One of the higher efforts and achievements of concentration of mind has been well described by Dr. Annie Besant in her book The Ancient Wisdom, in the following words:

“The student must begin by practicing extreme temperance in all things, cultivating an equable and serene state of mind; his life must be clean and his thoughts pure, his body held in strict subjection to the soul, and his mind trained to occupy itself with noble and lofty themes; he must habitually practice compassion, sympathy, helpfulness to others, with indifference to troubles and pleasures affecting himself, and he must cultivate courage, steadfastness and devotion. Having, by persevering practice, learned to control his mind to some extent, so that he is able to keep it fixed on one line of thought for some little time, he must begin its more rigid training by a daily practice of concentration on some difficult or abstract subject or, on some lofty object of devotion. This concentration means the firm fixing of the mind on one single point, without wandering and, without yielding to any distractions caused by external objects, by the activity of the senses, or by that of the mind itself. It must be braced up to an unswerving steadiness and fixity, until gradually it will learn so to withdraw its attention from the outer world and from the body that the senses will remain quiet and still, while the mind is intensely alive with all its energies drawn inwards to be launched at a single point of thought, the highest to which it can attain. When it is able to hold itself thus with comparative ease, it is ready for a further step, and by a strong but calm effort of the will it can throw itself beyond the highest thought it can reach while working in the physical brain, and in that effort will rise to and unite itself with the higher consciousness and find itself free of the body.”

The literature of religion is full of instances of remarkably extended vision of unseen things attained by the rapt mind. Indian yogis enumerate eight sets of faculties and powers, including vision of the absent, the past and the future, psychic telephony, telescopy, and microscopy, the power of traveling invisibly in the subtle body, and others — all attainable by concentration. Marvelous as these effects are and fascinating as are the study and the practice of them to many, they present only one of the developments through concentration.

In another direction, many thinkers look upon these as small matters in comparison with the discovery of the god within us, and declare that we need only to find the place of peace within ourselves to achieve the fulfillment of human life. They, too, extol concentration as the means.

Thus thousands of people all over the world are now turning to the practice of concentration as a first step towards new developments in human life — of which man himself, not his environment, will be the cause.

Still there are many more thousands who value the practice for its known benefits in the familiar spheres of every-day life. These are the people who say: “We do not want fascinating novelties; we want ordinary life to be saner than it is — thought clearer, love cleaner, will calmer — and we will leave to destiny any larger future that may be ours”.

In every case concentration does not mean a narrowing, limiting or confining of our thoughts and activities, nor any loss of human sympathies and interests. It does not mean retiring to the forest or the cave, with the wine of life run dry in our veins like a desert river in the summer drought. It does mean that the whole of our life becomes polarized to a chosen purpose animated by increased powers of thought, love and will, and inspired with a higher self than we have known before.

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