Many of our friends are concerned about the environmental crisis right now and are asking what Easwaran would advise us to do. Love for the environment was one of Easwaran’s main teaching messages throughout his life, increasing in urgency as he saw the situation deteriorate. His starting point in healing the environment is the mind. “Without some control over the thinking process,” he explains in our latest Blue Mountain Journal, “it is impossible to make lasting changes in the way we live.” Through systematic training of the mind we can harness our desires and start to build a better world.
Over the next month, therefore, we will explore Easwaran’s writings to find how we can use the practice of one-pointed attention to help us become beacons of light, even in a dark world.
Our reading this week is from Passage Meditation.
Easwaran offers several tips on one-pointed attention. Which one leaps out for you?
Find a way to use your tip this week, and try it out as often as you can.
Let us know how it goes.
From Passage Meditation, by Eknath Easwaran:
Training the Mind
Though our mind may be three-pointed or four-pointed or a hundred-pointed now, we train it to be one-pointed in meditation. This remarkable discipline brings all the powers of the mind to an intense focus. We can say that it seals all our mental cracks and then sends the vital energy that was seeping out to the single point on which we have put our attention. As our meditation deepens, we shall discover that where we thought we had only a tiny, rather leaky light, we actually possess a tremendous beacon that can instantly illumine any problem.
In meditation we train the mind to be one-pointed by concentrating on a single subject – an inspirational passage. Whenever the mind wanders and becomes two-pointed, we give more attention to the passage – over and over and over again. It is certainly challenging work, but gradually the mind becomes disciplined, taking its proper place – not as the master of the house, but as a trusted, loyal servant whose capacities we respect.
Consider the practicality of having a disciplined mind. If you haven’t trained your mind and you feel, for example, some resentment towards your neighbor, you may say, “Don’t be resentful, my mind.” But the mind answers superciliously, “To whom are you speaking?” When very angry, you add a “please,” but the mind only responds, “You haven’t taught me to obey you; why should I now?” And the mind has a case. If, however, you have learned to meditate and made your mind one-pointed, you have only to say, “No, my friend,” when the mind gets unruly. There’s the end of it. If the disturbance stems from a negative emotion like resentment, you will be able to draw your attention away and the distress will immediately be lessened. If it is actually a problem with a solution, you will be able to take some action later on to work it out.
In the Katha Upanishad we find a brilliant simile likening the mind to a chariot. Untrained horses can break away and run where they will, here and there, perhaps leading us to destruction, and what can we do about it? But trained horses – horse lovers know the delight of this – respond to even a light touch of the reins. Similarly, the mind well trained in meditation responds to a light, almost effortless touch. If the memory of a hostile act done to us by our partner tries to force its way in, we can eject it by turning our full attention to the many loving acts our partner has done in the past. Here we are refusing to be pulled about relentlessly by our thoughts – we are thinking them in full freedom. This is what the Buddha meant when he said, “There is nothing so obedient as a disciplined mind – and there is nothing so disobedient as an undisciplined mind.”
The Benefits of One-Pointedness
The one-pointed mind, once we have obtained it, gives us tremendous loyalty and steadfastness. Like grasshoppers jumping from one blade of grass to another, people who cannot concentrate move from thing to thing, activity to activity, person to person. On the other hand, those who can concentrate know how to remain still and absorbed. Such people are capable of sustained endeavor.
I’m reminded of a story about a great Indian musician, Ustad Allauddin Khan. When Ravi Shankar, the sitarist, was a young man, he approached Khan Sahib for lessons, passionately promising to be a diligent pupil. The master turned his practiced eye upon Ravi and detected in his clothes and manner the signs of a dilettante. He said, “I don’t teach butterflies.” Fortunately, Ravi Shankar was able after many months – a test of his determination – to persuade the master to reconsider. But we can readily understand the teacher’s reluctance to waste his precious gift on someone who might jump from interest to interest, dissipating all his creative energies.
People who cannot meet a challenge or turn in a good performance often suffer from a diffuse mind and not from any inherent incapacity. They may say, “I don’t like this job,” or “This isn’t my kind of work,” but actually they may just not now how to gather and use their powers. If they did, they might find that they do like the job, and that they can perform it competently. Whenever a task has seemed distasteful to me – and we all have to do such things at times – I have found that if I can give more attention to the work, it becomes more satisfying. We tend to think that unpleasantness is a quality of the job itself; more often it is a condition in the mind of the doer.
The same may be said for boredom. Few jobs are boring; we are bored chiefly because our minds are divided. Part of the mind performs the work at hand and part tries not to; part earns his wages while the other part sneaks out to do something else or tries to persuade the working half to quit. They fight over these contrary purposes, and this warfare consumes a tremendous amount of vital energy. We begin to feel fatigued, inattentive, restless, or bored; a grayness, a sort of pallor, covers everything. How time conscious we become! The hours creep, and the job, if it gets done at all, suffers. The result is a very ordinary, minimal performance, since hardly any energy remains with which to work; most of it goes to repair the sabotage by the unwilling worker.
When the mind is unified and fully employed at a task, we have abundant energy. The work, particularly if routine, is dispatched efficiently and easily, and we see it in the context of the whole into which it fits. We feel engaged; time does not press on us. Interestingly too, it seems to be a spiritual law that if we can concentrate fully on what we are doing, opportunities worthy of our concentration come along. This has been demonstrated over and over in the lives not only of mystics but of artists, scientists, and statesmen as well.