Should you need someone to tell you how long to practice, start with 10 minutes a day and work up to an hour or two each day as your life allows. If you can learn to hold your attention completely on your chosen object for even one solid minute, you have some strong concentration skills. That said, you might have 10 hours a day to devote to practice. Don’t let me hold you back! How long it will take you to develop access concentration is dependent upon a number of factors including practice conditions, your natural and cultivated concentration ability, the strength of your drive to succeed, and how much you practice.
Sharpening your concentration may help almost everything you do, and can provide a mental and emotional stability that can be very useful.
Concentration can also lead to some very nice states called “jhanas” and other names. These can be extremely blissful and peaceful. Being able to access these states of mind can be ridiculously enjoyable and can increase steadiness and stability of mind. These are of value in and of themselves and also serve the important function in the Buddhist tradition of providing a disposable foundation for insight practices, i.e.
the third training.
I will leave off describing the high concentration attainments until Part III so as to keep this section focused on the essential skills necessary for meditation, as once you gain access concentration getting into those states is very easy. Until you can get into access concentration, you ain’t got squat. Thus, pick an object, practice well and often, learn to attain to access concentration, finish reading this book, and by that point everything should be very straightforward.
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Concentration, The Second TrainingMorality, The First and Last Training
Now, it must be said that concentration practices, like all practices, have their shadow sides. For instance, high and unusual experiences can become addictive and seductive, causing them to receive more attention and focus than they deserve. They can also lead to people becoming very otherworldly and ungrounded, very much the way that
hallucinogens can. They can also bring up lots of our psychological
“stuff.” This last limitation could be a benefit if we are in a mood to deal with this stuff. Perhaps the most important limitations of concentration practices is that they do not lead directly to the insights and permanent understandings that come from training in wisdom, as much as we might like them to. That brings us to the third training…
