The current turbulent and chaotic times are taking a terrible toll on people’s ability to concentrate and focus on what needs to be done to bring this world around to a sustainable, stable, and joyful playing field. More than anything else humans need a method of coping with the innumerable distractions that threaten to overwhelm them psychologically and prevent real progress toward creating community and cooperation. Concentration, one of the most important and powerful of human survival abilities, is absolutely necessary if you want to create from the maze of impressions, inspirations, and ideas that rise from the fertile creative subconscious. To be able to concentrate is also essential in order to raise your consciousness to new heights of awareness, something that is wonderfully possible during these unfolding and evolutionary times.  All other animals besides human beings have amazing powers of concentration because they are constantly living in the present moment and are able to focus more easily on whatever they are doing. The challenge for humans of course is to cope with memories of the past, visions of the future, and fantasies related to any time frame, all competing for center stage in consciousness. This has always been true for humans since Paleolithic times. Yet in times past, humans spent much time hunting and gathering and this helped them to strengthen their powers of concentration. They had to keenly focus to obtain the game or plants they were out to find if they were going to eat that day. Today due to the terrific onslaught of advertising and media to get people’s exclusive attention twenty-four hours a day, in addition to distractions such as cell phones, e-mail, and all manner of electronic devices requiring response, our ability to concentrate is in overwhelm. Each day concentration becomes harder for people and very little supports it’s strengthening. The result is that this once great power of the hunter-gatherer is now quite weak in a world that still demands ever-greater powers of concentration to navigate and thrive. The diminished power to concentrate poses a major obstacle to raising  consciousness and that poses one of the world’s greatest challenges at this time.Here let us examine the power of concentration more closely. Think of your mind as being like a small child who feels compelled to put everything in his/her mouth. Without something to suck the child feels restless and dissatisfied. When that need to suck is met the child relaxes and feels content. That is your mind. Your mind resists a vacuum so it will desire to pull into it anything at all to chew on. The mind works by association so when it chews on one thing and it loses a little flavor the mind associates to something else and chews on that briefly and so on. This process often leads to anxiety or depression as the mind slowly or quickly draws in worry or problem oriented thoughts and memories. The result is often intense suffering and/or further distraction, obsession, and preoccupation that leads no where. There is a Tibetan Buddhist story called The Temple of Ten Thousand Demons that illustrates this well.

There was a monastery where young monks were training to become Lamas. After several years of practice they were faced with a severe test, an initiation that would determine if they could advance in their studies. They were required to pass through the dreaded hall of ten thousand demons. This was a large mysterious room deep within the monastery that was always kept locked up. The young monks avoided it because every time they went near it they heard horrible groans and screeches that terrified them. Now for their supreme test, they would have to enter inside the temple of demons and make it through to the other side. When the day for the initiation arrived they were lined up in front of the locked door and told they would be let in one by one and the objective was to come out the door on the far end unscathed. They were sternly warned that in the past many novices never succeeded in coming out the other end and were lost forever. Trembling the young monks prepared themselves with whatever skills in meditation they had acquired thus far. The elder lamas opened the door and pushed the first novice in. Immediately the waiting novices heard intense screams, horrible noises, and dragging chains. After a long while it was announced that the first novice had failed to come out the other end. The second novice began to sweat profusely and was visibly shaking as he was pushed in the front door. Again the waiting novices heard terrific groans, screams, and gnashing of teeth. And again after an interminable wait it was announced that this second novice failed the test and did not come out the other end.

Now the third novice was beside himself with anxiety. He looked desperate and glanced around seeing if he could find an escape from such a horrible fate. However he remembered his training and quickly gathered his wits and spoke to the elder lama. “Please, tell me one thing that might help me in my passage through the hall of ten thousand demons.” The elder lama, remembering his own initiation, took pity and said, “Ok, just remember this. You must never take your eyes off the door on the far end.” Armed with this bit of wisdom the young novice, no longer afraid, stepped forward and entered the door. Again came the screeching and horrible moans and wild sounds. The ground shook and thunderous crashes could be heard coming from inside. After awhile an elder lama announced that the young novice had come out the other side, shaken but smiling.

