Concentration

What is concentration? Is it focus? What does focus mean? Is it an action, where the retinal image is sharp? When you are listening to music – ‘concentrating’ on it – your eyes are defocused and closed. Are your ears sharpened? So is it using your senses more acutely? What does concentration during a lecture mean? Listening, hearing and feeling intently? Then how do you assimilate knowledge? What about the thinking part of learning?

Let us analyse this differently. Is concentration the absence of distraction? So when I close the door, turn off the music, create a sensory vacuum, am I concentrating?Our mind cannot be shut, our thoughts cannot be stopped.

I would say concentration is not getting distracted even if there are distractions present. Concentration is continuing towards your goal irrespective of distractions. What prevents us from concentrating?

1. We do not have a goal. When we study, we just read a book until we fall asleep or get distracted. Distractions can be physical / external distractions – the ones that disturb our senses – people talking, moving, watching other things like emails etc. Or they can be mental / emotional / internal distractions – when our mind starts wandering. We lose our sense of the goal.

• So ideally, we should have a goal. We have the concept of micro-goals or ‘chunking down’ – breaking a goal into tiny sub-goals. In project management, we call these milestones. They are a measure of progress and they are a reason to celebrate small successes. I want to see my email – I decide that I will see it after I finish and understand 10 pages or even 5 pages. I should reward myself with things that I love to do – after I reach a micro-goal.

1. Our mind plays games with us. It distracts us. We daydream. We go into flights of fancy, wishful thinking. Or we think of past incidents and try to give some meaning to of it (remember outliers and black swans). The way to handle it is not by telling our mind to shut up and focus. It is to watch the distractions and the thoughts but not get involved in it.

• When I teach meditation in class, it is not to raise our Kundalini or attain Samadhi or to blank my mind. It is to observe our thoughts, but not get involved in them. It is like I am the station master and a thought is a train, where the engine is the thought and the bogies are the emotions. We, as station masters of our mind, do not climb the bogey and ride with the train – we wave a green flag, observe and record the train timing and go back to our room – whatever we were originally doing.

The essence of concentration is not to have so much focus that we are lost in it. It is that we are aware of what our senses are feeling and what our mind is thinking, but we are not distracted by the thinking and the feeling. Too much focus is also a strain. It does not allow us to relax and assimilate. The best way to understand a paragraph is not to focus on each word, but to focus on a sentence and gradually the whole paragraph. That requires us to broaden our vision, not narrow it.

While reading J Krishnamurthi on education, I came across advice on how to meditate. It may be worthwhile to paraphrase the same:

“To learn about meditation, you have to see how your mind is working. You have to watch, as you watch a lizard going by, walking across the wall. You see all its four feet, how it sticks to the wall, and as you watch, you see all the movements. In the same way, watch your thinking. Do not correct it. Do not suppress it. Do not say, “All this is too difficult”. Just watch; now, this morning.

“First of all sit absolutely still. Sit comfortably, cross your legs, sit absolutely still, close your eyes, and see if you can keep your eyes from moving. You understand? Your eye balls are apt to move, keep them completely quiet, for fun. Then, as you sit very quietly, find out what your thought is doing. Watch it as you watched the lizard. Watch thought, the way it runs, one thought after another. So you begin to learn, to observe.

“Are you watching your thoughts – how one thought pursues another thought, thought saying, “This is a good thought, this is a bad thought”? When you go to bed at night, and when you walk, watch your thought. Just watch thought, do not correct it, and then you will learn the beginning of meditation. Now sit very quietly. Shut your eyes and see that the eyeballs do not move at all. Then watch your thoughts so that you learn. Once you begin to learn there is no end to learning.”