Concentration On Emptiness

Sit in a comfortable position and relax with your eyes closed for a few moments. Now just observe your thoughts creeping into your consciousness, each one clamoring for attention — daily events, emotional problems, future desires, etc. Now imagine you are in a completely dark room with a large picture window covered by a black blind. There is no pattern to the blind. It is just black. Concentrate now on that blind without allowing any distracting thoughts to intrude. If they do, push them back out of the way. Simply continue to concentrate on the black blind.
When you can hold an expression of complete blankness for just a short time, you will begin to have a different perspective, where time and distance take on a new meaning. Continued practice gives you better and better control over the sundry idle thoughts constantly trying to invade your consciousness. When you can control your thoughts during your daily life, you’re one giant step further on your ladder of progressive development. If it helps, imagine that you are a yogi or a lama that already has this power heightened to a fine tuned degree.

Concentration For Better Focus

Before going to sleep, try counting backwards from 100 to 1 by projecting an imaginary white numeral onto a blackboard in your mind and see how far you get before an interrupting thought invades the process. Eventually, you’ll be able to do it easily. Next, recite mentally all the multiplication tables. Go over each product taking one number at a time and recite its product. One times one is one through to one times nine. Then two times one through two times nine, etc. See if you can go through the entire multiplication table without having your mind wander off. The progress you make can be easily marked by where you strayed off in the multiplication table.

Concentration To Relieve Stress

When you choose to replay negative thought patterns during your normal day, it often keeps you in a negative state. A simple exercise in concentration can do wonders in breaking a negative condition, and it can also give you immediate relief!
Choose an object, a geometric design, a picture or a candle flame, and while in a relaxed position, direct your TOTAL conscious awareness toward observing it. Empty your mind of all thoughts and distractions as if nothing else existed except that object or picture. Purposefully blank your mind of internal comments, evaluations or stray pictures. Do this for 60 seconds without interruption. If an interruptive thought occurs, or your conscious awareness fleets even for a moment to an extraneous sound or other sensory stimuli, start over again, but do this for one full minute. To illustrate, look at the black dot in the middle of the circle for 1 full minute without distraction.

As simple as this exercise sounds, you’ll be surprised how casual thoughts or interruptions will try to creep into your mind. Concentration in this way does not mean grimacing with a frown on your face. It simply involves a relaxed focalization on one subject only. Once you accomplish this externally, do the same exercise internally with your eyes closed. Look at the subject matter first, then close your eyes and see it in your mind’s eye.
This technique rotates the mind’s resonance from negative to neutral to positive, where a feeling of relief is felt. Afterwards, care must be taken not to have the same negative thought sequences shift you back again. Even getting close to doing this exercise correctly will bring about good results, so practice it a lot. It is the precursor to “Exercise — Meditation” discussed later.

Positive Energy Imaging

Everything in the universe is interconnected in some way. Each one of your thoughts has some kind of an effect on the things in your environment — from the animate to the inanimate. Thoughts involving emotions are especially effective in this capacity on both yourself as well as on others. Many of these effects are discussed in other exercises in this manual. Since your adverse thoughts have adverse effects on your health and well being, beneficial thoughts have a positive influence on your overall welfare.
Assume a comfortable, relaxed position and take a few deep, abdominal breaths. Close your eyes and relax all parts of your body progressively from your toes to your head. Imagine that an inverted white tornado has enveloped your entire body with the small end leading up to infinity. Visualize the large end swirling around you and through you with purifying energy. All your hurts, negativities, and non-productive programming are being cleansed and washed away. Feel the energy flow through you with a tingling sensation. You are overflowing with this energy. You are radiating this energy from every pore in your body. Visualize all your fear, anger, guilt, depression, worry, loneliness and other negative emotion transforming to love, appreciation, joy, compassion, forgiveness and contentment. Imagine and feel it changing from negative to positive. Visualize yourself with a complete body and mind that is whole and well. Experience the clarity, and notice a feeling of freedom, joy and power spreading over you. Use this energizing technique any time you want to get clear of negative feelings and emotions.
As a variation to this exercise, you can also project this visualization of an inverted, white tornado of swirling, cleansing energy over someone else to help rid them of the negative feelings in their life. Visualize them receiving this purifying tornado of positivity and feeling complete and whole again.

Consciously Disciplining Yourself

Consciously disciplining your life is always beneficial. Without discipline, you are ruled by your habits and your limbic brain emotions. Exhibiting no control over such emotions places you on the same level as the beasts of the world. The phrase, “I’m only human,” is usually used to excuse irrational behavior. Are you less than ‘human’ when you consciously exhibit control over your primitive urges? Hardly. Then practice using your will power, and show yourself you have discipline.
It has been found that electrical stimulation of parts of the limbic system in the brain produces a wide range of basic emotional responses like fear, lust, anger and pleasure. Brain experiments in the 60’s with monkeys and human mental patients uncovered this fact very well. Fear, lust, anger and pleasure are the same emotions we share in common with all animals that have a limbic system.
When fear sweeps through a crowd in a burning building, it can turn into blind panic with all those that are present. When anger sweeps over a lynch mob, everyone can