Question: I am a musician and I would like to know your ideas on concentration. When we study music we realise that we need a great deal of concentration. I would like to know how you develop concentration.

Question: To me, concentration is awareness. The more I can concentrate on something, the more aware I am of it, the more I can grasp all the details. If I am not concentrating enough on something, I cannot understand it completely. I feel concentration also means leaving oneself a little to the side, but I would like to know your opinion.

Sri Chinmoy: Concentration is not the same as awareness. If you want to achieve extraordinary concentration, please try this. Take an idea and try to make this idea into a living being. Then place it on the wall at your eye level. If it is too difficult to use an idea, then take some material object and place it on the wall. Keep your eyes open. It is always better to concentrate with open eyes. Look at the object and start concentrating. Now enter into the object. You have to apply all your attention and pierce through the object to the other side. When you have gone to the other side, from there start concentrating. You are there, your body is here. You start concentrating from the other side and from there look at your own body.

First you try to focus your attention on a particular object, then you enter into it, then you go beyond it. At this time you become the witness, or sakshi purusha. This is real concentration. This is the secret of meditation. If you know it you can concentrate most effectively.

Sri Chinmoy: One's own witness.

Question: It is very difficult in that way?

Sri Chinmoy: It is difficult.

Question: It is as if you were there, standing there looking at yourself?

Sri Chinmoy: Yes, but first you have to enter into the object and then go beyond it. Then you come back to yourself and become the witness.