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Right Concentration involves cultivating focussed awareness. As described, all the steps on the Noble Eightfold path involve discipline.

And discipline requires concentration and focus. Right Concentration pairs up well with Right Mindfulness and Right Effort, particularly as these apply to mental cultivation. It is important to be mindful – aware and removed – in order to put forth the Right Effort to prevent unwholesome states from coming about, or to help overcome them once they have come about. But being mindful requires concentrating. Thus, it is not enough to be aware without focussed awareness. Likewise,

it is not enough to put forth effort without focussed effort. Without Right Concentration, Right Effort and Right Mindfulness can fall into disrepair and idleness. In a sense, Right Concentration speaks to the Rightness in Right Effort and Right Mindfulness (for to put forth Right Effort and Right Mindfulness rightly involves concentration and focus). Right Concentration is not only important for cultivating Right Mindfulness, but can also be described as extending or building upon Right Mindfulness, for in Right Concentration one is not just called on to be aware from a step remove, but to concentrate in being aware;

to wilfully be aware not of many things, but of few or one. It involves focussing or channelling one’s powers of attention and mindful ability, just as a magnifying glass can focus the sun’s rays. This capacity for Right Concentration is especially important for meditation.

More on Mindfulness

Mindfulness is meant to be a constant or fairly constant state of mind.

In being mindful one is to be ever vigilant, rather than occasionally or intermittently mindful (for this intermittence may not notice, let alone prevent, the rising of unwholesome thoughts and cravings – the prevent-iveness of mindfulness requires exercising it without such gaps). This constant employment does not seem to be required, at least not to the same extent, of other steps on the Noble Eightfold Path. For instance, Right Speech and Right Action pertain to moments when speech and action are performed or are called for. But again, Right Mindfulness (although perhaps not only Right Mindfulness) is required as a con-stant state of mind. This concon-stant mindfulness means that the Buddhist is always supposed to keep a mindful distance and detachment in his mind. This means never getting fully embroiled in a mental state (be this hate or love, anger or joy, or any other state) for reason of always occupying a mindful remove. A Buddhist adept cannot be mindfully aware of an episode in his mind if he is fully preoccupied with it. To be mindfully aware of his mental states, an adept must remain partly removed from them. Mindfulness requires that he keep at least part of

his power of attention occupied with being an ever watchful eye. Right Concentration, it is worth recalling, involves being effectively mindful and even more fully allocating and concentrating one’s attention to this watchful eye (as with concentrated awareness of the movement of one’s breath in breathing meditation).

As described, being mindful of being angry involves relocating atten-tion away from being angry, or away from other concerns, to being mindful. As a consequence, being mindful of being angry entails being at least a little less angry than one might otherwise be; it involves being partially removed from the feeling of anger so that one can be mindfully aware of it. But it is not only unwholesome states of which the Buddhist is charged to be mindful. As noted, Right Mindfulness requires that the follower be ever-mindful. And thus, the follower is to be mindful of happiness or joy as well. This is to say that, in the experience of hap-piness, one is not to indulge fully in the feeling, but to concurrently be mindful of the feeling. Again, in being mindful, the Buddhist adept removes part of his attention to a point from which he may concurrently be aware of being happy. But this should mean that being mindful leads him to be less happy than he might otherwise be (just as being mindful of his anger should lead him to be less angry than he might otherwise be due to the detachment involved). Thus, the mindful person may be less angry, less happy, less sad and less joyful, than he might otherwise be for reason of being mindful and the detachment this involves. The mind-ful person should be less attached to extremes (good or bad), and more detached and more dispassionate in general.

Perhaps this is at a cost: a moderation with fewer extremes of hap-piness and joy than otherwise might be available. However, the end of suffering and the attainment of happiness are not univocal in Buddhism (not unless happiness is reinterpreted so that it is not merely a pleasant psychological feeling, or the result of desire satisfaction, just as suffering has been reinterpreted away from being merely an unpleasant feeling or the result of unsatisfied desire in the movement away from the first and second groupings to the third grouping of the First Noble Truth).

The end of suffering involves overcoming attachment to self. This may lead to happiness, but, as we all know, a feeling of happiness can also

be gained through satisfying the desires and pleasing the senses of a self. These experiences, while not bad in themselves, lead to suffering in the Buddhist sense if pursued with attachment and craving. Indeed, attachment to happiness is also suffering-inducing, and so maintain-ing a mindful remove from an experience of happiness is a good thmaintain-ing from the Buddhist perspective (even if there is some cost in happiness).

Mindfulness, for instance, can help one realize that happiness is tran-sient. But this realization involves detachment from the experience of happiness (so that one may stand back and observe the transience of this happiness), and this involves some cost in the happiness being experi-enced. A lowered potential for feeling extremes of happiness or pleasure seems to come with the detachment and dispassion involved in the dis-ciplines of the Noble Eightfold Path, and in particular the exercise of Right Mindfulness. However, there is arguably a compensatory benefit, not only in the end of suffering, but in the greater awareness, and in the greater repose and equanimity, that may come with detachment and dispassion.

In being mindful of one’s thoughts there is no literal looking going on, for there are no literal eyes directed inwards to the contents of one’s mind (and no literal things to be seen even if there were eyes). The attentiveness of mindfulness may be described as involving a meta-phorical looking. It is introspecting with attention and discernment. The Argument from the Aggregates (which was described in Chapter Four and which will be revisited in the next chapter) involves mindfulness of the aggregates; it involves looking carefully and with discernment at the play and movement of the aggregates and observing that there is no permanent self or entity to be found. More than this, and as already described, the process of being mindful helps in the process of overcom-ing attachment to self. This is because in beovercom-ing mindful one detaches, at least somewhat, from the state being experienced so that one can be observant and mindful of the state. The detachment that comes with a mindful and dispassionate observation of one’s mind is part of overcom-ing attachment to self in one’s mind.

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