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050	0	0	_aBR65.C32 _bE5 2024
082	0	0	_a153.733 _223/eng/20230703 _bCAS-H
100	1		_aCassian, John
245	1	0	_aHow to focus : _ba monastic guide for an age of distraction _cby John Cassian ; excerpted, translated, and introduced by Jamie Kreiner.
260			_aPrinceton : _bPrinceton University Press, _c©2024
263			_a2401
300			_axxx, 257 p. ; _b21 cm.
490			_aAncient wisdom for modern readers
504			_aIncludes bibliographical references.
505	0		_aGoals -- Frustration -- Warming up for fiery focus -- A mantra -- Memories -- Slip-ups -- Getting away from it all.
520			_a"A new translation of selections from the 5th century monk John Cassian's writings on ways to avoid distraction and enhance our concentration. Distraction is not just an artifact of the digital age, and we're not the first to complain about how hard it is to concentrate. Monks in the late Roman Empire beat us to it. Concentration was their job, which made them more aware of how hard it was to master. John Cassian was a monk who lived in the Roman Empire in the fourth and early fifth centuries, the very early days of monasticism. He was born in the Levant and joined his first monastery there, then spent over twenty years in Egypt, interviewing and learning from ascetic hermits. Eventually, he moved to Marseilles to start his own monastery. He found that the monks in Gaul were hungry for stories of what he'd learned in Egypt, and in the 420s, wrote a massive record of his most memorable conversations with the Egyptian ascetics called the Collationes (or Conferences), in which one of the central preoccupations is the art of staying focused. While many monks in Cassian's day blamed demons for their cognitive lapses, Cassian was more convinced that distraction was largely a self-inflicted problem of minds "driven by random impulses" that could be fixed (or at least mitigated) by disciplining the mind itself. A large portion of his Collationes is dedicated to helping monks accomplish this, and his thoughts about thinking influenced centuries of monks. Many of Cassian's techniques to stay focused became signature elements of the emerging Christian monasticism: renouncing property and family, avoiding sex, eating sparingly. These were all strategies to minimize the things that didn't matter in order to stretch the mind out to God. But he also recommended forms of mental discipline that are accessible today, even to the non-monks among us. In this addition to our Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers (AWMR) series, historian of late antiquity Jamie Kreiner selects and focuses on (no pun intended) those portions of Cassian's work that can help us poor, overloaded, overstimulated moderns cope with our inability to concentrate"--
650		0	_aAttention _vEarly works to 1800.
650		0	_aDistraction (Psychology) _vEarly works to 1800.
650		0	_aSpiritual life _vEarly works to 1800.
700	1		_aKreiner, Jamie _etranslator
776	0	8	_iOnline version: _aCassian, John. _tHow to focus _bFirst. _dPrinceton ; Oxford : Princeton University Press, 2024 _z9780691250151 _w(DLC) 2023010546
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