by Robert Wilkinson
Let's get metaphysical! Today we explore how the evolving mind learns to go beyond its natural limitations.
I last gave this to you 5 years ago, so today we’ll take a new look at some of the basic differences in concentration, meditation, and contemplation. To know one’s mental state is to be able to know how to move beyond it, and use each level of awareness for maximum good.
As noted in the original article, this can only be an introduction, since each of these topics is a vast area of exploration and practice. Any thorough examination would require a book on each and all three together.
Mastering this process may take time, but any effort whatsoever will help you be more effective in applying the practices in any life area you want to explore. Training the mind to focus is all-important if we would translate our realizations into a living practice.
Disciplining the Mind Takes Time
It is in the nature of the mind to be distractible. That's because the mind is bi-hemispheric, and therefore works from duality, using a “compare and contrast,” "sequence and selection" process as it drifts through the proverbial ten thousand things.
While our mind’s quest for knowledge often leads us to interesting perspectives and realizations, it also tends to scatter our mind's ability to get and stay focused. To master anything, it takes some degree of time to become skilled in that area of our focus. That means we must master the mind’s inherent restlessness if we are to achieve the ability to concentrate on what we want, rather than allow our mind to lead us on endless adventures into distractions.
The mind’s operating system could be described as duality functioning through curiosity. However, as the Heart is the Seat of Knowledge, our minds can never truly know much of anything except a string of perceptions. The mind continually seeks knowledge but never finds it. That, and the mind’s inherent negativity, often create problems as we find our way from the unreal to the real.
Due to its ceaseless wanderings, our mind's natural weaknesses of indecision and distractibility come up from time to time since an untrained mind easily loses its bearings. These must be antidoted if we would find the focus to develop our Higher Self, however we define that throughout our lives.
So how to do antidote the distractibility and indecisiveness of our mind? By seeing how to use its natural functions and strengths in a more effective manner. In realizing and applying a clear vision leading to a pattern to growth, we override the drifting and lack of focus tendencies that are the mind's weaknesses.
The mind has as one of its strengths the ability to order perceptions through the "compare and contrast" function. This is valuable in teaching us critical thinking skills and discernment about what is core and what is peripheral. It is one of the means by which we develop the Divine 3rd Ray energies of "Intelligence in Action."
When we master 3rd Ray energies, then we can see how to order, how to further, how to know, and how to see a way beyond the frictions born of duality. Active Intelligence is adaptable, synthesizing, and can use the energies of Ordered Action, Devotion, Knowledge, and bringing Harmony out of Friction in the right proportion at the right time.
In applying our mental strengths, we must first learn the art and science of Concentration. This allows the mind to practice being "one-pointed" so we can go deeper into the meaning of things. Concentration is necessary to order the mind in its explorations so that it can prioritize what it wants to examine.
It has been said that our Higher Consciousness first must train our mind to concentrate before we can truly meditate, and that meditation must be developed before we can contemplate the greater meaning and purpose around any manifestation, in personal, interpersonal, and transpersonal realms. This process of learning first Concentration, then Meditation, and finally Contemplation results in the mastery of the mind, and allows us to see all things in a larger perspective.
There are many techniques to learn to concentrate. Try any and all of them to see which techniques work best for you. Of course, what works at one time may or may not work at another time, depending on the push and pull of the subconscious mind and how it’s influencing our conscious mind.
That’s why we will be somewhat distracted if our subconsciousness is more attentive to its imagery than what our conscious mind is trying to focus on. Self-consciousness is more influenced by subconsciousness than most suspect! Getting a firm hold on the (self) conscious mind is one of the “disciplines of self-realization” we must master if we are to figure out how to hold a focus for any length of time.
Disciplining the Mind’s Distractions
While I had learned something about concentration through my years studying various subjects in school, I really accelerated my ability to concentrate when I focused my mind through reading Spiritual, Metaphysical, and Astrological works. Because I was motivated by these things, it helped me shut out the various distracting ideas and feelings of my personality. Basically, I cared more for higher realizations than I did the usual mental and emotional patterns of my everyday life.
That’s when I realized occasionally my mind would be in a tug of war with itself, wanting to think about almost anything other than what I was reading! Despite the distractibility of my mind, I kept bringing it back by repeatedly focusing on whatever I was exploring so that I could understand what was being said or written. Even if I had to read something 10 times, I’d return to the subject if I couldn’t sum up, to myself in terms of a basic understanding, what I had read.
Over time I saw how I got distracted, or allowed my mind to wander unnecessarily. When I noticed how I had gotten distracted, I’d keep returning to the subject matter, and re-read whatever I needed to in order to make that which I learned more ingrained in my mind’s patterns.
On a related note, I also learned that it’s better to concentrate on mastering a few points than try to race across a wide variety of subjects. While a superficial gloss of a broad range of material can be a valid approach to learning a lot, both superficially and quickly, it’s not a great way to approach depth learning, which requires more earnest attention.
