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Book Name: From Misery to EnlightenmentPrevious     Next
 

using the word "concentration" for dhyana -- dhyana is not concentration. Concentration simply means your mind focused on one point; it is a state of mind. Ordinarily the mind is continuously moving, but if it continuously moves you cannot work with the mind on a certain subject.

For example, in science concentration is needed; without concentration there is no possibility of science. It is not strange that science has not evolved in the East -- I see these deep inner connections -- because concentration was never valued. For religion something else is needed, not concentration.

Concentration is mind focused on one point. It has its utility, because then you can go deeper and deeper into a certain object.

That's what science goes on doing: finding more and more about the objective world. A man with a mind which is continuously roaming around cannot be a scientist. The whole art of the scientist is that he is capable of forgetting the whole world and putting his whole consciousness on one thing. And when the whole consciousness is poured into one thing then it is almost like concentrating sun rays through a lens: then you can create fire.

Those rays themselves cannot create fire because they are diffused; they are going farther away from each other. Their movement is just the opposite of concentration. Concentration means rays coming together, meeting on one point; and when so many rays meet on one point they have enough energy to create fire. Consciousness has the same quality: concentrate it and you can penetrate deeper into the mysteries of objects.

I am reminded of Thomas Alva Edison -- one of the great scientists of this country. He was working on something so concentratedly that when his wife came with his breakfast she saw that he was so much involved that he had not even heard her coming. He had not even looked at her, he was not aware that she was there, and she knew that this was not the right time to disturb him. "Of course the breakfast will get cold but he will be really angry if I disturb him -- one never knows where he is."

So she simply put the breakfast by his side so that whenever he came back from his journey

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