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Hey, this is Leo for actualised.org. And in this episode, I'm gonna be talking about concentration versus meditation. This one key distinction will revolutionize your entire meditation practice and take your meditation results through the roof. I am not kidding when I tell you that this one tip that I'm going to give you here in this episode, this one practice will revolutionize everything you think you know about meditation, it's that important. It's extremely important. If you're a meditator, this is like the heart of becoming effective at meditation. This is the difference between having a little flimsy meditation habit that gets you rather mediocre results and having an industrial strength, meditation practice that takes you all the way through to the end, to the deepest levels that you can get with this practice. If you don't have a meditation practice already, man, I keep saying this over and over again. But this is the number one most important self improvement habit is meditation 20 minutes every single day, if you could install that one habit into your life, this one most important practice, this will completely change the rest of your life. But then when you add on top of it, what I'm showing you here today, we're talking about ridiculous levels of growth that you would never expect would be possible from something so simple as this. So go ahead and put that in place. If you do have it in place, then great. Let's move on to the distinction. The distinction here is between concentration meditation, these two things can sound similar, which is why we need to be very clear about distinguishing them. Because this is where we can really get amazing results. concentration means you select an object, whatever the object is, you could have a lot of different kinds of objects, and you focus on it like a laser beam consistently. very smoothly, you focus on it over and over and over again, until your concentration period is done. Without letting your mind wander at all. Until you reach a state of absorption you become absorbed in the object that you're concentrating upon. And this builds your concentration muscle or your concentration ability. Meditation. Meditation can also include concentration practices. But generally, most meditation especially how it's taught in the West, is not building your concentration muscles. Most meditation, when we tell you just kind of sit, relax, quiet your mind or just let go surrender, maybe you're doing the Do Nothing technique, this sort of stuff. Maybe you're just kind of like loosely following your breath. But you're not really concentrating on it very hardcore. This is all kind of standard different meditation techniques that you might have been taught. But this is just the mind letting go. And that's the difference between concentration meditation and meditation, you basically just let the mind go and you sort of surrender. And it can be very relaxing and peaceful. But also your mind can wander around as you let it go. And as you surrender, all sorts of weird thoughts can come up. And generally your mind is going to be all over the place. Unless you've done decades of this kind of meditation, and you become really good at it. With concentration, you're forcing your mind is a discipline, you're disciplining your mind to focus on one subject. So that's the key difference. And why is this important now? Well, it's critical, because really, the best results come when you enter something called Access concentration. That's where your best meditation results come from. See, surrendering is nice. The do nothing technique is very powerful. If you've been doing that I've talked about in previous episodes, okay, great. But you also need the ability to stabilize your mind and to focus in on one thing, because without this, you're basically fucked. You're fucked because you can't really meditate seriously. You can't self inquire seriously, and you can't contemplate seriously. And I've talked about all these different techniques in the past, so you know how important they are. And it's even worse these days because today, the age we live in right now is the worst time in human history for developing concentration skills. Because we have so many distractions and If we're not taught concentration abilities, nobody tells us an important ability. Even your meditation teacher might not have told you that this is an important ability. Maybe even the person that you're learning self inquiry from, for enlightenment hasn't told you that concentration is a critical ability. There. You see, today, people have terrible concentration because of video games, because of TV shows, because of movies because of virtual reality, all this stuff, all the amazing entertainment that we have developed in the last 50 years is getting better and better every year, in the sense that he's getting juice here. And juice here is appealing to your most basic instincts, your animal instincts. So it's very hard for you to take your eyes off the TV screen, off your smartphone, and so forth, right? The media, politics, all the entertainment stuff, all the gossip, all the celebrity stuff, all the tabloids, this is killing your concentration abilities, not to mention, of course, your smartphone and all the text messaging you do and all that sort of stuff, the emails, all this right, this is killing your concentration, your concentration is terrible. I'm willing to bet if you're like me, that it's hard for you to even focus for one minute on a single thing. At the quality that I'm talking about here, so when I'm talking about concentration, I don't just mean like, oh, yeah, selecting an