Meditation
Meditation at its core is the training, or the directing, or the focus of attention in a deliberate way. Also it is the human capacity to open to perspectives larger than the ordinary consciousness or the small, separate sense of self. And there are a hundred forms of them. There’s shamanic forms, and Buddhist forms, and Hindu, and Kabalistic, and Jewish meditations, and Christian mystical, and Sufi, and Muslim, And so on.
The main categories of meditation include devotional practice, and these focus us on inspiration and love. And they open us to pray, or worship, or become inspired, or even become one with that ideal or that to which we’re devoted, to connect to something bigger and to show practices through prayer, through song, through visualization. And it can be to spirits or the divine in all kinds of forms.
Concentration
There are many forms of concentration. And concentration means the ability of this mind and psyche, the capacity, to attend to quite fully, to focus, and in its deepest level to become unified with a particular experience. There are visual concentrations, outer ones of a candle flame or an image. It can be a tree or it can be a sacred mandala.
There are all kinds of ways to concentrate the mind. But all of them require a repetition, where you do it a 100 and 1,000 and 10,000 times until you become so focused on that experience that all the thoughts and difficulties and other parts of your identity begin to drop away. And you become one with that experience. And in doing so, the mind becomes not only focused, but quiet, and peaceful, and directed, and often quite ecstatic.
Another form of concentration, besides a vision, where you have a mandala, or an image, or a candle, is mantra practice. That sacred repetition of a sound, or a sacred sound, or a name. And in that repetition, the mind starts to get both concentrated and focused and shift from ordinary consciousness to the experience of that sound and what it invites you into.
Or there are concentrations which focus on the body itself. And as you get more and more deeply concentrated, you can not only sense the body, but dissolve it into vibrations, and dissolve it into light, or into space– or many other possibilities.
Mauna Yoga 