Improve Your Concentration, Understand Your Mind Faculties

Concentration and ways to develop and improve concentration is a trending topic among the youth. But I do not prefer any discussion which could not help anyone to learn and evolve from his/her initial state. I am sorry to say that but most of the discussions that I see today going on among people are just discussing and not search of reality as they should be.

Before I try to explain intricacies related with the topic I again would like to remind you that for achieving anything you will have to work and apply effort. This blog can just show you the direction in which you such dissipate your energy.

Now, let’s begin understanding the term concentration. Simply, if I try to go a little technical, concentration of a mixture of some components with respect to a particular component is the amount of that particular component as compared to the amount of the whole mixture. Means, if I have a mixture of 20gm of sugar and 5gm of salt, we say the concentration of sugar is more as its amount as compared to the weight of total mixture is more than that of salt.

Similarly, in case of mind and mental faculties (simply parts of mind involved in different activities), if more of your mental faculties are doing, are involved in some desired activity than those involved into some other activities, we say you have good concentration. Our mind processes much information simultaneously with the help of its different faculties. And topics into which it will be involved, depends upon the information we ourselves feed by seeing, reading, discussing, listening, smelling and touching.

Now, in general, when we talk of improving concentration we think more mind to apply on the subject or something like that but there is nothing called more mind. In the physical case of mixture, the concentration of a component can be increased by two means one is the addition of that component and the second is the removal of the other component. In case of mind, we cannot add more faculties to process the information we require directly but yes we can let our faculties of mind involved into other unwanted activities relax so that they could also help to process the information that we want.

Also, the mind’s faculties will keep on processing information that is available to it in abundance. You cannot say that work with this idea and not that. It chooses the information to be processed on the probability basis. More the stock of information of a kind more is its probability to be chosen and processed by a faculty of mind.

So, if you want your mind to remain away from unwanted things when you want to concentrate onto a point, you need to clear that state of unwanted things off your mind or to reduce its stock to such an extent that the probability of your mind to take up that idea becomes nominal.

In other words, I am talking of increasing the concentration by removing useless thoughts. Inputs we accept through our senses produce thoughts. If you want to improve your concentration, you should stop stacking up unwanted materials into your mind. If you have 10 thoughts related with the subject and 20 thoughts off the topic, you do not have a good concentration but if you have the same 10 thoughts of the subject and only 5 thoughts off the topic you are said to have much better concentration.

To conclude, I just am trying to explain how we can improve concentration by reducing our thoughts and how we can reduce our thoughts by bringing renunciation into our lives. In fact, I am just dealing a part of my last post “Basics about Yoga” here. I am just oscillating to and fro between Pratyāhāra (renunciation) and Dhāraṇ (concentration). Concentration only can lead to meditation. It is important for everyone, without it there is no progress in any field.

So, now you know that in order to improve your concentration you need to stop feeding unwanted information inside your system. This automatically converts your mind emitting its rays in all directions equally into a mind sending high power/intensity beam of its energy to the subject of your interest and need. But for that you will have to use renunciation as the concave mirror used for flash lights.