idea, I just focus on it for for five minutes, sort of loosey goosey fashion? No, I mean, like, when we're talking about concentration, that means you're concentrating on that subject without wavering every single second, for the duration for let's say, for five minutes, or 10 minutes or for however long. You see. And that is an ability, well, you can test yourself on that and see how will you do, you will be quickly surprised to learn that you're not very good at it. And that, in fact, it's very painful for you. Not only do you suck at it, but you don't even have a sort of like inner desire to become good at it. Because you sort of have sold yourself on this idea of multitasking and your mind wandering around is that being the good thing. I know this because this is what happened to me, my concentration skills are really bad. And one of the reasons that is because I have a very creative mind, and my mind tends to wander a lot. So I tend to be intuitive in the way that I think and I think about a lot of stuff at the same time. And I get some amazing insights from that because my mind tends to interconnect all these dots. But this is killing my meditation ability. And I didn't realize the importance of this, because I've been meditating now for three or four years, I'm trying to lose track of how long. And what I overlooked is how important the concentration is. For me to meditate effectively. I've been getting some amazing results from meditation nevertheless. But I think that if I put in place a concentration practice from the very beginning, four years ago, man, my meditation would be 10 times better than it is right now. So I feel like I wasted a lot of time. Because I didn't realize this critical distinction. I only learned about this distinction recently. It's not that I didn't know that there was the distinction said I didn't understand the significance of it. And just how much of a difference it can make your meditation practice. So lately, what I started to do is I started to really put the screws to myself, and force myself to develop the concentration. And I've been seeing that just within the last month of doing so it hasn't even been a month yet. My meditation has been going through the roof, my self inquiry has really been becoming much more powerful and strong. And I can only see this getting better and better because my concentration abilities are still quite weak. But here's a technique for how to develop them very quickly. So how do you develop concentration? It's so simple. That is very, maddeningly difficult. That's the trouble with this. It's so simple, that your mind is going to want to do everything but simply follow the technique. Here's the technique, you sit down with a digital timer, make sure you have a digital timer with an alarm. Let's say you set it for five minutes to start, then you select an easy and clear object that you're going to concentrate upon. This object can be almost anything. In a minute, I'm going to give you a list of various ideas for what your concentration objects could be. But let's say for this example, it's just going to be the the pressure between your thumb and your index finger. So you hold these two together and you feel like there's a sensation there a certain pressure, you don't need to press real hard, just lightly and you just focus on that pressure and you sit there and you focus on it on that sensation alone. Excluding all other sensations, all thoughts, all mental imagery. And you just focus on that. And you get very clear about what your one object of content Question. So in this case, it's that sensation. So you kind of specify that sensation to yourself, you get a good real, a real good feel for it. And then you tell yourself, okay, that's what I'm focusing on for the next, let's say, five minutes. And then you sit there and you feel it. And you force your mind to focus just on that. And you do not allow it to waver, you leave no wiggle room. This is not a practice where you get to slack off. Here, you're disciplining yourself very harshly. That's why you want to start with a very short period of time, like five minutes, because for five minutes, you can stand it, right, so you just force yourself for five minutes. And as your mind, white wavers off, you bring it right back, and you force yourself even harder. You just keep forcing yourself and forcing yourself and forcing yourself until your five minutes are done. With the objective of hitting access concentration. What is access concentration? How do you know that you've gotten there? Well, basically, if you focus on a sensation, or some object for a very consistent, steady period of time, at some point, you will hit access concentration, which means that you will go into this flow state and you'll feel it, you'll feel like something has shifted your attention or your focus has shifted in some way, where now all of a sudden, it became a lot easier to focus on that object. And to exclude all the distractions is sort of like all the distractions just kind of melt away in the background. And you're just rather effortlessly focusing on this target that you selected, you still need to maintain an effort. So it's not completely effortless. But it's a lot easier than it was before. And it might take you a while to build up to that. That depends on how good your current concentration skills are. And many other factors, right. So you want to start slowly and build yourself up, you want to start with a short duration, like two minutes, or five minutes, and then build up from two minutes to five minutes, to 10 minutes to 20 minutes to 30 minutes, and so forth. And the more you can get there, the better. And you want to