Concentration and awareness training are skillful methods for developing the path to productive, compassionate, and beneficial states of mind. The ordinary mind is the starting point of this path. Without training for mental stability through concentration- also known as making the mind serviceable, if you intend to put your mind on something and you focus, very shortly after that moment the likelihood is that the mind will go off “someplace” else. In other words, the problem is that the mind doesn’t stay. The ordinary mind is readily distractible, either by thought, or, by sense experience. Ideally, if you put your mind on something, it should simply stay on that object for as long as you’d like to stay.
Indeo-Tibetan cultures use the Elephant as a metaphor for the mind. Once tamed, the elephant obeys better than any animal. Likewise, the mind, when tamed, can perform any action, no matter how difficult. Unfortunately, we have almost no methods for training attention or concentration that have been significantly developed in this country. It's no surprise that our concentration is poor relative, since developmentally- and it does not come to be better on its own accord, most are simply advised to "pay attention" or, "concentrate," without any pointing out of how to do this. Burmese mindfulness, or continuity of awareness, is becoming popular in the Western world (though there’s much beyond mindfulness that’s not easily accessible in the West) because it can provide a foundation to having the mind stay.
