How to Focus: A Monastic Guide for an Age of Distraction
John Cassian
Jan 2024 · Highbridge Audio · Narrated by Mike Cooper
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2 hr 13 min
Unabridged
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About this audiobook
Distraction isn't a new problem. We're also not the first to complain about how hard it is to concentrate. Early Christian monks beat us to it. They had given up everything to focus on God, yet they still struggled to keep the demons of distraction at bay. But rather than surrender to the meandering of their minds, they developed powerful strategies to improve their attention and engagement. How to Focus is an inviting collection of their strikingly relatable insights and advice—frank, funny, sympathetic, and psychologically sophisticated.
This wisdom is drawn from John Cassian's Collationes, one of the most influential manuals for monks from late antiquity. The Collationes follow Cassian and his friend Germanus as they travel around Egypt, asking a series of sage monks how they can make their minds stronger. In response, these monks offer a range of techniques for increasing focus, including setting goals, training the body, managing the memory, using mantras, taking breaks, consulting others—and, most of all, being honest about yourself. As Cassian and Germanus eventually realize, we can't escape distraction—but we can learn how to confront it and, eventually, to concentrate.
Featuring an engaging new translation by Jamie Kreiner, How to Focus can help even the least monkish of us to train our attention on what matters most.
This wisdom is drawn from John Cassian's Collationes, one of the most influential manuals for monks from late antiquity. The Collationes follow Cassian and his friend Germanus as they travel around Egypt, asking a series of sage monks how they can make their minds stronger. In response, these monks offer a range of techniques for increasing focus, including setting goals, training the body, managing the memory, using mantras, taking breaks, consulting others—and, most of all, being honest about yourself. As Cassian and Germanus eventually realize, we can't escape distraction—but we can learn how to confront it and, eventually, to concentrate.
Featuring an engaging new translation by Jamie Kreiner, How to Focus can help even the least monkish of us to train our attention on what matters most.
About the author
John Cassian, an important figure in the early history of monasticism, can be considered one of the principal architects of the western monastic system. He joined a monastery at Bethlehem but left soon after to study monasticism in Egypt. Eventually he found his way west, spending a short time in Rome and settling in Marseilles, where he founded two monasteries. He collected much of his knowledge of monasticism in his Institutes and Conferences. Benedict of Nursia used Cassian's work in his famous monastic Rule. Cassian's theological importance and legacy comes in his disagreement with the Augustinian views of grace and predestination. He maintained that "the first steps towards the Christian life were ordinarily taken by the human will and that Grace supervened only later." His views, traditionally described as semi-Pelagianist, received widespread support in the monasteries in the West.
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