The Right Effort

All attempts to be 'mindful' (remember yourself, remember the name of god, the face of god, the sound of god, etc.), is just another mis-naming of the more obvious, direct idea of >concentration<. Or, put another way, you would be in an entirely different state of consciousness - you would be a new man mentally, your perception of yourself, other people, and Life in general would be permanently changed - if you could just willfully concentrate on one thing all the time. Screw all this other, extraneous stuff (remember yourself, remember the name of god, the face of god, the sound of god, etc.), if you could just concentrate your attention at will, then all that other stuff, is just dressing-up a dog - and why would you ever want to do that? But, even when told point-blank, the mind will NOT accept it. Why?... Why!!??

The Sage said: "You too can enter the Kingdom of God, and all you have to do, you sorry sonofabitch, is >>concentrate<<. Just concentrate, even when you don't have to!" And what does the mind immediately say to that?

---"On what?"

"Nah, nah, nah... Just concentrate!"

And consider this, nobody would want to awaken, if they could concentrate at will.

Yet, hanging from a 50foot ledge by your fingertips, trying to save yourself from a sabre-toothed tiger or a bill-collector, you can't HELP but totally concentrate on what is going on in you and around you. Just try to think about something else. ("Gee, will the Dems take back the White House this time?", "Will bell bottoms finally come back?")

Why can not the mind accept this correct detailing of what is necessary to awaken? Why must it invent other ways of saying what is so obviously simple to say - concentrate. (Not concentrate on something - just concentrate.)

This line of questioning, requires thinking more than you have to, because if you just allow your mechanical mind to work with it, you inevitably fall into the same trap everyone else has already fallen into - confusion through mis-naming and mis-direction.