Chapter Three: Concentration – The First Pillar of the Harmonious Mind
Concentration – The First Pillar of the Harmonious Mind
Our Capacity to Engage in our Experience is what Determines Whether it is Meaningful
What is Concentration in the Meditative Context
Questions and Answers
[Discourse given on day one of a seven day foundation retreat, December 2011]
Concentration – The First Pillar of the Harmonious Mind
Meditation is a bit like playing sport. How successful are your efforts will depend upon what kind of condition you are in; or what your capacity might be. When we start there may be a huge disparity between our capacity and our potential, and as much of an effort might be applied to increasing our capacity, as to actually engaging in our chosen sport. Like sport, you can develop meditation in many directions, but the one governing principle that applies in both cases, is that how far you can take it will depend upon how fit you are.
What condition you are in will determine how successful you are at sport. In the same way we can say it doesn’t actually matter what you choose to do by way of meditation; how effective it is for you will depend upon what kind of condition you are in and how you are able to apply yourself to it.
So for this week we are looking at what would make the grounds for progress in one who wishes to learn to meditate. One who wanted to seriously engage in any sport rather than just as a pleasurable pastime, would look at a number of conditioning factors that would lead to success, and this is the way we are looking at meditation.
Now you can approach meditation in the same way you could enjoy going for a jog on a Sunday. It might just be for your recreation and that’s fine, and it’s important that meditation is an enjoyable and a rewarding pastime. But it also has a capacity to enrich our lives tremendously, far more than we can anticipate when we first start.
I mentioned yesterday how when you pick up a trumpet or a musical instrument like a saxophone; when you look at it, and you blow in it and get the first sound out of it, there’s no hint of its potential. Or let’s take a violin, like a Stradivarius. Most people, even most very good violin players would not necessarily know what would make a Stradivarius different to an ordinary violin, but it has within it a potential that far exceeds our understanding when we first look at it.
This is really the extraordinary thing about meditation. There is no glimpse, there is no hint when we first try, how far it can carry us, any more than when we first start to play a violin, whether it’s a twenty pound fiddle from your local music shop or the finest Stradivarius on the planet; there’s no hint on how far it can go. And at the same time, how far it can go will depend upon both its potential and our capacity to realise and express that potential.
So, how far your mind can go with meditation right now is far beyond your understanding. But how far your mind can go with meditation if you actually reorganised it and turned it from a twenty pound fiddle into a Stradivarius is way beyond that.
This we need to understand because, you know, there are a thousand books out there teaching a thousand ways of meditating and there are lots of ways you can sit down and quietly still yourself and get something by way of a pleasurable experience out of it. But that is not the field of endeavour that would reveal to you what your potential is. What we are looking at here is how we can engage in meditation in such a way that we can start to get a glimpse of what might be our potential, and find a route towards realising it.
We are looking at what actually conditions the functionality of our being. And three things that condition the functionality of our being are:
what our potential might be,
how well organised and what state our body is in,
how well organised and what state our mind is in.
We will be looking at both of these aspects of how we can reorganise them to a higher state of coherence through our practice. For the first to be expressed, the other two must be addressed.
We have both the direct practice of meditation (meditative discipline and mental training) and the adjunct practices of conditioning our body and energetic structures in such a way that they become more coherent, for example, chi kung, pranayama and yoga. We can also look at the feedback effect of these two, how they are dependent upon each other.
This well-being, this health, this state of organisation in which both our body and mind are in, will be the determining factor in whether we are able to play the finest piece of Bach on our Stradivarius or whether we can just about bang out a folk tune on our fiddle from the local music shop.
Now, very few people would get to the point of being able to play the most elaborate piece of Bach or Mozart on a Stradivarius and that doesn’t matter because it doesn’t necessarily mean that that needs to be your aspiration; it certainly doesn’t. All I want to do is to give you a hint that there is more to be got from life by engaging in it in a more coherent state, and that investment in your own coherence will feedback to you as a more enriching experience.
Our Capacity to Engage in our Experience is what Determines Whether it is Meaningful
I’m hoping that you’ll come to the realisation that it doesn’t matter what it is you actually experience – that’s not the cause of your happiness and your contentment. It’s your capacity to engage in that experience that determines whether it is meaningful, or empty and pointless. I know many people who have extraordinary lives of tremendous experiences but don’t feel particularly enriched by them, because their ability to enter into them is hugely compromised by the incoherent state in which they live. And I know people who live extraordinarily simple lives with very little elaboration who are extremely content and happy with that life, because they enter into it in a state of coherence and find those simple experiences truly enriching.
This is really what meditation has the potential to offer us – the ability to engage in the life that we actually have in an enriching way, rather than be stuck in this state of constantly seeking that peak experience that we think might satisfy us. This happens because we fail to recognise that the reason that we are unsatisfied is because we aren’t well organised enough.
