Or, imagine the five-colored circles of the peacock tail to be your five senses in illimitable space. Now let their beauty melt within. Similarly, at any point in space or on a wall – until the point dissolves. Then your wish for another comes true.
- Two doors, one hinge — both halves use one mechanism: fix on a single point, concentrate totally until it dissolves, and consciousness, with nowhere left to move, is thrown to your own center (the navel). The real work is the concentration, not which point you pick — whether in or out is irrelevant. The point can be an inner spot (best at the navel), the inner meeting-point of imagined colors, or a dot on a wall.
- Inner door — for the color-sensitive (introverts): imagine the five senses as five vivid colors filling all space (peacock-tail circles), then let them penetrate inward and meet at one point inside — ideally the navel. Don’t think about the colors (that is the mind moving): be filled with them, then concentrate on the meeting point. Test of suitability: only those who see colored dreams (roughly one in a hundred) can do this; if your dreams are black-and-white, imagining ‘red’ yields only the word, not the color, and the method fails.
- Outer door — for extroverts who cannot conceive of any innerness: make a dot on a wall, fix it with open, non-blinking eyes. Blinking is a gap in which the mind resumes movement and concentration is lost. Bodhidharma tore off his eyelids to kill this gap — the story means: have only eyes, no lids, no break. Hold until the dot dissolves.
- Why the point dissolves — an inner imagined point dissolves because it was never real. An outer dot stays on the wall; what dissolves is the MIND. Mind is the bridge between consciousness and any object, and it lives only in movement; fixed on one point it cannot move, so it stops — and the eyes, which see only through the mind, can no longer register the dot. All outward connection breaks; with no object to move to, consciousness is thrown back to its own center.
- Mind is process, not substance — mind is like walking, not like legs. Stop walking and there is no walking though the legs remain; stop the mind’s movement and only consciousness remains. This is the scientific basis behind all these centering techniques.
- Q&A — concentration vs. meditation: four stages — ordinary thinking (movement anywhere) → contemplation (directed, one line) → concentration (one point, no movement at all) → meditation (no mind at all, not even one point). This technique is concentration, the penultimate step: it uses mind to transcend mind — as a living man can help himself to die.
- Q&A — uncover, don’t build: the navel center is not to be developed, it is to be uncovered. It is already there, already fully functioning. You are already a buddha, only unaware. These techniques merely remove the covering — which is why awakening can happen instantly, in a single sitting, rather than requiring years of gradual construction.