The crane's superpower is focus, 'cuz fish are fickle and they come and go very quickly. And you have to, in order to observe them, wait until they come near. So, the crane is able to stand and wait and focus and keep his or her mind on the task at hand, which is to catch a fish.So, this is one of the tenets of raising the mind to sattva, or the higher mode of nature, is to practice focus. There's focus, and I'm giving the antithesis as distraction. And the statement as a reminder that "focus is nectar and distraction is torture."

Patañjali Muni, in his book called the Yoga Sūtras, goes into the details of the human mind and the states of mind one may achieve through practice of focus. And he describes how there's a hierarchy of states of mind, five in all. He gives these five categories. The lower three are non-productive.

Have you ever been in a state of mind where you noticed that you weren't being productive, or you sensed you weren't being productive, that your mind might be absorbed in randomness? That's an interesting, almost contradictory in terms, because we say "absorbed," the mind's absorbed in something, it might indicate focus. But if I'm focusing on randomness, then I may not be completely focused.

So, the higher states of mind have to do with absorption in a specific subject, and also what's called samādhi, or one becomes one-minded with that object. And this is one of the practices of meditation: to find the ultimate object of meditation and learn how to bring the mind back to it. And Krishna talks about this in the Bhagavad Gītā in the sixth chapter. For those of you who are familiar with the sixth chapter of the Bhagavad Gītā, it's about dhyāna. Dhyāna comes from the Sanskrit word dhī, which means to be able to focus the mind in one place and become absorbed in it. And to achieve that, Krishna says in the sixth chapter of the Bhagavad Gītā, one has to learn how to again and again bring the mind back to one-pointedness. And just as when we practice some physical activity again and again, we get better at it, similarly, the mind has neuroplasticity; it can also develop what might seem as a parallel to muscle memory.

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https://thefourquestionsbook.com/

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