make sure that you're staying very consistent, and don't increase your time, unless you're seeing that you're able to stay consistent. So for example, if you can't stay consistent with two minutes of your target, and your mind is wavering off a couple times here and there, then don't bump that up to five minutes yet, become good at two minutes, then bump it up to five minutes, become good and consistent at five minutes, then bumped that up higher. You see, because when you're practicing concentration, the most important thing is that you're not letting your mind have any wiggle room. Because as soon as your mind wiggles off the target, you're losing that momentum that you're building, and you're never going to hit access concentration. You see, and this is something that I've been struggling with in my meditation practice, I noticed that in retrospect, is that because I wasn't hitting access concentration, meditation was just kind of like floundering, you know, just kind of like going back and forth. And it's not really going anywhere. So that's the idea. What you also want to do in order to help you to attain access concentration, is to smoothen out the object that you're contemplating. And what I mean by that, for example, if you're following your breath, that's another potential target for your concentration. If you're following your breathing, like in, out, in, out in, right. There's a lot of different sensations involved with your breathing. So you want to smoothen them out and create a singular object out of the entire breath. And just stay with that single object of the breath. You're gonna sort of conceptualize the different sensations and lump them all together into this new conceptual creation called your breath, and you're gonna focus, you're gonna get absorbed with your breath, or you're gonna get absorbed with a sensation of your fingertips or you're gonna absorb, get absorbed with whatever target you're, you're after. You see, so if your target is a little bit more complex of a target, then you're gonna want to smoothen it out. And then you just kind of like, let yourself get absorbed into it. How long will it take you to get access concentration, like I said, that's difficult to say depends on your skill. Some people are more skilled than others. Some people are already pretty good. Others are basically at zero or even at negative, right. So it depends where you start. But um, might take you a few weeks, might take you a few months. That's assuming you're doing a daily practice and you're being very rigorous with this. With this, starting at two minutes, bumping yourself to five minutes to 10 minutes to 30 minutes. You know, it might take you 30 minutes of practice to get there. Maybe it'll take you five minutes of practice. But you know for a whole All month to get there. So you're just gonna have to wait and see practices daily, every single day, and maybe even multiple times a day, because your practice is going to be so short when you start that you can have multiple, like you can do two minutes in the morning, two minutes at lunchtime two minutes before bedtime. That would be the ideal. For example, if you really want to develop your concentration very quickly, something like that. Be very careful. And don't just say, well, I want to develop my concentration really quickly. So what I'm gonna do how to do a half an hour of concentration, right from the beginning, that's not going to work. Because you can't will yourself to just focus steadily for 30 minutes straight, it's just you're not going to do it, you need to build up to it in the same way that if you go to the gym for the first time, you can just go and try to benchpress 500 pounds, it's not physically possible, it doesn't matter how much willpower you have, you're not going to be able to do it. Your mind is very powerful like that, just like your body is very stubborn. And you know, if it's weak, it's weak. You can't just fix it in one day, your mind if your mind is we can't fix Saturday, either. The habits of your mind are very powerful, and they take time to shift. So the more practice you can get in the better. The higher the quality of your practice, the better. Really when you're blurting concentration, stress the quality of your practice over the quantity. That's why the short durations, it might seem like well, Leo, I can already meditate for 30 minutes. So let me just try my concentration, let me just start it from 30 minutes. That would be a mistake. Because you're under estimating the difference between concentration and meditation abilities. Even if you're a pretty decent meditator, your concentration probably still sucks. So start slow, start low. And, and then just notice what your mind does and how it feels. At the end of that period. What I noticed is that at the end of my 20 Min. Right now I'm doing 20 minutes, at the end of my 20 minute period, my mind really quiets down, because when you're concentrating the monkey mind is not allowed to do its thing. And what I noticed is, I'm sort of like in the center of the hurricane, after 20 minutes of concentrating, it's just like the world becomes very still, my mind becomes very still. And I can see that already. I'm in a meditative state just from doing 20 minutes of concentration practice. And then sometimes I do 20 minutes back to back. So I'll do 20 minutes, followed by another 20 minutes was 40 minutes total, but I break them up into two segments. And then by the end of that, I can really meditate quite nicely. So that's the power of the concentration. What the concentration does, is that it has some sort of like, amazing synergistic effect for your meditation. If you do even just