The moral of the story? There are ten thousand distractions in life that can derail you and swallow you up but if you know where you are going and you make a point of concentrating on that goal, you are assured of getting there. A simplistic moral perhaps but one that is often ignored.
 
One of the main antidotes for distraction, worry, and negativity is meditation and meditation requires concentration, but quieting the mind is almost impossible because your mind resists being empty at all costs. The mind thinks it is dying if it does not have content to chew on just as the infant feels distressed without having something in its mouth. Although meditation has been gaining in popularity in the West and more people know about its health benefits, there is actually very little understanding of what meditation is all about. All meditation practices are not equal and not all meditation is actually helpful. In fact, many monks who pass the years meditating away in monasteries are actually simply sleeping their lives away. This may sound a little harsh but it happens to be true. Meditation requires certain ingredients to be effective. First you should have a strong desire to advance your consciousness through your practice of meditation. Then you need to baby-sit your mind as you grow more and more quiet. If you simply sit and try not to think of anything you will fail miserably because it is extremely difficult to make it beyond ten seconds without having a thought that distracts you. So you have to give your mind something to do. In some forms of mediation like Vipassana, the practice is to simply watch the various thoughts as they crop up. This is a passive form of concentration because it actually gives you something to do without much action. You are asked to watch the movie and that is something. Yet, that as well can be very difficult.

Some forms of meditation ask that you concentrate on something like a candle flame, your breath, music, or chanting a mantra and these too are forms that exercise concentration and use it in the service of becoming quiet. They are in some ways easier to do because they give the mind something concrete to occupy it and bring it back from its tendency to wander off into worry land. In the shamanic tradition there are various forms of concentration that accomplish similar ends. They usually involve being out in nature and concentrating on sounds or smells of the forest, seashore, or waterfall, the textures of the elements such as the wind, the air temperature, or the feel of the sun on the skin. The purpose for these shamanic forms of concentration is a little different from the traditional meditative practices of the East but in the end they amount to the same thing. First of all these shamanic practices are easier because human beings have been concentrating on the natural environment for tens of thousands of years so it is a very natural process. When humans were hunters and gatherers they concentrated on nature naturally. As the mind concentrates on the elements, the mind narrows its focus and distractions fall away more easily. The natural environment is typically benevolent so it tends to feel good to be out there with the elements.

 A couple of times I have sat on the beach in Baja for up to seven days doing meditative and spiritually oriented practices. Concentrating on the rhythmic crashing sound of the waves for hours upon hours produces deep trance states that open the doors of perception. As the mind focuses on the sound of waves the otherness of the sound gradually disappears and the mind becomes one with the sound. This allows for inner portals to open and consciousness to deepen.

 Worry tends to lower your frequency and as it drops lower you feel worse and worse. Shamanic practices reduce the tendency to worry and through concentration on the natural environment, your frequency tends to go up instead, and that feels good, making it self-reinforcing. As your mind becomes more quiet you are then able to make a dimensional shift and this is where the practice of concentration shifts to deeper more effective forms of meditation. According to the shamanic understanding of reality, there are different dimensions co-existing in the same space, overlapping energy fields so to speak, and there are windows into these deeper or higher frequency dimensions. In order to enter these deeper dimensions you must become quiet enough so that your heart opens and you may then discover portals you have not seen or felt before. These portals are well known among advanced Tibetan Buddhist lamas and they suggest going to extremely remote places in the Himalayas to meditate and discover these passageways. They say that you must look beyond the ordinariness of the landscape and by concentrating you will find hidden environments formerly not seen. Behind these hidden landscapes are  dimensions that if entered produce profound healing, increase longevity, and make  spiritual practice more effective than ever. By entering these high frequency energy fields you can accomplish more in a day than others might by practicing for years in a monastery.

