Back to the future

"[William] James's introspective investigations, as well as those of other psychologists of his time, led him to conclude in his chapter on attention that keeping the mind focused on one thing for more than a few moments is impossible:

No one can possibly attend continuously to an object that does not change. . . . To keep the mind upon anything related to them requires such incessantly renewed effort that the most resolute Will before long gives out and let[s] its thoughts follow the more stimulating solicitations after it has withstood them for what length of time it can.

This observation would have amused late antique Christian contemplatives, who knew that keeping the mind focused on one object is a skill that can be cultivated through systematic training that might go on for years.  It is not enough just to try to stop the flow of thoughts for a few minutes, as James did.  But James and other introspective psychologists at the turn of the twentieth century, such as Edward Titchener and Wilhelm Wundt, were not familiar with techniques that allow the mind to be calmed so that its underlying phenomena can be observed.  Thus, they did not have suitable tools at their disposal with which to conduct their introspective investigations.  Such tools—which had been developed by contemplative monks in late antiquity—were lost with the secularization of psychology [in the eighteenth century]."

     Inbar Graiver, Asceticism of the mind:  forms of attention and self-transformation in late antique monasticism (Toronto:  PIMS, 2018), 193-194.