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of distraction at all. When you are concentrating there are thousands of things which will try to distract you; a train passing by will be a distraction. The scientist needs a soundproof air-conditioned room so nothing distracts him, but in an absolutely soundproof air-conditioned room new distractions are felt. For the first time you start hearing your own heartbeat. If it is really sound proof, totally soundproof, you will start hearing your heartbeat as loudly as if you are hearing it through a stethoscope. You will start hearing the noise, the sound of your breathing. Not only that, people who are very sensitive start hearing the sound of the blood running through the body.
You cannot avoid distraction. If you are trying to concentrate then distraction and anger are bound to be there because whenever you are distracted you will be angry at yourself that you missed again. You will force yourself again.
Concentration needs a tremendous effort to control. It is a bracketing. The whole reality has to be bracketed out except for a small thing on which you are focussing. Hence the definition of science: knowing more and more about less and less. That's why science creates so many branches.
In the beginning there was only one science; they used to call it natural philosophy. In tradition universities like Oxford and science departments are still called the Departments of Natural Philosophy. That is a three-hundred-year-old idea -- when science was not yet divided into many branches. Then physics and chemistry became separate; then chemistry also became divided into organic and inorganic, then physics also became divided into pure and practical, and so on, so forth. Now there are so many divisions and they go on dividing.
I have heard a twenty-first century story: a man goes to an eye specialist and tells him his eye is getting worse and worse every day; "Please help me. I cannot see with one of my eyes." The doctor says "Which eye s getting worse? -- right or left." The man says "The right," and the doctor says "Sorry -- I specialise only in the left eye. You will have to go to some other expert."
That's how the situation is. In the
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