five minutes of concentration practice, right before your regular meditation practice, let's say you do 30 minutes a day, you'll notice that your meditation practice can become twice better, just from those five minutes of concentrating. Because otherwise, what you're doing in meditation is you're just most your meditation is wasted on monkey mind, your monkey mind is just kind of jumping back and forth and back and forth. If you put the screws to the monkey mind for five minutes, really discipline it, and then let go and then you can surrender, you'll notice that the monkey mind it still wanders around, but it generally behaves a lot better. You gotta slap it around a little bit, and then it'll behave. That's how your mind tends to work. Now, this whole process is quite painful when you first start, which is why I resisted it for a long time. Because when you first start that first week or two of concentrating, it's going to be very painful, because you can't even concentrate for one minute. So you're not even going to be able to successfully complete your two minute concentration exercise because you're gonna screw it up halfway through, the only thing you can do is just push through it. Yes, you're gonna make mistakes, just push through it, do the best you can. And just be very rigorous and disciplined with yourself here. And just try to tough it out for those five minutes or whatever. however long you're doing this for. Now, let's talk about the different objects or targets that you could select for your concentration. So already, we already talked about a couple we talked about mudras which is basically this different gestures or configurations of your hand that you can make. So these come from classical Hinduism, and the eastern meditative and concentrated traditions. They have mudras mood because we're basically different hand positions. So a very basic one is just your thumb and your index finger like this, or your middle finger and your thumb like this. There's other various exotic configurations. So just pick something simple. And then what you do is you just focus on that sensation. And you concentrate on that. And that's your target the whole way through. We already talked about the breath. Now with the breath, there's really two different ways you can do the breath. One is the tip of your nose, it's just the air coming in and out your nose, especially your nostrils. And that's the only part of the breath that you're focusing on. So you're very laser targeting that area. And there's still multiple sensations that are happening there. And there's like an in breath, there's an out breath, there's a period of silence there, a pause at the beginning, and at the end of those inhales and exhales. So what you do is you, you smooth and all those out into a single sort of conceptual, breathing object, and you focus on that. The other possibility is that you follow your entire breath. So not just the nostrils, the nose, but also the throat, and the chest, the lungs, and even the belly, all of that, if you pay attention to it, then you notice there's a lot of different sensations going on there, it's hard to even focus on all of them at the same time. So what you want to do is you want to smoothen them out into a single object, this is going to be a conceptual creation, that you make this sort of object, all the different sensations throughout your lungs and your entire breathing apparatus. And then you're just gonna focus on that, as it breathes in and out, including the pauses to the pauses will be included in this conceptual object, that's gonna be your entire target. Another possibility, if you're more of a visual person is to pick a physical object to actually look at. This could be a candle flame, could be a apple, an orange, a pencil, something simple a simple object, and you just keep your eyes open, and you just focus on that object for your entire duration. The trick with that is that your eyes can get dry, sometimes your eyes are sleepy, you'll want to close them. But you can't do that with this particular target. So there's some limitations to this one. I know for me, my, my eyes get dry a lot, especially if I'm doing this in the morning or at night. So I don't like that 1/3 Possibility is a mental image, which allows you to close your eyes. A mental image can be any physical object, a simple physical object that you can imagine in your mind's eye. For example, close your eyes and imagine an orange. And then that orange, I don't mean the color orange, I mean, the orange orange of fruit, imagine that or an apple or something. And then just keep that image in your mind's eye for the duration, and that's your target. Another possibility is to select a color. This is pretty cool, I have experience with this one in the past. Take a color like red, blue, or white. Close your eyes. Picture that color in your mind's eye. Like for example, let's select color white. So I'm picturing White, I'm focusing on it. And then I remove all of the distractions, and that's my target the color white. So you can try that one. If you're sort of an imaginative person and you're visually oriented, you have a vivid imagination, you can do that. Another possibility is mantras, which is a sound that you repeat to yourself, which has no verbal or linguistic meaning. So a mantra might be something like dum de dum, dum de dum, dum dee dum, it's just like, some random words or syllables. And then you say to yourself, not verbally, but in your inner voice. Don't be Don't, don't be Don't, don't be Don't, don't be I mean, you just say that over and over and over and over again, you focus on that mantra in your mind. And you say, 1000s of times, and