When you concentrate you also ignore stuff.
(we all concentrate, for work, play, reading, studying, school … we practice it in school … people who are good at it are “good workers”…)
But you call it CONCENTRATION instead of IGNORING because the stuff you concentrate on gets easy-to-see but the stuff you ignore sorta fades away (and then you stop thinking about it, and then it disappears).
The stuff you concentrate on is relatively small. A book. An idea. A game. An attractive girl’s butt. A plan for the future. A tv show.
And that stuff getting ignored is relatively HUGE. Like a whole invisible universe there.
It’s spooky when you think of it. Like a little bit of DIY brain surgery that everybody does but nobody talks about. Like we’re all a bunch of Harry Potters casting obliviate upon ourselves.
And then we forgot that we cast it, because it’s obliviate.
So tell me what you think.
What one focuses-on is the key.
Concentrating on distraction, on counter-productive-meaning, on digging-the-dysfunction-deeper, on ideology/prejudice ( 2 sides of the same “coin” ), etc,…
Concentration, however, in dismantling one’s unconscious identity-crystal, underlying one’s ego can be vastly life-improving.
( Modern AwakeSoulism/Buddhism forgot that it is the unconscious-mind’s identity-crystal, not the “conceptual ‘I’” that is the obstacle distorting our Soul/Continuum’s life.
Just because modern Buddhism is ignoring the essence of its own root-teaching, doesn’t mean we need to do the same.
The root-instruction was important! )
The book “The Worm At The Core” is, in spite of being existentialist, and missing/ignoring the fact that all herd-animals have the same death-denial-mechanism our minds have, the key to understanding just how manipulating this denial-of-IDENTITY-death mechanism is.
Once one understands how one’s whole life is just an exercise in pretending-away one’s identity-crystal’s death, then one can get at attacking the false-identity, the identity-crystal, itself, & see what awareness-expansion lives when awareness isn’t shackled/crushed into fitting that identity-crystal.
AwakeSoulism/Buddhism seems to have forgotten that it is the annihilation of the identity-crystal, the “self”, that liberates AWARENESS.
All the disputes between branches of Buddhism over whether non-thinking is valid, etc, whether non-awareness is the goal ( idiocy, that ), etc, it is annihilating/dismantling-absolutely the identity-crystal, leaving AWARENESS that is the goal, and only right-concentration can produce progressing in that direction.
Concentration’s a tool, and it is neutral.
Same as violence is neutral: violence against cancer, against rabies, against parasites, is good, right?
Most people presume that neutral-factors/tools are inherently-bad or inherently-good, because their ideology/prejudice already-decided on that nature, but when you see what-is as it actually is, you realize the eating a bowl of porridge is doing-violence to it, and you realize that painting is doing-violence to the blankness of the paper, then you realize that all actions eradicate alternative-potential.
This is true of mental-actions as much as it is true of physical-actions.
Concentration is, itself, neutral.
Invest it in what grows your Soul/Continuum, & it’ll do your Eternity good.
_ /\ _
I think that what you concentrate on is not key. I think that the shape of your awareness is key, the shape assumed via concentration being one such shape.
Like clenching a small object in your fist. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a penny or a pebble. It’s the same shape.