Concentration by Mouni Sadhu
10 years ago I read a little book about concentration written by someone ‘nicknamed?’ Manou Sadhu, the first part of the book was fascinating and discussed how early Christians did to achieve enlightenment or the state of Samadhi and higher (cosmic consciousness, whatever you want to call this high state of consciousness) some of them simply went in cave and repeated the name of God until they die, the book continues by telling difference between Western and Eastern (Hindu) method of achieving enlightenment . The Western method put emphasis on the heart and the Eastern method on mastering the mind and there is a lot of comment on Yoga, the author seems to make a point that a candidate to enlightenment can skip most of the dogma in Yoga and strictly focus on concentration (mastering the mind), skipping fancy postures , karma yoga (service) etc…. the second part of the book focus on concentration and contains some of the most insanely complicated exercises from the first to the last , they are all difficult.
I bought the book again , lost the previous copy; I noticed that I’m no longer fascinated by the people in the caves or the many trouble of St. Augustin the man was plagued by terrible nightmares of ‘temptation’, I paid more attention to the mention of St. Sepharin of Zarov who worked on achieving enlightenment solely by focusing on love.
I also took the exercises from the book starting from exercise 1, I liked it , it wasn’t easy, but I might be ready for such training, contrary to the author I don’t believe this book can be used as a standalone system. They are better system out there, actually George King is much better and complete, however, I like the exercises from this book because they can help my inner dialogue to quiet down.
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