you just concentrate on that. So that's a possibility. And the last one is the repeating sound. So for example, if you're sitting there, have you ever meditated, and maybe you had a buzzing air conditioning unit, and then you could actually discover that you could meditate on that buzzing sound of the air conditioning unit. But then the problem is that the air conditioning unit turns off, right, it turns off the sound ends. And then what do you do, you lose your target of concentration. But what you can do is you can create a deliberate repeating sound, which is what I'm going to demonstrate to you in a second here. So the point that I'm trying to make with giving you this list of different concentration objects, is that I want you to select whichever one you're comfortable with whichever one you're most interested in, whichever one If you want to really focus your concentration on what I found, if I select a bad target to concentrate on, then my mind doesn't really want to stick to it. And then I wander off really quickly. So it took me a while to find one that I really like. And that's what I'm going to share with you here. So this I think, works beautifully. What I have is I have my phone, and on this phone, I downloaded a metronome app. A metronome just keeps a rhythm, like tick tock tick, tock, tick, tock, tick tock, that's what a metronome is, right. It's used by Muse by musicians for creating rhythms and beats. So I got this app on my phone. It's a metronome app free app, you can find a bunch of free metronome apps for whatever phone you have. So it doesn't really matter what the particular app is. And it allows you to select a beats per minute. And then once you select it and you click the play button, you hear that? So it's like a tick tock, tick tock, if you couldn't hear, it's just like, tick tock, tick, tock, tick tock. And then what I do is I sit there on my couch in a relaxed position, I close my eyes, and I just listen to it. Go Tick, tock, tick, tock, tick, tock, tick, tock, and I follow every tick, and every talk with my mind very carefully. And I watch when my mind wanders off. And as soon as it does it, bring it right back, and I discipline it. And for me, this, this right here has worked really, really well. So if you want to try that one out, feel free to do that. Or if you want to focus on your breath, or mudra or something else, then go with that. The key though is that you select something, then you stick with it. So that in the middle of your concentration practice, you're like, Oh, why wish I chose something else. Because that's gonna screw you up to completely, right, make sure you select one thing you can expect with a different variety of things. But then you select one of those, and you stick to it and you commit to it. And that's going to be the one that you use for a good long while to come. All right. So that's how you build concentration. Now let me answer a few questions and answers before I wrap this up. So the first question might be BillyOh, how can I focus and discipline my mind? If I don't have free will? You've said in the past that we don't have free will free will is an illusion. So in this case, now you're contradicting yourself, because you're asking me to now exercise my free will in order to focus. This is a question that is born out of a misunderstanding of what is meant by no free will. No Free will means that there is no doer in life who is doing everything. But stuff still gets done. Including focusing and concentrating and making decisions. So no free will does not mean that you can't make decisions, you can make decisions, it's just that you don't have free will to make your decisions. But the decisions still get made. It just means that the illusion that you are making the decisions that that's an illusion. See, same thing with concentrating. Just because there's no free will doesn't mean you can't concentrate, you can concentrate, it's just not you who's concentrating the universe or your body or your mind is concentrating for you in a sense. Or if it fails to concentrate, then it's failing to concentrate, you see. So this idea of no free will does not preclude anything, all actions. If you want think about this way, all actions that did happen in the past, still do happen in the future. Under the idea of no free will, is just that you realize that it wasn't me. I wasn't personally doing all this stuff. The stuff still gets done. A lot of very complicated intelligent things. get done. Even self discipline gets done. So when I say there's no free will that does not excuse you from self discipline. Is the DAS for a lot of people get this idea wrong is they think well, if there's no free will, that means that hey, you know, when I choose to just slack off and not go to work tomorrow. Hey, that's just you know, that's because I don't have free will. No. If you did go to work. That doesn't prove freewill. You went to work without freewill. See, so make sure you're very nuanced about your understanding of what no free will is because your mind will easily abuse this notion to backwards rationalize, whatever kind of lazy behavior it wants to. Speaking of lazy the next question might be but Leo, this sounds so trihard I mean, isn't the point of spirituality to just surrender? That's what meditation is about. and it's just surrendering. We don't need to discipline ourselves here, you're really forcing your mind is full of sounds like a very neurotic sort of technique. Again, this is a misunderstanding of spirituality, spirituality, some of the most disciplined and most rigorous practices that you can find anywhere. It's not about just surrendering. Yeah, you'll surrender in the