I found that it is very useful to try to relax into whatever you are doing or learning while ignoring the random white noise in the environment. Of course some types of noise are more annoying than others. They help us intensify our striving to concentrate. Focus on exactly what you're reading, how it relates to what you've read, and imagine understanding the bigger picture conveyed beyond the words.
Another extraordinarily valuable exercise to focus our mind is learning to listen to the words we are speaking. That way we are able to evaluate whether we are saying what we want to say and using the right words, or whether we’re unfocused, unclear, or just filling the air with sounds.
As we concentrate on what we're saying and why we're saying it, we'll become clearer about what we truly want to say and what we truly should NOT be saying. Monitoring one’s speech certainly helps us clear out unhelpful affirmations, since when we catch ourselves saying counterproductive things, we get very clear about what we don’t want to see made manifest!
Meditation
As we develop the strengths of our mind and learn to apply them toward exploring whatever we want to know, then the ability to meditate on that knowing becomes easier. In a form of “one-pointed” meditation, we focus specifically on one thing and one thing only. We clear out everything that relates to anything else, and refuse to grasp at ideas unrelated to that one thing.
That allows us to hold a specific focus while allowing other levels of our awareness also to attune to that focus. Then our lower mind becomes a gatekeeper and vehicle for higher awareness of related foci to arise from pure consciousness.
When we learn how to point our mind so it can reference meditating on a thing, then we begin to receive impressions from many subtle levels about the relatedness of the perceptions, assumptions, and interpretations of our lower mind. This helps us detach from the lower mind’s restlessness dominating our thinking, and cultivates our ability to focus our mind on receiving impressions related to what we are exploring.
Obviously, there are many ways to meditate. Any discipline which allows us to “get out of our own way” can be seen as a meditation. This is not daydreaming or musing idly about the clouds in the sky; true meditation takes us out of our separate self and tunes us to the One Life which surrounds us like water to a fish.
Meditation attunes us to “All That Is” in a state of active receptivity. It is the state of consciousness where we develop our subtle senses which are often referred to as clairvoyance, clairaudience, and clairsentience. Meditation allows us “to know” through bypassing the lower mind and experiencing subtle impressions from the higher invisible planes of Being.
In deepest meditation we forget the body, the astral vehicle, and the lower mind, and experience our Oneness with “All That Is.” The highest and deepest levels of meditation connect us with Fohat, the “Serpent Force” of the pulses of Life which are part of the planetary energy distribution system. Meditation, regardless of the form, is ultimately us listening to “The Voice of the Silence” and hearing what the secret of Life holds for us in the Now.
Contemplation and How It is Different From Meditation
As we meditate on various things without being distracted by dense mental constructs and attachments to perceptions, the ability to contemplate how any given thing is related to a larger field of knowing-existence develops over time. It is almost as though concentration requires attachment to focus, meditation requires a detachment from focus on forms and allowing awareness beyond forms to arise, and contemplation uses meditation to integrate the form with no-form, or the limited form with the limitless field in which all forms arise and dissipate.
I have heard some assert that Meditation is somehow greater than or the same as Contemplation. This confuses the nature of how these two are related. They are different tools, useful for different purposes at different points in how we regard whatever perception or knowledge we wish to explore.
The sequence of Concentration, Meditation, and Contemplation can be seen as a form of attachment, followed by detachment, developing into pure knowing without the mind's weaknesses distorting that knowing. First we attach our focus to a thing or process, then we learn to detach from the mind's specific focus while not losing the general focus, this ultimately developing into a knowing without having to think or not think.
As a general rule, Meditation begins with a focus that excludes the perceptual mind's distractibility. Contemplation can only have a non-specific focus so that the awareness of how everything is related to everything else naturally arises. We cannot truly contemplate a thing without there being an element of meditation present.
Both Meditation and Contemplation are beyond the lower mind's scattering tendencies, though most meditational techniques focus on not attaching to the lower mind's distractions. As we learn to still the chatter of random perceptions that draw us away from the focus on concentration, then we can more easily detach from that chatter into an awareness of the interrelationships between the object or process we originally focused on and other phenomenon in the larger field of relatedness.
While some of this is very abstract, all of it will become clearer when you revisit this material and try to apply its precepts in your life however you feel is appropriate. With practice over time, you will find yourself more easily concentrating on whatever you want to, and find meditational paths that work for you. As you develop skill in these, you will acquire and master the power to contemplate the Light/Life in all things, and see/know how all things are related within the larger Dharma of your Lovingly Wise Intelligent Consciousness.
Copyright © 2019 Robert Wilkinson
Brilliant! Thank you for the clarification of these 3 ‘modes’ of mental state.
Posted by: Carla M | August 20, 2019 at 11:39 AM