The Art of Concentration Session 2 Rerun: Intro Lesson

Hello Everyone and welcome back to the course.

Before we get started on the next module of our course, this lesson we will treat as a preparation and gathering week. For this reason I have shared the bonus meditation from the end of the last module on Mountain Lake Sky, to settle us and make sure we begin again from the right energetic configuration. Essentially this is a review of our practice of turning the mind around and establishing ourselves in awareness before we start to try to concentrate. As you all know by now, this is so fundamental to the way I teach, ie. that awareness is the ground of our meditation rather than the ordinary mind that we are seeking to refine, train, purify and develop.

I know some of our more experienced students are joining the course now and have not done the previous module. So what I am about to explain may take a bit of time to bed in, but please don’t worry, the practice will work on you. This is a slightly longer introduction text but please take your time reading it because this is so important, since it explains the premise of my system of teaching and hopefully will serve to clarify what we have done so far and where we are going to go from here. I have also shared a specific discourse that is an excerpt from towards the end of the last module. It explains the reasons why we build up the practice gradually and should not rush the various stages. So whilst the discourse applies to the breath and in this module we are meditating on the body; the sentiment and the instructions remain relevant. The point being, concentration is not a state that happens by accident. It takes great effort and is developed in stages. As the Buddha said it is the ‘Purification of Mind.’ As such it needs a skilful, diligent, patient and honest attitude if we are going to succeed.

Ultimately in this module we are working towards the state of ‘stopping and staying’, which is essentially the stage of genuine and sustained concentration. We are working towards a state where our attention just stops and stays wherever we place it because we have trained it correctly, and overcome the hindrances to doing so. And so it is essential that we have done the preliminary practices. Our success with this depends on laying the foundations correctly. This is the point I make in this week’s discourse. We will not just be able to stop and stay because we think we want to, nor can we do it wilfully simply as an act of determination. It is likely at this stage that what I call ‘the watcher’ or the ‘witness’ which is the aspect of mind that creates the sense and perception of ourselves as the meditator will not yet have been fully surmounted.

The practices we have done in the last module and the practices we are about to do have been devised specifically to work towards the state where the mind stops and stays and the watcher fades until it is gone. It is the fading of the sense of ‘me as the witness’ that marks our entry into genuine one pointed concentration. This entirely depends on the systematic preliminary work, and in particular our practice of turning the mind around and establishing ourselves in awareness. The witnessing mind cannot stop itself, by definition and this is one for the great milestones in meditation insight and approach; ie. when we realise that we can only passively surmount the mind but not actively and deliberately make it stop. The witness, that looks in upon our meditation only fades as the mind is trained in both the practices of ‘turning the mind around’, and gathering attention through one pointed concentration. These qualities will gradually mature to the point where the watcher/ witness is gone and the mind fades and awareness remains upon the single object that we pay attention to ( which is what concentration is). To actually make this happen takes time and sustained but appropriate effort. I know at one level this is subtle, but this is the real nature of genuine concentration. Complete one-pointedness of attention and absorption in our experience is what we are working to cultivate, which when it comes to fruit is a wonderful thing to have learnt to do. It is worth working at and we need to do it correctly to succeed. I have met many people who have tried and failed for many years because of incorrect approach or instructions.

So to recap what we are developing here:

We are deepening and developing our yogic attitude that works towards something that is hard to attain with patience and balance.
We are forgetting everything we think we know about traditional descriptions of the ways to concentrate and we are practicing this method which we are being taught here on this course.
Essentially we are developing the dual approach of blissful concentration and liberating insight simultaneously. It is a very sophisticated and subtle approach.

Practically:

We started the last module by building up direct perception of our object. This is the first stage of our practice, ie, the correct way of attention. It does not use the wilful mind to engineer, try to create or grasp at our meditation, trying or forcing to make it happen.
We then learnt to leave our object it appears within awareness itself as well as to leave our experience alone and not disturb it with the mind… so we stop playing with our meditation while we do it.
We learnt to recognise the hindrances to concentration and to see them as conditioned and tangible energetic aspects of mind. We learnt to be with them and work on them – particularly restlessness and sloth and torpor.
We then learnt to apply our mind to our meditation object with the quality of investigation of states to start to gather attention and to absorb the mind so that the witness or watcher fades, thus beginning the preparation for stopping and staying. These qualities we are hoping to build into our meditation as habits.

We will now over the course of the next few lessons continue to work the energy of the mind. We will continue to develop direct perception as the basis of our meditation throughout this module as an underlying theme so it becomes completely clear. We will work to further wear away our restlessness and dullness and to bring the required energy to the mind so we meditate properly, and avoid simply falling into a calm trance-like state. Then we will work the ‘gathering of attention’ so as to develop deeper one-pointedness. It is this that will cause the watcher to fade and prepare the mind for the practice of stopping and staying. Our ability for our attention to come to a point of rest and stop and stay will be entirely conditioned by our success with the preliminary work. As I mention in one of the coming meditations, some of these meditative drills are like practising scales and arpeggios in music. Our ability to express ourselves musically entirely depends on our practicing of these exercises. It may seem abstract at first but one day having practiced diligently you would find yourself playing with an uncontrived fluency that previously eluded you and the whole world of music and harmonic expression is unlocked and opened up. It will be like this with meditation, gradually you will find yourself just stopping and staying because your mind has been cultivated and prepped to such a degree that it just stops and stays; and from there the world of deeper concentration will open up.

So hopefully that is some inspiration and motivation for you. This is a wonderful thing to learn to do. I have explained many times that it is one of the hardest things to do and as such we would expect a certain amount of learning, understanding and then practice is involved. I am very much looking forward to taking you all on this journey, it is such an unbelievably valuable skill to cultivate.

Happy Meditating,

with metta

Burgs.