very, very, very, very end. But to get to that ultimate point of surrender, you will have to try very hard. This idea that spirituality means that you don't have any desires, it has spirituality means that you don't try. And you don't work hard, towards enlightenment, or towards certain meditative states, or certain attainments. This is ridiculous. This is the stupidest idea ever. Every single hardcore spiritual teacher and master will definitely tell you that working hard and having desire towards enlightenment and towards spirituality is very important. Very important, doesn't matter what tradition. If you're a Buddhist, if you're a Christian, if you're a Jew, if you're Islamic, it doesn't matter. All these traditions have very hardcore practices, and they all emphasize the importance of your love for truth. What do you think that is? That's a deep desire for truth. Your desire for truth should be so deep. Your desire for God should be so deep, that you are willing to discipline your mind, and also your body, and also your desires and many other things. But when they talk about desires, they're they're talking about shallow materialistic desires, and then see people many, many people misunderstand and think oh desires, that means all desires bad, including the desire for enlightenment. No, without the desire for enlightenment, you're gonna get nowhere. What does the average person have no desire for enlightenment. So if you remove your desire for enlightenment before you're lightened you're gonna be just like the average person. So be careful with that. Again, it's your mind misusing, misinterpreting some of these these spiritual truths and actually justifying its own laziness. And people who just tell you, hey, just be in The Now these sort of people generally aren't very aligned. They're not set many for Eckhart Tolle. But then for every one Eckhart Tolle, you have a million, who say what Eckhart Tolle says, but who aren't actually enlightened, you see? So yeah, he can say that, because he already is. But if you're not yet you got to try. You got to work real hard at it. Another objection or question might be, but Leo, enlightenment is not a state. So it sounds like what you're doing here is you're advocating that people attain mystical experiences or states of concentration. And that they will confuse this with genuine insight or enlightenment. So again, we got to be nuanced here and careful. I'm not saying that you will concentrate your way to a state that will then equal enlightenment. I mean, it could happen. But most likely, with concentration, the more you concentrate, the better you get at that, you'll get into absorb absorption states, you'll have Samadhi experiences, these can be beautiful, mystical experiences. They're very rewarding and powerful. And they can, they can create some real spiritual growth, but generally, they're not going to enlighten you. There is a difference between concentration and insight. Which is why a lot of people can say that they've had experiences of mystical union or oneness, or God or whatever you want to call it. Ultimate Truth. They've had little glimpses of it, right? You have a glimpse of it for five seconds, and it's gone. And then you come back and you start crying about oh, how do I get it back? Well, that's because you, you are concentrating and you got somewhere you have some sort of nice experience. But that's not ultimate liberation. ultimate liberation can only happen through knowledge or insight. But don't underestimate how powerful concentration can be for gaining insight. So that's the connection here. You're developing your concentration to build the capacity to focus with that capacity, then you can do really effective self inquiry, or really effective meditation or really effective contemplation. And any one of those can lead you to deep insights about the ultimate nature of reality. absolute truths about yourself others, the world and life and all of existence and from that you can attain enlightenment. And also other various more minor insights, which are still incredibly valuable for your growth and development. So I'm not saying that the concentration alone is sufficient, you will still want to maintain self inquiry practice, you will still want to contemplate once in a while upon things or a lot upon things, et Cie. So don't take this as concentration is now the only tool in your toolbox. This is just one tool out of many other tools. So keep things in perspective here. If you go and you only do concentration practices and nothing else, you will very likely curb your own growth. And you will not attain the highest deepest insights into ultimate truth. So be careful. With every tool, there are traps. There is no tool without traps. Because the ego always finds a way to misuse this knowledge. Because that's the egos, modus operandi is trying to protect itself, it will do that through any means possible, especially by CO opting spiritual techniques and spiritual ideas and principles to its own purposes, distorting them, twisting them around, and then using them to get deeper stuck in itself. So be careful. The last question I'll answer is, solely, does this mean that I should now replace my meditation practice with a concentration practice? And the answer, of course, should be no. Maintain your meditation practice, if you already have one. If you don't have one, start one. Even if it's only for 10 minutes, start one, but also add into your daily routine concentration practice, if only just five minutes of concentration, you definitely have five minutes every day. So it's not a matter of being short on time, it's a matter of, do you really care about it? Do you see