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

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.