Building concentration is,
I suppose we could say,
The point at which we turn meditation from being a daily practice into an art.
It's the point at which we turn our meditation into a craft.
And it's the practice that opens the doorway to the deeper states of consciousness that we might have read about,
But we maybe meditated for 20,
30 years and still they eluded us.
And the reason that the subtler states of consciousness aren't available to us is because we haven't developed our concentration sufficiently.
Now learning the art of meditation or the art of concentration and actually practicing it to the point of accomplishment,
This is a very different thing.
We can read about it and still be a very long way from actually being able to do it.
There's no doubt that there's a lot of misconception about the importance of concentration.
It's quite markedly been,
I would say,
Sidestepped in a sort of more mainstream approach of meditation,
Or to meditation.
And over the past 10 years or so,
I would say that the relevance of concentration has been very much downplayed.
And in place,
The relevance of mindfulness has been upplayed,
But they are two equally important qualities of mind to generate and develop if we want to train ourselves or train our mind to be one that is capable of deep,
What we call liberating insight.
Liberating insight is that capacity to see within our experience the root causes of suffering and the means by which we can free ourselves from them.
Now,
Mindfulness alone is not enough because it will not penetrate deeply enough into our experience to see clearly what's actually going on.
It's like in a way,
You know,
You might very deeply scrutinize the surface of a pool of water without having any idea what it contains therein.
And concentration is like the lens that allows us to deepen our perception of reality.
And without it,
We can just go,
So we're still stuck in the ordinary appearance of things.
This gross physical reality,
As I say many times,
Doesn't reveal to us the depth or the true nature of our experience or the mechanism by which it's actually happening.
So,
With mindfulness alone,
We are left trying to fathom things by scrutinizing the apparent or the appearance of things,
And it just doesn't take us far enough.
Concentration is the mechanism by which our mind goes from an ordinary pair of eyes into a magnifying glass,
Gradually into a microscope.
So it allows us to turn inwards more deeply and discern in more detail what actually is going on within our experience of life.
Not only that,
Allowing us to turn inwards and discern more deeply the creative mechanism or the way that we are functioning.
So without concentration,
Meditation doesn't do what it promises to do.
It doesn't allow us to transcend ordinary perception of reality to a deeper level.
It doesn't discern it in such a way that the misconceptions that we accumulate habitually can be broken down.
Now,
When we come to insight or vipassana practice,
Vipassana being the meditation practice that turns towards insight,
When we seek to develop that insight that might break down our habitual habit patterns,
If there isn't enough discernment,
I.
E.
Capacity to see clearly and understand what we are apprehending,
Then our vipassana practice won't perform its function either.
Insight is to see into,
And it has this capacity.
This is what the Buddha teaches us,
That by seeing the nature of our reality,
We disentangle ourselves from the roots of suffering,
And that essentially being entangled in suffering is only a function of not seeing.
With mindfulness,
We can pay attention to what appears to be going on,
But still not understand it,
Because without concentration,
Our insight doesn't penetrate deeply and become what we call liberating insight.
So concentration is the doorway to what we call liberating insight,
Which is the process by which our worldview and understanding of ourselves and our position in it is transformed in a direction that leads us in stages out of suffering.
This is so crucial that we understand this.
To practice insight without concentration,
Yes,
In the early stages it will help.
To practice mindfulness without concentration will help,
Because not paying any attention to what we're doing,
Of course,
Is sheer ignorance.
And so that is right at the root of some of the poor choices that we make with regards to self-care and living our lives appropriately and avoiding things that cause us suffering.
But breaking our addiction to unhealthy habit patterns,
This isn't achieved simply by recognizing them,
As I'm sure you all have come to understand for yourself.
So this is where concentration fits into the bigger picture.
It's absolutely the axis point at which meditation transforms from being a practice that will help us in daily self-management into a practice that opens the doorway out of suffering.
Now that is,
In a way,
The narrative on meditation,
Modern narrative on meditation,
Has,
I almost feel,
Has tended to try to convince us that that's not the case and that we could practice Dhamma without training the mind in concentration.
So there is a modern dry approach to Vipassana,
Which has been a wonderful doorway in to the Buddhist teachings in the modern era,
Allowing people to start the process of dismantling their unhealthy intoxication with themselves and some of the grossest root causes of suffering.
And on the other side,
We have this beautiful teaching of Dzogchen,
Or what I call the direct approach,
Which points towards the state of pure awareness that already is free from suffering and teaches us that should we develop a deep enough relationship to that,
All we need to do is align to that and we will in stages dismantle the intoxication with our mental states,
Our conditioned mental states,
And thus our egoic conditioning.
So there are two narratives that suggest concentration may not be necessary to explore all of this in great depth over our whole art of concentration practice.
But I'm simply saying that now to lay the framework because I really want to put down for you the basic architecture of concentration and encourage you to start this process of taking a long game approach to your meditation with the understanding that concentration does not suddenly emerge.
We can get flashes of insight by sitting together when very sharp teachings come through.
They can momentarily deconstruct some very deeply held conditioned views and help us a lot.
But to get to the place where we really free ourselves from our most limiting habits,
We have to have this long-term approach.
Many of you will have been meditating for many years and done all this work before and done make great efforts at your concentration and still see that there are residual,
Deeply embedded habit patterns in your mind that you have yet to transcend.
And the only reason you haven't,
As I just prompted out in the way that in the very early stages we can see unhealthy habit patterns and recognize them without being able to free themselves from it,
It is always a lack of insight,
Inability to penetrate deeply enough to the point of cracking and permanently dislodging the grip of these conditioning tendencies.
So this is why we need to keep going one step deeper,
One step deeper,
Further into the experience until we see it from the ground up and in that way we free ourselves.
