Right Concentration

An excerpt from a teaching called the Eightfold Path by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo

The eighth principal on the path is right concentration. Right, concentration occurs in all of us.  Have you ever gone without a meal?  You get really hungry, and suddenly you visualize cake.  It’s stronger than any deity visualization you’ve ever had.   I’ve always told people that if you say you can’t visualize, the best thing to do is go on a fast.  You will visualize night and day!  You’ll not be happy about it, but you’ll see hotdogs.  You’ll see chicken, and it will be right there!  So, I don’t buy that you can’t visualize.  That kind of concentration is very strong.  If you’re really hungry, and you’re about to sit down to a big meal, don’t let anybody get between you and that meal because there’s going to be trouble. That kind of concentration is very powerful.  That is our natural capacity.  We use it all the time.  The problem is we use it wrongfully.  We don’t use it in a way that is beneficial at all.  If your concentration is going into visualizing food, or new cars or sexy women or men, then you are wasting and using wrongfully a talent, a capacity that is uniquely human.  Even when a dog is starving and it runs for its food, its not concentrating in the way that we concentrate.  For a dog, it is more of a knee jerk reaction.  It knows to go to the food.  We do use concentration and visualization all the time.  If we didn’t, we wouldn’t be able to think or act.

The point of right concentration is to begin to dismantle the reaction, the heavy reactionism, the construct of our own perception, and to create a mind that is firm and strong and not out of control.  Our minds get out of control when we habitually are very emotional.  So we learn to do that.  And one of the wonderful techniques that’s given is to concentrate.  Its called single-pointed concentration or one-pointed concentration.

One of the first techniques that you learn in Buddhism for instance, is to take say an image of the Buddha and to concentrate on that, and let everything else go.  Let your perception go completely. You sit there in meditation and you just watch the image, are filled with the image and take note of the image.  You look at the finest parts of the image, and when the “I left the toaster on or I left the iron on” thoughts start to come, then you simply use a technique of just dismissing them and going back to the concentration.  For people that really have trouble dismissing the thoughts, you can even use a visualization of cutting them with scissors and throwing them away.  But you always return to your single-pointed concentration.  It’s extremely relaxing.  Extremely healing.  I don’t know why it isn’t done more.

Another thing that you can do is focus on a candle.  Just simply see the nature of that flame.  See what it is. Perceive only that.  Let the mind rest on it.  Let the mind rest on the image of the Buddha; rest on the image of a flower or on the image of a candle.  Just let it rest.  When something comes to interrupt you, you simply toss it away, cut it out, move it, and come back to rest. Come back to that.

You can also watch your breath.  One way to do that is to take very uniform relaxing breaths, such as four beats in, the hold one, then four beats out.  Like that.  A real relaxed kind of breathing, and just let your mind rest on the rhythm and the feel of your own breath. For a person whose mind is too active and too angry, it’s very restful, very peaceful, and lovely to do that. It’s completely different from watching TV, which actually gets your mind stirred up.  I know when I watch the news, I get stirred up.  I’ll tell you that.   I start talking back to the TV.  “Hey!”  I get really stirred up.  Then I go look at my candle.

It’s that single-pointed concentration, that right concentration.  It’s wholesome concentration.  Your mind is not filled with scattered B.S.  We review all the stuff that happened to us, and ruminate on it.  We fight battles that we had last week.  Two weeks later I thought of a smart come back in the middle of my meditation.  You know?  So you fight that by using single-pointed concentration and even if you do that, just laugh at yourself and come back.  Always drop it, come back.  Drop it.  Come back.  Pretty soon you’ll be able to do it for longer and longer.

Once you learn to apply single-pointed concentration on a candle or an image, the mind then has more control.  You have more muscle.  And really the mind is almost like a muscle.  You have to build it.  It’s flabby.  In the same way that you work out to keep your body strong, it’s the same with your mind.  Your mind has to be kept in shape.  It isn’t just there, and you just deal with it however it is, because in that case your mind tends to act like a monkey.  It’s all over you.  It rides you rather than you riding it.  Its like the master is not riding the donkey, the donkey is riding the master.  And that’s what happens when the mind is too agitated and too wild and too out of control.

Single-pointed concentration that kind of meditation is beautiful.  Lord Buddha, who was born a prince, he was a noble being but still he was a prince – had a life that said that ran the gamut of the very best most sensual almost hedonistic life to asceticism.  And Lord Buddha said that from his whole life what he really loved, his favorite practice was just the gentle watching of his breath.  You might want to try it yourself.  It’s a beautiful, healing practice.  If you’re sick or depressed or manic then you may not be able to do it without some sort of treatment or medication but it behooves us to try.  To calm the mind, to center the mind, to develop single-pointed concentration to the degree that eventually when you die and pass into the bardo, you actually meditate in the bardo without any distraction.  And that’s the fundamental, underlying truth of the bardo.  The bardo is as busy as our lives are or more so with loud noise, bright lights, and stuff you are not used to.  And stuff you will interpret according to your mind.  You will see your own mind in the bardo.  Doesn’t that scare you a little bit?  It should.  Rather than that, you learn the single-pointed concentration.

Eventually you can learn Phowa, but the single-pointed concentration if one can do that at the time of death and not let the experiences of death take you this way and that way, if you are already so strong in your concentration that you can meditate like that to the moment of your death or to the moment of losing consciousness, the bardo will be so easy for you.  Comparatively speaking, very easy.

© Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo