To begin to concentrate is essential to controlling your thinking and action. It is also necessary for the stages of meditation that can begin later. You should understand that from the beginning the healthy path is to control your thinking activity. Concentration should not be used to shut down your thinking activity in order to achieve emptiness. Such practices are outdated and unhealthy today. Rather, your beginning powers in concentration and attention can lead you to the experience of pure thinking over some time. Such concentration can lead you up the stairs to the experience and study of the Philosophy of Freedom of Rudolf Steiner.
Concentration exercise:
1. Hold out your finger tip. Look at it attentively with your eyes. Think healthy thoughts of strength, love, and vigor. Imagine that every thought that you think is going in and out of the tip of your finger.
Continue this practice until you can do it for 10 minutes without losing focus.
2. Do exercise 1 for 7 minutes. Then lightly hold the tip of your tongue between your front rows of teeth. Squeeze just enough to keep your attention on the tip of your tongue. Don't hurt yourself at all. But if your attention wanders, just lightly squeeze your tongue between your teeth. At the same time, take the same fingertip that you used for exercise 1 and touch it to the tip of your tongue as well. All good, loving, healthy thoughts of strength and I AM should pass through the tip of tongue. Do this for 10 minutes.
3. After you can control your thinking for about 14 minutes (7 minutes for exercise 1 and 7 minutes for exercise 2), begin step 3.
Take your concentration finger and touch it lightly above and between your eyebrows. Let all thinking of goodness, beauty, and truth pass through this center. Continue for 10 minutes.
You can do these exercises any time. If you can control your thinking for 21 minutes (7 minutes for each stage), you are are doing great. If you can control your thinking in this fashion for 30 minutes, that is all the better.
If you are not sure what to think about - I would suggest reading Rudolf Steiner's 'Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment', Chapter 1. Slowly memorize some of its content and use it during the concentration exercise.. Make sure you do not confuse the will of concentration with the content of the pure knowledge process of observing thinking while it unfolds. Concentration and the use of the will is not the same as observing the imageless meaning-light of pure thinking activity. Can you note the difference?
Thanks to Robert Toomey III, my first teacher, who demonstrated this exercise to me. It got me started on the path, I hope it can help you also. Good luck!
