215
edits
Changes
→Obstacles to develop concentration
There are schools which put an object in front of you, a flower or a stone, or any object, and then you sit around it and concentrate on it and your eyes go like this (Mother squints) until you become the object. That too is a method of concentration. By gazing steadily like that, without moving, you finally pass into the thing you are gazing at. But you must not begin to gaze at all kinds of things: only gaze steadily at that. That gives you a look... it makes you squint.
<Ref>The Mother. (1972). Questions and Answers 1957-1958. In Collected works of the Mother(pp. 381-383). Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram.</ref>
=Straining and Concentration=
Straining and concentration are not the same thing. Straining implies an over-eagerness and violence of effort, while concentration is in its nature quiet and steady. If there is restlessness or over-eagerness, then that is not concentration.
<ref>Sri Aurobindo. cwsa/29/concentration-and-meditation</ref>
----
Effort means straining endeavour. There can be an action with a will in it in which there is no strain of effort.
<ref>Sri Aurobindo. cwsa/29/concentration-and-meditation</ref>
=Inertia & Tiredness in Concentration=
It is not a fact that when there is obscurity or inertia, one cannot concentrate or meditate. If one has in the inner being the steady will to do it, it can be done.
<ref>Sri Aurobindo. cwsa/29/concentration-and-meditation</ref>
----
If the mind gets tired, naturally it is difficult to concentrate—unless you have become separated from the mind.
<ref>Sri Aurobindo. cwsa/29/concentration-and-meditation</ref>
----
Concentration is very helpful and necessary—the more one concentrates (of course in the limits of the body’s capacity without straining it), the more the force of the Yoga grows. But you must be prepared for the meditation being sometimes not successful and not get upset by it—for that variability of the meditations happens to everybody. There are different causes for it. But it is mostly something physical that interferes, either the need of the body to take time to assimilate what has come or been done or sometimes inertia or dullness due to causes such as those you mention or others. The best thing is to remain quiet and not get nervous or dejected—till the force acts again.
<ref>Sri Aurobindo. cwsa/29/concentration-and-meditation</ref>
=Obstacles to develop concentration=
Along with purity and as a help to bring it about, concentration. Purity and concentration are indeed two aspects, feminine and masculine, passive and active, of the same status of being; purity is the condition in which concentration becomes entire, rightly effective, omnipotent; by concentration purity does its works and without it would only lead to a state of peaceful quiescence and eternal repose. Their opposites are also closely connected; for we have seen that impurity is a confusion of Dharmas, a lax, mixed and mutually entangled action of the different parts of the being; and this confusion proceeds from an absence of right concentration of its knowledge on its energies in the embodied Soul. The fault of our nature is first an inert subjection to the impacts of things1 as they come in upon the mind pell-mell without order or control and then a haphazard imperfect concentration managed fitfully, irregularly with a more or less chance emphasis on this or on that object according as they happen to interest, not the higher soul or the judging and discerning intellect, but the restless, leaping, fickle, easily tired, easily distracted lower mind which is the chief enemy of our progress. In such a condition purity, the right working of the functions, the clear, unstained and luminous order of the being is an impossibility; the various workings, given over to the chances of the environment and external influences, must necessarily run into each other and clog, divert, distract, pervert. Equally, without purity the complete, equal, flexible concentration of the being in right thought, right will, right feeling or secure status of spiritual experience is not possible. Therefore the two must proceed together, each helping the victory of the other, until we arrive at that eternal calm from which may proceed some partial image in the human being of the eternal, omnipotent and omniscient activity.
<ref>Sri Aurobindo. sabcl/20/concentration</ref>
=References=