The Key to Concentration

How you too can find the key to success.....without the help of DJ Khaled

 by: Brandon Black

Concentration is something that many people can't master or even control for more than 10 minutes of their day at a time.  Concentration is defined as "to cultivate a mind that is one-pointed. ‘Maintaining-evenness,’ neither too high nor too low, neither too excited nor too dull."  There's just obstacles that we as people can not escape.  One of those things are our minds, because no matter how disciplined you are, your mind always finds a way to travel one hundred miles an hour to a thought that has no relevance to what you're doing.  As an individual, I struggle with this same concept and find myself constantly in past memories or day dreaming about future happiness.  To me this is the hardest piece to achieve in the Eightfold Path, because it's a constant requirement throughout each layer.  As you go deeper into the Eightfold Path, it seems like the amount of Concentration becomes more crucial and difficult to attain.

Here's a couple of tricks that help give your mind a break from running miles through the millions of thoughts you may have:

1.  Meditation is a practice that almost forces you to focus on the sounds you hear and to be more in tuned with your mind. 

2.  Like meditation, yoga is something that helps you be more attentive toward the stretches you're doing and be more in tuned with your body.

3.  A third possible way to attain this concentration is to simply take a 10-15 minute nap just to allow your mind to rest from constant thought and focus.  

4.  Something else I think that would be useful is prayer. Prayer is something that allows people to be more at peace and serenity with themselves and their problems at hand to help better focus.

5.  Lastly, I think a skill that could help this concentration would be a half hour to an hour of some sort of exercise. Physical exercise is something that allows someone to channel and release their emotions and stress. If you pick something fun, the process doesn't even seem like work it's simply a relaxation period.

Looking back on all of these quirks, the most effective for me seemed to be tips 2,3 and 5.  What I noticed for myself though was one of two things.  I felt more concentrated and conscious of my thoughts when I was either waking up early in the morning or late at night.  This was why the early morning yoga sessions as well as the naps and night football practices seemed to work for me the most.  The other thing I did notice as well though was the reaction I had to activities I enjoyed versus activities I felt more as a requirement.  It's kind of like eating in a sense.  You can't really go on an effective smoothie diet if you don't like eating fruit and dairy in general.  Football and yoga exercises were something that I found a liking to and began losing myself in the workouts, instead of looking at the clock agonizing over when I can go back to my room.  Whether those specific activities or times of the day were the key, it seems as though you kind of just have to try things out and see how your mind and body react to find what's best for your concentration.

"Right Speech" and Some Not-Swearing on the Eightfold Path

So. The Eightfold Path of Buddhism. I can't really begin to get into the absolute intricacies myself, but the general idea is that there is a "middle way" between the extremes of lifestyle that people tend to gravitate towards in the search for ultimate happiness: either over-the-top indulgence and frivolous living, or a lifestyle with almost everything stripped away, living on the absolute bare necessities. The second kind of lifestyle doesn't really sound like any fun to me, and I'm pretty sure it's the same for you. "Give up your phone, your computer, all your clothes, your house, your car, and any food that someone doesn't offer to you first." Uh, sorry, no.

But minus the iPhone and the car, that's pretty much what Siddhartha Gautama, Buddhism's founder, did. He was the son of a Kshatriya raja, a king, and a soothsayer said at Siddhartha's birth that the child would grow to be a great king... but if he ever saw the sights of human misery or the tranquility of a monk, he'd become a religious teacher and a Buddha (Enlightened One.) Which of course scared the bejesus out of the king - son's gotta follow in the family business! He spent around 30 years keeping Siddhartha from seeing a dead body, an aged person, a diseased person, or an ascetic monk. These four oddly specific sights (which I guess included his own grandmother) would eventually creep into Siddhartha's life, long after the prince had completed his education and married, and had a son. Around age thirty, Siddhartha happened upon some of these scenes, and everything began to unravel. His awareness of the suffering and pain in life culminated in an experience where he entered his harem room at the palace and had a vision that all the beautiful young women there would become old and wrinkled. Poor guy.

Anyways, he panicked. He kissed his wife and infant son goodbye in the dead of night, took the kingdom's best horse, and rode off into the distance. Then he chopped off his hair, sent the horse back, and traded clothes with a beggar. So begins Siddhartha Gautama's ascetic life.

I think that the story of his origins is hilarious in its own weird way. And I managed to tell the whole story without swearing! (More on that later.) But anyways, it ended up that Siddhartha was traveling around with some other monks, starving and basically torturing himself (he slept in a cremation ground among rotting corpses, and on thorns, in hopes that the pain would enlighten him). And it wasn't fun. And it wasn't helping! He was so thin from starvation that he could put his hand on his stomach and feel his own spine. One day, he's walking along a stream and faints because he's so out of energy, and hits the cold water. That wakes him up, and he realizes, after everything, after ALL THIS, he hasn't found enlightenment. So he deals with his problems the way we all tend to do nowadays, and he goes to a food stand and eats a meal.