There’s a school of thought that would suggest, “Do nothing and you’ll get everything.” With regard to meditation, at one degree that is absolutely right – the less you interfere with the process the more the nature of things will reveal itself. It’s certainly the case that nature expresses itself ever more exquisitely the less interfered with it is. That’s true of us too.
But, we are of the nature to interfere, so that we have to work hard to overcome that tendency to interfere. So if you don’t do anything and your habit pattern is a very interfering mind, then all you’re left with is a very interfering mind. Before we can do nothing and get everything we have to do that work which is necessary to remove the interference that is the cause of incoherence in our lives. And that may well entail hard work, and commitment, discipline, patience, perseverance, etc. which is why it’s great to come away on a retreat like this to do this kind of work.
I apologise if you are already practised in meditation and you have reached that understanding where you feel, “The less I interfere the better.” This work we do here is for identifying where the incoherence comes from and where we might work to uproot and relinquish it and be free of it. So this does involve doing something.
One thing we will need to do if we are going to see where our, let’s just use this word incoherence, is coming from, is to pay careful and close attention to what’s actually going on within this experience of being alive right now. We are going to have to understand what it is that’s going on in this mind and how this body functions. And, in order to pay enough attention, we are going to need to develop a faculty within our mind that can pay enough attention so that it doesn’t always fall into views and ideas; and this faculty we call wise attention, which means to see things as they are.
Now, what do we do normally? We don’t see things as they are because we can’t see how things are. So, what’s the next thing we do? We create an idea about it, don’t we? Our experiences are mostly ideas about our experiences. We spend more time formulating our ideas about ourself and what we are engaging in, than actually engaging in it. There’s more energy invested in our ideas about ourself than there is in the process of just being.
This wise attention, that sees things as they are, replaces, in stages, the coming to view, ideas, etc. And most of us live in a cloud of ideas about life, which is a filter between us and the direct experience of what’s going on around us. That’s the incoherence that means that we don’t get to that point of seeing and being with things as they are. We may not yet have within us this faculty of wise attention. We don’t necessarily have this skill, to be able to see how things are. We need to develop it. This is where the discipline of meditation comes in.
Last night I said to you that the first pillar of the Harmonious Mind is concentration. Most of our minds are distracted so much that we are very rarely able to focus one-pointedly on anything in particular. We’re doing one thing whilst thinking about another, or we’re thinking about half a dozen things at the same time. We never bring all our energy into the moment and apply it completely to what’s actually going on around us. So the first part, or the first pillar as I call it, of the mind that can develop this skill of wise attention is concentration. Until you can concentrate you will not be able to see how things are.
What is Concentration in the Meditative Context
So, what is concentration? Concentration is one-pointedness, which is the opposite of what goes on in our mind most of the time. Our mind is flitting around all over the place, one moment thinking about this and the next thinking about that, for a few moments engaging in something and then being distracted and going off and doing something else. It’s a mass of mental energy that is incoherent. It is pulled this way and that way all the time. That’s what we call restlessness.
It is restlessness that is one of the chief causes of us not being satisfied with what we’re doing. We’re not satisfied with it because we can’t be with it completely. We can’t sit still. We can’t pay attention to the point where we are completely immersed in it.
It’s this restlessness, this scattering of the mind that means that even when we’re doing something that we should be enjoying, it doesn’t feel as satisfying as it might. Because we are also thinking about this and thinking about that, and our mind is distracted. The habit pattern of our mind is normally restlessness, or distraction, and that is the first aspect of our incoherence.
We need to bring the mind into focus. We need to still the fizzing and buzzing of mental energy that swirls around us all the time, on account of this obsessive thinking about this, being distracted by that, worrying about that, anticipating this etc. Then we can start to turn up.
Concentration is our first pillar. We work for the first couple of days to establish at least some concentration so that some of this restlessness will fall away; and this is by far the hardest part of meditation. Most people learn to meditate without learning to concentrate. They develop mindfulness, they develop some kind of stillness in their mind or they develop some kind of insight, but they don’t concentrate. Concentration takes tremendous effort in the initial stages, because this restlessness, this hankering after variety, takes a lot of overcoming.
So how does that apply to what we’ll do? Well, last night and this morning I gave you some very simple instructions on how to observe your breath as it appears within your body. Now, there are two reasons why we choose to start in this way with our meditation.
Firstly, because most of the time a large part of our awareness is scattered externally or in a world of our own fantasies, our own thoughts, our own mental elaborations, or projected into the future or back into the past and not actually here. Now the truth is that what’s going on here right now is all there is. There is only that. There is no past and there is no future. Try and show me yesterday or try and show me tomorrow. You can’t. You can only show me this moment. And it’s not being in this moment (and so much of our awareness is not being in this moment) that is the cause for us not being able to see what’s actually going on.
