Drona called the first student near him. The trainee got in position and was ready to hit but he was interrupted by Drona, who asked him, “What do you see?”
“I see trees,” replied the student.
Drona asked him to step aside rather than shoot.
He repeated the exercise with each one of his disciples. Everyone gave a different answer. Some said they saw leaves, others said they could see birds, some others saw trees and so forth. He didn’t allow anyone to shoot.
When it was Arjuna’s turn, he was asked the same question.
Arjuna replied, “I am only seeing the bird’s eye.”
Drona gave him the permission to shoot and Arjuna hit right on the mark.
“If you are seeing other than what you should,” Drona said, “you are not concentrating hard enough.”
One pointed concentration cuts through the complicated mesh of intertwined thoughts like shafts of water cut through stone. No matter how warm a day, the sunlight outside does not melt plastic or set your newspaper on fire. Pass the same sunlight through a lens and it turns into a beam. The beam, made from nothing else but pure sunlight, can create fire in a matter of seconds. Concentration is the beam of your mental energy. The power that isn’t available to a million intelligent thoughts is easily accessible to a single concentrated thought.
Not all concentration is the same though. After sunlight passing through a convex lens will form a focused beam whereas the same sunlight when passed through a concave lens will scatter completely. The same goes for concentration as well. With what form of concentration you process a thought will eventually determine what it does to your mind. With this slight digression, let me now explain the five types of concentration.
One-pointed Concentration
One-pointed or single-minded concentration is the most important ingredient in attaining the tranquillity of mind through meditation. In fact, it is your road to the pinnacle of meditation. Imagine throwing a rock in a river; there may be ripples, there may be fishes, but the rock goes pointedly towards the bottom.
Think of an arrow from the archer’s bow, it goes straight. There are no diversions. This is one pointed concentration. It is the art of staying on the object of meditation with focus and lucidity.
Maintaining one-pointed concentration is a tiring act. It starts to get exhausting after the first thirty minutes. During the intermediate stages of meditation, my mind used to go numb after the first three hours. I would think that there was no way I could go on maintaining the crispness of my concentration, but I knew I had to persist. Thus, I used to practise mental relaxation for a few minutes and then get back to my intense meditation, which was basically to maintain the lucidity of my concentration with alertness and mindfulness.
Merely staring at an object is not pointed concentration. When it comes to meditation, it is how focused your mind is on the object of your meditation that determines how good your concentration is. For example, close your eyes and visualize your favourite image, any image at all. Try to keep the image in the frame of your visualization. At the beginning, you will find that the image is sharp and clear but after a few seconds it either fades or disappears altogether. Bring the image back in the sight of your inner eyes. It will fade again. Visualize it again. Each time the image fades or disappears, your concentration gets disrupted.
So, when I say one-pointed concentration, I mean to refer to your ability to hold onto a thought or visualization (I’ll cover it in greater detail in the chapter on Concentrative Meditation). In line with the six principles of meditation, you don’t have to examine the thought or the focus object. You simply have to retain it in front of you. The same principle applies even when you are just watching your breath. You need to concentrate on the inhalation and exhalation.
It takes great practice and in building this concentration you go through the four stages of mental stillness that I’ve elucidated earlier in this book. As you progress, you are able to hold on to the image for longer durations. One pointed concentration is a definitive way of exponentially increasing the power of your thought. Once you train yourself to concentrate on a thought, your thoughts start to manifest in your life.
Absorptive Concentration
Absorptive concentration, as the name says, is when you are deeply absorbed in doing something. You are in a kind of flow. It’s a beautiful form of concentration. It happens due to your interest in the matter at hand and not because you are trying very hard to concentrate. Think of an artist, a painter who is standing in front of the canvas unaware of the world around her. She is deeply absorbed in her area of interest, in painting. This type of concentration channelizes your energies, brings together your thoughts and composes your mind to produce a creative output.
The more you practice this concentration, the more creative you get. An artist’s skills continue to improve as she continues to paint. Painting is merely an example. You could be absorbed in composing music, writing a song or a book and so forth. One of the unique rewards of this concentration is the sense of independence that you attain. The more absorbed you are, the less you need the world around you. It brings a certain calmness in you.
If you build one-pointed concentration, the quality of your absorptive concentration improves automatically and significantly. Meditation can unlock your creativity in unimaginable ways.
Analytical Concentration
You can also think of it as an investigative or contemplative concentration. Your brain is constantly calculating and analysing in this form of concentration.
Think of a chess player. A chess player can look at the chess board unblinking for very long periods. He is concentrating but it’s not one-pointed concentration. He is constantly evaluating their line of attack, variations, moves and the opponent’s responses.
He is so absorbed in that analytical investigation that the world around him ceases to exist. Neither hunger, thirst nor nature’s call – nothing disturbs him when they are calculating. If you play chess or if you ever had the opportunity to observe a chess player closely, you will know what I mean.
The ability to carry out penetrating analysis on any given line of thought results from analytical concentration. A computer programmer engrossed in fixing a bug or creating a new piece of software, or a mathematician working on a theorem – they are masters of analytical concentration. Some of the all-time greatest scientists and inventors were extremely skilled in this type of concentration.
Like the other forms of concentration, the more you practice it, the better you get at it. It continues to sharpen. Over time, you are able to carry out even more detailed analysis quicker. That is not just because of experience in your field but also because your mind can cut through the noise and stay focussed in the analysis. The speed and depth at which a trained human mind can analyse is simply mind-boggling – a point that was proved by Gary Kasparov’s win against IBM’s supercomputer Deep Blue in 1995. On the one hand was Deep Blue, more than six feet high and three feet wide, a powerful machine capable of evaluating 200 million positions per second. On the other hand was a human being with brain the size of a lettuce and yet having superior analytical concentration and intelligence.
Elementary Concentration
This is not even real concentration, it is more like pseudo concentration but it’s what most of us utilize for the most part of our lives, especially in this day and age. With this form of concentration, the mind does not become sharper, quieter or even happier. Above all, our mind gains nothing new when practicing elementary concentration. It only helps in engaging the mind so that we get a break from the thinking machine our mind is. In that sense, it can be relaxing or entertaining at the most.