This, of course, caused his monk friends - who just happened to be passing by - to call him a traitor. So he (probably) shrugged, finished his meal and sat under a fig tree, and he meditated. He decided to meditate until he received enlightenment. And he did! From then on, he was known as the Buddha. First step now was to find his friends, and preach what he learned. In that first sermon, in Deer Park, the Buddha "taught that neither the extreme of indulgence nor the extreme of asceticism was acceptable as a way of life and that one should seek to live in the middle way." (This quote and the story of the Buddha all come from Hopfe's Religions of the World, 13th edition, a great read for information on all of the major religions.)

So the middle way seeks to remove all suffering and indulgence - nothing excess, just a balanced life that can and should eventually lead to Nirvana. It's not a state of bliss you're looking for, but an escape from craving and desire. As we've discovered in Dr. Salazar's Ethics class, the most direct guidelines for achieving this are given to us through the Eightfold Path, which the Buddha revealed when he gave that first sermon.

(The Eightfold Path of the Buddha)

The Eightfold Path involves all different manners of balancing your life with the world around you. I was asked for class to not only (somewhat embarrassingly) disclose which of the branches I thought I had the most trouble with, but then to take a week and work on it. And when my first thought had four letters and began with an "f", I knew which one I was going to end up pursuing.

Right Speech is based on Right Thinking, according to the writings of Thich Nhat Hanh. "Sometimes, when there are blocks of suffering in us, they may manifest as speech or actions without going through the medium of thought." Maybe it's silly, but I swear like a sailor in my casual life. And Right Speech involves "Not speaking cruelly. We don't shout, slander, curse, encourage suffering, or create hatred." And up until here, I assumed if I didn't say something scandalous in front of a boss or professor, I was doing okay. My friends know, my parents put up with it now (probably a red flag, after years of admonishment), and anybody who's gone out for a beer with me after work has noticed the difference between how I "am" and how I "act" at work. I put those in quotes because it's really apparent to me that I've been actively behaving during the day - like a first-grader told to sit still for a lesson. And that's not the way it should be! It's a bad habit, and one that I needed to relieve.

So I quit. Cold turkey. I wrote "DON'T SWEAR" in Sharpie on the palm of my right hand (where I record all the important things) and set off on my week of chaste speech. It started off easy enough, doing homework alone on a Saturday afternoon, and then I went out that night.

At dinner with a couple friends, I checked my hand a couple times and kept up with the no-swears thing for a couple hours, feeling a little proud, like how someone feels when they start a crash diet right before bed and are 8 hours into the diet by the time they wake up. Then my purse got caught on the bathroom door and I dropped an f-bomb and it was back to square one.

I decided I couldn't just not swear, and I couldn't really do it alone. So when I got back to the table... I apologized. I explained that I was working on a school assignment to better myself, and that I had decided to minimize swearing in my life, at least for the week. And I apologized for the swear. (Which of course, devolved into banter from my friends trying to get me to repeat whatever swear I said, but, you know, what are friends for?) My mission evolved here: I'd also decided on no censors. No "Christ on a cracker" or "crap" or "strumpet." The whole point wasn't to try and make myself radio-appropriate, but to be able to say that I don't need the swears to enhance my speech. I don't need to offend or be cruel to show how strongly I feel something - because after that week, I noticed that's what I was using them for. Like my own words weren't enough to convey my message.

Withdrawal for the first few days hurt. And to break a habit, whether it's smoking or fingernail-biting or not using the f-word more than the word "the" in a day, is kind of hard. But coming out on the other side (without any really cool stories about my squeaky-clean speaking saving the day), I feel relieved. Not because I don't have to play along anymore, but because I feel less bound by the modifiers in my sentence structures. The big difference came when I noticed I was swearing less (although never 100% not-at-all) in my own thoughts. My efforts didn't just change what I said aloud, they changed how I think. And it only took a week!

I'm out of my no-swear week now, and I'm kind of glad to be back. There's a lot of fun in a well-placed word, and sometimes I really do feel so strongly about something that I need to just throw the words in and let it out. And that's okay! That's the most important part, I've found, is that that's okay. There's a difference between excess and moderation. And maybe I won't be happening into Nirvana any time soon (no WAY I'm giving up my phone nor potato chips), but my own lifestyle has been improved a little bit, and for that I'm thankful. I take my own words more seriously now, and so do the people around me. I'm a little more radio-appropriate, and a little closer to figuring myself out, too.

