Know that concentration is a key to immense power. Concentration literally means coming with the centre. “Coming” denotes movement; “with” denotes cooperation; and “the centre” (which has many facets) here signifies the core of your mental and psychological energies.

Let’s focus first on the movement. When you concentrate, you effect a movement in your energies. Your mind has already entered a phase of correct thinking (see: Know. 1. Thinking), and different sections of your body have already begun to relax, releasing internal energies to focus on that you concentrate on.

The bigger movement, however, happens to (or within) your consciousness. In the same way that in correct thinking, chatter dissolves allowing a focused flow to take place, here your attention warps upon itself, moving from a stretched thin layer covering the entirety of what your senses bring in, to a deeper layer (much shorter but much thicker) that has space for only a single conception or a coherent flow of thoughts. Here, your senses tune in, shut off the antenna, as opposed to being bridges from the outside to the inside.

In such a state, you lose your consciousness of yourself .. the object of your attention has attracted the entirety of your self-consciousness that you has disappeared from the spectrum of your senses. Time seems to pass at different speeds during these moments of correct concentration. In reality, your self-consciousness is being enhanced by these concentrations, for when your senses are tuned in, and when different internal energies move in narrow flows and coagulate in big pools, your conscious mind comes close to the inner centres of cognition. This closeness, rare for the vast majority of people, enriches the mind in a multitude of ways.

This is the essence of the cooperation mentioned above (what “with” denotes). You must know by now, from your daily life experiences, that you hardly know anything about your powers of cognition, about the true capacities of your mind, let alone about how it works. But you also must have come to understand that there are layers of consciousness of which you are fully aware and able to access easily, and other, deeper layers that you may sense their existence, but are not really aware of, and can not access at will.

These deeper layers are much more than your mere memories, desires, and consciously acquired knowledge that have been stored at a deeper level of your cognition. At this stage, it suffices to think of them as entangled with immense knowledge you are not aware of.

And here comes the cooperation (again, what “with” denotes). As you correctly concentrate, in addition to the energetic moves you effect in your body, you connect with these deeper layers of cognition. And as in these periods of concentration, you lose your ordinary sense of a lot of what is in your realm of conscious cognition, and you lose your ordinary sense of time, you also connect with these deeper layers of cognition without having a clear sensory experience of that connection. The result of that contact is the wisdom that you get access to and that gets transported to your conscious cognition.

Do not think of wisdom in silly notions of old folks imparting carefully crafted sentences that encapsulate learnings they acquired from life-long experiences. Wisdom is not that. Suffice now, in this context, to think of It as the outcome of your contact with what is inside you that you were able to contact by concentration.

You can not overestimate the value of knowing correct concentration, because you can not overestimate the value of coming close to true Wisdom. At this stage, it suffices to know that one aspect of what you gain here is power.