Does this sound like something you’d be interested in? “Attention or concentration is probably the most important essential in the development of mind culture. The possibilities of attention when properly directed are so startling that they would hardly appear credible to the uninitiated. The cultivation of attention is the distinguishing characteristic of every successful man or woman, and is the very highest personal accomplishment which can be acquired”

That is from Charles F. Haanel’s book, “The Master Key System”. Napoleon Hill, author of “Think and Grow Rich” and a great inspiration to Dale Carnegie, said that Haanel’s book was the primary source for his motivation and success. Concentration has been given a bad wrap in today’s world. The men above, and many more that have employed concentration, are stoic men who were interested in mastering their minds – this is not fluffy shit.

In what I commonly refer to as the “Facebook Culture”, citizens suffer from culturally induced ADHD. Don’t get me started on the subscription of Ritalin and the likes - it is safe to say that the vast majority of these “cases” are not genuine ADHD. In the video which I will link below (highly worth watching), it talks about how these drugs are primarily subscribed in the East Coast of the United States, i.e. the competitive hub of the world.

The point being is that “ADHD” in the modern age isn’t something that kids are born with but rather something that kids learn. When we are constantly scattering our attention from one thing onto the next, we never learn to have a straight, directed stream of consciousness. Then, when the kids can’t concentrate in school, they must have a problem. The real problem is the NINE hours a day they spend tuned into the media, not a neurological brain disorder.

I say this because I have lived my past two years in Buddhist meditation centers. Furthermore, I say this because I am 24 years old and fresh out of the modern education/Facebook culture matrix. In other words, I do believe my perspective carries weight because answer me this, how many of my peers have delved into the realm of meditation and mind control? They have been too busy checking their phones.

I didn’t really know what I was getting into when I first went to Vermont to live the summer at a monastery. I was angry, I was afraid of joining the workforce, and I was jealous of the promised college experience that I may have just missed out upon. The one thing I did do was persist. After Vermont I went to India and then Nepal where I kept meditating more and more. I just got back from New Zealand where I spent three months on a 270 acre monastery deep in the woods. In this process, meditation has taken on a new face for me. It’s not just sitting there and smiling blissfully, but more so it’s literally the modus operandi which keeps me sane. In Tibetan culture, they start counting your age from the day you first meditate – now I know why.

One of the best ways to understand meditation again comes from Haanel’s book – “The power of attention can be more readily understood by comparing it with a magnifying glass in which the rays of sunlight are focused; they possess no particular strength as long as the glass is moved about and the rays directed from one place to another; but let the glass be held perfectly still and the let the rays be focused on one spot for any length of time, the effect will become immediately apparent.”

This quote can be readily understood on several levels. What I am trying to convey comes back to the primordial phrase “as above so below” – meditation goes infinitely deep. So, establishing a framework from which to live your life, is meditation. In other words, when you start to become one-pointed in your life purpose, your activities begin to reflect that life purpose and all other activities become more or less futile. For instance, do you think stoic men of the past, if they lived today, would choose to waste their time with “fantasy football”? When you begin to shine, life simply becomes more interconnected – every activity begins to have purpose, every moment is a chance to learn.

But, having a solid life purpose is not where the rabbit hole ends. Having a solid life purpose is the prelude to the depths of stillness – it is the very beginning stage. Ultimately what the mystics point towards is being so integrated with your life that you are living on “the razors edge of now”. This goes hand in hand with Carlos Casteneda and his teachings on the Tonal vs the Nagual worlds. The Tonal is the world which is dominated by description and mental chatter. The Nagual is the world which is beyond words. Eckart Tolle is much very much on board with this thinking in saying that you can look at a tree and just call it a tree or you can look at a tree and see it for what it really is. Concentration is the path to the Nagual, which once seen in its truer essences, becomes the obvious choice for ones life path. This is exactly what Haanel was referencing in saying, “The possibilities of attention when properly directed are so startling that they would hardly appear credible to the uninitiated”. The world beyond mental chatter is a world hardly touched by this culture. We are so entrenched in receiving sense perceptions and then immediately turning them into chatter, that it has suffocated us. We are slaves to the walls we build with our internal words.

The art of concentration is liberation from our mental prison. Quite frankly, it doesn’t matter which words you use to frame your life. The “smart” people of this generation frame their lives using continually evolving word patterns. They do this this through constant reading, self-discipline, and strict adherence to mental positivity. This way, they never become bogged down by a stale framework. Depression is a stale framework. Depression is being caught in a feedback system of words, which fuel emotions, that become trampled down like an overused path in the woods. “Smart” people don’t let this happen by continually traversing down new paths.

But, the art of concentration takes this to a whole new level. As Oscar Wilde said, “To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual”. It is the most intellectual because concentration at its finest, is plunging into the infinite depths of the source. It is beyond words and therefore unbounded from prison. To use the path in the woods analogy – smart people consciously direct their minds out of a stale framework by taking another, singular path. The state of pure concentration doesn’t just take one path, but takes all paths simultaneously.

This is living life like a warrior.

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