Concentration

Your everyday physical sensations have a huge effect on you, what you hear, see, feel, smell and taste immediately impact in your mind. However for spiritual development you need take the mind away from the physical world and its sensations and we can do this by concentration.

The Purpose of Concentration
Concentration Exercises
Visualisation & Imagination Exercise
What happens

Introduction

Concentration has all sorts of benefits. It will improve the functioning of your mind making you more observant and improving your memory. It will make you cleverer and more able to learn and study. If will improve your health, helping you to relax the body and calm the mind. I want you to learn more about and practice it for all these reason and because concentration is a basic skill fundamental to many types of spiritual development.

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The Purpose of Concentration

You have spiritual senses but these have just a subtle influence, partly because the physical senses are so powerful and partly because you have not developed them. To learn to feel your spiritual senses it helps to switch off your physical senses, to prevent them pulling at your mind.

If you lie or sit comfortably, shut your eyes and try switching off your hearing and all other body sensations what happens; do your physical senses get less powerful? For most people, this seems to make the physical senses even more sensitive and any distractions are even more noticeable to the mind.

Learning concentration will enable you to control your physical senses from disturbing your mind, you learn to switch off your physical senses. By concentrating you flood the mind with something absorbing which distracts its attention from the senses.

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You must teach your mind to focus on something you choose, you use will power to only think about that thing. Practice doing this, it will become a habit, you will get good at it and your mind learns to think in a concentrated way which stops the external sensations from interfering with your thinking.

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Concentration Exercises

A good time to practice concentration is whilst in bed, relaxed either before you sleep or just after you wake up in the morning, but any time is good.

Types of concentration

Visualisation & Imagination: This is where you picture in your mind something you are familiar with or some imaginary place.

Contemplation: This is where you think about some subject and let your thoughts flow but always linking those thoughts to your subject.

Focused Perception: This is where you focus all your attention on one of your senses. For example you will gaze at a flower, keep your eyes and mind focused on it, not allowing them to wander.

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You must become good at concentration, keep practicing to expand your skills. Each time you do it, will yourself to get clear visualisations, force your mind to do what you want it to do, to think only of the subject you have chosen.

As your concentration improves you will notice that more and more of the other thoughts will stop, all bodily sensations will become dimmed and less noticeable, you will temporarily forget the outside world. This is an important mind development step.

Because your aim is to switch off your physical senses it will help if you can ensure that you will not be disturbed during your period of concentrating. Lock the door, unplug the telephone, switch of the television. If you do get disturbed it can be quite a shock to you nerves.

The spiritual writers whose words have been an inspiration for this site all agree that concentration is fundamental to spiritual development.

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Visualisation & Imagination Exercise

	When you concentrate hard on something you seem to forget about other things happening around you.
	Think of something strongly, use your will power to think about it, think of nothing else
	Visualise it, imagine it.
	Think about where it came from, how it came to being, its purpose and uses.
	Switch off the telephone close the door shut your eyes
	Spend 10 minutes or more

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Examples:
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Think about this garden.

Think how this grew.

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What happens when you learn to Concentrate?

When you learn full concentration you will notice that the physical senses will relax and become less noticeable until one day you will be completely unaware of what is going on around you in the physical world.

This is an important Spiritual development skill. The plan is, when you can concentrate on something and exclude all external sensations, you then allow that concentration to fade away. But you stay in that consciousness of no external sensation. With the physical senses switched off and your mind now free you might well have some unusual experience.

Switching off from the physical world gives your spiritual senses opportunity to be noticed by your conscious mind.

You might experience new feelings of a deep sense of calm and piece. You might see things in your mind's eye. You might have a feeling of weightlessness. However don't rush, when you have switched off your physical senses your experiences will be new, take time settle into them, familiarise yourself and be comfortable with this new type of consciousness.