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Eightfold Path: Right Concentration (1 of 4)

Hello, and for this morning, I'm going to start the topic of Right Concentration, the eighth step, the eighth factor of the Eightfold Path. Concentration is a marvelous quality and capacity to celebrate. I know many people are challenged with concentration and meditation. Hopefully, we can engage in this topic and in the practice of it without being too concerned about success. Maybe there can be an inspiration or a sense of wonder at the marvel of a mind that gets concentrated. Perhaps some of you have had that from time to time—a mind that was very simply content, satisfied, and settled here in the present moment, with no concerns or troubles.

The first teaching I received when I went to Thailand—I had been practicing some years before that here in the United States, but when I went to Thailand, the first teaching I received when I got there within a day or two, was that concentration was mostly a matter of letting go. Rather than something that we work at doing, pushing, or straining to become concentrated, it was mostly letting go of what takes us away from being concentrated.

No one ever said this, but it's almost as if a concentrated state—or to say it maybe in Pali, samadhi^[1]—is more like coming home. Being settled at home, being at ease, and at rest at home. No longer running around the world in circles doing all kinds of things, but being able to come home and sit, really contented and happy because everything else has been let go of, and we're just here in a very nice way.

The word samadhi has a richer connotation than the English word "concentration." I think many English-speaking people think of concentration as a straining, narrowing, and tightening of attention. Maybe it's almost the opposite. It's a softening, opening, and settling. The mind is not distracted or being pushed here and there. It's really here and connected in a focused way on something healthy, wholesome, and beneficial.

The topic of concentration has a lot to do with what we do with our attention. If we don't do anything with our attention, if we don't have some choice about where attention is applied, the mind will choose for itself. The mind will go wherever the strongest signals are coming from, whether it's advertisers, social media, our friends, or whatever. The mind will just scatter or wander all over in itself. Attention just follows in a random or haphazard way, without any consideration about what is really best for the mind or the heart in any given moment.

These moments of non-decision—just letting the mind wander freely without any choice—are many. There's a phenomenal number of them. There's this amazing list having to do with time: We all are given one life, and if we live long enough, we'll have a hundred years. If we have a hundred years to live, that's 400 seasons. Then there's 1,200 months that we'll have in that hundred years. 5,200 weeks in a life. 36,000-some days. 876,504 hours. Over 52 million minutes, and over 3 billion seconds.

Every second, the mind chooses something for its attention. In fact, it actually happens in microseconds. In fractions of a second, the mind is already moving around and taking in many things. It's jumping around so much; we can actually take in a lot of data in small parts of a second. But just looking at this idea of 3 billion seconds in a life—now, some of those we are sleeping—there are a lot of moments in which to choose where attention goes. We can choose something that's beneficial, helpful, and wholesome.

The story about the Buddha discovering the value of concentration for the path of liberation has to do with remembering a time when he was young, maybe around six years old. It was supposed to be a spring plowing festival in his time, and his father was officiating this festival. As a six-year-old, he was left alone on the edge of the field under the shade of a rose apple tree. Apparently, he was sitting there, maybe absorbed in watching the festival or something. In this very safe, cozy environment, he dropped into a deep state of concentration, a deep state of well-being.

When he remembered this state as an adult, he thought, "Maybe this is the path forward." And he said, "Yes, this is the path forward." This sense of being settled, focused, and absorbed in a very nice way. Here he makes one of the first distinctions that I've been talking about earlier in this series on the Eightfold Path and Right Mindfulness: the distinction between that which is of the skin, and that which is deep inside. That which is of the flesh, and that which is deep inside.

He recognized that the sense of well-being that came from this concentrated state was not on the surface. It was not skin-deep or flesh-deep. It really belonged to the deep inner life. He realized he didn't have to be afraid of this deep inner sense of well-being. And so, his concentration practice was to cultivate and develop a deep sense of well-being.

One way that he describes this kind of state of mind—a samadhi mind, a mind of concentration—is one that is ready, receptive, free from hindrances, elated, and confident. To be able to settle the mind—in classic language, to tame the mind, develop the mind, and strengthen the mind—so that it's not jumping around, running around to this thought and that concern, paying attention to all kinds of data in the environment. But to really settle and gather itself together to be a unified mind. A mind that is ready, receptive, and free of hindrances.

Hindrances are these forces in the mind that grab attention so much that they're like black holes. We can fall into these hindrances, like desire and ill will. Like light goes into a black hole and doesn't come out, sometimes attention falls into the black hole of hindrances and doesn't come out for a while. To be free of hindrances is to have the attention available to be present here.

Then, elated. This idea that there's happiness, joy, and well-being in this inner life of ours that comes from letting go deeply and settling in. The art of letting go is challenging because we think many things are so important. We think we have to be concerned with things, or have things be a certain way, or stay close to our resentments. But to have the confidence and the trust to let go—at least in meditation—or take the risk to just let go of all things, except to really be here, gathered together, settled, and present.

Here's another description of a mind that's concentrated. This is some of the upper reaches of samadhi, so don't think that you're regularly supposed to be this in your morning meditation: purified, bright, unblemished, rid of imperfection, wieldy, steady, and attained to imperturbability. Sometimes the Buddha just called it much more simply: inner serenity. To cultivate an inner tranquility here.

The purpose for this is not for its own sake, but it has a number of values. One is that it's a powerful teacher. To discover this deep inner contentment, happiness, and serenity of concentration—of samadhi—is to have an experience of well-being that's qualitatively different from a lot of the sensual pursuits that people follow. It's a sense of well-being that's qualitatively better than being involved in ill will, jealousy, envy, and things like that. Once we have this reference point of a peaceful place of being, other things begin to not seem so interesting.

There's a deeper wellspring of vitality that can come that is very different from the energy involved in sensual pursuits—nothing wrong with them—or being involved in ill will, which has some things wrong with it. There's a different vitality that is clearly a really healthy and good place to be.

It's also very healing. To cultivate samadhi is a deep reconciliation with oneself. The parts of ourselves that are hurt, broken, divided, separated, or pushed away—you can't really develop the sense of wholeness that samadhi^[2] is without reconciling them. As we develop this concentration, it tends to do a lot of healing and reconciliation of ourselves.

But ultimately, the purpose of samadhi, and of Right Samadhi, is to bring wisdom. To be able to see things as they really are. To think clearly and see what's happening so clearly that we attain liberation and freedom. We begin using concentration, the subtle concentrated mind, to stay focused and connected to the sense of freedom that's here. We open that freedom more, grow it, and develop it until there's a deeper and deeper release.

Samadhi is not for its own sake, but has these benefits. The ultimate benefit is to go beyond samadhi itself, and that is to open up into liberation and freedom.

So that's the introduction. I'll talk about Right Samadhi some more next week, and probably give three more talks on it. Thank you.