Concentration

Your mind works with Couplings between Mental Photos. A Mental Photo is all the impressions from your senses at one given moment. What you see, hear, feel, taste and smell. But only the parts of a Photo that are coupled to from other Photos stay with you for a longer time. Most Photos fade away entirely. Sometimes just some parts of the whole Photo is left, you might be able to recall smell but nothing more from that memory.

Your Flow of Thought runs randomly along the Couplings between these Photos. If you suddenly come to think about something and ask yourself: "Why on earth did I come to think about this". Then you often can follow the Flow of Though backwards and end up on something you saw, heard, felt, tasted, smelled or Actively Thought about just recently. Active Thinking is the opposite of the random Flow of Thought. It is something that you think about intentionally and is totally controlled by you.

So when you are learning concentration it is important that your random Flow of Thought is halted. It should be held up at a certain point. It might be something visual (like focusing on a candle flame) or a feeling (like the feeling of being Awake) or something else. As long as it is just one and the same Mental Photo. And as soon as you realize that your Flow of Thought has drifted away to another Photo you bring it back to the one Photo you were trying to focus on.

This way you create more couplings to that Photo and it will be easier to stay focused for a longer time. This is just the basic process of learning. You repeat something until you remember it. Until that particular Photo (or series of Photos that are strongly connected, like a movement pattern) has been coupled to enough time to create a strong memory.

The last thing I want to state in this Post is that the way to stop the Flow of Thought is in itself a Mental Photo. So by focusing on a candle flame you will not just learn to couple back to that visual impression, you will at the same time create stronger couplings to the decrease in Flow of Thought itself! In this way, any effort to focus on just one Mental Picture, whatever it may be, will improve your ability of staying Awake.

Consciousness

There are 4 stages of Consciousness:

1. Sleep
2. Relative Consciousness
3. Consciousness
4. Objective Consciousness

Normally we only live in the first two stages. What is interesting is that the difference between stage 2 and stage 3 is as at least great as the difference between stage 1 and stage 2.

The 3rd stage might come by itself for short periods. Especially if you are in a situation you have never been before. Then you might be thinking "it is so strange than I am right here in this situation now". This kind of thinking can be associated with a feeling of being present. A strong realization of that you are right here right now. A focus on yourself, and the situation, at the same time.

The 3rd stage is sometimes referred to as being Awake, or just being Conscious because it really describes the feeling very well. You feel almost like the rest of you life is like in a coma. In general people think they are Conscious, but they are not. When you are awake for a longer time than just the random moments described above you will automatically experience the following things:

• your body becomes relaxed
• movements feel more natural
• your breathing is slower and deeper
• being conscious stops thought
• you understand people better
• you make the right choices
• you never take things personally
• you feel a huge boost of self esteem
• + a bunch of other secondary effects...

But staying Awake, staying Conscious, for more than just a minute requires a lot of concentration and a lot of Work. Work on that which disturbs your concentration. But that is not why more people are sleeping, first of all you need to realize and acknowledge to yourself that you are not conscious. Because no one are capable of learning something they think they already know, and no one are willing to work for something they think they already have.