The left eye of the bird...

One of the mental qualities that we try to develop in Bikram yoga is concentration, right?

Here's a cool experiment that will test your powers of concentration.  Bear with me on this one!!  First, you need to watch a short video with two teams of people, one team in white shirts and one team in black shirts, passing a basketball.  Your job is to watch closely and count how many passes the white team completes.  Ready?  GO, here.

Do this before you finish reading this post or you will ruin my cool trick!  Don't cheat! I promise it's not one of those lame videos where something jumps out at you and makes you crap your pants.  You don't even need to watch with the sound on.  Just focus on counting the white team's passes.

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One of my favorite parts of Bikram's newest book is the story he tells about concentration: an enlightened teacher gathers all his students together and lines them up in a field, with a single tree standing miles in the distance with a wooden bird in its branches.  Each boy has a bow and a single arrow.  The teacher tells the boys, "Everyone aim at the bird. Then, when I call your name, shoot the bird."

Approaching the first boy, the teacher asks, "What do you see at the end of the field?" 

"I see the bird, Sir!" 

"What else do you see?" 

"I see the tree, Sir!" 

"What else do you see?" 

"I see the sky and everything behind the tree, Sir!" 

"WRONG!  Next boy!"  The teacher goes down the line and asks the same question to 99 more boys, who give 99 different answers, all of which get the same response: "Wrong! Next boy!"

Finally he comes to the last boy, his favorite student.  

"What do you see, Arjun?" 

"I see the bird, Sir!" 

"What else can you see?" 

"Just the bird, Sir!" 

"What part of the bird?" 

"I see the head of the bird, Sir!" 

"What part of the head?" 

"I see the left eyeball, Sir!" 

"What else do you see?" 

"Nothing, Sir!" 

"Shoot!"  

Arjun releases his arrow and pierces the left eye of the bird, passing the test.

I think this is an awesome description of pure concentration.  I put it in the back of my mind sometimes  when I am practicing.  Focus your eyes on one point on your standing knee in the mirror, concentrate very deeply, don't move your eyes, don't blink your eyes.  Lock the knee. What do you see?  Lock the knee. The left eye of the bird.  Lock the knee.  Nothing else.

Now here's my fun trick.  Go back and watch that video again, but this time, don't concentrate on counting the passes, just watch it casually.

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I bet you didn't see that gorilla before, right??  (If you did, and you haven't seen this video before, then you are definitely in the minority.  The first time I saw this, I was in a room of 200 MIT students, and there were only 2 or 3 people who saw the gorilla.  I was not one of them.) The video is from an experiment on sustained inattentional blindness.  

I like this because it shows that you really can concentrate on one thing to the exclusion of everything else.  You can theoretically become so focused that a big freaking gorilla could walk through the middle of the yoga room during standing head to knee, and you wouldn't even notice.