POWER OF CONCENTRATION

12th February, 2012

POWER OF CONCENTRATION

By: Varinder Sharma 

In childhood everyone has seen the power of magnifying glass that it can burn a piece of paper if the focused sun rays are continuously passed through it and on the contrary if the sun rays are not focused enough it can’t burn that piece of paper. Even if you move the magnifying glass too far away or too close to the piece of paper the piece of paper can’t be burnt. This small experiment vividly describes the power of concentration.

Similarly I will tell you the beautiful story of swami Vivekananda which describes the power of concentration. Swami ji was having the habit of going to library and issue large volumes of books, take them home, study and then return them on the next day. This got the librarian’s attention and she asked swami ji a question that “Why do you issue so many books if you can’t read them in a day?” Swami ji replied that I have read all the books you can ask any question. Librarian was having a doubt so she asked swami 2-3 questions and got stunned when swami repeated exactly the same sentence written in the paragraph along with page number on which that paragraph was written.

Concentration has no of uses and benefits. It assists us in studying and understanding things faster. It improves memory. It also helps us in achieving any goal or task more easily and efficiently. Even in the recent study of neurologist it has been mentioned that an average person runs about 60 to 70 thousand of thoughts through their minds and out of which 80 to 90 percent are negative. Due to lack or poor concentration negative thoughts actually claim our attention and we waste our time and energy on useless matters. These negative thoughts actually rule our life. When we are worrying on daily basis it means that we are allowing these negative thoughts or emotions to rob mind’s life force energy. Therefore if we really want to have success in life and would like to attain wealth and prosperity then we need to understand that concentration is a great tool for the mind management which in turn is the essence of life management.

Even little practice of concentration has changed my life to a great extent. When I was in high school, I was not so good in studies but my life got totally changed when I heard the story of swami ram thirath who was a great scientist and mathematician. His concentration power was developed to such a great extent that during exams when he used get question paper a note was generally written on to the question paper that “ Out of 8 given questions you can write down the answer of any 5”. As mentioned his concentration power was so high that he used to write down the answers of all 8 questions instead of 5 and used to write a note on the given answer sheet that “MY all the 8 answers are correct you can pick any 5”. This story totally changed my life. Even though my practice was little but its impact was so huge that I got top position in university. In most of cases it has been seen that type of problems which we encounter on daily basis are not so big but due to un focused mind those problems appears us to so big. I can explain you with help of example and in bit detail “Let suppose you go to office and opened your system you saw 2-3 emails of negative feedback about the project on which you have worked.

email from your manager, one form senior manager and one from vice president then with immediate affect your mind will start thinking negatively and will produce thoughts like “ you are not going get promotion this year” or “you are not going to get good salary hike this year” and on the basis of that your mind will create a hypothetical image in front of you (Image of losing a job ) which actually does not exist but your mind has created on the basis of all those negative thoughts and on the basis of that image we lose our happiness and joy.

Therefore in order to avoid all such thoughts and to have more joy, happiness in our lives we should find ways to improve our concentration. There are number of ways to improve it .You can have a plane white paper and put a small dot in the centre of it. Now try to concentrate on that small dot for 1-2 minutes and this can be tried 2-3 times in day.

In the end just would like to finish with the statement written by a modern yogi “At each point of time we are doing thousand of things to cope up and manage with outer world but little practice of concentration can provide us much more inner strength with help of which it would be easier for us to manage the outer world more easily and efficiently”.