Concentration is Key

If you find yourself distracted, or you're not able to focus and it's starting to effect your daily life, there are five things that could help you kill this habit:

By: Lauren Gamache

 1. Live in the moment and think about now instead of the future.

2. Listen to people instead of toning them out.

3. Take time out of your day to let you mind wander so it’s easier to stay focused at school, work, and in conversations with friends, family and peers.

4. Use an agenda to organize your time so you're not constantly thinking what’s coming next.

5. Get 8 hours of sleep every night.

I think it’s really important to do all of these things because we cannot focus solely on the present if other thoughts are constantly running through our minds.  It’s very hard to train your brain from what you’re normally used to doing, but I’ve realized how important it is to have some “me” time to let my mind wander as well.  I think the most helpful thing is getting eight hours of sleep every night to allow your mind to be more clear the next day and you'll also be more alert. I think getting enough sleep is the key to the other four steps because in order to be fully mentally present in the moment, your mind must be allowed a certain about of resting time.  The trickiest thing to do is keeping up with an agenda and managing your time because sometimes it is easy to be lazy and not do what you scheduled at the scheduled time.  It is easy to lose track of time with a busy schedule.  I think it’s important to keep track of everything because doing things on a whim can turn into a stressful situation.  Although it is difficult to do all five things on the list, I think it is the key to concentration and time management.  Even if you cannot do all five things, doing simply one or two can be very beneficial as well.

Christian Ethics: The Emperor vs Love

When reading The Moral Quest: Foundations of Christian Ethics, I could not help but notice the similarities between the evolution of Christianity with my father's own way of raising me. Within this ethic, the relationship between God and his people was that of the superior-inferior. God was considered superior to all other beings and we as the inferior must strictly obey what he has set forth for us. This strict obedience to the covenant would prevent individuals from sinning and allow them entrance into the kingdom of god. This is the god of the Old Testament, one that was considered to be vengeful and that should be feared above all others. The relationship, to me, resembles that of an emperor and his subjects, with disobedience leading to the destruction of life as we know it.

However, this edict changed rather quickly with the coming of Christ on earth. He taught his followers that it was through love, repentance, and faith that one would enter the kingdom of God. God did not want his subjects to blindly follow his orders, like a storm trooper following Emperor Palpatine. Instead, his aim was a radical conversion of the mind that lead one another to love as God loved them. It is my belief that God realized that the way of the Old Testament was not growing true believers, and, in fact, was creating resentment towards him, even if no one of he time admitted it.


When reflecting on my own life, i see my father has changed his ways in a similar fashion. He is a former warden of New Jersey State Prison and he ran his household like it. He used to "bark" out orders and demand compliance. When I moved to Florida, he did not come with us because he had to continue working in New Jersey, which was during my adolescent years. During this time, i grew to resent my father and honestly hated him for how he treated me: never telling me that he was proud of anything I had done and treating me as another one of his inmates. When he moved to Florida, I think he realized how much his attitude effected my development (my mother had been warning him this would happen for many years) and so he changed how he treated me. I was no longer being ordered to do things, he trusted my judgement and showed he was proud to have me as his son. Now if my judgement was wrong, I definitely received a nice, long lecture, but it was having the ability to make the decision that changed my attitude and, in turn, allowed me to internalize more of his teachings. The path of the Old Testament leads to the makings of a General Grievous, while the path of love leads to the makings of Obi-Wan-Kenobi.

Family Traditions

Thanksgiving is a holiday that is surrounded by family traditions in the United States. It is a holiday in the fall were families come together and give thanks for what they have. 

Thanksgiving is believed to be traced back to a Pilgrim celebration in Plymouth, Massachusetts in the 1620's to celebrate and give thanks for a bountiful harvest. Some traditional foods associated with Thanksgiving dinner include a full cooked turkey, cranberries, and vegetables like carrots and turnips.

Every family has their own unique traditions that make this holiday a memorable one. This was made clear in class when we all discussed our own personal traditions. Each person had unique family traditions that made Thanksgiving special to them. My family has roots in Plymouth so we have a very traditional dinner with the same types of food served every year, similar to the ones typically associated with Thanksgiving.

These types of family traditions can be related to the deep rooted beliefs of the importance of family and tradition in Native American culture. Native Americans consider their whole tribe to be one big family even if they aren't related by blood. They also value tradition and even now in modern days they still perform traditional rituals that they have done for hundreds of years.

