A Million Thoughts: Learn All About Meditation from a Himalayan Mystic

Becoming a good meditator requires great concentration and to become a great meditator requires supreme concentration. Concentration, especially one pointed concentration, comes with practice. Quality of practice leads to abundance of results. Please note the term ‘one pointed concentration’. This is the primary form of concentration we are concerned with. Before I go on to share the five types of concentration in an exposition never done before, allow me to share a famous story from the great epic Mahabharata. I must point out that this knowledge is neither documented in Buddhist texts nor in the great Patanjali’s YogaSutras. It’s the result of my carefully distilled practise of over twenty years.

Arjuna, the great warrior-archer, his brothers, his cousins – all from the royal family – and many others were taught by the incomparable archer-guru Dronacarya. Guru Drona spent years training them. One day he decided to test them. He hung a bird, carved out of wood, on a high branch of a distant tree and gathered all his students. They were asked to stand in a line. The task was to hit the bird’s eye.

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.