Concentration....

Exercising our concentration is not only beneficial for our daily life but also extremely beneficial to our internal experiences and spiritual life; it is the key ingredient to experiencing meditation and astral travel etc. The physical benefits of concentration allow us to carry out tasks attentively until their completion, by doing one task at a time without thinking about anything else. If we attempt to do two or more things at once, either task will not be done properly and we won't reap the reward of slowly developing perfect concentration in daily life. For example the combination of walking and reading at the same time, is not only unfruitful but very dangerous as one may be so absorbed in the reading and fail to look up in time to dodge a car or bike. If we were to walk in concentration, we would be aware of every step we make, becoming in tune with our physical bodies and our surroundings. Without thoughts we can perceive things with clarity and awareness therefore make correct decisions. If we are comfortable and concentrated when we are reading we would comprehend better and possibly capture the deeper meaning that often is present in literature, giving us a better understanding therefore better results.
It is not as easy to concentrate on things we don't like doing, such as washing the dishes, if we had to apply the same level of concentration on the dishes that we do on our enjoyable hobby, washing dishes would become a pleasant learning experience. We could learn a great deal about our psychological states. As we are simply concentrating on washing the dishes, we would notice that thoughts keep popping into our heads, taking us away from the moments that we have chosen to concentrate on what we are doing. If we persistently refused each thought and went back to doing our task as concentrated as we can, we would find a serenity and clarity would replace the mental activity. This way we observe that our thoughts are somehow separate from us. These scattered thoughts often not related keep popping into our minds because we allow them to, they often take over and rule our lives, then due to the build up of negative thoughts we result in having outbursts of anger, jealousy etc. This fast paced society has lost the ability to use the mind as tool, by slowly training the mind to concentrate on what we want it to in daily life. The benefit of this discipline is tremendously advantageous to our spiritual growth. If we improve our concentration in the day, it will respectively and equivalently be active in our sleep, allowing us to remember our symbolic dreams and have astral experiences. Astral projection would happen spontaneously, especially if we were to concentrate on the sensations of falling asleep, we would catch sleep arriving and get up in our astral body. Bliss is achievable only in the stillness of each moment, if one is able to capture it. Through training oneself to concentrate, bliss along with many other spiritual states would become more possible with each practice.