the long term potential that it's going to have for transforming your life. And if you do, you'll find a way to make it happen. It's really not that difficult. I just want to reiterate how significant this can be for transforming your life, you might think five minutes or five minutes a day, I'll just skip five minutes here, I'll skip five minutes there, I'm tired, I don't want to do it today. All Tomorrow's a holiday, I won't do it tomorrow. You know, this sort of stuff, the sort of slacking off. This is not the attitude of someone who is serious about developing themselves or someone who is serious about attaining ultimate truth or enlightenment. If you care about those things, you will discipline yourself to make these small little changes in your life. And then to build on them periodically, every single month. ramp them up a little bit. Challenge yourself. Discipline yourself a little bit more discipline is important here. If you slack off, what's gonna happen is you're just gonna go with the flow of your environment and your culture. And I'm willing to bet that your environment and your culture is not going to support you in automatically developing yourself growing and spiritually purifying yourself, that's not going to happen. Not in our current time. This is a must do technique for sages. For people who are seeking enlightenment. For serious meditators. And you're serious about self actualizing, you must develop concentration ability. You must, it will make such a huge difference for you commit for the next month to practice this every single day, maybe even twice a day, build yourself up from five minutes, or maybe even just two minutes, from two minutes to five minutes to 10 minutes to 20 minutes so that by the end of the month, you're at 20 minutes in addition to your meditation practice, and then just see the synergistic effects that you'll experience. It'll be amazing. And then you can build more and more on that to come. And I'll have more episodes in the future that will talk about various absorption states that you can reach through deeper and deeper concentration ability. But for now, this is it. I'm signing off, please click the like button for me. Post your comments down below. Share this episode with a friend and lastly come check out my website right here at actualize that org. This is where I have some good resources for you. I have a book list. I have a life purpose course. I'm working on a new course. I have the actualized. Org forum where people can come and help you with your questions. So if you have questions about it, if you feel lonely on this journey, go there and find some community support. Make use of that resource. We're also developing resources and guides It's, so there's my guide to practical guide to enlightenment is there. Other people have great posts there, they share resources, videos, books, and so forth. So go check that out. And the last thing that I'll tell you is just stay tuned with me for more future episodes. Because this work that we're doing here is the most meaningful work that you can do in your life. This gets at the heart of what it means to be a human being. It might seem like I talk about disparate topics, I'll talk about some enlightenment topics, and I'll talk about some concentration topic, some meditation topics, some talk about the topic about emotions, you know, I'll talk about these various topics. And at first, it might seem like, well, this is very scattershot, I'm not sure what I should be doing, or why he's talking about all this stuff in all these different ways. How does it all come together? What does it all mean? What it means is, these are the building blocks of self actualization. And these are the building blocks of mastering life and being a human being. You see, you were born into this world, in a society that never really told you how to be a human being, how your emotions work, how motivation works, how life purpose works, how truth works, how paradigms work, how your mind works, right? Nobody taught you this stuff, by and large. Mostly, what they taught you is they taught you ideas and beliefs about how to function in the world. On a sort of, like utilitarian level, like they taught you how to do math, they taught you how to maybe earn a little bit of money, or they taught you how to, you know, be polite, when you're going to a dinner party, they taught you that sort of stuff. They taught you how to be a member of society, but they didn't talk teach you what it is like to be a human being, what that really means the deep principles of it. And to learn that you have to listen to the theory, which is what actualized org offers us a lot of theory, but also you have to start doing these practices. The only point of the theory is to get you to change your behaviors, and to install some of these habits. So if you're not doing that, then you might as well stop watching the videos. It's time to install some of these basic habits. Once you do, you're gonna feel a lot better about yourself. Believe me, I know how painful it is to sit there and watch video after video, read book after book. And then what happens months go by you take no action on anything you've learned. And then that just that weighs you down. That makes you feel guilty and bad or man, it's not a good feeling. So just bite the bullet. Install a couple of these simple habits that I keep talking about over and over again in my videos. And you'll start to see the results. And then your life is going to start to transform and you'll start to feel great, and you're going to build the snowball effect. So get started on that build your concentration practice. And I'll see you next week with more