Less Judgment, More Love

In The Moral Quest: Foundations of Christian Ethics, it identifies the idea that we are human and make judgments. These normative, or everyday, judgments can be either made through moral obligation and value versus non-moral obligation and value. The book tries to decipher what is needed to follow an "ethical life". 

When comparing judgments such as "My room is painted the best color" versus "People are obligated to tell the truth" there really is no comparison. Judgments are based on personal morality gathered through experience. In the Bible, God is the one to make the final judgment. But how is that possible is everyone's idea of how to lead an "ethical life" is different or skewed.

So is God subjective or objective when making that final decision, that final judgment. Does God base it solely on judgments of moral obligation and value or does he too take into account non-moral obligation and value as well. If God is to make a "final judgment", it seems a bit hypocritical to me if we are not allowed to make any judgments on others. I only wonder if that then causes people to think it is okay to place judgment because it is modeled by God in the Bible.

I assume that if God were to make no final judgments in the end, that people wouldn't feel the need to do the same. 

Religion and the Western Mind

As Vine Deloria Jr explains in God is Red the western mind assumes that the change in personality in humans must take place for religion to effective.  Most of this includes major changes in ones life.  This, in my opinion, is not a way to change someone for the better as it just changes the person completely, his or her ideals and all.  These ideals have been adopted from European decent and eventually transferred into the minds of Americans.  To summarize, the Christian religion involves a major change in your own intentions and ideals.  In contrast to this, the Native American religion does not aim to change personality but behavior.  I believe this is a much more effective method of becoming a better person.  By changing personality you are essentially stripping yourself of who you are but by changing behaviors and actions, you can better yourself by being kind to others.  This is what all religions should be striving for.  Another major difference between these religions is how they view their Deity.  "When we turn from Christian religious beliefs to Indian tribal beliefs in this area, the contrast is remarkable.  Religion is not conceived as a personal relationship between the deity and each individual.  It is rather a covenant between a particular god and a particular community" (194).  This quote summarizes nicely how these two religions differ.  The Native belief is that your relationship with your god is not based on an individual level but a community level for all to share.  I believe that this is a great basis for religion as it allows people to rid themselves of greed and selflessness.  By adopting this method we can all strive to become better people as a community instead of on an individual basis

The role of forgiveness

The Bible has forgiveness as a prominent theme. Growing up as a Roman Catholic, forgiveness was always a topic we went through in religous class and I would here on Sundays at church.
Although hearing about forgiveness may sound like the practice is easy, the theory is really far from the reality.

My mother with my grandparents 

Being a person that doesn't change her opnions and thoughts easily and also has her pride high, forgiving was always something hard for me, admitting I was wrong, even harder.
My mother is half Italian, half Lebanese making her personality really strong and most of the times she is really stubborn and refuses to admit she is wrong. Multiple times I had a hard time connecting with her because of that. We would just get into huge fights and not give up on any side and things with time would go back to normal. My view of this changes a few years ago when my mother and my grandfather got into a huge fight. My grandfather being the Lebanese side of my mmother is also really hot headed and his proud is also really high. My mother bought him a dvd player and they got into a fight about the electronic and how he said he didn't want one and my mother bought anyways. They didn't talk for about six months until my mother finally gave in and apologized in order to have their relationship go back to normal.
After seeing the way my mother would be upset about not being able to talk to my grandfather I started to think how bad it was I felt ashamed of apologizing, I understood forgiveness is not something you should be ashamed of, on the contrary. It takes a strong person to understand their mistakes and redeem themselves about it. The fact that today I don't have a problem forviging or asking for forgiveness made me feel like a better Christian.

My mother and I 

Christian Ethics: Protestantism

"Entrance into the kingdom comes through repentance and faith." 

Through studying central themes in Christian ethics, I was able to better
understand and interpret the origins of my own religion.
The basis for Christian ethics support that the good life is not the quest for happiness but the pursuit of God's kingdom. Other components of the Christian faith include salvation through divine grace, devotion and obedience to God, a pure heart, treating others like family and God as the father, acting selflessly and generously, and maintaining a focus on the future.

Martin Luther/The Reformation

The traditional fundamental principles of Protestantism include the scripture alone, justification by faith alone, and the universal priesthood of all
believers. Protestant values clearly are built on the foundations of Christianity.
                                         

It was the Protestant Reformation however, in which Protestants examined what they believed to be errors within the Roman Catholic Church and eventually established a separate division of Christendom. Differences in interpretation or opinion of the Bible on which Christianity is based, split this western religion into the separate denominations we acknowledge today.
Despite the three major divisions of Christianity (Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Protestantism), all are united under the same general beliefs of the Christian faith.

Bringing Infinity to a Finite World