Okay, I'm at my work and suddenly I realize there is a song playing in my mind.
How do I put my full concentration on my work?
It's difficult.
And you're realizing the difficulty.
You're realizing the danger in attraction.
Maybe danger is too hard.
Or the disadvantage or the downside of sensual pleasure.
Because guaranteed that song was not put in your mind by someone else.
And it's not just coming randomly into your mind.
Guaranteed it's there because in the past you were attracted to that song.
Either that or you're horrified by the song or it was a song that people made you listen to and therefore it's coming back to you.
But this is the power of attraction.
The power of attraction, the power of aversion is that it creates an imprint on the mind.
This is how we understand karma.
that this is the result of your karma of listening to music.
When a person is enthused by music, interested in music, engaged in the enjoyment of music,
then one will fall into these states, or will receive the result, which is the repeating and the replaying of the music based on the imprint that it's put in your brain.
This is how memory works.
You remember things that excite you.
So from a Buddhist point of view, based on the concept or the theory of non-self, there's nothing you can do.
You can try, you can work, you can force your mind.
to go to the work and it creates more stress and more karma and has more results and can turn you into a stressed, tense individual because you're trying to force your mind to work.
or from a Buddhist, what we would recommend rather, from a Buddhist point of view, is to slowly learn to give up craving, to give up attachment, and to give up the
the addiction to sensual pleasures, which will then get in the way of things like work.
So if you can be free from your need to listen to music, your need to find enjoyment, it can only help things like focusing on your work, focusing on an activity.
But the only qualifier there, of course, is that being non-self and you having already developed these sankharas and these conditions in the mind,
That in the end, this is why in meditation, if you meditate enough, in the end you give up your work, you give up society.
Because you realize it's based on impossible assumptions.
It's based on incoherent assumptions.
The idea that you can...
find stability in things like work.
And so you see that it's only causing stress.
You have these deadlines and the only way to meet these deadlines, the only way to be successful in the world is to have craving, is to force yourself, is to create more mental formations of focusing and of controlling the mind.
and therefore more suffering.
So in the end, this is why a meditator will give up the world and will become a monk, or at least live a simple life where they don't have deadlines and where they don't have the requirements to focus on something that the mind is not naturally inclined to focus on.
So they'll be more inclined to studying the Dhamma and doing things that
are really peaceful and conducive to peace.
In the meantime, when it does come up, what I would suggest is rather than focusing on your work, try to focus on the song for that moment, because it only takes a few seconds to say hearing, hearing, when you're hearing the song.
If you like it, liking, liking.
Put down your work, take a break for just five, ten seconds.
however long it takes to do away with that, then focus.
You'll find your focus has improved when you're able to do that.
Focus on the song first and then go back to your work, rather than forcing the mind, which is contrary to meditation and has negative effects on the mind.