Yoga Practice

In this way you acquire concentration without thinking about concentration. After several practices your mind learns to keep to a subject when previously directed to do so, instead of wandering and dissipating its energies. There arises a mood of return to the centre. After a little while you can put this mood on like a garment. You have found the feel of it, and now a small act of will sets it in operas lion, just as you walk and go somewhere definite as the result of a small act of will. You do not need to think of concentration, but can swing your mind round to things and thoughts, or from one to another, with great and calm definiteness. You can then use this for all kinds of mental work - reading, studying, writing, lecturing, teaching, etc.

In yoga practice, however, this concentration is used as a step to the further practices of meditation and contemplation. These are functions, something that you do not static conditions and states. Even contemplation (samedhi) is something that you do, though it is not thinking, and you do not think about it when you are doing it, once you have acquired it.

In the practice with the sheet of paper, let us notice the difference between concentration and meditation. After you have completed your concentration you possess a sheet of paper with many arrow-words on it. For the elementary exercises of meditation lay this completed sheet on the table, note the first arrow-word, for example, milk. Do not forget It or put it out of mind, as you did in the elementary concentration practice, but slide your eye back to the cow, carrying the idea of milk with you, and then think. Think all you can about the relations between the milk and the cow. When this is finished (and only you can judge as to when this is, but let the judgment not be motivated by impatience or the desire to get it done and done with), turn to the next arrow word the tufted tail - anti deal with it in the same manner and so on.

This will lead on to contemplation. Quite often people fall, to contemplation without thinking of it, until this is Important they find themselves coming out of it, much to their surprise. They have he memory of the enjoyment of consciousness in the now terminated act of contemplation. As they look back upon it they realize that they were they without thinking of themselves, but only contemplating the object. Out of it they come, back into their meditative mood, ringing something new back with them - some thought that they did not think in their meditation. It is an intuition, an item of knowing, or something that illumines the entire field, the whole subject, every part of it. Still more: after a while they come to know what contemplation feels like, and en can switch into it, through an act of concentration and meditation that seems to take no time. It is another mood, own only by experience, and then as a power of the mind.