Our Huichol teacher Guadalupe once told us that by going very deep and passing by all the lights, colors, images, and geometric designs during a peyote ceremony, a portal opens like a round entranceway and on the other side of that is an old man or woman, an elder who may teach many things. During a desert ceremony I once found this doorway and discovered that what he told us was true.

The deeper dimensions contain more expansive truths and information about the universe (non intellectual) that are not readily available at the surface layers. These truths are difficult to put into everyday words so they must be experienced to know their value. One way of talking about them is that they are accompanied by higher centered activity, the higher intellectual center, the higher emotional center, and the higher moving center. The key is that all these higher centers feel good and cannot be accessed when the mind is occupied by worry and other distractions. The higher centers are self-healing and so just the experience of them is often enough to resolve internal conflicts, distress, stressful situations, fears, and the like. Certainly it is not possible to feel depressed while experiencing a higher center. When the higher centers open, boundaries and resistances fall away and there is a real experience of union, timelessness, and perfection. These are the result of the power of concentration.

All these practices in concentration take time and require some dedication and repetition. If you are not willing to practice then it is difficult to become free of distraction, worry, and bad feelings. As you well know many people try to take short cuts by using stimulants like cocaine or amphetamines or other toxic drugs to get these higher centers to open, but these almost always backfire in the long run and leave you feeling worse. Some people believe that the highly feminine seductress, alcohol, will provide them with the relief they seek but that fails as well. Indigenous power plant medicines are unique in that they operate in a whole different way but they are best used only after or with shamanic ceremonial practices or they can have extremely hellish effects.

To get the most positive results from the use of power plants you need to have enough powers of concentration to be able to navigate the turbulence of changing dimensions rapidly.

Concentration by itself is not a good thing or a bad thing but depends upon what you do with it. If you use your powers of concentration to obsess over negative thoughts and their disagreeable emotional consequences then you are asking for trouble. This is a common problem for obsessive type people. So concentration has to be accompanied by the strong intention and desire to feel good, to raise the frequency, and to reach the higher centers through a kind of mental silence. Sometimes these opened portals lead to highly beautiful visual landscapes, beautiful music, or wise kind guidance from inner teachers and allies as mentioned earlier. Sometimes they lead to experiences that cannot be put into words but are life transforming. There are passageways to interior dimensions filled with ecstasy and to extraordinary localities in other parts of the universe where truly wise enlightened beings are sourced. There is a vast shamanic mapping system to where various portals lead and the kinds of experiences that can be had there. All this is beyond the scope of our topic here. Here we are concerned with baby steps, the importance of rudimentary concentration practices that are enjoyable and benevolent. Certainly there are forms of building concentration that rely on pain, endurance of very difficult conditions, starvation, and exposure to life threatening situations. Sometimes people choose these paths because they believe it is the only way they will make progress in light of their strong egos or because they have had some success in the past with these methods. Sometimes they take these paths because they are taught that these punitive methods are a short cut to success or more perversely they believe they must beat the bad habits out of themselves through pain and suffering. On occasion these painful methods to increase concentration are successful and do work but often they are fraught with the dangers of self-importance and ego contamination. There are other ways mentioned earlier that are more loving, quite natural, and resonant with where you might wish to go. Whatever methods you choose, developing concentration is vital to your growth and development as a human being. You may have to discipline yourself to limit or avoid those things that increase your impatience, your distractability, your tendency to engage in worry or concentrate on your fears. You might do well to reduce the noise level of your life, the flow of too much media into your living space, the endless trivia of unimportant e-mails and phone calls. If you truly evaluate how many of these things turn out to be essential or extremely informative, the fraction is quite small. So to develop positive concentration you may have to be more ruthless with your time, with your attention, and with your energy. Do you really want to give your attention away so easily to those things that are in actuality trying to rip off something so valuable as your attention, your precious life juice? Probably not, but sometimes you have to prodded awake again so that you can realize your priorities and make better choices. There are realities and experiences in this universe that are so powerful and so extraordinary that if you knew what was available your choice would be clear where to spend your time.

Jose Stevens