So we choose to meditate upon the body because it brings the mind into the moment. It’s not an abstract state that we can get lost in. It’s not a concept. It’s not an object that is sometimes there and sometimes not there. It is always there. By bringing our attention to our sense of physical presence our awareness turns up here. That has a benefit straight away. Thereafter we will start by observing the breath because the breath is always there. It’s easy to find. It’s not an abstract state. It’s gross enough an object that even when you’re distracted and poorly concentrated you’ll be able to find it.
Secondly, the breath has a tremendous mirroring effect of the state of our mind. We can learn quite a lot about what’s going on in our mind by observing the breath. But we are not going to look at that yet. We’re not interested in that yet. It’s merely an object to concentrate on, and at that level it’s arbitrary.
There are countless meditations that you could engage in with countless objects that you could concentrate on. The only key point is that you concentrate upon it. So you may have learnt using a mantra or you may have learnt building up a mandala or you may have done all kinds of visualisations – whether they have a constructive effect upon you will be determined by their capacity to bring you to a more organised state. Only that. It doesn’t matter, actually, what you choose to meditate upon. But we are going to choose to meditate upon the body and upon the breath for the reasons I have just explained.
So what actually is concentration? Concentration is one-pointedness with regard to an object. It is not, when you are knowing your breath either at the tip of the nose or in your body or wherever, and then suddenly start thinking about something else and then spend a couple of minutes meditating on your breath, then a couple of minutes meditating upon your foot, then a couple of minutes meditating on, I don’t know, a song that you heard on the radio; this is restlessness. To concentrate you must stay with one object. That’s quite clear.
The other point is with regard to attention. One-pointedness with regard to attention. Think of it like this: Imagine you had a convict running away from prison. He’s running towards the prison wall trying to climb over to escape; you switch on the searchlight and you’re looking for this convict, and then you find him and you catch him in the spotlight. You point a gun and shout halt. And he stops, and stops running and stands still. As long as you don’t thereafter move your spotlight you’ll continue to be able to see him. But if your spotlight is still moving around all over the place, sometimes you’ll see him and sometimes you won’t. And maybe in those moments that he’s not in your spotlight he might escape. This is what I mean by one-pointedness of attention.
It’s the way in which your attention does not waver. This is concentration. Do not play with your meditation. Once you put the light of your attention upon your object, leave it there. That’s it. Just leave it there. It’s the messing about that stops you getting concentrated. Even if you’ve come to the conclusion or agreement with yourself that you’re going to meditate only upon your breath, but then your attention is wandering about, moving about, playing with your breath all the time, you won’t get concentrated.
So today we need to look at these two aspects that together bring us to a state of concentration. And during our meditations we will look at ways in which we can create some finesse, a subtlety, so that our concentration may fully develop swiftly. Because you can spend a tremendous amount of time on your cushion trying to meditate, without getting much concentration. But if you apply yourself really skilfully, knowing what it is you’re trying to achieve, and put your effort towards that goal, then actually, quite swiftly you can get quite good concentration. And that’s our goal for today.
Questions and Answers
Any questions?
Q: When I’m attempting to focus or pay attention to my breath, if I feel like I’m just getting a bit closer to doing that, my mind will then start commenting on it and start going, “Oh actually, you’re not doing that well,” or “Hey, that’s better.” And the next thing I know I’ve lost it. So it’s constantly trying to judge what I’m doing.
A: Well we’ll be looking at what this is. I’m just going to call this, “Being smothered in self.” Now everybody starts out smothered in themselves, and everything they do is compared to everything they think they should do, and there’s nothing but a sense of me right in the middle of everything I’m doing. So, you are going to have to live with that until you get tired of it. Just be aware and recognise, “Oh look, that’s me smothering my experience in self again,” and just leave it and stop fussing and messing about with it. It doesn’t matter what you think about it. Concentration is just doing it, and leaving it alone as much as you can. Don’t get frustrated because it takes you a long time to leave it alone, and don’t put in any effort to try and force yourself to stop doing that. You will stop doing it when you become utterly disinterested in it.
At the moment we are highly invested in the ideas of ourselves, so we won’t be able to remove ourselves from our experience just like that. What happens through meditation is that we realise that this overinvestment in myself is the thing that robs me of the richness of my experience. So even the simplicity of experiencing your breath and its capacity to bring you to a deep state of stillness is smothered by the fact that I’m right there in the forefront of the show. Be aware of it and gradually, the more effort and energy you put towards knowing the breath, the less energy will be invested to this other thing that’s going on which is this, as you say, this commentary. So just be patient, it’s going to take time.
