that again. Manufacture magic. You do not hear those words often. And yet it is all around us in nature.

It is summer in Delhi, and everywhere the Amaltas tree is in bloom — so golden it is almost poetic. Just looking at it is art. Imagine the attention that goes into creating something so beautiful it can capture yours. The rustling of a peepal’s leaves is music. The way the sky changes colour from morning to evening — none of it could be made by fragmented attention. It is almost funny to imagine a blade of grass that is only half a blade of grass, confused, unfinished — the way most of our tasks are.

So start small. Tell yourself: for the next thirty minutes, I will do one thing only, and I will give it my whole soul. By the end of those thirty minutes, you will find that time itself has vanished.

It is the same with meditation. Depth matters more than duration. Next time you sit, ask God only that your mind be as focused as it can be — even for two minutes — and you will manufacture magic.

Why do you enjoy a movie? Because for two or three hours you give one story your undivided attention, and you do not touch your phone. If the story is well stitched, you are happy. Now imagine giving that same undivided attention to your own health. Could you sit with it — truly sit — without searching the internet, without asking everyone else? True attention, from the bottom of your heart. And your heart will answer with the solution.

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## So here is what to do

Plan your day in focused blocks, not fragmented ones. Not coworker, then phone, then email, then a WhatsApp bling, then another call, then something goes wrong — and the day is gone. Close the door when you must. Make your team think. Make yourself think. One thing, whole soul, then the next.

And there is a deeper layer to this, the one that matters most to me.

How often, when a problem comes, do we quiet down and listen to our own heart — instead of putting the problem out like a stock in the market, where everyone can trade on it? Buy it, sell it, hold it, or worse, hedge on it. The whole world is waiting to take your attention, because your attention is your energy, and they want it.

The Beloved is not asking for your time. God is always seeking what is in your heart — your love. And your love is your attention. Your care is your attention. Your joy is your attention. Your will is your attention.

The day you understand this, life begins to change.

Go ahead. Manufacture magic.

Om Guru.

Daddy Is Sad

I was playing with Urvansh.

We have always told him to express himself, to not throw tantrums, to speak out in words what he is feeling so that we know what is going on. And so sometimes when something he does not agree with happens, when he is unhappy about it, he tells me — Nanu is sad.

Nanu, not me.

And the moment he says it, I see the change in him. The cloud thins. He has named it from the outside, and in naming it from the outside he has stopped being it.

That is when I realised — the child is teaching me to be a witness to my own self.

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This thought has stayed with me on the walk. I want to write it down before I lose it.

Our feelings are clouds in the sky of our being. Sometimes they are of a different shape. Sometimes big, sometimes small, sometimes dark, sometimes white, sometimes so light you can hardly see them, sometimes so dense they cloud the sun and turn day to night. Sometimes floating away very slowly, sometimes floating away so fast. But never all the time. They are always in transition.

The mistake is to think we are the cloud.

The mistake is to internalise the weather. Because when we internalise it, we attach to it, and we suffer it as though it were the whole sky. Our default bliss state — the sun that is always shining — can never be seen unless we endeavour to move past the altitude of our cloudy sky. Only when we fly above the clouds do we see that the weather may change, but the sun always shines bright.

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How does one begin to even begin to do that?

It is relatively easier to imagine yourself as the parent to your own self. Just as you would talk to a child who is going through a mood — by distracting him, by drawing his attention towards the nicer things in life — you can do that to yourself. And when you start doing that slowly, you realise that you do hold power on your own mind, and not otherwise.

So when I am sad, I try not to say I am sad. I try to say — daddy is sad. And then I try to move daddy’s attention away. The same way the parent moves the child.

This principle can be used at work, at home, when alone, in every other situation.

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I have complained for almost all of my life till now.

That I am a victim of my circumstances, my situations, my moods, the weather, the people around me, the temperature, what I eat, who cooked it, my boss, my wife, my son, my maid, my staff, my parents, my siblings, my friends, my possessions — none of them seem to work in my favour sometimes, and that causes a lot of unhappiness within my state of being.

I learned to complain the way children learn most things — by watching. I cannot remember the first time. But I can imagine it. Someone in my family, or someone near and dear, said something they were unhappy about, and I felt them internalising the feeling. I felt them become the cloud. And I decided that was how one lived a life. Because everyone around me seemed to be doing the same thing.

It took me a very long time to suspect otherwise.

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The only way one can come about talking about something like this is if one has experienced coming out of that state — dissociating oneself from oneself. It does not matter how many times you have been able to do that. Even if you have done it once, you know how it tastes. And if you have done it once, you can do it again, and again, and again.

Some of the people reading this might never understand what I am talking about. That is alright. This is for those who at some point have watched themselves getting angry, watched themselves getting mad, watched themselves getting aggressive, and realised in that moment — they are not the ones who are doing it. It is happening to them. And in that very moment they can change it. And sometimes they do. Sometimes the witness simply arrives, and you stop, and you say to yourself — what the hell am I doing — and you change. That is the witness you need to develop to reach that stage.

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And here is the part I want to add, because most people stop at sadness and anger.

This can also happen in a happy moment. It can happen in an exciting moment. In any feeling, any mood you have ever experienced.

Swami Yogananda said it. Paramahansa Yogananda said it. Situations are always neutral. It is our reaction to them that is volatile. And Swami Kriyananda said the same thing. Life is lived in polarities — positive and negative, happiness and sadness, aggression and depression — and these polarities are the ones which cause us to always be a part of them. It is like swinging from front to back, back to front. The stronger we swing in one direction, the stronger we swing in the other.

So it is important to watch ourselves. To try and be neutral towards things. Yes, live our lives — that is important. But always realise.

My mother used to say it to me. She would say — *itna mat hass, thodi der mein roye phir.* Don’t laugh so much, my son, you will cry shortly.

For me, that sums it up.

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The cloud is not you. The cloud is not the sky.

Daddy is sad. Daddy is happy. Daddy is angry. Daddy is excited.

Daddy is moving. The sky is still.

Om Guru.